Politico

Congressional leaders are digging in ahead of next week’s White House meeting on the debt limit, with House Democrats prepping a Hail Mary while Republicans wait on President Joe Biden to meet them at the table.

The GOP’s insistence on Democratic concessions in the debt talks makes it highly unlikely that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) will succeed in his latest pitch: an arcane procedural maneuver that requires Republican support in order to jam Speaker Kevin McCarthy into voting on a “clean” hike to the nation’s borrowing limit.

Jeffries told his caucus in a Tuesday letter that he’s pursuing a so-called discharge petition on a standalone debt limit hike. That petition allows any bill to come to the House floor with the signatures of a simple majority of members — which means Democrats would need a handful of Republican colleagues to agree.

And that GOP agreement is highly unlikely to materialize any time soon. Jeffries’ plan landed with a thud among Republicans who want to see Biden give ground first, despite the Treasury Department’s warning that the nation could exhaust its ability to pay bills as early as June 1.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell confirmed that he will attend next week’s White House meeting while stressing that a deal must be struck by Biden and McCarthy: “There is no solution in the Senate.”

Biden must “make a counteroffer” during next week’s scheduled meeting with both parties’ top Hill leaders, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) agreed on Tuesday. “And a counteroffer cannot be a clean debt ceiling.”

No matter what compromise Biden can stomach, Tillis added, “there’s no question that” it would lose votes from House Republicans who supported McCarthy’s conservative opening bid last week. That bill would lift the nation’s borrowing cap by $1.5 trillion or through March 2024, whichever comes first, while slashing $130 billion in government funding and tightening work requirements for federal benefits.

Tillis described a Senate vote on a clean debt ceiling hike through the 2024 election, which Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is considering, as a “gimmick” and a “waste of chamber time” given the certainty of a GOP filibuster.

Senate Democrats will decide whether to put a clean debt ceiling increase up for a vote after the White House meeting on May 9, Schumer told reporters Tuesday.

If the Senate passes a clean debt limit increase, Congress could use the House GOP’s fiscal bill as a potential vehicle for a bipartisan government funding deal, Schumer said Tuesday. Yet the chances of that happening appear slim at the moment, with Republicans demanding massive federal funding cuts in exchange for raising the borrowing limit and GOP leaders refusing to decouple spending from debt.

Jeffries announced to House Democrats in a Tuesday letter that their party’s top member on the Rules Committee, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), had taken the first steps toward a discharge petition on a debt limit increase with no added conditions designed to win over Republicans.

“The filing of a debt ceiling measure to be brought up on the discharge calendar preserves an important option,” Jeffries wrote in a letter first reported by the New York Times. “It is now time for MAGA Republicans to act in a bipartisan manner to pay America’s bills without extreme conditions.”

His announcement came one day after the Treasury told lawmakers that the government could run out of cash by the beginning of June. Any discharge petition would require at least five Republicans to sign on in order to bring a bill to the House floor if it has sat in committee for more than 30 days.

McCarthy (R-Calif.) has vowed not to pass any debt ceiling bill without concessions in exchange, and his Republicans cleared a package last week that offers a slew of them — all enacting conservative priorities, on topics from energy to Biden’s student loan relief plan.

“Nobody wants to see the United States government have to change the name of the Department of Treasury to the Department of Debt because there’s no longer any treasury there,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said. “So, the time has come for the president to sit down with the House and be a leader.”

On Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Biden administration “won’t negotiate in public” about the potential for a short-term increase in the debt limit or any other options for averting a default.

“And our position is going to be very clear: that Congress needs to avoid a default — and I’ll leave it there — without conditions,” she told reporters.

Jean-Pierre also dismissed the suggestion that Biden’s inclusion of Schumer and McConnell in next week’s meeting is a sign that the president wants the Senate to take a leading role in the talks.

Meanwhile, with just over four weeks until the U.S. could risk defaulting on $31.4 trillion in debt, a temporary increase in the borrowing limit might be needed to head off economic tumult while leaders in Congress work with Biden on a longer-term solution.

Schumer on Tuesday swatted down that idea, however.

“We should not kick the can down the road. We should go for the full two-year extension,” he said.

Anthony Adragna and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.

The debt ceiling crisis has arrived on President Joe Biden’s doorstep — and left his administration with far less time than anticipated to solve it.

But don’t expect the White House to change tactics any time soon.

Administration officials on Monday insisted that Biden has no plans to drop his demand for a clean debt ceiling increase, even after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s warning that Congress may only have until June 1 to avert a disastrous default.

The new calculation drastically raised the stakes of the ongoing standoff over the nation’s debt limit, turning what officials expected would be a monthslong political fight into a brutal four-week brawl with the fate of the U.S. economy on the line.

Biden has now invited the top four congressional leaders to a meeting on May 9, setting the stage for his first substantial talks with Republicans on the issue since Feb. 1. Yet, while the timetable may have changed, Biden officials said the president’s message to the GOP will not.

“If you need to hear again that it’s your responsibility to address the debt ceiling without conditions and a ransom,” said a senior administration official who spoke about internal thinking on condition of anonymity, “then he can say that again.”

The stance reflects the West Wing’s belief that they can not set a template for having the debt ceiling serve as a point of political leverage for the opposition. It also reflects continued confidence that Biden still holds the stronger hand in a debt ceiling staredown, and that it was always a matter of when — not if — the two sides reached a crisis point.

Biden has vowed for months not to negotiate over the debt ceiling, deriding Republicans’ demands for concessions as “hostage taking” that risks tanking the country’s global reputation and economic stability.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy similarly dug in. After passing a Republican-only bill of spending cuts tied to a debt limit increase through the House last week, he declared that “no clean debt ceiling” increase would ultimately make it through the chamber. On Monday, he gave no sign of backing down, arguing Biden had “refused to do his job” by failing to negotiate.

For months, the business community has watched with relative nonchalance as the two sides stared each other down. But that may now change with Yellen’s letter.

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, said a stock market tumult may be what forces either side of the Biden-McCarthy standoff to give. “It may take a thousand points off the Dow before they actually move,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of drama, for sure.”

But even as the warnings on Wall Street grew more alarmist, they also put a spotlight on major logistical hurdles back in D.C.: There is painfully little time when everyone needed to solve this problem will actually be together, or when the government will be in session.

McCarthy and Biden will not both be in Washington at the same time for the majority of May, with McCarthy currently in Israel leading a congressional delegation while the House is out of session. The chamber will return on May 9, leaving only a week before Biden is slated to leave for Japan to attend the G-7 summit — and return just before the House leaves for Memorial Day recess.

Even if McCarthy and Biden could reach some kind of rapid agreement, it would take several days to get legislation through both chambers of Congress and raise the risk of disaster if it encountered any opposition.

The White House has nevertheless insisted that time — and politics — are on its side. The West Wing’s strategy to this point has been simple: point to the scores of times when it has been resolved in a bipartisan fashion with little drama, including under Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump.

Biden and aides have refused to engage with McCarthy on his hope to link budget talks with the debt ceiling, deeming it a non-starter. And until House Republicans passed their own debt ceiling legislation last week, Biden hadn’t even been willing to talk with McCarthy.

The White House had signaled a softening of that stance in recent days, allowing that it would be open to talks — but not one-on-one, and only on the broader federal budget, not the debt ceiling. The senior administration official said Biden would continue to insist that these matters were separate tracks and scoffed at the notion that because House Republicans had passed their own bill (with no bipartisan support) that they could simply sit tight until Biden and congressional Democrats responded.

Still, as recently as this past weekend, the West Wing had believed it still had time to play the waiting game, according to three senior aides not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations. Pointing to other standoffs, they noted that Congress only works on a deadline and believed that McCarthy — trying to hold his conference together — would eventually blink.

The White House has leaned on polling suggesting Republicans will take the lion’s share of the blame if the worst should happen, according to the senior aides. Aides are confident that their messaging about important programs that the Republicans want to cut will resonate with voters — and that they will be able to link the collapse to Republican “extremism” on the economy and their out-of-step stances on other issues like abortion and guns.

Shortly after the Treasury letter, the top Democrats on Capitol Hill — Sen. Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — locked hands in a joint response, asking Republicans to not allow “right-wing extremism to hold our nation hostage.”

Schumer also began a process to allow Senate votes on the House Republicans’ debt limit and a separate bill to lift the debt limit without conditions through the end of 2024. Still, Biden will need to manage rising anxiety outside the West Wing from Democrats eager for a deal — as well as worries that winning the public opinion battle on the debt ceiling won’t mean much for the party if it wrecks the economy at the center of Biden’s case for reelection.

“I hope President Biden’s invitation to Congressional leaders is sincere and he is genuinely willing to negotiate because the country cannot afford a failed negotiation,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) said in a statement. “I urge President Biden to show true leadership and finally put politics aside and the well-being of our nation first.”

Some Biden allies and Democratic lawmakers privately acknowledged even before the Treasury letter that the president will ultimately need to cut a deal, with much of the speculation so far focusing on the potential for a joint budget-and-debt-ceiling agreement later this year that offers Republicans minor concessions on spending — and crucially allows both sides to walk away claiming that they won.

But on Capitol Hill and in the administration, there’s been no consensus on what exactly that compromise might look like, or even how to thaw the bitter standoff to the degree it was possible to reach a deal — much less in four weeks.

“This clearly sends off a red flare that lawmakers need to get going here,” Zandi said. “The economy is so fragile that it wouldn’t take much turmoil in markets to upend it and push us into recession.”

Sam Stein contributed to this report.

Congress and President Joe Biden are running increasingly short on time to raise the debt limit.

In a letter to congressional leaders Monday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that the U.S. could default on its $31.4 trillion in debt as early as June 1, a forecast that rockets up the pressure on Hill leaders and the White House to strike a bipartisan deal as cross-party talks remain at a total stalemate.

House Republicans narrowly passed their proposal to make substantial cuts to government spending in exchange for staving off default last week, calling on Biden to meet them back at the negotiating table. That’s received crickets from the White House so far.

That GOP package — which would lift the borrowing cap by $1.5 trillion or until the end of March 2024, whichever comes first, and slash $130 billion in government funding next fiscal year — represents a major victory for Republican leaders hoping to gain leverage in stalled talks with the president. GOP leaders say the onus is now on Democrats to start negotiating in earnest or come back with their own legislative response.

Democratic leaders remain unmoved, insisting that Republicans hike the debt limit with no strings attached, as they have done in the past. Instead, they’re insisting on a separate spending discussion as part of the annual government funding process. The latest X-date estimate, however, could inflate the number of Democrats anxious for the president to accept a second sit-down with McCarthy this year.

Even before the secretary’s latest warning, the partisan standoff had begun to worry Wall Street traders and executives. They’ve laid out concerns about the likelihood of default in notes to investors but remain wary of pleading more directly to Congress for action to head off a default — one expected to devastate the global economy.

Independent forecasters expect to issue their own updated debt-limit forecasts by mid-May. Those analyses from the Congressional Budget Office and the Bipartisan Policy Center typically offer more detail than the timeframe the Treasury Department publicly releases.

CBO previously estimated that the federal government will run out of borrowing power between July and September, a range that would have given lawmakers far more breathing room.

NEW YORK — Republicans just gained an unlikely ally in their attacks on the president’s immigration policies: the Democratic mayor of New York, for centuries a beacon to migrants seeking a new home in America.

GOP leaders lit up this month after hearing New York City Mayor Eric Adams say President Joe Biden had “failed” the city on immigration. New York, Adams said, “is being destroyed by the migrant crisis.”

“The dam finally broke last week when Mayor Adams rightly blamed the border and migrant crisis on President Biden,” said Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, the GOP freshman who ousted Democrats’ congressional campaign chief, Sean Patrick Maloney, in last year’s midterms.

“This administration has been asleep at the wheel on border security, and it has had a tremendous, negative impact on New York City,” Lawler said in a statement to POLITICO. “I would be more than happy to work in a bipartisan way with the mayor to force President Biden to secure our borders and reform the immigration system.”

Since spring 2022, more than 57,000 migrants — largely from Latin America — arrived in New York after crossing the southern border. Some were sent from conservative states like Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott chartered as many as eight buses a day to carry migrants to Manhattan. Others arrived on their own.

The influx has strained the resources of one of the biggest cities in the world.

Services tied to housing, feeding, educating and providing health care to the newcomers are projected to cost $2.9 billion next year alone, an amount that exceeds the New York City Fire Department’s entire operating budget. So far, Adams has mostly failed to get the White House to respond to his pleas for additional funds, easing of work requirements and better coordination at the border to resettle asylum seekers around the U.S.

Adams’ new rhetoric, which drew praise from the conservative editorial page of the New York Post and mirrored remarks by Fox News contributor Sean Duffy, was even more eyebrow-raising given the moderate Democrat is a national surrogate for Biden.

The mayor’s comments came just days before the president announced his reelection bid and at a time when Republicans are gearing up to use voter discontent around immigration in their fight for the White House, the Senate and a larger majority in the House.

This is the second time in less than a year that Adams’ message on a highly contentious political issue has overlapped with Republican talking points. In 2022, he joined GOP calls for reforms to New York’s bail laws and only changed his tune as the midterms neared and it became clear his party would take a beating over crime at the ballot box.

Though Adams’ words on immigration could now hurt fellow Democrats running for national office, particularly in New York’s swing congressional districts where Lawler is facing a competitive race, Adams may be thinking more about protecting his own reelection bid in 2025.

One mayoral adviser, granted anonymity to discuss the administration’s internal mood, noted most New Yorkers would rather see investments in schools, libraries and other city services than billions more spent to help the newcomers. Indeed, a February poll by Quinnipiac University found that 63 percent of voters — including 53 percent of Democrats — don’t think New York City can accommodate the sanctuary-seekers.

Spokespeople for Adams strongly rejected criticism that he’s parroting Republican talking points, saying he’s done more to care for tens of thousands of migrants than any other Democrat in the country.

“To personally show his support for asylum seekers, Mayor Adams has organized haircuts for migrants, book donations for kids, and clothing drives, as well as slept besides migrants at a humanitarian relief center while spending hours hearing their personal stories,” mayoral press secretary Fabien Levy said in a statement.

“Anyone falsely accusing Mayor Adams of using Republican rhetoric should stop criticizing the one person doing more than anyone else in this city for migrants and start pushing for more aid from Washington, DC and Albany,” Levy said.

But his language around the issue — saying the migrant crisis has “destroyed” the city, directly blaming Biden for the situation and saying it has prevented New York’s economic comeback — is still jarring to many members of his party.

“It’s extremely disappointing and dangerous to hear anyone feed into anti-immigrant rhetoric, particularly the highest-ranking elected city official of one of the most diverse cities that is fueled by the contributions of the immigrant community,” said Rep. Delia Ramirez, a first-term Democrat from Illinois who says her progressive stance is key to stemming GOP gains in the Latino community.

“At the federal level, we need to utilize executive authority to ensure cities like Chicago and New York have the support they need to continue providing shelter with maximal flexibility,” she said.

Added Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a leading critic of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ immigration policies: “We should tone down the rhetoric and focus on solutions.”

Both Republican and Democratic strategists say Adams’ decision to amplify the right’s messaging around immigration could be a gift to the GOP.

“I think echoing Republican attacks when Biden is going to need every single resource from Democrats to back him up is not what good Democrats do,” said Bill Neidhardt, a progressive political consultant.

Republican strategist Bob Heckman said it’s surprising that other Democratic mayors of places like Chicago, D.C. and Denver, which have also faced an influx of migrants, aren’t speaking out like Adams.

“If you are the mayor of a city who’s receiving the huge influx of migrants that are pouring across the southern border, it’s hard not to talk like that,” Heckman said. “The administration needs to get serious about it. They can’t just ignore it and run on, ‘We can’t let Donald Trump get reelected.’”

A spokesperson for Biden declined to respond directly to Adams’ criticism but pointed to the president’s announcement in January about new border enforcement actions when he said “extreme Republicans” have always tried to use immigration to score political points but don’t help solve the problem.

One of those so-called extreme Republicans, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas who has advocated for conservative immigration measures, wasn’t quite ready to embrace the New York mayor.

“Eric Adams is right to blame the Biden Administration for the border crisis, but this is the same guy who campaigned on his city’s sanctuary status and extended childcare, colleague classes and other taxpayer-funded programs to illegal migrants,” Roy said in a statement.

“Texas has been bearing the brunt of this crisis for over two years — now New York is getting a taste of their own medicine.”

NEW YORK — Republicans just gained an unlikely ally in their attacks on the president’s immigration policies: the Democratic mayor of New York, for centuries a beacon to migrants seeking a new home in America.

GOP leaders lit up this month after hearing New York City Mayor Eric Adams say President Joe Biden had “failed” the city on immigration. New York, Adams said, “is being destroyed by the migrant crisis.”

“The dam finally broke last week when Mayor Adams rightly blamed the border and migrant crisis on President Biden,” said Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, the GOP freshman who ousted Democrats’ congressional campaign chief, Sean Patrick Maloney, in last year’s midterms.

“This administration has been asleep at the wheel on border security, and it has had a tremendous, negative impact on New York City,” Lawler said in a statement to POLITICO. “I would be more than happy to work in a bipartisan way with the mayor to force President Biden to secure our borders and reform the immigration system.”

Since spring 2022, more than 57,000 migrants — largely from Latin America — arrived in New York after crossing the southern border. Some were sent from conservative states like Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott chartered as many as eight buses a day to carry migrants to Manhattan. Others arrived on their own.

The influx has strained the resources of one of the biggest cities in the world.

Services tied to housing, feeding, educating and providing health care to the newcomers are projected to cost $2.9 billion next year alone, an amount that exceeds the New York City Fire Department’s entire operating budget. So far, Adams has mostly failed to get the White House to respond to his pleas for additional funds, easing of work requirements and better coordination at the border to resettle asylum seekers around the U.S.

Adams’ new rhetoric, which drew praise from the conservative editorial page of the New York Post and mirrored remarks by Fox News contributor Sean Duffy, was even more eyebrow-raising given the moderate Democrat is a national surrogate for Biden.

The mayor’s comments came just days before the president announced his reelection bid and at a time when Republicans are gearing up to use voter discontent around immigration in their fight for the White House, the Senate and a larger majority in the House.

This is the second time in less than a year that Adams’ message on a highly contentious political issue has overlapped with Republican talking points. In 2022, he joined GOP calls for reforms to New York’s bail laws and only changed his tune as the midterms neared and it became clear his party would take a beating over crime at the ballot box.

Though Adams’ words on immigration could now hurt fellow Democrats running for national office, particularly in New York’s swing congressional districts where Lawler is facing a competitive race, Adams may be thinking more about protecting his own reelection bid in 2025.

One mayoral adviser, granted anonymity to discuss the administration’s internal mood, noted most New Yorkers would rather see investments in schools, libraries and other city services than billions more spent to help the newcomers. Indeed, a February poll by Quinnipiac University found that 63 percent of voters — including 53 percent of Democrats — don’t think New York City can accommodate the sanctuary-seekers.

Spokespeople for Adams strongly rejected criticism that he’s parroting Republican talking points, saying he’s done more to care for tens of thousands of migrants than any other Democrat in the country.

“To personally show his support for asylum seekers, Mayor Adams has organized haircuts for migrants, book donations for kids, and clothing drives, as well as slept besides migrants at a humanitarian relief center while spending hours hearing their personal stories,” mayoral press secretary Fabien Levy said in a statement.

“Anyone falsely accusing Mayor Adams of using Republican rhetoric should stop criticizing the one person doing more than anyone else in this city for migrants and start pushing for more aid from Washington, DC and Albany,” Levy said.

But his language around the issue — saying the migrant crisis has “destroyed” the city, directly blaming Biden for the situation and saying it has prevented New York’s economic comeback — is still jarring to many members of his party.

“It’s extremely disappointing and dangerous to hear anyone feed into anti-immigrant rhetoric, particularly the highest-ranking elected city official of one of the most diverse cities that is fueled by the contributions of the immigrant community,” said Rep. Delia Ramirez, a first-term Democrat from Illinois who says her progressive stance is key to stemming GOP gains in the Latino community.

“At the federal level, we need to utilize executive authority to ensure cities like Chicago and New York have the support they need to continue providing shelter with maximal flexibility,” she said.

Added Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a leading critic of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ immigration policies: “We should tone down the rhetoric and focus on solutions.”

Both Republican and Democratic strategists say Adams’ decision to amplify the right’s messaging around immigration could be a gift to the GOP.

“I think echoing Republican attacks when Biden is going to need every single resource from Democrats to back him up is not what good Democrats do,” said Bill Neidhardt, a progressive political consultant.

Republican strategist Bob Heckman said it’s surprising that other Democratic mayors of places like Chicago, D.C. and Denver, which have also faced an influx of migrants, aren’t speaking out like Adams.

“If you are the mayor of a city who’s receiving the huge influx of migrants that are pouring across the southern border, it’s hard not to talk like that,” Heckman said. “The administration needs to get serious about it. They can’t just ignore it and run on, ‘We can’t let Donald Trump get reelected.’”

A spokesperson for Biden declined to respond directly to Adams’ criticism but pointed to the president’s announcement in January about new border enforcement actions when he said “extreme Republicans” have always tried to use immigration to score political points but don’t help solve the problem.

One of those so-called extreme Republicans, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas who has advocated for conservative immigration measures, wasn’t quite ready to embrace the New York mayor.

“Eric Adams is right to blame the Biden Administration for the border crisis, but this is the same guy who campaigned on his city’s sanctuary status and extended childcare, colleague classes and other taxpayer-funded programs to illegal migrants,” Roy said in a statement.

“Texas has been bearing the brunt of this crisis for over two years — now New York is getting a taste of their own medicine.”

President Joe Biden’s age is prompting internal party doubts and struggles with the nation’s youth, as he embarks on a reelection bid. But it actually may be helping him with a critical cohort of the electorate: older voters.

The latest example of this tradeoff came this week.

A new Harvard Youth poll out this week showed Biden with a 38 percent approval rating among voters under the age of 30, despite that cohort’s overall liberal lean. But despite Biden’s struggles, he has remained resilient with older voters. A Fox News poll, also released this week, showed 49 percent of voters age 65 and older approve of the job Biden is doing, outpacing his overall approval rating by 5 points.

The two surveys underscored an inside-the-crosstabs phenomenon that’s appeared in many — though not all — recent public surveys: Voters in older age groups approve of Biden’s job performance in greater numbers than those in younger clusters.

Over the past few decades, that’s been unusual for presidents from Biden’s party. The splits look more like polling from Biden’s predecessor, former President Donald Trump, who retained stronger numbers with seniors and voters just shy of retirement age than among the younger half of the electorate.

Enduring popularity with older voters could be a major asset for Biden in his just-announced reelection campaign. Though no Democratic presidential candidate has carried seniors — those 65 and older — since Al Gore in 2000, Biden limited his losses among that cohort, losing them by a mid-single-digit margin in 2020, according to exit polls. (By contrast, Republicans carried the senior vote by roughly twice that margin — 10 or 12 points, depending on the voter survey, in the 2022 midterm elections.)

Biden, 80, is the oldest person to serve as president. And there’s debate about whether attacks on him from some Republicans — recall Trump’s “Sleepy Joe” nickname during the last campaign — backfire among voters at or fast approaching the same age.

Seniors have become the most reliable voters in every presidential election since 1996, according to data from the Census Bureau. Seventy-two percent of voters 65 and older turned out in the 2020 presidential election, a higher rate than voters aged 45 to 64 (66 percent), 25 to 44 (55 percent) and those under 25 (48 percent).

Most public surveys show older voters are more likely to approve of Biden’s job performance than younger voters. In the Fox News poll, Biden’s approval rating was right-side-up with seniors, 49 percent approve versus 47 percent disapprove — but 8 points underwater among voters under 45.

An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released Tuesday similarly showed Biden’s approval lowest among Americans aged 18 to 29 (27 percent) and highest among those 60 and older (49 percent). And though a large-sample Pew Research Center poll from late March and early April showed a smaller disparity across ages, the trend was the same: Biden’s net-approval rating was lowest among Americans aged 18 to 29 (-32) and highest among seniors 65 and older (-20).

Not all polls show the same pattern. An Economist/YouGov poll this week showed Biden with a much higher approval rating among Americans aged 18 to 29: 61 percent. Biden’s approval rating with seniors was only 38 percent.

That’s much closer to what one would expect for a Democratic president, but it also represents an uptick in approval among young voters in their polling, as The Economist’s G. Elliott Morris wrote on Twitter this week.

Whether that’s an outlier, a more accurate reflection of public opinion or the start of a new trend could have significant implications for the next election. Whether the 80-year-old Biden is mostly unpopular among young voters, or equaling his best-ever approval rating with them could reshape his 2024 coalition.

Democratic presidential candidates have carried the under-30 vote in each of the past eight presidential elections. But dating back to 1976, only three Democratic presidential candidates have carried the senior vote, according to exit polls: Bill Clinton in his decisive victories in 1992 and 1996, and Gore in 2000.

In 2020, Trump edged Biden among older voters by a narrow margin: The traditional network exit poll gave the then-president a 7-point edge among voters 65 and older, while AP VoteCast, another survey of actual voters, had Trump only ahead by 3 points. Biden, meanwhile, won voters under 30 by a more-than-20-point margin.

As Americans live longer, seniors are also growing as a share of the electorate. Americans 65 and older made up 17 percent of all U.S. residents in the 2020 census — up from 13 percent only 10 years prior. And those numbers understate their share of the electorate, given that older Americans are more likely to be citizens, more likely to be registered to vote and more likely to turn out than younger ones.

Older voters outpunch their weight even more in Republican primaries — which might be why both Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are sparring over the future of Medicare and Social Security in recent weeks.

Biden is also highlighting the issue. About 35 seconds into the announcement video his campaign produced to announce he’s running for a second term, Biden begins decrying “MAGA extremists” who are “lining up to take away” Americans’ “bedrock freedoms.”

His first example? “Cutting Social Security you’ve paid for your entire life.”

The White House said on Thursday that it was “entirely normal” for a president to be briefed about the journalists who would ask questions at news conferences, a day after President Joe Biden was seen holding a paper with what appeared to be a reporter’s question.

“It’s entirely normal for a president to be briefed on reporters who will be asking questions at a press conference and issues we expect they might ask about,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a briefing on Thursday.

The comments come after Biden was seen on Wednesday holding a note card titled “question 1” regarding a Los Angeles Times reporter’s information during a joint news conference with President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea.

Jean-Pierre said the information on the card was different from the question that was asked.

“We do not have specific questions in advance. That’s not something that we do,” she said.

Jean-Pierre also said the White House reaches out beforehand to a number of reporters who will be at a news conference and tries to pick those who haven’t been called on for a while.

The press secretary said the White House talks with Biden before a news conference about an array of topics that could potentially come up.

“We are mindful on who we pick and who we want to communicate out to,” Jean-Pierre said.

Presidential campaigns often are waged on whether or not the country is ready to “turn the page.” President Joe Biden wants his reelection bid to hinge on whether or not there is a page to turn.

The president’s team has made the issue of book banning a surprisingly central element of his campaign’s opening salvos. He referred to GOP efforts to restrict curriculum — Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” was the third most banned title in America last year — in his first two campaign videos. He presents himself in each video as the defender of the country’s core values, a bulwark against an extreme Republican Party rolling back America’s freedoms.

The campaign’s first TV ad, a 90-second spot running in seven states over the next two weeks as part of a seven-figure buy, warns Republicans “seek to overturn elections, ban books and eliminate a woman’s right to choose.” Biden followed up with a tweet hitting “MAGA extremists … telling you what books should be in your kids’ schools.” That followed the explicit reference to book bans in Biden’s launch announcement video Tuesday.

The early focus on book banning is part of the campaign’s attempt to reinforce a broader message, said one Democratic adviser involved in the effort: Biden is the only one standing between the American people and a Republican Party determined to roll back rights and limit freedoms.

“People just don’t understand why we should ban books from libraries,” said the adviser, who spoke with candor about the campaign’s strategy on the condition of anonymity. “So it’s a measure of extremism and another thing [Republicans] are trying to take away.”

Biden’s message is based on mounds of research by Democratic pollsters over the last several months, as the president’s advisers and the Democratic National Committee have expanded the constellation of pollsters and data analysts tracking voter attitudes and the effectiveness of certain messages.

The potency of book bans, along with issues like abortion and gun safety, is quite clear, according to multiple people familiar with the campaign’s data.

“Book banning tests off the charts,” said Celinda Lake, one of the Democratic pollsters who tested the issue for Democrats. “People are adamantly opposed to it and, unlike some other issues that are newer, voters already have an adopted schema around book banning. They associate it with really authoritarian regimes, Nazi Germany.”

The campaign’s private research aligns with public polling on the issue. A CBS News/YouGov poll in February found that more than 8 in 10 Americans opposed GOP efforts to ban books that focus on slavery, the civil rights movement and an unsanitized version of American history. And a Fox News survey this week found that 60 percent of Americans — including 48 percent of Republicans — find book bans problematic.

Republicans led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appears likely to run for president, have leaned into the culture wars by leading efforts to bar those books, and others about LGBTQ topics. They’ve framed the push as an effort to protect social indoctrination via school curriculum. Lake sees it as a political gift to Biden.

“You’ll see Democrats up and down the ticket running on this,” she said.

But book bans don’t just rankle parents of children under 18, who account for just less than 30 percent of the electorate. Some of the strongest responses in focus groups to GOP book bans came from Baby Boomers.

The Biden campaign has leaned hard into the contrast of “more freedom or less freedom,” as the president put it in his announcement video, co-opting a quintessentially American idea and a political theme more traditionally emphasized by Republicans.

In the TV spot pushed out Wednesday, Biden pointed to GOP restrictions in many areas — abortion rights, voting rights — election denialism and the party’s inaction on gun safety all under the umbrella of freedom. But polling and focus group research found that the messaging around book bans appealed in particular to moderates and swing voters who may have nuanced views on gender and identity but are far more clear-eyed about being told what books they can or can’t read.

Those voters — which include moderate Republicans, suburban voters and college-educated white people — are among the demographics that Biden’s team believes will be critical to win. They are also more likely to live in areas where conservatives have sought to impose restrictions on libraries and school boards.

“Americans have a libertarian streak about them, and this is an absolute affront to that tendency,” the adviser said. “This is much more about reassembling the coalition from 2020.”

Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist prominent within her party’s more outspoken cadre of Never Trump activists, said that book bans have occasionally come up in her focus groups with voters.

“When we talk about them, usually in the context of DeSantis, these are the things that play very poorly with educated suburban voters,” she said, surmising that the campaign’s emphasis on book bans is at least partly about laying the groundwork for a general election match-up with DeSantis.

“They are positioning themselves to take on any candidate and to fight for those swing voters who put them over the top in 2020 and who are uncomfortable with some of the more extreme positions DeSantis and others are embracing,” Longwell said.

Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain says that sexism and racism are partially to blame for the swirl of criticism and negative stories that have followed Kamala Harris during her tenure as vice president.

“Well, I do think sexism and racism are part of the problem, no question about it,” Klain told Kara Swisher on an episode of her podcast, “On With Kara Swisher,” released Thursday. “I think she was not as well known in national politics before she became vice president. And I think that she hasn’t gotten the credit for all that she’s done.”

Klain’s comments come after a Reuters story published last month stated that Harris was “gearing up for another national campaign,” despite bad poll numbers and concerns about her from Democrats. Following that, senior administration officials publicly came to her defense.

White House chief of staff Jeff Zients said on Twitter that Harris was “an invaluable, relentless voice for the American people.”

Harris also had some public stumbles early on in the administration. The vice president faltered in early interviews and was given tricky portfolio items, such as stemming migration to the southern border. She also saw a number of top aides leave her office.

Klain, who was President Joe Biden’s chief of staff for two years before resigning earlier this year, told Swisher that he thinks Harris “takes a lot of grief unjustifiably.”

“Because this is a country that always thinks dubiously about someone who’s the No. 2,” Klain said. “We’re a No. 1 kind of country. I lived with that when Al Gore and Joe Biden were vice president. She makes a major contribution to the administration, and I think, hopefully, she’ll get more and more recognized for that.”