In an ABC News encounter as one-sided as the Biden-Trump clash in June, Harris forcefully argued Tuesday night that it’s time for America “to turn the page.” She emotionally defended her support of abortion rights and constantly goaded Trump into a shouting, disorganized defense of his own familiar positions.

At the same time, the former president did a poor job of prosecuting the GOP case against his Democratic rival on issues such as her changes in positions from her 2020 candidacy and the current administration’s problems in coping with inflation and multiple crises abroad.

Though each presidential debate is unique, this one at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center fit the frequent pattern in which the lesser-known candidate outperformed the better-known one. But it will take a few days before post-debate polling confirms the ultimate impact in an election where pre-debate surveys showed Harris and Trump almost even, nationally and in battleground states.

Several independent measurements exemplified the vice president’s strong showing. A CNN poll of debate watchers showed 63% said she won. A CNN focus group in Erie, Pennsylvania, produced a similar 2-to-1 margin.

And even some Republicans and conservatives conceded that Harris did well. “She passed the test,” Republican strategist David Urban said on CNN. “She looked presidential.”

“Make no mistake about it,” veteran Fox News analyst Brit Hume concluded. “Trump had a bad night.”

“I thought that was my best debate, ever,” Trump told reporters. But when asked about the Harris campaign’s call for another debate, he replied, “We’ll look at it, but they want a second debate because they lost.”

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale found that Trump made more than 30 false claims during the debate, while Harris made just one. ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis corrected the former president on several occasions.

One was in the exchange that typified the inaccurate claims Trump made through the night, as he repeatedly contended that illegal immigrants “are destroying the fabric of our country.”

“In Springfield (Ohio), they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country.”

Muir said Springfield’s city manager told ABC News “there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

“But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there,” Trump persisted. “Again,” Muir noted, “the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.”

When the debate turned to foreign policy, Trump refused to answer Muir’s question about whether he wanted Ukraine to win its war against Russia.

“I want the war to stop,” he said. “I want to save lives that are being uselessly — people being killed by the millions.” He repeated his claim that, if he wins, he could settle the war even before his inauguration, deriding Biden as “a president that doesn’t know he’s alive.”

When Muir asked Harris how she would deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, she said that “first of all, it’s important to remind the former president, you’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.

“I believe the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up,” she said. “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe. Starting with Poland.

“Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch?” she asked Trump.

In all, it was a very good night for Harris, and it ended with yet another boost: the endorsement of iconic pop music star Taylor Swift — a native Pennsylvanian.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

But Tuesday’s successes came tempered with a warning of trouble ahead as yet another major poll showed President Joe Biden in serious reelection trouble, a problem likely to persist when the immediate glow wears off.

The day’s races continued the pattern since the Supreme Court last year reversed its 1973 legalization of abortion rights: Democrats held Kentucky’s governorship with an increased margin, added Virginia’s House of Delegates to their control of the state Senate and made Ohio the latest state to guarantee the right to an abortion.

In all three states, Democratic campaigns stressed the need to protect abortion rights, a crucial factor in their victories over the past year. “We head into 2024 with the wind at our back,” tweeted longtime Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg

But one year’s elections don’t take place in a vacuum. And just like the New York Times/Siena College survey a few days earlier, a new CNN poll showed Biden suffering serious voter erosion in a possible 2024 rematch against his 2020 victim, former President Donald Trump.

The bottom line: Democrats are continuing to do well. But Biden’s reelection bid is in trouble.

And if that persists, party leaders won’t be able to take much solace from the fact that, since 2001, the Kentucky gubernatorial election has been an accurate prognosticator of the following year’s presidential race.

Pre-election analyses and a published poll suggested the race between Gov. Andy Beshear and GOP state Attorney General Daniel Cameron could be as close as the incumbent’s 5,000-vote victory four years ago.

But the actual Democratic showing at the ballot box proved stronger than in the polls. Beshear won by five points in a state that Trump carried in 2020 by 26 points. He did so by assailing Cameron’s support for a state law banning almost all abortions and defending his own veto of a measure curbing medical aid for transgender children, passed by the GOP-controlled legislature.

Meanwhile, the election for Virginia’s General Assembly may have reduced the number of prospective GOP presidential candidates. Glenn Youngkin, the state’s first Republican governor in a decade, spent time and money campaigning for a GOP takeover of the state Senate in hopes of enacting a conservative agenda that would provide a possible launching pad for his presidential ambitions.

Specifically, he hoped to show that the GOP could reduce its political damage from the abortion issue by pushing a 15-week abortion ban as a “consensus” measure. But Democrats seized on his promise and made it a crucial part of their campaigns in every closely fought legislative district, especially in suburban northern Virginia.

Party lines were also sharply drawn on the issue in Ohio, the seventh state where voters have codified abortion rights since the 2022 Supreme Court decision. All of the state’s top Republican leaders, including Gov. Mike DeWine, campaigned against the constitutional amendment that abortion rights supporters had placed on Tuesday’s state ballot.

Democrats scored another victory with potential 2024 political implications. Daniel McCaffery won election to a vacancy on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, solidifying the Democrats’ margin on the court that has made crucial rulings in that electoral swing state against past Republican challenges to state election laws.

The White House and Biden’s reelection campaign hailed the day’s results as omens of future successes. But a CNN poll showed that, not only did Trump lead Biden by four points in a hypothetical 2024 matchup, but a principal factor was a decline in Biden’s margins among several key elements in the coalition that elected him — Black, Hispanic and young voters.

Perhaps more seriously, CNN said the registered voters sampled gave Trump substantial advantages on “being an effective world leader” and “having the stamina and sharpness to serve.”

Rosenberg disputed the findings in the CNN and Times polls by citing other surveys. But he conceded “what we have right now is a close, competitive election with the Democratic coalition wandering a bit a year before the election, as to be expected, giving us a lot of work to do.”

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

“Why Vice President Harris Is Invaluable for 2024,” headlined a nine-page memo from Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and Becca Siegel, the campaign’s chief data operative. They argued her stress on issues important to core Democrats outweighs any popular shortcomings.

“ICYMI: Vice President Kamala Harris Takes on Gun Safety Reform and Critical 2024 Role,” headed another release, citing an array of articles about her recent appearances.

Actually, the campaign to spotlight Harris coincides with signs that she has found more of her political bearings, though it’s not yet apparent in the polls. Serving as the administration’s spokesperson on abortion, gun control and racial issues suits her a lot better than her initial assignment on immigration.

Harris downplays that there’s been a change. “It’s not as though I’ve just found myself,” she told Politico in a recent interview. “I’ve always been here and never went away.” But she has lately shown greater willingness to challenge the Republicans, while shedding some of the caution that marked her first two years as vice president.

Harris’ initial struggles were hardly surprising. Picked to provide racial and ideological balance and fulfill Biden’s pledge to pick a female running mate, she was far less experienced than the president, a veteran of five decades in Washington.

She had been a senator for only two years and spent much of it running for president and then vice president. And she lacked a close personal relationship with Biden.

Besides, the president had a well-established coterie of mostly male senior advisers from his years in the Senate, as vice president and his presidential campaign.

One of her two original assignments was to help pass broad-ranging voting rights legislation to counter restrictive GOP state laws, a no-win proposition because of the Senate’s filibuster rule and Biden’s unwillingness to change it.

The second was immigration, but mainly finding ways to counter the impact of Central American poverty and crime on the refugee influx into the United States.

As a result, she forswore a visit to the U.S.-Mexican border as outside her realm of responsibility, looking foolish in the process and prompting predictable Republican criticism that she was ignoring the impact of administration policies on the problems there.

The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning its 1973 ruling legalizing a woman’s right to an abortion has given her a natural issue on which to take the administration’s lead.

A second area tailor-made for Harris was the campaign by some GOP presidential candidates, notably Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, against teaching “woke” policies like the history of racial and sexual equality.

When the Florida Board of Education adopted new Black history standards to meet legislation pushed by DeSantis, she promptly flew to Jacksonville to denounce them, showing a flexible and aggressive response often lacking in her first two years. Her more outspoken role produced a spate of positive stories and columns, which the Biden-Harris reelection campaign was only too happy to publicize.

But Harris has a long way to go to overcome the widespread skepticism within Democratic Party ranks and the country at large over her qualifications to be president, something GOP candidates often raise.

“Joe Biden is the oldest president in history and, if he’s re-elected, we could end up with a President Harris,” said former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

A Los Angeles Times average of polls measuring the vice president’s popularity shows 40% of registered voters with a favorable opinion of Harris and 53% an unfavorable opinion, a tad lower than Biden’s approval level.

Campaign officials, unsurprisingly, stress her positives.

“More than any approval polling,” proclaimed the Rodriquez-Siegel memorandum, “is that the Vice President has established herself as a fearless voice on many of the issues that are most important to voters in the Biden-Harris coalition. “

They also count on the fact that, historically, vice presidential nominees play very little role in determining presidential voting choices. Only the election itself will show if that differs for the running mate of an 80-year-old candidate.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

As thousands of poor people lose the temporary access to Medicaid gained during the COVID pandemic, it could rectify the state’s shameful status as one of only 10 rejecting the Affordable Care Act’s offer to extend health care coverage to thousands.

Rather, the Republican-dominated body continues to respond mainly to conservative political priorities by targeting society’s most vulnerable members, notably joining the national GOP drive to prevent parents from undertaking gender-affirming treatments for their transgender children.

Ironically, their agenda represents a reversal of the GOP’s long-time governing philosophy: limited government, power closest to the people, individual rights, the primacy of the family.

Measures aimed at transgender children are only part of an agenda heavy on social issues since Republicans tightened their majorities in recent elections. Last year, they barred almost all abortions except in the case of a medical emergency involving the mother.

Meanwhile, legislators are again singling out Harris County (Houston) — two-thirds Latino or Black — for new voter rules despite the absence of significant fraud. And Gov. Greg Abbott is pushing a plan that would weaken the public school system by giving parents of private school students access to state education funds.

Their focus on social issues is hardly unique. It mirrors the way Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a supine Florida legislature passed an array of conservative measures designed primarily to bolster his presidential bid.

Similar agendas, singling out transgender youth and curbing abortions, are also being enacted by most other Republican governors and GOP legislative majorities.

Their target is a tiny proportion of the 330 million Americans. UCLA’s Williams Institute estimated there are 1.3 million transgender adults in the United States, including 92,900 in Texas, and 300,000 between the ages of 13 and 17, including 29,800 in Texas.

So far this year, according to the Trans Legislative Tracker, 73 bills aimed at transgender people have passed in 21 states and nearly 400 remain under active consideration, including the pending Texas measure to bar hormone treatments and puberty blockers for Texans under 18.

The independent research group monitoring those efforts says most restrict transgender treatments, bar transgender women from participating in sports or limit changing gender assignments made at birth.

Meanwhile, some Democratic controlled states such as Michigan and Minnesota are moving in the opposite direction, protecting parents of transgender children, while codifying a woman’s right to an abortion and making voting easier.

In Michigan, for example, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a new law permanently barring discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity and protecting gender identity as well as expression. She also signed a law revoking the state’s 1931 ban on abortions.

The Texas bill awaiting Abbott’s signature drew substantial medical opposition during hearings earlier this year. It would require the state to revoke the medical licenses of doctors who provide treatments like puberty blockers, hormone therapy or surgery to minors in order “to transition a child’s biological sex.”

It would ban taxpayer money from individuals and entities, including public colleges and universities, that provide such care to minors.

Such moves reflect the prevailing politics of gay and transgender issues, like opposition to gay marriage a generation ago. But the latter has changed dramatically over the years.

Public opinion surveys display some mixed trends. A recent Pew Research Center survey showed 64% favor laws protecting transgender people from discrimination with only 10% opposed. The remainder had no view.

But a Washington Post-KFF poll found 68% of adults oppose access to puberty-blocking medication for transgender children 10-14 and 58% oppose access to hormonal treatments for those 15-17. Some 57% agreed a child’s gender is assigned at birth while 43% said it could later differ, a significant minority.

But over 60% supported gender-affirming counseling or therapy for transgender minors.

For now, Republicans politicians in states like Texas can take comfort from the fact that the public favors the restrictions they are passing. But that hardly makes them right — and there is no guarantee it won’t change.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

Like prior presidents, Joe Biden used his State of the Union speech to build on his achievements and to lay the basis for what quite clearly is a plan to seek a second term.

“Let’s finish the job,” Biden urged Congress in an optimistic, forward-looking speech that may have been the most vigorous and effective of his presidency. After two years in office, he said, “the State of the Union is strong.”

Biden’s tone and substance were clearly aimed at countering perceptions he is a weak leader and overcoming the gap between his view of his administration’s record and widespread public doubts suggesting he may face a tough sell in seeking reelection.

Recent polls show more Americans think the country is in a recession than making economic progress and don’t believe that Biden has achieved very much despite the legislative successes in his two years in office. A majority of Democrats say they don’t want him to run again.

To be sure, it may not be easy to overcome that gap, since a post-speech poll showed Biden’s audience likely contained more supporters than critics. Immediate reaction was predominantly partisan, as fellow Democrats often cheered, while Republicans led by new Speaker Kevin McCarthy mostly sat on their hands.

But Biden may benefit politically from the contrast between his tone and substance and the frequent heckling of some Republicans. Loud jeers erupted from the GOP’s most conservative members when he said, in discussing the budget, that “some Republicans (and he stressed “some”) want Medicare and Social Security to sunset,” meaning “if Congress doesn’t keep the programs the way they are, they go away.”

But he got a standing ovation when he concluded, “Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right? We’ve got unanimity.”

For the most part, Biden appealed for a bipartisan approach to tackle such problems as immigration and the debt ceiling, repeatedly noting how much Republicans helped pass the significant legislation in his first two years.

Many of the president’s comments seemed to recognize his difficulty in getting through to voters, like the 3 in 5 in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll who said they believed he hadn’t accomplished very much.

So, in discussing his massive infrastructure program to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and sewer systems, he said, “Already, we’ve funded over 20,000 projects, including at major airports from Boston to Atlanta to Portland. And folks,” he added, “we’re just getting started.”

The president also sought to counter the widespread view, reflected in several recent polls, that the country is either in an economic recession or likely to enter one later this year.

He said that unemployment is at “a 50-year low,” noted 12 million new jobs have been created since his administration took office, and added that inflation has come down for the last six months. “Gas prices are down $1.50 a gallon since their peak,” he added.

Biden stressed that much of his economic program is aimed at “places and people that have been forgotten,” calling it “a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America and make a real difference in your lives at home.”

His speech was heavily keyed to domestic issues, spending just five of its 70 minutes focused abroad. He noted that “in the past two years, democracies have become stronger, not weaker,” and hailed the West’s help for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s aggression. “We’re going to stand with you as long as it takes,” he said, as the country’s ambassador stood in the gallery.

In the wake of last week’s incident in which a Chinese spy balloon flew over the United States before being shot down, he warned, “If China invades our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country — and we did.”

Three of the four most recent presidents who won second terms — Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — were especially effective salesmen for their policies, whatever their ideologies.

By contrast, those who lost —Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump — were not.

Because of his age, how Biden looks and speaks could well determine his 2024 success as much as his policies.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

Donald Trump is reportedly preparing an early announcement of his 2024 candidacy. The White House insists President Joe Biden will seek re-election.

But a lot of prominent figures in both the Republican and Democratic parties are behaving like they don’t believe either will ultimately run — or think they’re eminently beatable.

And the early maneuvering suggests both parties could face free-for-all nominating fights like the GOP in 2016 and the Democrats in 2020, starting the day after the Nov. 8 midterm elections.

Among Republicans, Trump has clearly sought to preempt the field by raising a multimillion-dollar war chest, choosing candidates in many GOP primaries and campaigning like it already is 2024.

But doubts about his real intentions, continuing threats of legal action and concern about the negative aspects of his prospective candidacy always made it likely Republicans would have the kind of contest faced by parties without an incumbent president.

Though the polls show the former president starts as the person to beat, his prospective opponents include many of his former closest aides — including former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

They’re hardly the only ones. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, shown in recent polls as Trump’s closest rival, has pointedly refused to say he’d back off if the former president runs. Outgoing Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, an anti-Trump moderate, has not ruled out a race. Nor has Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, perhaps the former president’s most outspoken GOP foe.

And an imposing array of GOP senators and governors have followed the usual path that prospective candidates make to help fellow Republicans in such crucial early voting states as Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

The Democratic outlook for 2024 is even more complicated: The party has a weak incumbent vowing to seek a second term — and an unsettled nominating calendar.

But Biden’s vows are not deterring other candidates, though most of their moves are more covert than overt.

Those making tacit opening 2024 moves include two prominent big state governors — California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker — and a member of Biden’s own Cabinet, Transportation Secretary and 2020 also-ran Pete Buttigieg.

Newsom, facing weak re-election opposition in November, recently took the unusual step of running an anti-DeSantis television ad in Florida. DeSantis responded in kind, criticizing California’s lockdown policies during the COVID-19 pandemic and accusing Newsom of treating his own state’s citizens “like peasants.”

Any list of potential 2024 hopefuls would also include two other Democratic governors — New Jersey’s Phil Murphy and North Carolina’s Roy Cooper — and one former governor — Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

Meanwhile, Buttigieg’s Cabinet position provides a built-in governmental platform to tour the country, touting the job-creating projects being launched by last year’s massive bipartisan infrastructure law.

The former South Bend, Indiana, mayor also took some political steps. He moved to Traverse City, Michigan, the hometown of his husband, Chasten, ostensibly because the latter’s parents could help provide childcare for their recently adopted twins.

Of course, Michigan, a swing state that often votes Democratic, might provide a better launching pad for future political endeavors than heavily Republican Indiana. Buttigieg also reactivated his political action committee to help endangered Democratic candidates this year.

The most obvious Democratic alternative to Biden, of course, is his vice president, former California Sen. Kamala Harris. She had a rough year politically, given the negative stories about her staff problems and her lack of influence within the administration.

But the Supreme Court’s decision reversing its Roe v. Wade abortion ruling gives her a powerful platform to campaign on this fall, stressing an issue important to Democrats that could help them counter a potential GOP tide.

Still, Democrats expect Harris to face opposition should she seek to succeed Biden in 2024. And though age could be a factor in deterring Biden’s candidacy, an aide to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said the Vermont independent might also enter an open 2024 race, though he is even older than the president.

Until the Nov. 8 midterm elections, expect a continuation of the shadow 2024 campaign. But once the results are in, it’s likely to emerge openly, in ways unpredictable at present.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

Last week’s two significant Supreme Court decisions — loosening some restrictions on American’s gun owners and restricting abortions for the nation’s women — represent the ultimate impact of Donald Trump’s narrow 2016 election victory over Hillary Clinton.

They also represent the success of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s cynical manipulation of Senate confirmation procedures. He kept a Democratic president from installing a justice in the last year of his presidency but enabled a Republican to install one as the nation’s voters were poised to oust him from office.

Ironically, neither Trump, known primarily before his election as a bombastic developer and reality television host, nor McConnell, a dour master of the Senate’s inside game, had ever identified strongly with the GOP’s most fervent abortion rights opponents.

Trump, who said in a 1999 interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, “I’m very pro-choice,” switched positions when he began to eye the Republican presidential nomination. “I’m pro-life (and) against gun control,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011.

While wooing religious conservatives cool to his 2016 candidacy, he issued a list of conservative jurists he would consider for the Supreme Court, predicting they would overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortions.

Similarly, he took increasingly fervent positions opposing any gun control measures, claiming they threatened the Second Amendment. His stance gained him strong political and financial support from the National Rifle Association and its allies.

The result is that, at a time when pervasive gun violence has prompted widespread support for increased limits on firearms ownership, a court with Trump’s three nominees further extended gun rights that it decided in 2008 were protected by the Second Amendment.

More dramatically, it repealed the constitutional right to an abortion that it established in 1973, though polls show most Americans favor its retention, some with limits.

These two decisions show a court more at odds with the public’s views than at any time in decades. They raise the question of whether public opposition to these decisions — especially the one curbing abortions — will help the Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential race.

Critics face one overriding reality: It may take a long time before they can displace the court’s current six-justice conservative majority. With liberal Justice Stephen Breyer’s impending retirement, the court’s oldest members, Republican nominees Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, are only in their early 70s.

November’s election could enable McConnell to block President Joe Biden from filing any unexpected vacancies in the second two years of his term, like he blocked former President Barack Obama’s choice of Merrick Garland, now the attorney general, in 2016.

In both decisions, Trump’s three nominees formed the majority, along with fellow conservative nominees of prior GOP presidents: Clarence Thomas (President George Bush) and John Roberts and Samuel Alito (President George W. Bush). Questionable circumstances surrounded the nominations or confirmations of all three justices who joined the court under Trump.

Justice Neil Gorsuch filled the vacancy caused by McConnell’s unprecedented decision to prevent Senate consideration of Obama’s choice of Garland to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

A year later, the White House persuaded Kennedy to retire so Trump could name Brett Kavanaugh, a former Kennedy clerk and onetime White House staffer whom President George W. Bush named as an appeals judge. Kavanaugh was confirmed after a contentious hearing, 50-48.

Last week’s decision might have been less sweeping had the Senate not confirmed Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett after liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020. Ignoring his own 2016 precedent, McConnell sped her nomination through, 52-48, just one week before Trump lost re-election.

An entirely different scenario might have unfolded had Ginsburg yielded to entreaties from some Democrats to retire while Obama could name a like-minded successor. As a result, the liberal icon shares some blame for a decision that she would have abhorred.

The potential impact of her decision may have influenced the 83-year-old Breyer’s decision to step aside for Biden to name his successor.

By then, however, the Trump majority was in place.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

The House Jan. 6 committee’s message is simple:

Former President Donald Trump sought to reverse his 2020 election defeat by an array of improper acts, including inciting a violent invasion of the Capitol and installing Justice Department officials who’d do his bidding.

The politics of the proceedings are more complicated.

Even Democrats who fully support their necessity and their message don’t expect them to limit their party’s likely losses in November’s midterm elections.

At best, they hope to remind some Democrats, who probably comprise most viewers, why they so opposed Trump and provide a voting rationale for those party adherents who are less than enthused by President Joe Biden.

As for Republicans, it’s unlikely the proceedings will make much of a dent among the millions of fervent Trump supporters who reject any effort to blame him for the Jan. 6 violence and accept the Republican National Committee’s characterization as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

But polls show the GOP is divided between all-out Trump backers and those who wish the former president would stop claiming the 2020 election was rigged and leave the party’s 2024 field to other Republicans of similar ideology.

A recent NBC News poll showed that, by about 2-to-1, more Republicans consider themselves followers of the party than of Trump, a reversal of pre-2020 election attitudes. An ABC News-Washington Post poll last month showed that, while 3 of every 5 Republicans said the GOP should follow his leadership, 1 of every 3 said it should not.

That suggests there may be millions of Republicans who are at least open to a convincing presentation of his responsibility for fomenting the Jan. 6 demonstrations — and failing to heed pleas to stop them. Even if they haven’t been watching, it may be hard for them to escape news reports of the proceedings.

Meanwhile, though Democrats comprise a majority of the House panel, they made the politically wise decision to start by having their most prominent GOP member, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, detail the case against Trump. The panel then presented confirming testimony from the former president’s own appointees, including former Attorney General Bill Barr and Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and other Republicans.

The facts are so devastating to Trump’s case that Republican critics have been reduced to condemning procedural and political aspects of the sessions — such as the decision to hold some of them in prime viewing time — rather than their substance.

Republicans also complained about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision last year to reject GOP efforts to add two outspoken Trump supporters, Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, to the panel. She accepted three other Republicans, but they refused then to serve.

While Democrats acknowledged Pelosi’s action had some political cost, the House Republican leadership made a far more serious political miscalculation in deciding to block creation of a truly bipartisan panel. A panel on which Republicans exercised some control might have been far less clear-cut — and far more contentious.

Republicans have also questioned the legislative purpose. But many important congressional hearings have been undertaken primarily to educate the public, like Sen. J.W. Fulbright’s mid-1960s inquiry into the U.S. policy in Vietnam, or to uncover wrongdoing, like the Senate Watergate committee’s probe.

In fact, these current hearings have both a legislative and an educational purpose.

The legislative purpose is to make the case for strengthening existing law on congressional counting of electoral votes to ensure the process can’t be manipulated as Trump sought to do.

The educational purpose is to bolster the nation’s democratic system by portraying the events of Jan. 6 as part of a broad conspiracy by Trump to overturn the legitimate decision of the American people. Their relevance is underscored by the continuing efforts of Trump’s allies to change procedures and personnel in many states’ election machinery to make possible in 2024 what they failed to achieve in 2020.

The panel clearly hopes that, the more the American people understand what Trump did and the extent of illegality involved, the less likely they will be to sanction a repeat attempt in 2024.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

The Republican quest to stamp out alleged voter fraud has a new poster couple.

It’s not any of those thousands of Texans whose mail ballots were tossed out under the strict requirements of the state’s new voting law. Their crime, in most cases, was inadvertent — leaving out some required numbers on the application.

No, it’s Donald Trump’s final White House chief of staff, former Rep. Mark Meadows, and his wife, Debra. After news stories raised the matter, North Carolina authorities flagged them for listing a rusted mobile home in a rural area as their residence in 2020 though they never lived there.

The State Bureau of Investigation announced it is investigating them at the request of the state attorney general’s office. Under North Carolina law, anyone who “fraudulently or falsely” fills out a voter form could face felony charges carrying a maximum imprisonment of one year. Neither the former White House chief of staff nor his wife has addressed the matter publicly.

It’s ironic. Meadows was a major player in Trump’s effort to peddle the notion of widespread voter fraud, and he was on the line when Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to demand he switch more than 11,779 votes so Trump could carry Georgia. That phone call has prompted a grand jury investigation in Georgia.

The Meadows probe is a reminder that there are already laws to cope with the scattered cases of voter fraud that occur in every election and that fraud is not confined to one party or one voter group. Indeed, every time in recent years that Texas and federal officials investigated the matter, they had difficulty finding more than a handful of examples, many from people who said they didn’t understand the rules.

But the recent spate of legislating was never really about voter fraud. It was a response by Republican governors and legislators to the former president’s unproven allegations that widespread fraud — especially the increased use of mail-in ballots — caused his 2020 defeat.

It’s reminiscent of what happened a decade ago when many GOP legislators and governors rewrote election laws to counter concerns about Barack Obama’s victory in 2008.

That election was marked by increased participation of minority and younger voters, inspired largely because Obama was the first major Black presidential candidate.

In fact, the 2008 financial crisis and President George W. Bush’s failures in Iraq may have been equally responsible for Obama’s victory. But many Republicans saw the result as a warning that their dependence on the diminishing proportion of white voters was a long-term problem.

One answer was voter identification laws and, in some states, tighter restrictions on voting by college students. The requirements of the Texas voter ID law were so strict that a federal court later forced changes after concluding it handicapped the poor and minorities.

There is, of course, nothing inherently racial in requiring identification for voters, just like requirements for boarding airplanes or buying alcoholic beverages. The problem is that, when you limit the kinds of valid identifications too tightly, you handicap people who don’t have driver’s licenses, live in remote areas or find it difficult to go to a state office during weekday business hours.

That was why the Justice Department, during the Obama administration, sought to block the Texas law under a provision of the Voting Rights Act requiring federal pre-clearance of significant voting law changes in states like Texas with past histories of discrimination.

Interestingly, Richard Posner, the Republican federal appeals judge whose 2007 opinion approving voter ID laws was later upheld by the Supreme Court, concluded some years later that the Indiana law in that case was “a type of law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.”

The federal efforts to block such laws collapsed when the Supreme Court ruled the pre-clearance requirement was no longer needed to prevent discriminatory voting laws. The opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, a critic of the Voting Rights Act since he was a young Justice Department attorney 30 years earlier.

Fast forward now to 2020, when fear of getting COVID-19 kept many Americans from every-day activities, like shopping and attending school.

It led to greater emphasis on absentee voting and drop-by boxes so voters wouldn’t risk infection in crowded polling places, especially in urban areas. Though Republicans historically relied more on absentee voting, in 2020 the Democrats took advantage of antipathy toward President Trump among many Democratic-leaning or independent voters to mount major efforts to turn out absentee votes.

In some states, voting officials eased some prior restrictions, such as those limiting absentee voting to those who were certified as too old or frail to go to the polls and stand there for several hours. (Texas officials rejected such a change.)

Even before the election, Trump questioned the potential impact of absentee voting on his chances. After the former president blamed it for the result, Republicans in many states sought to prevent a recurrence by curbing absentee voting and banning drop-by boxes, as well as creating new mechanisms to monitor or replace elections officials.

GOP politicians, meanwhile, continue to trumpet Trump’s unproven claims; Georgia GOP gubernatorial challenger David Perdue did that at a Trump rally last weekend. But expressions of concern over what Mark and Debra Meadows are accused of doing — if any — are hard to find.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

It’s been two decades since that horrific morning when an assault from the sky caused New York’s two iconic towers to erupt in flames and left an entire nation feeling it was under attack.

The gas masks, the bottles of water, the wads of bills and the other protective measures stockpiled in the ensuing weeks to prepare for the next emergency are mostly forgotten.

Though terrorists still strike — as they did in killing 13 U.S. service members and nearly 200 Afghans during the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan — enhanced domestic security and alertness have kept the American homeland safe.

Still, 9/11 stands as one of those significant crossroads in U.S. history, a fearsome prelude for a series of 21st century blows to our well-being, though its death toll of 3,000 pales alongside the pandemic that has killed more than 200 times that many Americans — and several million elsewhere.

For many of us who lived through it, it will always be one of those days vividly etched in memory, like when assassins gunned down John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In Washington, it was a brilliantly sunny September morning. My wife, Susan Page, was on a plane to New York when I heard the first bulletins, creating some personal heart-stopping uncertainty until I realized the doomed planes were not from the two airlines that regularly flew the Washington-New York shuttle route. Subsequently, I learned her plane had landed safely in Baltimore.

In the initial hours, there was panic in many streets of downtown Washington, as thousands rushed to leave the city, jamming major roads out of town. As journalists do, we went to work, helping to publish the first “extra” edition of The Dallas Morning News since the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan 20 years earlier.

Meanwhile, a third terrorist-commandeered craft hit the outer rings of the nearby Pentagon. A fourth was headed for the U.S. Capitol when its passengers courageously took control, forcing it to crash in a Pennsylvania field and saving democracy’s citadel at the cost of their lives.

Even the president, George W. Bush, conveyed an initial sense of uncertainty. Told of the attacks while visiting a Florida classroom, he was taken airborne for safety, flying in Air Force One to two distant bases, before returning to Washington to take command.

Fortunately, that first day proved to be the day of maximum threat, though the nation’s nerves were on edge for weeks, in part because of the unknown of whether it would happen again. Everyone shuddered when copycat terrorists sent packets of deadly anthrax to governmental and media offices.

After that initial uncertainty, Bush took firm command, rallying the nation to unite against the terrorist threat, in an impromptu speech to New York firefighters and a formal address to a joint session of Congress. In a showing of bipartisan unity rarely seen since, all but one lone House member, California Democrat Barbara Lee, voted to grant him the authority to strike back militarily.

The 9/11 attacks changed life for many Americans, especially in the nation’s capital. Vehicular traffic was barred from the three blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. Easy access to public buildings was constrained.

Airline security was enhanced. Several years before 9/11, finding myself at the wrong Washington airport, I walked onto a totally different flight to my destination without challenge. That can no longer happen.

And the aftermath of 9/11 reshaped our politics. At the time of the assault, the impression in Washington was that the 8-month-old Bush presidency was foundering, his early high job approval numbers drifting downward.

But his firm response gave him a sense of purpose and united the country, laying the basis for him to win a second term three years later.

By then, like so many presidents, he had over-reached, extending what had begun as a united nation’s strike against al-Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan into the kind of nation-building he had disdained during his successful 2000 presidential campaign.

His uniform support splintered even more when he switched his focus from the universally supported war on terrorism in Afghanistan to a 2003 attack to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. At first, Bush maintained substantial bipartisan support by justifying the proposed attack with claims, later proven false, that the Iraqi president was developing nuclear weapons.

In October 2002, Bush won congressional support to use “necessary and appropriate” force against Iraq by 296-133 in the House and 77-23 in the Senate. The subsequent invasion quickly overthrew Iraq’s dictator.

But the president’s support began to crater after his 2004 reelection as the Iraq campaign morphed into bloody civil war, and the search for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden persisted without success. By the 2006 midterm election, full-scale partisanship had re-emerged, and Bush and his GOP took what he described as “a thumping” that restored Democratic control of Congress.

The brief bipartisan era Bush initiated after the 9/11 attacks seems even more distant today, amid the sharply partisan reactions to the ongoing war against the COVID-19 pandemic and President Joe Biden’s recent end of the 20-year U.S. effort in Afghanistan.

The same president who inspired that more positive approach ultimately oversaw its demise, resulting in division that his three successors have mostly been unable or unwilling to surmount.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.