As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch sees it, an explosion in the complexity of the nation’s regulations is overburdening Americans and often trampling their rights and livelihoods.

Less than a century ago, the laws of the United States could fit into a single book, but since then they have swelled to fill enough volumes to take up an entire shelf in his office, Gorsuch said Thursday night during a conversation at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.

The Federal Register listing government regulations is now about 60,000 pages, and the number of federal crimes has grown to roughly 5,000 by some estimates, said Gorsuch, who is promoting a book, “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” which he co-wrote with a former clerk, Janie Nitze.

Gorsuch said that ever-expanding system has created a Kafkaesque maze, where Americans sometimes violate rules and regulations they didn’t know existed, compliance has become overly onerous, and even regulators sometimes don’t know the laws they are tasked with enforcing.

“I’ve been a judge now coming on 20 years,” he told the Reagan Library audience. “I’ve just seen so many cases come through my courtroom where ordinary Americans — decent, hardworking people who are trying to do their best — are just getting … thwacked by laws unexpectedly.”

Gorsuch illustrated his point by delving into several real-life vignettes from his book, involving magicians, monks and a hair-braider who found themselves in fights — sometimes surreal — with regulators.

He told the story of a commercial fisherman in Florida who was charged under a law, passed after the Enron corporate accounting scandal, that forbids the destruction of documents and “tangible objects” to impede a federal investigation. The man’s alleged crime: disposing of fish.

The government alleged that John Yates destroyed evidence by dumping his catch after a routine inspection found that the fish were smaller than the legal limit, then replacing them with other fish, a contention Yates denied. Prosecutors argued that the fish were tangible objects under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Yates was eventually convicted and served 30 days in jail, but he appealed his case to the Supreme Court, which overturned his conviction in 2015, finding that the law was never meant to apply to such circumstances. By then, the legal drama had upended Yates’s life and career as a fisherman.

Gorsuch said the heavy reliance on laws has many causes, but it may have to do with the nation’s fraying bonds of community and trust. He lamented the downfall of churchgoing, the decline in social clubs and the deepening political divide in recent decades.

“If I trust you and my local community and we can work together to solve problems, we don’t need to resort to law for everything,” Gorsuch said. “We have a lot of work to do on civility and civics.”

The justice said too many schools have dropped civics classes, and he urged people to lobby their local districts to reinstate them. He said it was shocking that, as surveys have shown, many Americans cannot name all three branches of government.

The appearance at the library was part of a series of interviews by the Donald Trump-appointed conservative, who like other justices rarely speaks to the media. In the recent blitz to promote his book, Gorsuch has expressed reservations about President Joe Biden’s plans to overhaul the Supreme Court and defended a blockbuster ruling from the high court in July that granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts as president.

Gorsuch, who became a Supreme Court justice in 2017, told Fox News in an interview aired Sunday that he would not offer an opinion on Biden’s proposed changes for the court, which include 18-year term limits for justices and a stronger enforcement mechanism for its ethics code, but he worried about the impact of any overhaul, saying it could make the judiciary less independent.

“It’s there for the moments when the spotlight’s on you, when the government’s coming after you,” Gorsuch said of the court system. “Don’t you want a ferociously independent judge and a jury of your peers to make those decisions? Isn’t that your right as an American? And so I just say, be careful.”

Gorsuch’s comments came after Justice Elena Kagan struck a different tone, recently telling an audience in California that she would support the creation of a committee of judges to examine potential violations of the court’s ethics code, which critics have complained is toothless.

In a second interview with Fox News, aired Tuesday, Gorsuch defended the court’s decision on presidential immunity, which arose out of a criminal case against Trump related to his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.

Gorsuch framed the decision as an outgrowth of a Nixon-era ruling by the court that insulated presidents from civil suits after they leave office, so as not to chill their actions while in office.

“All the court did in this case was simply apply that same precedent and idea to the criminal context,” Gorsuch said.

The Supreme Court has sharply curtailed the power of federal agencies in major rulings in recent terms.

The court struck down a 40-year-old bedrock of administrative law known as the Chevron doctrine that required courts to give broad deference to federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous statutes.

The court has also put on hold a major plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to combat smog-forming pollution that drifts across state lines, curtailed the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases and limited its powers to protect wetlands. It also invalidated the Securities and Exchange Commission’s use of in-house tribunals to go after securities fraud, among other actions.

David N. Dempsey came to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol well prepared and well experienced in committing violence at political rallies. Dempsey wore a bullet-proof tactical vest, a black helmet, a gaiter to obscure most of his face, and he brought a spare gaiter and shirt that he changed into during the riot.

Before climbing up over rioters on the steps of the Capitol, he gave an interview in front of the gallows constructed nearby and rattled off the names of prominent Democrats he hated. “They don’t need a jail cell,” Dempsey said. “They need to hang from these.”

Dempsey then repeatedly attacked police officers in the lower West Terrace tunnel for more than an hour, throwing poles and deploying bear spray at the line of officers protecting the Capitol. He then sprayed bear spray directly inside the mask of one officer, who testified that he thought he might die, and used a crutch to smash one officer’s head, giving him a concussion.

Senior U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth sentenced Dempsey, 37, to 20 years in prison Friday, the second-longest sentence of the approximately 950 defendants sentenced so far. Only Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, received a longer sentence of 22 years.

“Your conduct on January 6 was especially egregious,” Lamberth told Dempsey. “You didn’t make a split-second decision to use violence. You did not get carried away in the moment. You have a long and well-documented history of inflicting violence on political opponents.”

Dempsey pleaded guilty in January of this year to two counts of assaulting police with dangerous or deadly weapons in the Capitol attack. His family started an online fundraiser for him, which has raised more than $20,000, saying that “he is being politically silenced for his beliefs in the Constitution.”

The judge also weighed Dempsey’s lengthy criminal history in California for burglary, drug dealing, evading police and “assault with a caustic chemical,” for spraying bear spray at anti-Trump protesters in 2020, one of multiple attacks he allegedly launched at political rallies.

Nearly 1,500 people have been charged in the Capitol riot, and more than a third of those were charged with assaulting the police. The average sentence for assaulting police has been slightly less than four years, according to a Washington Post database.

But “Dempsey was one of the most violent rioters, during one of the most violent stretches of time,” prosecutors argued in their sentencing memo, “at the scene of the most violent confrontations at the Capitol on January 6.” That was the West Terrace tunnel, where rioters used sheer numbers to push officers from U.S. Capitol and D.C. police back toward an internal door, hurling items, spraying chemicals and cursing the officers.

Prosecutors said Dempsey flew from his home in Van Nuys, Calif., to Detroit on Jan. 4, then drove with friends to Washington on Jan. 5. Shortly before 4 p.m. on Jan. 6, as rioters continued to swarm the Capitol, Dempsey was captured on video climbing atop the shoulders and backs of others to reach the front line of the skirmish, where he announced his presence by throwing a short pole at an officer and cursing them.

Dempsey grabbed whatever was nearby and threw it at police, prosecutors said, including a riot shield and a flagpole, swung a pole into some officers, then unleashed two bursts of spray into the line of officers. Then as fellow rioter Kyle Fitzsimons of Maine yanked at the gas mask of D.C. police Sgt. Phuson Nguyen, Dempsey fired some spray into Nguyen’s face before Fitzsimons snapped the mask shut, trapping the chemicals inside.

“I thought that’s, you know, where I’m going to die,” Nguyen testified in 2022 at Fitzsimons’s trial. “And in my head, I was thinking about my family at that point before anything else.”

Fitzsimons then got smashed in the top of his head by another rioter swinging a crutch. It’s not clear whether Dempsey was the one who inflicted that wound, but surveillance video later captured Dempsey swinging a crutch at officers at least nine times, striking D.C. police Sgt. Jason Mastony in the head and arm.

Prosecutors said Mastony declined to provide a victim impact statement in other cases but did so in Dempsey’s case because “Dempsey is one of the most violent rioters I encountered on Jan. 6.” Mastony said Dempsey’s crutch struck his head “with such force that it cracked the plastic face shield of my gas mask. I collapsed and caught myself against the wall as my ears rang.” Mastony told investigators he believed he suffered a concussion.

Dempsey remained in the tunnel, surveillance video showed, continuing to swing the crutch and poles at officers before retreating at about 4:42 p.m. Then, prosecutors said, he changed his gaiter and shirt, removed his helmet and put on a hat, and returned to the fray, continuing to swing and throw things at police. He was still fighting and throwing things past 5 p.m., prosecutors said.

Dempsey was first identified by a group of online sleuths who used open-source video and photos to supply suspect names to the FBI, as detailed in the book “Sedition Hunters” by NBC News reporter Ryan Reilly. The sleuths, who initially dubbed Dempsey “FlagGaiterCopHater,” even noticed Dempsey’s change of outfits, but he continued to wear the same Converse high-top sneakers and camouflage pants throughout.

Dempsey appears to wear the same or similar Converse sneakers in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2019, video shows, when he was arrested after spraying anti-Donald Trump protesters with bear spray. He was convicted of that assault in 2021 and received a two-year suspended sentence. Dempsey was also photographed assaulting anti-Trump protesters with a metal bat and a skateboard, twice, at three rallies in 2019 and 2020 but wasn’t charged, prosecutors said.

Dempsey was arrested on multiple felony counts in August 2021 and has been held in jail since. His lawyers did not file any motions seeking his release in the intervening three years, an indication that they expected him to face a lengthy prison sentence.

Dempsey’s criminal record was so long he was classified as “criminal history category 6” for purposes of calculating his sentencing guidelines, the highest category. Someone with no criminal record would have qualified for a sentence of 10 to 12 years. Dempsey’s guidelines called for a sentence of 17 to nearly 22 years, and prosecutors asked Lamberth to give Dempsey the high end of that range.

In front of a packed courtroom with a number of officers who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Dempsey apologized to the police and the community. “You were doing your duties and I responded with anger and violence,” Dempsey said. “To the officers and their families, I really am sorry about everything that has transpired and I hope you find it in your hearts to forgive me.”

Lamberth noted that on Jan. 6, Dempsey “spoke at length about the need to lynch various public officials.” The judge said Dempsey “used every instrument at your disposal…to inflict the maximum harm on the members of the ‘thin blue line’ protecting members of Congress and the Capitol.” The judge declined to give the 22-year sentence sought by prosecutors, but imposed the longest sentence yet on a defendant convicted of assaulting the police at the Capitol.

An Israeli security unit found by the United States to have committed gross violations of human rights will continue to receive U.S. funding because its actions have been “effectively remediated,” the Biden administration said Friday.

The announcement concludes a months-long investigation that coincided with an intense lobbying campaign by the Israeli government to oppose funding restrictions for the Netzah Yehuda battalion, an ultra-Orthodox unit accused of wrongdoing in the death in 2022 of an elderly Palestinian American man.

“This unit can continue receiving security assistance from the United States of America,” said State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.

The finding amounts to a victory for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a stinging defeat for human rights experts inside the State Department and Pentagon who built a case over years that certain Israeli units should be barred from U.S. assistance under legislation known as the Leahy Laws.

Current and former officials said the decision by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to approve continued funding for the unit defied past practices of withholding assistance until serious accountability measures are taken such as criminal penalties for individuals accused of gross human rights violations.

“I have never seen a case where administrative measures such as the ones employed here were sufficient for remediation,” said Charles Blaha, a former State Department official in charge of the office that implements the Leahy Laws.

“This is especially troubling when one of the allegations against this unit is that the unit is responsible for the death of an American citizen, which really calls into question the value that the State Department places on Palestinian American lives,” he said.

The Israeli Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In 2022, a commander of the battalion was reprimanded and the platoon commander and company commander removed from their positions following the death of Omar Assad, a 78-year-old former grocery store owner from Milwaukee who had been detained at a West Bank checkpoint.

Assad was reported to have suffered a stress-induced heart attack that was probably brought on by being bound, gagged and held by Israeli forces, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement at the time. The IDF added that his death was the result of “moral failure and poor decision-making” by the soldiers who had detained him.

Though the individuals faced no criminal penalties, the State Department said it was satisfied by the measures taken by the Israeli government and noted that the individuals in question no longer serve in the military.

The Israel Defense Forces “took several steps to avoid a recurrence of incidents: it enhanced screening requirements for personnel recruited into that battalion and put in place new control mechanisms during the soldiers’ training,” said the State Department. “Soldiers now receive a two-week educational seminar unique to the battalion, and conduct is documented.”

Republicans in Congress vehemently opposed any efforts to punish the Israeli unit or any members of it, with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) saying the action would “stigmatize the entire IDF and encourage Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.”

Blaha, who retired last year from the department and worked extensively on the case, said the consequences didn’t match what amounts to a “criminal homicide.”

“Just think about what they did: This was a 78-year-old man. They arrested him for no legitimate reason — he was never charged with anything, they gagged him, they bound him, they left him on the floor of a construction site in the middle of January. The man died of a stress-induced heart attack, according to the Israeli autopsy,” said Blaha.

“The autopsy, however, found no connection between what the soldiers did to him and his fatal heart attack. In what U.S. court would that be credible? How would that hold up?” he said.

The Israeli government told U.S. officials that the two soldiers were referred for prosecution, said a U.S. official, but those prosecutions could not go forward because witnesses declined to cooperate. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.

For months, Blinken weighed the recommendations from the panel known as the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. The panel said it found multiple instances of gross violations of human rights by Netzah Yehuda and other Israeli units all occurring in the West Bank before Oct. 7. In each case, the State Department said the units had been remediated.

The review process was required under the landmark legislation created by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) that prohibits the U.S. government from providing military assistance to individuals or security force units that commit gross violations of human rights with impunity.

Long before the State Department had announced its decision, Netanyahu vowed to resist the action.

“If anyone thinks they can impose sanctions on a unit of the IDF — I will fight it with all my strength,” Netanyahu said in a statement earlier this year.

A mechanical issue caused former president Donald Trump’s plane to be diverted Friday as he headed to Montana for a rally, according to airport staff at Billings Logan International Airport.

The plane was scheduled to land in Bozeman, Mont., where his Friday evening rally is slated to take place, but instead landed in Billings, Mont., and Trump took another plane to Bozeman. The two cities are more than 100 miles apart.

At 5:30 p.m. Eastern, Trump released a video from inside a plane where he said he “just landed” in Montana but did not address the situation. Trump’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump is scheduled to hold a rally at 10 p.m. Eastern in Bozeman to boost Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee for Senate. Sheehy is challenging Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) highlighted the race as key at a Friday event in Atlanta as Republicans try to win back control of the chamber in November.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

As Vice President Kamala Harris ramps up a presidential campaign with almost unprecedented speed, she has been meeting quietly but regularly with a small group of close aides to go over everything from upcoming speeches to her convention address and debate preparation.

Sometimes the meetings are at Harris’s official residence in the Naval Observatory; other times, in deference to her intensifying travel schedule, they take place on the road, with some aides joining via Zoom.

The group, which started convening in June to prepare Harris for what was expected to be a vice-presidential debate, has now become the closest thing she has to a brain trust. The team includes Lorraine Voles and Sheila Nix, her chiefs of staff at the White House and campaign respectively. Also included are Karen Dunn, who helped Harris prepare for her 2020 debate, and Rohini Kosoglu, a longtime policy adviser.

Harris, supplied with briefing books by her aides, often spends time in the mornings or aboard Air Force Two reviewing materials assembled by these aides and others, taking notes and making edits.

This story is based on conversations with half a dozen Harris aides and allies, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal processes.

In one of the meetings, the vice president told aides she wanted to lean more heavily on her record as a prosecutor. That has now become a central part of her stump speech.

And when Republican nominee Donald Trump announced Thursday that he will take part in a Sept. 10 debate against Harris, it confirmed yet another high-stakes event this group will have to help Harris prepare for. Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, has been lined up to play the part of Trump in debate practice.

The meetings are a reminder that Harris is assembling a campaign on the fly. Less than a month will have elapsed between President Joe Biden’s exit from the race on July 21, making Harris the likely nominee, and the kickoff of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19. That provides a tiny window for Harris to figure out how she wants to talk to voters and shape her message.

At an appearance Thursday in Michigan, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), Harris’s running mate, emphasized the compressed schedule, noting that only 89 days remained until the election.

“Think about this: 89 wake-ups,” Walz told a union audience. “I’ve been saying this. Eight-nine days — we can do anything for 89 days. Telling people, ‘Sleep when you’re dead.’ We’ve got work to do right now — right now. 89 days to make Kamala Harris the next president of the United States.”

The meetings with the inner circle of advisers are central to handling that expedited timetable. Two top communications aides, Brian Fallon and Kirsten Allen, take part. Minyon Moore, who will chair the convention; Sean Clegg, a senior adviser from Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign; former congressman Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.), who was a top Biden aide; and Adam Frankel, a former senior adviser to Harris in the White House, have also joined the sessions.

The group was formed under very different circumstances, before the political landscape was upended.

After Harris, then Biden’s running mate, accepted an invitation from CBS News in May to take part in a vice-presidential debate, she put together a team to prepare. But as the weeks dragged on without the Trump campaign agreeing to a date, the team’s meetings morphed into general strategy sessions on policy and messaging, with aides figuring this would help Harris prepare for a ramped-up campaign schedule.

Then, when Trump selected Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate on July 15, the group accelerated its preparations, lining up Reines to play Vance in mock debates.

But six days after Vance was selected, Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris.

After some back-and-forth, Trump has now agreed to join Harris on Sept. 10 in a presidential debate sponsored by ABC. The two campaigns remain in talks about scheduling a second debate with NBC, according to a person familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential deliberations.

“Well, I’m glad that he finally agreed to a debate on Sept. 10,” Harris told reporters on Thursday. “I’m looking forward to it, and I hope he shows up.”

After the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19-22, the same group will lead her efforts to prepare for the debates with Trump. Reines will play the part of Trump, reprising a role he had in 2016 for Clinton’s mock debates. Reines did not respond to a request for comment.

For now, the small team is mostly focused on Harris’s convention speech and major policy announcements to be made in coming weeks.

To that end, Harris has brought on additional policy aides, including Josh Hsu, who worked for Harris in the Senate and in her vice-presidential office. Hsu is advising Harris on legal and policy issues, including on criminal justice. Brian Nelson, a longtime Harris aide who worked at the Treasury Department, has also joined the campaign as a senior adviser for policy.

In recent days, Trump and his campaign have attacked Harris for not engaging with the media, accusing her of hiding and being afraid to take questions. Harris has not participated in a formal interview with a news outlet since Biden dropped out of the race, only answering brief questions from reporters while traveling.

“She can’t do an interview,” Trump said Thursday during an hour-long news conference at Mar-a-Lago. “She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview. I look forward to the debates, because I think we have to set the record straight.”

Harris said on Thursday she would grant an interview soon. “I’ve talked to my team,” she told reporters. “I want us to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month.”

Trump and Biden broke with decades of tradition this year by setting up debates directly with television networks, instead of relying on the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization formed in 1987.

The two campaigns eventually agreed to two debates, one hosted by CNN in June and one hosted by ABC in September. In the first debate, Biden struggled to complete sentences and at times appeared confused, leading to a panic in the Democratic Party about his ability to defeat Trump. That eventually led Biden to exit the presidential race.

Biden’s stumbles in the debate may raise the stakes for Harris’s performance in the Sept. 10 showdown, as she seeks to show that she is a stronger candidate and can take on Trump more forcefully.

Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’s campaigns for attorney general in California, said the vice president prepares for debates as she does other high-stakes public appearances, with deep dives into the subject matter and an obsession with details.

“When you are an attorney in a courtroom, words matter and details matter and if you get one fact wrong, it can cost you a verdict,” Brokaw said. “I think that’s in part why she is so hyper-focused on facts and getting the details right.”

But Brokaw also cautioned about raising expectations too high for Harris in her faceoff against Trump.

“He knows how to put on a show. He’s no amateur when it comes to this,” Brokaw said. “So it will be pretty interesting to see how their two very different styles line up.”

Michael Scherer contributed to this report.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the national popular vote for president by 4.5 percentage points, a seemingly safe margin that should have easily put him in the White House.

But under the hood, the presidential race was extremely close. In fact, if just 42,000 votes in three battleground states — Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — had gone differently, Biden would have lost his electoral vote majority.

Instead, Biden not only won the popular vote but also 306 votes in the electoral college, a convergence that has not always happened over the past 24 years in the U.S. political system.

And given what we’re seeing this year in the data and in The Washington Post’s election model, it may not only happen again in 2024 — but be easier for Democrats to clinch the electoral college and win the White House with a smaller popular-vote margin than in recent years.

Here’s why.

To better understand how elections are won, one of the best signals that political data scientists use are tipping-point states.

To identify the tipping-point state in 2020, The Post’s elections data team ranked all U.S. states and D.C. based on the margin by which Biden won them — that is, he won D.C. by the largest margin, followed by Vermont, Massachusetts and so on, adding up how many electoral votes each state was worth as we went. The state that took Biden over 270 electoral votes was the one we were looking for — the tipping-point state. In 2020, that state was Wisconsin — and it was decided by only 0.6 percentage points.

In recent elections, we’ve seen a pattern that hasn’t helped Democratic presidential nominees who lead in the national popular vote. They have notched a narrower edge — or perhaps no lead at all — in the tipping-point state, which sometimes means the Democratic candidates don’t win the electoral college.

This happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to Al Gore in 2000. Both won the national popular vote by about 2 and 0.5 percentage points but lost the tipping-point states — Wisconsin and Florida — and, thus, the election.

In other words, in those elections, Republicans did better in the electoral college than in the popular vote. The difference between the national popular-vote margin and the margin in the tipping-point state is called the electoral college bias.

Because of this recent history, we’ve come to assume that Republicans have a baked-in electoral college advantage. We think Democrats need to win the popular vote with some buffer, maybe two or three percentage points, to win the presidential election.

But in 2024, things may be changing. That’s because Democrats are performing less well in populous, blue states while simultaneously not losing any ground in the close states that decide the election.

The presidential race has dramatically re-formed after Biden decided not to run again and Kamala Harris, his vice president, became the Democratic nominee and will face Donald Trump in November.

According to The Post’s polling average, the national popular vote between Trump and Harris is currently tied. At the same time, if the election were held today and the polls (and our average) are right, Michigan would be 2024’s tipping-point state (but that might change as we get closer to November and get more polls).

According to our polling average, which ingests quality polls and past voter data, Trump is ahead in Michigan by a single percentage point. With a tied national polling average, our model shows the current electoral college bias as favoring Republicans by a single percentage point.

This is an average-size electoral college bias, relative to elections going back to 1948, and significantly smaller than the one we saw in the last two election cycles.

That means that if the national environment continues shifting toward Harris, our model shows she would not only win the national popular vote but also squeak by in Michigan. Significantly, the polling data has shown real movement toward Harris since she jumped into the contest on July 21. She has improved by nearly two percentage points in every swing state since becoming the candidate.

So why is Republican’s electoral college advantage shrinking?

It’s important to remember that the electoral college bias hasn’t favored just Republicans in recent years. As recently as 2012, Democrats actually had an advantage. Barack Obama won the popular vote by 3.9 percentage points — but he also won Colorado, which was the tipping-point state, by 5.4 percentage points. So the electoral college bias in 2012 was 1.5 percentage points in favor of Democrats.

In more recent elections (2016, 2020), the bias has grown toward Republicans. That’s because Democrats have racked up large popular-vote margins in populous states such as California and New York but didn’t necessarily win over voters in the states that decide elections, such as Wisconsin.

Republicans also win populous states such as Texas and Florida, but by smaller margins. But in 2020, Democrats triumphed in California by 5 million votes and in New York by nearly 2 million votes, while Republicans won Texas and Florida by under 1 million votes.

In 2024, paradoxically, Democrats are doing slightly less well in the really populous states.

According to a recent Siena College Research Institute poll, Harris leads Trump in New York by 14 percentage points — significantly less than the 23 percentage points by which Biden won the state in 2020. We don’t have any recent polls in California, but the most recent RealClearPolitics average before Harris climbed to the top of the ticket showed Biden winning the state by 22 points. That’s still a lot, but less of a landslide than the 29 percentage points by which he triumphed in 2020.

To be clear, the closing Democratic margins in blue, populous states predates Harris and Biden.

Other Democrats also have recently underperformed in those states. In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom won reelection by 19 percentage points, five percentage points less than in 2018 and 10 percentage points less than Biden’s margin in the state in 2020. Similarly, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul beat Republican Lee Zeldin by only 6.5 percentage points in 2022, while her immediate predecessor, Andrew M. Cuomo, won by 23 percentage points in 2018.

What does all this mean?

If these trends continue — and that’s a big if, as there is no doubt this is a close race and polls do and can change — Harris could win the presidential race without as many votes as previous Democratic nominees. That is, as long as she can eke out a victory in the tipping-point state.

The Biden administration is lifting its years-long suspension of offensive arms shipments to Saudi Arabia, authorizing an initial shipment of air-to-ground munitions and saying it would consider additional new transfers “on a typical case-by-case basis,” according to senior administration officials.

The sale of certain classes of offensive weapons was frozen in early 2021 to signal administration disapproval of the Saudi war with Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen and strikes against civilian targets there. Since a United Nations-mediated truce in the spring of 2022, “there has not been a single Saudi airstrike into Yemen and cross-border fire from Yemen into Saudi Arabia has largely stopped,” a senior official said.

“So the Saudis have met their end of the deal, and we are prepared to meet ours, returning these cases to regular order through appropriate congressional notification and consultation,” said the official, one of several who discussed the decision on the condition of anonymity imposed by the White House.

The decision was first reported Friday by Reuters, which said that Congress was briefed on the sale this week.

Significant numbers of both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the past have opposed any change in the suspension policy toward Saudi Arabia, primarily on the basis of domestic human rights abuses that the administration has also criticized.

Congress can withhold approval of weapons sales, but can only stop any transfer with a veto-proof joint resolution of disapproval. Rep. Joaquin Castro (Tex.), a senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee who supported the administration’s initial decision to pause transfer of offensive weapons, said Friday that the Saudis had a “troubling” record on human rights. “I hope to see compelling evidence that Saudi Arabia has changed its conduct,” Castro said.

But relations have grown considerably closer in recent years between the administration and the monarchy in Riyadh, which President Joe Biden called a “pariah” state during his 2020 campaign.

Much of the rapprochement has focused on larger administration goals for the Middle East, including the establishment closer defense ties with Persian Gulf nations to prevent Iranian expansion in the region, to defend Israel against Iran and its regional proxies, and to stem Russian and Chinese influence.

The Iranian threat increased with the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, as the Houthis in Yemen began firing missiles at commercial shipping in the Red Sea, while Hezbollah stepped up its strikes from Lebanon into northern Israel. Both Iranian-supplied and backed groups have said they are acting in support of Hamas.

“Throughout this period, Saudi Arabia has remained a close strategic partner of the United States and we look forward to enhancing that partnership,” the senior official said. “Just this week, the Saudis had a senior delegation in Washington to discuss cooperation in advanced technologies and artificial intelligence. Last week, a senior U.S. interagency delegation visited Jeddah to meet with the Crown Prince and Saudi leaders on regional issues and integrated air and missile defense.”

A senior State Department official also noted “the positive steps that the Saudi Ministry of Defense have taken over the past three years to substantially improve their civilian harm mitigation processes, in part thanks to the work of U.S. trainers and advisers.”

Administration attempts to expand U.S. defense cooperation with the Saudis, which predate the beginning of the war in Gaza, have also been aimed at normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The United States has offered to sweeten the deal with expanded arms sales and civil nuclear cooperation.

But early progress toward that end has been stalled as Arab states have called on the administration to do more to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza from Israeli attacks and to move toward a long-term solution to the Palestinian crisis.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan aided the United States in helping Israel repel an Iranian attack in April. But with a new Iranian threat looming following the Israeli assassination in Tehran of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on July 31 and Israel’s foot-dragging in attempts to negotiate an end to the Gaza war, it is unclear whether they are willing to do so again.

John Hudson contributed to this report.

The superficial, oversimplified reason Democrats decided to turn the page on President Joe Biden in the 2024 election was that he was too old. The more specific reason may have been that this problem — manifested in his stilted, often incoherent speaking and a light schedule — rendered him largely incapable of driving a consistent message about Donald Trump.

That fateful June 27 debate epitomized it. Biden didn’t even mention Project 2025, for instance, despite its quickly emerging as a leading Democratic talking point. And that was a big problem, especially with Trump suddenly more popular than he’d been in many years.

That very liability has now landed firmly in Republicans’ laps.

Amid some Republican consternation about Trump and his campaign’s slow build toward making a case against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump emerged Thursday from his relative obscurity to deliver a news conference at Mar-a-Lago.

He spoke and took questions at length — for more than an hour.

One thing he did not do: Offer anything amounting to a coherent or detailed case against Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).

Trump has for years been prone to tangents and riffs and generalities, but even by his standards this session was unfocused. And that was despite the apparent reason for calling the news conference in the first place: to take on an opponent who was rising in the polls.

Trump said repeatedly that Harris and Walz were bad on issues, but often without saying how or even clearly describing the issue. He dwelled on process and polling, as well as Biden and Harris’s replacement of him, rather than Harris herself. And he for whatever reason didn’t even summon Walz’s name — referring to him as Harris’s pick, the “new governor from Minnesota” (Walz was first elected six years ago), the “Minnesota gentleman” and Harris’s “new friend.” (Sometimes politicians avoid naming their opponents while lodging attacks, but Trump was perfectly happy to cite Harris by name, repeatedly.)

Just as Biden failed to invoke Project 2025, Trump didn’t even mention many of the biggest potential sticking points for the Democratic ticket. There was nothing on Harris’s 2020 campaign support for banning offshore drilling and fracking, or her approving comments about the Green New Deal and “starting from scratch” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ditto Walz allowing undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses or his stewardship of the Minneapolis unrest after George Floyd’s murder.

Last month I highlighted seven potential vulnerabilities for Harris from that 2020 campaign; Trump mentioned only two of them — both glancingly.

On Harris’s past support for a mandatory gun buyback program for assault weapons, Trump said twice simply that Harris wants to “take away” people’s guns. He also briefly mentioned Harris wanting to “defund the police.” (Harris’s past comments sympathized with the defund-the-police movement but didn’t explicitly advocate defunding the police.)

That the other things went unmentioned was particularly astonishing given that many of them feed into the same themes Trump sought to play up: inflation, energy prices, immigration and crime.

When Trump did bring up specific attacks, they often lacked any real clarity and were almost perfunctory.

He mentioned “what they’ve done to the national reserves.”

“The Strategic National Reserves is, as you know very well, because you cover it, but what they’ve done is incredible,” Trump said. “They’ve just — for the sake of getting some votes, for the sake of having gasoline, you know, that’s meant for wars. It’s meant for, like, tragedy.”

Left out? What the Biden administration actually did with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was to deplete it.

Trump repeatedly accused Harris of having “destroyed” San Francisco and California as a prosecutor and state attorney general. About the closest he got to saying how was a brief reference to “no cash bail, weak on crime.” (In fact, Harris’s push to eliminate cash bail came after she left those state positions; she had previously pushed for higher bail amounts in some cases.)

Trump was asked, “How you are going to go after Black voters now that she is the nominee?”

He proceeded to summarize his poll numbers and express confidence, before landing on this recipe: “I think ultimately, they’ll like me better because I’m going to give them security, safety and jobs; I’m going to give them a good economy.”

Trump referenced Harris having attacked Biden in 2019, saying she was “nasty with the — calling him a racist, and the school bus and all of the different things.” The “school bus” reference appeared to be Harris attacking Biden’s past stance on busing Black students to different schools.

Trump was asked how Harris compares as an opponent to Biden and Hillary Clinton. He briefly spoke about how Clinton was smarter than Harris — rather than, for example, accusing Harris of being more liberal — and quickly asked for the next question.

And with Republicans hitting Walz for a “trans refuge” bill that protected access to gender-affirming care, Trump merely said the Minnesota governor was “heavy into the transgender world.” (He followed that by accusing the Democratic ticket of being “heavy into lots of different worlds, having to do with safety” — whatever that meant.)

Trump summarized:

“These guys get up — think of it: We’re going to give you no security, we’re going to give you a weak military, we’re going to give you no walls, no borders, no anything, we’re going to — all these things they’re doing,” Trump said. “I mean, the transgender became such a big thing. But they do all of these things.”

But “these things” were largely outcomes rather than actual policies. And to the extent Trump won’t or can’t offer details about why Democrats will drive things in those directions — or really demonstrate any familiarity with Harris’s and Walz’s actual records — Republicans might begin to worry about their own candidate’s campaigning wherewithal.