Former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama turned over their classified records to the National Archives upon leaving office, representatives for each of the three leaders said Tuesday, after classified materials were discovered in yet another former top official's home.

The next front is rapidly emerging in the struggle between supporters and opponents of legal abortion, and that escalating conflict is increasing the chances that the issue will shape the 2024 election as it did last November’s midterm contest.

President Joe Biden triggered the new confrontation with a flurry of recent moves to expand access to the drugs used in medication abortions, which now account for more than half of all abortions performed in the United States. Medication abortion involves two drugs: mifepristone followed by misoprostol (which is also used to prevent stomach ulcers). Although abortion opponents question the drugs’ safety, multiple scientific studies have found few serious adverse effects beyond headache or cramping.

Federal regulation of the use and distribution of these drugs by agencies including the FDA and the United States Postal Service has long been overshadowed in the abortion debate by the battles over Supreme Court nominations and federal legislation to ban or authorize abortion nationwide. But with a conservative majority now entrenched in the Court, and little chance that Congress will pass national legislation in either direction any time soon, abortion supporters and opponents are focusing more attention on executive-branch actions that influence the availability of the pills.

[Read: The abortion backup plan no one is talking about]

“The reality of abortion care has been changing very, very rapidly, and now the politics are catching up with it,” Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who served as one of Biden’s advisers in 2020, told me.

Tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists will descend on Washington today for their annual March for Life—the first since the Supreme Court last summer overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a nationwide right to abortion. The activists will cheer the swift moves by some two dozen Republican-controlled states to ban or severely restrict abortion since the Court struck down Roe.

But even as abortion opponents celebrate, they are growing more frustrated about the increased reliance on the drugs, which are now used in 54 percent of U.S. abortions—up dramatically from less than one-third less than a decade ago, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. “With the overturning of Roe, [with] COVID, and with President Biden’s loosening of the restrictions on these [drugs] … there is a new frontier that everyone is pivoting to,” Rebecca Parma, the legislative director for Texas Right to Life, a prominent anti-abortion group, told me.

George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the two Republicans who have held the presidency since the drugs were first approved under Democratic President Bill Clinton, in 2000, took virtually no steps to limit their availability. But conservative activists are already signaling that they will press the Republican presidential candidates in 2024 for more forceful action.

“Our job is to make sure … this becomes an issue that any GOP candidate will have to answer and address,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, told me. “No one can be ambivalent again; it will simply not be an option.”

The challenge for Republicans is that the 2022 midterm elections sent an unmistakable signal of resistance to further abortion restrictions in almost all of the key swing states that tipped the 2020 presidential election and are likely to decide the 2024 contest. “Would you really want to be Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump running in a close election saying, ‘I’m going to ban all abortion pills in Michigan or Pennsylvania’ right now?” says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis, who has written extensively on the history of the abortion debate.

Sunday is the 50th anniversary of the original Roe decision, and the Biden administration will mark the occasion with a defiant pro-abortion-rights speech from Vice President Kamala Harris in Florida, where GOP Governor DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential contender, signed a 15-week abortion ban last April.

White House officials see access to abortion medication as “the next battlefront” in the larger struggle over the procedure, Jennifer Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council, told me. She said she expects Republicans to mount more sweeping efforts to restrict access to the drugs than they did during the Bush or Trump presidencies. “The reason you’ve seen both Democratic and Republican administrations ensure access to medication abortions is because this is the FDA following their evidence-based scientific judgment,” she said. “So what I think is different now is you are seeing some pretty extreme actions as the next way to double down on taking away reproductive health and reproductive rights.”

Federal regulation of the abortion drugs has followed a consistent pattern, with Democratic presidents moving to expand access and Republican presidents mostly accepting those actions.

[Read: The other abortion pill]

During the 2000 presidential campaign, for instance, George W. Bush called the Clinton administration’s initial approval of mifepristone “wrong” and said he worried it would lead to more abortions. But over Bush’s two terms, his three FDA commissioners ignored a citizen petition from conservative groups to revoke approval for the drug. Under Barack Obama, the FDA formalized relatively onerous rules for the use of mifepristone. Physicians had to obtain a special certification to prescribe the drug, women had to meet with their doctor once before receiving it and twice after, and it could be used only within the first seven weeks of pregnancy.

The FDA loosened these restrictions during Obama’s final year in office. It reduced the number of physician visits required to obtain the drugs from three to one and increased to 10 the number of weeks into a pregnancy the drugs could be used. The revisions also permitted other medical professionals, such as nurses, to prescribe the drugs if they received certification, and eliminated a requirement for providers to report “adverse effects” other than death. Trump didn’t reverse any of the Obama decisions. He did side with conservatives by fighting a lawsuit from abortion-rights advocates to lift the requirement for an in-person doctor’s visit to obtain the drugs during the COVID pandemic. But by the time the Supreme Court ruled for the Trump administration in January 2021, Biden was days away from taking office. Within months, women seeking an abortion could consult with a doctor via telehealth and then receive the pills via mail.

On January 3 of this year, the FDA took another major step by allowing pharmacies to dispense the drugs. In late December, the Justice Department issued a legal opinion that the Postal Service could deliver the drugs without violating the 19th-century Comstock Act, which bars use of the mail “to corrupt the public morals.”

The paradox is that the impact of these rules, for now, will be felt almost entirely in the states where abortion remains legal. Obtaining abortion pills there will be much more comparable to filling any other prescription. But 19 red states have passed laws that still require medical professionals to be present when the drugs are administered, which prevents pharmacies from offering them despite the FDA authorization. And although the FDA has approved use of mifepristone for the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, medical professionals cannot prescribe the drugs in violation of state time limits (or absolute bans) on abortion. In terms of anti-abortion states, the Biden administration’s actions have had “basically no impact,” Greer Donley, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies abortion law, told me in an email.

Although the red states have largely walled themselves off from Biden’s efforts on medication abortion, conservatives have launched a multifront attempt to roll back access to the pills nationwide. Students for Life has filed another citizen petition with the FDA, arguing that doctors who prescribe the drugs must dispose of any fetal remains as medical waste. In a joint letter released last week, 22 Republican attorneys general hinted that they may sue to overturn the new FDA rules permitting pharmacies to dispense the drugs. In November, another coalition of conservative groups filed a lawsuit before a Trump-appointed judge in Texas seeking to overturn the original certification and ban mifepristone. Jenny Ma, the senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, says that decision could ultimately have a broader effect than even the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe: “This case,” she told me, “could effectively ban medication abortion nationwide. It means people in every state … may not be able to get abortion pills.”

Republicans will also ramp up legislative action against the pills, although their proposals have no chance of becoming law while Democrats control the Senate and Biden holds the veto pen. Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi is planning to reintroduce her “SAVE Moms and Babies Act,” which would restore the prohibition against dispensing abortion drugs through the mail or at pharmacies.

[From the May 2022 issue: The future of abortion in a post-Roe America]

However these legal and legislative challenges are resolved, it’s already apparent that the 2024 GOP presidential field will face more pressure than before to propose executive-branch actions against the drugs. “That’s going to be our clarion call in 2024,” says Kristi Hamrick, a long-term social-conservative activist, who now serves as the chief strategist for media and policy at Students for Life.

Katie Glenn, the state-policy director at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me that, at the least, the group wants 2024 Republican presidential candidates to press for restoring the requirement to report adverse consequences from the drugs. Former Vice President Mike Pence, a likely candidate, has already suggested that he will support a ban on dispensing the pills through the mail. But the anti-abortion movement’s long-term goal remains the same: ban mifepristone altogether. Hawkins shows the growing fervor GOP candidates will face when she says, “This pill is a cancer that has now metastasized throughout our country.”

Simultaneously, abortion-rights advocates are pushing the Biden administration to loosen restrictions even further. “Medication abortion … has been overregulated for far too long,” Ma told me. Many advocates want the FDA to extend permitted use of mifepristone from 10 to 12 weeks, eliminate the requirement that the professionals prescribing the drugs receive a special certification, and begin the process toward eventually making the drug available over the counter.

The immediate question is whether the Biden administration will challenge the red-state laws that have stymied its efforts to expand access. Advocates have argued that a legal case can be made for national FDA regulations to trump state restrictions, such as the requirement for physicians to dispense the drugs. But Biden is likely to proceed cautiously.

“We don’t have a lot of answers … because, frankly, states have not tried to do this stuff in hundreds of years,” Ziegler, the author of the upcoming book Roe: The History of a National Obsession, told me. Even so, she added, it’s a reasonable assumption that this conservative-dominated Supreme Court would resist allowing the federal government to preempt state rules on how the drugs are dispensed.

These mirror-image pressures in each party increase the odds of a clear distinction between Biden (or another Democrat) and the 2024 GOP nominee over access to the drugs. Democrats are generally confident they will benefit from almost any contrast that keeps abortion prominent in the 2024 race. Some, like Lake, see access to the pills as a powerful lever to do that. The issue, she argues, is relevant to younger voters, who are much more familiar than older people with the growing use of medication abortion and are especially dubious that pharmacies can offer certain drugs in some states but not in others.

The impact of abortion on the 2022 election was more complex than is often discussed. As I’ve written, in the red states that have banned or restricted the practice, such as Florida, Ohio, and Texas, there was no discernible backlash against the Republican governors or state legislators who passed those laws. But the story was different in the blue and purple states where abortion remains legal. In pivotal states including Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a clear majority of voters said they supported abortion rights, and, according to media exit polls, crushing majorities of them voted against Republican gubernatorial candidates who pledged to restrict abortion. Those Democratic victories in the states likely to prove decisive again in 2024 have left many Republican strategists leery of pursuing any further constraints on abortion.

What’s clear now is that even as abortion opponents gather to celebrate their long-sought toppling of Roe, many of them won’t be satisfied until they have banned the procedure nationwide. “It is totally unacceptable for a presidential candidate to say, ‘It’s just up to the states’ now,” Marilyn Musgrave, the vice president for government affairs at the Susan B. Anthony group, told me. “We need a federal role clearly laid out by these presidential candidates.” Equally clear is that abortion opponents now view federal regulatory actions to restrict, and eventually ban, abortion drugs as a crucial interim step on that path. The U.S. may seem in some ways to be settling into an uneasy new equilibrium, with abortion banned in some states and permitted in others. But, as the escalating battle over abortion medication makes clear, access to abortion in every state will remain on the ballot in 2024.

The recent discovery of a small number of classified documents, left over from President Joe Biden’s time as vice president and found at his private office and home, has injected confusion into the public’s understanding of whether any criminal liability might be appropriate for former President Donald Trump in connection with the huge trove of classified documents found last year at Mar-a-Lago.

Given the facts as they are now known, only the most superficial parallel can be drawn between Biden’s possession of these documents and Trump’s conduct relating to the documents held at Mar-a-Lago. To be clear, Biden having classified documents in unsecure, nongovernmental settings violates the law regarding the handling of such documents. Unfortunately, his administration has done itself no favor by its delayed disclosure of the problem, creating unnecessary suspicion and political turmoil.

[Quinta Jurecic: The classified-files scandal is the most Trumpy scandal of all]

Under these circumstances, Attorney General Merrick Garland has, in our view, acted wisely in appointing special counsels to fully evaluate the facts concerning both events, and his selection of a highly qualified, experienced prosecutor—Robert K. Hur—is a sign that he is taking account of the need for public trust in the administration of justice.

Even if, at some point, evidence of potential criminal conduct develops in the Biden case, in no proper prosecutorial universe should that affect or deter Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump. In the unlikely event that both men did commit crimes, that would be no reason not to prosecute Trump—or Biden, for that matter, once he is out of office. No person is above the law.  

But these two cases are not equivalent. For starters, let’s consider the two stories through the lens of the statutes cited in the Mar-a-Lago search warrant approved by a federal court.     

Individuals violate the Espionage Act when, among other things, they willfully retain national-defense documents and fail to return them to a proper government official upon request. In November, Biden’s personal lawyer discovered the classified documents and returned them to the government without a request. So that statute does not apply. Biden has denied knowing that he had the documents.

The contrast with Trump is stark. The National Archives and Records Administration first asked him to return missing documents in May 2021. The following January, Archives officials retrieved 15 boxes of government records, and on June 3, 2022, his lawyer signed a sworn statement that all documents responsive to a grand jury subpoena were being returned after a “diligent” search. (That any lawyer would do so without conducting the search herself raises serious ethical questions, and strongly implies that she was instructed by someone to make the statement.)

[Bob Bauer: Why do former presidents have access to classified information?]

In August, a federal court was provided evidence that the lawyer’s statement was likely false, and the court issued the search warrant that allowed the FBI to seize upwards of 11,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago. They included more than 70 documents marked “Secret” or “Top Secret,” some apparently containing information whose disclosure could conceivably endanger the lives of American intelligence sources overseas.

The apparent obstruction of justice—with evidence pointing to Trump’s direct involvement—make up the serious misconduct here, more serious than a former president simply having removed documents from their proper place. Trump’s lawyers repeatedly asserted in court that the Mar-a-Lago documents were “personal,” effectively admitting that Trump took them and kept them.

The centrality of concealment to the case is made even clearer by the second statute cited in the Mar-a-Lago affidavit. It subjects to prosecution anyone who “knowingly … conceals [or] covers up … any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede [or] obstruct … the investigation or proper administration of any [federal] matter.”

By contrast, in Biden’s case, no evidence yet exists of concealment or of intent to impede or obstruct the proper administration of any federal matter. With Trump, a federal judge has already determined, in approving the Mar-a-Lago warrant, that there was probable cause to believe that Trump intended to impede or obstruct an investigation or NARA’s proper administration of government records, and likely both.

[David French: Don’t minimize Biden’s classified-information mess]

Similarly, the third criminal statute relied on in the Mar-a-Lago affidavit prohibits “willfully and unlawfully concealing [or] removing” a government record or document from “any public office … of the United States.” Willful and unlawful intent requires knowledge that one is breaking the law, and Trump was placed on notice over the course of many months, and asked numerous times by multiple federal agencies to return all classified and presidential records. He still did not.

From what we know now, Biden’s situation differs significantly both from Trump’s conduct at Mar-a-Lago and from prior prosecutions of high-level government officials for mishandling classified documents.

In 2005, Sandy Berger, a former national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, pleaded guilty to unlawfully removing government documents. In 2003, years after his government service, he had gone to the National Archives to review files, and as he left, a staffer spotted what appeared to be paper protruding from Berger’s pant leg. Stuffing documents into his trousers to hide them, along with his later attempt to throw the records into a construction site, was powerful evidence of willful and unlawful intent.

In 2015, David Petraeus, a former general and CIA director under President Barack Obama, pleaded guilty to having given his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell, classified material that he had improperly retained. Petraeus had falsely attested to having no classified material in his possession. Like documents taken and concealed in clothing, false statements are compelling evidence of a guilty mind and a cover-up.

One of us (Mark S. Zaid) has represented many clients who have accidentally taken classified documents home or unintentionally left them in unsecured environments. Those cases involved no deliberate flouting of law but rather negligent or reckless conduct. These situations are routinely resolved through administrative proceedings, such as suspension or revocation of security clearances or other sanctions short of prosecution.

Biden’s case requires careful handling, and that appears to be just what Garland has in mind. In November, shortly after learning that classified documents were discovered at Biden’s University of Pennsylvania think tank, Garland properly directed U.S. Attorney John R. Lausch Jr., a Trump-appointed prosecutor, to investigate the matter and later accepted his recommendation to appoint a special counsel. In that role, Robert Hur will determine whether the matter involves anything more than inadvertent security violations without any effort to conceal them.

The current state of facts strongly suggests that Biden’s errors are not criminal. It is not even clear that these incidents can be tied to him personally, unlike Trump’s conduct at Mar-a-Lago. But whatever Hur finds to be true, the facts and law regarding Trump’s concealment and evasion are a separate matter. The administration of justice must advance swiftly and not be influenced by those attempting to create a false equivalence between the two cases.

When President Joe Biden visited Kentucky yesterday to tout a new bridge project, most media attention focused on his embrace of bipartisanship. And indeed Biden, against the backdrop of the GOP chaos in the House of Representatives, signaled how aggressively he would claim that reach-across-the-aisle mantle. He appeared onstage with not only Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, but also GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, a perennial bête noire for Democrats.

But Biden also touched on another theme that will likely become an even more central component of his economic and political strategy over the next two years: He repeatedly noted how many of the jobs created by his economic agenda are not expected to require a four-year college degree.

Throughout his presidency, with little media attention, Biden has consistently stressed this point. When he appeared in September at the groundbreaking for a sprawling Intel semiconductor plant near Columbus, Ohio, he declared, “What you’ll see in this field of dreams” is “Ph.D. engineers and scientists alongside community-college graduates … people of all ages, races, backgrounds with advanced degrees or no degrees, working side by side.” At a Baltimore event in November touting the infrastructure bill, he said, “The vast majority of these jobs … that we’re going to create don’t require a college degree.” Appearing in Arizona in December, he bragged that a plant producing batteries for electric vehicles would “create thousands of good manufacturing jobs, 90 percent of which won’t require a college degree, and yet you get a good wage.”

[Peter A. Shulman: What infrastructure really means]

Economically, this message separates Biden from the past two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Both of those men, as I’ve written, centered their economic agendas on training more Americans for higher-paying jobs in advanced industries (and opening markets for those industries through free-trade agreements), largely because they believed that automation and global economic competition would doom many jobs considered “low skill.”

Although Biden also supports an ambitious assortment of initiatives to expand access to higher education, he has placed relatively more emphasis than his predecessors did on improving conditions for workers in jobs that don’t require advanced credentials. That approach is rooted in his belief that the economy can’t function without much work traditionally deemed low-skill, such as home health care and meat-packing, a conviction underscored by the coronavirus pandemic. “One of the things that has really become apparent to all of us is how important to our nation’s economic resiliency many of these jobs are that don’t require college degrees,” Heather Boushey, a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me this week.

Politically, improving economic conditions for workers without advanced degrees is the centerpiece of Biden’s plan to reverse the generation-long Democratic erosion among white voters who don’t hold a college degree—and the party’s more recent slippage among non-college-educated voters of color, particularly Latino men. Biden and his aides are betting that they can reel back in some of the non-college-educated voters drawn to Republican cultural and racial messages if they can improve their material circumstances with the huge public and private investments already flowing from the key economic bills passed during his first two years.

Biden’s hopes of boosting the prospects of workers without college degrees, who make up about two-thirds of the total workforce, rest on a three-legged legislative stool. One bill, passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $75 billion in direct federal aid and tax credits to revive domestic production of semiconductors. An infrastructure bill, also passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $850 billion in new spending over 10 years for the kind of projects Biden celebrated yesterday—roads, bridges, airports, water systems—as well as a national network of charging stations for electric vehicles and expanded access to high-speed internet. The third component, passed on a party-line vote as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, provides nearly $370 billion in federal support to promote renewable electricity production, accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, and retrofit homes and businesses to improve energy conservation.

All of these measures are projected to trigger huge flows of private-sector investment. The Semiconductor Industry Association reports that since the legislation promoting the industry was first introduced, in 2020, companies have already announced $200 billion in investments across 40 projects in 16 states. The investment bank Credit Suisse projects that the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy provisions could ultimately spur $1.7 trillion in total investment (in part because it believes that the legislation’s open-ended provisions will produce something closer to $800 billion in federal spending). And economists have long demonstrated that each public dollar spent on infrastructure spurs additional private investment, which could swell the total economic impact of the new package to $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, the administration estimates.

Taken together, the three bills constitute a level of federal investment in targeted economic sectors probably unprecedented in recent U.S. history. “The kind of money we are going to see going into these sectors is just unheard-of,” Janelle Jones, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor under Biden, told me. Though rarely framed as such, these three bills—reinforced by other Biden policies, such as his sweeping “buy American” procurement requirements—amount to an aggressive form of industrial policy meant to bolster the nation’s capacity to build more things at home, including bridges and roads, semiconductors, and batteries for electric vehicles. “This is a president that is taking seriously the need for a modern American industrial strategy,” Boushey said.

[Read: What Joe Biden has (and hasn’t) accomplished]

These measures are likely to open significant opportunities for workers without a college degree. Some analysts have projected that the infrastructure bill alone could generate as many as 800,000 jobs annually. Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, estimated that about four-fifths of the jobs created under an earlier version of the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the House would not require a college degree, and he told me he believes the distribution is roughly the same in the final package. A Georgetown University institute projected an even higher percentage for the infrastructure bill. More of the jobs associated with semiconductor manufacturing require advanced education, but even that bill may generate a significant number of blue-collar opportunities in the construction phase of the many new plants opening across the country. (The industry is also pursuing partnerships with community colleges to provide workers who don’t have a four-year degree with the technical training to handle more work in the heavily automated facilities.)

Yet even if these programs fulfill those projections, it remains unclear whether they will reach the scale to improve the uncertain economic trajectory for the broad mass of workers without advanced education. These three bills mostly promote employment in manufacturing and construction, and together those industries account for only about one-eighth of the workforce (roughly 21 million workers in all), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total construction employment peaked in 2006, manufacturing in 1979. Far more workers, including those without degrees, are now employed in service industries not as directly affected by these bills.

What’s more, both of those occupations remain dominated by men. And largely because of resistance from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Congress didn’t pass Biden’s companion proposals to bolster wages and working conditions for the preponderantly non-college-educated, nonwhite, female employees in the low-paid “care” industries such as home health care and child care. “We can’t [ignore] these millions and millions of care workers, particularly Black and brown women,” said Jones, now the chief economist and policy director for the Service Employees International Union.

Another complication for Biden is that his plans are colliding with the Federal Reserve Board’s drive to tame inflation. Spending on his big three bills is ramping up in 2023, which could increase the demand for—and bargaining power of—workers without college degrees. But the Fed’s push to slow the economy may neutralize that effect by increasing unemployment. “They are undercutting the job creation that we are supposed to be incentivizing,” Hersh said.

The list of further projects tied to these three bills is almost endless. The White House calculates that firms have announced some $290 billion in manufacturing investments since Biden took office; the Congressional Budget Office projects that spending from the infrastructure bill could be more than twice as high in 2023 as last year and then increase again by half in 2024.

That pipeline means Biden could be cutting ribbons every week through the 2024 presidential campaign—which would probably be fine with him. Biden rarely seems happier than when he’s around freshly poured concrete, especially if he’s on a podium with local business and labor leaders and elected officials from both parties, all of whom he introduces as enthusiastically (and elaborately) as if he’s toasting the new couple at a wedding. At his core, he remains something like a pre-1970s Democrat, who is most comfortable with a party focused less on cultural crusades than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to people who work with their hands. In his instincts and priorities, Biden is closer to Hubert Humphrey or Henry Jackson than to George McGovern or Obama.

Less clear is whether that throwback approach—the formula that defined the Democratic Party during Biden’s youth—still works politically. Over the course of Biden’s career, the parties have experienced what I’ve called a “class inversion”: Democrats have performed better among college-educated voters while Republicans have grown dominant among white voters without a college degree and more recently have established a beachhead among nonwhite, non-college-educated workers. For most of these voters, the evidence suggests that cultural attitudes have exerted more influence on their political allegiance than their economic circumstance has.

[Ruy Teixeira: Democrats’ long goodbye to the working class]

Biden, with his “Scranton Joe” persona, held out great hopes in the 2020 campaign of reversing that decline with working-class white voters, but he improved only slightly above Hillary Clinton’s historically weak 2016 showing, attracting about one-third of their votes. In 2022, exit polls showed that Democrats remained stuck at that meager level in the national vote for the House of Representatives. In such key swing states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, winning Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates ran slightly better than that, as Biden did while carrying those states in 2020. But, again like Biden then, the exit polls found that none of them won much more than two-fifths of non-college-educated white voters, even against candidates as extreme as Doug Mastriano or Kari Lake, the GOP governor nominees in Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively.

The Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me she’s relatively optimistic that Biden’s focus on creating more opportunity for workers without a college degree can bolster the party’s position with them. She said the key is not only improving living standards, but “validating that this is real work … not the consolation prize to a job that a college degree gets you.” No matter how many jobs Biden’s initiatives create, she said, “if you are treating them as lesser jobs, we are still going to have our problems from the cultural side of things.” Biden has certainly heard (or intuited) such advice. In his speeches, he commonly declares that an apprenticeship as an electrician or pipe fitter is as demanding as a college degree.

Yet Murphy’s expectations remain limited. “Just based on the negative arc of the last several cycles,” she said, merely maintaining the party’s current modest level of support with working-class white voters and avoiding further losses would be “a win.” Matt Morrison, the executive director of Working America, an AFL-CIO-affiliated group that focuses on political outreach to nonunion working-class families, holds similarly restrained views, though he told me that economic gains could help the party more with nonwhite blue-collar voters, who are generally less invested in Republican cultural and racial appeals. No matter how strong the job market, Murphy added, Democrats are unlikely to improve much with non-college-educated workers unless inflation recedes by 2024.

What’s already clear now is how much Biden has bet, both economically and politically, on bolstering the economic circumstances of workers without advanced education by investing literally trillions of federal dollars in forging an economy that again builds more things in America. “I don’t know whether the angry white people in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are less angry if we get them 120,000 more manufacturing jobs,” a senior White House official told me, speaking anonymously in order to be candid. “But we are going to run that experiment.”

In the fall of 1998, as an assistant history professor recently out of graduate school, I was excited to get a call from a producer of a local CBS morning news show who had noticed a panel discussion I’d organized about the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. The producer asked me on the show to put the event in historical context. I of course accepted.

It went well, and I kept being asked back on. Even as my academic career progressed, I remained in demand as a historian who could talk in an accessible way on TV and radio about current affairs. I’ve inhabited this strange space now for more than two decades, so I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on how historians contribute to the public square. Here’s what I’ve learned about what historians get wrong—and can get right—when they do so.

The main pitfalls involve clichéd shorthands or tropes—tempting to use when communicating with a lay audience, but distorting and reductive. There are five, in particular, I’ve heard too many times.

Unprecedented: We use the word because it seems a surefire way of getting attention in a media environment that is constantly searching for novelty. Fundamental breaks are more newsworthy than more of the same. For the historian, it’s also a way of stepping into the shoes of contemporary observers who feel as if something could never have happened before.

[Read: What is really unprecedented about Trump?]

The problem is that unprecedented can be misleading: To say something is without precedent ignores comparable phenomena in the past, even if they took a different form. Consider President Donald Trump’s penchant for false statements: To declare his lies “unprecedented” risks downplaying how much presidential lying we’ve seen throughout American history. How should we weigh Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 fabrication about an attack by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin—which became the pretext for one of the United States’ most catastrophic military interventions ever—with Trump’s habitual lies? Or George W. Bush’s grossly exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which proved false after being used to justify a disastrous invasion of Iraq that lasted from 2003 until 2011?

Similarly, talk about today’s “unprecedented” polarization in Washington ignores most of American history. As the Yale historian Joanne Freeman has shown, legislators regularly brought pistols and other weapons to the floor of Congress in the mid-19th century, and physical fights broke out among members. More recently, in the 1990s, House Speaker Newt Gingrich abandoned old norms of bipartisan conduct by urging his Republican colleagues to attack Democrats as “anti-child,” “pathetic,” and “traitors.” Political scientists were producing mountains of work on the shrinking center, the rise of party-line voting, and the breakdown of civility back when Trump was famous mainly as a fixture on Page Six of The New York Post.

[David Frum: The new history wars]

Occasionally, unprecedented is apt: Never, before January 6, 2021, had an outgoing president orchestrated an effort to overturn an election result. But the word should be used sparingly, because otherwise its effect is to make significant developments that are deeply rooted in the design of our political system appear transitory or based on an exceptional individual.  

“Just like” comparisons: The flip side of unprecedented is when historians say something that happened today is “just like” something we’ve seen before. For example, when Clinton’s health-care-reform effort failed in 1993, we heard how President Harry Truman’s attempt had suffered the same fate. More recently, to explain contemporary smear politics, commentators have pointed to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s spreading of disinformation and media manipulation in the early 1950s.

“Just like” comparisons can be instructive. When President Barack Obama seemed to get little credit for his economic-stimulus plan after the 2008–09 financial crisis, historians reminded us how successfully Franklin D. Roosevelt had promoted his public-works projects.

Yet the trope tends to flatten history and strip away context and nuance. In their 1986 book, Thinking in Time, Ernest May and Richard Neustadt showed how bad analogies have led to poor foreign-policy decisions, citing Johnson’s insistence on likening U.S. intervention in Vietnam to World War II, when comparison with France’s experience in Indochina or with America’s own experience of stalemate in Korea might have guided him toward a wiser choice.

[Joanne Freeman: I’m a historian. I see reason to fear—and to hope.]

Cycles of history: Historians love to discuss cycles in American history, picking up on a theme from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who argued that U.S. politics veered between eras of reform and reaction, akin to a law of physics. The problem is that the theory has been largely debunked.

Rather than operating in a cycle, every era contains competing progressive and regressive impulses. Historians have documented the ways in which, during the supposed mid-’60s high point of liberalism, conservatism retained a powerful hold on America. As Johnson pushed for his Great Society, conservative Southern Democrats and midwestern Republicans were teaming up in Congress to block most of what he was attempting to do. For every chapter that the radical Students for a Democratic Society formed at colleges and universities, the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom did the same.  

Nor does the cycles thesis have much to say about what social scientists call policy entrenchment—the way new policies outlast the coalition that created them. Despite the vaunted Reagan Revolution in the 1980s, Social Security, Medicare, and other government programs survived: The conservative ascendancy of the Reagan era was layered over the Great Society of the ’60s, which was layered over the New Deal of the ’30s, and so on.

In other words, the appealing neatness of the cycles argument always collides with the messiness of real-world politics.

Instructive quotations: Who doesn’t love a great quote? And quotations can work very well in a media environment that privileges brevity and catchiness. On the surface, the words of a past leader might seem explanatory for a topical news story, but dig a little deeper into the quote’s original setting, and the particularities—who said it, when, and for what purpose—might make the saying less apt.

The celebrated line from Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural speech that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” should not be stripped of the precise boldness he was urging—robust government action to defeat the Great Depression. Just because it sounds like an inspirational lesson for crisis does not mean it should be a bumper-sticker slogan for any situation, including calls to cut government. The trouble is that—even more than “just like” comparisons—quotes get deprived of their original context.  

Partisanship: This has become one of the worst offenses—the rise of commentators who deploy historical arguments in service of partisan goals. No one would deny legitimacy to a historian who comes to an understanding of the past that meshes with their lived politics. But things go wrong when historians put forth only arguments that fit their political beliefs and skew history to do so.

Included in this cottage industry are conservative historians who depict the history of feminism as being at odds with family values and ignore the ways that the women’s movement championed public policies offering more security for working mothers and their children. Although the problem has been particularly acute in the conservative media bubble, left-wing historians can be guilty as well—reluctant to discuss the failures of certain government programs, say, or the problematic conduct of past progressive leaders.

[Imani Perry: The duty to tell a good story]

Historians need to make intellectually honest appraisals based on their research, even if that might cause tension with friends and allies. Echo chambers produce bad history.

Given these traps in store for the media-friendly historian, what is the remedy?

The historian’s most important task is to provide a long view. The value of the discipline is to counter the narrow time frames of most news analysis. Historians can unpack the economic, political, and cultural backgrounds of current events to help make sense of them. Heather Cox Richardson has found a huge and loyal audience for her Substack column with this approach. And the historian Jeffrey Engel did a terrific job during the Trump impeachments of explaining how impeachment has evolved as a political tool and illuminating its complicated legal questions.   

At their best, historians can bridge the worlds of academic scholarship and breaking news. For all the jurisprudential talk of originalism, professional historians offer the surest guide to the principles that motivated the Founders and subsequent generations of leaders, as well as to the specific circumstances in which their ideas took shape. Historians can also provide a valuable corrective to lazy conventional wisdom—for instance, the work of Daniel Immerwahr reveals the historical amnesia beneath the notion that the U.S. never acted as an imperial power toward other parts of the world.  

Finally, historians can push back against simplistic claims and inject nuance into news coverage. Media producers and editors may prefer black-and-white arguments because they make good sound bites and create conflict that increases viewership, but a historian’s sensitivity to gray areas of complexity and ambiguity is extraordinarily important for making sense of the news.

“Wisdom is the tears of experience,” the eminent sociologist Daniel Bell told my graduating class at Brandeis University. I have that experience now, and understand that we must be more deliberative and self-conscious about how we do history within the constraints of media platforms.

None of this is easy. In the words of Jill Lepore, one of our finest historians, “Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.” Trying to do all of that in a 30-second TV segment or a Twitter thread is a formidable challenge. In an age when our public discourse has become so impoverished, and disinformation so normalized, historians must have a voice in our national conversations. But we have to speak in the right way.