We’ve seen a lot of newspaper dodges over the years, but the idea of endorsing two sharply opposed candidates for the same nomination is a new one on us. It turns out to be the latest innovation of the New York Times, which, in the Democratic presidential primary, just endorsed both Senators Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren.

Good for the Times, we say, though just what the Gray Lady is thinking is hard to decipher from the two full broadsheet pages she devoted to this brainstorm. Had the Times picked one of the two women as the better candidate, it might have delivered the full complement of readers who vote according to the Times endorsements. Now that treasure is going to be split.

If we were either Mss. Klobuchar or Warren, we’d be furious. When the dust clears, after all, it’s likely that the candidate who’ll be actually helped by this will be Mayors Bloomberg or Buttigieg, say, or even Senator Sanders or Vice President Biden. After all, they don’t have to worry about the Times giving a leg up to one candidate in particular.

Then again also, too, the Times seems to have little but condescension for Democrats other than Mss. Klobuchar and Warren. Vice President Biden ought to “pass the torch” even though he’s leading in the polls. The editors “look forward” to Mayor Buttigieg “working his way up.” The Times hopes Andrew Yang “decides to get involved in New York politics.”

Yet the Times frames all this in the idea that American voters “must choose between three sharply divergent visions of the future.” It sees Mr. Trump as offering “white nativism at home and America First unilateralism abroad.” No mention of record employment, the lowest minority unemployment in decades, or prison reform.

So the other two of the three divergent visions, the Times reckons, are on the Democratic side. “Some in the party view President Trump as an aberration and believe that a return to a more sensible America is possible,” it says. The others figure that President Trump is “the product of political and economic systems so rotten that they must be replaced.”

Lest one might try to speculate that Ms. Klobuchar is the former and Ms. Warren the latter, the Times says it spent “significant time” with the leading candidates and is struck not by their differences but by “the similarity of their platforms on fundamental issues,” which it calls “striking.” What they differ on, the Times says, is “not the what but the how.”

It beats us how that leads to an endorsement of the two opposing candidates. The Times acknowledges that the history of its editorial endorsements would suggest “we would side squarely with the candidate with a more traditional approach to pushing the nation forward, within the realities of a constitutional framework and a multiparty country.”

We’ve long since lost the thread of the Times editorial endorsements. In 1908, it backed the Republican William Howard Taft against the Democrat William Jennings Bryan, but in 1924 it backed the Democrat John W. Davis against the Progressive Robert La Follette and the Republican incumbent, Calvin Coolidge, who trounced the two of them.

Yet in 1940, the Times backed the Republican, Wendell Wilkie, against FDR, saying that Mr. Wilkie was better equipped than the incumbent to deal with national defense (FDR became a towering wartime commander). The Times in 1948 backed the Republican Thomas Dewey against the Democratic president, Harry Truman, and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.

The Times insists that its latest endorsement is “not veering away from the values we espouse” but that it is merely “rattled by the weakness of the institutions that we trusted to undergird those values.” The truth is that the trail of Times endorsements suggests that its current inability to make up its mind is less an anomaly than a symptom of its own institutional failure. May the GOP make the most of it.

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Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.