<....And the schools don’t have much recourse besides tailoring their pitch to convince potential students they are not defined by their state.

“What we have to do is to double down on the role of higher education, how we are educating the next generation of leaders and what makes each institution unique, so that students can find the place that’s the right fit,” said Heidi Tseu, assistant vice president of national engagement for the American Council on Education.

“I think what this survey is showing is that the political noise that is generated, it doesn’t suit anyone. If students are making these decisions based on their desire to avoid politicization, we need to get the message across that higher education institutions are about education and formation, and that’s the work that I think, you know, we’re looking at when it comes to conveying the value of higher education,” she added.

The trend does not appear to have significantly impacted enrollment numbers, but such shifts could be on the horizon.

“If you’re in a state like Texas, the decline in out-of-state migration might not be such a big deal, because you are projected to have a larger high school cohort graduating in the coming years, and you’re less worried about the enrollment club, as opposed to, if your state, like California, that already … loses sort of more students every year and is forecasted to have more of an enrollment clip from the coming years,” Meyer said.

And as the nation becomes increasingly siloed politically, students choosing their school based on its state’s politics could only exacerbate the situation.

“This seems to be symptomatic of how polarized the country has become on many things, and one can understand why people make these decisions, but it’s kind of a shame that we’ve got ourselves into this situation.” Startz said.>

<Donald Trump is broken and no one can put Humpty Trumpty back together again.

This thought occurred to me at a truck stop in rural Nevada. Less than two weeks away from the presidential election which could determine the survival of our species, I decided to visit as many swing, red and blue states as possible. I wanted to talk to people, one-on-one, as many as possible and without the blinding glare of a television camera by my side. I visited 15 states in 21 days; Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and California. The bulk of the trip found me in 12 states in 14 days.

On the seventh day, I rested and visited with the seventh son of a seventh son, sipping 7-Up and eating a seven-layered bean dip on a front porch in rural Pennsylvania. “You’re an idiot,” my host told me.

“I don’t disagree, but what makes you say so?” I asked.

“That’s a lot of places to travel to in order to find out an answer you should already know,” he said as I explained my travel plans. “And it’s easy enough. Trump’s going to win. All politicians are crazy crooks, but he’s crazy in the right way.”

“I didn’t know there was a right way to be crazy, but I agree with you,” I said.

“You do?” He asked.

“Yes,” I said. “He is definitely crazy.”

In suburban Maryland, I found few who were buying Trump’s brand of b.s. In Gaithersburg, I saw one yard sign for Trump and it was surrounded by eight signs declaring allegiance to Harris/Walz in the yards of the nearest neighbors.

“Trump is insane and is becoming more so every day,” I was told as I sat for a drink at Hershey's, a local Gaithersburg watering hole famous for great fried chicken and good rock n’ roll. (Full disclosure, my band has played there.)

On my trek west from there, I stopped in West Virginia where at a grocery store I ran across a large man working behind the counter who said, “Even a tweaker knows better than to vote for Trump.” But, he explained, “The economy was better when he was in office, so you know he’s going to win West Virginia real easy. No one around here is for Harris.”

I had a hard time getting around the fact that, according to this grocery store sales clerk, meth addicts know better than to vote for Trump, but according to that same West Virginia native, apparently, no one living in West Virginia knows better than a meth addict.

By the time I reached the Blue Grass state, I was tired. While everyone I spoke with in Kentucky had come down with the presidential sweepstakes fever, I couldn’t find anyone making sense. I had a Harris supporter tell me, “I have to vote for her, or my family won’t speak to me again.”

What did that mean?

I found that behavior prevalent in Trump families, but not usually among Democrats. Still, Kentucky was a divided state in the Civil War and remains one to this day. It says something that the first rude driver I ran into on the interstate was from Kentucky. You know the type — the kind you want to torture with a rusty butter knife for camping out in the fast lane, then passing you, only to slow down after they’ve gotten in front of you.

In Louisville, I asked a waitress, “If I’m an undecided voter, who would you recommend I vote for?” She smiled. “I want the candidate who will allow tips to be tax-exempt,” she answered.

“Both of them favor that,” I replied. She sighed and admitted she did not know that.

“So where do you get your news?” I asked.

“Oh, I quit watching mainstream media,” she said. “I count on my friends.” Her friends, she told me, get their news from Fox News and OAN.

Indiana was a mixed bag of people too polite to explain who they supported, or too scared to do so. One woman explained that she wouldn’t even tell her husband, who owns “At least six Trump hats and wasted money on golden sneakers he never got”, who she would vote for — but told me that “If you think I’d vote against women’s rights, you’re as dumb as my husband.”

Missouri was probably the most Trump-happy state I visited. Just 20 miles outside of St. Louis, a huge billboard proclaimed, “Welcome to Trump Land.” That billboard was sandwiched in between a billboard advertising a strip club and one that read, “Do you really know what happened in the Garden of Eden?” advocating a visit to a nearby church. The billboard advertising marijuana came right after the church billboard. So it went, strip club, Trump, church and weed. They can really show you something in the Show Me state....>

<....Drivers there raced across I-70 as if they were fleeing the apocalypse. Dead animals littered the side of the road; deer, raccoons, something that looked like a purple jackal, a Chupacabra or two, what looked like a werewolf, and at least one low-flying turkey vulture. I saw one guy in a pickup had stopped and was sawing off the head of a dead stag — presumably for the antlers, but maybe he was just hungry.

A portly gentleman celebrating the University of Missouri’s homecoming victory that weekend informed me “Everybody in America wants Trump. He’s good for the economy, hates immigrants and won’t let people like me get replaced.” I hesitated to inform him that I don’t know anyone that would want to “replace” him and the economy isn’t . . . oh never mind. The “hating immigrants” part was speaking the quiet part out loud though.

And of course, as I left Missouri, just west of Independence (Home of Harry S. Truman) there was a 150 x 200-foot flag hoisted between two earth movers that stated: “Trump/Vance Take America Back.”

“Yeah, back to the 1850s,” my wife — a native Missourian — said with distaste.

Oddly enough, GOP Sen. Josh Hawley isn’t doing so well in the very Trumpian state. “He’s a coward,” I heard from more than one person. “He’s not brave like Trump,” I was also told. I just shook my head at that one.

By the time we got to Kansas, the Trump fever, indeed the presidential race fever began to subside. While I saw Harris and Trump billboards and people had definitive opinions about the race, I saw Trump and Harris supporters calling each other friends – and they were far more worried about college football than the presidential race. One Trump supporter told me he expected the former president to declare victory “before the polls close in California,” to furious nods of agreement from his Harris-supporting friend.

By the time I got to Grand Junction, Colorado, there was no one talking politics, and no signs on the road and few at homes proclaiming allegiance to either candidate. At the local Denny’s the conversation was about the movie “A League of Their Own,” with no one remembering the title as a family sat there quoting Tom Hanks, “There’s no crying in baseball,” line to varying degrees of success. The young waitress who waited on us there looked like she had been attacked by a barbed-wire fence and was wearing more hardware than a Borg in Star Trek. When I asked her who she favored, she was blunt. “Anyone that supports Trump is an idiot – voting for an idiot. He doesn’t care about women. He doesn’t care about health care, and he doesn’t care about students. I’m already broke and at least Biden cares about student debt. I think Harris will too.”

I found on this trip that when asked, the opinions were definitive. There was a passion in the Trump and the Harris voters. And while the presidential fever broke the farther west I traveled, of the more than 200 people I spoke with, not one of them said they were going to abstain from voting. “It’s too important,” I was told. A few said they wouldn’t vote for the top of the ticket, but everyone was voting “down ballot”. Those who were previously avowed Trump supporters who were now sour on him said they might not vote at all, or “Hold their nose and vote for Harris,” though if anyone asked – they were still voting for Trump.

Harris may own the “hold your nose” vote this year. No one is holding their nose and voting for Trump. His supporters are all in.

That brings me to the truck stop in Nevada....>

<....Earlier I had been looking for any signs of Trump support. Yard signs, half-eaten dogs or cats, maybe an Arnold Palmer poster – you know anything. I found little. But when I walked into the Nevada truck stop I saw a man mopping the floor who had a “Trump” tattoo on his right bicep.

“So, Trump’s your man?” I asked as I caught his attention and pointed to his tattoo.

“Hell No,” he said.

“Your tattoo says otherwise,” I said.

“I voted for him twice. Never again.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“He’s insane. Maybe he always was. But he is now. Did you see him dancing like he was j**cking off two giraffes? Or how about what he said about Arnold Palmer?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “That’s what did it?”

“I’m a veteran. I don’t like what he’s said about Kelly (General John Kelly) and I was pissed off that he claims he’s so damn healthy now but was too unhealthy to serve. He’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”

I sighed. “I would think that tattoo would be.”

He actually laughed. “I can get that removed. It’s going to be painful, but not as painful as Trump has been. Screw him. And screw Elon Musk. And all those other rich people who don’t give a s*** about us.”

“So, who are you voting for?” I asked.

“I’m holding my nose and voting for Harris. At least she’s not insane.” He said.

And that my friends is where I leave you with two weeks left in the campaign, the polls as close as they can be, people losing their minds and others just trying to survive. The race may boil down to Nevada, and voters like the man I met who is holding his nose and voting for Harris — because she’s not insane.

The only conclusion I draw from my trek is that we in the media have long misunderstood and woefully underreported the sense of frustration in this country about a democracy that has been usurped by a donor class. It has left people who do the actual work that makes this country run fearful they will no longer be able to do so for fear that roving bands of immigrants will both replace them and steal from them.

That’s America.

But, I also saw hope. Most women I spoke with got it, though they didn’t want their fathers, husbands or boyfriends to know it. And not one single person under the age of 25 that I spoke with had any desire to vote for Trump. “He needs to be put in a home,” I was told.

If the vote goes right in two weeks, maybe he will. But if not, then there may not be a home to put him in.>

<I grew up in a violent home. You name it, it happened, usually more than once. I was also raised Catholic, complete with Catholic schools, where I learned first-hand how religion could be bent into a cruel and uncaring tool. The upshot is that I’ve never had much faith in organized religion, or in man’s fairness when no one is looking.

When I ran for Congress, imposter syndrome kicked in and I didn’t talk about my early years. Instead, I leaned on my Constitutional law pedigree, a diversion I hoped would highlight my competence and hide my origins. But the truth is, I turned to law because I needed something [sic] believe in.

I found my faith when I read the Federalist papers. In the mid 18 century, when people were still governed by brute force, our founders conceived of a brilliant concept: that all men should be equal before the law. Jefferson, Washington et al. had the singular insight to understand that governance by the rule of law would check the capricious whims of an indulged king.

I was smitten. For twenty years, I clung to Constitutional law like it was a life raft. As a federal trial lawyer, I drank and passed the koolaid with conviction.

I believed… until Dobbs

All of that changed in 2022 with Dobbs, when the Supreme Court threw out Roe v. Wade, not because science or facts had changed, but because six religious zealots finally had enough votes to do it. I understood from Dobbs that Constitutional law is mutable and politics-contingent, that what it says depends on who’s talking.

I have written enough about the legal infirmity of Dobbs, and how Alito, a lifelong misogynist, essentially spit at Equal Protection for women. But, with half the country supporting Trump, many Americans don’t fully grasp why “letting states decide” is so flawed.

Why “letting states decide” offends the 14 A

Last week Trump appeared on Fox News and demonstrated his complete ignorance of American history and the Civil War. His comments illustrated why states can’t vote on a woman’s body any more than states can vote on human bondage.

In the interview, Trump doubled down on comments he previously made about the Civil War, saying, “Lincoln was probably a great president, although I’ve always said, why wasn’t that settled, y’know? it doesn’t make sense, we had a Civil War.”

Trump would have "settled" the civil war the same way the rightwing hacks on SCOTUS “settled” abortion: by letting states decide.

What the 14 Amendment requires

On June 8, 1866, the 14 A was passed by the Senate; it was ratified two years later, granting citizenship to all persons including formerly enslaved people. Crucially, it also guaranteed that all citizens would have equal protection under the laws.

The language explicitly extended protections under the Bill of Rights to the states: if the federal government had to respect the freedom in question, state governments had to respect and protect it as well. This meant states no longer had the right to “vote” to keep slavery. Black men were entitled to the same legal protections under the law as white men, regardless of how the majority voted.

The whole point of the 14th A, adopted after the Civil War, was to remove fundamental freedoms from the whims of public opinion, because public opinion is easily manipulated.

The 14th A prohibits all states from making or enforcing any law that denies the equal protection of the laws to all citizens, or that deprives any person of liberty without due process of law; it does not subject these rights to periodic revision as popular opinion fluctuates.

Applying the same Equal Protection analysis to women, states don't get to force women to give birth by voting on it any more than they get to put people in chains by voting on it.

The court in Roe v. Wade ruled that a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy is a “liberty” protected against state interference by the Due Process and Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. When overturning Roe, Justice Alito wrote disingenuously that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause did not protect women’s medical privacy because “that theory is squarely foreclosed by the Court’s precedents, which establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification,” prioritizing the Court’s “classification precedent” over 50 years of substantive due process.

<At a Wednesday rally for Donald Trump in Duluth, Georgia, disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson showed up in the guise of an emcee from a psychosexual nightmare realm.

After describing the American public as “a 2-year-old smearing the contents of his diapers on the wall” and “a hormone-addled 15-year-old girl slamming the door and giving you the finger,” a red-faced Carlson proposed a solution. “There has to be a point at which Dad comes home,” he said, to full-throated cheers from the crowd. “Dad comes home and he’s pissed. He’s not vengeful, he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children. … And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way.”

And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.

The crowd went wild. And when Donald Trump came to the stage, it greeted him with rapturous cries of “Daddy’s home.” This segment of the nation, it seems, is eager for a spanking. Or at least titillated at the prospect of pain inflicted on others. This is not a new phenomenon within the MAGA movement, which has always been keen on the pain of those it deems wayward — but it is a florid illustration of the way patriarchal family dynamics and punishment stand at the center of contemporary right-wing morality.

Carlson, of course, is hardly the first person to conceptualize the nation as a family, although he may be the first to engage in a blissed-out ode to spanking on C-SPAN. George Lakoff, linguist and philosopher, posited that conservative ideologies rely on a “strict father” metaphor to conceptualize the nation and how it should be ruled. In his 2006 book “Thinking Points,” Lakoff explained that in this model, “The strict father is the moral authority in the family; he knows right from wrong, is inherently moral, and heads the household. ... Obedience to the father is moral; disobedience is immoral. ... When children disobey, the father is obligated to punish, providing an incentive to avoid punishment.”

Authoritarian conservatives, Lakoff argues, apply the strict-father model “not just to all issues but to governing itself.” In this vision, the state and its leader adopts both absolute control and the moral necessity to punish.

But Carlson’s words might have had a special resonance for a particular breed of authoritarian conservative: members of the evangelical right, who have been Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers; 77% of white evangelical protestants voted for Trump in 2016, and 85% did in 2020. Carlson — a maestro at knowingly appealing to the far-right masses — utilized a skin-crawling, sexualized misogyny in the culmination of his metaphor. But his central appeal to an angry father was consonant with a 50-year movement on the Christian right, one in which tens of millions of Americans have experienced, firsthand, the consequences of disobeying Daddy....>

<....In the 1970s, in response to the student-led social revolutions of the 1960s — civil rights, feminism and gay rights — a newly awakened religious right created a movement designed to quash the impulses of rebellious youth. It was called “biblical parenting.” Its first megahit was James Dobson’s incredibly cruel book “Dare to Discipline,” which instructed parents, in great detail, to take a “rod of correction”-centric approach to child rearing. Dobson, founder of the evangelical institution Focus on the Family, recommends regularly spanking children from the ages of 18 months to 10 years old, with a spanking “of sufficient magnitude to cause tears.” This will efficiently quash “willful, haughty disobedience.”

Published in 1970, the book quickly sold millions of copies and launched a movement that centered God, and the rod, in child rearing. It’s a movement that has endured in millions of households across America, and across generations — leading to a new cadre of people, like the baying crowd in Duluth, for whom authoritarian principles were first nurtured in the home.

For my recently released book, “Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America,” I reviewed 50 years’ worth of evangelical parenting manuals, from 1970 to 2017, and conducted interviews with nearly 150 former evangelicals who were raised according to “biblical parenting” principles. Evangelicals also evince a consistently higher approval toward corporal punishment in polling than other groups, a case of successful propaganda enforced with paddles, switches, sticks and hands. The through line throughout decades of these parenting manuals, and in testimonies, was an emphasis on corporal punishment, sometimes brutal, in order to enforce, in the words of youth-centered ministry Youth With a Mission, “instant, joyful obedience.”

In this family model, the strict father isn’t just the moral core of the household; he is also its spiritual head, with the mother as a submissive co-enforcer. Obedience to parents, according to these texts, is both a necessary prelude for and expression of obedience to God. The stakes are existentially high: One frequently cited verse is Proverbs 23:13 — “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.” This system coerces parents into using physical violence on their children in order to save their souls. And in an extension of Lakoff’s “strict father” model of the nation, this model of the family, predicated on obedience enforced with physical violence, creates an authoritarian politics in its practitioners.

The best way to rebuke authoritarianism is to not just rebuke it, but to defeat it and make it look ridiculous and weak.

Consider that a child who has been systemically beaten in the name of God since toddlerhood grows up to be accustomed to brutality and to exhibiting instant and joyful obedience to authority no matter how capricious or unjust. Someone who empathizes with the aggressor to survive, and is inured to brutality by repeatedly being subjected to it. When you ask what might motivate a crowd of people to cheer on the idea of a national spanking — to picture, with approval, a nation submitting to punishment by an abusive father as just and righteous, a necessary corrective to disobedience — you might not have to look any further than the kitchen tables they were raised around as kids, where wooden spoons were broken on their backs.

The best way to rebuke authoritarianism, to break the tyranny of the strict father, is to not just rebuke it, but to defeat it and make it look ridiculous and weak. Mockery and defeat undoes the authoritarian more effectively than violence. When a system is predicated on a cartoonish hypermasculinity, the solution is to treat its leaders as deserving of ridicule, not fear. And until voting ends next month, we have the chance to do just that. To disobey, with glee and en masse, the edict of this punitive would-be father. He’s not our dad. He’s just a man on a mission of punishment, and we can — and must — deny him that chance.>

<When Melissa Kono, the town clerk in Burnside, Wisconsin, began training election workers in 2015, their questions were relatively mundane. They asked about election rules, voter eligibility, and other basic procedures. The job was gratifying and enjoyable; they helped their neighbors while sipping coffee.

But over the past few years, everything has changed. Kono now finds herself fielding questions about what to do when approached by suspicious voters who ask provocative questions or gripe about fraud. She’s added an entire training section dedicated to identifying threats and how to report them. “I never in a million years imagined that that would be part of my curriculum,” she told me. Kono has yet to receive any direct threats herself—perhaps, she thinks, because Donald Trump won the popular vote in her area in 2016 and 2020—but she fears that things may be different this time around. “What I do hear is I know the election is not rigged here, but in other places,” she said. “And I’m honestly worried sometimes: What if Harris wins? What if it gets too close? And now they start questioning me or coming after me, when I have nothing to do with the outcome.”

Around the country, election officials have already received death threats and packages filled with white powder. Their dogs have been poisoned, their homes swatted, their family members targeted. In Texas, one man called for a “a mass shooting of poll workers and election officials” in precincts with results he found suspicious. “The point is coercion; the point is intimidation. It’s to get you to do or not do something,” Al Schmidt, the secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, told me—to get you to “stop counting votes, or we’re going to murder your children, and they name your children,” a threat that Schmidt said he received in 2020. This year, the same things may well happen again. “I had one election official who said they called her on her cellphone and said, ‘Looks like your mom made lasagna tonight; she’s wearing that pretty yellow dress that she likes to wear to church,” Tammy Patrick, the chief programs officer at the National Association of Election Officials and a former elections officer in Maricopa County, Arizona, told me. “It’s terrorism here in America.”

These workers, from secretaries of state to local officials to volunteers, are bearing the immediate, human toll of a campaign to discredit the integrity of American democracy. They are the most direct and vulnerable targets for people who have embraced conspiracy theories about fraudulent and “stolen” votes following the 2020 election—unfounded claims that have been directly promoted by Trump and many other members of the Republican Party, who still will not accept that he lost his first reelection bid. Where candidates used to compete against each other, Schmidt told me, some are now “attacking the referees.” In the most extreme narratives, election workers are accused of fabricating, shredding, or double-counting ballots, which leads to suspicion and harassment. “Since the 2020 election, we have seen an unprecedented spike in threats against the public servants who do administer our elections,” including shootings and a bomb threat, Attorney General Merrick Garland said last month. A survey conducted in February and March by the Brennan Center for Justice found that 38 percent of election officials reported being harassed, abused, or threatened—up from 30 percent a year earlier.

This is not just a story about assaults on individual workers, although that would be bad enough. Election administration is “underappreciated as the foundation upon which all of our representative government thrives,” Rachel Orey, the director of the Bipartisan Policy Center Elections Project, told me. In a very real way, these officials represent the soul of democracy. Many of them are undertaking their duties while also juggling child care and everyday errands such as grocery shopping. Without their diligence, nobody could be elected, period. The form of government that Americans recognize and celebrate could not exist.

Dissuading or preventing people from going to, or otherwise attempting to interfere with, the polls are century-old dirty tactics, and there are all manner of legal ways to suppress or dilute the vote, many of which target racial minorities. But Trump’s attempts to unilaterally dictate election results are different. As far back as 2012, he criticized Barack Obama’s reelection as a “total sham and a travesty.” Victory in 2016, and the conversion or defeat of nearly all of his Republican rivals, gave Trump the power to mount a serious and systematic attempt to discredit the democratic process. He and his furious supporters, in turn, have unleashed a sustained assault on national and state elections alike....>

<....“I wasn’t aware of any real threats or harassment or wide-scale verbal abuse on election officials prior to the 2020 election cycle,” Tina Barton, the vice chair of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, told me. The outrage and attacks that emerged in 2020 have now been harnessed into a well-funded campaign: Republicans have reportedly donated upwards of $100 million to a network of so-called election-integrity groups to lay the groundwork for contesting the results should Trump lose again. Although poll watching is itself normal, the GOP is training and deploying armies of monitors with the presumption of fraud, flooding election offices with public-records requests, and filing endless challenges to voter-registration records. “I don’t think there’s any question that there is a more coordinated and sophisticated effort ahead of this election to discredit it than there was in 2020,” Lawrence Norden, the vice president of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center, told me.

This election cycle, one of the “dominant narratives” is about noncitizen voting, Thessalia Merivaki, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies how election officials combat misinformation, told me. Republican activists, politicians, lawmakers, and pundits have especially seized on false fears about immigrant and foreign voting to burnish a conspiracy theory that noncitizen votes from overseas will turn the election. These claims have been widely debunked, but all the energy behind them could delay vote counts and disenfranchise citizens. Republican groups are filing more and more lawsuits in battleground states about voter-identification requirements, absentee ballots, and other basic procedures, “setting up an opportunity afterwards to cast doubt on the election results,” Norden said.

When I began reporting this article, I was curious about whether election officials had concerns over new technologies. The internet has changed substantially since 2020. For the past couple of years, I’ve written about the rise of generative AI and its attendant issues: In terms that are most directly relevant to the election, that means the arrival of easy-to-create and highly convincing deepfakes, the concoction of micro-targeted conspiracy theories, the overall degradation of our information environment, and the possibility that our sense of shared reality might be wiped out altogether. It’s easy to imagine that AI could wreak havoc around Election Day—earlier this year, a robocall that cloned President Joe Biden’s voice was used in a voter-suppression effort—and experts have made their concerns about the technology clear.

The election workers and officials I spoke with did express worry about AI and its ability to accelerate disinformation and election-interference campaigns. But they also described problems that came from more familiar sources. They spoke with me about how videos of entirely proper and legal election procedures—snippets of livestreamed election procedures, for instance—had been miscontextualized to suggest that officials who were simply following the rules were actually smuggling in ballots, rigging voting machines, or otherwise manipulating the results. Blatantly false headlines and incendiary posts spreading on messaging apps and among social-media groups have done and continue to do plenty of damage. Sometimes, the details are irrelevant. As my colleague Charlie Warzel recently wrote, manipulated media and misinformation is useful not necessarily because it convinces some population of undecided suckers, but because it allows the already aggrieved to sequester themselves in a parallel reality. A voter might say, “Let’s just set the facts aside,” Patrick, of the National Association of Election Officials, told me, “and I’m going to tell you what I think or what I feel about this.”

Amy Burgans, the clerk-treasurer in Douglas County, Nevada, herself had doubts about the outcome of the 2020 election when she started in her role that December. (The previous clerk-treasurer had resigned—the pandemic and contentious election cycle, Burgans told me, had been “a lot.”) Burgans said that she had heard in the news, on social media, and from people she knew that there “must have been” some foul play. But once she was in charge of running elections and administered the 2022 midterms, she said, she saw the rigor at every step of the process and understood that the allegations of widespread, systemic fraud were impossible....>

<....Now she’s the one fielding questions, frequently about voting machines. Burgans has explained to voters all of the controls in place, that she’s “never seen even one error” after an election audit. Still, people ask her about election procedures at almost every event she attends, or “even if I’m at the Elks Club just hanging out,” she said. Burgans said she has “no issues with” and tries to address these questions. But doing so takes time and energy—and these comments are just the tip of the spear.

Burgans received a threat in the mail in 2022. Although it was mostly a broad rant about the government, it did make her worry for her children’s safety, and she installed a security system in her home. Her county’s election facilities are stocked with personal protective equipment and Narcan, in the event of suspicious substances or powders (which might be fentanyl) arriving in the mail—something that has already happened at election offices in several states. She also recently installed bulletproof glass in the office, where Burgans and full-time staff work—as a precaution rather than a response to any particular threat, she said. Election deniers are “consistently coming into [election] offices saying things like ‘You’d better watch your back’ or ‘Don’t you forget: I know where your kids go to school,” Barton, the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections vice chair, told me. What was unprecedented in 2020, Barton said, is now an “ongoing onslaught.”

This attack on American elections is not an invasion so much as a siege. And just as hateful, outlandish, and conspiracist misinformation have eroded Americans’ trust in one another, institutions, and basic facts, this environment is taking a psychic toll on election workers. They find themselves having to put in extra hours to field questions, accommodate an influx of poll watchers, process voter challenges, sort through public-records requests, and prepare for any emergencies and attacks—all while fearing for their safety. For more than two decades, running an election has become steadily more complex and involved. After 2000’s infamous hanging chads, election workers had to become IT professionals. After long lines became a key issue in 2008 and 2012, they became logistics experts. After 2016, they learned cybersecurity, and in advance of 2020, they studied public-health protocols and how to process enormous quantities of mail-in ballots. Now election workers have to be communications experts as well. “We’ve had poll watchers in here every single day since September 26,” when early voting began, “sometimes three or four of them in a small space,” Aaron Ammons, the clerk and recorder of deeds in Champaign County, Illinois, said in a recent press briefing....>

<....Meanwhile, support and resources for these emerging responsibilities are frequently missing. The result, inevitably, is burnout: The job keeps getting harder and requiring more hours, but resources for hiring, buying new equipment, improving security, and more have been inconsistent and haphazard. “There have been new challenges and new expectations put on election administrators, but funding hasn’t kept pace,” Rachel Orey said. Hours spent on election work have ballooned since 2020, according to a recent national survey of election workers conducted by Reed College. Meanwhile, nearly one-third of election offices don’t have any full-time staff, wages are pitiful, and turnover rates grew from 28 percent in 2004—already high—to nearly 39 percent in 2022.

This burden “has taken away from [election officials’] ability to just focus on the mechanics of that very important election,” Kim Wyman, a former secretary of state for Washington who recently served as a senior election-security adviser at the Department of Homeland Security, told me. Skeptics will use innocent mistakes and logistical snares—which are mundane and easily rectified—and even the act of correcting “as gasoline on the fire to ‘prove’ their point or their claim of voter fraud,” she said. This, in turn, only fuels the exhaustion. “People just make up stuff about what we do and are coming after us,” Kono, of Wisconsin, told me. She’s seen many longtime clerks and election workers leave, telling her, “I can’t do another presidential election” and “I don’t want to have to deal with voters.”

Those who remain do not take the job lightly. In 20 years working in election administration, Barton told me, “I have never seen election officials train so much in four years’ time”—improving security, being transparent at every step of the process, speaking at events and posting on social media to educate their communities. They’ve been preparing for November 5, 2024, for four years, Wyman told me. “This is my Olympics,” Kono said.

The misinformation crisis is commonly understood as a clash between two “realities” that is most visible online, in the words of high-profile politicians, or during spectacular flashpoints such as the January 6 Capitol riot. But for four years, and especially in the weeks leading up to and after November 5, these battles have and will be quotidian and interpersonal. “We are your soccer coaches. We are the moms helping at the schools, the dads coaching baseball, the grandmothers that are going on field trips,” Burgans said. This everyday warfare, waged against the neighbors and teachers and elders and bus drivers who administer the polls, and in turn democracy, may be more consequential than any single vote or outcome.>

<Major businesses and their lobbying groups have seized on a set of recent Supreme Court decisions that sharply limit the government’s regulatory powers, aiming to advance dozens of lawsuits that could invalidate a vast array of federal climate, education, health and labor rules.

The moves underscore the lasting significance of the justices’ findings — and the risks to President Joe Biden’s signature economic policies — ahead of an election in which the two candidates have presented starkly different visions for the future of federal regulations.

In a closely watched case last term, the high court jettisoned a long-standing legal doctrine that had afforded agencies broad latitude to craft rules even without express instructions from Congress. The justices also restricted how certain federal watchdogs can pursue alleged wrongdoers, and they opened the door for some companies to launch new lawsuits over seemingly settled government rules — some of them decades old.

Since then, the three separate yet intertwined rulings have influenced a groundswell of litigation, particularly from conservative and corporate interests that chafe at the power of the federal bureaucracy. Between June and mid-October, the cases have factored into more than 150 new or ongoing legal challenges, according to court records analyzed by The Washington Post and data amassed by Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy group that had urged the Supreme Court to rule differently. The new citations include new and updated lawsuits, briefings and rulings.

The lawsuits touch on virtually every aspect of the U.S. economy, especially federal labor law. Major companies including Amazon and SpaceX, and leading lobbying groups for restaurants and other industries, have incorporated elements of the new Supreme Court decisions into a range of lawsuits against regulations on wages, overtime pay, whistleblower protections or union organizing, court records show. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)

Lobbying groups for AT&T and Verizon have cited the opinions in their campaign to thwart federal regulations that would prevent them from interfering with internet traffic. Airlines including American, Delta and United have referenced one of the cases to keep the government from requiring them to disclose baggage fees. And some companies have argued the Supreme Court decisions should prohibit federal punishment for allegedly overcharging consumers, offering faulty products or committing other misdeeds.

The maker of the popular TurboTax software, for example, has relied in part on the justices’ recent reasoning to try to ward off a federal fine, after the government charged that the company had deceived consumers that some of its services are “free.” The case has the backing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has lobbied for years to weaken the Federal Trade Commission, an agency that broadly polices deceptive corporate practices.

“If the government continues to try to stretch the law … it’s going to lose a lot of cases in court,” said Daryl Joseffer, the executive vice president of the Chamber’s legal arm.

Like many of the companies, groups and regulators contacted for this story, spokespeople for Intuit and the FTC declined to comment.

The surge of legal challenges illustrates the tectonic shifts underway in Washington, as voters cast ballots in a highly contested presidential contest.

Much as he did during his first term, former president Donald Trump has broadly called for rolling back a vast array of federal climate, education, health-care and labor regulations, arguing that they hamper economic growth. Vice President Kamala Harris, in contrast, has called for new federal initiatives to fight fraud, combat high fees and lower the costs that Americans face for prescriptions and other necessities.

The victor will face key, early decisions about which rules to issue or rescind, and which judges to nominate to adjudicate disputes over them. All those choices will unfold amid a greatly changed legal landscape, after the Supreme Court struck down a long-standing shield for federal regulation.

For roughly four decades, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council essentially instructed judges to defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law, on the grounds that those regulators could best divine the intentions of an imprecise Congress. In June, though, the court threw out that framework, known as the Chevron doctrine, sending immediate shock waves through the judicial system.

Republican policymakers soon seized on the development in their fights against the Biden administration, targeting its initiatives on climate change and its protections for transgender students. Major businesses also looked to capitalize on the rulings to strike at the government agencies that oversee them....>

<....In October, for example, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of KalshiEx, a betting website that initially sought to allow wagers as high as $100 million on the outcome of the presidential election. Regulators viewed such bets as an emerging threat to democracy, but the judges sided with the company, which had argued that Congress had never explicitly granted the Commodity Futures Trading Commission the authority to outlaw the practice.

An organization representing insurance marketers has looked to capitalize on the ruling in its long-running fight with the Federal Communications Commission over robocalls. After the agency tried to crack down on some of the unwanted, automated contacts, the Insurance Marketing Coalition told a federal judge in August that regulators did not have Congress’s blessing to issue any such rules, citing the Supreme Court’s overturning of Chevron.

Similar arguments have been deployed at times against federal efforts to promote energy-efficient home appliances, protect retirees from subpar investment advice and prevent stock market manipulation. The American Securities Association, a lobbying group representing major financial firms and brokers, tried to convince a court this year that the Securities and Exchange Commission had no legal basis to monitor trades closely in real time — likening the oversight to “tyranny.”

“These claims would have been laughed out of the room just a couple years ago,” said Tyler Gellasch, the president of the Healthy Markets Association, which has advocated for greater SEC authority in the decade since the 2010 “flash crash” that gashed markets. He warned the SEC stands to have “have less info about trading markets than it’s had since the advent of the personal computer.”

Like many battles between industry and regulators, the war over the SEC audit system predates the Supreme Court decisions last term — and the new lawsuit relies on more than those precedents to argue that the government is acting unconstitutionally. But Mark Chenoweth, the president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), said the dynamic illustrates how companies and other interests could become “more willing to stand their ground” in fights against federal policymakers.

A conservative-leaning outfit, NCLA spent years seeking to chip away at Chevron. The group has served as counsel to Relentless, a fishing company that sued over federal rules that would require such firms to pay for federal monitors. The Supreme Court heard its arguments in tandem with another company, Loper Bright, which charged that Congress had never given the Commerce Department the explicit power to require industry-funded oversight.

“I don’t think there’s been enough time for the effects to really be well understood,” Chenoweth said of the aftermath, noting that lower courts must still adjudicate the original claims brought by Relentless and Loper Bright. But he predicted the cases would have a “disciplining effect” on regulators broadly.

In the immediate aftermath, some conservative groups and major corporations have been especially quick to leverage the Supreme Court rulings against the Labor Department, targeting a vast array of rules issued under Biden that aim to protect workers and their wages.

For years, the Restaurant Law Center has opposed Biden-era rules that aim to raise pay for tipped workers. But the group, whose board of directors includes executives from Chipotle and Yum! Brands, incorporated the Loper Bright decision into its broad legal strategy this July, leading an appeals court the following month to strike down the administration policy.

The decision left some experts fearful about the future of federal labor law, particularly at a time when Congress is too gridlocked to address some of the issues facing employees and employers nationwide.

“Congress is going to have to quickly adjust to policymaking that bears in mind this new legal landscape,” said Skye Perryman, the president of Democracy Forward.....>

<....Some major companies, including Amazon, Starbucks and SpaceX, have specifically looked to neuter the National Labor Relations Board, the government’s leading labor watchdog. They have targeted the NLRB with the aid of another key case that came before the Supreme Court last term: Jarkesy v. SEC, which sharply limited the SEC’s use of in-house tribunals to adjudicate alleged securities fraud.

The ruling carried vast implications for other federal regulators, including the NLRB, which relies extensively on its own internal administrative law judges to hear workers’ complaints and award back pay when necessary. (Its rulings can be appealed to federal court.)

Jennifer Abruzzo, the board’s general counsel, acknowledged the wave of litigation already has forced the NLRB to “divert some of its scarce resources to defend itself in cases that cite this Supreme Court precedent.”

In July, for example, the rocket-maker SpaceX successfully seized on the justices’ decision — and the ambiguity in their ruling — to halt lawsuits stemming from its allegedly unfair labor practices. The Elon Musk-owned company pointed to the fact that the Supreme Court deliberately did not address one of the issues it was asked to consider: whether agencies like the NLRB are unconstitutional because they are overseen by presidential appointees who cannot be removed by Congress.

Amazon has raised similar arguments in its own fight with the NLRB over union organizing efforts, faulting the government in September for “illegitimate proceedings led by an illegitimate decision-maker.” Others have leveraged the Jarkesy case to fight off whistleblowers: The poultry giant Perdue Farms, for example, has challenged whether the board can hear a case and award damages to a former worker who sounded the alarm years ago about the company’s alleged mistreatment of chickens.

Catherine Ruckelshaus, the general counsel at the pro-labor National Employment Law Project, described some of the litigation as “part of a really aggressive, multipronged broadside against the government’s ability to protect workers and other consumers, the environment, anything the government does.”

“We’re concerned about those cases and their implications,” she said.>

<Nearly 240 miles east of Lauren Boebert’s former stronghold Rifle, past the Rockies and onto the Colorado plains, the high school homecoming parade in the Republican’s newly-adopted town marched a circular route last week – twice passing a corner yard with a Harris/Walz sign declaring: “UNITY OVER DIVISION.”

Boebert’s arrival with her sons has sparked the opposite in Windsor, a community of just under 43,000 people about an hour north of Denver. Her relocation here from the Western Slope was divisive in itself – not just between Democrats and Republicans but also among loyal GOP voters – when she announced quietly during last year’s holiday season that she would abandon her re-election campaign in CD3 in favor of a run on the other side of the state.

That placed her in a district she knew nothing about, where she’d never lived and where well-connected, well-respected local Republicans eyeing congressional bids themselves took great umbrage – along with their loyal supporters and those on the other side of the political spectrum.

“She’s not a leader; she’s a rabble rouser,” Holly Hoag, a 65-year-old who’s lived in Windsor for more than three decades, tells The Independent. She’s posted a sign in her yard, just a block from Main Street, in support of Boebert’s Democratic opponent, Trisha Calvarese.

The aesthetics and vibe of Windsor are a far cry from Boebert’s old stomping grounds of Rifle and Garfield County, where the congresswoman got her first job at McDonald’s, dropped out of high school and became infamous for owning a restaurant with gun-strapped women waitstaff. Rifle remains unpretentious, with a still rough-and-tumble feel of the Old West; 2022 census data put its population at just under 15,000, with a little more than 15 per cent of residents holding a college degree.

Windsor, which is growing fast, boasts well-manicured neighborhoods and developments reminiscent of Desperate Housewives-perfect Wisteria Lane, all of it anchored by a downtown described by the Main Street hair salon’s website as “trendy.” There are cute restaurants, breweries and shops, and local power players – especially Republicans with deep pockets – clearly have big plans for the place. Almost 50 per cent of residents have a college degree, and the median household income is 40 per cent higher than the rest of the region’s.

Boebert’s district switch was widely viewed as a response to her Democrat opponent, Adam Frisch – who’d nearly beat her in 2022 – continuing to exponentially out-fundraise the 37-year-old and build grassroots support as he sought to claim her seat this time around.

The cross-state move also followed a series of personal public embarrassments. The professed devout Christian divorced her husband in 2023; then, perhaps most damningly, the mother of four was kicked out of a Denver performance of Beetlejuice last September after allegedly vaping, misbehaving and groping her date – a Democrat from Aspen, no less. She lied about it, then apologized.

None of that helped her already uncertain re-election bid, but the family drama continued following the CD4 announcement. Spats and family issues prompted police intervention repeatedly back in Garfield County at the beginning of this year; her 18-year-old son was also arrested in February, charged with a string of offenses that included allegedly robbing a woman with a brain tumor.

Boebert claimed the relocation east was meant to give her family a new start; politically, though, she notably carpetbagged to a district that’s far more heavily red, all but guaranteeing her a win for the seat previously held by Rep. Ken Buck. The more moderate Republican, who’d attracted the ire of the MAGA faction, announced last November that he would not seek reelection but went a step further and decided not to finish out the rest of his term – leaving office in March as he complained that Congress “just keeps going downhill.”

Buck had held the seat for nine years, winning with almost 61 per cent of the vote in 2022; in Weld County, where Windsor sits, he took 21,828 votes to the Democrat’s 8,648. Boebert faced significant competition to fill the office from well-known local players, who immediately took aim at her carpetbagging, personal drama and perceived preference for national headlines over local issues – but she still won the primary by a landslide....>

<....CD4 hasn’t elected a Democrat since 2008. As of 2022, Democrats constituted 17.7 per cent of registered voters to 37.1 per cent of Republicans – and unaffiliated accounted for the largest bloc at 43.6 per cent. The district’s 721,794 residents were 79.6 per cent white.

When Boebert landed in Windsor, Democrats, in particular, were horrified.

“She’s very inappropriate; I think she’s not somebody that we want our kids looking up to,” Hoag, who displayed a satirical “Putin/Trump” sign alongside her Calvarese sign, tells The Independent. “I just think she’s pretty disgusting.”

Hoag is pretty tough; she’s recovering from a broken sternum sustained in a moose attack on a recent trip to Wyoming. But, given the political climate, she says she “was afraid to put my signs out” and “really thought twice about it.”

Janene Willey, another Calvarese supporter in Windsor who lives a few streets away, decided to “put our signs up in the window so they don’t disappear.”

“Everybody’s keeping their mouth shut because they don’t know what’s going to happen, and there is a certain amount of fear of the weaponized side that they’re going to revolt or do something,” she says.

But Hoag, despite the fear of vandalism, theft or repercussions, explains why she felt public support was important.

“I think we need to speak up,” she says. “I just think there’s a real, silent majority right now that are too afraid to put bumper stickers on their car, because there’s this radical side that is violent.”

That silent majority is what Democeat Calverse – a labor activist and speechwriter who grew up in the district – is banking on.

“It’s exactly that – it is quiet, where they’re saying, ‘Well, you know, I’m not going to take a sign or … I can’t put that out, but you have my vote and I’m going to call my neighbors,’” she tells The Independent.

Calverese raised nearly five times the amount Boebert did between July and September 30, a whopping almost $2.7m in contrast to the congresswoman’s $532,000.

Trisha Calvarese, who is the same age and was born the same week as Boebert, is running agains the Republican in a district that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 2008 (Calvarese Campaign) Trisha Calvarese, who is the same age and was born the same week as Boebert, is running agains the Republican in a district that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 2008 (Calvarese Campaign) “Don’t let anybody tell you this race is unwinnable,” Calvarese says.

“Keep in mind, actually the highest percent of voters in this district are unaffiliated,” she adds, noting that she’s “absolutely” targeting that bloc. “So people are thinking beyond the party paradigm … we’ve been doing meet-and-greets all throughout the district and the rural parts of the counties; people show up, and they’re thrilled that other people are showing up.”

The daughter of conservative Catholics, she’s not afraid to broach dialogue with the other side, either – perhaps bolstered by news from one Republican, her AP chem teacher, that he would in fact be voting for her.

“I’m even reaching out to Republicans, too, wherever I meet them, shaking their hand, looking them in the eye, and saying, ‘Look, I’m here to represent you. I see you have a Trump hat on, right?’

“I’m endorsed by the Teamsters, for example … and I’m getting ticket splitters,” she says, calling a campaign goal “trying to restore that traditional blue-dog Democratic … neighborhood feeling.”

She and Boebert are not only the same age, they were born the same week, the Democrat in Colorado and the Republican in Florida.

“It’s just going toe-to-toe with this millennial who’s just like a representative for an entire generation,” she tells The Independent. “I tell young people, ‘Look, this wasn’t on my bingo card …Run for office.’ If people like Lauren Boebert are doing it, then people like me need to do it, and other people need to step up, too.”

Bev Wallace, who chairs Weld County Democrats, points to the many independent voters in the district as well as recent data she read on a neighborhood website compiling statistics on “schools, on income, on political leanings, on cost of living, all kinds of data you would want to know if you were moving there.”

“The map that they put up from the most recent data that they got from elections, on voter registration, they put Weld County as not red; it’s a light lavender blue, not dark blue.”

She points to an influx of younger families lured by the area’s relative affordability, particularly in parts of Boebert’s new county – although not Windsor itself – that are $100,000 less than properties just across the interstate.

“And that’s been our hope,” she says. “To turn Weld County blue.”....>

<....Regardless of any trends or rapidly changing demographics, however, politics has created deep divisions within CD4 and, particularly, Windsor.

“It is really tough up here to say anything,” Willey, who’s lived in Windsor for 20 years, tells The Independent. “And I think that’s kind of the overwhelming premise of this election.

Willey serves on the Windsor Water/Sewer board, which still meets at 6.30am in the court house “because that’s when the old ditch riders would be done with their day opening all the ditches, and then they would come in, have a cup of coffee and be the water board,” she says.

She also works at a nearby garden operation, where “there’s been a big divide” thanks to politics.

“The flower people are all Democrats, and the veggie people are all Republicans,” she says.

“It’s horrible,” says Hoag. “I have neighbors that are pretty conservative and that will vote for Trump – neighbors that have been my neighbors for years. You don’t speak to them anymore. They don’t speak to you. We don’t speak to each other anymore.”

Lifelong Windsor resident Mario Melendez, who The Independent later learned is married to the town’s former mayor, lives in one of the few homes proudly displaying a Boebert sign outside – but echoes Hoag’s comments about an absence of dialogue.

“I’m more Republican, so I don’t really say anything to other people.” he tells The Independent. “And I just don’t understand what they’re thinking …. Democratic and liberal people.

“People don’t understand what the heck’s going on in the world,” says Melendez, 63. “They think it’s the new wave or something.”

When it comes to Boebert, though, the avid Trump supporter believes “she’s a good person … I respect what she says” and “what she stands for.”

“I got to meet her a few times and sit and talk to her,” Melendez says. “My wife does the same thing, and she’s behind her.”

Some residents argue that, anecdotally, there are fewer political signs displayed in Windsor than in previous years; it’s uncertain whether Boebert’s presence has anything to do with that, but locals in Rifle and Silt had also seemed loathe to put out endorsements during her previous two bids – either for or against the MAGA stalwart.

There were Boebert trailers, posters and billboards scattered throughout CD3, inarguably; they just tended never to materialize in her backyard.

A few blocks away from Boebert’s new home in Windsor, Michelle Softich and Toby Rogers decided “just to inject a little humor into a pretty contentious situation” – putting out a “Willie Nelson for President” sign.

They’re of the opinion that they “haven’t seen as many signs one way or the other this year” – but Softich, 43, has her own theory.

“Even if you are friends or family members with people who are on different sides, I think we’ve already had those blowups,” she says. “And now we’re trying to keep the peace.”>

<When someone attacks the messenger rather than the message, they’re usually revealing something.

Friday night in Austin, Texas, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, fiercely criticized The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, over a recent report about Trump’s troubling attitude toward the military, which he believes should be loyal to him personally. As Goldberg reports, Trump said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” which is both chilling and historically illiterate.

Trump called The Atlantic “a failing magazine run by a guy named Goldberg.” He added that “they were the ones that made up the story about me saying bad things about this, about the soldiers.” That’s a reference to another article that Goldberg published, in September 2020, reporting that then-President Trump had called Americans who died in wars “suckers” and “losers.” Trump’s attack is factually wrong on nearly every count, but it’s still a useful demonstration of Trump’s political methods and aims.

First, some housekeeping: Trump’s own former staffers have confirmed the “suckers” and “losers” reporting on the record. The Atlantic is thriving both journalistically—it has won the magazine industry’s top award three years running—and as a business, attaining profitability this year with more than 1 million subscribers. Nearly the only thing that Trump got right was Goldberg’s name. As in past instances, he emphasized the name in a way that reeked of anti-Semitism. Trump likes to deny allegations of anti-Semitism by pointing to his Jewish family members, but he has a long history of crude, stereotypical remarks about Jews, and in this election he has repeatedly attacked American Jews for not supporting him, saying they will be to blame if he loses.

Trump is attacking the messenger here because he can’t really attack the message. He denies making the remarks, but a pile of other evidence backs up the report. Goldberg’s recent story was closely followed by a New York Times story in which John Kelly, a retired general who served as Trump’s chief of staff, described Trump’s obsession with personal loyalty and desire to use the military against domestic critics. Thirteen other former Trump-administration officials signed a letter backing these accounts up. “President Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country,” Kelly recently told Goldberg. “There are many, many people who have heard him say these things.” Besides, Trump has said himself that he wants to use the military domestically, and he’s disrespected fallen soldiers by trying to use Arlington National Cemetery as a cheap campaign prop.

He’s also employed this kind of attempted bullying before. Four years ago, Trump denied Goldberg’s story about “suckers” and “losers,” but other reporters quickly duplicated the reporting, including Jennifer Griffin of Fox News. Trump quickly (though unsuccessfully) demanded that Fox fire her. The former president has also sporadically railed at Goldberg and The Atlantic since 2020.

Although Trump’s attacks on the press are not new, they have escalated in recent weeks. Trump has said that CBS should lose its broadcast license over a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent. He has pressured Fox News to stop airing ads that are critical of him. He has threatened Google for showing negative stories about him. He has previously vowed to jail reporters.

The point here is not to plead for pity for the poor press. Courageous reporting is courageous because it puts journalists in conflict with powerful people. Anyone who expects adulation all the time should go into a different business. (This also goes for any media owner who might feel tempted to tone down criticism of Trump.)

But voters need to understand why Trump is attacking the press, and where it will lead if he is reelected. The future of American democracy is the key question of this election. Trump has left an ample record showing that he is committed neither to the rule of law nor to rule by the people—after all, he tried to steal the last presidential election after he lost it. But many Americans seem to have forgotten what Trump’s presidency was like, or they simply don’t believe that he’ll do the things that he keeps saying, loudly and publicly, that he’ll do.

<Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris held massive rallies as part of their respective campaigns over the weekend. With a week to go until the election, the candidates are making a final push to energize voters.

Trump, the Republican nominee, held what was reported to be a sold-out event in Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday. The venue has a capacity of 19,500.

The rally was the largest the former president has held this year, which is notable considering it took place in the Democratic stronghold of New York City.

One New York City police officer told the New York Post that thousands more were turned away from the event after it reached capacity.

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek in an emailed statement: "Madison Square Garden was at capacity and, according to media reports, the number of people outside could have filled up a second Madison Square Garden easily."

Meanwhile, the vice president held a rally in Houston, Texas, on Friday which was also her largest since she became the Democratic nominee. Her campaign estimated that the rally drew a crowd of around 30,000 people.

Trump has averaged crowd sizes of about 5,600 across the 28 rallies (with capacity information) he has appeared at this year until mid-August, according to analysis from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut.

Between July and mid-August, Harris appeared at six rallies, with an average crowd size of about 13,400, the analysis found.

Both of this weekend's major rallies were held in areas dominated by the opposing party, in places neither candidate expects to win.

Trump's New York City rally was a break from his recent tour of battleground states and featured appearances from his wife and two eldest sons, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and billionaire supporter Elon Musk.

The event included several controversial moments, including one speaker describing Puerto Rico as an "island of garbage" and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson incorrectly describing Harris's heritage as "Samoan-Malaysian."

Meanwhile, Harris's Houston rally featured appearances from native Texans Beyoncè Knowles-Carter and Willie Nelson.

The Democratic nominee focused much of the rally's messaging on reproductive rights, issuing a warning that the rest of the country could end up like Texas—which has some of the nation's strictest abortion laws.

Newsweek reached out to the Trump and Harris campaigns via email outside of regular working hours.

With the election drawing ever closer, both candidates are neck-and-neck in the polls.

The latest analysis of recent polls by aggregator FiveThirtyEight gives Harris a 1.4-point lead over Trump in the popular vote with 48 percent of the vote against 46.6 percent. However, the polling website has Trump as the favorite to win the electoral college, with a 53 percent chance of victory.>

<The crowd was beaming with optimism, shaking hands and embracing friends and strangers, all dressed head-to-toe in patriotic colors — then digested six hours of borderline racist, profanity-filled remarks and vulgar insults aimed at their political opponents.

A long list of Donald Trump’s high-profile allies at his massive Madison Square Garden rally labeled Kamala Harris “the antichrist” and “the devil” and lamented “f****ing illegals.” Tucker Carlson joked that Trump’s Democratic rival — a Black and Indian-American woman — is “the first Samoan, Malaysian, low IQ” presidential nominee.

“I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” said comedian Tony Hinchliffe, who goes by the stage name Kill Tony.

The Manhattan arena, which seats roughly 19,500 people, was nearly filled to capacity on Sunday, with supporters filling the rafters and suites and lingering in hallways and stairwells. Hundreds of people who couldn’t get inside were glued to a large screen and speakers blasting his address towards the street from the steps.

A woman covered head to toe in red, white and blue sequins and “MAGA” decals wore the outfit to celebrate her 20th rally since 2020. Thousands of others wore T-shirts saying they were “voting for the felon” and “f*** Joe Biden.”

More than nine years after he descended golden escalators from his Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, and nearly five months to the day he was criminally convicted for conspiring to interfere in the 2016 election, Trump had his name in lights in one of the biggest marquees in town, sneering back at a city he claims is falling apart without him.

At his rallies, Trump routinely mentions that he is able to draw a crowd despite not playing an instrument. When he rallied on Long Island last month, he proudly mentioned that Elvis Presley once performed there.

He came back to the “city that raised him” without “embarrassment,” Tucker Carlson said on Sunday. “The stones that takes.”

While he embraces being the center of attention at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump dreams of swinging his home state. If he can turn out a crowd at a place like this, that should be proof enough that New York is no longer the Democratic stronghold their opponents have claimed it to be, the thinking goes.

Michael Zumbluskas, who is running for Congress to represent New York’s 12th district, which spans Manhattan, spoke to The Independent over the strains of Lee Greenwood singing Trump’s theme.

Trump’s rally proves Republicans “have a shot,” he said.

Trump will likely not win New York in 2024, but his presence could boost down-ballot Republicans in tighter races.

“All these major Democrats thought he was afraid to come back,” Zumbluskas said. “And this is saying, ‘no, I’m sticking it in your face, even if I don’t win New York.’”

“This doesn’t feel like second place energy tonight,” former Republican presidential aide and Trump booster Vivek Ramaswamy said to the crowd. “Welcome to 2024. New York is a swing state.”

“The king of New York is back,” Donald Trump Jr told the crowd, “to reclaim the city that he built.”

His father headlined in a city where judges and juries have him on the hook for more than half a billion dollars, including a $350 million judgment for defrauding bankers and investors for $350 [sic], and nearly $90 million for defaming a woman he was also found liable for sexually abusing.

Next month he will be sentenced for falsifying business records in connection with a hush money scheme to pay off an adult film star who threatened to derail his presidential ambitions in 2016.

The walls of Madison Square Garden are full of reminders of some of its most famous matchups and concerts, from 1971’s “Fight of the Century” to “the dunk” in 1993. Hulk Hogan won the main event at the first Wrestlemania there in 1985.

He came back to the Garden on Sunday and ripped off his shirt, just as he did at the Republican National Convention in July....>

<....“It’s surreal,” said Andrew Giuliani, son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who appeared on the rally stage one day before he is due in federal court to face an order to hand over his assets to election workers he defamed.

“I think about all the times I’ve been here to watch the Knicks,” he told The Independent. “It really brought everything into this sense of New York being the center of the universe. … If we can pull off a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, in the heart of leftism, anything is possible. … And I think it’s going to reverberate across the country.”

The rally was a revival of July’s Republican National Convention, when Trump — days after an attempted assassination — received the party’s nomination, when he thought he was facing President Joe Biden.

Republicans have rejected rally comparisons to an infamous Nazi-supporting event in the Garden in 1939, or have shot down accusations of fascism in the days before Election Day.

“There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden,” Harris’s running mate Tim Walz said from Nevada on Sunday. “Don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.”

Several speakers at Trump’s rally made the comparisons themselves.

“I just got back from Israel … and they go, ‘Sid, you want to speak at this MSG thing? I go, ‘Sure. Out of character for me to speak at a Nazi rally. I was just in Israel,’” joked right-wing radio personality Sid Rosenberg. “But I took the gig.”

“I don’t see no stinking Nazis in here,” said Hogan, moments after ripping off his shirt. “I don’t see no stinking domestic terrorists in here.”

Moments after taking the stage, after his introduction from former First Lady Melania Trump, who was introduced by billionaire Elon Musk, Trump launched into a familiar message of decline and chaos that only he can fix.

“The day I take office the migrant invasion of our country ends and the restoration of our country begins,” he said.

“Savage Venezuelan prison gangs” are “taking over apartment complexes,” said Trump, painting a false picture of life for people in Colorado. “And now they’ve even taken over Times Square.”

Outside the arena, vendors unloaded bootleg MAGA hats at two for $20. Business for one vendor in Sixth Avenue one block away wasn’t much better.

But on 8th Avenue and 34th Street, less than half a block from where a crowd listened to Trump promise the death penalty for immigrants accused of killing American citizens, a few vendors told The Independent they had success selling massive flags, including American flags with Trump’s face on them. “Can you see these anywhere else?” one vendor said.

There was one, attached to a truck parked in front of Macy’s on 34th Street.>

<We love the internet. Whether we’re placing insomnia-fueled eBay bids on action figures from our childhoods, emailing the latest Taylor Swift conspiracy theory to our best friend, or just paying our electric bill, being online makes our lives more fun, more connected and a whole lot easier.

Unfortunately, there are countless creeps who love that we love the internet — and who would love to swipe our personal information. Last year saw a record-breaking number of data breaches, which increased 20% between 2022 and 2023, so, if we’re going to live digitally (and how can we not?), we need to be vigilant about protecting our privacy.

We can start locking down our information by looking at how secure the internet in our own homes is.

“You will probably not be shocked to hear that we’re the problem on this one,” Alysa Hutnik, a privacy lawyer with Kelley, Drye & Warren LLP in Washington, D.C., told us — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast. “It’s usually human error in how you set it up and how you manage your Wi-Fi.”

The first thing Hutnik advised we immediately do is check our router settings.

“You get it out of the box — don’t leave yourself with the default factory settings because guess what? Those are public, right?” she warned. “It’s really easy for hackers to get into. You’re able to change those factory settings, including your password, and so setting up a really strong password and not having the default is super important.”

Next, we want to ensure we’re using encrypted settings.

“Usually somewhere in [your settings], there’s [an option to choose] “WPA,” or Wireless Protected Access,” she said. “You can just enable that, and that’s essentially like, you’re not leaving your front door open, right? You wouldn’t do that in real life.”

Hutnik recommended that checking our settings doesn’t stop at our routers.

“Anytime you’re buying technology, go to settings,” she said. “Usually there’s a privacy option and a security option ... spend 60 seconds just exploring what those options are. Companies are getting so much better — we’ve got a whole lot of new [privacy] laws — so they are offering new options. [These protective settings] may not be default, but you can certainly turn them on.”

Hutnik had loads of other potent privacy tips, including this one that takes only a second.

“[I am] paranoid as a privacy lawyer,” Hutnik told us. “I like to keep [my webcam] covered if I’m not intentionally using it. There is potential of malware where your device can be taken over [and hackers could use your camera to see into your home].”

She covers her cam with a Post-it note or a sticker when it’s not in use, and if she’s done working on her laptop, she always closes it.

“These are just things to think about — again, you’re mitigating risk. It doesn’t mean that you are going to get hacked, but I would rather somebody not see into my room if I can avoid it.”

We also discussed how to make your passwords the strongest they can be, which setting on her phone she almost always turns off, and much more.>

<Leave it to our resident goon to assert that Lee is un-American, particularly since she just competed in the USA women's chess championship again. Lee, who finished fourth, broke Carissa Yip's eight game tournament winning streak in 2024.

My compliments to the existence of the Chessgames biography page. Perhaps an overzealous editor will take time from his life's calling of harassing CG members to provide some actual information on Lee. Two original sentences is asking a lot from that corner, but it seems doable even for an elderly yank if he uses octogenarian Joe Biden for inspiration.

One might mention Washington, a state with a fine chess history going back to 1862, American Civil War days. However, we don't want any false or misleading information posted about Lee, do we perfidy?? That would be per usual, but unethical.>

<Yipping lap dogs aren't necessary, as the summer showed.>

By the bye, <coprophagicfred>, less than 2500 posts before I attain that number you love to loathe. Try being more economical with the truth if at all possible, <fredthestalker>, as you love the sin and hate the sinner in that fine, upstanding 'Christian' way.

<Sonebody [sic] has made 100s - literally 100s - of misguided posts this month alone. I warned everybody that trash posting would be back in a big way, full throttle, and it did not take long to rear its ugly head.

<offramp> the persons who "discipline" kibitzers don't want that information known, because it would show their extreme bias and wildly misplaced "discipline" is constantly directed toward the same few members, while the smarmy savages who harass members day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and decade after decade -- contributing to a great decline in membership and non-participation in game pages run amuck -- are given a free pass to attack non-stop.>

<Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have been neck-and-neck in the polls, prompting questions over what would happen if the Electoral College is tied.

The Constitution has a solution.

To win the presidency, a candidate needs to earn the majority of 270 electoral votes.

Article II Section 1 Clause 3 of the Constitution states that if no candidate gets a majority, the election turns to the House of Representatives, who need to choose immediately, by ballot.

Each state gets one vote, no matter the size.

States with multiple House Representatives would have to conduct an internal poll among themselves. This poll would also include the newly elected members of Congress, according to the Congressional Research Service.

“What we’re really saying here is if the Electoral College was really in a tie, then the outcome of House races and Senate races would be absolutely critical to the outcome” of the presidential election, Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told NPR.

The House votes would be cast after these new members are sworn in on January 6.

Whichever candidate gets a majority — at least 26 out of 50 — of these House votes becomes president.

If the House doesn’t elect a president before Inauguration Day on January 20, then the vice-president elect would serve until the House decides the presidency.

In the case of a tie for the vice presidency, the Senate would decide. Each Senator casts one vote and the winner is determined by whomever earns 51 votes or more, the Constitution says.

Only once in US history has the president not been chosen by the Electoral College, since the current system came into play.

In 1824, a crowded field of candidates vied for the presidency. While Andrew Jackson earned the most electoral votes, he failed to secure a majority, so the election was given to the House.

The House elected John Quincy Adams as president. He won by a margin of one vote, according to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

With less than two weeks left until the presidential election, polls show Harris and Trump deadlocked.

National polling averages from FiveThirtyEight show Harris with a 1.7-point lead over Trump. The vice president has maintained a slight lead over Trump for almost the entire time she’s been in the race. But in a new Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday, Trump appears to be leading Harris by two points, with 47 per cent compared to her 45 per cent.

Election Day is Tuesday, November 5.>