US Politics

As my colleague Charlie Warzel recently noted, the effect of this disinformation is not necessarily to deceive people, but rather to help this small subset of people stay anchored in their alternate reality.

Tim Walz says, “You don't get elected to bank political capital to get elected again. You get elected to burn that capital to improve lives.”

The Democratic coalition really is tetchy and hard to manage. I’ve watched a number of Arab-American writers who disapprove of Biden’s approach to Israel but agree that Trump’s would be worse spend the final month of the campaign driving up the salience of an issue that they know is bad for Harris and being relentlessly negative about her approach ... See more

Given the global trend, it’s really Republicans who should be hand-wringing and asking why it’s even close, and the answer is obviously that Trump is a scumbag.

The question of why all post-Covid electorates are grumpy and miserable is more interesting and hasn’t been the subject of as much work as it deserves.

Per polling out of Michigan State University, Trump voters in this cycle, at least in Michigan, are much more likely to say that the country is “changing too fast, undermining traditional values” than they were in 2016, when researchers first found a strong correlation between aversion to social change and a vote for Trump.

That dividing line is gro... See more

They argue that dynamic exists because these racialized accusations of fraud serve a function for these Americans: They allow them to preserve their sense of superiority over nonwhite Americans and continue to support democracy in theory, while still rejecting electoral outcomes that they don’t agree with. In this way, racialized talk of voter frau... See more

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, an... See more

We talk a lot about a crisis of public trust in America today. But when we do we’re usually talking about Red America or what we might call Disaffected America — people lack trust in the press, in elections, in scientific or expert authority and big institutions. But there’s this other crisis of trust in institutions and people, rapidly catching up... See more