When reality is seen as biased, objectivity alone won’t shield the press. By Philip Bump

When reality is seen as biased, objectivity alone won’t shield the press

The media has a trust problem that overlaps with its economic problems. But that trust problem is often a function of external actions, not internal ones.

by Philip Bump

October 30, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

“The press doesn’t occupy the same place in American society it once did,” a presidential candidate said during a campaign stop at Ohio State University. “And the reason is that many newspapers have failed to meet the demands of responsible reporting.”

He continued: “People used to say they knew it was so because they read it in the newspaper, but you don’t hear that said anymore.”

You would be forgiven for assuming that the candidate who offered those words was Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president. But it wasn’t. It was Alabama Gov. George Wallace, speaking 60 years ago as he attempted to wrench the 1964 nomination away from President Lyndon Johnson by exacerbating the widening gulf between Southern, pro-segregation Democrats like him and those in the North. (He failed.)

The point is not to compare Trump to Wallace or to overlay Wallace’s racist politics onto Trump. It is, instead, to point out that even 60 years ago, reactionary politicians promoted the idea that the media was irresponsible in its coverage to the detriment of their political views.

On Monday, Jeff Bezos, the owner of this particular newspaper, wrote an essay explaining why the paper’s editorial side wouldn’t endorse a candidate for president. He noted, correctly, that such an endorsement probably wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway. But he framed the decision as centered in the need to rebuild confidence in The Post as an institution. The essay was titled “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.”

“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” Bezos wrote of the media. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.”

“It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help,” he continued. “Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.” That includes presidential endorsements, which “create a perception of bias.”

Let’s set aside all of the other considerations raised by the essay and the controversy that obviously prompted it. Let’s simply drill down on these overlapping points: that the media is suffering from a lack of trust and that among the steps we can take to increase our credibility is to withhold such endorsements.

Bezos unquestionably knows more about the business side of The Post than I do, and I would never assume that I know as much or more about the industry than he does. But, as someone with a particular familiarity with the overlap of the media and politics, this defense of the decision not to endorse as a vehicle for increasing trust seems obviously and deeply flawed.

It's obviously true that trust in the media has declined over time. Polling from Gallup shows that while two-thirds of Americans said they had a great deal of trust or a fair amount of trust in the press in 1968, only 31 percent say that now.

But while this decline in confidence has occurred on both the left and the right, the drop has been steadier and sharper among Republicans. Most Democrats still express confidence in the mass media, though that is also down after a surge in 2017. There was an equal-and-opposite drop among Republicans the year prior.

You know why. Democrats embraced the mass media — which most people would probably understand as the traditional media — in 2017 because it seemed like a vehicle for holding the newly inaugurated president to account. There were a flurry of stories both about Trump’s actions as president and about the ongoing investigation into the election that awarded him that title. Parallels were drawn to the investigations that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 — a period in which confidence in the media sagged among Republicans and rose among Democrats. Even after the Trump-era bubble collapsed, trust in the media among Democrats landed about where it was a decade ago.

That coverage and those stories didn’t lead to Trump’s resignation or removal from office. That was in part because he had been so effective in stoking skepticism about the press as he sought the Republican nomination the year prior. Trump deployed the term “fake news” with abandon, something he admitted that he did to discredit the sort of coverage described above. “Fake news” entered the lexicon, with no cable-news channel deploying it more frequently than Fox News and no show using it more often than the one hosted by Trump’s friend Sean Hannity. Hannity averaged 3.2 million viewers each night of 2017.

The advent of candidate Trump presented Fox with both opportunity and risk. The opportunity was that, by aligning with the increasingly popular candidate, it could consolidate some of the fringe-right audience that had drifted to more-extreme sources of information, such as Breitbart and Infowars. The risk was that the channel’s audience might be more loyal to Trump than to Fox, which made the post-election period in 2020 particularly fraught.

It’s the fragmentation that is important here. There is a story to tell about the changes in the industry from Wallace’s speech in 1964 until, say, 2010, but it’s more important to consider the era of the internet and social media in particular. Fox News wasn’t the only outlet to see its base erode as the barriers to competing with larger outlets vanished — and as it became clear that the only reason to tell audiences the truth rather than what they wanted to hear was where outlets drew the line between self-respect and income.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post published a poll conducted in coordination with the Schar School that, among other things, evaluated where swing-state voters get their news and how much trust they granted the news media. Most Americans viewed the media with more distrust than trust — but the extent of distrust was much wider among those who identified Fox News or nontraditional news sources as primary venues for their information.

People like information sources that present the world the way they are predisposed to view it. This is why the mainstream media gained trust on the left in the Trump era; Democrats saw Trump as dangerous and controversial, and news coverage often validated those concerns. For many on the right, it’s Steve Bannon and Elon Musk and Sean Hannity who are presenting a vision of the world as they want to see it — including that the traditional media offers a misleading, left-wing view of the world, not an objective one.

Back to The Post’s owner. Bezos’s argument is not that this divide and the erosion of trust is a function of newspaper endorsements, just that withholding endorsements is a way in which trust might be rebuilt, for people to believe that what we’re saying is accurate.

But the reason people don’t believe our coverage of the investigation into Russian election interference was accurate or accept our debunkings of Trump’s false claims about election fraud isn’t because they erroneously conflate our editorial board’s decisions with our coverage. It’s because there is a large, powerful, immediate universe of voices heavily invested in telling Trump supporters that the way they see the world is correct: that Trump is a victim and that the media and the elites are out to get him.

I get emails constantly from people challenging The Post’s reporting, particularly on Trump, usually by claiming that I or we are ignoring some piece of information because of our bias. When I occasionally respond, say by pointing to a story showing that their premise is incorrect, the goal posts are invariably moved elsewhere. An inconsequential correction is presented to suggest that we are consistently wrong. Some other tidbit is lifted from the social-media-nonsense universe. These exchanges aren’t rooted in bad faith, really, but in the writer’s misplaced faith in the accuracy of the news outlets they choose to believe.

This is what Bezos rejected as a victim mentality, sure, blaming the outside world for our travails. I’ve also admitted before that I have no useful answer to rebuilding trust broadly, much less in bolstering The Post’s subscriber base specifically. Those stipulations aside, I also recognize that the issue isn’t that many Americans see The Post as biased when its opinions are presented. The issue is that many Americans, particularly on the right, see The Post as biased when it presents facts. The effort to promote that perception dates back long enough to include Wallace, but the internet and social media made it much easier for it to propagate.

We must be believed to be accurate, Bezos wrote, which is true. But this is a moment in which tens of millions of Americans won’t believe that anything is true unless one man says it is. It’s a moment in which belief takes primacy to the extent that the misplaced conviction that the 2020 election results were suspect lead a coterie of senators to argue that the election should be overturned. Belief often precedes fact in 2024 rather than following it.

To make his point about the importance of belief, Bezos points to voting machines, devices that need to both tally the vote and present results that people accept. A central problem in 2020, of course, was that false claims about the inaccuracy of voting machines spread widely, bolstered by a falsehood-riddled news universe hoping to appeal to Trump’s base of support. That belief persists. The machines were the victims, sure, but what else could they have done?

Incidentally, the tendency to expect news sources to comport with the audience’s expectations is also why the decision not to offer an endorsement in the presidential contest resulted in such robust criticism from subscribers. The decision was seen — very understandably — as being in conflict to our reporting about the threat Trump poses to American institutions. It was seen as being in obvious conflict with the motto that sits on every page of The Post’s website. Many people who expect The Post to serve as a bulwark against what Trump advocates — however unfair that expectation often is — see the endorsement decision as a subversion of why they gave The Post money. So they stopped.

Maybe over the long term the decision will make it easier for those who are currently skeptical of the paper to buy a subscription. But the tension isn’t between subscribing and not subscribing. It’s between subscribing to The Post and getting information from some cheap or free news source that tells people exactly what they want to hear. Including, at times, that traditional media outlets that attempt to present an objective view of the world are dangerous and disingenuous.

Again, I don’t have an answer. And, again, I don’t think anything I wrote above will be new to Jeff Bezos. But if you’re on the ground getting kicked in the head by a mugger, it’s fair to identify yourself as not being entirely at fault. It is also fair to think that deciding not to carry a wallet won’t solve all of your problems in the future.

The Dilemma at the Center of McDonald’s E. Coli Outbreak. By Yasmin Tayag

The Dilemma at the Center of McDonald’s E. Coli Outbreak

Prepared food is convenient, but it’s also susceptible to contamination.

By Yasmin Tayag

October 24, 2024

The promise of the American food supply is that you can eat anything and not get sick. You can usually assume that whatever you buy from a grocery store or fast-food joint won’t land you in a hospital.

But lately, foodborne-illness outbreaks seem to be distressingly regular. On Tuesday, the CDC reported 49 cases and one death linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders tainted with E. coli. In the past week, hundreds of waffle and pancake products were voluntarily recalled due to potential Listeria contamination. Listeria, in particular,  has been a problem of late: Earlier in October, more than 11 million pounds of ready-to-eat meat and poultry products were recalled. And an especially bad Listeria outbreak involving Boar’s Head deli-meat products has led to 59 hospitalizations across 10 states and 10 deaths.

Many of this year’s outbreaks have occurred in foods that are preprepared—those that can be eaten as-is, without further cooking. Foods such as Quarter Pounders and waffles, yes, but also cold cuts, prepackaged salads, and jarred salsa are popular because they are convenient. That convenience comes at a cost. A rule of thumb in food safety is that “the more a food is handled prior to consumption, the higher the chances it can be contaminated,” Lawrence Goodridge, the director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety, told me. Americans are left with a difficult choice: save time or risk getting sick.

Many bacteria that cause foodborne illness live among us. Listeria can be found in soil and water, and E. coli and Salmonella are normally found in human and animal digestive tracts. They become a problem when they get into food. Preprepared foods are particularly prone to contamination because they are usually processed in large, sometimes even multiple, facilities where microbes have lots of opportunities to spread. “Somebody, somewhere, or a company, has produced the food so that we don’t have to do it at home,” Goodridge said. A factory worker with mud on his shoe, or an employee who didn’t wash her hands after using the bathroom, can be all it takes to start an outbreak. Food-safety practices—such as regular cleaning, temperature control, and strict hygiene standards—are supposed to keep these factories pristine. But occasionally, they fail.

Refrigerated facilities keep most bacteria at bay—microbes grow more slowly at lower temperatures—but not Listeria, which thrives in cool conditions. Given enough time to grow, a Listeria colony forms a protective gel over itself, called a biofilm, which makes it especially difficult to get rid of. Meanwhile, E. coli typically gets into produce through water soiled with feces. Usually, contamination occurs at the farm level, but microbes can spread as fresh foods are processed into products such as precut fruit, bags of chopped lettuce, and even prewashed whole greens. When clean produce is washed together with a contaminated batch or sliced with the same equipment, bacteria can spread. Many foods are produced in a central location and then shipped cross-country, which is how a contamination event at a single farm can lead to illnesses nationwide.

This may be the reason for the ongoing Quarter Pounder debacle. According to McDonald’s, the E. coli outbreak may be linked to slivered onions, which were sourced from a single supplier that served certain McDonald’s locations in 10 states, as well as some Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut stores. Centralizing the slivering of onions no doubt increases efficiency at fast-food chains. But it also raises the risk of contamination.

In food safety, cooking is known as a “kill step,” because high heat kills most dangerous pathogens. Precut salads and fruit are usually eaten raw. Nobody cooks cold cuts, even though the CDC recommends heating them until they are steaming (who knew?). Even convenience products that are meant to be heated, such as frozen waffles and vegetables, aren’t always prepared properly at home. A toaster may not get a waffle hot enough—Listeria is killed at an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit—and thawed frozen vegetables may be eaten without being boiled first, Barbara Kowalcyk, a food-safety expert at George Washington University, told me.

To be clear, there’s no need for Listeria hysteria. “On the surface, it looks like there are many more outbreaks,” but there are no data to prove that yet, Goodridge said. Still, some recent outbreaks demonstrate that precautions are working as they should. Listeria was identified in a regular sweep of the waffle factory and products were voluntarily recalled; no cases of illness have been reported. Tools for detecting outbreaks are becoming more sophisticated, Darin Detwiler, a food-safety expert at Northeastern University, told me. A technique called whole-genome sequencing can identify instances in which people have been sickened by the same bacteria, pinpointing the source of an outbreak. Earlier this year, it was used to investigate a Listeria outbreak in Canada that killed three people and hospitalized 15.

No food is totally safe from contamination. Practically everything sold in stores or restaurants is handled in some way. Milk is pooled from any number of cows, then pasteurized and packaged. Hamburger patties are usually made with meat from many butchered cows that is then ground, seasoned, and formed. People get lulled into the idea that “the U.S. has the safest food supply in the world,” Kowalcyk said, “but that doesn’t mean that it’s safe.” People can reduce their risk of contracting a foodborne illness by buying whole foods and cooking from scratch when possible, Goodbridge said; it’s probably safer to clean and chop your own head of lettuce. Yet even that is not a guarantee. Foodborne illness also spreads in home kitchens, where cross-contamination of raw meat with other foods, unsafe storage, and food spoilage often occurs. The risks are lower for healthy people, who can usually get through foodborne illness without excessive discomfort. But for vulnerable groups—very young, very old, and pregnant people—foodborne illness can lead to hospitalization, and even death.

The recent spate of outbreaks highlights the dilemma plaguing the state of American eating. People are simply too busy and exhausted to cook from scratch. In the daily scramble to get dinner on the table, ready-to-eat food is a lifeline. But with every additional stage of preparation comes an extra helping of risk.

How bad could a second Trump presidency get. The Economist

A sting in the tail risks

How bad could a second Trump presidency get?

The damage to America’s economy, institutions and the world would be huge

Read time: 13 minutes

Oct 31st 2024|Washington, DC

On the Stump, Donald Trump makes lots of eye-widening pledges. He will deport illegal immigrants by their millions; he will launch missiles at Mexico’s drug cartels; he will use the army to crack down on the “far-left lunatics” who run the Democratic Party. Yet Mr Trump’s tenure as president, whatever its merits or failings, was not the cataclysm that many Democrats had predicted. The economy hummed along, until the pandemic struck. There were no big foreign-policy crises. And although Mr Trump tried to steal the presidential election of 2020, he failed.

So what would a second Trump term be like? Many voters will dismiss Mr Trump’s overheated rhetoric as just that. They may see the election as a finely balanced decision about which candidate would manage the economy better, or as a choice between divergent stances on such issues as abortion and immigration. But Mr Trump not only seems intent on following through on some of his wilder pronouncements if elected, but would also be in a better position to do so than last time. That suggests another way of looking at America’s choice: how badly wrong could things go?

Kamala Harris, the sitting vice-president, is running as the candidate of the status quo. Her unofficial slogan is “We are not going back.” Mr Trump, in contrast, implies that radical change is needed, and that he will provide it. In all likelihood, if he returns to the White House, he will have trouble implementing many of his most extreme ideas, just as in his first term. He may be stymied by Congress, the courts and the bureaucracy or distracted by events or dissuaded by aides or foiled by his own incompetence. But there is a chance—and not a negligible one—that he might succeed in doing some of the things he talks about, with disastrous consequences for America’s economy, its institutions and the world. Fears that he may permanently damage American democracy and the rule of law are not far-fetched.

Battle-hardened

After eight years of institutionalisation, Trumpism is much more organised than when it crashed into the Oval Office in 2017. Mr Trump’s agenda was slowed then by inexperienced acolytes who did not know enough about administrative law and the workings of the civil service to make things happen. What is more, Mr Trump, wanting to make his administration appear distinguished, appointed grandees to senior jobs even though they often disagreed with his ideas. The leaders of a second Trump administration, by contrast, would be loyal veterans. Many of them would arrive in office with plans already in mind. The architects of Project 2025—a 900-page policy agenda for the next Trump administration drawn up by the Heritage Foundation, a Trumpist think-tank—fell out with Mr Trump after Democrats began using it to attack him. But Mr Trump nonetheless embraces the underlying idea that he should return to office with pre-vetted personnel and detailed plans. The Supreme Court’s recent decision setting out extremely wide immunity for presidents also seems likely to embolden him.

Mr Trump’s economic plans are certainly bold—but not in a good way. The first iteration of Trumponomics was lucky enough to be implemented during a period of high growth and low inflation. Its next incarnation would not only be adopted in less benign circumstances, but would also itself be of a much more disruptive nature. His campaign is proposing a second, much bigger hike in tariffs, lavish tax cuts, a labour-supply shock in the form of mass deportations and attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve.

These are all terrible ideas. “Normally, if you’re cutting off migrant labour, you try to get goods from outside. And if you’re cutting off goods from outside, you try to get migrant labour. If you cut off both, you almost certainly get inflation, if not stagflation,” says Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think-tank. JPMorgan Chase, a bank, has estimated that a tariff hike half the size of the one Mr Trump is advocating would knock a third to half a percentage point off GDP growth in its first year and increase inflation by 1.5-2 percentage points.

Whether Mr Trump would be able to put all his plans into practice is doubtful. The president has the authority to raise tariffs on national-security grounds or as retaliation for unfair trade practices. Mr Trump’s pledge of an across-the-board tariff of 20% on all imports, and 60% on imports from China, does not really seem to fit under these headings. But while the courts debated this question, businesses would suffer ruinous disruption, presumably made worse by retaliatory tariffs imposed by other countries. Some advisers think Mr Trump would raise tariffs gradually, as a means to extract concessions from trading partners. That might only draw out the agony, however, and would not reduce the risks of a trade war.

An illustration of Trump preparing to grab the globe as a bowling ball, aiming to throw it at missiles arranged like bowling pins.

Illustration: Olivier Heiligers

The personal-tax cuts Mr Trump signed into law in 2017 are due to expire next year and he would have to negotiate with Congress to extend them. He wants to renew them all, as well as end taxation on tips, overtime and Social Security payments. If Mr Trump wins the presidency, our election model gives the Democrats a 34% chance of controlling the House of Representatives. They have different, less profligate plans. Moreover, were Mr Trump to steer America onto an even more irresponsible fiscal course than its current one, the bond markets might eventually rebel, prompting a reassessment.

Mass deportations of the magnitude that Mr Trump has proposed are also unlikely to happen. The federal government simply would not have the capacity to hunt down and deport millions of people unless Mr Trump were to enlist the armed forces or deputise state and local law enforcement. There would be public uproar, resistance from Democratic-led states and cities, and endless legal challenges. “I don’t think that there’s any world, even in Donald Trump’s fantasy, that you’re actually going to try to send…ICE agents door to door, to round up 12m residents of this country and deport them,” says Mike Johnston, the Democratic mayor of Denver. “There’s just no infrastructure capacity for that and Denver would never participate in it.” Shortages in industries that rely on immigrant labour such as agriculture, construction and slaughterhouses would also be inflationary.

Unreserved

If the Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy to counteract the inflationary pressures of higher tariffs, a shrinking workforce or lavish spending, Mr Trump would be minded to attack it. Already, some in his orbit are suggesting that a Trump administration undermine Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve whose time in that job (but not as a member of its board) expires in 2026, by appointing a “shadow” chair to make less hawkish recommendations about interest rates. Yet an attack on the Fed would be almost certain to horrify the markets. “The stockmarket is a very effective and instantaneous feedback mechanism for economic policy which provides a constraint on crazy tariffs, a constraint on crazy Fed stuff, but probably not much constraint on unsustainable fiscal policy,” says Jason Furman, a former Democratic policymaker who is now a professor of economics at Harvard University.

Even assuming Mr Trump would eventually relent and water down or abandon some of these policies, he could still cause huge damage in the process. Many optimistic scenarios rely on markets tanking, inflation jumping or growth slumping to curb his enthusiasm. Moreover, there is no amount of deportations, tariff increases or Fed-bashing that is good for the economy; the only question is how much damage Mr Trump would inflict. Were he really to stick to his guns, inflation, higher interest rates and recession beckon.

Foreign policy also presents alarming risks. Although Mr Trump’s advisers may try to sketch out clear doctrines in rough alignment with America First rhetoric, their boss thinks that foreign policy succeeds or fails owing to force of personality, not policies. His stochastic style is inconsistent and unpredictable. “If former president Trump is re-elected, we are going to pay an enormous chaos premium” as allies scramble to work out what his policies will be, says Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute, another think-tank. Whereas, during his first term, the world was relatively calm, Mr Trump would return this time as America grappled with wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine.

Mr Trump says his commanding presence would be enough to settle the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of his election—before he was even inaugurated. What this means, if anything, is hard to gauge. The leading candidates for top national-security jobs in a second Trump administration have a wide range of views on Ukraine. Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state and potential future defence secretary, argues for giving Ukraine a massive $600bn in weaponry to force Russia to the negotiating table. J.D. Vance, who would be vice-president, seems to think any dollar spent on Ukraine is a dollar wasted. Who Mr Trump ultimately listens to is maddeningly unpredictable—often his view is decided by the last person to speak to him.

No matter who is elected president, it seems increasingly likely that Ukraine will have to abandon or at least shelve its ambition to reclaim much of the territory Russia has stolen. Given Republicans’ hostility to the military aid for Ukraine proposed by Mr Biden’s administration, it seems unlikely that a Republican-led House of Representatives would approve another big dollop—and it is hard to imagine Mr Trump protesting very stridently. But an abrupt and haphazard American abandonment of Ukraine would embolden Vladimir Putin, Russia’s dictator, and increase the risk he poses to his neighbours.

There are many other nightmare scenarios. Might Mr Trump, in effect, void the collective-security guarantee at the heart of the NATO alliance by refusing to counter further Russian aggression? Would he decline to send American forces to help Taiwan in the event of a Chinese blockade or invasion? Would Israel be given a completely free hand to do as it wishes in the Middle East, including striking Iranian oil-production and nuclear-weapons facilities? All of these are possible. Mr Trump has a deep aversion to war, but also a strong urge to avoid looking weak.

Some vague but worrying trends can be guessed at. “You would assume that the US reaction function is more escalatory because their doctrine is peace through strength,” says Jon Lieber of the Eurasia Group, a geopolitical consultancy. Both Mr Trump and his party are disinclined to sign up to any meaningful international initiatives on climate change. But most important are the possibilities that cannot be ruled out: of a forced capitulation of Ukraine, of the collapse of NATO, of an expanding war in the Middle East and so on.

Perhaps most serious of all are the threats Mr Trump poses to American democracy and the rule of law. There is no doubt about his autocratic instincts. To stay in power after his election loss in 2020, Mr Trump tried to suborn electoral officials and fomented a mob, ultimately leading to the ransacking of the Capitol by his supporters on January 6th 2021. He has not recanted since. He still insists the election was stolen; he calls those convicted of crimes on January 6th “political prisoners” and has pledged to pardon them; he has mused about cancelling the licences of critical broadcasters; he calls his political opponents “the enemy within” that may need to be dealt with using military force. An astonishing number of those who work closely with Mr Trump come away appalled. John Kelly, a former chief of staff, became the latest in recent days to declare him a “fascist”.

The real question, instead, is whether America’s institutions would be able to constrain him. America’s courts and constitution would be the best check on Mr Trump’s autocratic whims. Mr Trump’s many lawsuits seeking to overturn the election result in 2020 got nowhere, after all. Mr Trump would not be able to get Congress to adopt constitutional changes, allowing him a third term, for instance. Nor would he have much sway over state governments led by Democrats. Although he has consolidated his control over the Republican Party, making it almost impossible that he would be impeached, there would still be some Republicans in Congress who would resist his worst instincts.

For these reasons, some political scientists think that American institutions will comfortably absorb the shock of a second Trump presidency. Of the 40 populist governments around the world between 1985 and 2020 identified by Kurt Weyland of the University of Texas, only seven devolved into authoritarianism. And those unfortunate countries had weak institutions and suffered precipitating crises. “I would not think that Trump would be able to do more damage in a second government than in the first,” says Mr Weyland. The Democrats may control the House of Representatives, ensuring divided government from the start. But even if Republicans began a second Trump term in control of both chambers of Congress, Democrats would be likely to do well in the midterm elections in 2026, constraining Mr Trump for the remainder of his presidency.

An illustration of a casino roulette machine with the Capitol dome at its center.

Illustration: Olivier Heiligers

Even if the risk of a catastrophic breakdown in American democracy is low, a second Trump term would still corrode democratic institutions. Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of Lawfare, a national-security publication, warns that Mr Trump would be a worse danger to the rule of law for three reasons: first, “the grown-ups will not be in the room”, unlike in his first term; second, “he does at least rhetorically seem very fixated on revenge” after enduring four separate criminal proceedings; and third, he will be emboldened by his triumph “partly legally and partly electorally over the forces that tried to restrain him”.

Mr Trump is all but certain to dismiss the federal charges against himself. He is also likely to pardon the January 6th rioters. He has promised to end the independence of the Department of Justice, a norm since the Watergate scandal. That would allow him to initiate investigations of his political enemies, which seem likelier than not. “There’s a whole set of second-order considerations that flow from this. Once you know those sorts of selective prosecutions are on the table, you will calibrate your behaviour very differently,” says Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College.

Intimidating

The notion that Mr Trump might use the institutions of state to cow potential critics was raised this week when Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, stopped it from publishing an endorsement of Ms Harris. Mr Bezos said he was trying to bolster the paper’s reputation for independence, not curry favour with Mr Trump, but roughly a tenth of the Post’s subscribers have reached the opposite conclusion and cancelled their subscriptions. There is also the risk that violent extremists, such as the Proud Boys militia, may feel emboldened to harry Mr Trump’s political opponents.

Mr Trump is also likely to try to put his stamp on the federal bureaucracy. He might invoke an authority known as Schedule F, which would allow him to dismiss many low-level civil servants. He has also talked about sacking America’s top generals, whom he considers too “woke”. There is a chance that he tries to hound Mr Powell into resigning or claims the (legally untested) authority to fire him. All this would politicise parts of the government that have been relatively free from such meddling until now.

These scenarios may sound mundane compared with a stolen election or the institution of a dictatorship, but they would have grave consequences. Selective, politically motivated law enforcement would not only be an injustice in itself, it would also be a threat to America’s economic might, frightening businesses and deterring investment. What is more, such abuses would be unlikely to stop when Mr Trump left office. Given the political polarisation of recent decades, once one of America’s parties has broken a norm, the other is likely to follow suit, if only to remain competitive. Confidence in the rule of law would be difficult to restore.

Many Americans find Democratic ranting about the risks of another Trump term hypocritical. They think that Democrats have weaponised the justice system against Mr Trump, not the other way round. They see Mr Biden’s tenure as a litany of foreign-policy failures far worse than anything that occurred on Mr Trump’s watch. The surge in inflation under Mr Biden is proof in their eyes that Mr Trump is a better economic manager. There is some merit to all these contentions—and a second Trump term might prove no more catastrophic than the first. But voting for Mr Trump on that assumption would be risky in the extreme to America and the world. ■

A second Trump term comes with unacceptable risks. The Economist

A second Trump term comes with unacceptable risks

Read time: 6 minutes

Our election endorsement.

If The Economist had a vote, we would cast it for Kamala Harris.

The Economist

Oct 31st 2024

NEXT WEEK tens of millions of Americans will vote for Donald Trump. Some will do so out of grievance, because they think Kamala Harris is a radical Marxist who will destroy their country. Some are fired up by national pride, because Mr Trump inspires in them the belief that, with him in the White House, America will stand tall. Yet some will coolly opt to vote Trump as a calculated risk.

This last group of voters, which includes many readers of The Economist, may not see Mr Trump as a person they would want to do business with, or any kind of role model for their children. But they probably think that when he was president he did more good than bad. They may also believe the case against him is wildly overblown. Central to this calculation is the idea that Mr Trump’s worst instincts would be constrained: by his staff, the bureaucracy, Congress and the courts.

This newspaper sees that argument as recklessly complacent. America may well breeze through four more years of Mr Trump, as it has the presidencies of other flawed men from both parties. The country may even thrive. But voters claiming to be hard-headed are overlooking the tail risk of a Trump presidency. By making Mr Trump leader of the free world, Americans would be gambling with the economy, the rule of law and international peace. We cannot quantify the chance that something will go badly wrong: nobody can. But we believe voters who minimise it are deluding themselves.

Some will dismiss this as alarmism. It is true that our worst fears about Mr Trump’s first term did not come to pass. At home, he cut taxes and deregulated the economy, which has grown faster than any of its rich-world counterparts. His administration deserves credit for funding vaccines for covid-19, even if he refused to urge Americans to get vaccinated. Abroad, he projected strength, shifting the consensus towards a confrontational posture on China. He helped broker the Abraham accords, which formalised relations between Israel and some of its neighbours—a peace that has so far survived a regional war. He prodded some of America’s allies to increase their defence spending. Even when Mr Trump behaved abominably by fomenting an attack on the Capitol to try to stop the transfer of power on January 6th 2021, America’s institutions held firm.

If The Economist failed to foresee so much in 2016, why heed our warning now? The answer is that today the risks are larger. And that is because Mr Trump’s policies are worse, the world is more perilous and many of the sober, responsible people who reined in his worst instincts during his first term have been replaced by true believers, toadies and chancers.

Make America grate again

The case against Mr Trump begins with his policies. In 2016 the Republican platform was still caught between the Mitt Romney party and the Trump party. Today’s version is more extreme. Mr Trump favours a 20% tariff on all imports and has talked of charging over 200% or even 500% on cars from Mexico. He proposes to deport millions of irregular immigrants, many with jobs and American children. He would extend tax cuts even though the budget deficit is at a level usually seen only during war or recession, suggesting a blithe indifference to sound fiscal management.

These policies would be inflationary, potentially setting up a conflict with the Federal Reserve. They would risk igniting a trade war that would ultimately impoverish America. The combination of inflation, out-of-control deficits and institutional decay would bring forward the day when foreigners worry about lending the US Treasury unlimited money.

America’s economy is the envy of the world, but that rests on it being an open market which embraces creative destruction, innovation and competition. Sometimes it seems as if Mr Trump wants to return to the 19th century, using tariffs and tax breaks to reward his friends and punish his enemies, as well as to finance the state and minimise trade deficits. Politics could yet wreck the foundations of America’s prosperity.

Another reason to fear a second Trump term is that the world has changed. In 2017-21 it was largely at peace. Mr Trump’s supporters chalk that up to his unpredictability and willingness to take strong and unconventional action, a combination that can indeed keep awkward countries in line. When the foreign-policy elite warned of dire consequences after the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, one of Iran’s main generals, Mr Trump was vindicated. But as the next president takes office, two wars will be endangering America’s security. In Ukraine Russia has the upper hand, putting Vladimir Putin in a position to threaten further aggression in Europe. In the Middle East a regional war creeping towards Iran could yet suck in the United States.

These conflagrations would test Mr Trump in a way that his first term did not. His glib promises to bring peace to Ukraine in a day, and his open-ended encouragement of Israel’s offensives, are not reassuring. Even worse is his contempt for alliances. Although these are America’s greatest geopolitical strength, Mr Trump sees them as scams that let weak countries scrounge off its military power. Bluster and threats may see Mr Trump through, but they could equally destroy NATO. China will be watching as it weighs up how aggressive to be against Taiwan. Asian allies may calculate they can no longer trust America’s nuclear guarantee.

The risks for domestic and foreign policy are amplified by the last big difference between Mr Trump’s first term and a possible second one: he would be less constrained. The president who mused about firing missiles at drug labs in Mexico was held back by the people and institutions around him. Since then the Republican Party has organised itself around fealty to Mr Trump. Friendly think-tanks have vetted lists of loyal people to serve in the next administration. The Supreme Court has weakened the checks on presidents by ruling that they cannot be prosecuted for official acts.

If external constraints are looser, much more will depend on Mr Trump’s character. Given his unrepentant contempt for the constitution after losing the election in 2020, it is hard to be optimistic. Half his former cabinet members have refused to endorse him. The most senior Republican senator describes him as a “despicable human being”. Both his former chief-of-staff and former head of the joint chiefs call him a fascist. If you were interviewing a job applicant, you would not brush off such character references.

Good presidents unite the country. Mr Trump’s political genius is for turning people against each other. After the death of George Floyd, he suggested the army shoot protesters in the leg. America’s prosperity depends on the idea that people are treated fairly, regardless of their politics; Mr Trump has threatened to turn the Justice Department on his political enemies.

Next to Mr Trump, Kamala Harris stands for stability. True, she is an underwhelming machine politician. She has struggled to tell voters what she wants to do with power. She seems indecisive and unsure. However, she has abandoned the Democrats’ most left-wing ideas and is campaigning near the centre, flanked by Liz Cheney and other Republican exiles.

She has ordinary shortcomings, none of them disqualifying. Some of her policies are worse than her opponent’s, for example her taste for regulation and for further taxing wealth-creation. Some are merely less bad, on trade and the deficit, say. But some, on climate and abortion, are unambiguously better. It is hard to imagine Ms Harris being a stellar president, though people can surprise you. But you cannot imagine her bringing about a catastrophe.

Presidents do not have to be saints and we hope that a second Trump presidency would avoid disaster. But Mr Trump poses an unacceptable risk to America and the world. If The Economist had a vote, we would cast it for Ms Harris. ■

The Democratic Theory of Winning With Less. by Ronald Brownstein

The Democratic Theory of Winning With Less

The Atlantic - Politics / by Ronald Brownstein / Oct 31, 2024 at 9:42 PM

For years, the dominant belief in both parties has been that Democrats need to run up a big lead in the national presidential popular vote to win an Electoral College majority. But in the dead-heat election of 2024, that may no longer be true. The distinctive dynamics of the 2024 campaign could allow Kamala Harris to eke out an Electoral College win even if Donald Trump runs better in the national popular vote this time than during his previous two campaigns.

The belief that Democrats need a big popular-vote win to prevail in the electoral vote hardened in the course of those two previous Trump campaigns. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump by a resounding 4.5 percentage points in the popular vote but still only squeezed past him by relatively small margins in the three Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that decided the race. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by two points in the national popular vote but narrowly lost those same three states, and with them the presidency.

That history has weighed heavily on Democrats as a procession of recent polls has shown Trump shrinking or even erasing Harris’s national lead. But the pattern of differences among white, Black, and Latino voters found in most of those national surveys show how Harris could still potentially capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed for victory—even if she wins the nationwide popular vote by much less than Biden did in 2020, and possibly by only about the same margin that Clinton got in 2016.

The principal reason is that these recent polls show Trump making most of his gains in national support by performing better among Black and, especially, Latino voters than he did in either of those previous elections. Even the most favorable surveys for Trump consistently find Harris polling very close to Biden’s level of support in 2020 among white voters, which had improved over Clinton’s performance with that group by several points. In other words, Harris will likely rely a bit more on white voters than her party’s past two nominees did.

That subtle shift is the crucial distinction from the earlier contests. It could allow Harris to scrape a win by sweeping the predominantly white, former “Blue Wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, even if Trump improves over his prior popular-vote results by gaining among Black and Latino voters (and Black and Latino men in particular).

[Read: Elon Musk wants you to think this election’s being stolen]

In each of his previous two races, Trump benefited because the decisive states leaned more Republican than the nation overall. In both 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin was the tipping-point state that provided the 270th Electoral College vote for the winner—first for Trump, then for Biden. In 2016, Trump ran about three percentage points better in Wisconsin than he did nationally; in 2020, he ran nearly four points better in Wisconsin than he did nationally, according to the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

The fact that Trump each time performed much better in the tipping-point state than he did in the national popular vote is central to the assumption that Democrats can’t win the Electoral College without a popular-vote majority. But as the Center for Politics research demonstrates, that hasn’t always been true.

The tipping-point states in the three presidential elections preceding 2016—Ohio in 2004 and Colorado in 2008 and 2012—each voted slightly more Democratic than the national popular vote. And in none of those elections was the disjunction between the tipping-point-state result and the national popular vote nearly as big as it was in 2016 or 2020. In fact, the gap between the national popular vote and the tipping-point state in Trump’s two races was considerably wider than in any election since 1948, the Center found.

Polling in the past few weeks, however, has indicated that this gap has shrunk to virtually nothing. Trump and Harris remain locked in a virtual tie both nationally and in the swing states. With polls that closely matched, none of the swing states appears entirely out of reach for either candidate.

Still, professionals on both sides with whom I’ve spoken in recent days see a clear hierarchy to the states. Both camps give Harris her best chance for overall victory by winning in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; Trump is considered stronger across the Sun Belt in North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada (ranked from most to least promising for him).

That separation reflects the race’s unexpected racial dynamics. If Trump’s polling gains among voters of color bear out in practice, that would benefit him the most in the Sun Belt battlegrounds. There, minority voters are such a large share of the electorate that even a small shift in their preferences—toward Trump—would greatly diminish Democrats’ chances.

Whatever happens in the Sun Belt, though, if Harris sweeps the Rust Belt big three, she would reach exactly the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win (so long as she held all of the other states that Biden carried by about three percentage points or more, which is very likely). All three of those major industrial states are much less diverse than the nation as a whole: In 2020, white people cast about four-fifths of the vote in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and roughly nine-tenths of it in Wisconsin, according to census figures.

“One of the potential outcomes here is that at the end of the day, Trump will have gained with Blacks and Latinos and it may not have decided the Electoral College, if we don’t need [the Sun Belt states] to win,” Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster with long experience in Wisconsin, told me.

Obviously, Harris has no guarantee that she could survive a smaller national popular-vote margin than Biden: The polls showing national gains for Trump could be capturing a uniform uptick in his support that would deliver slim victories across most—and possibly all—of the seven decisive states. Even the most optimistic Democrats see marginal wins in the battlegrounds as probably Harris’s best-case scenario. But the prospect that she could hold the former Blue Wall states even while slipping nationally challenges the conventional wisdom that Democrats must amass a significant lead in the national popular vote to secure enough states to win the electoral vote.

“The Blue Wall states are the likeliest tipping point for either candidate,” Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the Sabato’s Crystal Ball newsletter published by the Center on Politics, told me. “If the country moves two to three points to the right but those states only move a point or less, that’s where you start to get the tipping point looking pretty close to the popular vote.”

The Democratic strategist Mike Podhorzer, a former political director at the AFL-CIO, also believes that Harris could win the Electoral College with a smaller popular-vote advantage than most analysts have previously assumed. But he says the demographic characteristics of the swing states aren’t the primary cause of this possibility. Rather, the key factor is that those states are experiencing the campaign in an immersive way that other states are not thanks to huge advertising spends, organizing efforts, and candidate appearances.

That disparity, he says, increases the odds that the battleground states can move in a different direction from the many states less exposed to such campaigning. Both Podhorzer and Kondik note that the 2022 midterm elections supported the general thesis: Although broad dissatisfaction with Biden allowed Republicans to win the national popular vote in House elections, Democrats ran much better in statewide contests across the most heavily contested battlegrounds, especially in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

“It is really the difference between how well you are doing outside the battlegrounds and inside the battlegrounds,” Podhorzer told me. Inside the battlegrounds, he pointed out, voters have for years now been exposed at blast-force volume to each party’s arguments on all the major issues. “The cumulative effect of it is that they have an awareness of what is at stake, a different worldview, than people living outside those states,” he said.

The analogue to 2022 this year would be whether general disappointment in Biden’s economic record increases Trump’s popular-vote total in less-contested blue and red states alike, but Harris holds on to enough of the battlegrounds where voters are hearing the full dimensions of each side’s case against the other.

[Read: How the Trump resistance gave up]

The same national polls that show Trump gaining among voters of color this year do not show much, if any, improvement for him compared with his 2020 performance among white voters. The latest aggregation of high-quality national public polls published by Adam Carlson, a former Democratic pollster, found that Harris is almost entirely preserving Biden’s gains among white voters; that means Harris is also exceeding Clinton’s showing with them from 2016.

The comparison with Clinton is instructive. Among voters of color, Clinton ran better in 2016 than either Biden in 2020 or how Harris is polling now. But Clinton lagged about three to four points below both of them among white voters. If Harris wins the popular vote by only about the same margin as Clinton, but more of Harris’s lead relies on support from white voters, the vice president’s coalition would be better suited to win the Rust Belt battlegrounds. In that scenario, Harris would assemble what political scientists call a more electorally “efficient” coalition than Clinton’s.

Biden’s margins of victory in the former Blue Wall states were so slim that Harris can’t afford much erosion with voters of color even there. But two factors may mitigate that danger for her. One is that in the Rust Belt states, most voters of color are not Latino but Black, and Democrats feel more confident that they can minimize losses among the latter than among the former.

The other key factor is a subtle change in those states’ white populations. Calculations from the latest census data provided to me by William Frey, a demographer at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank, found that since 2020, white voters without a college degree—the demographic group in which Trump performs best—have declined as a share of eligible voters by about three percentage points in both Michigan and Wisconsin, and by about 1.5 points in Pennsylvania. In Michigan and Wisconsin, college-educated white voters, who now tilt mostly toward Harris, largely made up the difference; in Pennsylvania, the share of minority voters grew. In a typical election, these slight shifts in the electorate’s composition probably would not matter, but they could in a contest as close as this one.

“There is still room to grow in the suburbs [across the region], and two things are going to contribute to that growth: January 6 and the Dobbs decision,” Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic consultant, told me, referring to the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021 and the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. The racist slurs against Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally last weekend could also cost him with Pennsylvania’s substantial Puerto Rican population.

Sweeping Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with a smaller national-popular-vote lead than Biden’s is nonetheless a high-wire assignment for Harris. A significant concern for Democratic strategists is whether the party has plausibly declined since 2020 only among voters of color, without suffering material losses among white voters as well.

One strategist with access to a wide array of party polls, who asked for anonymity to discuss that private research, told me that although many Democrats are optimistic that surveys overestimate Trump’s strength among Black voters, a risk also exists that polls underestimate Trump’s strength with white voters (something that has happened before). That risk will rise if Trump turns out unexpectedly large numbers of the blue-collar white voters who compose the largest share of infrequent voters in the Rust Belt battlegrounds.

However, the Republican pollster Whit Ayres told me that he is seeing the same divergence between slipping non-white support and steady white backing for Harris in his surveys—and he sees good reasons for that pattern potentially persisting through Election Day. “The Hispanic and African American weakness [for Harris] is a function of a memory of the Trump economy being better for people who live paycheck to paycheck than the Biden-Harris economy,” Ayres said. “On the other hand, there are far more white voters who will be voting based on abortion and the future of democracy. There’s a certain rationale behind those numbers, because they are making decisions based on different issues.”

Democrats generally believe that they maintain a fragile edge in Michigan and Wisconsin, partly because many public polls show Harris slightly ahead, but even more because their party has built a better turnout operation than the GOP in those states. Pennsylvania looks like the toughest of the three for Harris and, in the eyes of many strategists in both parties, the state most likely to decide this breathtakingly close race.

“Looking statewide, I’ve always thought from the time she got in that Harris would do better in the suburbs and the cities than Biden, and Trump would do better in a lot of these redder counties, and the million-dollar question is what number is bigger and how much bigger,” Mikus, the Pittsburgh-based consultant, told me.

Biden carried the Keystone state by only 1.2 percentage points while winning the national popular vote by nearly 4.5 points. Whether Trump wins a second term to execute his dark vision of “retribution” against “the enemy from within” may be determined by whether Harris can hold Pennsylvania while winning the national popular vote by much less, if at all. It would be a fitting conclusion to this bitter campaign if the state that decides the future shape of American democracy is the same one where the nation’s Constitution was written 237 years ago.

Why Kamala Harris Is Targeting Deep-Red Counties. by David A. Graham

Why Kamala Harris Is Targeting Deep-Red Counties

The Atlantic - Politics by David A. Graham / Oct 30, 2024 at 8:49 PM

Gaston County, North Carolina, is not an obvious place to look for Democrats. Just a few miles east is Charlotte, one of the state’s Democratic strongholds, but suburban Gaston hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, when the South threw its weight behind Jimmy Carter. In recent years, the high-water mark is Barack Obama’s 37 percent vote share in his first election. In 2020, it was one of President Donald Trump’s last campaign stops as he worked to juice turnout. Gastonia, the county seat, has a Republican mayor, a majority-GOP city council, and a statue of the Ten Commandments outside city hall.

And yet, on a Friday morning this month, a few dozen supporters and volunteers were gathered outside a Democratic field office in Gastonia, dancing to Aretha Franklin and revved up to hear from Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell, two former officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. The setting wasn’t dazzling—like many campaign offices, it’s in a dingy old building available for a short-term lease—but it’s one of 29 field offices for Kamala Harris’s campaign across the state, and its existence is a sign of a new Democratic strategy: the idea that by pouring energy into red counties, they can turn out a previously untapped vein of Democratic voters, and win the Old North State for the first time in 16 years.

This requires a certain amount of optimism. Being a Democrat in Gaston County is “tough,” county party chair David Wilson Brown told me. He’d know: He ran two quixotic campaigns for U.S. House in the area. “We were thrilled when we found out that they wanted to base here,” he said of the national and state parties. “I’m thrilled that they’re paying attention here.”

North Carolina is sometimes discussed as a state split along urban (Democratic) and rural (Republican) lines, but that’s too crude a division. Places like Gaston represent a crucial third category. Mac McCorkle, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with the Harris campaign, has identified 28 counties that he calls “countrypolitan,” borrowing a term from 1970s country music. (I teach journalism as an adjunct at Duke.) Sometimes called exurban, these places are technically defined as metropolitan, but their heritage is rural. “People have memories and nostalgia. They still want to think they’re in a small town,” McCorkle told me. “That’s why they don’t live in Charlotte. They want the values to be that way.”

Picture of volunteers going door-to-door to canvas for the Gaston County Democratic Party in Gastonia, NC.

Volunteers making calls at the Gaston County Democratic Party headquarters, in Gastonia (Mike Belleme for The Atlantic)

In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won North Carolina’s 10 biggest counties decisively, while Trump won rural counties easily. But Trump’s victory in the state—by 1.34 percent, or fewer than 75,000 votes—was decided in the countrypolitan counties, where he captured 63 percent of the vote. Democrats have no hope of winning these counties, but they need to lose them by less to take the state overall. It’s here, not in rural areas, where North Carolina will be won and lost.

For years, Democrats in North Carolina and elsewhere have tried to win by running up the score in cities. That strategy helped deliver Georgia to Biden in 2020, but it has limits. Even when it works—and it has sputtered in Charlotte, as Politico’s Michael Kruse writes—it offers a single, narrow path to victory. It also all but relinquishes many more local races, helping Republicans win a supermajority in the state legislature, despite a Democratic governor. “The idea that we can keep squeezing more and more votes out of Raleigh and Charlotte—I wanted to squeeze the turnip as much as you can, but I’m just worried that that doesn’t get” enough votes, McCorkle told me.

So why now? Countrypolitan counties aren’t what they used to be. North Carolina’s population is becoming more racially diverse, and about half of the adult population was born out of state. Many of those newcomers have landed in places like Gaston, Cabarrus, and Union Counties, all countrypolitan counties outside Charlotte. Movement within the state is important too. As cities like Charlotte grow and sprawl outward, younger, more liberal people are moving with them.

(One telltale sign of young liberals’ arrival: luxury loft apartments in a refurbished Gastonia textile mill, the site of labor strife in 1929 that led to the deaths of a labor organizer and the local police chief. Perhaps the only thing the mill’s old and new denizens share is a likelihood of voting Democratic.)

Four years ago, I wrote about Union County and its county seat, Monroe, hometown of the late Senator Jesse Helms. The epicenter of change in Union County might be East Frank Superette, a hipster deli and bottle shop I visited at the time. More recently, the restaurant has been embroiled in a legal fight stemming from drag shows it hosted. Speaking on the way to an Obama rally for Harris last week, Carley Englander, one of East Frank’s owners, attributed that to cultural backlash.

“We created a place that people were able to come and just see that it’s not just white, cis humans living in this town,” Englander told me. “It was a party at the store when Harris stepped up to run. When Biden won, when Trump got indicted, when all these things happened, all of a sudden people gather at the store and they kind of party, because they’re in a safe place where they can celebrate something that they’re happy about.”

Back in 2020, the process of change was already apparent, and walking through downtown Monroe this month, I saw signs that it had accelerated. I passed a cat café, an upscale head shop, and a hip coffee shop—exposed brick, subway tile, Kendrick Lamar–themed artwork—that had all opened in the past year and a half. But nearly as soon as I passed the Monroe city limits, the landscape changed to small farms, many with Trump yard signs.

Not everyone who is moving to these counties is liberal, though. North Carolina has also attracted people from northern states drawn by economic opportunities, better weather, lower taxes, and, yes, a more conservative lifestyle. They don’t want to live in rural areas, but they’re also not interested in living in deep-blue cities, so they land in countrypolitan counties. They fit in with existing residents who are neither wealthy country-club Republicans nor, for the most part, evangelicals, but who are conservatives.

Even so, some of these more conservative voters—generally white, college-educated, and better off—could swing Democrat, or at least that’s what the Democrats hope. In every election since Trump’s victory in 2016, Democrats have made gains among traditionally Republican residents of suburbs—sometimes offsetting the GOP’s advances among working-class voters. Now the Harris campaign is making a push for them too or, failing that, hoping they stay home and don’t vote for Trump.

“There are a wide range of voters in North Carolina who maybe aren’t dyed-in-the-wool liberals but do not want—and in many cases reject—the kind of extreme politics Donald Trump represents,” Dan Kanninen, Harris’s battleground-state director, told me.

The Republican primary fueled Democratic hopes of winning these voters. Although Trump won the nomination, Nikki Haley won a substantial portion of the vote in presidential primaries, even after dropping out of the race. In North Carolina, she won nearly a quarter of the GOP primary vote, including 25.2 percent in Union County, 24.1 percent in Cabarrus County, and 21.1 percent in Gaston County. If only a small portion of North Carolina Haley voters defect to Harris, it could swing the race.

Michael Tucker, who lives in Gastonia, is at the top of that list. A former member of the county GOP board in Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County, he moved farther out seeking affordable housing. His politics have moved too. He’d supported Trump in the past but backed Haley in the 2024 primary. Now he’s a leader of Republicans for Harris.

“Seeing his treatment of Nikki Haley, the treatment of those of us who voted for Nikki Haley, it really just sends a resounding You are not welcome in the Republican Party,” he told me. “There’s a lot of Republican women who are appalled by the felonies, by the adultery, by the misogyny, by his lack of compassion towards women and women’s issues,” he said, adding that “soccer dads” were edging away from Trump for the same reasons.

Some polls suggest a wider pattern of what Tucker has seen up close. A national survey released earlier this month by the Democratic firm Blueprint found that only 45 percent of Haley voters were committed to backing Trump, while 36 percent backed Harris.

Potential voters are not the same as actual voters, though, which is why Andy Beshear was in town to encourage canvassers to knock on doors. Brown, the Gaston County Democratic Party chair, told me he hoped Democrats might be able to hit 41 or 42 percent of the vote there this year, which would be the highest level since Jimmy Carter in 1980. If Harris can do that, she’ll probably be inaugurated on January 20, but it won’t be easy. A few days after I visited, a Harris sign outside the field office was ripped down—for the second time. Gaston County is still a tough place to be a Democrat.

Muslim American Support for Trump Is an Act of Self-Sabotage by Hussein Ibish

Muslim American Support for Trump Is an Act of Self-Sabotage

The Atlantic - Politics by Hussein Ibish / Oct 30, 2024 at 8:49 PM

Over the weekend, a group of Arab American and Muslim American leaders in Michigan appeared onstage at a Donald Trump rally and urged their communities to vote for him. The outreach might be working: A recent poll showed Trump with a narrow lead among Arab American voters.

This is shocking, but hardly surprising. It’s shocking because Trump’s stated policies—on Palestine, on political freedom, and on the very presence of Muslims in America—are antithetical to so much of what most of these voters believe in. It’s unsurprising because we Arab and Muslim Americans have a long tradition of merciless political self-sabotage.

In 2000, angered by the sanctions against and bombing of Iraq, the use of “secret evidence” in deportation proceedings against Arab and Muslim immigrants, and especially the carnage of the Second Intifada, many liberal Arab Americans—myself included—decided not to vote for Al Gore and turned instead to Ralph Nader, himself a prominent Arab American. If the point was to advance Arab political interests, our protest was a pathetic failure. The election of George W. Bush led directly to the catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq, a strategic disaster that continues to resonate in the Middle East, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians.

This time around, the primary grievance is the Biden administration’s support of—or, at least, inability to end—Israel’s invasion of Gaza and, now, its widening wars in Lebanon and Iran. Once again, the impulse is to express our anger and “punish” the politicians responsible by withholding a vote for them. In an election with only two viable candidates, however, there is no difference between not supporting Kamala Harris and actively supporting Trump. And a quick review of the most important issues on which there’s a consensus among Arab and Muslim Americans demonstrates that a second Trump term would be dramatically worse than a Harris presidency.

Start with Trump’s signature issue, immigration. Nothing in Harris’s agenda would restrict immigration from Arab or Muslim countries. Trump offers the precise opposite. One of his first acts as president was to institute a “Muslim ban,” flatly prohibiting the entry of nationals from a list of seven majority-Muslim countries. President Joe Biden rescinded that executive order; Trump has vowed to reinstate and possibly expand it.

Moreover, Trump’s likely attack on Temporary Protected Status, especially for Haitian immigrants, is ominous for a number of Arab and Muslim communities whose members currently qualify, including Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis, Syrians, and Sudanese. With a stroke of Trump’s Sharpie, all of them could find themselves stripped of this protection—and included in his promised “bloody” mass deportations. Efforts to extend Temporary Protected Status to Lebanese nationals, entirely plausible under a Harris administration, would be dead in the water under Trump. Defending his decision to endorse Trump, an imam in Michigan declared that the former president “promises peace.” He plainly does not. The Washington Post has reported that, according to six sources, Trump recently told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “do what you have to do” militarily in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. The notion that Trump would prioritize the interests of Arab civilians is simply absurd. This is a man who has repeatedly used the word Palestinian as an epithet against his (in many cases Jewish) Democratic political opponents.

Trump already has a long, instructive, and highly discouraging record on these issues. As president, he moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and issued a statement recognizing Israel’s sovereignty in the contested holy city. He recognized Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, in direct contravention of the United Nations charter’s rule against the acquisition of territory by war. And he slammed shut the Overton window on Palestinian independence and a two-state solution, which had been a matter of bipartisan consensus since the end of the Cold War. His “Peace to Prosperity” plan, released in January 2020, invited Israel to annex 30 percent more of the West Bank. Such a move would leave the remaining Palestinian territory surrounded entirely by Israel, and therefore incapable of meaningful sovereignty. The primary effect of this crude document was to create a permission structure for Republicans to support wide-scale Israeli annexation of the West Bank and dispense with supporting Palestinian independence.

Harris, by contrast, has been categorical in her support of a real two-state solution that would mean the end of the occupation that began in 1967. The vice president has clearly stated that Palestinians and Israelis need to reach a peace agreement that affords them “equal measures of prosperity and freedom.” Trump has never spoken of Palestinians and Israelis enjoying equal measures of anything.

Trump’s anti-Palestinian bias extends to the home front. Arab and Muslim Americans have been emigrating to the United States in large numbers since the late 19th century in search of a better life characterized by liberty and democracy. And yet Trump’s whole campaign, and his entire agenda, amounts to an assault on those ideals. He has consistently singled out pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses as part of a “radical revolution” that he has pledged to eliminate. According to The Washington Post, he told a group of Jewish donors in May that he is determined to deport pro-Palestinian students and “set that movement back 25 or 30 years.”

Our communities are overwhelmingly aghast at the U.S. government’s ongoing support for Israel’s military campaigns. I share the sentiment. But channeling that anger into support for Trump would be an exercise in the most rarefied gullibility and naivete. Far from promising peace, Trump threatens war on “the enemy from within.” Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, particularly those with pro-Palestinian sentiments, are likely to be high on the list of targets. We need to learn from the lessons of our own history. When we try to punish the politicians who have disappointed us without taking a serious inventory of the likely consequences, we usually just end up hurting ourselves.