Elections

As former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his surrogates make their closing arguments in battleground states stressed by economic hardship amid the pandemic, they often focus on one number: $750.That’s the amount President Trump paid in federal income taxes in 2016 and again in 2017, a recent New York Times investigation found. And as Mr. Biden accuses Mr. Trump of not doing enough to help working families, he and his allies have held up the president’s income tax bill as a potent symbol of the inequities they seek to remedy in the American tax system.“Why should a firefighter, an educator, a nurse, a cop, pay at a higher tax rate, which you do, than a major multibillion-dollar corporation?” Mr. Biden asked in Iowa on Friday. “Why should you pay more taxes than Donald Trump, who paid $750?”Mr. Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, weighed in during her debate in early October: “When I first heard about it, I literally said, you mean $750,000?” Biden supporters like Senator Bernie Sanders have also raised the issue, while Priorities USA Action, the largest Democratic super PAC, has run Facebook ads in English and Spanish highlighting the figure.Few, however, have dug into the topic with as much relish as former President Barack Obama, who has been stumping for his former vice president in recent days. “Listen, my first job was at a Baskin-Robbins when I was 15 years old,” Mr. Obama said during a speech in Philadelphia. “I think I might have paid more taxes that year.”He returned to the theme in Orlando, Fla., this past week: “First year in the White House, only paid $750 in taxes, in federal income taxes. $750! Can you imagine that? I mean, teachers pay more than that. Social workers pay more than that in taxes. Soldiers, folks in uniform, pay more in taxes than that.”The Times’s investigation — based on tax information that Mr. Trump has fought to keep hidden in defiance of presidential tradition — found that he had paid virtually no federal income taxes for most of the last two decades, largely because he lost far more money than he made. In addition, he is facing a decade-long audit of a $72.9 million tax refund; an adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.Since the investigation was published in late September, Mr. Trump has claimed that the $750 he paid in 2016 and again in 2017 was actually a filing fee, though there is no fee to file federal income taxes. He has also said he prepaid millions of dollars in federal income taxes, but any prepayments would be estimated taxes factored into his final bill.Mr. Trump reiterated his argument in a tweet on Saturday morning: “I paid many millions of dollars in Taxes to the Federal Government, most of which was even paid early, or PREPAID. MANY $MILLIONS. The Failing @nytimes never likes reporting that!”In a statement on Friday evening, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, Courtney Parella, said, “Joe Biden is attacking the president on inaccurate claims from illegally leaked documents, but we’d expect nothing less from a failed career politician with no real policy accomplishments and a platform being dictated to him by the far-left radicals of his party.”Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he will release his taxes after the I.R.S. audit is complete, though there is nothing preventing him from releasing them now.In the last days of the campaign, the candidates are scrapping for the few remaining undecided voters at a time when the economy is still digging itself out of the hole caused by the pandemic.Mr. Biden has assailed Mr. Trump for policies that have largely benefited the wealthy. In the 2017 Republican tax package, one of Mr. Trump’s signature achievements, the top fifth of earners received more than 60 percent of the total tax savings, according to the Tax Policy Center. Mr. Biden is proposing to refocus on middle-class relief and increase taxes on corporations and those with incomes above $400,000.“Why should you pay more taxes than Donald Trump pays?” Mr. Biden asked in Florida on Thursday. “And that’s a fact. $750? Remember what he said when that was raised a while ago? How he said: ‘Because I’m smart. I know how to game the system.’ He games the system at your expense.”He continued along the same lines the next day in Iowa: “They ain’t going to be gaming the system anymore in a Biden administration,” he said. “They’re going to start paying. And we’re going to deliver tax relief for working families, the middle class.”During their first debate in September, Mr. Trump said that he had paid “millions of dollars” in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, even though his tax returns show he had not.At the same time, he also justified why his bills were so small compared with those of average Americans. “It was the tax laws,” he said. “I don’t want to pay tax.”“Before I came here, I was a private developer,” he said, adding, “Like every other private person, unless they’re stupid, they go through the laws, and that’s what it is.”Indeed, over the years, Mr. Trump has taken advantage of tax breaks that disproportionately benefit the real estate industry.Mr. Trump has also accused Mr. Biden of failing to advance his agenda during his nearly half-century as a public servant. But during the Obama presidency, Republicans repeatedly thwarted attempts to tilt the tax system away from higher earners. In 2010, Mr. Obama had wanted to end Bush-era tax cuts for couples with incomes of more than $250,000, but Republicans balked, and he gave in to their demands as part of a compromise.The next year, another plan by Mr. Obama to increase taxes on the wealthy was derided as “class warfare” by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee. And the year after that, Senate Republicans blocked Mr. Obama’s proposal that the superrich pay at least 30 percent, a plan that Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, dismissed as a “political gimmick.” Republicans have gone on to drop their rhetoric about fiscal discipline as the national debt has soared under Mr. Trump.“Listen, the only people truly better off than they were four years ago are the billionaires who got Trump’s tax cuts,” Mr. Obama said in Orlando. He and other surrogates have also highlighted a Times report about more than $188,000 in taxes that Mr. Trump paid from 2013 to 2015 out of a previously undisclosed Chinese bank account maintained by the Trump Organization.“Can you imagine if I had had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for re-election?” Mr. Obama asked in Philadelphia. “You think Fox News might have been a little concerned about that? They would’ve called me Beijing Barry!” More

.g-slide-fade { transition: opacity 1000ms ease-in-out; -webkit-transition: opacity 1000ms ease-in-out; } .g-slide-flip, .g-slide-slide { transition: transform 1000ms ease-out; -webkit-transition: transform 1000ms ease-out; } A few nights ago, Shana Gadarian, a political scientist at Syracuse University, was ordering a takeout dinner when the DoorDash app suggested she use the time waiting for her order to “make […] More

Four years ago, I didn’t have a plan. Donald Trump was the surprise winner of the 2016 presidential election, and I wasn’t quite sure what to say to the people who were on the verge of losing their minds.In the wee hours of Nov. 9, 2016 — as futures trading suggested that the U.S. stock market was going to fall an awful lot when it opened — I sought to encourage the discouraged. Continue to bet on capitalism, I advised. You can still count on it to deliver the same sort of long-term returns to investors that it had for decades.Then, within hours of the opening bell in the United States, there was a reversal. Shares ended up rising that Wednesday. That calm-down column that I wrote in the middle of the night needed some revising.So this time, I’m writing things down ahead of election night. And I’ve had daytime conversations with financial planners who had, in previous careers, worked in government jobs under both Republicans and Democrats. They offered a few helpful pointers.First, a maxim of sorts about our collective state of anxiety — whether you’re pulling for four more years or a new occupant in the Oval Office. “Emotions are really good at raising questions and really bad at answering them,” said Zach Teutsch, a financial planner in Washington, D.C. It’s true in life, and it’s certainly true with financial decisions. Try not to make any big ones anytime soon.Second, it’s easy to overestimate how much change is possible in the first year of any presidential term, especially for things that can hit you squarely in the wallet, like taxes, retirement rules or health care. Mr. Teutsch learned all about that during his time at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he worked from 2013 to 2017.As Mr. Teutsch tells it, many people working in government spend their careers focused on a single problem within a specific policy area that they would love to fix. They make plans and have memos in their back pockets and are ready when the legislative, executive or judicial clouds part.“Mostly, what you do is think and wait for those brief moments when you can move the thing to fix the problem that you’ve been obsessed with,” he said. It tried his patience enough that he found another line of work.But here’s the problem for those policy lifers and for those of us who pay the taxes that keep them employed: Only a tiny fraction of them finally get to do their thing during any presidential administration, and it isn’t possible to predict who will get their shot or how successful they will be. It would be foolish to, say, fundamentally alter your retirement savings strategy in anticipation of a change to some or another tax rule.But what if Joe Biden wins and the Democrats regain a majority in the Senate? Don’t assume anything, warned René Bruer, who worked for Jeb Bush when he was governor of Florida and Republicans controlled both houses of the State Legislature.“Governor Bush told us not to bet on any legislation passing or failing based on Republican politics,” said Mr. Bruer, now a financial planner in Colorado Springs. “He said it will very much surprise you.”While it feels like a long time ago now, we should not forget the John McCain thumbs-down moment, which sank the legislation that would have gutted Obamacare in 2017. That was with one party in control of both chambers and the presidency, a reminder that even two years of control over Congress and the White House may not be enough time to fulfill a long list of legislative wishes. Now imagine chastened Republicans reframing their pitches to voters and taking back the House in 2022, again dividing the government.Mr. Bruer is a Marine Corps veteran who spent part of his childhood in Africa seeing people burn banks on his way to school. He actually takes some comfort in what to others feels like a heightened level of American governmental chaos.Election 2020 More

Facebook is not the entire internet. But it does reflect and account for some of the greater web’s chaos. With just days to go, hyperpartisan pages on the platform are churning out propaganda to millions of followers.In recent weeks, malicious actors both foreign and domestic have attempted to use inauthentic networks to push narratives to sow confusion and division. Others, including President Trump and his campaign, have used the platform to spread false information about voting while some partisans try to undermine the public’s faith in the U.S. election system. Then there are the conspiracy theorists and the long-running battle Facebook continues to fight against pandemic-related misinformation and disinformation.Which is to say that all eyes are on Facebook. The security of the platform from outside interference as well as domestic manipulation is a crucial factor in assuring a fair and free election. At the head of that effort is Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy. I spoke with him on Friday afternoon.This is a condensed and edited version of our conversation for clarity.What’s your specific role with the platform as it relates to the upcoming election?My work is to find and deal with two kinds of threats: cybersecurity, which is hacking, phishing and exploiting Facebook’s technical assets. The other is influence operations, which is both foreign (Russia, Iran, China) and domestic actors manipulating public debate with disinformation or in other ways.So you’re not involved in content moderation? Your team doesn’t take down specific posts because they violate a rule?We tend to treat public debate problems online as one thing. But they’re very different. You can break into three parts: actors, behaviors and content.We are on the actor and behavior team. That’s intentional because in influence operations content isn’t always a good signal for what’s happening. We’ve seen Russian actors intentionally use content posted by innocent Americans. We see other people post and share content from Russian campaigns. It doesn’t mean they’re actually connected. In fact, most times they’re not. But that is the point. These foreign operations want to look more powerful than they are.There’s been a lot of debate on this topic. Namely, that the reach and potency of foreign interference is overstated or at least over-covered in the press and that the biggest problems are actually organic and domestic.One thing Facebook started doing after I joined is we began publicly announcing coordinated inauthentic behavior (a somewhat vague term that means using fake accounts to artificially boost information designed to mislead) takedowns. We’ve found more than 100 of these in the last three years and we announce them and publicly share info and give this to third-party researchers so they can give their own independent assessment of what’s happening. As a result, these operations are getting caught earlier and reaching fewer people and having less impact. That’s also because government organizations, civil society groups and journalists are all helping to identify this.What that means is that their tactics are shifting. Foreign adversaries are doing things like luring real journalists to create divisive content.Are these malicious actors trying to use fear to get us to manipulate ourselves?Influence operations are essentially weaponized uncertainty. They’re trying to get us all to be afraid. Russian actors want us to think there’s a Russian under every rock. Foreign actors want us to think they have completely compromised our systems, and there isn’t evidence for that. In a situation like this, having the facts becomes extremely useful. Being able to see the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of these campaigns is useful. It’s a tool we can use to help protect ourselves. We know they’re planning to play on our fears. They’re trying to trick us into doing this to ourselves, and we don’t have to take the bait.It seems we as a nation are our own worst enemy in this respect.It’s like you wake up in the morning on Election Day and the whole process is this black box. It feels like jumping off a cliff and you land at the bottom when the votes are counted and you don’t really see the things that happened along the way. But really there’s a staircase you can take. There’s a bunch of steps. Voting starts, then officials begin counting ballots. There are controls and systems in place, and at the end you’ve made it to the bottom of the staircase. We need to do our part to show people the staircase and what happens in each moment to say, “There’s a plan to all this.” A threat actor wants to exploit the uncertainty in the election process to make us feel like the system is broken. But that’s harder to do if you can see the system.How do we protect ourselves and our democracy?One of the most effective countermeasures in all of this is an informed public. So we have to do the best — all of us, not just Facebook — to amplify authentic information. One of biggest differences between 2016 and 2020 is that you have teams in government, in tech, in civil society that understand the risks and challenges and are working together. We didn’t have this four years ago.What keeps you up at night?A year ago we predicted some trends we thought we might see. A number of them have come to pass and we’re ahead of a few things. We’ve seen threat actors target smaller communities trying to hide from us. We predicted that bad actors would move from fake accounts to trying to target influencers. They’ve tried to do it but haven’t reached all that many people because we saw it coming.When we think of things to be worried about the first is that our elections system is very complex. And there are so many opportunities to pick at that complexity. The other big piece is the very tense civic debate around the outcome as votes are counted. You can imagine malicious actors will try to accelerate that debate and that we’re certainly focused on that. Like efforts to claim without any basis that a spike in voting in a swing district or state is evidence of fraud and trying to use that to inspire or incite conflict.What you want to do is call it out right now ahead of time so that if they do it, people will say, “Hey, look at that claim. We were just hearing that claim might be made to hack our perception.” It’s part of why there is a large effort concentrated around debunking and prebunking.If an uninformed or rash or gullible public is working against its own interest, that seems potentially outside the scope of you and your team.You have defenders and attackers. Defenders win when they control the terrain of debate. You won’t get bad actors to stop. But if you change the terrain, you make life harder and harder for them over time. Our platform is a piece — an important piece — of the public terrain. It’s our job to keep this debate as authentic as possible by putting more information and context out there. We can force pages that are pushing information to disclose who is behind them, and we do. We have an independent third-party fact-checking network. When we fact-check we put a label up [to say this is disputed information] and what we’ve seen is that 95 percent of people don’t click through the label. That’s a powerful tool as well.The truth is this: Existing societal divisions are always going to be targeted by bad actors. What we’re doing is ensuring that this debate will be as authentic as possible. And that we can get as much context to people as possible so U.S. citizens can decide U.S. elections.Authenticity seems like a fundamental problem. Because some of that authenticity — let’s use some of the president’s comments as an example — could become a security threat.I think it is easy to want to resolve this moment to one problem. And I think it’s a real trap. I think there are many things happening at once. Facebook is an important piece of this but it’s not the whole puzzle. It’s worth noting when you think about the content side — part of this is why whenever anyone makes a claim about trustworthiness of ballots we can put a clear statement about historical trust and mail in ballots and how we expect them to be trustworthy in this election, too. We are living through a historic election with so many complex pieces to monitor. The piece that I and my team can help with is that we can make sure we secure this debate.What will your evening look like on November 3?We have an elections operation center that’s been running for some time now that brings together the 40 teams inside Facebook that work to protect the election that builds into partnerships with law enforcement, Homeland Security, to state and local elections officials and to civil society groups and other platforms.You’re working with other platforms?My counterpart at Twitter says I call him more than his mother does. We’re spending lots of time and exchanging information to try and stay ahead of this.So is it safe to say you’ll see things on November 3 that you’ve likely never encountered before?You want to be ready for what you don’t expect. We do threat ideation where we put ourselves in shoes of the bad guys and ask what malicious tactics they might use in a specific situation and we wind the clock back to today and ask, “What can we do to put ourselves in a better place now?”Facebook has invested a lot in security around this election but these threats will persist well after the decision desks call it for Donald Trump or Joe Biden. What is Facebook doing to ensure election security measures continue, especially in other countries?Between 2016 and next week we’ll have worked to protect more than 200 elections across the world. It’s critical to focus on next week, but we also have to remember Myanmar has an election five days later.The way you keep focus is that to protect these elections you must protect the moments in between them. The question of public debate online doesn’t just come up every two years in the U.S. We’ll take the lessons from this election and bring parts of them to other elections. We’ve learned a lot. It’s been painful at times. But for my team the focus isn’t going anywhere. We’ll continue. At least after we get a little sleep.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email:[email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

La contienda presidencial en Florida se parece a la de 2016 al menos en un aspecto: posiblemente será muy cerrada. Pero quién votará por quién será muy distinto.El presidente Donald Trump puede seguir contando con el apoyo de los votantes rurales y los hombres blancos mientras que Joe Biden casi tiene asegurado un fuerte apoyo de las mujeres y los votantes negros en el estado.Es poco probable que Biden repita el sólido apoyo que logró Hillary Clinton entre los votantes latinos: busca compensarlo con algunos de los bloques de votantes blancos que apoyaron a Trump en 2016, en particular los electores suburbanos y los de más edad.Esta última semana antes del día de la elección se publicaron varios sondeos de buena calidad y todos ellos mostraban que Biden lidera por entre 3 y 6 puntos porcentuales entre los probables votantes. Las encuestas de Universidad Monmouth, Universidad Quinnipiac y NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College colocan a Biden en una fuerte posición para conseguir una coalición ganadora en Florida, un estado que ha votado por el triunfador en las últimas seis elecciones presidenciales.En cada sondeo, la diferencia se encontraba en el margen de error y habría que ser precavidos al recordar el fallo de las encuestas de 2016, que sobreestimaron el apoyo de Clinton por un par de puntos.Pero la victoria de Trump en Florida en 2016 dependía fuertemente de los votantes que se decidieron a último minuto y tanto en el sondeo de Monmouth como en el de Marist, la cantidad de votantes que dijeron todavía no saber por quién iban a votar no era mayor del 2 por ciento.No solo la mayoría de los votantes ya decidieron su voto en Florida sino que también ya lo emitieron: casi ocho millones de personas habían enviado boletas de voto anticipado hasta el viernes en la mañana, más del 80 por ciento del total de los que votaron en el estado en 2016.Tanto en la encuesta de Monmouth como en la de Quinnipiac, solo el 17 por ciento de los votantes probables dijeron que votarían el martes, el día de las elecciones. Una mayor participación deja menos espacio para que ciertos grupos acudan menos, como sucedió con los votantes demócratas en 2016, lo que desvió aún más las encuestas.Hasta ahora, han votado más demócratas que republicanos, pero solo por 200.000 votos.Esa ventaja se ve reforzada por el liderazgo de Biden en las encuestas entre los independientes, que han emitido aproximadamente uno de cada cinco votos hasta ahora. Los republicanos pueden contar con un aumento de la votación de último momento el día de las elecciones, cuando es casi seguro que superen en número a los demócratas que van a las urnas. Pero dada la cantidad de votos que se habrán emitido para entonces, y dado que menos de uno de cada cinco votantes les está diciendo a los encuestadores que planean votar ese día, puede ser un difícil ascenso cuesta arriba.MÁS ENCUESTAS Biden ha mermado la ventaja de Trump entre los habitantes de los suburbios y los votantes mayores, pero el apoyo que le dan los votantes latinos parece más débil que el que recibió Hillary Clinton en 2016. More

Federal laws and longstanding custom generally leave the US military out of the election process.
But Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated warnings about widespread voting irregularities and exhortations to his supporters to become an “army for Trump” as uncertified poll watchers have raised questions about a possible military role next week.
If any element of the military were to get involved, it would probably be the national guard under state control.
These citizen soldiers could help state or local law enforcement with any major election-related violence, especially in the event of a contested result.
But the guard’s more likely roles will be less visible – filling in as poll workers, out of uniform, and providing cybersecurity expertise in monitoring potential intrusions into election systems.
Unlike regular active-duty military, the national guard answers to its state’s governor, not the president.
Under limited circumstances, Trump could federalize them, but in that case, they would generally be barred from doing law enforcement.
A contested vote could stir the kind of wild speculation that forced America’s top general to assure lawmakers the military would have no role in settling any election dispute between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
A decisive result could allay such concerns by lowering the risk of a prolonged political crisis and the protests it could generate, say current and former officials as well as experts.
“The best thing for us [the military] would be a landslide one way or another,” a US defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters, voicing a sentiment shared by multiple officials.
A week before the election, a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll showed Biden leading Trump nationally by 10 percentage points, but the numbers are tighter in battleground states that will decide the election and gave Trump his surprise 2016 win.
The coronavirus pandemic has added an element of uncertainty this year, changing how and when Americans vote.
The president, who boasts about his broad support within military ranks, has declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he believes that results coming in on election day next Tuesday or, more likely with postal ballots still being counted, a day or days thereafter, are fraudulent.
He has even proposed mobilizing federal troops under the 200-year-old Insurrection Act to put down unrest, and his tendency to be provocative on Twitter adds an extra element of tension, which caused discomfort among some military top brass.
“Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send them in and we do it very easy,” Trump told Fox News in September.
For his part, Biden has suggested the military would ensure a peaceful transfer of power if Trump loses and refuses to leave office after the election.
US army general Mark Milley, selected last year by Trump as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has been adamant about the military staying out of the way if there is a contested ballot.
“If there is, it’ll be handled appropriately by the courts and by the US Congress,” he told National Public Radio this month.
“There’s no role for the US military in determining the outcome of a US election. Zero. There is no role there,” he added.
Peter Fever, a national security expert at Duke University, cautioned that America’s willingness to look to the military when there is a crisis could create a public expectation, however misguided, that it could also help resolve an electoral crisis.
“If things go poorly and it’s November 30 and we still have no idea who the president is … that’s when the pressure on the military will grow,” Fever said, imagining a scenario where street protests escalate as faith in the democratic process erodes.
Steve Abbot, a retired navy admiral who has endorsed Biden, said the danger that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act “undoubtedly concerns those who are in uniform and in the Pentagon”. More