Elections

Republican senator David Perdue has pulled out of the final debate with his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff, after the pair exchanged personal attacks during a televised debate on Wednesday.
In the debate moderated by WTOC-TV, Ossoff called the incumbent ‘a crook’, while Perdue accused his rival of profiting off ‘communist China’. The exchange later went viral after Ossoff shared the clip on social media
‘It’s voter suppression’: the Republican fight to limit ballot boxes
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Welcome to Poll Watch, our weekly look at polling data and survey research on the candidates, voters and issues shaping the 2020 election.The presidential race in Florida looks similar to 2016 in at least one regard: It’ll probably be close, maybe decided again by just a single percentage point. But under the surface, there will be major differences in terms of who’s voting for whom.President Trump can count on the continued support of rural voters and white men, while Joseph R. Biden Jr. is almost guaranteed to carry strong support from women and African-American voters across the state.Yet Mr. Biden is unlikely to hold on to Hillary Clinton’s strong showing with Latino voters. Instead, he’s looking to make up for it among some of the white voting blocs that Mr. Trump relied on in 2016, particularly suburbanites and older voters.A batch of high-quality Florida polls arrived this week — probably some of the last that we’ll see before the election — and they all showed Mr. Biden with an advantage of three to six percentage points among the state’s likely voters. Taken together, the surveys from Monmouth University, Quinnipiac University and NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College put Mr. Biden in a strong position to pull together a winning coalition in Florida, which has successfully predicted the victor in the past six presidential elections.In each poll, the difference was within the margin of error, and the polling miss of 2016 — when Florida surveys overestimated Mrs. Clinton’s support by a few points — should give us pause.But Mr. Trump’s victory in Florida that year relied heavily on late-deciding voters, and in both the Monmouth and Marist polls, no more than 2 percent of voters said they still didn’t know how they would vote. Turnout is also on track to be considerably higher this year, which leaves less room for certain groups to under-participate, as Democratic voters did in 2016, further throwing off polls.The consistency of the findings from this week’s polls suggests that Mr. Trump does have ground to make up. The Monmouth and Quinnipiac polls also showed that he will be fighting the clock: In both surveys, just 17 percent of likely voters said they would vote on Election Day, with the rest planning to cast ballots early in person or by mail.The early returnsTurnout has been running high across the state, with more than seven million ballots already cast as of Thursday night. That’s nearly 80 percent of the total votes cast in 2016. After one more weekend of early voting and a few more days of mail ballots arriving, the vote tally could well surpass 2016’s total vote before Election Day even arrives.Slightly more Democrats have turned out than Republicans, though only by 200,000 votes. That advantage is padded by Mr. Biden’s polling lead among independents, who have cast about one in five ballots so far.If the crosstabs from Monmouth University’s latest poll of Florida were to perfectly predict how Democrats, Republicans and independents are voting, then Mr. Biden would be winning 52 percent of early votes and Mr. Trump 43 percent, according to the available voter data on ballots already cast by Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters. Those are almost certainly not the exact real numbers, but they’re somewhere in that range.Republicans can count on a last-minute voting surge come Election Day, when they are almost certain to outnumber Democrats going to the polls. But given how many votes will have been cast by then, and since less than one in five voters are telling pollsters they plan to vote that day, it may be a steep uphill climb.Older votersDaniel Smith, a professor of political science and pollster at the University of Florida, has been tracking voter turnout by demographic groups, and he said he had been struck by the participation from older voters. Florida is home to vast numbers of retirees, and its diverse population of seniors is a heavily sought-after chunk of the electorate.“The senior vote has been huge so far,” Dr. Smith said, citing numbers showing that two-thirds of voters 65 and older had already voted. That is occurring in traditionally Republican areas — like Sumter County, home to the Villages, which has already matched its 2016 vote total — and more heavily Democratic ones, such as Broward County.But the election may be won and lost in the middle, among the many older voters who cast ballots for Mr. Trump four years ago but have turned against him, and whose opposition has only been cemented by his response to the coronavirus pandemic.“Trump has doubled down on ‘Covid, Covid, Covid’ and the ‘hoax’ of this virus, and older voters aren’t buying it,” Dr. Smith said.Election 2020 More

“Terrible voting weather,” a character remarks at the beginning of José Saramago’s Seeing. In this powerful novel, torrential rains blanket the streets of an unnamed capital and no one turns up to vote until late in the afternoon. When the ballots are counted, however, poll workers discover that more than 70% are blank. The few valid ballots aren’t enough to give complete legitimacy to the winning party, which is the party on the right. (The other parties – the party on the left and the party in the middle – earn humiliatingly small percentages of the vote.) After a period of confusion, the government organizes a new plebiscite, in the hope that citizens will exercise their civic duty and cast proper ballots. But the number of blank ballots this time is 83%, thrusting the capital into bureaucratic disarray, media excitement and government conspiracy.
I read Seeing years ago, during a time in which I devoured Saramago’s books one after the next, barely pausing to catch my breath. I was reminded of it recently because of the current moment. The novel renders an extreme version of the situation we have in the United States, where turnout in the last presidential election was little more than half of all eligible voters. In effect, more Americans sat out the election than voted for the current president. “I don’t feel bad,” one non-voter from Wisconsin told the New York Times in November 2016. “They never do anything for us anyway.”
I recognize this feeling, because I grew up hearing it. Perhaps you heard it, too, from people in your life who speak of elections with indifference or even distrust. After all, elected leaders change, but images of police brutality, border violence and drone bombing continue to flicker on our screens, year in and year out. It’s hard for conditional citizens – people whose rights are often curtailed because of accidents of birth, like race, gender or class – to trust in a system that historically has not served our interests. To add insult to injury, conditional citizens may be courted during electoral campaigns, then ignored the rest of the time.
But the disproportionate focus on presidential politics in our media obscures the fact that elections are about local choices as well. We choose sheriffs, district attorneys, state and local judges, and school board members, which is to say the people who will make decisions that directly affect how criminal justice is handled in our communities, how schools are run in our districts, or what textbooks are chosen for our children. Not voting means forfeiting the right to have a voice in policy decisions that affect us every day. The government isn’t just in the White House; it’s here in our streets, and the ballot is the only means we have to evaluate the public servants whose salaries we all pay, whether we choose to vote or not.
Then there are state propositions on the ballot. In California, where I live, voters can decide by simple referendum whether people who have served their felony convictions should regain voting rights, whether rent control should be expanded by local governments, and whether cash bail should be replaced by risk assessment for suspects in pre-trial detention. In other words, we have in our hands the power to expand the franchise, protect people from eviction at a time of enormous financial strain, or reduce the number of people in pretrial detention. In each case, the lives of tens of thousands of people – our families, our friends, our neighbors – will be affected by the outcome, whatever it may be.
Of course, non-voters aren’t the only reason why turnout in US elections remains relatively low compared to other democracies. There are millions of would-be voters who face obstacles of all kinds, resulting in disenfranchisement. In some states, particularly in the south, many polling stations have been closed, which means lines of as long as 12 hours to cast a ballot. Hourly-wage and other non-exempt workers must forfeit a day’s pay in order to take part in the electoral process, at a time when the pandemic has already caused financial stress for so many people.
There are also rules that complicate the voting process unnecessarily. Some states have plenty of collection boxes for mail-in ballots, for example, while others limit them to one a county. Then there are logistical hurdles. Once I was text-banking with voters in Georgia to remind them to vote when I heard from an elderly lady who said she lived in a rural area and didn’t have a ride to the polls. Each year, voters like her are prevented from participating in the democratic process because voting is more onerous and more convoluted than it needs to be.
To me, the most important reason for voting has to do with our past and our future. In the earliest days of the republic, the franchise was a privilege accorded only to propertied white men. They could be governed by consent, but everyone else was to be governed by force. It took decades of struggle, some of it violent and bloody, for voting rights to be extended to people of other races and genders. Until the Civil Rights Act, the right to vote could not be taken for granted: Black people were enfranchised, disenfranchised and re-enfranchised depending on the state and the political moment. Given this history, voting is a moral obligation, a way to honor the sacrifices of the people who came before us.
It is also a way to honor those who will come after us. In the last few weeks, California has been consumed by the largest wildfires in the state’s history, which have severely damaged our air quality and threatened the health of our most vulnerable residents. Elsewhere in the US, there have been massive tornadoes in Iowa, record-shattering heatwaves in Florida and hurricanes in Texas. Casting a vote with the future in mind is a way to take responsibility for the kind of natural environment we will leave for our children.
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Earlier this month, I spent time researching the candidates and initiatives on the ballot, then filled it out and mailed it. Afterward, I took a walk through our neighborhood, where signs advocated for different candidates for school board, city council or president. One of my neighbors, fed up with the abundant advertising all along our tree-lined street, recently put up a sign that read “Giant Meteor 2020”. I let out a dry laugh. Our state is struggling with wildfires, a housing crisis, food insecurity and the effects of the coronavirus pandemic – a meteor can’t be much worse.
Yet the sign also signaled despair, which is a gift to apathy. Apathy isn’t going to resolve the crisis we face. Since March, the United States has endured a public health emergency and an economic downturn that have been called “unprecedented”. No one can say with certainty how much time it will take to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, how long schools and businesses will remain closed, and whether workers will recover from the loss of jobs and wages. Despair won’t fix this mess; only action will. What is certain is that the struggle is collective and our success will depend on solidarity.
Active solidarity takes many forms. We can join local mutual-aid organizations, make monthly contributions to food banks, volunteer in schools, or donate time, money or effort to various grassroots organizations. We can strike, protest or engage in acts of civil disobedience. Voting is another expression of solidarity, especially when our electoral choices are based not just on self-interest, but on collective wellbeing.
Those of us who have the right to vote have a huge responsibility toward those who don’t, including children and young adults, documented or undocumented immigrants, incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people, and citizens who can’t access the ballot for various reasons. Voting is our duty in the social contract, a way to steer the republic in a direction that accurately reflects the will of all its citizens.
In Seeing, the blank ballots create a dilemma for the government and the media because they deprive the former of legitimacy and the latter of a conventional story. But the fallout is swift. The minister of defense imposes a state of emergency, which is breathlessly but unquestioningly covered by journalists. The people seem unmoved, however. They go on about their daily business. “Since the citizens of this country were not in the healthy habit of demanding proper enforcement of the rights bestowed on them by the constitution,” Saramago writes, “it was only logical, even natural, that they failed even to notice that those rights had been suspended.” These words serve as a warning, which we should heed, now more than ever.
Laila Lalami is the author of The Other Americans and, most recently, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America
This essay is part of Pen America’s We Will Emerge project, a collection of essays speaking directly to voters around the country in advance of the US election. This project is made possible with the support of Pop Culture Collaborative’s Becoming America. You can read the full version of this essay here More

Dina Litovsky is a photographer whose work explores the idea of leisure, often focusing on subcultures and social gatherings. She previously photographed women’s big-wave surfing for the magazine.

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for the magazine and the Truman Capote fellow for creative writing and law at Yale Law School. Her book “Charged” won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for 2020 in the current-interest category and the Silver Gavel book award from the American Bar Association.

Additional design and development by Jacky Myint. More

En Georgia, un grupo de hackers rusos bloquearon el acceso a una base de datos que verifica las firmas de los votantes por medio de un cibersecuestro que también eliminó los datos de registro de los votantes en línea.En California e Indiana, los atacantes informáticos más formidables del Estado ruso, una unidad vinculada al Servicio Federal de Seguridad (FSB, por su sigla en inglés), penetraron en las redes locales y atacaron algunos sistemas electorales, aunque todavía no se sabe por qué.En Luisiana, se solicitó la participación de la Guardia Nacional para detener una serie de ciberataques dirigidos a pequeñas oficinas gubernamentales en los que se emplearon herramientas que solo se habían visto en ataques norcoreanos.Y el martes por la noche, alguien hackeó la campaña de Trump, pintarrajeando su sitio web con un mensaje amenazador en un inglés deficiente, que advertía sobre la llegada de más mensajes.Ninguno de estos ataques fue demasiado grave. Sin embargo, desde la sala de guerra del Cibercomando de Estados Unidos hasta la gente que monitorea la elección en Facebook, Twitter, Google y Microsoft, los expertos están vigilando de cerca la posibilidad de más “hackeos de percepción”: pequeños ataques que se pueden exagerar con facilidad para crear algo más grande y se podrían usar como evidencia para declarar que todo el proceso de votación está “amañado”, como el presidente estadounidense, Donald Trump, ha asegurado que sucedería.La frase aparece cada vez que Christopher Krebs, el funcionario del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional encargado de garantizar la seguridad de los sistemas de votación, habla sobre las vulnerabilidades más peligrosas durante estas elecciones. Su preocupación no es que suceda un gran ataque, sino una serie de embates pequeños, tal vez concentrados en los estados pendulares, cuyo efecto sería más psicológico que real.Los hackeos de percepción forman parte de una serie de problemas que mantienen ocupados a los funcionarios electorales y los expertos en ciberseguridad durante los últimos días de la votación, y sus preocupaciones no se terminarán el día de las elecciones.Una teoría que está ganando terreno dentro de las agencias de inteligencia de Estados Unidos es que los rusos, tras dejar claro que siguen dentro de sistemas estadounidenses cruciales a pesar del mejoramiento de las defensas y las nuevas operaciones ofensivas del Cibercomando, podrían no participar la próxima semana, hasta que se determine si la votación está reñida.Según esta teoría, la maniobra rusa sería avivar las llamas de las batallas electorales estado por estado, para generar o amplificar los reclamos de fraude que podrían socavar todavía más la confianza de Estados Unidos en la integridad del proceso electoral.Los iraníes seguirían realizando las acciones de su manual, las cuales, según funcionarios de inteligencia de Estados Unidos, son más parecidas a un vandalismo que a un hackeo en serio, pues están plagadas de amenazas mal escritas en inglés.Sin embargo, los expertos estadounidenses les han advertido a las autoridades locales que el 3 de noviembre los iraníes podrían paralizar o anular sitios web de las secretarías de Estado, con lo que afectarían la información de los resultados, y darían la impresión de estar infiltrados en la infraestructura de la votación aunque nunca lo hayan estado y los resultados de las elecciones no hayan estado en peligro.A continuación, presentamos algunas de las amenazas potenciales y qué se ha aprendido en un año de ciberbatallas.La protección de las máquinasLos funcionarios gubernamentales quieren asegurarles a los votantes que las máquinas para votar son difíciles de atacar de manera masiva: están desconectadas casi por completo de internet. Los estados y los condados usan sus propios sistemas, cuya amplitud y diversidad, se dice que casi anulan la posibilidad de que un solo ataque los tenga a todos como blanco.Sin embargo, esto no elimina el riesgo. En la Universidad de Míchigan, J. Alex Halderman ha convertido su laboratorio en una galería de vulnerabilidades de las máquinas para votar y ha encontrado la forma de crear “ataques que pueden pasar de máquina a máquina como un virus de computadora y cambiar silenciosamente los resultados de las elecciones”.Otras personas señalan que no es necesario hackear todos los estados para provocar un caos. En una elección cerrada, un atacante podría centrarse en ciudades como Atlanta, Filadelfia, Detroit o Milwaukee, y demorar la entrega de resultados de un estado en disputa.Según expertos en seguridad electoral, el otro punto débil del argumento que asegura que la diversidad es equivalente a la seguridad es la constelación de contratistas que respaldan las elecciones en varios estados y condados. “La aseveración de que la diversidad está protegiendo las elecciones es una falacia lógica”, opinó Harri Hursti, un consultor de seguridad electoral.A Hursti le preocupa un escenario en el cual los escáneres de boletas pudieran reprogramarse para leer un voto por Joe Biden como uno por Trump o viceversa.“Un solo punto de falla podría poner en riesgo la infraestructura electoral en varios condados y estados”, advirtió Hursti.Las copias de seguridadEl constante redoble de los ciberataques y la interferencia extranjera ha obligado a los estados a implementar salvoconductos. Los estados han trabajado para imprimir respaldos en papel de los datos de registro de los votantes, y han eliminado poco a poco las máquinas que no dejan copias de seguridad en papel.Krebs mencionó que la próxima semana más o menos el 92 por ciento de todos los votos emitidos estarán “asociados” con algún tipo de copia en papel, una cifra significativamente mayor a la de hace cuatro años.No obstante, con la ola de boletas de votación por correo que habrá este año, los votos en máquinas también disminuirán como un porcentaje de los votos totales. Por lo tanto, las vulnerabilidades en las que se está enfocando la Agencia de Seguridad de Infraestructura y Ciberseguridad del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional son ataques potenciales al registro y la verificación de votantes, y los sistemas de reporte de votos, junto con las redes de cómputo de las secretarías de Estado o los cortes de electricidad en los comicios.Esos ataques no cambiarían el conteo de los votos. Sin embargo, si se ejecutan con el ingenio suficiente, en especial en estados pendulares o distritos clave dentro de esos estados, podrían usarse para sembrar dudas sobre la legitimidad de la elección.Algunos funcionarios se preguntan si ese fue el motivo detrás de parte de la interferencia rusa en 2016, cuando algunos hackers “escanearon” las bases de registro de los 50 estados, irrumpieron en los sistemas de Arizona y Florida, y realizaron un despliegue inusualmente escandaloso para robar los datos de registro de los votantes en Illinois, pero a final de cuentas no hicieron nada con ellos.Muchas de esas vulnerabilidades han sido reparadas, gracias a una campaña agresiva del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional y los estados. No obstante, votar es un asunto local y las vulnerabilidades persisten, como lo descubrió el gobernador de Florida, Ron DeSantis, cuando fue a emitir su voto de manera anticipada en Tallahassee, la capital del estado. Alguien —la policía arrestó a un chico de 20 años de Naples, Florida— cambió la dirección del gobernador a West Palm Beach.Por eso hay tanta preocupación en torno al grupo ruso llamado Energetic Bear. A lo largo de los años, esa agrupación que se cree que es una unidad del FSB, ha penetrado las redes eléctricas de Estados Unidos, las plantas de tratamiento de aguas, una planta nuclear en Kansas y, hace poco, los sistemas web en el Aeropuerto Internacional de San Francisco.Y, a partir de septiembre, comenzó a penetrar los sistemas de los gobiernos estatales y locales. Según funcionarios de inteligencia, han traspasado con éxito tan solo dos servidores en California e Indiana.El cibersecuestroSegún funcionarios, la amenaza más inminente son los cibersecuestros, que podrían congelar parte del sistema de votación y demorar los resultados.Una señal del nivel de inquietud de las agencias de inteligencia y la industria privada sobre el cibersecuestro es que, durante el mes pasado, el Cibercomando y un grupo de empresas lideradas por Microsoft derribaron servidores en todo el mundo que estaban ligados a TrickBot, un conjunto de herramientas usadas en algunas de las operaciones más sofisticadas de cibersecuestros.“Todo esto es para interrumpir las operaciones de TrickBot en el momento de mayor actividad en las elecciones”, comentó Tom Burt, el ejecutivo de Microsoft a cargo de la operación.Sin embargo, ya hay evidencia de que los hackers detrás de TrickBot han comenzado a usar nuevas herramientas, según Mandiant, una firma de ciberseguridad. Durante el último mes y medio, algunos investigadores descubrieron que la misma gente ha ordenado un aluvión de nuevos cibersecuestros agresivos que han desconectado de la red a hospitales estadounidenses, justo cuando los casos de coronavirus se están disparando.“Podrían usar estas mismas herramientas en contra de lo que quisieran, ya sean las elecciones o los hospitales”, señaló Kimberly Goody, una analista de delitos de seguridad cibernética en Mandiant.La semana pasada, un cibersecuestro en Gainesville, Georgia, bloqueó los sistemas de verificación de firmas de votantes, lo que obligó a los funcionarios de casilla a hacer las cosas a la antigua: tomar las credenciales de registro manualmente y observar con cuidado las firmas.El ataque, que no parece haber estado dirigido contra las elecciones pero afectó los sistemas electorales como daño colateral, expuso los puntos débiles en Georgia, un estado clave en las elecciones.Los correos electrónicos internos mostraron que la oficina del secretario de Estado de Georgia deshabilitó la autenticación de dos factores en las últimas semanas, luego de que su software electoral colapsara por el diluvio de votantes tempranos. La autenticación de dos factores, que evita que los piratas informáticos ingresen a los sistemas con una contraseña robada, ha sido clave para la estrategia de seguridad electoral del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional y, en este caso, los correos electrónicos muestran que el secretario simplemente lo desactivó.La preparación para los resultadosTrump ha promovido la idea de que las boletas de votación por correo estarán plagadas de fraudes y ha buscado usar pequeñas fallas en la distribución y la devolución de boletas como evidencia de que no se puede confiar en el sistema si los resultados no le favorecen.Hace poco, la Agencia de Seguridad de Infraestructura y Ciberseguridad realizó un “anuncio de servicio a la comunidad” sobre el cuidado que se debe tener al momento de verificar la información, antes de creerla o difundirla. Pero, como admiten algunos funcionarios gubernamentales, el remedio para un presidente que repite rumores no comprobados y teorías de la conspiración es contradecirlos de manera directa.“Han operado con cuidado”, opinó el senador independiente de Maine, Angus King. “Pero la verdadera prueba está por llegar”.David E. Sanger es corresponsal para temas de seguridad estadounidenses. En su carrera de 36 años como reportero en The New York Times ha formado parte de tres equipos ganadores de premios Pulitzer, más recientemente en 2017 por Periodismo de Asuntos Internacionales. Su libro más reciente es The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age. @SangerNYT • FacebookNicole Perlroth es una reportera que cubre ciberseguridad y espionaje. Antes de unirse al Times en 2011, reportaba sobre Silicon Valley en la revista Forbes. @nicoleperlroth More

On the night of the US election, the Guardian is offering readers a unique way to get live, up-to-the minute election results delivered to their mobile phones.
What is it?
When results start coming in on Tuesday evening, we’ll send one mobile alert that will automatically update with the latest national vote count data over the course of the night. Without a tap, a search or the opening of an app, you can follow the vote tally and key developments live on your phone’s lock screen. (That’s the screen on your phone when you’re not actively using it.)
This alert will be one of the fastest ways to receive election results on Tuesday and beyond. Since we don’t know how long it will take to count the votes this year – whether it will be hours, days or weeks – the election alert will keep counting until the election is officially called, though you can minimize it any time.
How do I sign up?
The alert is available free worldwide on both iOS and Android devices to anyone who downloads the Guardian’s mobile app.
If you’re in the US: If you already have the Guardian app and you’re signed up to breaking news notifications in the US, you don’t need to do anything – you’ll automatically receive the live election alert. But if you need to download the app or you’re not already signed up to receive notifications, you can follow these steps:
Download the Guardian app from the iOS App Store on iPhones or the Google Play store on Android phones by searching for “The Guardian”
If you already have the Guardian app, make sure you’re on the most recent version
In the Guardian app, tap the yellow button at the bottom right, then go to Settings (the gear icon), then Notifications
Turn on “US Election 2020” notifications
If you’re outside the US:
Download the Guardian app from the iOS App Store on iPhones or the Google Play store on Android phones by searching for “The Guardian”
If you already have the Guardian app, make sure you’re on the most recent version
In the Guardian app, tap the yellow button at the bottom right, then go to Settings (the gear icon), then Notifications
Turn on “US Election 2020” notifications
What will I receive?
If you sign up, you’ll receive a single continuously updating notification that will sit on your phone’s lock screen as results come in on election night and beyond. The notification will show the most up-to-date numbers of electoral votes won and states called, as well as an indication of which swing states have been called, and the breakdown of the popular vote between the two top candidates.
You will also be able to expand the alert to see a data visualization showing the electoral vote and options to tap through to the Guardian liveblog or a page of full results.
What if I decide I want to stop getting alerts?
No problem. When the notification is expanded (pull down to expand notifications on Android, and either swipe sideways to tap “View” or hard-press to expand them on iOS) there will be buttons attached to the notification, including an option to Manage notifications (on iOS) or Stop (on Android). Tap that and you can unsubscribe.
Who created the alert?
The project was developed in 2016 by the Guardian’s Mobile Innovation Lab, which was funded by the John S and James L Knight Foundation to explore news delivery on small screens. The 2020 version was developed by the Guardian Apps team, part of our product and engineering division. It is fed by live by data from the Associated Press, which has played a key role in assessing US election results since 1848. More

Many of our best presidents have been underestimated. Truman was seen as the tool of a corrupt political machine. Eisenhower was supposedly a bumbling middlebrow. Grant was thought a taciturn simpleton. Even F.D.R. was once considered a lightweight feather duster.I’ve been reading Joe Biden’s speeches and I’m beginning to think even his supporters are underestimating him.He’s walking across treacherous cultural ground, confronting conflicts that are shredding the nation, and he’s mastering them with ease.Biden is campaigning in a country that has lost faith in itself. Sixty-six percent of Americans believe our nation is in decline, according to a study from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.He’s also running in the middle of a political and cultural civil war. Eighty-two percent of Biden voters believe that “Donald Trump would like to gradually transform our country into a dictatorship,” according to that I.A.S.C. study. Ninety percent of Trump voters believe that the Democrats want to gradually turn America into a socialist country. According to a survey conducted by Braver Angels, a group that sponsors bipartisan conversations, 70 percent of Americans believe that if the “wrong” candidate wins, “America will not recover.”Biden is campaigning in a land filled with fear, hatred and apocalyptic thinking. It would be so easy for him to reflect that fear and hate back to voters. That’s what Trump does.But Biden is not doing that. Never in my life have I seen a candidate so confidently avoid wedge issues. Biden is instead running on the conviction that, despite it all, Americans deeply love their country, and viscerally long for its unity. He’s running with the knowledge that when you ask America about the greatest threats to our future, “political polarization and divisiveness” comes out No. 1.It’s easy to say you’re for healing division. But here’s what Biden has actually done:He’s de-ideologized this election. He’s made the campaign mostly about dealing with Covid-19. That’s a practical problem, not an ideological one. Conservatives and moderates don’t have to renounce their whole philosophy to vote for him. They can just say they’re voting for the person who can take care of this.He’s separated politics from the culture war. Over the past generation, culture war issues have increasingly swallowed our politics. Trump has put this process into overdrive. He barely talks about policies. Instead, his every subject is really about why “our” identity group is better than “their” identity group.So now the positions people take — on issues ranging from climate change to immigration — are determined by whether they see themselves as part of the rural white Christian conservative army or part of the urban multicultural secular progressive army. Policies are no longer debated discretely; they are just battles in one big, existential fight over who we are.But Biden goes back to the New Deal, to an era of policymaking when there really wasn’t a polarized culture war. He sidesteps the Kulturkampf issues — which statues to take down — to simply talk about helping the middle class.Biden has scrambled the upscale/downscale dynamic. The most important fissure in our politics is education levels. The Democratic Party’s greatest long-term challenge is that it might become the party of the highly credentialed college-educated class and let some future Republican rally a multiracial working-class coalition. Even Trump is now making surprising gains among Latino and Black men.Biden has avoided all the little microaggressions that cultural elites use to show they are morally superior. Wokeness, for example, is partly about fighting oppression, but it’s also become a status symbol. It’s showing people that you are so intellectually evolved that you can use words like intersectionality, decolonizing and cultural appropriation. Political correctness is not just a means for the less privileged to set standards of behavior; it is also sometimes the way people with cultural power push others around.Unlike, say, Hillary Clinton, Biden has a worldview and a manner that is both educated class and working class and defuses the divide.Biden has avoided the stupid binaries about race. Donald Trump went to Mount Rushmore and made a speech essentially saying you can either believe in systemic racism or you can love America. Biden went to Gettysburg and argued that you can “honestly face systemic racism” and love America. He argued that you can believe in fighting racism and believe in law and order. His worldview is based on universal categories — the things we share — not identitarian ones — the ways we supposedly can’t understand each other across difference.He’s done a good job reaching out to white evangelicals. Right now, many of them think he’s a godless socialist who will usher in a reign of anti-religious terror. In his campaign he’s done a pretty good job reaching out to those voters. His campaign has run ads on Christian radio and reached out aggressively to evangelical leaders. If he can allay their cultural fears (by making it clear he will not shut down Christian charitable groups) and win them over with working-class economic policies, he can create a long-term governing majority.Seventy percent of Americans in that Braver Angels survey say America is facing permanent harm, but 70 percent also say the most important job after the election is to heal our enmity, to do the hard job of working with people whose views we find completely objectionable. This unity impulse is powerful in the populace, but it is deeply hidden.Joe Biden knew it was there.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

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.On Wednesday, my colleague David Leonhardt wrote about the battle Democrats and Republicans are waging over voting rights. “In almost every instance,” he noted, “Democrats are trying to make it easier for Americans to cast ballots, and Republicans are trying to make it harder.”But despite the political and epidemiological challenges arrayed against them, Americans are participating at record levels. With five days still to go before Election Day, the number of early votes cast by mail and in person, more than 80 million, has already exceeded half of the total votes cast in the 2016 election.That amount of turnout is “stunning,” according to Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist and voting expert. Does that mean the Republican strategy might be failing?A fight in a much longer warEven before the coronavirus, the United States had made it harder to vote than any other affluent democracy:The United States is one of only seven countries in the 37-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that don’t hold elections on a weekend or a holiday.While many countries put citizens on the voter rolls by default or promote voter registration, signing up to vote here is a cumbersome, opt-in process.Some Americans find out too late that they cannot cast a ballot because they lack photo ID or were erroneously purged from voter rolls, and millions more are made automatically ineligible because they were convicted of a crime.Shortages of equipment and poll workers often cause unreasonably long waits, especially for Black voters. In the 2016 election, voters in Black neighborhoods waited 29 percent longer on average than voters in white neighborhoods, according to one study.As the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has argued, being forced to wait eight hours in lines to cast a ballot, as some early voters have been in Georgia, amounts to a kind of poll tax: “For most workers, time spent in line is money in the form of lost wages and labor hours. For low-income workers in particular, long lines may prove so economically ruinous that they may not vote at all. Given the uneven distribution of long lines, this is the point.”None of these obstacles is novel, but many have become more prohibitive since the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, which was passed in 1965 to end the de facto disenfranchisement of African-Americans. The court ruled that one of the law’s key provisions was based on outdated data and therefore unconstitutional, effectively eliminating the requirement that states with a history of racially discriminatory voting laws gain federal approval before making minor changes to voting procedures, like moving a polling place, or major ones, like redrawing electoral districts.The consequences of that ruling have been stark: Hours after the decision came down, Texas enacted a strict photo ID law. Other states soon followed suit, and the seven years since have seen suspect poll closures, cutbacks to early voting, an uptick in illegal voter purges and other forms of voter suppression.The first episode of our four-part series, Stressed Election, focuses on voter suppression in Georgia, where a growing Black and Latino population is on the precipice of exercising its political voice, if they get the chance to vote.The pandemic factorWhen the coronavirus crisis hit, states took measures to facilitate safer elections, like expanding the use of absentee ballots and early in-person voting, which opened a new front of legal contestation. As of last week, lawyers have filed more than 400 lawsuits, across 44 states, over issues related to pandemic voting:In Wisconsin, Republican officials have fought to discount any mail-in ballots that arrive after 8 p.m. on Election Day, a move the Supreme Court upheld on Monday. In an opinion that mirrored President Trump’s rhetoric, Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that counting absentee ballots after Nov. 3 could sow “chaos” and “potentially flip the results” of the election. (In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan responded that “there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted.”)In Texas, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, cited largely baseless claims of voter fraud as a justification for imposing a limit of a single drop-off box for absentee ballots per county, including the state’s largest, Harris, which is home to 4.7 million people. On Tuesday, the Texas Supreme Court upheld the policy.In Pennsylvania and North Carolina, two key swing states, Republicans have challenged laws extending the period for accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day. But on Wednesday, the Supreme Court upheld the new deadlines.The effort to discredit and discourage mail-in voting is being spearheaded by President Trump, but as The New York Times Magazine documented in a five-month investigation, it is also the culmination of a decades-long disinformation campaign by the Republican Party and others to suppress votes, especially those cast by Black and Latino Americans.That is not to say voter suppression is just a red-state issue. New York, despite its progressive reputation, has had some of the most restrictive election laws in the nation, and New York City’s politically unaccountable Board of Elections is uniquely plagued by nepotism and dysfunction. During early voting this week, many city voters — including the mayor, Bill de Blasio — reported having to wait hours at the polls, in violation of state regulations. “The powers that be don’t care,” the director of a state government watchdog organization told The Times.Reading the turnout tea leavesThe high levels of early turnout now on display have raised questions about whether the Republican strategy to suppress the vote is backfiring. In Texas, for example, Governor Abbott’s emergency declaration limiting drop-off sites for absentee ballots may have galvanized voters in Democratic-leaning areas like Harris County, whose early vote count as of Wednesday was rapidly approaching the total number of ballots cast there in the 2016 election.“Efforts to suppress votes in Texas and across the South have very often been done in secret, in smoke-filled rooms, in ways the public can’t fully digest,” Chris Hollins, the county clerk of Harris County, told Mother Jones. “When it’s thrown in your face like it has been this election season, voters are responding by saying, ‘I’ll show you,’ and coming out in record numbers to have their voices heard.”What’s more, in states where party registration data is available, about 47 percent of all early voters have been Democrats, while just about 30 percent have been Republicans, suggesting that Democrats are banking an early advantage. That discrepancy may reflect in part the mistrust of mail-in voting Mr. Trump has generated in his base, which his campaign and its surrogates are now spending millions attempting to counteract.Yet the polarization of the use of mail-in ballots is also what gives some Democrats concern: Mail-in ballots have a higher rate of rejection than those cast in person, as Thomas B. Edsall writes for The Times. In Pennsylvania alone, more than 100,000 mailed ballots may be thrown out because of a court ruling on an envelope policy.Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and parts of Michigan — three important battleground states — also won’t start counting mailed ballots until Election Day. Because those votes could take days or weeks to process, the results reported there on Nov. 3 are more likely to show early leads for Mr. Trump, who might take it as an opportunity to declare premature victory.That would be a “doomsday scenario” for Democrats, and it’s certainly one that lawyers in both parties are preparing for. In the meantime, the most responsible option for voters and observers might be to take a step back from the prediction business. “It’s lazy to simply throw up one’s hands and say we don’t know what will happen, so feel free to call me lazy,” writes Philip Bump at The Washington Post. “We don’t.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at [email protected]. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.MORE ON THE ELECTION“Trump Isn’t the First Conservative to Try to Limit the Vote” [The New York Times]“How Long Will Vote Counting Take? Estimates and Deadlines in All 50 States” [The New York Times]“Facing Gap in Pennsylvania, Trump Camp Tries to Make Voting Harder” [The New York Times]“Biden Is Not Out of the Woods” [The New York Times]“The State That Could Decide How Far Republicans Will Go to Win” [The New York Times]WHAT YOU’RE SAYINGHere’s what readers had to say about the last edition: Three paths for reforming the Supreme Court.Viki from Colorado: “In my mind, one of the big problems is that we allow Supreme Court justices to be approved on a simple majority of the Senate. … If we required two-thirds, or even more, the nominated justice would need to be more moderate to appeal to both sides of the aisle.”John from North Carolina: “Article III states, in part, ‘Judges … shall hold their offices during good behaviour.’ Good behavior is not defined. It is common practice in most endeavors to subject subordinate employees to a periodic review of their job performance, often annually. Since the Senate approves the appointment of a judge, it seems appropriate for the Senate to periodically review the performance of judges to determine if they are exhibiting good behavior.”Darcy Harris, a professor in the thanatology program at King’s University College at Western University, from Canada: “One major change affecting life appointments is the increased longevity that is now a part of normal life in developed countries. Where a Supreme Court judge may have lived for 10-15 years max after being appointed to the Supreme Court prior to 1900, it is now an expected prospect that people live well into their 80s and 90s, which could mean life tenure for more than double the amount of time now than in the past when the Constitution was written.”Peter from Australia: “Appointing anybody to any position for life is incredibly stupid.” More