Elections

In a year of serial crises, solace for many people has come from an unlikely source: the stock market.Despite periodic jitters and a horrendous downturn earlier in the year, the stock market has been a surprisingly sturdy refuge. Though there is heartbreak almost everywhere else you look, most of the time stocks rise anyway.Through Friday, the S&P 500, a benchmark for the shares of big American companies, was up almost 8 percent this year. And this stock market prosperity in a time of general desperation isn’t an outlier. With important exceptions, the stock market has generated rich returns for decades, regardless of the outcome of portentous events, including presidential elections.Since 1929 through 2019, the S&P 500 and its predecessor indexes generated annualized returns of 10.3 percent, according to data supplied by Dimensional Fund Advisors, an asset management firm.There were terrible stretches in world history during that long period, and some calamitous stock returns. The volatility of the stock market is a key reason for holding high-quality bonds: Bonds can buffer the gut-wrenching shifts in stocks.But it is hard to pin either the market’s losses or gains explicitly on the policies or management of presidential administrations, or on voter expectations.Presidents are powerful, but they don’t control the market. Was Barack Obama responsible for the fabulous 16 percent annualized market returns during his eight years in office? Was Donald Trump responsible for the 14.5 percent annualized returns for his presidency through January (according to Bloomberg data) — or for the 33 percent downturn in February and March, or for the subsequent bull market run? You can argue this any way you like. I think the most intelligent answer is: yes, to some extent, but certainly not entirely. With all the factors affecting the staggeringly complex markets and the overall economy, presidencies don’t matter as much as it may seem in campaign season. More

It is a phrase that has been constantly invoked by Democratic and Republican leaders. It has become the clearest symbol of the mood of the country, and what people feel is at stake in November. Everyone, it seems, is fighting for it.“This campaign isn’t just about winning votes. It’s about winning the heart and, yes, the soul of America,” Joseph R. Biden Jr. said in August at the Democratic National Convention, not long after the phrase “battle for the soul of America” appeared at the top of his campaign website, right next to his name.Picking up on this, a recent Trump campaign ad spliced videos of Democrats invoking “the soul” of America, followed by images of clashes between protesters and the police and the words “Save America’s Soul,” with a request to text “SOUL” to make a campaign contribution.That the election has become a referendum on the soul of the nation, suggests that in an increasingly secular country, voting has become a reflection of one’s individual morality — and that the outcome hinges in part on spiritual and philosophical questions that transcend politics: What, exactly, is the soul of the nation? What is the state of it? And what would it mean to save it?The answers go beyond a campaign slogan, beyond politics and November, to the identity and future of the American experiment itself, especially now, with a pandemic that has wearied the country’s spirit.“When I think of soul of the nation,” Joy Harjo, the United States poet laureate and a Muscogee (Creek) Nation member, said, “I think of the process of becoming, and what it is we want to become. That is where it gets tricky, and that is where I think we have reached a stalemate right now. What do people want to become?”Ms. Harjo said the country’s soul was “at a crucial point.”“It is like everything is broken at once,” she said. “We are at a point of great wounding, where everyone is standing and looking within themselves and each other.”In Carlsbad, Calif., Marlo Tucker, the state director for Concerned Women for America, has been meeting regularly to pray with a group of a dozen or so women about the future of the country. The group has been working with other conservative Christian women to register voters.“It really comes down to what do you stand for, and what do you not stand for,” she said.“I know this is a Christian nation, the founding fathers were influenced by the biblical values,” she said. “People are confused, they are influenced by this sensationalism, they are angry, they are frustrated. They are searching for hope again in government, they are searching for leaders who actually care for their problems.”Framing an entire campaign explicitly around a moral imperative — with language so rooted in Christianity — has been a standard part of the Republican playbook for decades. But it is a more unusual move for Democrats, who typically attract a more religious diverse coalition. More

For much of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s second and final term, it seemed a foregone conclusion that New York City had not seen the last of his family. His wife, Chirlane McCray, was openly toying with the idea of running for public office.Earlier this year, she narrowed her sights to one office: Brooklyn borough president.But that was before New York City was shaken by protests against discriminatory policing and battered by the coronavirus, and the resulting fallout — a rise in shootings and homicides, huge revenue shortfalls and shuttered schools and businesses — has vexed Mr. de Blasio, all but cementing his unpopularity with voters.Ms. McCray has also invited scrutiny through her leadership of ThriveNYC, a nearly $1 billion mental health initiative that has been criticized as wasteful, overly ambitious and lacking any tools to measure its success.With the viability of a political campaign suddenly in doubt, Ms. McCray said on Thursday that she would not be running for office next year and planned instead to focus on the city’s recovery during Mr. de Blasio’s final year as mayor.“I thought about running for Brooklyn borough president. I thought about it long and hard and decided in this urgent moment there’s so much work to be done, right now, right here where I am,” Ms. McCray told the NY1 anchor, Cheryl Wills. “And my priority really is to see this through — my priority is serving the people of New York.”To many, the announcement felt like the beginning of the end of the de Blasio era in New York.“We have a horrible economic downturn, the pandemic, and schools are in flux,” said Robert Cornegy Jr., a councilman from Brooklyn who is running for the borough’s presidency. “That’s not helpful to the case for electing the mayor’s wife.”Until recently, it seemed as if Ms. McCray was expanding her visibility in the administration.There was a $9 million effort in Brooklyn to help new mothers. Mr de Blasio named her to head a commission to create more diverse monuments. She was also a co-leader of a commission on racial justice that Mr. de Blasio created in the wake of the health and economic disparities further exposed by the pandemic.Recently, Ms. McCray launched a podcast about mental health with BRIC, a media and arts institution in Downtown Brooklyn.“I became more comfortable being out front in my role as first lady,” Ms. McCray said in an interview Friday about her activities and decision to explore a run for borough president.Ms. McCray said she is proud of the work that ThriveNYC has done, and she said she saw the role of borough president as a way of continuing that.“I spoke to a couple of dozen people about the fact that I was seriously considering running, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a lot of support,” she said. “Of course you can’t judge by what people say, you have to judge by what they do.”But the pandemic seemed to damage the mayor’s political capital. The mayor and Ms. McCray had been calling labor and ecumenical leaders recently about her candidacy, and the response was unenthusiastic, according to several people familiar with the conversations.“Her prospects of success were tied to the work that the mayor was doing,” said Antonio Reynoso, a councilman from Brooklyn who is also running for borough president. “In some ways, the election would have been a referendum on him.”The pandemic had recently eroded one of Mr. de Blasio’s longest and strongest alliances: his ties to the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, which he represented when he was a councilman.Some members of the community have criticized Mr. de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo as singling out their community for closing schools and businesses to help prevent an uptick in coronavirus infectionsDavid G. Greenfield, a former member of the City Council who is now chief executive of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, said he recently received a call from a candidate for Brooklyn borough president who wondered if Ms. McCray would control the Orthodox Jewish vote.“I said that may have been the case six months ago, but now the mayor’s relationship with the Orthodox community is at the lowest point it has been at since his time in public office,” Mr. Greenfield said. “I wouldn’t say it’s the end of his administration, but its the beginning of the end.”Bill Neidhardt, a spokesman for Mr. de Blasio, said the mayor’s “multiracial, working-class coalition in Brooklyn” is still intact.“Despite what some elite prognosticators have said, that base is still there and it still strongly backs the mayor,” Mr. Neidhardt said. “It would have backed the first lady as well.”Her withdrawal from the race may actually have some benefits for the last 14 months of the mayor’s term, said Rebecca Katz, a former adviser to Mr. de Blasio and Ms. McCray.“With the door closed on the possibility of Chirlane running for borough president, it may become more clear to the mayor that what he’s doing now is his legacy,” Ms. Katz said. “Maybe that will mean there’s some renewed energy there.” More

new video loaded: More

SAN FRANCISCO — It is the 11th hour before the presidential election. But Facebook and Twitter are still changing their minds.With just a few weeks to go before the Nov. 3 vote, the social media companies are continuing to shift their policies and, in some cases, are entirely reversing what they will and won’t allow on their sites. On Friday, Twitter underlined just how fluid its policies were when it began letting users share links to an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Hunter Biden that it had previously blocked from its service.The change was a 180-degree turn from Wednesday, when Twitter had banned the links to the article because the emails on which it was based may have been hacked and contained private information, both of which violated its policies. (Many questions remain about how the New York Post obtained the emails.)Late Thursday, under pressure from Republicans who said Twitter was censoring them, the company began backtracking by revising one of its policies. It completed its about-face on Friday by lifting the ban on the New York Post story altogether, as the article has spread widely across the internet.Twitter’s flip-flop followed a spate of changes from Facebook, which over the past few weeks has said it would ban Holocaust denial content, ban more QAnon conspiracy pages and groups, ban anti-vaccination ads and suspend political advertising for an unspecified length of time after the election. All of those things had previously been allowed — until they weren’t.The rapid-fire changes have made Twitter and Facebook the butt of jokes and invigorated efforts to regulate them. On Friday, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said he wanted to subpoena Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to testify over the “censorship” of the New York Post article since the social network had also reduced the visibility of the piece. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said that Twitter was “against us.” And President Trump shared a satirical article on Twitter that mocked the company’s policies.“Policies are a guide for action, but the platforms are not standing behind their policies,” said Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “They are merely reacting to public pressure and therefore will be susceptible to politician influence for some time to come.” More

In a recent Instagram video, Whoopi Goldberg fills out her New York State mail-in ballot, joining other celebrity early voters like Zoë Kravitz, Elle Fanning, Joe Jonas, Tracee Ellis Ross and Lily Collins, all of whom recently posted images of their own ballots or “I voted” stickers on social media.Ms. Goldberg’s completed ballot is blurred out in the video; were it not, she could be guilty of committing a misdemeanor.In New York, as in a number of other states, showing your ballot after “it is prepared for voting” or asking someone to show theirs is against the law.Each election cycle, voters in New York, Illinois, Florida and elsewhere are reminded that taking photos of their ballots is illegal. And each election cycle, people post ballot selfies on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook anyway.This year might see a higher streak of violations than usual, given the number of people expected to vote by absentee ballot from home, where taking out a phone and snapping a quick photo is much easier than in a booth at one’s polling place. More

When Joseph R. Biden Jr. dropped the Arabic phrase “inshallah” in the first presidential debate last month, Muslim Twitter lost it. Inshallah, which means “if god wills,” can be a double-edged sword, equal parts sincere and savage. I grew up with a Muslim Iranian mother, and having spent time in Iran, where Farsi speakers also use the term handily, I recognized Mr. Biden’s deployment as a mockery of his opponent, President Donald J. Trump.Responding to a question about his tax returns, which he has refused to make public, President Trump claimed that he’d paid millions of dollars to the government in 2016 and 2017. “And you’ll get to see it,” Mr. Trump said. “When?” Mr. Biden retorted. “Inshallah?” Translation: We’re not going to see it.It wasn’t the first time the Democratic presidential nominee used the saying in public. Earlier this year, at a campaign event in New Hampshire, Mr. Biden employed the term with the same level of irony when talking about Senator Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All platform. “It’s going to take at least four years to pass it. Inshallah,” Mr. Biden said, and then, in case his audience missed it, added: “You’re not going to pass it.” More

Joe Biden said at a town hall event on Thursday night that he would announce before election day whether he favors expanding the supreme court.Biden has repeatedly declined to lay out a stance on the issue amid an ongoing Republican sprint to install a third justice nominated by Donald Trump before the election, in what critics have called a naked power grab.The Senate judiciary committee appeared poised to approve and hand off the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the full Senate next week.Barrett’s installation on the court would make for the most dramatic ideological realignment on the court in decades. In part that’s because she would replace a liberal justice, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.But the conservative court coup would also be the result of a successful plot by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to hold open a supreme court seat for almost a year in 2016 so that Trump could fill it instead of Barack Obama.That fact, combined with similar maneuvering by McConnell at the district and appeals court levels, have led Biden backers to express outrage that the candidate’s unwillingness to stake out a position on so-called “court-packing” would create controversy.The court has already been packed, Biden supporters say, by Trump, McConnell and their Republican surrogates and outside accomplices.In a town hall in Philadelphia on Thursday night, Biden sought to hold the focus on the Republicans’ conduct, telling host George Stephanopoulos that “no matter what answer I gave you” on court packing, “if I say it that’s going to be the headline tomorrow.’”As Stephanopoulos insisted on knowing whether Biden would encourage Congress to pass legislation to expand the court – all of this in the hypothetical instance in which Democrats win the White House in November, hold the House of Representatives, flip the Senate and then make court-packing a legislative priority – Biden said people would know how he felt “before they vote”.Barrett’s likely confirmation would establish a solid 6-3 conservative majority on the court that could last decades. Some progressives have called on the next Democratic president and Congress to add seats to the court, which would change the norm of nine seats that has been in place since 1869. Other activists have called for term limits for judges to increase court turnover.But none of those measures would be effective in the long term so long as Republicans in the Senate, whenever in the majority, refuse to fill court vacancies with judges appointed by a Democratic president and then pump those vacancies full when a Republican president takes over. More