Elections

There are many ways for New York City to turn the page on Mayor Eric Adams.None of them need to include Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor now plotting a comeback as mayor. Yet he is working the phones right now, trying to persuade donors and New York Democrats to back him for mayor in a special election if Mr. Adams resigns in the wake of his recent indictment. It is up to Democratic leaders as well as voters to make it clear that Mr. Cuomo has no political future — not as a replacement for Mr. Adams, and not in any vainglorious attempt to return to the governor’s office, either.Before abjectly resigning in 2021, having been accused in a state attorney general report of sexually harassing 11 women, Mr. Cuomo did some things well as governor. He was adept at slashing through the state’s thicket of bureaucracy to finish big infrastructure projects. New York’s airports are much improved, for example, for which Mr. Cuomo deserves credit.The press briefings he held during the pandemic defending public health measures, like mask mandates and vaccinations, were a balm of responsible leadership during the Trump presidency. They were undermined, however, when the public later learned that Mr. Cuomo’s officials had helped cover up the deaths of more than 4,000 people who had died of Covid in nursing homes.But after nearly four years of visionless mediocrity and cronyism, New York City needs a mayor who is deeply ethical and treats his staff with respect. It needs a mayor who puts the priorities of the public above his own political ambition and personal interest. It needs a mayor, in fact, who likes living in New York City.None of that describes Mr. Cuomo, whose toxic bullying of state employees was legendary in Albany, whose trampling of fundamental ethics was continuous. If he does run for mayor, the public will need answers to some basic questions, including who is funding his campaign and when and how he established residency in New York City. For years, he lived in Albany and Westchester.The 2020 report from Letitia James, the state attorney general, found Mr. Cuomo had sexually harassed numerous women who worked for him in his role as governor, then used the powers of that office to punish women who complained, an abuse of power. In a state with a normally functioning Democratic Party, a governor forced to resign amid serious allegations of sexual harassment wouldn’t be the first choice to replace a mayor under criminal indictment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Sirens sounded in northern Israel, warning of incoming fire from Hezbollah.Israel’s air force pounded targets in Lebanon as its soldiers clashed with Hezbollah militants in the southern part of the country, the military said on Sunday. Lebanon’s government said that at least 23 people had been killed over the past 24 hours.The Lebanese Red Cross said overnight that it was responding to a “major strike” in the southern city of Nabatieh, posting an image on social media that showed flames and rubble. Lebanon’s civil defense said on Sunday morning one person had been killed and four others wounded.The civil defense also said its teams had completed a search and rescue operation shortly before dawn after an attack a day earlier on the town of Al-Maaysra in the central Keserwan district. It said that 17 people — including two women and three children — had been killed and 12 others wounded. The Health Ministry listed a series of other attacks in which it said that at least six people had been killed and dozens of others injured since Saturday.On Sunday morning, the Israeli military said that its jets had hit around “200 Hezbollah targets deep in Lebanon and southern Lebanon” over the past day as part of its multipronged fight against the Iranian-backed militant group.Hezbollah started firing on northern Israel in solidarity with its ally Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks last year, setting off back-and-forth exchanges of fire that displaced communities on both sides of the border. Israel, which is also fighting in Gaza against Hamas, stepped up its bombardment in recent weeks before invading southern Lebanon with ground troops.The Israeli bombardment and ground invasion have killed at least 2,000 people and caused significant destruction and forced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians to flee their homes. Aid agencies have warned it is compounding a humanitarian crisis prompted by the war in Gaza.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

As the Harris campaign continues to court male voters, it is dialing up a deep shot, targeting a venue where it thinks it will reach quite a few of them: professional football.The campaign is spending six figures on flyover advertisements knocking former President Donald J. Trump and promoting Vice President Kamala Harris at four N.F.L. games that are taking place on Sunday in swing states, with teams in those matchups collectively accounting for six of the seven main presidential battlegrounds.The four games are in Wisconsin, where the Green Bay Packers will host the Arizona Cardinals; Nevada, where the Las Vegas Raiders will host the Pittsburgh Steelers; North Carolina, where the Carolina Panthers will host the Atlanta Falcons; and Pennsylvania, where the Philadelphia Eagles will host the Cleveland Browns. (Michigan is the only swing state left out, with its Detroit Lions playing in Dallas on Sunday.)In Las Vegas, fans will see skytyping planes fly over the stadium to draw a simple message in white: “Vote Kamala.” In the other venues, a plane with a banner will deliver a slightly longer plea: “Sack Trump’s Project 2025! Vote Kamala!” In Philadelphia, that message will include a nod to the home team: “Go Birds!”The campaign is part of an effort to attract hard-to-reach voters, especially men, said Abhi Rahman, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.“Our goal is to meet people where they are, and there is only a sliver of the electorate that is still undecided,” Mr. Rahman said. “What we know about these undecided people — majority male — is they don’t like to read political publications. They aren’t in the 24-7 world of policy and politics, so what we are trying to do is reach them in a different way.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

What this year’s Nobels can teach us about science and humanity.Alan Burdick and Technology observers have grown increasingly vocal in recent years about the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the human variety. A.I. models can write and talk like us, draw and paint like us, crush us at chess and Go. They express an unnerving simulacrum of creativity, not least where the truth is concerned.A.I. is coming for science, too, as this week’s Nobel Prizes seemed keen to demonstrate. On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two scientists who helped computers “learn” closer to the way the human brain does. A day later, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three researchers for using A.I. to invent new proteins and reveal the structure of existing ones — a problem that stumped biologists for decades, yet could be solved by A.I. in minutes.The Nobel Committee for Chemistry announced the winners last week.Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCue the grousing: This was computer science, not physics or chemistry! Indeed, of the five laureates on Tuesday and Wednesday, arguably only one, the University of Washington biochemist David Baker, works in the field he was awarded in.The scientific Nobels tend to award concrete results over theories, empirical discovery over pure idea. But that schema didn’t quite hold this year, either. One prize went to scientists who leaned into physics as a foundation on which to build computer models used for no groundbreaking result in particular. The laureates on Wednesday, on the other hand, had created computer models that made big advancements in biochemistry.These were outstanding and fundamentally human accomplishments, to be sure. But the Nobel recognition underscored a chilling prospect: Henceforth, perhaps scientists will merely craft the tools that make the breakthroughs, rather than do the revolutionary work themselves or even understand how it came about. Artificial intelligence designs and builds hundreds of molecular Notre Dames and Hagia Sophias, and a researcher gets a pat for inventing the shovel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Here’s a bit of advice to help maintain your sanity over the next few weeks until Election Day: Just ignore the polls. Unless you’re a campaign professional or a gambler, you’re probably looking at them for the same reason the rest of us are: to know who’ll win. Or at least to feel like you know who’ll win. But they just can’t tell you that.Back in 2016, Harry Enten, then at FiveThirtyEight, calculated the final polling error in every presidential election between 1968 and 2012. On average, the polls missed by two percentage points. In 2016, an American Association for Public Opinion Research postmortem found that the average error of the national polls was 2.2 points, but the polls of individual states were off by 5.1 points. In 2020, the national polls were off by 4.5 points and the state-level polls missed, again, by 5.1 points.You could imagine a world in which these errors are random and cancel one another out. Perhaps Donald Trump’s support is undercounted by three points in Michigan but overcounted by three points in Wisconsin. But errors often systematically favor one candidate or the other. In both 2016 and 2020, for instance, state-level polls tended to undercount Trump supporters. The polls overestimated Hillary Clinton’s margin by three points in 2016 and Joe Biden’s margin by 4.3 points in 2020.In a blowout election, an error of a few points in one direction or another is meaningless. In the California Senate race, for example, Adam Schiff, a Democrat, is leading Steve Garvey, a Republican, by between 17 and 33 points, depending on the poll. Even a polling error of 10 points wouldn’t matter to the outcome of the race.But that’s not where the presidential election sits. As of Oct. 10, The New York Times’s polling average had Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points nationally. That’s tight, but the seven swing states are tighter: Neither candidate is leading by more than two points in any of them.Imagine the polls perform better in 2024 than they did in either 2016 or 2020: They’re off, remarkably, by merely two points in the swing states. Huzzah! That would be consistent with Harris winning every swing state. It would also be consistent with Trump winning every swing state. This is not some outlandish scenario. According to Nate Silver’s election model, the most likely electoral outcome “is Harris sweeping all seven swing states. And the next most likely is Trump sweeping all seven.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

I’ll never forget the first time I heard my oldest daughter’s heartbeat. My wife was experiencing trouble in the first three months of pregnancy, and we were worried she was miscarrying. We rode together to her doctor’s office, full of anxiety. And then, we heard the magical sound — the pulsing of our little girl’s tiny heart. We didn’t know if she would ultimately be OK, but there was one thing we knew: Our daughter was alive.I’ve long supported so-called heartbeat laws. A well-drafted heartbeat law bans abortion after a heartbeat is detected, which typically occurs roughly six weeks into pregnancy. Whether you refer to that sound we heard all the way back in 1998 as a heartbeat or simply as a form of early cardiac activity, it sends the same message, that a separate human life is growing and developing in the mother’s womb.The significance of that heartbeat is the reason I believe that the second-most-important election of 2024 is the Florida contest over Amendment 4, a ballot measure that would enshrine a right to abortion in the Florida Constitution.The text of the amendment is broad: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s health care provider.” And it is aimed straight at what I believe to be one of the most reasonable pro-life laws in the nation.Florida’s Heartbeat Protection Act bans abortions if the gestational age of the fetus is over six weeks, but it also contains exceptions for pregnancies that are a result of rape, incest or human trafficking; for fatal fetal abnormality; and to preserve the life of the mother or “avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”Properly interpreted (problems interpreting pro-life laws have tragically led to too many terrible incidents), this is not a law that leaves women vulnerable to dangerous pregnancy complications. It has elements that are necessary to assure doctors that they won’t be prosecuted if they provide life or health-saving care. In short, it represents a statutory effort to respect the lives and health of both mother and child.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

As the presidential campaign begins its final sprint, Donald Trump has made crystal clear how he will respond if he loses. He will refuse to accept the results; he will make baseless claims of voter fraud; and he will turn, with even more ferocity than he did in 2020, to the courts to save him.Mr. Trump has made clear that he views any election he loses — no matter how close or fair — as by definition illegitimate. The question then is whether there will be lawyers willing to cloak this insistence in the language of legal reasoning and therefore to assist him in litigating his way back to the White House.Republican lawyers have already unleashed lawsuits ahead of Election Day. These legal partisans have pursued their efforts across the country but have concentrated on swing states and key counties. The moves are clearly intended to lay the groundwork for Mr. Trump’s post-election efforts in states where the margins of victory are close.Such post-election efforts will be credible only if credible attorneys sign on to mount them. So it is critical that lawyers of conscience refuse to assist in those endeavors. As Mr. Trump’s rhetoric grows ever more vengeful and openly authoritarian, a great deal turns on the willingness of members of the legal profession to make common cause with him.At least since 2000, every close presidential election has involved recounts or litigation. Both sides lawyer up, and a high-stakes game of inches ensues.Although the lawyers engaged in those efforts are playing hardball, their work is predicated on a shared set of premises: In elections, the candidate who gets the most votes prevails (whether that means winning state or federal office or winning a state’s electoral votes). And in a close election, skilled lawyers will seek to develop legal arguments that determine which votes count, and therefore who emerges as the winner.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Las últimas encuestas del Times/Inquirer/Siena sitúan a Donald Trump con seis puntos de ventaja en Arizona y a Kamala Harris con cuatro puntos en Pensilvania.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Dos de los estados más disputados del país —Pennsylvania y Arizona— ilustran las dificultades a las que se enfrentan ambas campañas para obtener una clara ventaja en la recta final de la contienda para 2024, en la que Kamala Harris mantiene una estrecha ventaja en Pensilvania, pero Donald Trump sigue manteniendo una ventaja en Arizona, según un nuevo par de encuestas del New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College.Las encuestas, realizadas en dos estados separados por más de 3000 kilómetros, muestran el reto al que se enfrentan ambos partidos al intentar cerrar sus campañas ante un conjunto diverso de votantes que, en ocasiones, tienen prioridades contrapuestas.Tanto en Arizona como en Pensilvania, Harris ha consolidado el apoyo entre los demócratas desde que sustituyó al presidente Biden como candidata del partido. Pero la fuerza de Trump sigue siendo la economía, el tema principal responsable de su potencia política en Arizona y otros estados disputados este año.En Pensilvania, la ventaja de Harris en las encuestas ha sido constante, aunque el estado sigue siendo reñido. Su ventaja, 50 por ciento a 47 por ciento, entra dentro del margen de error. Pero esta es la tercera encuesta Times/Siena en dos meses que muestra el apoyo a Harris de al menos la mitad del estado. (Su ventaja en la encuesta fue de cuatro puntos porcentuales si se calculan sin redondear las cifras).Lo que impulsa a Harris en el estado es su ventaja de casi 20 puntos porcentuales en lo que se refiere al aborto, su mejor tema en los estados disputados y la segunda preocupación más importante para los votantes de Pensilvania.How the polls compare More