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      Is Argentina the First A.I. Election?

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      The posters dotting the streets of Buenos Aires had a certain Soviet flare to them.There was one of Argentina’s presidential candidates, Sergio Massa, dressed in a shirt with what appeared to be military medals, pointing to a blue sky. He was surrounded by hundreds of older people — in drab clothing, with serious, and often disfigured, faces — looked toward him in hope.The style was no mistake. The illustrator had been given clear instructions.“Sovietic Political propaganda poster illustration by Gustav Klutsis featuring a leader, masssa, standing firmly,” said a prompt that Mr. Massa’s campaign fed into an artificial-intelligence program to produce the image. “Symbols of unity and power fill the environment,” the prompt continued. “The image exudes authority and determination.”Javier Milei, the other candidate in Sunday’s runoff election, has struck back by sharing what appear to be A.I. images depicting Mr. Massa as a Chinese communist leader and himself as a cuddly cartoon lion. They have been viewed more than 30 million times.Argentina’s election has quickly become a testing ground for A.I. in campaigns, with the two candidates and their supporters employing the technology to doctor existing images and videos and create others from scratch.A.I. has made candidates say things they did not, and put them in famous movies and memes. It has created campaign posters, and triggered debates over whether real videos are actually real.A.I.’s prominent role in Argentina’s campaign and the political debate it has set off underscore the technology’s growing prevalence and show that, with its expanding power and falling cost, it is now likely to be a factor in many democratic elections around the globe.Experts compare the moment to the early days of social media, a technology offering tantalizing new tools for politics — and unforeseen threats.Mr. Massa’s campaign has created an A.I. system that can create images and videos of many of the election’s main players — the candidates, running mates, political allies — doing a wide variety of things. The campaign has used A.I. to portray Mr. Massa, Argentina’s staid center-left economy minister, as strong, fearless and charismatic, including videos that show him as a soldier in war, a Ghostbuster and Indiana Jones, as well as posters that evoke Barack Obama’s 2008 “Hope” poster and a cover of The New Yorker.The campaign has also used the system to depict his opponent, Mr. Milei — a far-right libertarian economist and television personality known for outbursts — as unstable, putting him in films like “Clockwork Orange” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”Much of the content has been clearly fake. But a few creations have toed the line of disinformation. The Massa campaign produced one “deepfake” video in which Mr. Milei explains how a market for human organs would work, something he has said philosophically fits in with his libertarian views.“Imagine having kids and thinking that each is a long-term investment. Not in the traditional sense, but thinking of the economic potential of their organs,” says the manipulated image of Mr. Milei in the fabricated video, posted by the Massa campaign on its Instagram account for A.I. content, called “A.I. for the Homeland.”The post’s caption says, “We asked an Artificial Intelligence to help Javier explain the business of selling organs and this happened.”In an interview, Mr. Massa said he was shocked the first time he saw what A.I. could do. “I didn’t have my mind prepared for the world that I’m going to live in,” he said. “It’s a huge challenge. We’re on a horse that we have to ride but we still don’t know its tricks.”The New York Times then showed him the deepfake his campaign created of Mr. Milei and human organs. He appeared disturbed. “I don’t agree with that use,” he said.His spokesman later stressed that the post was in jest and clearly labeled A.I.-generated. His campaign said in a statement that its use of A.I. is to entertain and make political points, not deceive.Researchers have long worried about the impact of A.I. on elections. The technology can deceive and confuse voters, casting doubt over what is real, adding to the disinformation that can be spread by social networks.For years, those fears had largely been speculative because the technology to produce such fakes was too complicated, expensive and unsophisticated.“Now we’ve seen this absolute explosion of incredibly accessible and increasingly powerful democratized tool sets, and that calculation has radically changed,” said Henry Ajder, an expert based in England who has advised governments on A.I.-generated content.This year, a mayoral candidate in Toronto used gloomy A.I.-generated images of homeless people to telegraph what Toronto would turn into if he weren’t elected. In the United States, the Republican Party posted a video created with A.I. that shows China invading Taiwan and other dystopian scenes to depict what it says would happen if President Biden wins a second term.And the campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida shared a video showing A.I.-generated images of Donald J. Trump hugging Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who has become an enemy on the American right for his role leading the nation’s pandemic response.So far, the A.I.-generated content shared by the campaigns in Argentina has either been labeled A.I. generated or is so clearly fabricated that it is unlikely it would deceive even the most credulous voters. Instead, the technology has supercharged the ability to create viral content that previously would have taken teams of graphic designers days or weeks to complete.Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, said this week that it would require political ads to disclose whether they used A.I. Other unpaid posts on the sites that use A.I., even if related to politics, would not be required to carry any disclosures. The U.S. Federal Election Commission is also considering whether to regulate the use of A.I. in political ads.The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based research group that studies internet platforms, signed a letter urging such regulations. Isabelle Frances-Wright, the group’s head of technology and society, said the extensive use of A.I. in Argentina’s election was worrisome.“I absolutely think it’s a slippery slope,” she said. “In a year from now, what already seems very realistic will only seem more so.” The Massa campaign said it decided to use A.I. in an effort to show that Peronism, the 78-year-old political movement behind Mr. Massa, can appeal to young voters by mixing Mr. Massa’s image with pop and meme culture.An A.I.-generated image created by Mr. Massa’s campaign.To do so, campaign engineers and artists fed photos of Argentina’s various political players into an open-source software called Stable Diffusion to train their own A.I. system so that it could create fake images of those real people. They can now quickly produce an image or video of more than a dozen top political players in Argentina doing almost anything they ask.During the campaign, Mr. Massa’s communications team has briefed artists working with the campaign’s A.I. on which messages or emotions they want the images to impart, such as national unity, family values and fear. The artists have then brainstormed ideas to put Mr. Massa or Mr. Milei, as well as other political figures, into content that references films, memes, artistic styles or moments in history.For Halloween, the Massa campaign told its A.I. to create a series of cartoonish images of Mr. Milei and his allies as zombies. The campaign also used A.I. to create a dramatic movie trailer, featuring Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, burning, Mr. Milei as an evil villain in a straitjacket and Mr. Massa as the hero who will save the country.The A.I. images have also shown up in the real world. The Soviet posters were one of the dozens of designs that Mr. Massa’s campaign and supporters printed to post across Argentina’s public spaces.Some images were generated by the campaign’s A.I., while others were created by supporters using A.I., including one of the most well-known, an image of Mr. Massa riding a horse in the style of José de San Martín, an Argentine independence hero. “Massa was too stiff,” said Octavio Tome, a community organizer who helped create the image. “We’re showing a boss-like Massa, and he’s very Argentine.”Supporters of Mr. Massa put up AI-generated posters depicting him in the style of José de San Martín, an Argentine independence hero.Sarah Pabst for The New York TimesThe rise of A.I. in Argentina’s election has also made some voters question what is real. After a video circulated last week of Mr. Massa looking exhausted after a campaign event, his critics accused him of being on drugs. His supporters quickly struck back, claiming the video was actually a deepfake.His campaign confirmed, however, that the video was, in fact, real.Mr. Massa said people were already using A.I. to try to cover up past mistakes or scandals. “It’s very easy to hide behind artificial intelligence when something you said come out, and you didn’t want them to,” Mr. Massa said in the interview.Earlier in the race, Patricia Bullrich, a candidate who failed to qualify for the runoff, tried to explain away leaked audio recordings of her economic adviser offering a woman a job in exchange for sex by saying the recordings were fabricated. “They can fake voices, alter videos,” she said.Were the recordings real or fake? It’s unclear. More

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      Death of Zimbabwe Opposition Activist Raises Fears of Political Crisis

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      Leaders of the main opposition party said a member had been abducted while campaigning, the latest in a string of political violence.An activist with Zimbabwe’s main opposition party was found dead on the side of a road in the capital, Harare, the police said on Tuesday. A party spokesman said he had been abducted while campaigning in a local election over the weekend.The death of the activist, Tapfumanei Masaya, is the latest in what opposition and civil society leaders say has been a string of violent episodes fueling a growing political crisis in the southern African nation since national elections were held in August.President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his governing ZANU-PF party maintained power in the August vote, despite doubts raised by regional and international observers about the election’s credibility.Mr. Masaya, 51, a pastor, was campaigning door to door on Saturday to promote a candidate along with other members of the political party Citizens Coalition for Change when multiple S.U.V.s pulled up and attackers jumped out and chased them, said Gift Ostallos Siziba, a spokesman for the party.When Mr. Masaya stopped to help a fellow activist who is disabled, the attackers pounced, beating them and taking them away in separate vehicles, Mr. Siziba said.The attackers eventually dropped off the disabled activist, still alive, on the road but kept Mr. Masaya, Mr. Siziba said. He was discovered dead on Sunday, his body disfigured by the slashes of a machete, the spokesman said.Mr. Masaya’s death has raised alarm in a nation where, officials with Citizens Coalition for Change say, at least four of their members have been killed since last year. Mr. Masaya was the fourth party member to have been abducted and tortured over the past two months — though the other three survived, according to a post on X, formerly Twitter, by David Coltart, a senator with the party.In one of those cases, Takudzwa Ngadziore, a member of Parliament, posted a video on Facebook of what he said was his own abduction. In the short, shaky clip, he is seen in a suit and tie, breathing heavily, and a man wearing a cap with a Mercedes logo and carrying a rifle rushes toward him. Then the footage ends.The police confirmed the identity of Mr. Masaya in a statement released on Tuesday, but said they were still investigating the circumstances surrounding his death.Farai Muroiwa Marapira, the director of information and publicity for the governing ZANU-PF party, said it was disrespectful and irresponsible of the opposition to jump to conclusions about the death before the police investigation had been completed.ZANU-PF had nothing to do with Mr. Masaya’s death, he said. The opposition, he said, “would rather seek political mileage on the loss of a family.”Several abductions and some of Zimbabwe’s worst post-colonial political violence occurred in the aftermath of the highly controversial 2008 elections, leading to a power-sharing agreement between ZANU-PF and the main opposition party at the time, the Movement for Democratic Change.The lack of police intervention or other efforts by the state to curb the violence “creates a culture of impunity in the country, and those behind the abductions and rights abuses would continue doing it, knowing that nothing would happen to them,” said Rawlings Magede, spokesman for Heal Zimbabwe Trust, a nonprofit peace-building organization.Mr. Magede said that “the human rights situation in Zimbabwe continues to deteriorate” after this year’s elections.An observer mission from the Southern African Development Community criticized this year’s vote, saying there had been several irregularities, an almost unprecedented rebuke from a regional body that tends to avoid openly criticizing member nations.The election, Mr. Siziba said, had created “a crisis of illegitimacy where the state is turning against its own citizens.”Mr. Marapira rejected that assertion, saying that the Citizens Coalition for Change had not challenged the election result in court within the time frame allowed by Zimbabwean law.“In the media, anyone given attention can say what they want whether there is truth, fiction or absence of reality,” he said. “The crisis is only in the imagination of the opposition.”Jeffrey Moyo More

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      Under Pressure, U.K.’s Sunak Tries Another Cabinet Reset With a Swerve to Center

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      After more than a year as prime minister, Rishi Sunak, a Conservative, has failed to close a yawning gap in the polls. On Monday he did something new.Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain fired one of his most senior and divisive ministers on Monday, in a reshuffle of his top team that unexpectedly brought a centrist predecessor, David Cameron, back into government.The departure of Suella Braverman as home secretary and the surprise return of Mr. Cameron as foreign secretary were the latest in a series of convulsions that have rocked the governing Conservative Party since the fateful Brexit referendum that Mr. Cameron called in 2016, and signaled the peril facing Mr. Sunak as he nears a general election expected next year.After 13 years in Downing Street, the Conservatives’ grip on power appears to be slipping, with the party trailing Labour by around 20 points in the polls against a challenging economic backdrop, with sluggish growth and inflation eroding living standards, and a public sector under acute strain after years of Conservative-led austerity.Mr. Sunak has tried various gambits to address his party’s unpopularity with voters, weakening environmental targets, pledging to defend motorists and promising tougher sentencing for serious criminals. None seem to have worked.At the same time, Ms. Braverman, who is seen as a rival within the party, had become increasingly emboldened as home secretary, raising her profile and appearing to prepare the ground for a leadership bid if the Conservatives lose the election as many expect.Last week she wrote an extraordinary opinion article in The Times of London, which was not authorized by Downing Street, in which she criticized the police for not seeking to ban a pro-Palestinian protest march in the capital, and described the demonstrators as “hate marchers” and “Islamists.”Protesters in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, on Vauxhall Bridge in London, on Saturday.Hollie Adams/ReutersAfter counterprotesters clashed with the police on Saturday, critics accused Ms. Braverman of inflaming tensions and encouraging far-right demonstrators onto the streets, and her position was judged untenable by Downing Street.Mr. Sunak and Ms. Braverman spoke by phone on Monday, and in the shuffle of jobs that followed her departure, she was replaced by the more emollient former foreign secretary, James Cleverly, freeing up his position for Mr. Cameron.Both men are regarded as moderates and the changes appeared to signal a shift away from the divisive politics that were championed by Ms. Braverman, whose focus on cultural issues had become a feature of Mr. Sunak’s government in recent months.Neither of the two appointments was good news for the right-wing faction of the Conservative Party where Ms. Braverman had a small but vocal group of supporters.Nor was Mr. Sunak’s decision to keep Jeremy Hunt as chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Hunt’s resistance to offering tax cuts has antagonized a wider group of Conservative lawmakers. He, like Mr. Cameron, campaigned against Brexit in 2016, but Mr. Hunt has made controlling inflation his priority and says that reducing taxes will have to wait.The return to the cabinet of Mr. Cameron may remind some voters of the political chaos that he triggered in 2016 when Britons ignored his recommendation and narrowly voted to leave the European Union. Mr. Sunak is the fourth Conservative leader to have become prime minister since Mr. Cameron stood aside after the referendum result, which sent shock waves around Europe.David Cameron, Britain’s new foreign secretary, departing 10 Downing Street on Monday.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Sunak restored some stability when he succeeded Liz Truss as prime minister last year, but his latest reshuffle risks reopening ideological divisions that have dogged the party in recent years. Though the salience of Brexit has faded in British politics, Mr. Cameron — who led the campaign against it — will now be partly responsible for promoting the policy around the globe.Yet, while bringing back Mr. Cameron is a political gamble, Mr. Sunak may have judged the risk worthwhile. He has limited time to win back voters, or possibly even to limit the scale of a defeat in the looming election.Ms. Braverman had lost her job as home secretary once before, under the short-lived government of Ms. Truss, but she was given it back by Mr. Sunak when he entered Downing Street. She used her position in cabinet to push hard-right policies and embraced polarizing rhetoric, describing migration as a “hurricane,” the arrival of asylum seekers on the British coast as an “invasion” and homelessness as a “lifestyle choice.”While Mr. Sunak’s language was more measured, he supported most of her ideas — in particular, her pursuit of a policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. That faces a critical test on Wednesday when the country’s Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on its legality following a series of challenges.Mr. Sunak visiting an Ikea distribution center in Dartford, Kent, in June.Pool photo by Jack HillThe decision to bring back Mr. Cameron, who led the Conservatives between 2005-16, seemed at odds with Mr. Sunak’s recent claims at his party’s annual conference to be an agent of change.It also underscored a constitutional requirement of Britain’s political system that ministers hold a seat in Parliament so they can propose legislation and be held to account by fellow lawmakers. As a consequence Mr. Sunak on Monday nominated Mr. Cameron for a seat in the House of Lords, Parliament’s less powerful, unelected upper chamber.It is not the first time in the modern era that a foreign secretary has been a member of the House of Lords, rather than the House of Commons: Peter Carington, who became Lord Carrington — and as such, gained a second r in his name — filled that role between 1979-82. He resigned amid the Falklands crisis, when troops from Argentina occupied a British overseas territory in the South Atlantic in 1982, sparking a brief conflict.While the situation is not unique, Mr. Cameron’s status as a member of the House of Lords has already raised tensions among lawmakers in the House of Commons as he will normally speak not to them, but to an assembly of unelected members of the upper chamber.Lindsay Hoyle, speaker of the House of Commons, said on Monday that he was looking into ways in which the new foreign secretary could be held accountable by elected lawmakers. It was “especially important” that they should be able to scrutinize his work, “given the gravity of the current international situation,” Mr. Hoyle said in Parliament. More

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      Brian Higgins to Step Down From Democratic House Seat in February

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      Representative Brian Higgins, Democrat of New York, said he would step down in February.Representative Brian Higgins, Democrat of New York, said on Sunday that he would leave Congress in February.Mr. Higgins, a Buffalo native who has spent 19 years in the House, said he would step down before the end of his term after a year in which “institutional norms have been compromised.” “I think, unfortunately, this is the beginning of a bad trend, not the end of it,” he said.Mr. Higgins, 64, noted that the chamber has been gripped by chaos and dysfunction. He assigns blame to the growing influence of Republicans seeking public attention and viral moments through aggressive floor speeches and controversial legislative amendments.“It’s all individuals that have weaponized the legislation-making process,” he said. “And this is where I think the current leadership of the House has failed miserably. They’re the poster child for dysfunction right now, as evidenced by their own inability to identify what they want and to develop a strategy to achieve what it is they want.”Under New York law, Gov. Kathy Hochul has to call a special election next year to find a successor for Mr. Higgins.In his 10th term in Congress, Mr. Higgins is a center-leaning member of the Ways and Means and Budget Committees. He plans to remain in office until the first week of February. His resignation will open a seat representing New York’s 26th Congressional District, a heavily Democratic region including Buffalo and Niagara Falls.Dozens of incumbent members of the Senate and House have announced decisions not to seek re-election, and a growing number have said their departure will be a retirement from public office.Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, announced last week that he would not seek another term.Mr. Higgins said he was recently in the running to fill an opening as the president of Buffalo State University. Once his intentions to leave Washington became more widely known in his district, more opportunities started to materialize, as did plans to find his replacement.“I feel fortunate to have some choices here,” he said.In a social media post praising Mr. Higgins after his announcement, Governor Hochul suggested that he may have accepted a position to become the president of Shea’s Performing Arts Center in Buffalo. But he said in an interview that a decision had not been made.Other tributes quickly began pouring in from officials in the state.“Throughout his historic career, he has been an integral part of the transformation of our region,” State Senator Sean M. Ryan said in a statement.State Senator Timothy M. Kennedy said Mr. Higgins had changed “the way the nation sees Buffalo,” revitalizing the city’s waterfront and securing federal infrastructure investments.The two state lawmakers, both Democrats from Western New York, are seen as possible candidates to seek Mr. Higgins’s House seat. More

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      The New Republican Party Isn’t Ready for the Post-Roe World

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      Ohio is not a swing state, not any longer. Donald Trump won it by eight points, twice. It has a Republican governor, and while its senators are split between the parties, its U.S. House delegation is made up of 10 Republicans and five Democrats. And yet Ohio just passed an abortion-rights referendum by a margin of more than 13 points.There’s no way to spin this result. There’s no way to spin every other pro-choice result in every other red-state referendum. The pro-life movement is in a state of electoral collapse, and I think I know one reason.In the eight years since the so-called New Right emerged on the scene and Trump began to dominate the Republican landscape, the Republican Party has become less libertarian but more libertine, and libertinism is ultimately incompatible with a holistic pro-life worldview.I’m not arguing that the pro-choice position is inherently libertine. There are many millions of Americans — including pro-choice Republicans — who arrive at their position through genuine philosophical disagreement with the idea that an unborn child possesses the same inherent worth as anyone else. But I’ve seen Republican libertinism with my own eyes. I know that it distorts the culture of the Republican Party and red America.The difference between libertarianism and libertinism can be summed up as the difference between rights and desires. A libertarian is concerned with her own liberty but also knows that this liberty ends where yours begins. The entire philosophy of libertarianism depends on a healthy recognition of human dignity. A healthy libertarianism can still be individualistic, but it’s also deeply concerned with both personal virtue and the rights of others. Not all libertarians are pro-life, but a pro-life libertarian will recognize the humanity and dignity of both mother and child.A libertine, by contrast, is dominated by his desires. The object of his life is to do what he wants, and the object of politics is to give him what he wants. A libertarian is concerned with all forms of state coercion. A libertine rejects any attempt to coerce him personally, but he’s happy to coerce others if it gives him what he wants.Donald Trump is the consummate libertine. He rejects restraints on his appetites and accountability for his actions. The guiding principle of his worldview is summed up with a simple declaration: I do what I want. Any movement built in his image will be libertine as well.Trump’s movement dismisses the value of personal character. It mocks personal restraint. And it’s happy to inflict its will on others if it achieves what it wants. Libertarianism says that your rights are more important than my desires. Libertinism says my desires are more important than your rights, and this means that libertines are terrible ambassadors for any cause that requires self-sacrifice.I don’t think the pro-life movement has fully reckoned with the political and cultural fallout from the libertine right-wing response to the Covid pandemic. Here was a movement that was loudly telling women that they had to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, with all the physical transformations, risks and financial uncertainties that come with pregnancy and childbirth, at the same time that millions of its members were also loudly refusing the minor inconveniences of masking and the low risks of vaccination — even if the best science available at the time told us that both masking and vaccination could help protect others from getting the disease.Even worse, many of the same people demanded that the state limit the liberty of others so that they could live how they wanted. Florida, for example, banned private corporate vaccine mandates.This do-what-you-want ethos cost a staggering number of American lives. A 2022 study found that there were an estimated 318,981 vaccine-preventable deaths from January 2021 to April 2022. Vaccine hesitancy was so concentrated in Republican America that political affiliation was more relevant than race and ethnicity as an indicator of willingness to take the vaccine. Now there’s evidence from Ohio and Florida that excess mortality rates were significantly higher for Republicans than Democrats after vaccines were widely available.And this is the party that’s now going to tell American women that respect for human life requires personal sacrifice?It’s not just that libertinism robs Republicans of moral authority; it’s that libertinism robs Republicans of moral principle. The Ohio ballot measure could fail so decisively only if Republicans voted against it. The same analysis applies to ballot referendum losses in pro-Trump states like Kansas, Montana and Kentucky.In each state, all the pro-life movement needed was consistent Republican support, and it would have sailed to victory. All the Democrats in the state could have voted to protect abortion rights, and they would have lost if Republicans held firm. But they did not.“Do as I say and not as I do” is among the worst moral arguments imaginable. A holistic pro-life society requires true self-sacrifice. It asks women to value the life growing inside of them even in the face of fear and poverty. It asks the community to rally beside these women to keep them and their children safe and to provide them with opportunities to flourish. It requires both individuals and communities to sublimate their own desires to protect the lives and opportunities of others.As the Republican Party grows more libertine, the pro-life movement is going to keep losing. Of course, it’s going to keep losing with Democrats and independents, many of whom have always been skeptical of pro-life moral and legal arguments. But it’s also going to lose in the Republican Party itself, a party that is increasingly dedicated to outright defiance.An ethos that centers individuals’ desires will bleed over into matters of life and death. It did during Covid, and it’s doing so now, as even Republicans reject the pro-life cause.The challenge for pro-life America isn’t simply to raise more money or use better talking points. As Republican losses in Virginia demonstrate, advocating even a relatively mild abortion ban — a 15-week law, not a so-called heartbeat six-week bill — is fraught. The challenge is much more profound. Pro-life America has to reconnect with personal virtue. It has to model self-sacrifice. It has to show, not just tell, America what it would look like to value life from conception to natural death.At present, however, the Republican Party is dominated by its id. It indulges its desires. And so long as its id is in control, the pro-life movement will fail. There is no selfish path to a culture of life.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Betting on the Presidential Election Has Begun

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      While two leading prediction markets are fighting regulatory restrictions in court, wagers on politics and economics are still being made.Financial journalists love Wall Street aphorisms. I use them whenever I can.“Don’t fight the Fed” has been handy this year. “The stock market climbs a wall of worry” is useful whenever investors are fretting.Here’s one I’ve never been able to drop into an article — not yet, anyway: “It is an old axiom in the financial district that Wall Street betting odds are ‘never wrong.’”But nearly a century ago, on Sept. 28, 1924, one of my anonymous predecessors at The New York Times (bylines were uncommon then) used it. That hallowed saying could be repurposed today, except for a formidable problem. It refers to the betting on elections that took place on Wall Street, which was commonplace back then — and covered extensively in The Times and other major newspapers, as an important source of information about national, state and local political contests.Today, except for indirect and elaborate financial hedges on the policy implications of election outcomes, outright betting on elections is no longer a core part of American finance.Legal battles are underway to change that, however. And in the meantime, three prediction markets — PredictIt, Kalshi and the Iowa Electronic Markets — continue to operate and generate compelling insights. With any of them, it’s possible to make bets on who will win the 2024 presidential election and on a host of other consequential matters.Markets Versus PollsI’ve used prediction markets for years, especially during election season, much as my predecessors presumably used the Wall Street election betting markets — not to place bets but to obtain information.I don’t depend on these markets, and don’t buy the notion that they are superior to other means of obtaining information — or that they have the ability to reliably predict the future or change the world.Even so, they are illuminating. Some studies have found prediction markets to compare favorably with polls, especially when you are weeks or months away from voting. And when an issue or an election is important, one can never have enough data.Right now, for instance.The latest New York Times/Siena College poll shows that for the 2024 election, President Biden is trailing former President Donald J. Trump in five of six swing states. Both PredictIt and the Iowa market indicate, however, that most people placing wagers on those sites believe that in the end Mr. Biden will win.Which Question?John Aristotle Phillips, who runs the PredictIt market on behalf of Victoria University of Wellington, a New Zealand institution, said in an interview that there were frequently major differences between the findings of the polls and the prediction markets. That’s entirely normal, he said. “Polls and prediction markets ask different questions.”A poll asks who, right now, you would prefer as a candidate. But a functioning market that demands real money for a trade asks something else, he said, “not who you want to win but who you think will win.”As a sports fan, I understand the difference.If you asked me which baseball team I wanted to win, I’d always pick the Mets. But over many decades, they have usually disappointed me. So if I had to put money down, I’d never bet on them.What do I really think? It depends on which question you ask.The State of PlayKalshi, PredictIt and the Iowa market operate legally but function under specific limitations.One general problem is that “no states allow betting on political events and, if it was allowed, it would be on a state-by-state basis,” said Cait DeBaun, vice president of the American Gaming Association, which represents the gambling industry. You can’t avoid enticements for betting on sports if you watch a game on television in most major markets, but you won’t see ads for bets on politics. They aren’t permitted.But both PredictIt and the Iowa market offer overtly political wagers under academic exemptions granted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.The Iowa market, which started in 1988, is the most purely academic of the three. It is devoted entirely to research and teaching, but is open to anyone who wants to place a wager.PredictIt is operating under an academic exemption, too, but it has had to fight to retain it. The C.F.T.C. withdrew its permission in August 2022, and ordered the site to shut down, saying it had strayed from its academic mission. But PredictIt won a court injunction allowing it to continue operating, and it is suing the C.F.T.C., seeking permanent authority to run its market.It has 19 contracts running now, but Mr. Phillips said he expected to offer “hundreds” soon. “We aren’t going anywhere,” he said. “We’re going to keep operating.”Kalshi, the biggest of the three sites, is the most constrained at the moment in betting on politics. As a commercial derivatives market, it can accept trades amounting to scores of millions of dollars.It already runs prediction markets on inflation, unemployment, oil prices, Federal Reserve policy, government shutdowns, the temperature in Austin, who will win an Oscar and President Biden’s approval rating. The consensus forecasts are often on the mark and extremely useful.But what Kalshi has been unable to do is run a market predicting which political party will control Congress. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has turned it down, saying that would violate prohibitions on election contracts implied by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. So Kalshi sued the C.F.T.C. this month.In an interview, Tarek Mansour, a founder of Kalshi, said that he would ultimately like to start markets on presidential elections and on a range of other contests. “Betting on elections is as old as the United States,” he said, adding that if that betting isn’t done through a careful marketplace like his, it will happen elsewhere anyway.Already, he pointed out, sophisticated and well-financed investors can hedge against the risks of election outcomes through bespoke derivative contracts arranged by investment banks. “Why limit these trades to the very rich?” he asked. “We want to make this kind of hedging available to the average investor.”I said that I would call these “trades” bets.He said, “I wouldn’t disagree.”Betting on U.S. elections takes place abroad. Betfair in Britain runs a robust market. And unregulated offshore betting is conducted on Polymarket, which uses cryptocurrency and was fined $1.4 million by the C.F.T.C. for running afoul of its rules. Then there’s FTX, the failed cryptocurrency exchange that was headed by Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted this month on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. It ran an unregulated, offshore prediction market in the 2020 election cycle.“Driving these markets offshore doesn’t make sense to me,” Mr. Mansour said.I’ll leave these legal matters to the courts and the regulatory agencies to decide.But like my journalistic predecessors, I welcome the data trove that betting on elections provides. I’m hoping the entrepreneurs who run prediction markets will keep the information flowing, so we can really test the truth of the old saying, “Wall Street betting odds are never wrong.” More

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      Sánchez’s Deal With Catalonia Separatists Creates Turmoil in Spain

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      Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s agreement with Catalan separatists will likely keep him in power, but it has provoked an upheaval.Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain sealed a deal to extend amnesty to Catalan separatists on Thursday in exchange for their political support, likely allowing him to stay in power but causing turmoil throughout Spain, doubts in Europe and questions about the country’s stability.Mr. Sánchez, 51, who is currently acting as a caretaker prime minister after inconclusive snap elections he called in July, backed the amnesties related to an illegal referendum that shook Spain in 2017 to receive the critical support of the Junts party, which supports independence from Spain for the northern region of Catalonia.With their support, Mr. Sánchez will likely avoid new elections, win parliamentary backing for another stint as prime minister and solidify his place in the European Union as its standard-bearer for progressive politics.But the proposed amnesties, something Mr. Sánchez had previously said he would never do, triggered an uproar..Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain speaking with the media last month.Virginia Mayo/Associated PressEarlier in the day, Mr. Sánchez’s allies, eager to avoid the appearance that the deal had been struck out of pure political calculation, sought to frame the proposal as instrumental in putting a tense and violent period of Spanish history behind the country.It was “a historic opportunity to resolve a conflict that could — and should — only be resolved politically,” Santos Cerdán, a top negotiator with the Socialist Party, who had performed shuttle diplomacy between Madrid and separatist exiles in Brussels, said after the deal was announced. “Our aim is to open the way for a legislature that will allow us to progress and to build an open and modern society and a better country.”The deal potentially marks a remarkable reversal of political fortune for Mr. Sánchez, who has made a career out of bold, long-shot bets, but who seemed on the brink of a political abyss after his party received a drubbing in local and regional elections in May.But the Junts party is not a reliable partner, and has already made clear it will continue to seek to extract concessions in exchange for its support in close votes in Parliament.The deal, and the violence, come after thousands of protesters angrily surrounded the Socialist Party headquarters in Madrid in past days and called on Mr. Sánchez not to make a deal with the separatists, whom many conservatives consider an existential threat to Spanish nationhood.Protesters holding independence flags in September during a demonstration to celebrate the Catalan National Day in Barcelona.Emilio Morenatti/Associated PressThe mainstream conservative Popular Party, which had been expected to win elections over the summer but fell short of enough votes to form a government, has called for major demonstrations throughout Spain’s major cities on Sunday.It is about “privileging a minority to the detriment of a majority, and ending the equality between Spaniards that is enshrined in the Constitution,” said Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the Popular Party leader, who said that Mr. Sánchez had clearly aligned himself with enemies of the state. “The humiliation to which Sánchez is subjecting our country is complete.”In Brussels, the European commissioner for justice, Didier Reynders, sent a letter to Spain’s justice and presidency ministers about the “serious concerns” raised by the amnesty proposal.In regional and local elections in May, Mr. Sánchez’s party took such a shellacking that he pulled the plug on his government, opting to try his chances with an early national election instead. He was expected to lose.But while Mr. Sánchez did not come out on top in the July election, he and his progressive allies won enough support to stun the favored conservative and hard-right parties, depriving them of the necessary parliamentary support to form a government.Mr. Sánchez, who has served as the prime minister since 2018, a position he won in a daring confidence vote, instead had a narrow path to building a government, but it ran right through the issue of Catalan independence, among the most prickly and fraught in Spanish politics.In 2017, leaders of the Catalan separatist movement provoked Spain’s greatest constitutional crisis in decades when they staged an independence referendum that Madrid called illegal.Carles Puigdemont, Catalonia’s exiled former leader, at a news conference in Brussels. Mr. Puigdemont has been in exile in Belgium.John Thys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAfter enormous demonstrations in Barcelona and a tense national climate, the heads of the movement balked. Their leader, who was president of Catalonia at the time, Carles Puigdemont, fled the country and has remained in self-imposed exile in Belgium since. His allies have faced convictions.But on Thursday, Mr. Sánchez won the support of seven lawmakers from the Junts party that Mr. Puigdemont essentially leads, in exchange for the Socialist Party proposing a new law granting amnesty to him and everyone else in the failed independence referendum. The new law could affect many separatists who have been convicted or are currently facing trial for pro-independence activities.The specifics of the agreement have not yet been made public, and it is expected to be proposed in the Spanish Parliament next week. The deal was not a given, and required more than two months of negotiations between Sánchez’s Socialist party, his own, more progressive allies, and the Catalan and Basque independence movements that, despite a lackluster showing in July’s election, retained enough leverage to force a deal.Mr. Puigedemont said on Thursday at a news conference in Brussels that he would still support the cause of independence, and he celebrated the deal, saying that it took the issue out of the judiciary and brought it back in the public sphere where it belonged.“It is a way to return to politics,” he said, “what is politics.”Rachel Chaundler More

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      In School Board Elections, Parental Rights Movement Is Dealt Setbacks

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      Culture battles on gender and race did not seem to move many voters.Conservative activists for parental rights in education were dealt several high-profile losses in state and school board elections on Tuesday.The results suggest limits to what Republicans have hoped would be a potent issue for them leading into the 2024 presidential race — how public schools address gender, sexuality and race.The Campaign for Our Shared Future, a progressive group founded in 2021 to push back on conservative education activism, said on Wednesday that 19 of its 23 endorsed school board candidates in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia had won.The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest educators’ union and a key Democratic power player, said that in 250 races it had tracked — a mix of state, local and school board elections — 80 percent of its preferred candidates won.On the right, Moms for Liberty, the leading parental-rights group, said 44 percent of its candidates were elected.The modest results for conservatives show that after several years in which the right tried to leverage anger over how schools handled the Covid-19 pandemic and issues of race and gender in the curriculum, “parents like being back to some sense of normalcy,” said Jeanne Allen, chief executive of the Center for Education Reform, a right-leaning group in Washington.She suggested Republicans might have performed better if they had talked more about expanding access to school choice, such as vouchers and charter schools, noting that academic achievement remains depressed.In the suburbs of Philadelphia, an important swing region, Democrats won new school board majorities in several closely watched districts.In the Pennridge School District, Democrats swept five school board seats. The previous Republican majority had asked teachers to consult a social studies curriculum created by Hillsdale College, a conservative, Christian institution. The board also restricted access to library books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes and banned transgender students from using bathrooms or playing on sports teams that correspond to their gender identity.Democrats in nearby Bucks Central School District also won all five open seats. That district had been convulsed by debates over Republican policies restricting books and banning pride flags.The region was a hotbed of education activism during the pandemic, when many suburban parents organized to fight school closures, often coming together across partisan divides to resist the influence of teachers’ unions.But that era of education politics is, increasingly, in the rearview mirror.Beyond Pennsylvania, the unions and other progressive groups celebrated school board wins in Iowa, Connecticut and Virginia, as well as the new Democratic control of the Virginia state legislature.That state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has been a standard-bearer for parental rights, pushing for open schools during the pandemic and restricting how race is discussed in classrooms.Supporters of school vouchers had hoped that a Republican sweep in the state would allow for progress on that issue.For the parental rights movement, there were some scattered bright spots. Moms for Liberty candidates found success in Colorado, Alaska and several Pennsylvania counties.Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the group, said she was not deterred by Tuesday’s results. She rejected calls for conservatives to back away from talking about divisive gender and race issues in education.Progressive ideology on those issues, she said, was “destroying the lives of children and families.”Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said culture battles had distracted from post-pandemic recovery efforts on literacy and mental health.Notably, both the A.F.T. and Moms for Liberty have argued for more effective early reading instruction, including a focus on foundational phonics skills.But the conservative push to restrict books and to ideologically shape the history curriculum is a “strategy to create fear and division,” Ms. Weingarten said. The winning message, she added, was one of “freedom of speech and freedom to learn,” as well as returning local schools to their core business of fostering “consistency and stability” for children. More