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      Yes, the Polling Warning Signs Are Flashing Again

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      Ahead of the last presidential election, we created a website tracking the latest polls — internally, we called it a “polling diary.” Despite a tough polling cycle, one feature proved to be particularly helpful: a table showing what would happen if the 2020 polls were as “wrong” as they were in 2016, when pollsters systematically underestimated Donald J. Trump’s strength against Hillary Clinton.The table proved eerily prescient. Here’s what it looked like on Election Day in 2020, plus a new column with the final result. As you can see, the final results were a lot like the poll estimates “with 2016-like poll error.”2020 Polling Averages and Election Results More

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      Why the U.S. Is Being Compared to Hungary and Turkey

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      A conversation with Max Fisher, who covers the decline of democracy around the world.Friday’s newsletter is a discussion with Max Fisher, an international reporter and columnist for The New York Times who covers conflict, diplomacy and the sweeping sociopolitical changes taking place all over the globe.Max often delves deep into the world of ideas and where they intersect with the real world, from the rise of new social movements to the subject of today’s chat: the decline of democracy in the United States and abroad.Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:You recently wrote about how democracy is under threat all over the world. What did you find most worrying?That democracy is declining more or less everywhere now. Not necessarily in every country but in every region, in rich and poor countries, old and new democracies. And the decline is incremental but steady, which means that the scale of the change isn’t necessarily obvious until you start looking at the data.We tend to think of democratic decline as something that happens in big dramatic moments — a coup, a government collapsing, tanks in the streets. But that’s not typically how it happens anymore.What happens is more like what has occurred in Venezuela, say, or Turkey or Hungary. Elected leaders rise within a democracy promising to defeat some threat within, and in the process end up slowly tearing that democracy down.Each step feels dangerous but maybe not outright authoritarian — the judiciary gets politicized a little, some previously independent institution gets co-opted, election rules get changed, news outlets come under tighter government control.No individual step feels as drastic as an outright coup. And because these leaders both promote and benefit from social polarization, these little power grabs might even be seen by supporters as saving democracy.But over many years, the system tilts more and more toward autocracy.That doesn’t always end up leading to full-on dictatorship. But that pull toward elected strongmen rulers is something we see happening in dozens of countries. By the sheer numbers, according to a democracy monitoring group called V-Dem, more democracies are in decline today than at any other point in the last century.What did you find most surprising?There’s one chart I think about a lot that was put together by the political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. They tracked every election in Europe, at every level, going back decades. And they looked at how populist candidates did, on average in those elections, over time.Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart(Political scientists typically use the word “populist” to describe politicians who champion cultural backlash and oppose establishment institutions. Here’s a definition from the book “How Democracies Die,” by two academics named Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “anti-establishment politicians — figures who, claiming to represent the voice of ‘the people,’ wage war on what they depict as a corrupt and conspiratorial elite.”)What Norris and Inglehart found was that, in Europe, populists have been receiving a steadily larger share of the vote, on average, basically every year since 1960. That year is important because it’s roughly when Western countries, as the colonial era ended, collectively began to embrace what we now think of as full, liberal, multiracial democracy. And that is also the moment, it turns out from this research, when populist politics began steadily rising in a backlash to that new liberal-democratic order.That discovery is really important for understanding the threat to democracy. It shows that, for all the ways that we might think of the threat as top-down, it’s also, and maybe chiefly, bottom-up.And though we might tie the rise of populist hard-liner politics to specific events like the global financial crisis of 2007-8 or the refugee crisis of the mid-2010s, this is in fact something much larger.It’s a deeper backlash against the demands of modern liberal democracy — and this is something I’ve written about a lot over the past few years — both among voters who feel that they’re being asked to soften their racial and religious identities and among leaders who are being asked to compromise their political self-interest for the sake of democratic norms.What patterns have you found abroad that you now see in the United States?The United States fits pretty cleanly into what is now a well-established global pattern of democratic backsliding.First, society polarizes, often over a backlash to social change, to demographic change, to strengthening political power by racial, ethnic or religious minorities, and generally amid rising social distrust..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.This leads to a bottom-up desire for populist outsiders who will promise to confront the supposed threat within, which means suppressing the other side of that social or partisan or racial divide, asserting a vision of democracy that grants special status for “my” side, and smashing the democratic institutions or norms that prevent that side from asserting what is perceived to be its rightful dominance.You also tend to see political parties and other establishment gatekeepers, who are in theory meant to keep authoritarians from rising in politics, either weaken or become co-opted. Once populist hard-liners gain enough power to begin eroding democratic checks, such as an independent judiciary or the rule of law, it’s usually a steady slide toward democratic erosion.This trend has really picked up speed, globally, only in the last 20 years or so. So it’s hard to say exactly how common it is for countries that begin on this path to end up like Hungary or Turkey. But very few democracies have begun to slide and then reversed course.You have a new book called “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.” In your reporting and research for the book, what sorts of effects on democracy did you find social media is having? I’m old enough to remember when techno-evangelists like Clay Shirky were predicting that social media would unleash a wave of democratization in the developing world. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. Or has it?I had that same arc of initially seeing social media as a democratizing force.So did a lot of Arab Spring activists from the early 2010s, like Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian revolutionary and Google engineer. But, within a few years, Ghonim had come to conclude, he has said in a TED Talk, that “the same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart” by “amplifying the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers and hate speech.”A neutral social media really could be a democratizing force, in theory. But the major platforms are far from neutral. They are deliberately designed to manipulate you, and to manipulate your experience on the platform in ways that will change how you think and how you behave. These platforms do this not just by what they show you, but also by eliciting certain emotions and behaviors from you.All this digital manipulation, at the scale of maybe hundreds of hours per year, changes you. And not just online, but in your offline life, too. It changes your emotional makeup, the way that you approach politics, your sense of your own identity — even the way that you process right and wrong.For an individual user — and we now have hard, empirical, scientific evidence for this — the effect can be to make you angrier, more extreme and intolerant, more distrustful, more prone to divide the world between us and them, and more disposed toward hostility and even violence against people outside your social in-group.This might change you just by a matter of degree. But when you multiply this effect out by billions of users, and often among a majority of the population, the effect can change society as a whole, too, and especially its politics, in ways that can be detrimental to democracy.What do you think most people miss about the link between social media and threats to democracy?One thing that social platforms have done — and it’s hard to blame this entirely on Silicon Valley — is to displace the traditional activism that is an important part of bringing about democracy or of preventing an existing democracy from backsliding.That activism used to happen through organizing among real-world networks, like student groups during the civil rights movement in the United States, or mothers’ groups in 1970s Argentina resisting that country’s dictatorship. Now, social media allows a protest group, even a leaderless one, to skip that process and, by going viral online, to activate thousands or even millions of people overnight.That is really effective at driving huge numbers of people onto the street, but not at much else.With the advent of social media, the number of mass protest events in the world shot way up. A million people marching on a capital city became a more common occurrence. But the success rate of those movements fell from about 70 percent to only 30 percent.The Yellow Vests movement in France quickly gained momentum in 2018 before fizzling out.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesThe Yellow Vests, the French protest movement that began in 2018, exemplifies this. It was this stunning, spontaneous, nationwide uprising for political change. And it had been organized almost entirely through Facebook and other platforms. But it was also internally incoherent. For all its force, it quickly fizzled out, having caused a lot of traffic problems but having changed very little.Partly that was because of what had been lost in the displacement of traditional organizing. But partly it was also because of the distorting effects of those platforms. Those systems, just as they do for users globally, had pulled the Yellow Vests supporters who were gathering on those platforms toward extremes: demands to bar all refugees from the country, to default on the national debt, to replace elected legislatures with fuzzily defined citizens’ councils.It’s not the only reason the Yellow Vests mostly receded, but it is, I think, a metaphor for those platforms’ effects on our societies and democracies broadly.What to read about democracyLuke Broadwater and Michael Schmidt have an update on the long-shot push, led by some members of Congress and nonprofit groups, to bar Donald Trump from running for president in 2024 by invoking the 14th Amendment to establish him as an “insurrectionist.”Writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik asks a provocative question: Can’t we come up with something better than liberal democracy?The editorial board of The New York Times is reaching out to readers to ask: What concerns and confounds you about the state of American democracy? Read about the project here.Thank you for reading On Politics. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      in Elections

      Democrats Didn’t Conjure Up the Demand for MAGA Candidates

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      In my column this week, I tackled some of the major objections to President Biden’s Philadelphia speech on MAGA Republicans and the threat they pose to democracy, including the view that it was too divisive.Even if it was, most Americans land on Biden’s side of the argument — in a Reuters poll conducted just a few days after the speech, 58 percent of respondents, including a quarter of Republicans, said that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement is “threatening America’s democratic foundations.”What I didn’t address was the charge that Biden, and Democrats in general, are acting in bad faith when they condemn Trump and his allies. If Democrats truly believe that MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy, goes the argument, why are they spending tens of millions of dollars to elevate them in Republican primaries? My colleagues Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens both made a version of this point in their respective columns this week.They are keyed into something real: that it is a bit unsavory, if not outright hypocritical, for Democrats to spend huge sums to help nominate MAGA Republicans at the expense of their more moderate, pro-democracy colleagues while condemning those same candidates, and the movement they represent, as a threat to the constitutional order.Where I part ways with my colleagues is in their conclusion that Democrats are therefore crying alligator tears when they condemn MAGA extremists. If the top priority is depriving the Republican Party of power and influence, then the most important thing for Democrats to do, right now, is win elections. And if the most Trump-aligned candidates tend to be the weakest challengers in a general election, then it is entirely consistent with the argument in Biden’s speech to want to elevate those candidates over more moderate alternatives.At the end of the day, a more moderate Republican in Congress is still a vote for Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House or Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader. It is still a vote, in other words, for a coalition that includes MAGA Republicans.I could leave it there, except that I think that this answer concedes too much to the premise. Implicit in the question is the factual claim that Democratic spending in Republican primaries is either responsible for — or a significant factor in — the success of MAGA candidates with Republican voters. Otherwise, why would Democrats spend the money and why would conservatives complain about the outcome?I think it is true that Democratic spending has had an effect. But I think the more significant reason that Republican voters keep nominating MAGA candidates is that Republican voters like MAGA candidates. All you have to do is look at the results of the Republican primaries in question and ask if Democratic money really mattered that much.Did Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, spend millions to give a boost to Darren Bailey, the Trumpiest candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary? Yes. But Bailey led the Republican field before Pritzker’s intervention, swamping his opponents in an October 2021 poll. Democrats may have nudged some undecided voters into Bailey’s camp, but that alone does not explain how the hard-right Republican won more than 57 percent of the vote in a six-way primary. The more likely answer, given his early lead, is that Republican voters liked what Bailey was selling.The same goes for Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, the pro-insurrection Republican candidate for governor. Democrats gave him a boost as well. But he led the Republican pack for much of the race and his final tally — nearly 44 percent of the vote in an eight-way contest — reflects his very real popularity with Republican voters in the state.The other thing to consider is the actual content of Democratic ads on behalf of MAGA Republican candidates. The ad meant to support Mastriano, for example, simply stated his conservative views and emphasized his support for Trump. The ad said that Mastriano wanted to “outlaw abortion” and is “one of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters.” It also points out that Mastriano “wants to end vote by mail, and he led the fight to audit the 2020 election. If Mastriano wins, it’s a win for what Donald Trump stands for.”It is not the Democratic Party’s fault that Republicans are attracted to this message, and nothing forced Republicans in Pennsylvania or Illinois (or Michigan or Arizona) to nominate the most MAGA candidates in the field. Republicans voters like Trump and they want Trumpist candidates, and where there’s demand, supply usually follows.Which is to say that even with Democratic intervention in Republican primaries, the thrust of Biden’s story about the Republican Party still holds up. The party has been captured by extremists, and it’s up to the rest of us to ensure that it doesn’t win more power than it already has.What I WroteMy Friday column was on President Biden’s Philadelphia speech, why I think the objections to it are misguided, and what, if anything, was missing from his argument that the MAGA movement is a threat to American democracy.To divide against a radical minority that would attack and undermine democratic self-government is to divide along the most inclusive lines possible. It is to do a version of what Franklin Roosevelt did when he condemned“organized money,” “economic royalists” and the “forces of selfishness and lust for power.”And in the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, Unclear and Present Danger, we discussed the 1992 crime thriller “Deep Cover” with special guest Adam Serwer of The Atlantic.Now ReadingAdam Serwer on free speech for The Atlantic.Jerusalem Demsas on “Black flight” for The Atlantic.Blair McClendon on Jordan Peele’s “Nope” for Mubi.Andrew Elrod on Watergate for N+1 magazine.Rick Perlstein on the assault on public schools for The Forum.Keisha N. Blain on objectivity in history for The New Republic.Feedback If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to your friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at jamelle-newsletter@nytimes.com. You can follow me on Twitter (@jbouie), Instagram and TikTok.Photo of the WeekJamelle BouieI went to a car show in nearby Culpepper, Va., and took a few photos. This was one of the better ones. I used Ilford black and white film and a Voigtlander 35mm lens.Now Eating: Farro Broccoli Bowl with Lemony TahiniI’ve been on a real grain salad kick — they’re easy to make for lunch — and this is the latest one. I have no real changes to make. I used more broccoli than the recipe called for and also added a bunch of cilantro. Personally, I would go heavy on the tahini, but I like tahini quite a bit. Your mileage may vary. Recipe comes from NYT Cooking.IngredientsKosher salt1½ cups farro, rinsed and drained4 large eggs, scrubbed under hot running water1 large head broccoli, cut into florets, tender stems sliced2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil1 teaspoon soy sauce, plus more for serving2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil1 tablespoon sesame seeds1 scallion, thinly slicedHot sauce or thinly sliced green chiles, for serving (optional)2½ tablespoons fresh lemon juice, plus more for serving1 garlic clove, finely grated or minced¼ teaspoon kosher salt, plus more as needed⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more as needed3 tablespoons tahiniDirectionsBring a medium pot of salted water to a boil. Add farro and eggs. Cook eggs for 6 minutes for very runny centers and 7 minutes for medium-runny. Use a slotted spoon to transfer eggs to a bowl of cold water. Let them sit for 2 minutes, then crack and carefully peel the eggs.Continue to let the farro cook until done according to package directions, usually a total of 20 to 40 minutes. Drain farro.As farro cooks, prepare the dressing: In a medium bowl, whisk together lemon juice, garlic and ¼ teaspoon salt. Let sit for 1 minute, then whisk in oil, a few drops at a time, until emulsified. Whisk in tahini and set aside.Broil the broccoli: Position the rack underneath your broiler so that it’s at least 4 inches away from the heating element; heat the broiler.On a rimmed baking sheet, toss broccoli with olive oil and soy sauce, then spread the pieces out into an even layer. Broil until slightly charred in spots, 2 to 5 minutes, watching closely so that it doesn’t burn all over (a few burned spots are OK). Let cool slightly, then toss with sesame oil and sesame seeds and cover to keep warm. (You can also roast the broccoli at 450 degrees for 8 to 15 minutes instead of broiling.)Toss cooked farro with 5 to 6 tablespoons tahini dressing to taste, a large pinch of salt and a drizzle of olive oil. Taste, and add salt and olive oil if needed.To serve, divide farro across 4 serving bowls and drizzle with remaining dressing. Top with turnips, and sprinkle them lemon juice and salt. Add broccoli and egg to the bowl and garnish with sliced scallions and more sesame. Serve immediately, with soy sauce, hot sauce, and-or sliced chiles on the side if you like. More

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      in Elections

      Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungary and Turkey

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      A conversation with Max Fisher, who covers the decline of democracy around the world.Friday’s newsletter is a discussion with Max Fisher, an international reporter and columnist for The New York Times who covers conflict, diplomacy and the sweeping sociopolitical changes taking place all over the globe.Max often delves deep into the world of ideas and where they intersect with the real world, from the rise of new social movements to the subject of today’s chat: the decline of democracy in the United States and abroad.Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:You recently wrote about how democracy is under threat all over the world. What did you find most worrying?That democracy is declining more or less everywhere now. Not necessarily in every country but in every region, in rich and poor countries, old and new democracies. And the decline is incremental but steady, which means that the scale of the change isn’t necessarily obvious until you start looking at the data.We tend to think of democratic decline as something that happens in big dramatic moments — a coup, a government collapsing, tanks in the streets. But that’s not typically how it happens anymore.What happens is more like what has occurred in Venezuela, say, or Turkey or Hungary. Elected leaders rise within a democracy promising to defeat some threat within, and in the process end up slowly tearing that democracy down.Each step feels dangerous but maybe not outright authoritarian — the judiciary gets politicized a little, some previously independent institution gets co-opted, election rules get changed, news outlets come under tighter government control.No individual step feels as drastic as an outright coup. And because these leaders both promote and benefit from social polarization, these little power grabs might even be seen by supporters as saving democracy.But over many years, the system tilts more and more toward autocracy.That doesn’t always end up leading to full-on dictatorship. But that pull toward elected strongmen rulers is something we see happening in dozens of countries. By the sheer numbers, according to a democracy monitoring group called V-Dem, more democracies are in decline today than at any other point in the last century.What did you find most surprising?There’s one chart I think about a lot that was put together by the political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. They tracked every election in Europe, at every level, going back decades. And they looked at how populist candidates did, on average in those elections, over time.Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart(Political scientists typically use the word “populist” to describe politicians who champion cultural backlash and oppose establishment institutions. Here’s a definition from the book “How Democracies Die,” by two academics named Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “anti-establishment politicians — figures who, claiming to represent the voice of ‘the people,’ wage war on what they depict as a corrupt and conspiratorial elite.”)What Norris and Inglehart found was that, in Europe, populists have been receiving a steadily larger share of the vote, on average, basically every year since 1960. That year is important because it’s roughly when Western countries, as the colonial era ended, collectively began to embrace what we now think of as full, liberal, multiracial democracy. And that is also the moment, it turns out from this research, when populist politics began steadily rising in a backlash to that new liberal-democratic order.That discovery is really important for understanding the threat to democracy. It shows that, for all the ways that we might think of the threat as top-down, it’s also, and maybe chiefly, bottom-up.And though we might tie the rise of populist hard-liner politics to specific events like the global financial crisis of 2007-8 or the refugee crisis of the mid-2010s, this is in fact something much larger.It’s a deeper backlash against the demands of modern liberal democracy — and this is something I’ve written about a lot over the past few years — both among voters who feel that they’re being asked to soften their racial and religious identities and among leaders who are being asked to compromise their political self-interest for the sake of democratic norms.What patterns have you found abroad that you now see in the United States?The United States fits pretty cleanly into what is now a well-established global pattern of democratic backsliding..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.First, society polarizes, often over a backlash to social change, to demographic change, to strengthening political power by racial, ethnic or religious minorities, and generally amid rising social distrust.This leads to a bottom-up desire for populist outsiders who will promise to confront the supposed threat within, which means suppressing the other side of that social or partisan or racial divide, asserting a vision of democracy that grants special status for “my” side, and smashing the democratic institutions or norms that prevent that side from asserting what is perceived to be its rightful dominance.You also tend to see political parties and other establishment gatekeepers, who are in theory meant to keep authoritarians from rising in politics, either weaken or become co-opted. Once populist hard-liners gain enough power to begin eroding democratic checks, such as an independent judiciary or the rule of law, it’s usually a steady slide toward democratic erosion.This trend has really picked up speed, globally, only in the last 20 years or so. So it’s hard to say exactly how common it is for countries that begin on this path to end up like Hungary or Turkey. But very few democracies have begun to slide and then reversed course.You have a new book called “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.” In your reporting and research for the book, what sorts of effects on democracy did you find social media is having? I’m old enough to remember when techno-evangelists like Clay Shirky were predicting that social media would unleash a wave of democratization in the developing world. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. Or has it?I had that same arc of initially seeing social media as a democratizing force.So did a lot of Arab Spring activists from the early 2010s, like Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian revolutionary and Google engineer. But, within a few years, Ghonim had come to conclude, he has said in a TED Talk, that “the same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart” by “amplifying the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers and hate speech.”A neutral social media really could be a democratizing force, in theory. But the major platforms are far from neutral. They are deliberately designed to manipulate you, and to manipulate your experience on the platform in ways that will change how you think and how you behave. These platforms do this not just by what they show you, but also by eliciting certain emotions and behaviors from you.All this digital manipulation, at the scale of maybe hundreds of hours per year, changes you. And not just online, but in your offline life, too. It changes your emotional makeup, the way that you approach politics, your sense of your own identity — even the way that you process right and wrong.For an individual user — and we now have hard, empirical, scientific evidence for this — the effect can be to make you angrier, more extreme and intolerant, more distrustful, more prone to divide the world between us and them, and more disposed toward hostility and even violence against people outside your social in-group.This might change you just by a matter of degree. But when you multiply this effect out by billions of users, and often among a majority of the population, the effect can change society as a whole, too, and especially its politics, in ways that can be detrimental to democracy.What do you think most people miss about the link between social media and threats to democracy?One thing that social platforms have done — and it’s hard to blame this entirely on Silicon Valley — is to displace the traditional activism that is an important part of bringing about democracy or of preventing an existing democracy from backsliding.That activism used to happen through organizing among real-world networks, like student groups during the civil rights movement in the United States, or mothers’ groups in 1970s Argentina resisting that country’s dictatorship. Now, social media allows a protest group, even a leaderless one, to skip that process and, by going viral online, to activate thousands or even millions of people overnight.That is really effective at driving huge numbers of people onto the street, but not at much else.With the advent of social media, the number of mass protest events in the world shot way up. A million people marching on a capital city became a more common occurrence. But the success rate of those movements fell from about 70 percent to only 30 percent.The Yellow Vests movement in France quickly gained momentum in 2018 before fizzling out.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesThe Yellow Vests, the French protest movement that began in 2018, exemplifies this. It was this stunning, spontaneous, nationwide uprising for political change. And it had been organized almost entirely through Facebook and other platforms. But it was also internally incoherent. For all its force, it quickly fizzled out, having caused a lot of traffic problems but having changed very little.Partly that was because of what had been lost in the displacement of traditional organizing. But partly it was also because of the distorting effects of those platforms. Those systems, just as they do for users globally, had pulled the Yellow Vests supporters who were gathering on those platforms toward extremes: demands to bar all refugees from the country, to default on the national debt, to replace elected legislatures with fuzzily defined citizens’ councils.It’s not the only reason the Yellow Vests mostly receded, but it is, I think, a metaphor for those platforms’ effects on our societies and democracies broadly.What to read about democracyLuke Broadwater and Michael Schmidt have an update on the long-shot push, led by some members of Congress and nonprofit groups, to bar Donald Trump from running for president in 2024 by invoking the 14th Amendment to establish him as an “insurrectionist.”Writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik asks a provocative question: Can’t we come up with something better than liberal democracy?The editorial board of The New York Times is reaching out to readers to ask: What concerns and confounds you about the state of American democracy? Read about the project here.Thank you for reading On Politics. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Live by the Trump, Die by the Trump

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      Republicans’ amoral alliance with the former president may well be a midterms curse.Ben WisemanDemocrats were doomed. We prediction-mad pundits felt predictable certainty about that. The recent history of midterm elections augured disaster for the party in power. Inflation would make the damage that much worse.So why are Republicans sweating?Their overreach on abortion and the subsequent mobilization of women voters explain a great deal but not everything. There’s another prominent plotline. Its protagonist is Donald Trump. And its possible moral is a sweet and overdue pileup of clichés — about reaping what you sow, paying the piper, lying in the bed you’ve made.Republicans chose to kneel before him. Will he now bring them to their knees?Thanks in large part to Trump, they’re stuck with Senate candidates — Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona — whose ineptness, inanity, immoderation or all three significantly diminish their chances in purple states at a propitious juncture.Thanks in even larger part to Trump, voters ranked threats to democracy as the most pressing problem facing the country in a recent NBC News poll. That intensifying concern is among the reasons that President Biden went so big and bold last week in his intensely debated speech about extremism in America. He was eyeing the midterms, and he was wagering that Republican leaders’ indulgence of Trump’s foul play and fairy tales might finally cost them.Trump is also a factor in Republicans’ vulnerability regarding abortion rights. For his own selfish political purposes, he made grand anti-abortion promises. He appointed decidedly anti-abortion judges, including three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. He as much as anyone fired up the anti-abortion movement to the point where Republicans may now get burned.With two months until Election Day, Republicans want to focus voters’ attention on unaffordable housing, exorbitant grocery bills and the generally high cost of living. They want to instill deeper and broader fear about immigration and crime. They want to portray Democrats as the enemies of the American way.But that’s more than a little tricky when Trump had America’s secrets strewn throughout the bowels of Mar-a-Loco. When his excuses for mishandling those classified documents change at a dizzying clip, contradict previous ones and often boil down to his typical infantile formula of I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I. When he uses Truth Social, the media penal colony to which Twitter and Facebook sentenced him, for all the old falsehoods plus new ones. When criminal charges against him aren’t out of the question.The progressive excesses of some Democrats pale beside the madness of this would-be monarch.Democrats could still have a bad, even brutal, November. That is indeed how the pendulum historically swings, and two months is plenty of time for political dynamics to change yet again. Biden could overplay his hand, a possibility suggested by that speech.But for the moment, Republicans are spooked. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, has decided to try to recapture the party’s long-ago Contract-With-America magic by detailing a “Commitment to America” that will no doubt omit what should be the most important commitment of all — to the truth. It also won’t erase the fact that 196 of the 529 Republican nominees running for the House, the Senate, governor, attorney general or secretary had “fully denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election,” according to a chilling FiveThirtyEight analysis of the party’s nominees as of Wednesday.That morally corrupt position was probably a political asset in their primaries, just as having Trump’s endorsement usually was. But in the general election? As Republican nominees pivot toward that, at least a few of them are realizing that it’s a different ballgame — and that Trump is trouble. They’re taking baby steps away from the world’s biggest baby.Good luck with that. He’ll never let them go, never muffle himself long enough or behave well enough for there to be a Republican narrative that doesn’t revolve around him. That was clear to Republicans from the start. To hang with him is to hang with him.Words Worth SideliningSean Penn in his early, star-making role as the stoner Jeff Spicoli in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”PhotofestThe debut of “Words Worth Sidelining” last month prompted a tsunami of emails, which I’m sure I told friends was “amazing.”Gabriela Kegalj of Toronto would have my head for that.Her email was one of the many droplets of water in that great wave, and its purpose was the classification of “amazing” as “a linguistic sickness,” used so promiscuously that it means nothing anymore.“Human birth is amazing,” she wrote. “The images captured by the James Webb telescope are amazing. Toast is not amazing — neither is hair, your shoes or your new enamel-coated cast-iron made-in-France skillet.”She’s right, of course. To be “amazing” something should genuinely “amaze” you or a saner analogue of you, and that’s a high bar, suggesting that the thing in question almost defies belief, leaves you dumbfounded, perhaps casts a sort of spell on you, maybe even flabbergasts you. (No, I did not just take out a thesaurus, though that litany probably would have been better if I had consulted one.) In its purest form, “amaze” has an aura of magic, a touch of grandeur. It’s squandered on a skillet. (On a top-notch air fryer, however …)“Amazing” as a ubiquitous catchall encomium seems to be most popular among young adults. It’s another thing for which we can thank Generation Y or Z. (I lose my bearings at the end of the generational alphabet.) It’s to 20-somethings today what “awesome” was to 20-somethings of my time, and both words belong to an ignoble tradition of overstatement that’s fetchingly playful and theatrical at first but then just reflexive and banal.That tradition includes “brilliant,” which is the British version of “amazing.” It includes “perfect,” an adjectival crime of which I’m guilty. The brunch plans that a friend just floated? “Perfect,” I say, though they’re not. They’re convenient. They’re sensible. Maybe they’re even mildly exciting. But “perfect” would be Thomas Keller waltzing into my bedroom with his finest Gruyere omelet and a pitcher of mimosas on a brushed nickel tray that enables me to eat and drink while still under the covers, deep in a gripping mystery novel. That’s a brunch you can’t improve on. And that’s what “perfect” means.Of course, “perfect” is polite. “Brilliant” and “amazing,” too. “Awesome” at this late date just sounds like the sub-articulate raving of a stoner — but that could be because I’ll always associate it with Jeff Spicoli, the dazed and bemused character brought to unforgettable life by Sean Penn in the 1982 movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” I loved his performance.I might even call it amazing.“Words Worth Sidelining” will appear every month or so, at least for a while. To suggest a term or phrase, please email me here, please put “Words Worth Sidelining” in the subject line and please include your name and place of residence.For the Love of SentencesThe walrus Freya was a harbor fixture.Tor Erik Schroder/NTB Scanpix, via Associated PressWhen we met here three weeks ago, many of you were aptly besotted with Dwight Garner’s review of Jared Kushner’s White House memoir, “Breaking History,” in The Times. Although I showcased one sentence from it, I could have showcased half a dozen. That review yielded more nominations for this feature than any article ever had.So it feels right to begin today with a favorite line of yours from Elizabeth Spiers’s subsequent review of Kushner’s MAGA opus in The Washington Post. She called the book “a portrait of a man whose moral compass has been demagnetized.” (Thanks to Barry Bergen of Lisbon, Portugal, and Lois DiTommaso of Rutherford, N.J., among many others, for nominating this.)Also in The Post, Michael Gerson contrasted Christianity at its best with what Trump’s evangelical supporters have not only accepted but also embraced: “It is difficult for me to understand why so many believers have turned down a wedding feast to graze in political dumpsters.” (Carol Mack, Minneapolis, and Peggy Somermeyer, Richmond, Texas, among others)And Dan Zak wondered why, during a water crisis, we cling to a certain sponge. “Lawns: burned out, blond and dead, in the air fryer of August,” he wrote. “Lawns: emerald green — no, alien green — and kept that way by maniacal vigilance and an elaborate system of pipes and potions, organic and otherwise, in defiance of ecology. And for what? To have, in this chaos, dominion over something?” (Judy Morice, Lansdale, Pa.)In The Guardian, Andrew Rawnsley fashioned a deft start to a recent plaint about Britain’s political woes: “I have an issue with the phrase ‘zombie government.’ Say what you like about the walking dead, they occasionally get their teeth into things.” (Marianne Valentine, Johannesburg, South Africa)In The Tampa Bay Times, John Romano reflected on the predominance of passing over rushing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, led by the phenomenal quarterback Tom Brady: “When you have Eric Clapton in your band, you don’t schedule a lot of drum solos.” (Tom Akins, Trinity, Fla.)As for the abundance of standout sentences from my colleagues at this fine news organization, here’s Jason Horowitz on Norwegian officials’ killing of the female walrus Freya: “On Friday, they decided that she would no longer swim with the fishes.” (Anne Melanson, Manhattan, and Jeff Hiday, Vienna, Va., among others)Libby Watson on Amazon versus a challenge famously resistant to efficiency and ingenuity: “Put it up against the problems of the American health care system, and it looks like David with a slingshot made of wet spaghetti.” (Marianne Lambelet, Farmington, Conn.)Bret Stephens on Trump’s evolving excuses for absconding with classified documents: “With Trump, the line between the shambolic and the sinister is often blurred. His entire being is like Inspector Clouseau doing an impression of Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining,’ or maybe vice versa.” (Mark Fenske, Moraga, Calif., and Marci Imbrogno, Charlotte, N.C., among others)Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer on that dark bumbler’s deathless tantrums: “Even as he fuels outrage in sympathetic media outlets and tries to turn attention to Mr. Biden and the so-called deep state, Mr. Trump is to some extent walking on the phantom limbs of his expired presidency.” (Margaret Akin, San Diego, and Donae Ceja, Akron, Ohio, among others)And Charles Blow on what Mike Pence, the former vice president, is selling to voters who thrilled to Trump but might prefer a saner alternative: “someone who has touched the hem of the garment but has not put on the straitjacket.” (Helen Mooty, Seabrook, Texas, and Linda McCray, Dayton, Ohio, among others)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.On a Personal NoteJohn Houseman (far right) in his Oscar-winning role as an intimidating, exacting professor in “The Paper Chase.”20th Century Fox/Jagarts, via PhotofestA new semester just began, my third at Duke University, and last week I met the dozen students in my writing seminar. Three of them I was really reconnecting with — I’ve had them in classes of mine before, and I apparently didn’t screw up too badly.I’m still a novice at this professor gig, still wondering how it’s done best, still hitting up colleagues for their wisdom and, above all, still asking the question: What do we owe students — in general and, specifically, at this moment in time?We owe them candor. We always have. But one of the greatest challenges of teaching is calibrating the optimal mix of candor and kindness, because we owe them the latter, too. Even college-age students are relatively raw, with undiscovered or unrealized talents whose development depends on encouragement, so “The Paper Chase” model of supposedly constructive effacement seems wrong to me. It might toughen some of them. It might break others.Unearned or exaggerated praise, though, isn’t the answer. It can make students believe that they’ve aced something they haven’t and found a calling when they didn’t. That’s not kindness. That’s cowardice. It’s also deception.We owe students something else, too — or at least I think, in my novicehood, that we do. We owe them doubt.In our world now, there’s a tug toward premature and excessive certainty, even stridency. (Or, worse yet, snark.) Social media rewards that.It fuels our politics, too. Many leaders and voters alike rush toward judgments and then won’t back off them, and those judgments are often just the borrowed opinions of their chosen clique. They’re the fruits of identity, not inquiry.In that context, shouldn’t we professors be wary of modeling anything akin to voice-of-God omniscience? Yes, there are things we know — facts and insights that we must share with students, skills that we’re there to show them how to acquire. We mustn’t be shy about those.But there are also things that we don’t know, things that no one can fully know, subjects that aren’t quickly reducible to tidy talking points. “It’s complicated,” I say constantly to students. “It’s debatable.” “Maybe.” “Possibly.” “Probably.”“Definitely” is more alluring. But that’s precisely the reason to resist it. More

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      4 Types of Voters We’re Watching in the Midterms

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      For our podcast The Run-Up, Astead Herndon and his team are talking with voters of all stripes. For many of them, frustration with politics is tied to their worries about democracy.Today’s newsletter is a guest piece from Astead Herndon, a reporter for The New York Times who is hosting our political podcast The Run-Up, which returned this week. Listen to the first episode here. You can follow The Run-Up on platforms including Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and Amazon Music.Voters in both parties think the United States is heading in the wrong direction, public opinion surveys show — and, more alarming, large majorities of Americans believe democracy is in danger of collapse.The Run-Up, a political podcast that I host, explores how Democratic and Republican voters came to agree on that worry and how these midterm elections might break from the historical mold.For our first episode, we called dozens of voters who had participated in New York Times polling to talk about their concerns in greater detail. The conversations made clear that for many people, frustration with politics is tied to worries about democracy.Photo illustration: The New York Times; Photo: Samuel Corum for The New York TimesHere are four types of voters who could be pivotal in the midterms and from whom we’ll be hearing more on The Run-Up as November approaches:The skeptical Trump voter“The voting system is not secure, and I’m just having doubts as to whether or not it’ll make a difference if I vote at all.” — Belinda SchoendorfIn several nonpresidential elections since the 2020 contest between Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, a dip in enthusiasm from Trump’s voters has hurt Republican candidates. Most notably, in the two Senate elections that took place in Georgia before Biden’s inauguration, Republican voters failed to turn out in large numbers for their party’s candidates.Worries about election integrity, stoked by the false conspiracy theories Trump and his allies have embraced, have discouraged some of the most energized conservative voters from casting ballots or supporting candidates who do not reflect Trump’s wild claims. The result is a Republican quandary: a midterm landscape with candidates who reflect Trump’s grievances but have not motivated his voters to the same degree that he did.In this year’s midterm elections so far, Democratic energy has surged — in what appears to be a result of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. If Republicans are to turn their hopes around, they will need their most passionate voters to match Democrats’ newfound enthusiasm, even though Trump won’t be on the 2022 ballot himself.The court’s decision has scrambled the typical midterm circumstances, in which the party out of power enjoys the benefits of an energized voting base.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries winding down, both parties are starting to shift their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Battleground Pennsylvania: Few states feature as many high-stakes, competitive races as Pennsylvania, which has emerged as the nation’s center of political gravity.The Dobbs Decision’s Effect: Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the number of women signing up to vote has surged in some states and the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage are hard to see.How a G.O.P. Haul Vanished: Last year, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans was smashing fund-raising records. Now, most of the money is gone.Digital Pivot: At least 10 G.O.P. candidates in competitive races have updated their websites to minimize their ties to former President Donald J. Trump or to adjust their stances on abortion.The young voterBiden “isn’t taking the action that needs to be taken on things like health care, climate change, etc. And I don’t feel like he’s using the tools he could use if he wanted to, you know, make good on his campaign promises.” — Lucy Ackerman, 23Biden’s approval rating hit rock bottom this summer, to the point where even many Democratic voters expressed frustration with his administration.But in the past month, he has improved his historically low standing among voters by appearing to win back some of these same Democrats — those who believed that the president and his administration should do more for those who elevated him to power.This comes after the White House has notched a series of legislative victories in recent weeks — most notably a sweeping climate, tax and drug-pricing package that followed through on several campaign promises. Biden also moved to cancel billions of dollars in student debt for borrowers.However, the constituencies among whom student debt relief polls the best — particularly young people — do not always turn out in big numbers during midterm elections. Democrats are hoping that changes in November.Lucy Ackerman, 23, a recent college graduate, said she felt young people weren’t receiving an adequate return on their vote for Biden. The reasons extended beyond policy to a fear that Democrats weren’t doing enough to address problems she believed were distorting democracy, including gerrymandering, the Senate filibuster and the Electoral College.Will young voters reward Democrats for Biden’s major move on student debt? Or will it not be enough to change their traditional behavior, considering that the president, who served in Congress for nearly half a century, represents the political establishment to many of these voters?President Biden’s approval ratings have risen lately after dropping into the 30s.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe disillusioned Democrat“I think democracy is much more fragile than I thought.” — Ramiro MartinezIf Biden’s actions on student debt could energize young people, other policies would be more relevant to moderate Democrats.Beyond the climate and tax bill, Democratic candidates are promoting the party’s legislative accomplishments on gun control, infrastructure and coronavirus relief. The party has taken to promoting its ability to “deliver” in advertisements across the country, an acknowledgment that the midterms could be a judgment on their policy agenda.However, voter decisions aren’t made only on policy grounds. Ramiro Martinez, a Democrat who lives in Massachusetts, said that he appreciated Biden’s focus on Trump in the Democratic primary but that he had been disillusioned by the country’s direction since Biden’s inauguration. Recent Supreme Court decisions have rocked his faith in electoral politics, and he has also been frustrated with some cultural changes he sees in the Democratic Party.In fact, Ramiro framed his voting decision in those terms, balancing the threats to democracy he believes Republicans pose with frustrations he has with a Democratic Party that has — in his words — become “woke,” embracing ideas on race and social justice that he felt were rigid and uncompromising.Still, Ramiro said he expected to back Democratic candidates, particularly after watching the Jan. 6 committee hearings in the House of Representatives. Democrats are hoping that moderate liberals across the country make a similar calculation.The non-MAGA Republican“I tended to support Trump for a long time. But he’s just, he has gone too far negative.” — Clair CowdenThe most important demographic in the midterms could be the moderate Republican voter.Although Trump has continued to dominate the Republican Party, whose base reflects his interests and grievances, some G.O.P. voters have tired of his constant headlines. Need proof? Trump’s favorability rating has dipped among Republicans — and potential rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, notably Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, have started to emerge.Clair Cowden, who once voted for Trump, said she had been turned off by what she learned during the Jan. 6 committee hearings about his actions.Biden and other Democrats have bet their electoral hopes in part on moderate attrition from the Republican Party. In races for Senate and governor — particularly in states with Trump-like candidates on the ballot, such as Arizona, Ohio and Wisconsin — Democrats have asked moderate Republicans to put ideological differences aside in the name of preserving democracy.However, as issues like inflation and the economy continue to dominate voters’ lists of concerns, the question for Democrats is one of urgency. Will voters see protecting democracy to be as pressing a political challenge as Biden does? Or will other issues — where Democrats poll worse — take greater precedence?We’ll be listening to their answers. For today’s, tune in here.What to readIn one of the nation’s most prominent governor’s races, Democrats in Georgia are increasingly worried about Stacey Abrams’s chances of beating Gov. Brian Kemp as she consistently trails him in polls. Maya King and Reid Epstein dove in.A review by The New York Times of about 400 voting-fraud charges filed nationwide since 2017 underscores that actual prosecutions are exceedingly rare, and that penalties can be wildly inconsistent and are often harsher for poor and Black people. Michael Wines has the details.Election officials are beefing up security for themselves, their employees, polling places and even drop boxes as violent language from the right intensifies. Neil Vigdor surveys the protective steps.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Americans Think Our Democracy Is on the Brink. So Does Biden.

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      We examine the president’s speech in Philadelphia with Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House reporter.In a new national poll this week from Quinnipiac University, 67 percent of American adults said they thought the country’s democracy was “in danger of collapse.”That’s a huge number. And, as Quinnipiac noted, it is an increase of nine percentage points from its January survey, when 58 percent of Americans said the same thing.One noteworthy caveat: “Adults” is not the same as “likely voters,” which is what political pollsters use to estimate who will turn out to vote in the next election. Figuring that out is as much art as it is science, as any pollster worth their salt would acknowledge.In January, Quinnipiac found that 62 percent of Republicans, and 56 percent of Democrats, agreed that America’s democracy was in danger of collapse. In the latest poll, the partisan breakdown is dead even: Sixty-nine percent of Republicans and Democrats alike share that fear.So Democrats have caught up to their Republican counterparts. But their views of who might be responsible for that potential collapse differ greatly, as Peter Baker writes in a forthcoming story analyzing the data in greater detail.The numbers are “disturbing,” Larry Sabato, the longtime director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said in a tweet reacting to the Quinnipiac poll. It doesn’t mean that American democracy is collapsing or will collapse; we’ve arguably endured far worse at various times in our history, and yet, like Tom Brady, we’re still here.But it does mean that people’s confidence in our system of government is declining to an alarming degree.In December, most of the Democratic and Republican political strategists I spoke with said democracy wasn’t a huge topic in their private polling and focus groups and wasn’t likely to move votes in the midterms.Some Democrats also told me then that they worried that drawing too much attention to the issue of “threats to democracy” (as Democrats describe the topic) and “electoral integrity” (as Republicans describe it) would help Republicans, as Donald Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories and election falsehoods seemed to be a powerful motivator for voters in his party’s base.If more voters are indeed starting to prioritize democracy over other issues, that is big news in the political world. But the evidence for that notion is thin at the moment.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsAn Upset in Alaska: Mary Peltola, a Democrat, beat Sarah Palin in a special House election, adding to a series of recent wins for the party. Ms. Peltola will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.Evidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a New York special election is one of the latest examples.G.O.P.’s Dimming Hopes: Republicans are still favored in the fall House races, but former President Donald J. Trump and abortion are scrambling the picture in ways that distress party insiders.Digital Pivot: At least 10 G.O.P. candidates in competitive races have updated their websites to minimize their ties to Mr. Trump or to adjust their uncompromising stances on abortion.Examining Biden’s speechPresident Biden laid out his own concerns about American democracy with a prime-time address on Thursday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. My colleague Zolan Kanno-Youngs was there to capture it along with Michael Shear, his frequent collaborator.I asked Zolan to unpack Biden’s speech — why he made it and what the White House’s political calculations might be, alongside the serious concerns the president laid out in his 24-minute address. (Be sure also to read Peter Baker’s analysis and Jonathan Weisman’s takeaways.)Our Slack chat, lightly edited for length and clarity:You’ve been following President Biden’s focus on threats to democracy for a while now, including his idea for a summit rallying the world’s democracies and Thursday’s speech in Philadelphia. What’s your read on why he is doing this?President Biden has said all along that it is this threat against democracy that motivated him to run for president. For him, this battle began when he saw neo-Nazis and white supremacists marching through Charlottesville in 2017.From the conversations I have had with sources in and around the White House, the president is genuinely concerned about the rise of autocracy overseas and about extremism within the United States. He came into office expecting that people would leave Trumpism behind and that his message of unity and national healing would resonate. That obviously hasn’t happened.Some of his supporters found that assumption to be out of touch with the current polarized state of the nation. He had been planning Thursday’s speech since early this summer because of persistent false claims of election fraud and the impending midterm elections, according to officials familiar with the matter.When you talk to people at the White House, do they say that there is a political upside to Biden’s emphasis on saving democracy from the Republican Party, or that it is purely about substance? Because the political portion of my brain wonders why he keeps returning to a swing state for these speeches. More

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      A Journey Into Misinformation on Social Media

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      “Fake news” has gone from a hot buzzword popularized during the 2016 presidential campaign to an ever-present phenomenon known more formally as misinformation or disinformation.Whatever you call it, sowing F.U.D. — fear, uncertainty and doubt — is now a full-time and often lucrative occupation for the malign foreign actors and even ordinary U.S. citizens who try to influence American politics by publishing information they know to be false.Several of my colleagues here at The New York Times track the trends and shifting tactics of these fraudsters on their daily beats. So I exchanged messages this week with Sheera Frenkel, Tiffany Hsu and Stuart A. Thompson, all three of whom spend their days swimming in the muck brewed by fake news purveyors here and abroad.Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:This is a political newsletter, so let me ask my first question this way: What are you seeing out there that is new during this election cycle, in terms of tactics or topics?Sheera Frenkel: I’d say it’s the way misinformation has shifted slightly, in that you don’t have the same type of superspreaders on platforms like Twitter and Facebook that you did in the 2020 election cycle. Instead, you have lots of smaller-scale accounts spreading misinformation across a dozen or more platforms. It is more pervasive and more deeply entrenched than in previous elections.The most popular topics are largely rehashes of what was spread in the 2020 election cycle. There are a lot of false claims about voter fraud that we first saw made as early as 2016 and 2018. Newspapers, including The New York Times, have debunked many of those claims. That doesn’t seem to stop bad actors from spreading them or people from believing them.Then there are new claims, or themes, that are being spread by more fringe groups and extremist movements that we have started to track.Tiffany Hsu: Sheera first noticed a while back that there was a lot of chatter about “civil war.” And, quickly, we started to see it everywhere — this strikingly aggressive rhetoric that intensified after the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago and with the passage of a bill that will give more resources to the I.R.S.For example, after the F.B.I. search, someone said on Truth Social, the social media platform started by Trump, that “sometimes clearing out dangerous vermin requires a modicum of violence, unfortunately.”We have seen a fair amount of “lock and load” chatter. But there is also pushback on the right, with people claiming without evidence that federal law enforcement or the Democrats are planting violent language to frame conservative patriots as extremists and insurrectionists.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsThe Evidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s increasingly hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a special election in New York’s Hudson Valley is the latest example.New Women Voters: The number of women signing up to vote surged in some states after Roe was overturned, particularly in states where abortion rights are at risk.Sensing a Shift: Abortion rights, falling gas prices, legislative victories and Donald J. Trump’s re-emergence have Democrats dreaming again that they just might keep control of Congress. But the House map still favors Republicans.Bruising Fights in N.Y.: A string of ugly primaries played out across the state, as Democrats and Republicans fought over rival personalities and the ideological direction of their parties.Stuart A. Thompson: I’m always surprised by how much organization is happening around misinformation. It’s not just family members sharing fake news on Facebook anymore. There’s a lot of money sloshing around. There are lots of very well-organized groups that are trying to turn the attention over voter fraud and other conspiracy theories into personal income and political results. It’s a very organized machine at this point, after two years of organizing around the 2020 election. This feels different from previous moments when disinformation seemed to take hold in the country. It’s not just a fleeting interest spurred by a few partisan voices. It’s an entire community and social network and pastime for millions of people.Sheera, you’ve covered Silicon Valley for years. How much progress would you say the big social media players — Facebook/Meta, Twitter and Google, which owns YouTube — have made in tackling the problems that arose during the 2016 election? What’s working and what’s not?Sheera: When we talk about 2016, we are largely talking about foreign election interference. In that case, Russia tried to interfere with U.S. elections by using social media platforms to sow divisions among Americans.Today, the problem of foreign election interference hasn’t been solved, but it is nowhere near at the scale it once was. Companies like Meta, which owns Facebook, and Twitter announce regular takedowns of networks run by Russia, Iran and China aiming to spread disinformation or influence people online. Millions have been spent on security teams at those companies to make sure they are removing foreign actors from spreading disinformation.And while it is not a done deal (bad actors are always innovating!), they’ve made a huge amount of progress in taking down these networks. This week, they even announced for the first time that they had removed a foreign influence op promoting U.S. interests abroad.A cutout of Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, dressed as the “QAnon Shaman” and cutouts of others involved in the Capitol riot before a House hearing last year.Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesWhat has been harder is what to do about Americans’ spreading misinformation to other Americans, and what to do with fringe political movements and conspiracies that continue to spread under the banner of free speech.Many of these social media companies have ended up exactly in the position they hoped to avoid — making one-off decisions on when they remove movements like the QAnon conspiracy group or voter fraud misinformation that begins to go viral. More