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    Trump Heads to North Carolina as Mark Robinson’s Campaign Reels

    With somewhat awkward timing, former President Donald J. Trump plans to campaign in North Carolina on Saturday as his pick for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, faces accusations of making disturbing posts on a pornographic website.Mr. Trump’s visit to Wilmington, N.C., for a rally will take place two days after CNN reported that Mr. Robinson had once called himself a “black NAZI!” and defended slavery years ago on a pornographic forum.Mr. Robinson, whom Mr. Trump endorsed in March, has denied the report and vowed to stay in the race. But both parties are looking closely at the fallout, which could have a spillover effect in the presidential contest, given that North Carolina is a key battleground state that Mr. Trump won twice but that Democrats see as competitive.The lieutenant governor, who has a long history of making inflammatory and offensive remarks, is not expected to attend Mr. Trump’s rally on Saturday, according to a person familiar with the program’s details. Mr. Robinson was also absent when Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, visited the state on Wednesday, the day before CNN released its report.A spokesman for Mr. Robinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. The Trump campaign avoided weighing in on the controversy when asked for comment on Friday.Democrats, who last carried North Carolina in the 2008 presidential race, are seeking to remind voters in the increasingly competitive state about Mr. Trump’s past praise for Mr. Robinson. Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign released a television ad on Friday, “Both Wrong,” highlighting Mr. Trump’s past warm words for Mr. Robinson and some of Mr. Robinson’s past polarizing statements. At least nine electronic billboards around the state will display ads on Friday and Saturday paid for by the Democratic National Committee linking the two Republicans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Harris lidera en el promedio de encuestas en Pensilvania y empata a nivel nacional

    Aunque este escenario inesperado podría reflejar una variación usual en los resultados de las encuestas, también podría señalar una ventaja cada vez menor de Trump en el Colegio Electoral.Kamala Harris lidera por cuatro puntos en nuestro nuevo sondeo de Pensilvania.Kenny Holston/The New York Times[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Tenemos nuestras dos primeras encuestas desde el debate presidencial de la semana pasada: una a nivel nacional y otra sobre Pensilvania.Combinadas, son un pequeño enigma.En la encuesta nacional, Kamala Harris y Donald Trump están empatados entre los votantes probables, ambos con un 47 por ciento, un ligero avance para Harris desde nuestra encuesta nacional más reciente, realizada inmediatamente antes del debate.Al mismo tiempo, Harris tenía una ventaja de cuatro puntos en una encuesta de The New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College de Pensilvania, 50 por ciento a 46 por ciento.Antes de entrar en detalles, empecemos por el panorama general:No ha cambiado mucho tras el debate. A pesar de su buena actuación, la vicepresidenta Harris no ganó mucho terreno en comparación con nuestras encuestas más recientes a nivel nacional y en Pensilvania. La encuesta está llena de señales de que nuestros encuestados pensaron que Harris tuvo un buen debate —y que Trump uno malo— pero no ha hecho una gran diferencia, al menos por ahora y al menos en nuestro sondeo.Pensilvania, Pensilvania, Pensilvania. Es posible que Harris no haya ganado mucho, pero su campaña seguramente estará contenta con las cifras en Pensilvania. El resultado nacional, por otra parte, es bastante favorable para Trump (esa es la parte que nos desconcierta y que estamos a punto de analizar). Pero nuestras elecciones se deciden en el Colegio Electoral, y ningún estado tiene un lugar más relevante en las matemáticas electorales que Pensilvania.Ahora vayamos a nuestro enigma: ¿una clara ventaja para Harris en Pensilvania, pero un empate a nivel nacional? Esto es inesperado. Hace cuatro años, el presidente Joe Biden ganó el voto nacional por 4,5 puntos porcentuales, pero ganó Pensilvania por solo 1,2 puntos. Del mismo modo, nuestros promedios de encuestas han mostrado que Harris obtiene mejores resultados a nivel nacional que en Pensilvania. Esta encuesta es casi lo contrario.Por lo general diría que se trata de ruido estadístico, la inevitable variación en los resultados de las encuestas que es inherente al muestreo aleatorio. Y puede que lo sea, como veremos. Pero creo que es difícil suponer que se trata simplemente de ruido, por dos razones:Es lo que hemos señalado antes. Es fácil descartar cualquier resultado de una encuesta como una casualidad estadística. Pero hemos encontrado resultados similares en nuestras dos encuestas más recientes a nivel nacional y en Pensilvania.Esto se está convirtiendo en una tendencia para los encuestadores de alta calidad. Sí, el promedio de nuestras encuestas revela que Harris obtiene mejores resultados a nivel nacional que en Pensilvania, pero la historia es un poco diferente si nos centramos solo en las encuestas de mayor calidad (a las que llamamos “encuestadoras selectas” en nuestra tabla). En el último mes, muchos de estos sondeos muestran que a Harris le va relativamente mal a nivel nacional, pero le va bien en los estados disputados del norte de Estados Unidos.Nota sobre los encuestadores “selectos”: para ser considerados selectos en nuestro promedio de encuestas, los encuestadores deben cumplir dos de los tres criterios siguientes: un historial de resultados superiores a los de otros encuestadores, una metodología transparente y el uso de un método que tenga posibilidades de llegar a la mayoría o a todos los votantes potenciales. No se trata de un enfoque perfecto (omite algunas encuestas muy buenas e incluye otras que no lo son tanto), pero incluye a la mayoría de los pesos pesados del sector y elimina gran parte de lo que no funciona. More

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    Why Trump Can Afford to Disrespect His Anti-Abortion Voters

    The Babylon Bee, which is like The Onion for conservative Christians, last month ran a despairing story about the presidential options anti-abortion voters have before them. “Pro-Lifers Excited to Choose Between Moderate Amount of Baby Murder and High Amount of Baby Murder,” said the headline. It was a dark joke, but it spoke to something real: a disquiet among some anti-abortion activists over Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the abortion bans enabled by his Supreme Court appointees. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told my Times colleague Astead W. Herndon that declining evangelical enthusiasm for Trump could be a “grave danger” to his campaign.As someone who wants Trump to lose, I hope he’s right, but I’m skeptical. “One of the things that Trump has done is reveal what you might call the G.O.P.’s dirty little secret, and that is that it’s never really been only about abortion,” said Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute. Conservative activists, he argued, have long seen themselves as part of a moral crusade against the killing of babies, but Republican voters, even white evangelical ones, tend to have more complicated views. In P.R.R.I. surveys, he said, white evangelicals are more likely to identify the economy, crime and immigration as critical issues than abortion. “The bond between Trump and rank-and-file Republicans and between Trump and white evangelical Protestants has really not been abortion,” said Jones.Clearly, a second Trump presidency would be catastrophic for reproductive rights. He obviously doesn’t care about abortion and is happy to take whatever position suits him at any given moment. But many of the people he will sweep into office with him are devoted to abortion bans. Part of the purpose of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was to make sure there was a deep bench of MAGA apparatchiks ready to staff a second Trump administration, freeing him from the legal and bureaucratic roadblocks that stymied his first administration. The same people Heritage selected to defend Trump at all costs have thought deeply about how to use the levers of the federal government to restrict abortion.Still, in his spasmodic abortion positioning, Trump has annihilated the expectation that Republicans show deference to the social conservatives who’ve been crusading against abortion for a generation. On his vanity social media site, Truth Social, he wrote that he would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” He’s come out against six-week abortion bans. He removed a plank from the Republican Party platform calling for an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution. He’s promised that his administration would provide free in vitro fertilization, a procedure that the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose in June.In doing all this without losing significant support among Christian conservatives, he’s demonstrated how little leverage the anti-abortion movement has over him.Part of the reason Trump is less constrained on this issue than his predecessors is that he’s transformed the Christian right just as he has the broader conservative movement, dethroning serious-seeming figures while promoting those once regarded as flamboyant cranks. In Republican politics, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones now have far more influence than erstwhile conservative stalwarts like Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney. Similarly, in the religious realm, the ex-president has elevated a class of faith healers, prosperity gospel preachers and roadshow revivalists over the kind of respectable evangelicals who clustered around George W. Bush. “Independent charismatic leaders, who 20 years ago would have been mocked by mainstream religious right leaders, are now frontline captains in the American culture wars,” writes the scholar Matthew D. Taylor in his fascinating new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Se enfría el apoyo a Kamala Harris, según una nueva encuesta

    Es la primera encuesta nacional no partidista en un mes en que Donald Trump aventaja a la vicepresidenta; casi el 30 por ciento de los votantes dijo que necesitaban saber más sobre ella.Kamala Harris iba ligeramente por detrás en la última encuesta nacional de Times/SienaJamie Kelter Davis para The New York Times¿Comienza a menguar el auge de Kamala Harris?Esa es la pregunta que plantea la encuesta de ayer del New York Times y el Siena College, según la cual Donald Trump la aventaja por poco entre los votantes probables de todo el país, 48 por ciento a 47 por ciento.Para mí, el resultado es un poco sorprendente. Es la primera ventaja de Trump en una encuesta nacional no partidista en aproximadamente un mes. Por esa razón, vale la pena ser al menos un poco cauteloso acerca de estos resultados, ya que no hay mucha confirmación de otras encuestas.Dicho esto, no sería difícil de explicar si el apoyo de la vicepresidenta Harris realmente se ha desvanecido un poco en las últimas semanas. Después de todo, se estaba beneficiando de un entorno noticioso ideal: un mes ininterrumpido de cobertura elogiosa desde la salida del presidente Joe Biden de la carrera en julio hasta la convención demócrata en agosto. Es posible que se encontrara en un momento de euforia política; de ser así, tendría sentido que se desinflara en las dos semanas sin incidentes transcurridas desde la convención.También hay una razón plausible por la que la encuesta del Times/Siena sería la primera en captar un giro hacia Trump: simplemente no ha habido muchas encuestas de alta calidad desde la convención, cuando Harris estaba en la cresta de la ola. Esta semana ha habido un puñado de encuestas online, pero no ha habido ninguna encuesta tradicional de alta calidad con entrevistas realizadas después del 28 de agosto.¿Por qué no ha habido más encuestas? Una explicación es el fin de semana del Día del Trabajo, que siempre hace una pausa en las encuestas. También es plausible que muchos encuestadores prefieran esperar hasta después del debate del martes antes de hacer otro sondeo. Cualquiera que sea la explicación, la encuesta del Times/Siena sería una de las primeras oportunidades para recoger una reversión hacia Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Floats I.V.F. Coverage Mandate While Campaigning in Michigan

    The week after Democrats spent much of their national convention attacking him over his position on abortion rights and reproductive health, former President Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that he would require insurance companies or the federal government to pay for all costs associated with in vitro fertilization treatments if he is elected in November.Mr. Trump’s announcement — made in an NBC interview, a speech in Michigan and a town hall in Wisconsin — came with little detail about his proposal or how he might address its cost. For one cycle, the treatments can cost up to $20,000 or more. But he has been trying to rebrand himself to voters on reproductive access and abortion rights, issues that have cost Republicans at the ballot box.Mr. Trump, who often on the campaign trail has bragged about his role in appointing Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, last week on social media declared that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” a phrase used by abortion-rights advocates.The post appeared to be an effort by Mr. Trump to cast himself as more of a political moderate on abortion, an issue that could hurt him in November.On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign accused Mr. Trump of trying to run from his record on abortion access.“Trump lies as much if not more than he breathes, but voters aren’t stupid,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for the Harris campaign, said in a statement. “Because Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, I.V.F. is already under attack and women’s freedoms have been ripped away in states across the country.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    In Las Vegas, Trump Calls Harris a ‘Copycat’ Over ‘No Tax on Tips’ Plan

    Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday fumed over the fact that when it comes to exempting tips from being taxed, he and his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, are on the same page.Mr. Trump, before a gathering of supporters at a Las Vegas restaurant, complained that Ms. Harris had stolen his idea and sought to cast her as an opportunist who was pandering to service industry workers by cribbing from one of his signature proposals.“She’s a copycat,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s a flip-flopper, you know. She’s the greatest flip-flopper in history. She went from communism to capitalism in about two weeks.”A Harris campaign spokesman declined to comment. This month, while in Las Vegas herself, Ms. Harris said she would seek to end federal income taxes on tips if she were elected. Mr. Trump first floated the idea in June, and it quickly garnered bipartisan support.He has publicly stewed over her embrace of the plan, especially in Nevada, a battleground state that Mr. Trump lost in 2016 and 2020.Before President Biden withdrew from the race in late July, Mr. Trump had appeared to be on a trajectory to end his electoral drought in the desert — where one of his hotels towers over the Strip. Mr. Biden, whose campaign called the “no tax on tips” overture a “wild campaign promise,” had been trailing Mr. Trump by an average of seven percentage points in Nevada.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Sadness Among Teen Girls May Be Improving, C.D.C. Finds

    A national survey found promising signs that key mental health measures for teens, especially girls, have improved since the depths of the pandemic.In 2021, a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on teen mental health focused on a stark crisis: Nearly three in five teenage girls reported feeling persistent sadness, the highest rate in a decade.But the newest iteration of the survey, distributed in 2023 to more than 20,000 high school students across the country, suggests that some of the despair seen at the height of the pandemic may be lessening.Fifty-three percent of girls reported extreme depressive symptoms in 2023, down from 57 percent in 2021. For comparison, just 28 percent of teenage boys felt persistent sadness, about the same as in 2021.Suicide risk among girls stayed roughly the same as the last survey. But Black students, who reported troubling increases in suicide attempts in 2021, reported significantly fewer attempts in 2023.Still, the number of teens reporting persistent sadness in 2023 remained higher than at any point in the last decade aside from 2021. And around 65 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender high school students reported persistent hopelessness, compared with 31 percent of their cisgender or heterosexual peers. One in five L.G.B.T.Q. students reported attempting suicide in the past year.“For young people, there is still a crisis in mental health,” said Kathleen Ethier, head of the C.D.C.’s adolescent and school health program. “But we’re also seeing some really important glimmers of hope.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Investigadores de oposición hablan de una contundente derrota de Maduro en Venezuela

    El organismo electoral anunció que Nicolás Maduro había obtenido una clara victoria. Sin embargo, las cifras facilitadas al Times por un grupo de investigadores de oposición ponen en entredicho ese resultado.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El organismo electoral de Venezuela anunció el lunes que el presidente del país, Nicolás Maduro, había obtenido una cómoda victoria en las elecciones, ganando otros seis años en el cargo al superar a su principal oponente por siete puntos porcentuales en una votación que se vio empañada por irregularidades generalizadas.Sin embargo, los resultados parciales de las elecciones, facilitados a The New York Times por un grupo de investigadores asociados a la principal alianza opositora de Venezuela, aportan nuevas pruebas que ponen en entredicho el resultado oficial.Sus cifras sugieren que el candidato de la oposición, un diplomático jubilado llamado Edmundo González, en realidad venció a Maduro por más de 30 puntos porcentuales. La estimación de los investigadores del resultado —66 por ciento contra 31 por ciento— es similar al resultado obtenido por una encuesta de salida independiente realizada el día de las elecciones en todo el país.El Times no pudo verificar de manera independiente los conteos, que según los investigadores fueron tomados de los recuentos en papel impresos por unas 1000 máquinas de votación, alrededor del tres por ciento del total del país. El miércoles, la autoridad electoral venezolana, controlada por el gobierno, aún no había publicado los resultados detallados, a pesar de la creciente presión internacional.Pero varios analistas independientes de encuestas y elecciones revisaron el enfoque de los investigadores y dijeron que, basándose en los conteos compartidos en esa investigación, las estimaciones parecían creíbles. Partiendo de los recuentos parciales, el Times pudo replicar ampliamente las estimaciones de los investigadores sobre los resultados con una diferencia de dos puntos porcentuales. More