Presidential Election of 2024

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      Is Paying Kids to Read a Wise Strategy?

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      More from our inbox:Trump and the Psychiatrists: Is He Unfit to Serve?The Folly of a Second DebateA Heartwarming Story of Immigrants in the Heartland Tara BoothTo the Editor:Re “To Persuade a Reluctant Tween to Read, Try Cash,” by Mireille Silcoff (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 8):While I appreciate Ms. Silcoff’s desire to have her daughter experience the joys of reading, I seriously doubt that paying her daughter to read “worked.” While the monetary reward persuaded her daughter to read the book in the short term, it was unlikely to facilitate the motivation to read, which must feel like a choice and unpressured.Decades of research have shown that paying people to do things they love undermines their subsequent motivation, and paying them to complete tasks they do not enjoy keeps the motivation tied to rewards so that they are less likely to value the activity and choose to engage in it on their own.The belief in rewards as an effective motivator is a myth; other strategies are more likely to facilitate long-term motivation. Rewards are a simple fix that is likely to backfire.Wendy S. GrolnickLongmeadow, Mass.The writer is professor emeritus of psychology at Clark University and co-author of “Motivation Myth Busters: Science-Based Strategies to Boost Motivation in Yourself and Others.”To the Editor:I loved this guest essay because that’s precisely what I did 20 years ago when my husband and I traveled for our yearly two-week vacation to the beach with my daughter, two nephews and three other children who often vacationed with us.I offered each child a new book of their choice and $20 if they finished it before the trip was over. All of the kids got the $20 to use during two hours on their own at souvenir shops, and this reading challenge became a standard of our summer vacations.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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      How Meta Distanced Itself From Politics

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      In January 2021, after pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new priority for Meta: He wanted to reduce the amount of political content on the company’s apps, including Facebook and Instagram.As the United States hurtles toward November’s election, Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan appears to be working.On Facebook, Instagram and Threads, political content is less heavily featured. App settings have been automatically set to de-emphasize the posts that users see about campaigns and candidates. And political misinformation is harder to find on the platforms after Meta removed transparency tools that journalists and researchers used to monitor the sites.Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, no longer meets weekly with the heads of election security as he once did, according to four employees. He has reduced the number of full-time employees working on the issue and disbanded the election integrity team, these employees said, though the company says the election integrity workers were integrated into other teams. He has also decided not to have a “war room,” which Meta previously used to prepare for elections.Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee laying out how he wanted to distance himself and his company from politics. The goal, he said, was to be “neutral” and to not “even appear to be playing a role.”“It’s quite the pendulum swing because a decade ago, everyone at Facebook was desperate to be the face of elections,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook. 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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      Sheriff Who Suggested Tracking Harris Supporters Is Stripped of Election Role

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      An Ohio sheriff has been stripped of his role providing security at his county’s early voting location, members of a local elections board said, after he compared immigrants to insects and urged residents to record the addresses of people who have yard signs supporting Vice President Kamala Harris.In a Facebook post earlier this month, the sheriff, Bruce D. Zuchowski of Portage County, called Ms. Harris a “Laughing Hyena,” and described immigrants as locusts, the crop-destroying pests that were said in the Bible to have caused a plague in Egypt.“Write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards!” Mr. Zuchowski, a Republican who is running for re-election, said of Ms. Harris’s supporters, according to a screenshot of the since-deleted post. Then when immigrants “need places to live,” he wrote, “we’ll already have the addresses of their New families.”His comments were met with swift condemnation. And on Friday, the bipartisan Portage County Board of Elections voted 3 to 1 to remove the sheriff’s office from its role providing security at the board’s office during the early voting period, which lasts from Oct. 8 to Nov. 3. (One Republican board member voted for the motion; the other Republican member voted against it.)During early voting in Portage County, which is southeast of Cleveland, residents can vote only at the Board of Elections office.The board’s vote came in response to residents’ fears stemming from Mr. Zuchowski’s post, and concerns that the presence of the sheriff’s department on site could create an “appearance of impropriety,” said Terrie Nielsen, the deputy director of the Elections Board, who is a Democrat.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 Is Set to Visit Border, Trying to Cut Into Trump’s Immigration Edge

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      Vice President Kamala Harris is planning to visit the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday during a trip to Arizona, according to two people briefed on the preparations, as she seeks to counter former President Donald J. Trump’s advantage with voters on the issue of immigration.The trip is set to be her first visit to the southern border since President Biden dropped out of the race.Ms. Harris may give remarks about border issues during the visit, according to the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss a trip that has not yet been made public. The people said final details about exactly where Ms. Harris would visit or what else she might do on the trip have not been decided. The Harris campaign did not immediately provide a comment.Mr. Trump and Republicans have blamed Ms. Harris for the large numbers of migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico over the past several years. Early in his administration, Mr. Biden made Ms. Harris responsible for addressing the root causes of migration from Latin America.But she struggled in that role and drew criticism after telling the NBC News host Lester Holt in a 2021 interview, when he asked why she had not yet visited the southern border, that she had “never been to Europe” either. The Trump campaign has used that exchange in advertisements attacking her record on immigration. Ms. Harris traveled to the border soon after her interview with Mr. Holt.In recent months, border crossings have fallen to their lowest levels since she and Mr. Biden took office.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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      Elecciones 2024: la precisión de las encuestas depende de quién va a votar

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      A medida que se acercan las elecciones, la mayoría de las encuestadoras informan acerca de las respuestas de los “votantes probables”. El reto es averiguar quiénes son.En la avalancha de encuestas electorales que verás en las próximas semanas, la mayoría de los grupos de sondeo incluirán respuestas de “votantes probables”, y a menudo de nadie más.En teoría, estos sondeos deberían arrojar resultados más precisos, pues aquellos que van a votar son quienes dictan el resultado el día de las elecciones. Sin embargo, tener una imagen certera de quien votará en noviembre es una tarea complicada.Después de todo, ¿cómo puede saber exactamente una encuestadora quién es “probable” que vote a fin de enfocar sus resultados en esas personas? No hay una respuesta correcta, y cada empresa de sondeos tiene su propia estrategia.Las decisiones que toman son importantes, pues los resultados de las encuestas de votantes probables pueden ser diferentes de los de las que toman muestras de una población más amplia, como todos aquellos que están registrados para votar. En una contienda tan reñida como la presidencial de este año, un candidato puede ir a la cabeza en un sondeo entre los votantes probables, mientras que otro puede tener la delantera en el mismo sondeo entre los votantes registrados.Entender estas decisiones será útil este otoño para los observadores de las encuestas. La proporción de encuestas electorales que muestran los resultados entre los votantes probables se ha disparado en semanas recientes, como suele ocurrir en torno al Día del Trabajo.Recent Times/Siena polls

      Note: The most recent Times/Siena polls of each state are shown.By The New York TimesWe 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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      What Nebraska’s Electoral Votes Reveal About the Constitution

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      Here’s how rickety our constitutional system has become: The fate of the 2024 election could hang on the integrity of a single Republican state senator in Nebraska.To understand why requires getting a bit deep in the Electoral College weeds. Almost all states use a winner-take-all system to apportion their presidential electors, but Nebraska and Maine award some electors by congressional district. In 2020, Joe Biden won one of Nebraska’s five electoral votes, and Donald Trump won one elector from rural Maine. This year Kamala Harris’s clearest path to victory is to take the so-called blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, plus one electoral vote in Nebraska.One reason that both states have resisted partisan pressure to switch to winner-take-all is the assumption that if one did so, the other would as well, balancing out any Electoral College effect. But this year, Republicans waited until it was too late for Maine to change its rules before starting a push to change them in Nebraska. If they succeeded and Harris held the blue wall but lost the other swing states, there would be a tie in the Electoral College. For the first time in 200 years, the election would go to the House, where each state delegation would get one vote and Trump would almost certainly be installed as president.So far, one man, State Senator Mike McDonnell, who defected from the Democratic Party this spring, is standing in the Republican Party’s way. We should all be grateful for his courage. But the pressure on him from his new party will be intense, and he can still change his mind in the coming weeks.Whether or not McDonnell remains steadfast, this is a preposterous way to run a purportedly democratic superpower. The Electoral College — created in part, as the scholar Akhil Reed Amar has shown, to protect slavery — has already given us two presidents in the 21st century who lost the popular vote, and it continues to warp our politics. It is one reason Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law and an eminent legal scholar, has come to despair of the Constitution he’s devoted much of his life to. “I believe that if the problems with the Constitution are not fixed — and if the country stays on its current path — we are heading to serious efforts at secession,” he writes in his bracing new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”Chemerinsky’s description of the way our Constitution thwarts the popular will — including through the Electoral College, the growing small-state advantage in the Senate and the rogue Supreme Court — will be familiar to readers of books like last year’s “Tyranny of the Minority” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The surprising part of his argument is his call for a new constitutional convention, which can be triggered, under the Constitution’s Article V, by a vote of two-thirds of the states.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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      Vance, Declining to Denounce Robinson, Lashes Out at Media Instead

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      Senator JD Vance of Ohio lashed out at the news media on Monday as he campaigned in North Carolina, deflecting questions about a scandal engulfing the campaign of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the embattled Republican running for governor in the state.Mr. Vance, who has previously cast doubt on a CNN report linking Mr. Robinson to disturbing comments on a pornographic forum, avoided mentioning the lieutenant governor during a campaign rally in Charlotte. When pressed by journalists, he declined to denounce Mr. Robinson but said the onus would be on him to convince voters that he didn’t make the posts, in which the report says he called himself a “black NAZI” and defended slavery.“What he said or didn’t say is between him and the people of North Carolina,” said Mr. Vance, former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate. He added: “I’ve seen some of the statements. I haven’t seen them all. Some of them are pretty gross, to put it mildly. Mark Robinson says that those statements are false, that he didn’t actually speak them. So I think it’s up to Mark Robinson to make his case to the people of North Carolina that those weren’t his statements.”As audience members booed and jeered the local journalists asking Mr. Vance about Mr. Robinson, with many standing up in their seats and turning around to shout at the press gathered in the back of the venue, Mr. Vance shifted his focus there as well. “This entire episode illustrates something that is fundamentally broken about the American media,” Vance said, later comparing the gathered journalists to “supermarket tabloids” and adding “I really cannot believe that the American media is so much more focused on this than on the struggles of their fellow citizens.”But Mr. Vance brushed aside the questions about Mr. Robinson, some of which were drowned out as the crowd roared against them. He declined to say if the lieutenant governor still had the endorsement of the Trump campaign.Mr. Trump, for his part, has avoided mentioning Mr. Robinson in recent days, including at his own rally in the state on Saturday. The scandal surrounding Mr. Robinson presents a delicate challenge to Mr. Trump, who called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.” More

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      Inside a Trump Ad Hammering Harris Over Americans’ Economic Woes

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      Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign began running this 30-second ad linking Vice President Kamala Harris to President Biden and the administration’s economic record on television stations in at least five key battleground states last week. The campaign has spent $2.8 million on those commercials, according to AdImpact.On the ScreenThe ad begins with a blurry image of a laughing Ms. Harris standing behind Mr. Biden on a stage, reaching out and grabbing his shoulder — physically linking them — as the words “Bidenomics is a FAILURE” blare across the screen.More bleak headlines follow: “Bidenomics FAILED.” “Bidenomics is a RECORD FAILURE.” “Americans’ incomes down THREE STRAIGHT YEARS.” “Unemployment RISING.” “America may soon be in a RECESSION.”The ad shows scenes intended to evoke Americans struggling as they go about their lives: a man putting gas in his pickup truck, a family standing morosely in front of a house with a for-sale sign, construction workers in hard hats, a man looking somberly out a window scratching his head. Another headline warns, “Bidenomics hits families with $5,600 pay cut,” before grainy video shows Ms. Harris happily declaring, “We are very proud of Bidenomics.”The ad ends with a close-up of Ms. Harris laughing, followed by a photo of Mr. Trump pumping his fist in front of an American flag and the words “Americans trust Trump on the economy.”The ScriptNarrator: “Their Bidenomics led to the highest inflation in 40 years. Highest gas prices ever. Skyrocketing interest rates. Unaffordable housing. Incomes down. Unemployment rising. And a recession now headed our way. Yet Kamala Harris is clueless.”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