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    They Barter and Trade in Rural America. How Will They Vote?

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    Many rural Americans engage in cashless barter systems to get food and firewood for heating and cooking. They value self-sufficiency, making them wary of government intervention.When Miki Shiverick needs firewood to heat her home, or help clearing the rusted appliances and vehicles from her property, she doesn’t go to a store or pay for services. Instead, she trades for it.For instance, preparing her land in Bergholz, Ohio for livestock over the last four years required hauling away piles of salvage, old tools and antiques from the rundown property she bought from the family of an old tinker. The place, with its barn house and five outbuildings, resembled a 12-acre junkyard.Ms. Shiverick, 56, found local scrappers willing to keep the profits from selling the rusted cars, campers, tractor parts, buried gas tanks and aluminum ingots at the local scrap yard. She also found woodsmen willing to clear trees for her in exchange for most of the wood.On this newly blank canvas, she dreams of creating a clean, natural retreat for her family with gardens that support wildlife and livestock, which she raises to promote food self-sufficiency and land stewardship.Bergholz is a rural town with a population of fewer than 600. For centuries, rural communities like Bergholz have operated in cashless barter systems built on mutual trust and neighborly relationships — a culture of self-sufficiency that has also shaped political views toward a kind of bootstrap conservatism.“People around here don’t do welfare, it’s not who we are,” Ms. Shiverick said.Ms. Shiverick bartered a bolt of linen with an Amish neighbor for a chicken coop.Rebecca Kiger for 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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      Tim Walz Blasts Trump and Vance at Pennsylvania Event

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      Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, wearing a camouflage baseball cap and red-and-black plaid flannel, took the stage on Tuesday as the skies cleared on a muddy farm in Lawrence County, Pa.He opened with tender talk of his rural roots. Then, he painted the kind of haunting picture frequently evoked by the Republicans opposing him and his running mate atop the Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris: of a rural America under attack.“Been a lot of talk about outsiders coming in, coming into rural communities, stealing our jobs, making life worse for the people who are living there,” he said, alluding to the hostile remarks about immigrants.But Mr. Walz — speaking pointedly before a couple hundred people, with barns, bins and tractors as his backdrop — paused for dramatic effect.“Those outsiders have names. They’re Donald Trump and JD Vance,” he said, eliciting laughter and a few whistles from the audience.The event on Tuesday was part of a Wisconsin and Pennsylvania swing that Mr. Walz used to unveil his ticket’s plans to address the needs of rural voters. And Mr. Walz, who has been on a quest in recent days to reclaim male voters and football from the Republican Party, sought to make the most of the moment as a born and bred Nebraskan.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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      Francisco Lopera, the ‘Country Doctor’ Who Upended Our Understanding of Dementia

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      Francisco Lopera defied rebels, cartels and vampire bats to become a pioneering researcher of Alzheimer’s disease.In 1978, Dr. Francisco Lopera did what recent medical school graduates in Colombia and much of Latin America have long done: He set out for an obligatory year of work in a remote part of the country, where an inexperienced médico rural might be the only physician for miles. Dr. Lopera, who was born in the Andean region of Antioquia and knew mostly mountains and farm life before medical school, carried out his service in the Darién Gap, on the Caribbean coast near Panama.There Dr. Lopera, a groundbreaking Colombian Alzheimer’s researcher who died this week at age 73, treated stabbings, snakebites, complicated births, burns and fevers in a hospital that had electricity for only half the day. On one occasion, he was kidnapped by Marxist guerrillas. Another time, he had to flee gunshots.When I met Dr. Lopera in 2017, to start research on a book about the families with Alzheimer’s that became his life’s work, he told me a story about two young brothers who had died one after the other in his hospital, of unknown causes. Lopera traveled to the family home in a remote jungle clearing, where he discovered that the boys’ surviving siblings had bites on their fingers from vampire bats. He sent the bodies to a pathology lab hours away by boat, and the pathologists confirmed rabies. When the government brought in a rabies expert to investigate, Dr. Lopera joined him.He left that experience — long nights in the rainforest, searching for hidden roosts, engrossed in the natural history of rabies and bats — wanting to become a rabies epidemiologist. But that was not to be. His interests were eclectic and quick to change, and a few years later he became a neurology resident in Medellín.In 1984, Dr. Lopera examined a farmer in his 40s who appeared to have dementia. Dr. Lopera took again the unusual step of traveling to the family home, in a mountain hamlet like the one where he had been born. Not just the farmer had symptoms of dementia, he saw — a brother also appeared to be affected. Dr. Lopera had discovered what would turn out to be the world’s largest family with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The family shared a genetic mutation, later nicknamed the paisa mutation, that was unique to their region of Colombia. Dr. Lopera spent the next four decades studying the family’s 6,000 members.Dr. Francisco Lopera, second from right, in Yarumal, Colombia, in 2010, with Oderis Villegas, center, who was showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease at age 50. A sister, María Elsy, left, had a more advanced case.Todd Heisler/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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      Meet the Rural Voters Who Could Swing North Carolina’s Election

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      The most rural of the battleground states this year is North Carolina. About 3.4 million people, or roughly a third of the state’s population, reside in a rural area, more than in any other state besides Texas. Democrats have seen their support slip in rural areas, ceding ground to Republicans. As such, rural voters in […] More

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      Tim Walz and the Pull of Rural America

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      More from our inbox:A Rattled Donald TrumpCancer Screenings Save Lives and Are Worth the CostFrom Rust to Rescue HeroAn Olympic Transit Reality Check Abbie Parr/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Democrats Have Needed Someone Like Walz for Decades,” by Sarah Smarsh (Opinion guest essay, Aug. 9):Thank you for publishing Ms. Smarsh’s article, which so eloquently and succinctly illustrates how politicians, pundits and journalists have marginalized rural America by lumping us into a single category: red state.I am from a long line of early Indiana settlers: hard-working people who began as farmers and maintained honest lives while supporting democratic ideals and the Democratic Party. Reading this piece is a breath of fresh air, and I appreciate that Ms. Smarsh shares our appreciation for the honesty and direct communication of a fine person like Tim Walz. Thank you, Minnesota.Diana WannLebanon, Ind.To the Editor:Having grown up in a small town in Minnesota, I agree with Sarah Smarsh that Gov. Tim Walz brings back some essential elements into our politics.I am only a few generations removed from Norwegian immigrants who came to America and helped settle an area near the South Dakota border in the last decades of the 19th century.The effort to tame and harvest the prairie created a very pragmatic “let’s get it done and move on to other things” philosophy. Many of the older farmers I remember would describe today’s political rhetoric as “bells and whistles, but no engine.”Mr. Walz is not only a refreshing relief from much of the mindless political rhetoric we have to listen to today. He may very well also be putting the engine back on our national economy.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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      If Kamala Harris Is a D.E.I. Candidate, So Is JD Vance

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      Ever since speculation began that Vice President Kamala Harris might replace President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, there has been a steady, ugly chorus on the right. The New York Post published a column that declared that Harris would be a “D.E.I. president,” and quickly the phrase ricocheted across the conservative media ecosystem.The invocation of diversity, equity and inclusion programs meant to bring people from underrepresented backgrounds into institutions of power and influence clearly implied that a Black woman got power because of racial preferences. Black achievement, in this narrative, is always unearned and conferred without regard to merit.Listening to JD Vance’s speech at the Republican convention on Wednesday night, as he laid out his remarkable biography — a young man with roots in an economically devastated backwater who scaled the heights of the American elite — I couldn’t help thinking to myself: If Harris is a D.E.I. candidate, so is Vance. It just depends on what kind of diversity you mean. It depends, indeed, on how you understand the role of identity in shaping the opportunities that define anyone’s life.All politics is, at some level, identity politics — the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country. For modern presidential and vice-presidential candidates, one of their most valuable assets is their life story. Some elements of that story are bequeathed at birth, but what makes politicians successful is their talent at narrating that story in a manner that allows voters to see some version of themselves and their own aspirations in the candidate. This kind of storytelling, embedded in American archetypes and ideals, has shaped our politics.Vance’s entire business and political career has flowed from his life story, which is embedded in identities he did not choose: Born a “hillbilly,” of Scotch-Irish descent, he grew up in poverty, son of a single mother who was addicted to drugs. Overcoming this adversity, these disadvantages, lies at the core of his personal narrative. His ascent would hardly be so remarkable if he started from a life of middle-class comfort. But no one is portraying Vance’s elevation to the Republican ticket as the outcome of some kind of illegitimate identity politics, nor is Vance perceived as having benefited from a political form of affirmative action.And yet he almost certainly did. Race is not the only kind of diversity that gets noticed and embraced. Elite institutions love up-by-your-bootstraps Americans, and that archetype is all over Vance’s life story. A promising white candidate from a county that sends few students to an elite college like Yale would get a strong look, even if that person’s grades and test scores were less impressive than other applicants’. (To be clear, I have no idea what kind of grades or scores Vance had.) Regardless of race, applicants from working-class backgrounds, especially if they were the first in their family to attend college, are deemed to add class diversity.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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      The Sunday Read: ‘A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies’

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      Tally Abecassis and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeCindy Elgan glanced into the lobby of her office and saw a sheriff’s deputy waiting at the front counter. “Let’s start a video recording, just in case this goes sideways,” Elgan, 65, told one of her employees in the Esmeralda County clerk’s office. She had come to expect skepticism, conspiracy theories and even threats related to her job as an election administrator. She grabbed her annotated booklet of Nevada state laws, said a prayer for patience and walked into the lobby to confront the latest challenge to America’s electoral process.The deputy was standing alongside a woman that Elgan recognized as Mary Jane Zakas, 77, a longtime elementary schoolteacher and a leader in the local Republican Party. She often asked for a sheriff’s deputy to accompany her to the election’s office, in case her meetings became contentious.“I hope you’re having a blessed morning,” Zakas said. “Unfortunately, a lot of people are still very concerned about the security of their votes. They’ve lost all trust in the system.”After the 2020 election, former President Donald J. Trump’s denials and accusations of voter fraud spread outward from the White House to even the country’s most remote places, like Esmeralda County. Elgan knew most of the 620 voters in the town. Still, they accused her of being paid off and skimming votes away from Trump. And even though their allegations came with no evidence, they wanted her recalled from office before the next presidential election in November.There are a lot of ways to listen to “The Daily.” Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Frannie Carr Toth and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      The Climate Challenges That India’s Next Government Will Face

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      India, the world’s most populous country, is also among the most vulnerable to climate hazards. That’s not only because of the heat and floods that global warming has exacerbated, but also because so many of the country’s 1.4 billion people are vulnerable to begin with. Most people are poor, by global standards, and they have no safety net.Early election results Tuesday signaled that the party led by Narendra Modi, the two-term Hindu nationalist Indian prime minister, is poised to win the largest number of seats in the Indian Parliament but may have to join with smaller parties to form a coalition government.That government will face major challenges brought on by climate change.Heat is now an election issue, literally.The six-week process of voting took place amid a scorching heat wave in several parts of the country. In the northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, at least 33 people, including poll workers, died of complications from the heat last week, according to government authorities cited by Reuters.Rohit Magotra, deputy director of Integrated Research and Action for Development, called on national election officials to reschedule elections in the future to avoid such calamities. He pointed out that workers from every political party suffer in the heat, and so do voters, who often have to line up under the sun.“I definitely see the momentum building up, and elections are unlikely to be scheduled in peak summer in future,” said Mr. Magotra, whose organization has advocated heat solutions in Indian cities.The Election Commission this year did set up a task force to monitor weather conditions, but only after voting got underway amid abnormally high temperatures. It also sent election workers a list of heat precautions prepared by the National Disaster Management Agency. However, according to a report published in Scroll, an Indian news site, political-party campaigners were not told to do anything differently because of the heat.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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      ‘Fix the Damn Roads’: How Democrats in Purple and Red States Win

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      When Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania got an emergency call about I-95 last June, his first thought turned to semantics. “When you say ‘collapse,’ do you really mean collapse?” he recalled wondering. Highways don’t typically do that, but then tractor-trailers don’t typically flip over and catch fire, which had happened on an elevated section of the road in Philadelphia.Shapiro’s second, third and fourth thoughts were that he and other government officials needed to do the fastest repair imaginable.“My job was: Every time someone said, ‘Give me a few days, and I’ll get back to you,’ to say, ‘OK, you’ve got 30 minutes,’” he told me recently. He knew how disruptive and costly the road’s closure would be and how frustrated Pennsylvanians would get.But he knew something else, too: that if you’re trying to impress a broad range of voters, including those who aren’t predisposed to like you, you’re best served not by joining the culture wars or indulging in political gamesmanship but by addressing tangible, measurable problems.In less than two weeks, the road reopened.Today, Shapiro enjoys approval ratings markedly higher than other Pennsylvania Democrats’ and President Biden’s. He belongs to an intriguing breed of enterprising Democratic governors who’ve had success where it’s by no means guaranteed, assembled a diverse coalition of supporters and are models of a winning approach for Democrats everywhere. Just look at the fact that when Shapiro was elected in 2022, it was with a much higher percentage of votes than Biden received from Pennsylvanians two years earlier. Shapiro won with support among rural voters that significantly exceeded other Democrats’ and with the backing of 14 percent of Donald Trump’s voters, according to a CNN exit poll that November.Biden’s fate this November, Democratic control of Congress and the party’s future beyond 2024 could turn, in part, on heeding Shapiro’s and like-minded Democratic leaders’ lessons about reclaiming the sorts of voters the party has lost.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