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      These Voters Are Anti-Trump, but Will They Be Pro-Harris?

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      Emily Brieve, a Republican county commissioner in Michigan, voted for Donald J. Trump in 2020. Her campaign website highlighted her opposition to abortion rights. And until this year, she had never considered voting for a Democratic presidential candidate.But to Ms. Brieve, 42, the people with whom Mr. Trump surrounds himself seem increasingly “extreme.” His running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, is “divisive” and “robotic,” ripe for caricature on “Saturday Night Live.” And after Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominees helped overturn Roe v. Wade, she thought some state abortion restrictions went too far.“I’m still not 100 percent sure how I’m planning on voting,” Ms. Brieve, of Caledonia, Mich., said in an interview. “I just know that I’m not supportive of Trump, and I won’t vote for Trump ever again.”In a bitterly divided nation, relatively few Americans are genuinely torn between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Ms. Brieve represents a different yet crucial kind of undecided voter: one who has ruled out Mr. Trump but is grappling with whether to support Ms. Harris, write in someone else or skip the top of the ticket entirely.In recent elections, center-right voters who have recoiled at the direction of the Republican Party — particularly college-educated suburbanites — have played significant roles in Democratic victories, helping propel President Biden in 2020 and shaping key 2022 midterm contests.Now, in the final stretch of this campaign, Democrats see opportunities to expand that universe of voters. The party is betting that since Mr. Trump was last on the ballot, he has disqualified himself with more Americans who detest his election denialism and conspiracy theories, as well as his party’s abortion bans.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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      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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      Trump Gets a Lift From Arizona Ticket-Splitters Backing a Democrat for Senate

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      Representative Ruben Gallego, the Democratic candidate for Senate, leads in this key contest, a New York Times/Siena College poll found, while Kamala Harris trails Donald Trump.Former President Donald J. Trump appears to be benefiting from ticket-splitters in Arizona, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Monday, a finding that highlights his strength with Latino and younger voters as well as the unique weaknesses of the Republican nominee for Senate.The poll found Representative Ruben Gallego, the Democratic candidate for Senate, leading Kari Lake, a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, by six percentage points, even as Mr. Trump has opened up a five-point lead in the state over Vice President Kamala Harris.Such a scenario would represent a notable degree of ticket-splitting, perpetuating a trend captured by surveys throughout this election cycle. Democratic Senate candidates in a number of swing states, including Arizona and Nevada, have consistently polled ahead of the top of the ticket, especially when President Biden was the party’s standard-bearer. As Ms. Harris’s nomination has made the election more competitive, the gap between her and those down-ballot Democrats has narrowed — but the trend persists in most races in swing states.“Donald Trump creates his own weather, and he has a coalition supporting him like no other Republican nominee in our lifetime — perhaps ever — in Arizona,” said Stan Barnes, a former Republican state lawmaker who is now a political consultant there. He pointed to the support Mr. Trump has garnered from young people and voters of color, who traditionally lean Democratic, in surveys this year. “He’s breaking out of that rule, and it does not translate down-ballot,” he said.In 2022, Ms. Lake angered many traditionally Republican voters during her divisive governor’s race, feuding with the governor at the time, Doug Ducey, a conservative Republican, and angering supporters of Senator John McCain, who died in 2018, by saying her political rise “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine.” She further alienated some Republicans by filing a series of lawsuits after she lost her election, claiming that it had been stolen.This year, she has tried to change tactics, courting the moderate wing of the Republican Party in Arizona. But old grievances die hard.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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      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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      Top Aides Resign From Embattled North Carolina Candidate’s Campaign

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      Most of the senior staff members on Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign for North Carolina governor resigned on Sunday, dealing a seismic blow to the embattled Republican who has faced widespread criticism after an explosive CNN report that he had made a series of disturbing comments on a pornographic website.Among the resignations was his top campaign consultant, Conrad Pogorzelski III, who for years had been one of Mr. Robinson’s most loyal confidants and who had been the only consultant to take a chance on him during his run for lieutenant governor four years ago.Mr. Pogorzelski confirmed his resignation in a text message on Sunday evening, saying he and seven other campaign staffers had resigned on “our own accord.”The other resignations included Chris Rodriguez, the campaign manager; Heather Whillier, the finance director; and Jason Rizk, the deputy campaign manager. Two political directors, John Kontoulas and Jackson Lohrer, and the director of operations, Patrick Riley, also resigned.The 11th-hour shake-up in the campaign less than 50 days before the election will only exacerbate the troubles already plaguing Mr. Robinson, the fiery Trump acolyte who has been widely criticized for comments perceived as racist, antisemitic, transphobic and hateful.CNN reported on Thursday that Mr. Robinson had written on a porn site years ago that he was a “black NAZI,” that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography and that slavery was not bad. He also recounted on the site how he went “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a teenager. Mr. Robinson has denied that he wrote the posts and ignored calls from some fellow Republicans to withdraw from the race.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