THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Less than a month out from Election Day, the polls are predicting a Democratic rout. According to the election forecaster Nate Silver’s polling average, Democratic Senate candidates are leading in Kansas, which voted for Donald Trump by 16 percentage points in 2024, as well as Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas, all of which Trump won by more than 10 points. In the House, Democrats are poised to win their largest majority in 18 years.So the polls tell us. Can they be believed? Ever since underestimating Trump in 2016, pollsters have been busy trying to regain the public’s trust, tweaking their methodologies in ways both dramatic and subtle. Perhaps they’ve finally got it right. They seem to think so. “I’m confident that not just ourselves, but the industry, has good technique, good methodology, and that they are reflecting and representing public opinion,” Spencer Kimball, the director of polling at Emerson College, told me. But the industry has been confident before, only to be proved wrong.After 2016, pollsters concluded that they had failed to pay enough attention to educational polarization, the somewhat-new phenomenon of college-educated voters having political preferences that were sharply different from those of voters without a degree. Going forward, the industry would try to include more non-college-educated voters in surveys or, if that proved impossible, would weight those voters’ responses to align with their share of the electorate. In 2018, the pollsters nailed the midterms with little error, suggesting that their adaptations had paid off.Then came 2020. Although the polls correctly gauged that most people preferred Joe Biden to Trump, they underestimated Trump’s support by even more than they did in 2016, especially at the state level. The most memorable example was Wisconsin, where polls had Biden winning by up to 10 percentage points. He wound up winning by less than one. These results left pollsters even more perplexed. If controlling for education didn’t work, what would? Perhaps, they figured, Trump supporters were just different from other voters: less likely to talk to pollsters than other demographically similar voters were. This phenomenon, known as partisan-nonresponse bias, would help explain why midterm polls in the Trump era have generally been more accurate than presidential-election polls: The midterm electorate skews toward politically engaged voters who are more trusting of institutions and more likely to have answered polls. Moving forward, pollsters decided to reach for the bluntest object they had access to:… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Christopher LeeThe concerns about $4.14-a-gallon gas at the Lincoln Costco an hour and a half to the east? The worries about the war in Iran, the sort of Middle East conflagration this president promised to avoid? The disappointment over the Epstein files, which failed to bring down the alleged network of deep-state pedophiles? This was not that sort of political event. No, yesterday’s Trump rally in Grand Island, Nebraska—a raspberry-colored fleck in a jammy-red state, a couple of hours from the nearest major airport—was a distinct type of Trump rally, more 2016 than 2026. It was a Midwest way station on President Trump’s recent tour of solid Republican strongholds. And it was a chance for longtime Trump supporters to show their appreciation for the two-term president who has somehow dominated the national conversation for three terms—and, more important, for him to bask in their reflected glow. Trump, after all, is in the middle of a rough stretch. Interest rates and gas prices—all prices, frankly—are high, and his approval is low. He doesn’t seem to really care how Republican candidates fare in the midterms, but he’d rather they win than lose, if only because it would save him the headache of congressional investigations.Much like his midterm convention last month in Dallas—a Trump-a-palooza that few Republicans other than Trump particularly wanted—the Nebraska rally seemed to be less about helping his party and more about reminding himself of his immovable base, via yet another trip back through the good ol’ days. (Although Nebraska’s races for governor and Senate are closer than Republicans might like, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report has rated them “solid Republican” and “likely Republican,” respectively.)“We won this state all three times by a landslide,” Trump said, moments after taking the stage, raising the question of what exactly he was doing here. Christopher Lee for The AtlanticI have covered Trump, in some form or fashion, since early 2016, when he dispatched the candidate I had been following (Jeb!), the first of several purported giants he slayed on his way to the White House. The scene I found when I arrived in Grand Island midmorning yesterday was, in many ways, reminiscent of those early rallies, when the lines were long, the promises had not yet been broken, and Trump really might have shot people on Fifth Avenue without losing votes. Deb Reeves, a row-crop (corn, soybeans) farmer, had come to the rally with her 17-year-old… [TheTopNews] Read More.

President Trump is in a race against time. There are 28 days until the midterms. There are 837 days left in his presidency. There are actuary tables noting the challenges of battling Father Time for 80-year-old men. But, at the moment, he is focused on one particular slice of time: daylight savings.It has become the latest obsession for a man known for not letting go of his compulsions. He has tilted against windmills, told the government to stop procuring paper straws, and spent significant mental and rhetorical energy openly discussing which is worse: electrocution in a sinking electric boat or being devoured by a shark.His attention has been pulled to daylight savings by pending legislation that would end the requirement to change clocks twice a year to match the seasons, moving an hour back in the fall and then jumping forward in the spring. Instead, he wants to keep the clock where it is after springing forward—ensuring more sunlight in the evening—and not falling back, which allows for more light in the mornings during winter months. “LOCK THE CLOCK!” the president wrote on social media over the weekend.Trump has offered a number of anecdotal arguments to support his view. During an interview with the conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root in August, he claimed that he was once an hour late for an important meeting—“a big person from a big country”—because he had forgotten to reset his clock. He then claimed that stopping the time change would deter crime, “because criminals sleep late, you know; they do their crime in the evening.” He has suggested that it’s unsafe and costly for workers to have to reset clocks on church steeples or government buildings twice a year. He has also said that getting rid of daylight savings would lower people’s risk for cardiac issues and stroke, limit seasonal depression, and boost tourism.[Read: A different kind of fading president ]But perhaps Trump’s most fundamental motivation became evident late last month: A president who likes to golf would like more sunlight to do so. During the final day of the Presidents Cup, held at a Chicago-area country club on September 27, Trump met with the PGA Tour Chief Executive Brian Rolapp and discussed daylight savings. A few days later, Rolapp sent Trump a letter urging him to ensure that there is more sunlight in the evenings. Too many golfers are busy with their lives… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Carol GuzyHe kept going over the details.“I run this route every day, like clockwork,” the trucker was saying, heading west to where he had first seen the man on the side of the highway.Now it was a Sunday morning, his day off, and Jack Buhring was driving his mother’s minivan, retracing the route, trying to make sense of what had happened less than a week before. His girlfriend, Renee Claytor, was in the passenger seat, studying him, then looking out the window. His mother, Diana Buhring, was in the back. “It wasn’t your fault,” she kept saying, and “Jack, do you think you’re still in shock?” But her son was not really listening.“Mondays—that’s usually my long day,” he continued. Up at 1:30 a.m., shower, coffee, and by 2 a.m. he’d be pulling out of the mobile-home park in Chillicothe, the southern-Ohio town where he had grown up, gotten his first job hauling garbage, his second job driving cross-country, and the one he had now, hauling powdered concrete hardener in a Kenworth T800. Fairborn to Westerville, Westerville to Fairborn, repeat. Two loops, paid per load, no health insurance, and a recliner where he fell asleep most evenings. Those were the basics of Jack Buhring’s 41-year-old life, and just after eight that Monday morning, August 31, he had reached his favorite part of the route, a westbound stretch of highway running through miles of cornfields and wildflowers near Springfield, a small city that he passed each day, and whose recent troubles had barely registered as a series of memes and headlines that he’d mostly tried to avoid.“We’re getting closer,” he said now, passing the fields. “We’re coming up on it.”He’d been in the right lane, he said, when he’d noticed a car rolling to a stop on the right shoulder. As he flipped on his left turn signal to move out of the way, he’d seen a man getting out of the car, who was then walking toward his trunk, who was then continuing on against traffic, then running—then diving out in front of him.[Read: The northern passage]“Right here,” Jack said as he drove over black tire marks curving left across all three lanes. “See, I locked it down right here. You can see where I swerved. See? I started to signal and—it just happened so fast.”Renee and Diana glanced back at the marks. Jack continued: An SUV and another… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel vowed before God, Fox Nation, and Donald Trump that he would punish the “deep state” for its manifold transgressions, especially the (actually nonexistent) conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.“I’ve been with the president nearly since day one on this,” he said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo. “I can announce on your show that we’ve got all the information we need. We’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”That was five months ago. Patel has not yet delivered on his promise. But in interviews with more than 40 current and former administration officials, FBI employees, and members of Congress and their staffers, as well as others close to the White House, I’ve learned that it is not for lack of trying.The people I spoke with described Patel as desperate to help the Justice Department indict putative malefactors and stimulate headlines to please the president. Nearly all of the people I spoke with would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation if their name appeared in the story. Patel has filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and me in response to my reporting earlier this year that he has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.In recent months, Patel has been briefed on the FBI’s “election integrity” investigations in Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, and beyond. Officials told me their understanding is that many of the election-related investigation requests came directly from the White House, many times with the instruction that “this is a big deal for the president” or “this is a push from 47.” But all of that attention hasn’t yielded results. In meetings, Patel has expressed frustration that there have been no new findings, and instructed staff to “look harder” or “look again,” according to three people familiar with the conversations.The FBI’s preoccupation with the 2020 election represents a dramatic break with its past. Though the bureau—one of the world’s most famous and most powerful law-enforcement agencies—has experienced more than its share of controversies and episodes of overreach, it has also been dedicated to criminal investigation based in evidence, science, and reality. The commitment of personnel, resources, and time to investigate a conspiracy theory that was… [TheTopNews] Read More.