THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Around the same time that the world learned that swarms of autonomous AI agents were escaping their testing environments and carrying out sophisticated hacking attacks this past summer, researchers who focus on election security were running tests of their own. They wanted to see whether the safeguards that top AI companies had enacted to prevent their technology from disrupting the upcoming midterms would work in the real world. The results were ominous.In response to sample prompts designed to create misinformation, several chatbots produced realistic photos of a man stuffing ballots into a mailbox, a man holding a foreign passport while trying to vote, and FBI agents investigating a voter-registration organization. The chatbots also created fraudulent government documents and deepfake videos of government officials purporting to substantiate election-conspiracy theories. In some cases, the chatbots acted in violation of their own policies. They even helped the researchers, from the Brennan Center for Justice, hone the prompts that would create propaganda to boost specious claims of election fraud.The resulting images were so realistic that when the researchers asked other chatbots to determine whether they were real or fake, several of the leading AI firms’ models were stumped. Much of the activity contravened safety systems that companies had touted just months ago—and some seemed to run afoul of various state laws, researchers found. The experiment shows just how wide the gap has become between the fast-moving technology and the glacially paced effort to regulate it, Lawrence Norden, who helped conduct the research as the Brennan Center’s vice president of elections and government, told me.“All the companies apparently have some guardrails to try to prevent this from happening,” he said, citing AI firms’ written guidelines around misinformation and cybersecurity. “They’re easily circumventable, and the tools themselves make it easy to circumvent them. That’s really what makes me think we’re not ready.“Washington and Silicon Valley have been consumed in recent weeks with debate over the extent to which ever more intelligent AI agents may put all of humanity in danger. Much less attention has been on what researchers and election officials told me is a more pressing short-term reality: The November midterms are more vulnerable to AI-powered disruption or manipulation than most voters realize. Few signs indicate that the federal government is taking the risks as seriously as it should. Instead, as misinformation and cyberhacking threats rise, the agencies and entities responsible for protecting America’s electoral… [TheTopNews] Read More.

On many mornings, as New York City is waking up, a diminutive grandmother from Buffalo puts on sneakers and a baseball cap and takes a 45-minute walk with her husband around the streets near their apartment on Manhattan’s East Side. Her security detail keeps its distance, and hardly anyone seems to recognize Kathy Hochul on these strolls, even though she has been the governor of New York for the past five years.Not many big-state governors enjoy such anonymity, but the spotlight has been slow to find the 68-year-old Hochul. Andrew Cuomo excluded her from his inner circle during her years as his deputy. Since succeeding him in 2021, she has operated in the shadow of much larger political personalities, be they fellow Democrats eyeing the White House or the polarizing Queens men—President Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—who generate far more headlines.What attention Hochul attracted in her first years as governor was largely negative. She won her own full term in 2022 by six points, a relatively narrow margin for New York that Nancy Pelosi blamed for costing Democrats control of the House. (The party lost five winnable congressional races in New York that year.) By late 2024, Hochul’s approval rating had dropped below 40 percent, and the Democrats who were plotting primary challenges included her own handpicked lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado.But the past two years have yielded an impressive turnaround. Hochul has drawn praise for forging productive relationships with both Trump and Mamdani. She easily dispatched opponents on her left (Delgado quit his campaign for governor in February) and her right (Representative Elise Stefanik’s bid lasted just more than a month). Hochul appears on track to secure another four-year term as New York’s governor, and if she remains something less than an A-list political celebrity, she has earned the respect of a party that all but dismissed her not long ago.“Kathy Hochul is the comeback governor of America,” Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat who was once one of Hochul’s harshest critics, told me. As recently as late 2024, Torres used words such as erratic, chaotic, and embarrassing to describe her performance; he warned—and this was not meant as a compliment—that she could be the Democrats’ “new Biden.” But he has learned not to underestimate her. “You do so at your own peril,” Torres said. Mamdani, who as a state legislator said that Hochul had “failed our… [TheTopNews] Read More.

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.