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- Flávio Bolsonaro’s Advance in Brazil’s Election Is Grim News for the Climat...
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. More fire, more ash, more crime, more death. And a globally important ecosystem driven ever more rapidly towards a point of no return. That is the prospect for the Amazon rainforest for at least the next four years if Flávio Bolsonaro holds on to the lead he established this week in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election. This appears to be of far more concern to the outside world than to voters in Latin America’s biggest, richest, and most biodiverse nation. The far-right son of the former president and jailed coup-monger Jair Bolsonaro won 47 percent of the vote, putting him in pole position before the October 25 runoff with the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was backed by 44.2 percent. The result is an unnerving jolt to climate and nature campaigners. Taken out of context, this appears to be a vote against the forest. The current administration of Lula (as the veteran Brazilian president is best known) has reduced deforestation in the Amazon by almost 50 percent. The wrong outcome would imperil the Amazon, along with all of Brazil’s biomes, its traditional peoples, and the stability of the global climate. But that success secured little noticeable electoral traction for either Lula or pro-forest candidates in other polls held the same day. The former environment minister Marina Silva lost a bid for the senate and Joenia Wapichana, a former head of Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, Funai, failed to win a seat in the nation’s congress. Out of 57 Indigenous candidates, only two won. Flávio Bolsonaro is the heir to the political legacy of his father, Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain whose four years in power resulted in a 59.5 percent increase in Amazon deforestation, roughly equivalent to destroying 2 billion trees. If he wins, Bolsonaro has promised to free his father, who was imprisoned for plotting a military coup and attempting to annihilate democracy in Brazil. He has said that his father could have any position he wants in his administration. Flávio Bolsonaro has shown that he will be just as willing as his father to dismantle protections for climate and nature and allow illegal miners, loggers, and land grabbers to invade Indigenous territories. As a lawmaker, he backed a 2019 bill to eliminate requirements for landowners in the Amazon to conserve a proportion of native vegetation.… [TheTopNews] Read More.8 hours ago - How the Polls Could Be Wrong Again
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.8 hours ago - Lawrence O’Donnell Says There’s 1 Trump Story That Could Eclipse Everything ...
“Everything else follows from that, everything,” the MS NOW host warned. [TheTopNews] Read More.8 hours ago - Trump Goes Full Damage Control On LA-San Diego Comment At Texas RallyThe president’s “Let them take out LA. Let them take out San Diego” declaration got a makeover. [TheTopNews] Read More.8 hours ago
- GOP Rep. Brad Finstad Runs Attack Ad That Erases Critical Voter From Photo“What a poor decision,” Beth Benike said of her congressman altering her photo with Democrat Jake Johnson to make a fake image of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. [TheTopNews] Read More.9 hours ago
- U.S., Russia Explore Gas Sale To Europe Amid Ukraine War: ReutersThe discussions included Kirill Dmitriev, a close adviser to Vladimir Putin, and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, according to sources. [TheTopNews] Read More.10 hours ago
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