PHOENIX, Ariz.—The Watchers tend to show up at sundown—or so I’d heard. And yesterday evening, I went looking for them. Around 7 p.m., at a ballot drop-off site next to a juvenile-detention center in Mesa, just east of Phoenix, I sat on a concrete bench and waited under the parking lot’s bright lights. A steady stream of cars drove through, and people hopped out to slip their green mail-in-ballot envelopes into the big metal box.
Though it feels reductionist to compare Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the Musk era at Twitter has some eerie parallels to the Trump White House. There’s a ton of confusion; lots of firings; people shredding documents; outlandish, impossible-to-execute ideas being floated; sycophantic advisers; nervous employees trying to appease a mercurial man; and tweets—so many tweets. It is an exhausting, enraging, and sometimes grimly hilarious spectacle that changes by the hour.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Americans sometimes forget how blessed they are. I hope they remember today, regardless of their vote, that their Constitution is a miracle. I learned a lesson about this in, of all places, the former Soviet Union.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
In 2020, and again in 2021, the dreaded twindemic never came. The worry among experts was that a winter COVID surge layered on top of flu season—or even, in worst-case scenarios, a flu outbreak of pandemic proportions—would push already strained hospitals to the brink. Thankfully, we got lucky. Flu season simply didn’t materialize in 2020: The United States recorded only about 2,000 cases, a jaw-dropping 110 times fewer than it had the season prior.
We speak to Damon Hewitt, the head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which is spearheading nationwide efforts to protect the vote in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Republicans at the national and state levels have tried to disqualify thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots in an effort to swing close races in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
We speak with New Yorker staff writer Sue Halpern about the Senate race in New Hampshire, where she says far-right Republican nominee Donald Bolduc is running a “vigorous campaign” against the incumbent Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan and spreading conspiracy theories that some schoolchildren were using litter boxes.
Indigenous voters in Arizona who played a key role in catapulting Joe Biden to victory in 2020 are facing a sweeping rollback of their voting rights that may swing the state back to Republicans in Tuesday’s midterms.
The climate movement warns the midterm elections will either advance or torpedo climate initiatives in the U.S. This comes as climate activists and scientists at the U.N. climate summit in Egypt cautioned that the world is heading toward climate disaster without deeper cuts in planet-heating emissions.
The family of the imprisoned Egyptian dissident Alaa Abd El-Fattah says they no longer know if he is still alive or if he is being force-fed, more than 50 hours after he stopped drinking water in an intensification of a six-month hunger strike. We feature an address by Alaa’s sister Sanaa Seif at the U.N. climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh. “The symbolic battle has been won by your show of support,” says Seif. “I just hope his body and he is not sacrificed for it.
These results could affect reproductive rights for millions of Americans.
Access to abortion remains legal, but in limbo, in eight states.
Kentucky progressives are hoping for a repeat of Kansas’ upset vote on Tuesday.
The doctors argue in the lawsuit the subpoenas are effectively a “fishing expedition” against abortion providers that violate Indiana law.
The update comes amid anxieties about the administration’s effort to promote the newest vaccination as an upgrade over the original.
Aid Access, a Netherlands nonprofit, is prescribing more abortion medication in the U.S. than ever, in defiance of state laws.
If the measure passes, language will be added to the state’s constitution guaranteeing the right to abortion as well as contraception and other reproductive health services.
Inflation has cooled only slightly and job growth remains strong.
A new POLITICO-Morning Consult poll suggests voters’ views of the economy are baked in.
Housing investment, though, plunged at a 26 percent annual pace, hammered by surging mortgage rates.
According to an NBC News poll released Sunday, 70 percent of registered voters expressed interest in the upcoming election as a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale.
Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Department of Homeland Security is working with private tech companies to fight online speech that undermines support for the U.S. government. We speak to one of the co-authors of The Intercept’s report, investigative journalist Lee Fang, who says the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act signed into law in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump expanded the government’s power to reshape online discourse.
“You can’t fight inflation if you don’t understand it,” the Pennsylvania lieutenant governor said of Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent for U.S. Senate.
“You see what the reaction is on the other side to this, to make a joke of it,” the speaker said of the GOP. “And, really, that is traumatizing.
Trump has been hinting that he’s going to run for president again.
Trump’s insistence on people who agree to spread his “big lie” about the 2020 election above all else saddled Republicans with weak candidates in key races.
With quite literally thousands of elections on the ballot across the country, staying on top of the most important contests is no mean feat. But at Daily Kos Elections, we’ve got you covered with a range of guides to all of the key races, from Senate to state legislature and many more in between.
UPDATE: Tuesday, Nov 8, 2022 · 12:51:05 AM +00:00
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OMG:
Russian children’s show teaches that children deserve to die for misbehaving This atmosphere of total violence shapes people who are ready to murder, people who think it’s the norm and people who are ready to be murdered. pic.twitter.com/2PB30nS2ox— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) November 6, 2022
OMG.
The founder of the Oath Keepers, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, told jurors on Monday that when he learned on Jan. 6 that members of the extremist organization went inside of the Capitol, he told them it was “stupid.”
This. broadly speaking, was a common theme on Monday for Rhodes as he came under cross-examination by U.S. prosecutors at the federal courthouse in Washington.
If one looks to polling as a general guide to Election Day, the ‘red wave’ scenario sold to voters as inevitable isn’t exactly panning out. The last round of polls released over the weekend continues to suggest a highly competitive midterm election that will all come down to turnout in the end.
In that regard, Democrats got some good news with the final NBC News poll of the cycle showing Democrats and Republicans locked dead even on enthusiasm at 73%.
When Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill in April to launch what had all the makings of being a dark election-fraud special police, it was difficult to imagine it actually coming to fruition. And yet it has. In August, deputies from the department arrested 20 Floridians for allegedly voting illegally—and 15 of them (unsurprisingly) were Black voters.
All of the accused were charged with voting illegally.