Attention to the Unseen

Aaron Blake writes: Vice President Kamala Harris turned in one of the more resounding debate performances in recent decades on Tuesday night — to the point where Donald Trump’s allies have struggled to locate a silver lining. Precisely how much the debate could impact the race is an open question, as my colleague Dan Balz notes; we’re a very polarized country, and we don’t generally see big and sudden shifts in polls anymore. But small margins can matter greatly in…

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Sarah Longwell writes: Last night, Trump was, in a certain sense, a stand-in for strongmen like Putin and Xi, and the voters I spoke with right after the debate said that Harris held her own. They appreciated her ability to bait Trump, counter his lies, and look calm while doing it. Her decision to point out how easily foreign despots use flattery to influence Trump also did her a lot of good. “I was actually pleasantly surprised at Harris,” said…

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The Associated Press reports: State and local election officials from across the country on Wednesday warned that problems with the nation’s mail delivery system threaten to disenfranchise voters in the upcoming presidential election, telling the head of the U.S. Postal Service that it hasn’t fixed persistent deficiencies. In an alarming letter, the officials said that over the past year, including the just-concluded primary season, mailed ballots that were postmarked on time were received by local election offices days after the…

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By Tim Golden This story was originally published by ProPublica From the start of U.S. investigations into the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the question of whether the Saudi government might have been involved has hovered over the case. The FBI, after the most extensive criminal probe in its history, concluded that a low-level Saudi official who helped the first two hijackers in California met them by chance and aided them unwittingly. The CIA said it saw no evidence…

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Philip Bump writes: If the 2024 presidential election were held today, it’s not clear who would win. Vice President Kamala Harris has a slight national advantage, according to The Washington Post’s average of polls, but margins in swing states are uniformly narrow. If the polls are overestimating Harris’s support, Donald Trump will return to the White House. If they are underestimating her support, she’ll be the next president. Unless, of course, there’s some successful, anti-democratic effort to subvert her victory….

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NPR reports: Using dehumanizing language to describe immigrants is nothing new for former President Donald Trump or vice presidential candidate JD Vance. Accusations of immigrants being criminals, being rapists or poisoning the blood of the nation have become common currency. But this week, the rhetoric seemed to hit a new low: the allegation that immigrants eat pets. Vance, who represents Ohio in the U.S. Senate, spread a debunked claim about Haitian migrants living in the city of Springfield, Ohio, on…

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Daniel Martinez HoSang writes: It’s a cold day in Washington DC in late January 2025. Though Donald Trump has lost the popular vote for a third consecutive election, his narrow capture of the electoral college has delivered the presidency. During the campaign, Trump offered some symbolic gestures to distance himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led policy blueprint for the next Republican administration, matched with a database of conservative personnel to execute those plans. “Personnel is politics,” they explain. But…

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