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Mariano Rivera was never secretive about the grip on his signature pitch. He’d show it to teammates, coaches, even reporters. He placed his index and middle fingers together along the seams. He pulled down with his middle finger upon release. The ball would whiz arrow-straight before veering sharply a few inches from where the hitter expected it.When teaching pitchers how it should feel coming out of their hand, however, Rivera could be frustratingly vague. Put pressure on the middle finger, he would say. This can be a moneymaker for you. Even now, nobody can make a fastball move quite like Mo’s. “It is as if it dropped straight from the heavens,” he wrote in his 2014 memoir. “How can I explain it any other way?”Eleven years after Rivera’s retirement, a wrist brace with claws could strip any last intimation of divinity out of pitching. A pitcher’s fingers slide into its four rubber rings, attached to metal straws that are fastened by a Velcro strap around the wrist. This device, the FlexPro Grip, measures exactly how quickly each of a pitcher’s fingers exert pressure on a ball. But the point of the gadget isn’t just to register finger forces. It’s to transform the art of pitching into a science.One afternoon last year, at a training facility called VeloU, I watched as Aidan Dolinsky, a pitcher for New York University, slipped on the FlexPro Grip and awaited instructions from Adam Moreau, the device’s co-creator. “I want you to squeeze with your two fingers”—the index and middle—“but only at about 50 percent of your maximum pressure,” Moreau said. “Hold it there for a few seconds. Hold, hold. And then instantly—boom—ramp up to your max force.”As Dolinsky squeezed, Moreau began peppering him with numbers. “Get to 69,” he said, glancing at the app in front of them, “and then when you see that little green dot there, slam on it … Okay, hold, hold, go!”The young pitcher needed a few tries before he mastered the proper sequence of acceleration. “I realized I was squeezing too hard, so then I backed off too much,” Dolinsky said.“That’s quantifying feel!” Moreau cried. Imagine, he said, standing on the mound, and knowing exactly how much force to put on each key finger, and exactly how to peak them at the same time. “What would that do to your spin?”Today’s professional pitchers throw harder than ever, but their art is still largely dictated by speculative notions of feel. Pitchers have forever been licking their fingers and clutching rosin bags to help with grip; these days, camera technology and data analysis have put a premium on players who can also impart enough spin to make the ball run, ride, cut, carry, sink, tunnel, and bore along a split-second flight path. It’s not enough to be blessed with a golden arm. You need to have it work in conjunction with your fingers, too.Only recently, though, has anyone tried to understand exactly how those fingers work in pitching. In 2017, Glenn Fleisig, an expert in biomechanics, led a cohort of researchers looking at how elite pitchers apply finger pressure while throwing. By stuffing a regulation baseball with sensors, the researchers found that the force of the middle and index finger on the ball spiked twice, the last coming roughly six to seven milliseconds before release—in essence, the instant the ball leaves the hand. The force of that final peak averaged 185 Newtons, exerted through two fingers kissing the seams of a five-ounce baseball. It’s enough force to heave a bowling ball about 90 miles an hour.When I spoke with Fleisig, he recalled that the primary motivation around the study was injury prevention. Elbow tears are collectively a billion-dollar problem for Major League Baseball each year, and “knowing how hard someone grips has implications about what’s happening in your elbow,” he said. What he found, though, also unlocked a mystery about pitching. Fleisig had previously reported that the angular velocity achievable by a pitcher’s shoulder maxes out at about 90 miles an hour, but pitchers can throw faster than that. Something else had to be providing that extra oomph—the fingers. “A huge thing that separates a good pitcher from a great pitcher,” Fleisig said, “is their ability to do that last push.”[Devin Gordon: Arms are flying off their hinges]Fleisig’s work is emblematic of a recent and long-overdue boom in touch research. “We’re now catching up to where we’ve been for many decades in the auditory and visual fields,” David Ginty, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, told me. When Ginty started his somatosensory research lab in the mid-1990s, the field was small and quirky, dominated by a few labs producing a handful of papers a year. Today, the IEEE World Haptics conference, the top symposium where touch researchers share their findings, is a sprawling, festival-like event, sponsored by a subsidiary of Meta. Advancements in molecular-genetic techniques have enabled labs like Ginty’s to see how individual nerve cells respond to certain stimuli. It’s given researchers the best picture yet of the basic biology of touch, and it’s jump-started investigations into new treatments for chronic pain, anemia, irritable bowel syndrome, traumatic brain injury, and even low bone density. A stream of studies in recent years has also highlighted the psychological, cognitive, and creative benefits of doing things by hand.In science, the closer anyone looks at touch, the more its influence becomes apparent. In baseball, it could revolutionize how teams look for the next Mariano Rivera with the magic feel.For Connor Lunn’s entire baseball career, “feel” was waved off as something subjective and abstract, mostly because it couldn’t be measured. Eventually, Lunn, a recently retired minor-league pitcher, realized that people weren’t even trying. “We have every other metric out there—how hard you’re throwing, all the spin rates, the tail axis, everything,” Lunn told me. “But there was nothing out there on where you’re gripping the ball.” Learning how to throw a new pitch was like getting a prescription for eyeglasses based on what somebody else is telling you looks clear for them. In April, shortly before being signed as a free agent by the Tampa Bay Rays, Lunn was co-awarded the patent on a design for a baseball wrapped in a pressure-sensing fabric.Alex Fast, a data analyst and writer for PitchingList.com, also thought the role of pressure was being overlooked. In March 2023, he gave a talk at the MIT Sloan Analytics Conference in Boston about measuring finger pressure in baseball. Using sensors and other supplies bought from Amazon, he built a feedback device that was tiny and flexible enough to be worn underneath a piece of tape on the fingertip and that could transmit force data to a microcontroller, worn inside a fanny pack on the pitcher’s lower back. “When I first got into analytics, I remember thinking that they’ve quantified everything,” Fast told me. But so many people that he spoke with after the conference shared his hunch about finger force, Fast told me later, that he began to think, This could be pitching’s next great analytical frontier.[From the July/August 2023 issue: Moneyball broke baseball]Part of what’s so notable about the attention being paid to touch in baseball circles is its contrast with how most of us navigate the world. I can point to one tool I reliably touch in my daily life: my iPhone, with its flat, smooth surface. I tap, scroll, and occasionally pinch it; calling it a touchscreen is an insult to the various forms of touch humans once used to manipulate pens, books, Rolodexes, keys, cash, coins, camcorders, calculators, discs, tapes, and credit cards. In households around the world, voice assistants and smart devices already respond nimbly to vocal commands to turn on lights, play songs, set temperatures, and change television channels. Hands-free fixtures fill the bathroom. Telehealth visits replace physical exams. Virtual reality has barely any use for the hands or feet.That our grip on the physical world is slipping has real consequences: A long history of medical study has connected hand strength to overall physical health and longevity, for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear. Christy Isbell, a pediatric occupational therapist at East Tennessee State University, said she sees some kids as old as 4 or 5 years who have never held a pencil or a crayon. The absence of that tactile experience may change how they learn to read and write, she told me, and limit them in other ways. Healthy young adults who spend lots of time on their smartphones have weaker grips, duller fingers, and higher rates of hand and wrist injuries than their peers who use their phones less frequently. Professors at medical schools are raising alarms about the diminishing dexterity of surgical students.Pitchers are an outlier. Unlike the rest of us, they must be attuned to precisely how their fingertips interact with the world every time they take the mound. And simply paying a little more attention to that interaction appears to make a great difference. According to research by the company that manufactures the FlexPro Grip, pitchers who use the device have been able to increase the rate of spin on their fastball by about 4 percent. A higher spin rate on a fastball can produce a “rising” effect that makes it harder for hitters to square up.[Read: The scourge of ‘win probability’ in sports]Even if the rest of us never get our finger pressure measured, the research is clear that we can benefit emotionally, cognitively, and physically by doing more with our hands—by jotting down notes, knitting, or taking a pottery class. With that effort, and the help of a few committed baseball buffs, perhaps we can arrest our collective drift into a hands-free world.

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If you’re dealing with election-related stress, you’re not alone. Feeling jittery and unsettled about the upcoming election? If you’re anything like the 69 percent of American adults who said the 2024 presidential election was a “significant” source of stress in their lives, per this year’s American Psychological Association’s Stress in America poll, you’re not alone.  Elections are common wellsprings of anxiety because they’re rife with uncertainty, says David H. Rosmarin, the founder of the Center for Anxiety. You’re unsure of the outcome, and unsure of what life may look like for you under a new administration, especially when the difference between the two choices is undeniably vast. Some of the proposed policies may threaten people’s safety and freedoms, resulting in even more anxiety. Research shows political anxiety can impact people who aren’t generally anxious otherwise. There are key differences between everyday anxiety and election-related anxiety. Sometimes, generalized anxiety is rooted in cognitive distortions, or inaccurate beliefs or fears about the world. But election-based distress isn’t necessarily based on hypotheticals or overreactions, says licensed clinical social worker Jneé Hill. “A lot of the concerns,” she says, “are very real and very valid based on people’s real lives and lived experiences.” While election anxiety may feel large and existential, mental health experts agree it can be managed. In the lead-up to November 5 — and the uneasy days following — there are some strategies that can help quiet your mind. Get to the root of your anxiety To properly address your fears, you first need to specify what triggers your feelings of anxiety beyond not wanting the other side to win, Rosmarin says. What specific policies or issues impact you the most? It might be reproductive rights, the economy, immigration, or war abroad. Identify your top three issues, Rosmarin says, and try to share these worries with family, a friend, a supportive online community, or mental health professional.  Knowing the causes of your fears can help you anticipate and gird against them. Research shows when people were asked whether they expected to be stressed about the election the following day, they reported worse moods and were more likely to rate their physical health as poor, regardless of political affiliation, age, or gender.  Knowing the causes of your fears can help you anticipate and gird against them You might also ask yourself why these issues concern you, Hill says. If reproductive rights are your top priority, maybe your deeper fears center on being unable to receive lifesaving medical treatments. “A lot of this,” Hill says, “comes down to safety.”  However, you can anticipate your stress and get in front of it. There’s a thought exercise you can do ahead of encountering something upsetting to slow your thoughts and talk yourself through your anxiety, says Shevaun Neupert, a psychology professor at North Carolina State University and author of a study on how to combat anticipatory election stress. Take a few minutes and think about why you’re stressed, how it’s related to the election, and why this contentious issue exists in the first place. “It really is focused on mental engagement, perspective-taking,” Neupert says, “trying to understand where did this thing come from? Why is it here? And to fully understand it rather than trying to solve it.” This exercise is effective, Neupert believes, because it helps reduce uncertainty. For instance, you may come to realize a source of your anxiety is a decades-long ongoing foreign policy issue. While this realization doesn’t minimize the problem or provide a solution, sometimes it’s helpful to put the issue into its proper context and perspective. “If we feel like we have a better understanding of a problem or of a stressor or we have a clearer sense of it,” Neupert says, “it’s not as scary.” Take control where you can Uncertainty about the future is a major source of general anxiety and can lead to a sense of powerlessness. With so much out of an individual’s control, it’s important to focus on areas where you do have authority. You can, of course, vote, volunteer as a poll worker, and get involved with get out the vote or activist organizations in your community.  You can also try setting goals in your work or social life that have nothing to do with politics but still might help you feel like you’re making progress in some small way, Neupert says. Maybe that goal is to finish a book over the next two weeks or to make dinner every night with your family. “That goes a long way to boosting perceptions of control,” she says. Then, consider how you’ll assert autonomy over your life after the election, especially if your candidate doesn’t win. You can plan on leaning heavily on your friends or distracting yourself with hobbies. “There might be situations that are beyond my control,” Rosmarin says, “but that doesn’t take away my power of choice in my life, in my limited way.” Lean into community Feeling supported by friends and family helps combat anxiety, so try to avoid spending the next few weeks in isolation. Instead, reach out to friends and family (preferably discussing anything but politics) or attend a safe and affirming community event. Find people who fill you with calm instead of dread and with whom you can talk things through and problem-solve. “What can be helpful,” clinical psychologist Krystal Lewis says, “is feeling all emotions, feeling all the feels, with people who are going through it as well.”  These communities will be especially crucial post-election, too, Lewis says. Find people or groups where you can process strong emotions, whether that’s a dance class or a volunteer organization. Care for your mind and body In the days leading up to the election and immediately following, especially if a clear winner is not apparent, stressed-out Americans should pay extra care to their minds and bodies. This might mean curbing your consumption of news and social media. While experts say everyone’s tolerance will be different, it’s important to pay attention to how they feel while watching or reading the news and social media. Engage enough to stay informed, but step away if you feel overwhelmed, Lewis says. “Unless that’s your job,” she says, “there’s no need to be that consumed with it.” Rosmarin suggests turning off your phone and avoiding all news at least 30 minutes before you go to sleep, including on election night. “You’ll wake up in the morning, you’ll find out what the story is. You watching it isn’t going to change anything,” he says. “The only thing it’ll change is make you more tired and grumpy the next day.” Engage enough to stay informed, but step away if you feel overwhelmed Proper sleep, a healthy diet, and physical activity can ward off anxiety, so experts recommend getting enough to eat, moving a bit, and prioritizing rest. Try going for a walk or hike as exposure to nature can lower stress and anxiety levels. Grounding exercises can also help you calm down. Hill suggests deep breathing from your diaphragm or picking a color and describing objects of that color in your surroundings. Difficult as it may be, try to incorporate joy however you can, Lewis says. Spend a few minutes each day on pleasurable activities that reduce stress, like listening to music, getting together with friends, or meditation.  Regardless of what happens over the coming days and weeks, remind yourself that your concerns are real, Hill says. What matters is finding coping strategies that work for you — and will continue to be effective no matter the outcome.

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Well, it’s that time again: Millions of Americans are stress-eating while clicking “Refresh” on 538’s presidential forecast, hoping beyond hope that the little red or blue line will have made a tiny tick upward. Some may be clutching themselves in the fetal position, chanting under their breath: “There’s a good new poll out of Pennsylvania.”The stakes of this election are sky-high, and its outcome is not knowable in advance—a combination that most of us find deeply discomfiting. People crave certainty, and there’s just one place to look for it: in the data. Earlier humans might have turned to oracles or soothsayers; we have Nate Silver. But the truth is that polling—and the models that rely primarily on polling to forecast the election result—cannot confidently predict what will happen on November 5.The widespread perception that polls and models are raw snapshots of public opinion is simply false. In fact, the data are significantly massaged based on possibly reasonable, but unavoidably idiosyncratic, judgments made by pollsters and forecasting sages, who interpret and adjust the numbers before presenting them to the public. They do this because random sampling has become very difficult in the digital age, for reasons I’ll get into; the numbers would not be representative without these corrections, but every one of them also introduces a margin for human error.Most citizens see only the end product: a preposterously precise statistic, such as the notion that Donald Trump has a 50.2 percent—not 50.3 percent, mind you—chance of winning the presidency. (Why stop there? Why not go to three decimal points?) Such numerical precision gives the false impression of certainty where there is none.[Read: The world is falling apart. Blame the flukes.]Early American political polls were unscientific but seemingly effective. In the early 20th century, The Literary Digest, a popular magazine in its day, sent sample ballots to millions of its readers. By this method, the magazine correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election from 1916 until 1936. In that year, for the contest between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alf Landon, the Digest sent out roughly 10 million sample ballots and received an astonishing 2.4 million back (a response rate of 24 percent would be off the charts by modern standards). Based on those responses, the Digest predicted that FDR would receive a drubbing, winning just 41 percent of the vote. Instead, he won 61 percent, carrying all but two states. Readers lost faith in the Digest (it went out of business two years later).The conventional wisdom was that the poll failed because in addition to its readers, the Digest selected people from directories of automobile and telephone ownership, which skewed the sample toward the wealthy—particularly during the Great Depression, when cars and phones were luxuries. That is likely part of the explanation, but more recent analysis has pointed to a different problem: who responded to the poll and who didn’t. For whatever reason, Landon supporters were far more likely than FDR supporters to send back their sample ballots, making the poll not just useless, but wildly misleading. This high-profile error cleared the way for more “scientific” methods, such as those pioneered by George Gallup, among others.The basic logic of the new, more scientific method was straightforward: If you can generate a truly random sample from the broader population you are studying—in which every person has an equally likely chance of being included in the poll—then you can derive astonishingly accurate results from a reasonably small number of people. When those assumptions are correct and the poll is based on a truly random sample, pollsters need only about 1,000 people to produce a result with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.To produce reasonably unbiased samples, pollsters would randomly select people from the telephone book and call them. But this method became problematic when some people began making their phone numbers unlisted; these people shared certain demographic characteristics, so their absence skewed the samples. Then cellphones began to replace landlines, and pollsters started using “random-digit dialing,” which ensured that every active line had an equal chance of being called. For a while, that helped.But the matter of whom pollsters contacted was not the only difficulty. Another was how those people responded, and why. A distortion known as social-desirability bias is the tendency of respondents to lie to pollsters about their likely voting behavior. In America, that problem was particularly acute around race: If a campaign pitted a minority candidate against a white candidate, some white respondents might lie and say that they’d vote for the minority candidate to avoid being perceived as racist. This phenomenon, contested by some scholars, is known as the Bradley Effect, named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley—a Black politician who was widely tipped to become governor of California based on pre-election polling, but narrowly lost instead. To deal with the Bradley Effect, many pollsters switched from live callers to robocalls, hoping that voters would be more honest with a computer than another person.But representative sampling has continued to become more difficult. In an age of caller ID and smartphones, along with persistent junk and nuisance calls, few people answer when they see unfamiliar numbers. Most Americans spend much of their time online, but there are no reliable methods to get a truly random sample from the internet. (Consider, for example, how subscribers of The Atlantic differ from the overall American population, and it’s obvious why a digital poll on this site would be worthless at making predictions about the overall electorate.)These shifts in technology and social behavior have created an enormous problem known as nonresponse bias. Some pollsters release not just findings but total numbers of attempted contacts. Take, for example, this 2018 New York Times poll within Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District. The Times reports that it called 53,590 people in order to get 501 responses. That’s a response rate lower than 1 percent, meaning that the Times pollsters had to call roughly 107 people just to get one person to answer their questions. What are the odds that those rare few who answered the phone are an unskewed, representative sample of likely voters? Zilch. As I often ask my undergraduate students: How often do you answer when you see an unknown number? Now, how often do you think a lonely elderly person in rural America answers their landline? If there’s any systematic difference in behavior, that creates a potential polling bias.To cope, pollsters have adopted new methodologies. As the Pew Research Center notes, 61 percent of major national pollsters used different approaches in 2022 than they did in 2016. This means that when Americans talk about “the polls” being off in past years, we’re not comparing apples with apples. One new polling method is to send text messages with links to digital surveys. (Consider how often you’d click a link from an unknown number to understand just how problematic that method is.) Many pollsters rely on a mix of approaches. Some have started using online “opt-in” methods, in which respondents choose to take a survey and are typically paid a small amount for participating. This technique, too, has raised reasonable questions about accuracy: One of my colleagues at University College London, Thomas Gift, tested opt-in methods and found that nearly 82 percent of participants in his survey likely lied about themselves in order to qualify for the poll and get paid. Pew further found that online opt-in polls do a poor job of capturing the attitudes of young people and Hispanic Americans.No matter the method, a pure, random sample is now an unattainable ideal—even the aspiration is a relic of the past. To compensate, some pollsters try to design samples representative of known demographics. One common approach, stratification, is to divide the electorate into subgroups by gender, race, age, etc., and ensure that the sample includes enough of each “type” of voter. Another involves weighting some categories of respondents differently from others, to match presumptions about the broader electorate. For example, if a polling sample had 56 percent women, but the pollster believed that the eventual electorate would be 52 percent women, they might weigh male respondents slightly more heavily in the adjusted results.[Read: The asterisk on Kamala Harris’s poll numbers]The problem, of course, is that nobody knows who will actually show up to vote on November 5. So these adjustments may be justified, but they are inherently subjective, introducing another possible source of human bias. If women come out to vote in historically high numbers in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, for example, the weighting could be badly off, causing a major polling error.The bottom line is that modern pollsters are trying to correct for known forms of possible bias in their samples by making subjective adjustments to the data. If their judgments are correct, then their polls might be accurate. But there’s no way to know beforehand whether their assumptions about, say, turnout by demographic group are wise or not.Forecasters then take that massaged polling data and feed it into a model that’s curated by a person—or team of people—who makes further subjective assessments. For example, the 538 model adjusts its forecasts based on polls plus what some in the field call “the fundamentals,” such as historical trends around convention polling bounces, or underlying economic data. Most forecasters also weight data based on how particular pollsters performed in earlier elections. Each adjustment is an educated guess based on past patterns. But nobody knows for sure whether past patterns are predictive of future results. Enough is extraordinary about this race to suspect that they may not be.More bad news: Modern polling often misses the mark even when trying to convey uncertainty, because pollsters grossly underestimate their margins of error. Most polls report a plus or minus margin of, say, 3 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval. This means that if a poll reports that Trump has the support of 47 percent of the electorate, then the reported margin of error suggests that the “real” number likely lies between 44 percent (minus three) and 50 percent (plus three). If the confidence interval is correct, that spread of 44 to 50 should capture the actual result of the election about 95 percent of the time. But the reality is less reassuring.In a 2022 research paper titled “Election Polls Are 95 Percent Confident but Only 60 Percent Accurate,” Aditya Kotak and Don Moore of UC Berkeley analyzed 6,000 polls from 2008 through 2020. They found that even with just one week to go before Election Day, only about six in 10 polls captured the end result within their stated margin of error. Four in 10 times, the polling data fell outside that window. The authors conclude that to justify a 95 percent confidence interval, pollsters should “at least double” their reported margins of error—a move that would be statistically wise but render polling virtually meaningless in close elections. After all, if a margin of error doubled to six percentage points, then a poll finding that Harris had 50 percent support would indicate that the “true” number was somewhere between 44 percent (a Trump landslide) and 56 percent (a Harris landslide).Alas, the uncertainty doesn’t end there. Unlike many other forms of measurement, polls can change what they’re measuring. Sticking a thermometer outside doesn’t make the weather hotter or colder. But poll numbers can and do shift voting behavior. For example, studies have shown that perceived poll momentum can make people more likely to vote for the surging party or candidate in a “bandwagon” effect. Take the 2012 Republican primaries, when social conservatives sought an alternative to Mitt Romney and were split among candidates. A CNN poll conducted the night before the Iowa caucus showed Rick Santorum in third place. Santorum went on to win the caucus, likely because voters concluded from the poll that he was the most electable challenger.The truth is that even after election results are announced, we may not really know which forecasters were “correct.” Just as The Literary Digest accurately predicted the winner of presidential races with a deeply flawed methodology, sometimes a bad approach is just lucky, creating the illusion of accuracy. And neither polling nor electoral dynamics are stable over time. Polling methodology has shifted radically since 2008; voting patterns and demographics are ever-changing too. Heck, Barack Obama won Indiana in 2008; recent polls suggest that Harris is losing there by as much as 17 points. National turnout was 55 percent in 2016 and 63 percent in 2020. Polls are trying to hit a moving target with instruments that are themselves constantly changing. For all of these reasons, a pollster who was perfectly accurate in 2008 could be wildly off in 2024.In other words, presidential elections are rare, contingent, one-off events. Predicting their outcome does not yield enough comparable data points to support any pollster’s claim to exceptional foresight, rather than luck. Trying to evaluate whether a forecasting model is “good” just from judging its performance on the past four presidential elections is a bit like trying to figure out whether a coin is “fair” or “rigged” from just four coin flips. It’s impossible.[Read: The man who’s sure that Harris will win]The social scientists Justin Grimmer, Dean Knox, and Sean Westwood recently published research supporting this conclusion. They write: “We demonstrate that scientists and voters are decades to millennia away from assessing whether probabilistic forecasting provides reliable insights into election outcomes.” (Their research has sparked fierce debate among scholars about the wisdom of using probabilistic forecasting to measure rare and idiosyncratic events such as presidential elections.)Probabilistic presidential forecasts are effectively unfalsifiable in close elections, meaning that they can’t be proved wrong. Nate Silver’s model in 2016 suggested that Hillary Clinton had a 71.4 percent chance of victory. That wasn’t necessarily “wrong” when she lost: After all, as Silver pointed out to the Harvard Gazette, events with a 28.6 percent probability routinely happen—more frequently than one in four times. So was his 2016 presidential model “wrong”? Or was it bang-on accurate, but an unusual, lower-probability event took place? There’s no way of knowing for sure.The pollsters and forecasters who are studying the 2024 election are not fools. They are skilled analysts attempting some nearly impossible wizardry by making subjective adjustments to control for possible bias while forecasting an uncertain future. Their data suggest that the race is a nail-biter—and that may well be the truth. But nobody—not you, not me, not the betting markets, not Nate Silver—knows what’s going to happen on November 5.

Editor’s Note: On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.Don’t want to miss a single column?Sign up to get “Dear Therapist” in your inbox. Dear Therapist,My younger brother and I are both in our 50s. He met his wife about 16 years ago, and they got married in 2014. This is her third marriage, my brother’s first. They have one child together, who’s 13, and his wife also has three other children, each from a different earlier relationship.From the beginning, their relationship has been beset with problems. She accuses him of cheating on her, wanting to cheat on her, looking at other women, and lusting after other women on television, in restaurants, and when out walking the dogs. Things will be fine for a while and then the whole thing starts back up again. Over the course of this relationship, he has given up his hobbies and fallen out of contact with his longtime friends, and seems allowed to do things only with her and her family. I have watched as my brother has changed from a healthy and happy man to a shell of his former self.Every time she gets upset, he has to jump through more hoops, make bigger gestures, and flagellate himself more until she relents and stops punishing him. He has come to my house twice in the past year and stayed, because she told him she wanted him to leave. I have continually emphasized to him the importance of seeking professional counseling but he says she refuses to consider it, because the problems all come down to him and his (alleged) wandering eye. My brother is a kind, gentle, considerate man, and this hurts him deeply.I fear that my brother is the victim in an abusive marriage, and I don’t know how best to support him. I have told him repeatedly that he always has a home here and he can move in and stay for as long as he wants. I have also reassured him that his daughter wouldn’t be the only one in her friend group with parents who have decided to split up.I care about him very much and want him to be healthy, safe, and happy. Our mom and I both worry that his wife will end up breaking him to the point that he would harm himself. How can I help him?Dear Reader,Your letter paints a troubling picture of your brother’s marriage, so I understand why you’re so concerned about his well-being. The situation you describe is indeed alarming, as it bears many hallmarks of emotional abuse: the constant accusations, the isolation from friends and family, the gradual erosion of your brother’s sense of self, and the cyclical nature of conflict and reconciliation, also known as “the cycle of abuse.”In this cycle, things are calm for a time, but never for long. The tension builds and builds until there’s an explosion, followed by another period of calm, of promises, of temporary peace. Each time, the price of peace becomes higher. Your brother must make bigger gestures, offer greater sacrifices, diminish himself even further. This is painful to witness, especially when it involves someone you love.Clearly you care deeply for your brother, and your desire to help him end this suffering comes from a loving and compassionate place. But I want to tell you something that might be hard to hear: You can’t save your brother from this relationship.This doesn’t mean, however, that you’re powerless to help—far from it. But it does mean that you need to reframe how you think about your role. Once you accept that no matter how much you want to rescue him, your brother is the only one who can decide to change his situation, you’ll be able to support him much more effectively.[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]So what is your role? First, you need to understand his situation better so you can appreciate what he’s up against. Start by educating yourself about his experience so that you can understand why he engages in behaviors that seem baffling to you—such as his tolerance of his wife’s behavior and repeated begging for forgiveness for crimes he didn’t commit. You might feel that what he should do here is obvious: He’s in an unhealthy relationship and should get out. But bear in mind that abusive relationships frequently create a warped reality for the person being abused. Your brother has likely internalized many of his wife’s criticisms and may believe he truly is to blame for the problems in their marriage. This warped view makes leaving incredibly difficult for victims.Think of it this way: Your brother and his wife are locked into a dance where the music of their relationship has become a monotonous dirge of accusation and defense. The steps go like this: His wife searches constantly for evidence of betrayal. Every glance becomes a crime; every interaction becomes a transgression. And your brother? He hears the music of confusion, self-doubt, shame. So he does his part of the dance: constantly attempting (and failing) to prove his innocence. Unfortunately for him, he’s trying to prove a negative—how do you show someone the absence of something? How do you demonstrate faithfulness to someone who has decided that you are unfaithful?What makes this dance hard for you to watch is that the qualities you admire in your brother and that could make him a wonderful partner to a different person—his kindness, consideration, gentleness—have become the very things that his partner is using to manipulate him. The more he accommodates, the more his wife demands of him.You say that this dynamic has been present since their relationship’s beginning, so instead of trying to convince your brother that his partner is mistreating him, you might get curious—and help him get curious—about what has drawn him to such a partnership in the first place. She seems to have come into this relationship with a history of relational instability—three children from three different relationships, prior to a fourth child with him. If she didn’t work through the issues that led to those relationships ending, she entered this current relationship with a suitcase full of previous betrayals (perceived or real), abandonment fears, and unhealthy communication patterns. But instead of unpacking this suitcase, she handed it to your brother and said, “You carry this. You are responsible for all of it.”[Read: Couples therapy, but for siblings]At the same time, your brother came into this relationship with his own suitcase. You say that he and his wife dated for six years before marrying, and even after having a child together they waited another three years to get married. I wonder if part of him had doubts about whether he wanted to be in this relationship, and another part of him preferred the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty. What in his own history led him to make that choice, to confuse controlling behavior with evidence of being needed, or to decide that the relationship he had—with all of its intense volatility—was “safer” to stay in than to leave so he could find something else?Another way to support him is to encourage his curiosity. Your instinct might be to focus on his wife’s behavior, but a more helpful role is to provide a safe space for him to explore his own. Instead of saying “Your wife is abusive and you need to leave,” you can try “I’ve noticed that you seem unhappy this week. How are you feeling about things at home?” You can also gently challenge the narrative that he has internalized. When he blames himself for their problems, you might say something like “That doesn’t sound like the brother I know. The person I know is kind and loyal. I wonder if there’s another way to look at this situation?”Whenever possible, you can float questions (not all at the same time) that help him reflect: “Do you ever feel lonely?” “Have you seen so-and-so lately?” “Do you miss doing (insert favorite activity)?” “What would be different if you weren’t worried about her reaction?” After another fight that ends with him at your house, rather than suggesting couples therapy, you might say, “Maybe you’d find it helpful to talk with a therapist on your own, even for just one session.” If he worries about his daughter, you might ask, again with gentle curiosity, “What do you imagine she’s learning about self-worth or loving relationships as she observes the two of you staying together?” He may not be able to answer these questions aloud, but you’d be helping him begin to consider an alternative narrative to the one he is carrying around. Just as important, you wouldn’t be trying to control him with what you want him to do and think, as his wife is—you’d be allowing him to go inside himself and access his own thoughts, feelings, and desires, which is a crucial step in a process that includes questioning, awareness, and finally, if he chooses, action.As you open up this space for him, remember that just as your brother is overly focused on his wife’s unhappiness, you don’t want to be overly focused on his. Supporting someone in an abusive relationship can be emotionally exhausting and shouldn’t come at the expense of seeking support (such as therapy) for yourself. Your brother is fortunate to have such a caring sibling, but if you want to model healthy boundaries in a relationship, make sure you’re taking good care of yourself too.Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

Former President Donald Trump and Justice Brett Kavanaugh during Kavanaugh’s ceremonial swearing-in at the White House in 2018. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Three things are true about the current, Republican-controlled Supreme Court. The first is that, in 2020, when outgoing President Donald Trump was pushing his fellow partisans on the Court to overturn his loss in that year’s presidential race, the Republican justices didn’t do it. Despite everything this Court has done before and since to undermine democracy and write Republican policy proposals into the law, even these justices balked at joining a coup. Joe Biden won by a sufficiently clear margin that even this Court didn’t question his victory. The second truth is that, in 2000, when the election was much closer and turned on the outcome in a single state, the Court did hand Republican George W. Bush the presidency in Bush v. Gore. All five of the justices who typically voted for outcomes favored by the GOP were in the majority in Bush, and all four of the justices who typically favored the Democratic Party’s goals were in dissent. The majority’s reasoning was widely mocked, in no small part because it seemed to abandon longstanding conservative principles in order to achieve a partisan end. And then there’s a third reality about this Court: In the past year, the Court has gone out of its way to protect Trump from the legal consequences of his behavior. Last March, after the Colorado Supreme Court ordered Trump removed from the ballot based on a very persuasive argument that, by inciting the January 6 insurrection, Trump violated the 14th Amendment’s ban on high officials who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States, five Republican justices effectively neutralized this provision of the Constitution for the duration of the 2024 election. Similarly, the Court’s opinion in Trump v. United States (2024) gave Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution for crimes he committed while in office. The most astonishing part of the Trump immunity case held that, if he is returned to office, Trump may give any order he desires to the Department of Justice — even if he orders federal law enforcement to act “for an improper purpose” — and Trump would be immune from criminal consequences for giving these orders. Meanwhile, Trump is openly campaigning on having his political rivals arrested. He even suggested that critics of the Republican Supreme Court “should be put in jail.” Right now, polls show the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris to be more or less a coin flip. On Election Day, the country could easily find itself in another Bush v. Gore situation. And, if Trump loses, his behavior after his 2020 loss suggests that he will eagerly petition a GOP-controlled Supreme Court to undo the will of the voters.  The only uncertain question is whether these justices would join him in a second effort to overthrow the results of a presidential election. A coup is much more likely if the election is very close In retrospect, the result in Bush v. Gore was not surprising. Once all the other states’ votes were counted in 2000, the winner of the presidential election turned entirely on who won Florida. And initial tallies in that state showed Bush leading by 1,784 votes (that lead eventually shrunk to 537 votes).  The justices who wanted Bush to be president didn’t actually need to do much to ensure his victory. All they had to do was maintain the status quo, and prevent Florida from recounting the votes to potentially place Gore in the lead. And the five justices in the majority did just that, ordering the state to halt a recount that might have revealed that Gore, and not Bush, was the real winner of the election. Of course, the Court’s decision was hard to defend on its legal merits. It was unusually radical, faulting Florida for failing to apply “uniform rules” to the ballot recount, and suggesting that any state that applies slightly different procedures in one county than it does in another violates the Constitution.  Were this rule applied universally, Democrats could have wielded it to make American election law much more egalitarian and progressive. But the five justices in the majority made sure this would not happen, ruling that “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances.” Bush was a one-time-only decision, breaking out a radical theory of equality for exactly as long as it took to install a Republican in the White House, then immediately placing that theory back on the highest shelf.  But the cynical nature of the Court’s decision did not change the fact that, once five justices committed to making Bush president, it was very easy for them to find a way to do so. Again, all they had to do was keep everything the same in one state until Bush was officially declared the winner of the election. Compare this result to the multiple election disputes that arose out of the 2020 election. While several states were nail-bitingly close, Biden won a 306-232 victory in the Electoral College. To change the result, Trump’s lawyers needed to convince the justices to toss out about 43,000 Biden votes in three different states.  That means the justices would have needed to reach the implausible conclusion that, in one presidential election, three states somehow violated either the Constitution or federal law so severely that they declared the wrong candidate the winner. The likelihood that such a cascade of errors would independently occur in multiple states is, to put it mildly, very small. And the justices probably realized that if they tried to convince the American people that such an implausible series of events had occurred, large numbers of Biden’s more than 81 million voters would have taken to the streets and refused to accept the Court’s ruling. Thus, the more that the 2024 election looks like 2000, with the outcome turning on a single state, the more likely it is that the Republican justices will intervene to ensure a Trump victory. The more that Harris can run up the score, the more likely it is that the Court allows her victory to stand. The Court has already laid the doctrinal framework for a decision overturning the 2024 election  So what would a Supreme Court decision overthrowing the 2024 election look like? Most likely, it would look like a 2020 court dispute out of Pennsylvania. During the pandemic, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that certain ballots mailed before Election Day would be counted even if they did not arrive at an election office until up to three days after Election Day. Though the US Supreme Court has the final word on questions of federal law, each state’s highest court has the last word on questions of state law. So the Pennsylvania court’s decision should have been final because it was rooted in that court’s interpretation of Pennsylvania state law. Nevertheless, the Republican Party asked the Supreme Court to reverse the Pennsylvania court’s decision and order these ballots tossed out, and several Republican justices urged their Court to do so. Ultimately, the Court dismissed the case as moot — Biden won Pennsylvania by a large enough margin that it wouldn’t have mattered what happened to these ballots. Since then, the Court handed down its decision in Moore v. Harper (2023), a case in which the justices claimed a new power to overrule a state supreme court’s interpretation of the state’s own election law. Though Moore was largely viewed as a victory for voting rights because it rejected a very aggressive attempt to eliminate voter protections enshrined in state constitutions, the Court’s opinion includes an ominous line stating that the US Supreme Court may overrule a state’s highest court’s decision impacting a federal election if the state decision “exceed[s] the bounds of ordinary judicial review.”  The Court did not define this phrase — it just left it dangling out there as a warning that the justices may exercise a new and unprecedented power to swing elections at some point in the future. In any election, there will be some disputes about which ballots are counted, whether certain polling places should be kept open late, and other routine legal disagreements that are typically resolved by state courts without too much drama. Now, however, a Republican-controlled Supreme Court claims the power to overrule any of these decisions, and potentially to rewrite a state’s own election law. If the justices decide to overturn the 2024 presidential election, in other words, they have given themselves a powerful new tool that they can use to find reasons to do so.

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Donald Trump speaks to the media before boarding Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base on January 12, 2021. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images No less an authority than Vladimir Putin has predicted that the coming years in global affairs will be a “revolutionary situation”: a reference to a line of Vladimir Lenin’s from 1913, just prior to World War I. Putin’s counterpart Xi Jinping concurs, foreseeing “changes the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years.” This doesn’t mean World War III is inevitable or even likely. But it does mean we are in an era when the decisions of major leaders in moments of crisis could have an outsize impact on global security and the lives of millions.  This also is the moment when Donald Trump may return to the presidency.  The year 2016, when Trump was elected the first — and so far only — time, didn’t exactly feel like a very peaceful or stable moment in world history. The Syrian civil war and the US-led campaign against ISIS were raging. In June, one of the terror group’s sympathizers killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Russian-backed forces were occupying much of Eastern Ukraine and shot down a Malaysian airliner.  About a month before the election, North Korea conducted its most powerful nuclear test to date. Europe was still in the midst of an unprecedented influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, which would end up having dramatic political consequences in several countries. Ted Cruz was terrifying 3-year-olds on the campaign trail by telling them the world was “on fire.” And yet, viewed from the vantage point of this year, 2016 feels like a simpler time. Wars of all types have gotten more common and deadlier around the world in the years since, and superpower conflict — a concern that had largely receded in the post-Cold War era — is back on the agenda.  In short, the global situation Trump would inherit if he were elected this time around would be far more dangerous and unpredictable. And that in turn raises the risks of his erratic and transactional approach to foreign policy.  What was, eight years ago, a localized “gray zone” conflict in Eastern Ukraine is now the first major land war in Europe in decades, one in which Russia’s president has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons. Israel’s war in Gaza, already one of the deadliest conflicts for civilians of the 20th century, is fast spiraling into a regional conflict that could involve direct combat between Israel and Iran and could yet drag in the US military.  Further east, potentially even more dangerous conflicts loom. Many North Korea watchers believe the country is preparing for war, and that the risk of all-out conflict on the Korean peninsula — which could potentially kill more than a million people, even if North Korea doesn’t use its nuclear arsenal — has never been higher.   Then there’s Taiwan. Even putting aside a death toll on both sides that could dwarf the war in Ukraine, a war in Taiwan would be a body blow to the global economy. If the US came to Taiwan’s aid, it could lose as many troops in a matter of weeks as it did in 20 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some analysts believe China could even preemptively attack US bases in the Pacific if it believed US intervention was inevitable, something the US military has not experienced since WWII. And the threat of nuclear weapons use would loom over the conflict: China has the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, one that is growing fast.  China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran — a group some have dubbed the “axis of upheaval” — may not have much in common in terms of ideology of overall interests, but are increasingly collaborating: The reported presence of North Korean troops fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine is just the latest example.  None of this is to downplay the wars and security threats that existed in 2016 and continued through Trump’s presidency, nor the obviously massive disruptive effect of the Covid pandemic. But state vs. state conflict, and even superpower vs. superpower conflict, is an entirely different matter than war against terrorist groups. Gray zone conflict is a different matter than open warfare. Recent rapid advances in drone technology and artificial intelligence are likely to make the wars of the future all the more unpredictable, and potentially more destructive.   All of which makes the idea of putting back in the Oval Office a president who proudly calls his foreign policy approach “crazy” so dangerous. A world on fire Even putting aside the issues of Trump’s temperament, mental acuity, or the warnings from multiple senior national security officials from his own past administration that they believe he is dangerously unqualified for the presidency, there are several reasons to believe that a new Trump presidency would amplify this “revolutionary situation” rather than moderate it.  First, Trump does not put much value in the idea of territorial integrity. It may sound like a wonky academic point, but we tend to take for granted that in our current era, countries rarely conquer each other and borders are rarely changed by force. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has obviously challenged this taboo against what the UN Charter calls the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity” of other countries. As president, Trump reportedly told other world leaders that the Crimean peninsula, which was illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, is rightfully Russian because everyone there speaks Russian. Figures close to the Trump campaign like Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have openly endorsed the view that Crimea is rightfully Russian.   Trump overturned decades of US policy and international consensus by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which he has described as a snap decision made after a quick history lesson from his ambassador to Israel and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. He did the same for Morocco’s claims over the disputed region of Western Sahara, in return for Morocco recognizing Israel. (In fairness, the Biden administration hasn’t reversed either of these moves — once the taboo is broken, it’s hard to reestablish.) For Trump, the president who after all, mused about buying Greenland, sovereignty and territorial integrity are like anything else in a deal: negotiable.  Second, Trump doesn’t value alliances. One reason why Russia has not attacked any of the countries bordering Ukraine, even as weapons flow into Ukraine from those countries, is that they are members of NATO, meaning that an attack on them could bring a military response from the alliance as a whole. It’s proof of concept for the most powerful military alliance in history. Trump tends to take a narrowly transactional view of alliances. His antipathy to NATO and threats to pull the US out of the alliance have been well-documented, as have his comments that treat the US defense of Asian partners like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as a protection racket.  The third related point is Trump’s attitude toward nuclear weapons. Defying many predictions made at the dawn of the nuclear age, no nuclear weapon has been used in war since 1945, a record that likely involves both a bit of luck as well as the power of nuclear deterrence and the very justified fear these weapons cause. Trump, though, seems a bit more blase on the topic.   According to former aides, Trump discussed using a nuclear weapon against North Korea as president during the period he was publicly threatening Kim Jong Un’s regime with “fire and fury.” As president, he withdrew, or let lapse a number of key arms control treaties, most famously the Iran nuclear deal, instead preferring an approach where the US would build up its own nuclear arsenal to spend its rivals into oblivion. Recently on the campaign trail, he suggested that a reason presidents need legal immunity is so they could use nuclear weapons without fear of legal repercussions. The issue is not just Trump’s own attitude toward nuclear weapons. In a number of US allies in Europe and Asia, there is now an active debate over whether they need nuclear deterrents of their own, driven in part by concerns over whether they could actually count on the US nuclear umbrella. Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently suggested that without effective security guarantees from allies, his country might need nuclear weapons for protection.  The international community’s success at limiting the number of nuclear powers is one of the biggest reasons why the nuclear taboo has remained intact. But a world with more nuclear powers is a world where the use of nuclear weapons is more likely, and that world becomes more likely if allies don’t believe security guarantees are worth the paper they’re printed on.  An agent of chaos in the Oval Office Trump would no doubt counter that the very fact that the world has become so dangerous is the reason he should be returned to the presidency. He has repeatedly made the unprovable claims that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s October 7 attacks would not have happened had he been president. He has also falsely claimed that there were no terrorist attacks and no wars during his presidency. Those claims elide the major military escalations in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia that took place under his tenure, as well as risky actions like the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, which prompted an Iranian missile strike on US troops in Iraq. Thankfully, no one was killed in those strikes, but commanders say up to 150 troops could have been. As president, he reportedly considered missile strikes into Mexico and the idea of sending troops into America’s neighbor — and No. 1 trading partner — has evolved into a mainstream Republican position.  The Trump case, essentially, is that he was able to rule the world through fear. In his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he cited his ideological ally Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán: “Why is the whole world blowing up? [Orbán] said, ‘Because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him. China was afraid.’ And I don’t like to use the word afraid, but I’m just quoting him. ‘China was afraid of him. North Korea was afraid of him.’ Look at what’s going on with North Korea, by the way. He said ‘Russia was afraid of him.”  Trump has also claimed that he threatened to strike Moscow if Putin attacked Ukraine, though it’s not quite clear when this was since Russian troops were in Ukrainian territory throughout the entirety of Trump’s presidency.  It’s also not clear that US adversaries were deterred by Trump’s tough-guy posturing. Trump has maintained that the punishing sanctions he put on Iran after withdrawing from the nuclear deal stopped it from orchestrating attacks in the region, but he had little response after Iran attacked Saudi oil infrastructure in 2019.  The killing of Soleimani did not stop Iran’s proxies from attacking US troops in Iraq. When it comes to Taiwan, he has suggested that the island is simply too small and insignificant to be worth defending — the kind of rhetoric that would surely influence China’s calculations over a possible invasion. Once more unto the breach? At the moment, world affairs seem to be in a bit of a holding pattern, with leaders not making major decisions until they see the results of November 5. Trump may have soured a bit on his onetime good friend Benjamin Netanyahu, but in all likelihood — based on his past record — he would apply even less pressure than the Biden administration has to get Israel to reach a ceasefire in Gaza or allow in more humanitarian aid. A Trump win would likely embolden annexationists within the Israeli government, including the once-fringe but increasingly vocal movement in favor of reoccupying Gaza with Israeli settlers.  On Ukraine, Trump has promised to end the conflict immediately. Judging by comments made by his running mate JD Vance, though, this would likely involve pressuring Ukraine to both cede territory to Russia and accept neutrality, without security guarantees — not far from Putin’s desired outcome. When it comes to China, the outlook is more unpredictable. Trump portrays himself as the ultimate China hawk, except when he believes doing so is bad for business. Ultimately, the question is not whether Trump is a hawk or a dove. It’s what a return of the chaos and unpredictability that marked his first tenure will mean in a world where the risk of cataclysm is now so much higher. 

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Jacqueline “Jackie” Strickland, 59, poses with her students at EduCare, an Early Head Start program, in Washington, DC. | Rosem Morton for Vox Jacqueline Strickland was tired, but hopeful. The Washington, DC, early childhood educator had been teaching young children for nearly 40 years, and prayed that one day she would be fairly compensated for her experience and education. Strickland even went back to school, years into teaching, to upgrade her credentials, acquiring associate’s and bachelor’s degrees to better understand youth brain development. She watched as valued colleagues left for higher-paying pastures, teaching older children, driving school buses, working for the postal service. Strickland kept with her career path though, partly out of passion for young kids, but also because she knew there was a local effort afoot to raise the wages of teachers like her. She began testifying at council hearings in support of the idea. Finally, two years ago, after years of waiting, Strickland’s salary was bumped. She’s gone from earning $57,000 a year to $75,000, and gained access to free health insurance. “I’m a mother of two, both my daughters have gone to college and I had to pay for school, maintain my own household, I didn’t have money to put away for retirement,” she said. “That was the scary part for me. I will be 60 in November and I couldn’t save.” Strickland’s raise came from the nation’s first program aimed at aligning the salaries of the city’s 4,000 day care teachers with their public school counterparts. Known as the Pay Equity Fund, this innovative program has paid more than $80 million over the last two years to augment the salaries of child care workers, and was funded by a new non-lapsing tax increase on DC’s wealthiest residents, approved by the local council in 2021.  In the program’s first year, lead teachers like Strickland received lump-sum payments of $14,000, assistant teachers $10,000, and part-time teachers $5,000. In its second year, the city began issuing wage increases through quarterly payments, eventually transitioning these boosts into newly established salary minimums. While DC’s Pay Equity program stands out for its scale, its wage supplement effort reflects a broader national trend, as states try to stabilize child care sectors hit hard by the pandemic and address the chronic underpayment of the workforce. In 2022, the median hourly wage for child care workers was just $13.71, significantly less than comparable roles like preschool and kindergarten teachers. Child care is the 10th lowest-paid occupation out of roughly 750 occupations in the economy, per one industry analysis.   Out of recognition that families are already burdened by high costs and can’t afford to pay much more for child care, states like North Carolina, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Maine, and Tennessee have introduced wage supplement programs to boost child care teacher recruitment, retention, and quality. And on the federal level, several proposals aim to bolster child care workers’ salaries. One bipartisan bill introduced this summer by Sens. Katie Britt (R-AL) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) proposes new federal grants to state and local governments that supplement child care worker pay.  As politicians elevate child care on the campaign trail and polls suggest it’s a motivating concern for voters, the pressure to raise wages for one of America’s most underpaid professions has taken on new importance. DC’s Pay Equity Fund is proving the model can work — provided elected officials stay committed to funding it. What we’ve learned from DC’s pay equity fund Leading researchers have been analyzing the impact of DC’s wage supplement program on child care providers and the early education sector more broadly. Data from the first two years of the program showed that the wage supplements had increased lead teachers’ pay by 37 percent and assistant teachers’ wages by 31 percent. On a practical level, the increased pay has enabled child care teachers to pay off their debts, cover emergency expenses, and cover essentials like food, rent, and utilities. Some began looking to purchase homes, and nearly 70 percent said the fund allowed them to actually save money, some, like Strickland, for the first time in their careers.  On an emotional level, many educators reported in surveys that the extra pay made them feel genuinely appreciated and respected, and that reduced financial stress helped them focus more on the children they work with.  Researchers found that assistant teachers, in particular, reported significantly improved mental health. “Indeed, the Pay Equity Fund…appears to have contributed to educators’ beliefs that they are now being compensated fairly,” the Urban Institute concluded. From a hiring perspective, research by the think tank Mathematica found that the first few years of the Pay Equity Fund boosted the number of early childhood educators working in DC. Mathematica estimated the program led to an increase of 100 new hires, representing a 3 percentage point increase over what would have been expected without the wage boosts. Many child-care center directors also told Urban Institute researchers that the wage supplements made it easier to attract qualified new teachers and easier to retain their best staff. “What’s new about the pay equity program compared to other states is that they had a dedicated source of revenue,” said Erica Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who has been studying the program. “And that it was not just to stabilize the sector, but was really also about fairness.” Can the idea spread further? Taking a page out of DC’s playbook, Maine has similarly sought a dedicated funding stream to boost child care wages.  Maine’s child care wage supplement program began in September 2021 using American Rescue Plan relief funds.  “Stability grants” provided nearly 7,000 child care staff with an additional $200 per month, according to Tara Williams, the associate director of early care and education in Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services. Maine officials solicited feedback on how best to distribute the dollars, and concluded that sending the money to program owners and directors, so they could put the funding directly into staff payroll, made the most sense.  Beginning in October 2022, Maine included the program in its state budget, continuing to fund it through general state revenues at a cost of $30 million annually. It now exists as a three-tiered program, in which the lowest eligible tier of child care workers can earn an additional $275 per month, the second tier earns an additional $415 per month, and the highest-tier providers can earn an additional $625 a month.“So that’s an over $3,000 a year bonus for the first tier,” Williams said proudly. “I’ve just been really excited to watch the expansion and implementation of this program.” Over 7,500 child care workers were receiving the Maine supplements as of June.Williams has been sharing Maine’s experience with compensation reform with other states, including this past summer at a conference hosted by the North Carolina-based Hunt Institute.  In Pennsylvania, advocates have been organizing for their own child care wage supplement program, arguing that such investments are necessary to address the state’s worker shortage. They pointed to Republican-led states like Alaska and Georgia that have recently made new investments to support child care wages ($7.5 million and $23.6 million respectively) and Democratic-led ones like New York and Minnesota that have done the same ($500 million and $316 million respectively). Some cities are also taking their own steps. This past June, a coalition of care advocacy organizations launched an 18-month pilot in New York City to provide $1,000 per month to licensed home-based child care providers.“We have educators deciding every month what bills to pay, they are deciding every month whether to stay open,” said Jessica Sager, the CEO of All Our Kin, a national group that trains and supports home-based child care educators and is involved with the pilot. “When educators don’t have that stress they can focus wholly on the care.” The policy will require sustained commitment Wage supplements are not unique to child care, and governments have long used them to augment salaries of workers in fields like health care, home care, and agriculture.  Yet as promising as these wage supplements are, advocates are learning that even passing a dedicated funding stream is not enough to insulate the salary boosts from politics and annual budget fights. Earlier this year, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed gutting the Pay Equity Fund entirely as a way to balance the city’s budget amid flat growth and declining revenue from vacant office buildings. Teachers and community allies rallied for months in protest and in the end the DC Council restored $70 million to the program, though that still represented a $17 million cut. “We thought we were done with this kind of fighting — we had found a non-lapsing funding source for the program, there isn’t that much more security we can build in,” said Ruquiyyah Anbar-Shaheen, the director of early childhood at DC Action, a local advocacy group. “The challenge is just having the political will to keep the program in place.”  Strickland said if the city had gone forward with gutting the program, she would have had to look for an alternative job.  “I’ve been fighting this fight a long time, but this shouldn’t be a fight, it should be a given,” she told Vox. “It’s not a bonus, it’s what’s owed to early childhood educators. We put in a lot of time and we give children the foundation that supports them for future learning.” This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. 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