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Republican National Convention attendees hold signs that read “Mass Deportation Now!” on the third day of the gathering in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 17, 2024. | Alex Wong / Getty Images This spring, an eye-opening poll from Axios suggested what once seemed unthinkable: Four in 10 Democrats were open to the idea of the US government deporting undocumented immigrants en masse. Though that share of support might seem high, other polls conducted since have found something similar, suggesting Americans at large are open to harsher, more Trumpian immigration policies. And yet, as attention-grabbing as some of the headlines on support for mass deportations have been (and as Donald Trump and his allies continue to talk about his plans for such), those polls may not accurately capture the mood of the American electorate. Support for a policy of mass deportation, while superficially high, rests on two related complications: substantial confusion among voters about what it might actually entail, as well as a generalized desire to do something — anything — on immigration, which polls frequently report to be among Americans’ top issues. That disconnect is because standalone polls and headlines do very little to capture the complexity of many Americans’ feelings about immigration, which often include simultaneous, and apparently contradictory, support for more immigrant-friendly policies alongside draconian ones. The real answer, more specific polling by firms like Pew Research Center suggests, lies somewhere in the middle: A good share of voters, it seems, are fine with increasing deportations. Some might even want the kind of operation Trump is floating. But many also want exceptions and protections for specific groups of immigrants who have been living in the US for a while, or have other ties to the country. Taking a deeper look at polling on immigration Back in August, the Pew Research Center dug into the question of mass deportations by asking registered voters their opinions on immigration levels, the value of immigrants, and what kind of exceptions they might endorse to allow undocumented immigrants to remain in the US. The results were messy, but showed two distinct things. First, support for “mass deportations of immigrants living in the country illegally” received majority support: 56 percent of registered voters “strongly or somewhat” favored such a proposal. That majority of voters included, unsurprisingly, 88 percent of Trump voters; it also included about 3 in 10 supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris. The August findings align with Pew’s earlier research, conducted in January 2024, which found a majority of Americans think “increasing deportations” of people who are living in the US illegally would improve the US immigration system and reduce southern border crossings. Republican respondents in that survey were essentially uniform in supporting such a policy; Democrats were divided, with similar shares (about 30 percent) saying deportations would make things better or worse. At the same time, both of Pew’s surveys found Americans were also supportive of more friendly policies for undocumented immigrants, like a pathway to citizenship. The August report notes that about 6 in 10 registered voters say that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to “stay in the country legally, if certain requirements are met.” And a similar share, 58 percent, favored “allowing undocumented immigrants to legally work and stay in the country if they are married to a US citizen.” Sahana Mukherjee, one of the Pew Research Center analysts behind the August deep-dive on “mass deportations,” told me that as many as 40 percent of registered voters who support mass deportations also support a policy that would allow undocumented spouses of US citizens to remain in the country.  That share varies based on which candidate these voters support: About a third of Trump supporters who back mass deportations support such a plan, while about 60 percent of Harris supporters who back mass deportations do. But this group of voters with overlapping priorities suggests that when taking the temperature of the public, being open to mass deportations isn’t the same as supporting a specific policy. Support changes when you get into the details of who could be affected. Similarly, Mukherjee said, about 40 percent of registered voters who support mass deportations — one-third of the Trump supporters who do so, and two-thirds among the same pool of Harris supporters — also endorse the idea of undocumented immigrants being allowed to remain in the US “if certain conditions are met.” Other high-quality polls second these nuanced, seemingly contradictory feelings: A September Ipsos poll found 54 percent of American adults supported a mass deportation plan, while, at the same time, 68 percent would also support a “pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as children.” Similar dynamics hold true among Hispanic and Latino respondents, with a twist: While about 4 in 10 Latinos in the two most recent high-quality polls of these voters backed some kind of deportation program, a much higher share also supported some kind of pathway to citizenship.  A New York Times-Siena poll of Hispanics from October, for example, found 67 percent of Hispanics backed a pathway to citizenship for “all undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States” while 45 percent supported deporting immigrants living illegally in the US. A poll from NBC/Telemundo in September showed similar levels of support for deportations, while 87 percent of Hispanics backed a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought as children to the US, and 91 percent supported that pathway for undocumented spouses. Making sense of these policy nuances So why do voters hold seemingly conflicting views on immigration? Pro-immigrant advocates argue that there isn’t a contradiction here — those competing numbers instead represent people who don’t understand exactly what “mass deportation” means or what a deportation program would look like in practice.  Americans might not understand that deportations of all undocumented immigrants would include deportations of DACA recipients and longtime neighbors or friends who have been living normally and are bedrocks of local communities, advocates and researchers say — rather than only recent arrivals, or those few migrants who commit violent crimes yet get outsize media and political attention, who they may view differently. Mukherjee said there’s also a degree of nuance that issue and horserace polls might not be picking up, since they aren’t necessarily equipped to ask in-depth questions. “We asked about one requirement specifically in the survey, which is looking at if you’re married to a US citizen, but it remains to be seen whether there are other requirements that people are also thinking about,” Mukherjee said. “What we hear about in everyday discourse, in the media, is if you have a child who is US born, or if you yourself came as a child. We didn’t get into this in the survey, but it’s possible these are some of the requirements people were thinking about, and perhaps that could be influencing that share of people who support both.” At the same time, when it comes to complex policy options, and especially to immigration policy, Americans can be idiosyncratic in their opinions. Surveys that don’t specify what “mass deportation” means may also be tracking inflated support for the kind of hardline stance the Trump/Vance campaign is offering, Steven Kull, the director of the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland, told me. “Questions that are just like, ‘do you favor or oppose mass deportation’ I think are very limited in their value, because you don’t know what it means,” Kull said. “All people know is ‘deport a large number of people.’ And 1,000 people is a lot of people. Ten thousand is a lot of people. It’s not clear that it’s 11 million — that the policy is to deport 11 million — and that it would entail a massive operation, and all that has to be clear to really understand what public opinion is on the issue.” Kull’s team instead has run surveys of national samples and groups of swing-state voters that provide additional information and arguments in favor and against either mass deportations or pathways to citizenship. The result, again, is complex, but support for mass deportations falls when presented against the option for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants provided they meet specific requirements. “There is some appeal to the idea [of mass deportation] — let’s be clear about that. But it’s not that people have it all crystallized in their mind,” Kull said. How is this playing out on the campaign trail? Immigration reform advocates and some Democratic strategists are doing their best to highlight that nuance when advising Democrats on how to respond to Trump’s escalating rhetoric around immigration and immigrants. They urge Democrats to be clear about just who would get caught up in a broad mass deportation scheme — and to contrast that with a more “balanced” Democratic approach to immigration and the border. In a private memo prepared for national Democratic campaigns looking to address Trump’s mass deportation position and shared with Vox, strategists argue that this polling picture presents Democrats with a narrow path to repudiate the Trump approach while acknowledging the real concerns some voters have with recent waves on migration in the Biden years. “We have more than enough reason to believe that voters, when asked their opinion on deportations, take it to mean the deportation of people who have recently crossed the border, as well as known criminal elements,” the strategists advise. They highlight Trump running mate JD Vance’s October debate statement explaining this deportation scheme (emphasis original to the memo): “So we’ve got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country. What do we do with them? I think the first thing that we do is we start with the criminal migrants. About a million of those people have committed some form of crime in addition to crossing the border illegally. I think you start with deportations on those folks.” “The Vance position as stated here is likely popular,” the strategists explain. “That is why Harris and Democrats cannot allow him to frame his position in that way, especially when we know their actual plans call for the deportation of all undocumented immigrants (including spouses and Dreamers).” Complex feelings on immigration and potential deportation programs offer Democrats an opportunity to stake out more moderate ground when discussing immigration policy — and to prevent immigration opponents from defining the terms of the debate over policy. They’re also an important reminder that it can be perilous to trust top-line numbers and polling results without digging into the details, or presenting voters with more options to begin with. Recent polls all show a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, yes, but they also show that there is room for pro-immigrant candidates to shape the national debate and make a vocal case for Americans and immigrants.

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People mourn over the body of a victim at a hospital in northern Gaza Strip, on October 7, 2024. At least 13 Palestinians were killed and dozens of others injured in an Israeli raid. | Abdul Rahman Salama/Xinhua via Getty Images Genocide is often referred to as the “crime of crimes,” a designation developed after the Holocaust and reserved for a very specific form of mass atrocity that deserves the highest condemnation. It should be unthinkable that Israel, home to the descendants of many Holocaust survivors, would perpetrate such a crime, and yet it has been accused — by human rights groups, academics, and even South Africa — of committing genocide in Gaza.  Those accusations aren’t new. They became more widespread shortly after Israel responded to the October 7, 2023, attack by Gaza-based militant and political group Hamas with a bombing and ground campaign that left more than 5,000 dead in the first weeks of fighting. But in the year since the war in Gaza began, the question is whether the evidence supporting these claims has grown. Last October, my Vox colleague Sigal Samuel and I interviewed scholars about how to think through those allegations of genocide. At that time, some were willing to definitively call what was happening in Gaza a genocide. But most were hesitant, citing the high threshold required to establish genocide under international law. Several said “crimes against humanity” or “war crimes,” which hold equal weight under international law, had likely been committed, but withheld judgment on genocide. The debate has evolved since then, along with conditions on the ground in Gaza, which is in ruins. The Palestinian death toll now exceeds 40,000. A Refugees International report published in September found evidence of a “severe hunger crisis in Gaza and found consistent indications that famine-like conditions occurred in northern areas during the first half of 2024,” in part due to Israel’s obstruction of aid deliveries.  South Africa has brought its case accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has issued preliminary rulings ordering Israel to improve access to humanitarian aid in Gaza and to halt its operation in Rafah, the enclave’s southernmost city. Israel has also tightened its grip on occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank. And there is no end to the fighting in sight: Long-feared regional war has now come to Lebanon, and ceasefire negotiations have repeatedly stalled.  In light of those developments, I went back to the scholars we cited and spoke to last fall to see if their thinking about allegations of genocide against Israel had changed over the last year. Of the five who responded, most of them were now more confident the legal requirements for genocide had been met. If an official determination of genocide by the ICJ follows, that could have critical legal and political consequences.  Here’s what the scholars had to say.  How genocide is defined First, some background: There are different ways to conceptualize genocide, but the ICJ is concerned only with its legal definition under the Genocide Convention, the international treaty criminalizing genocide that went into effect in 1951 and has been ratified by 153 countries, including Israel and its closest ally, the US.  The ICJ is the judicial branch of the United Nations and handles disputes between nations, typically involving resources and borders, though it has heard genocide cases in the past. It is distinct from the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes individuals accused of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity; that’s where arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders have been sought. A nation must bring genocide charges against another at the ICJ, providing evidence that the state itself (not just certain individuals) committed genocide. The accusing nation can also petition for provisional measures before a final ruling, including an interim court order to stop the violence, though the ICJ has no means of actually enforcing such rulings. For the court to have jurisdiction, both parties generally have to be signatories of the Genocide Convention. They will then make their case to the court through written briefs and oral arguments. A final ruling often takes years. Under the Genocide Convention, genocide is “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”: Killing members of the group Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group Those five physical acts can be measured, but it turns out “intent to destroy” is incredibly difficult to prove — and that has been the sticking point in the debate over whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, where the physical component of the crime is already demonstrably satisfied given the overwhelming number of Palestinian civilian casualties. Intent has been central to nearly every other debate over genocide as well, and the high bar for proving intent has made international court findings of genocide rare.  Only three genocides have been officially recognized under the definition of the term in the Genocide Convention and led to trials in international criminal tribunals: one against Cham Muslim and ethnic Vietnamese people perpetrated by Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia in the 1970s, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre in Bosnia. (The Holocaust occurred before the adoption of the 1948 Convention.)  UN investigations found the mass killings of the Yazidis by ISIS in Iraq and of the Rohingya in Myanmar constituted genocide. Though the US called the killing of the Masalit and other ethnic groups in the Sudanese region of Darfur between 2003 and 2005 “genocide,” a UN investigation ruled it was not. That may have caused the conflict to extend longer than it would have if a finding of genocide had been made, and gave the Sudanese government diplomatic cover to continue its campaign, despite widespread international condemnation.  Is Israel committing genocide? One of the first scholars to say Israel was committing genocide was Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, who called it a “textbook case” in Jewish Currents just days after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Ahead of the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack, he told me he wished he had been wrong.  “I fully stand behind my description of Israel’s attack on Gaza as a ‘textbook case of genocide’ because we’re still actually seeing, nearly a year into this genocidal assault, explicit and unashamed statements of intent to destroy,” he said. “The way that intent is expressed here is absolutely unprecedented.” He said public statements by people with command authority in Israel — including state leaders, Cabinet ministers, and senior army officers — have repeatedly demonstrated genocidal intent that has been realized in the scale of the violence and destruction in Gaza. Other scholars I spoke to pointed to statements from Israeli officials last October, cited in the ICJ’s January preliminary ruling:  Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called for a “complete siege” on Gaza and stated “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” apparently in reference to Hamas.  Israeli President Isaac Herzog said it was “an entire nation out there that is responsible” for Hamas’s attack on Israel in reference to Palestinians.  And Israel Katz, former Israeli minister of energy and infrastructure, vowed “no electric switch will be turned on, no water tap will be opened and no fuel truck” would enter Gaza until Hamas returned its Israeli hostages, suggesting Palestinians would face collective punishment. Several other scholars who Vox spoke with last fall, at that point reluctant to say Israel was committing genocide as defined by the Genocide Convention, now appear to agree with Segal. “Any early hesitation I had about applying the ‘genocide’ label to the Israeli attack on Gaza has dissipated over the past year of human slaughter and the obliteration of homes, infrastructure, and communities,” said Adam Jones, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia who has written a textbook on genocide. “There is plenty of this demonization and dehumanization on the other side as well, but whatever peace constituency existed in Israel seems to have vanished, and there is a growing consensus for genocidal war, mass population transfer, and long-term eradication of Palestinian culture and identity.” Among other things, Jones noted Israeli leadership’s recent plans to expel the entire remaining civilian population of northern Gaza and turn the territory into a military zone where no aid would be allowed as influencing his thinking on the issue. There is no indication of whether civilians would ever be allowed to return. This could be taken as an example of the kind of “state or organizational plan or policy” necessary to prove genocidal intent, he said. Though the plan, if it has been implemented, has not yet been seen to completion, it can still serve as evidence of intent. Ernesto Verdeja, a professor of political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, said it could be “called a genocide, even in a narrow legal sense, for several months now” given the accumulation of Israeli attacks clearly and consistently targeting the civilian population in Gaza. A major tipping point for Verdeja and many other human rights experts was Israel’s ground offensive in Rafah in May. The Israeli military had been pushing civilians increasingly into the southern city, which connects Gaza and Egypt, telling them it was a safe zone while it pursued Hamas to the north. But by August, an estimated 44 percent of all buildings in Rafah had been damaged or destroyed in heavy bombing. Israeli forces took over and shut down the Rafah border crossing, limiting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. They killed civilians camping in tents in a humanitarian zone. When the ICJ ordered Israel to stop its offensive in Rafah, Israeli officials condemned the ruling and said it was open to interpretation, despite the fact that many human rights lawyers argued it was unambiguous. The assault on Rafah continued.  “I wouldn’t say [Rafah was] necessarily the defining moment, but I think it’s indicative of a broader pattern where we see a genocidal campaign really crystallizing,” Verdeja said. Michael Becker, a professor of international human rights law at Trinity College, Dublin, said, overall, the above incidents and others mean “South Africa has an ever-expanding repository of evidence that it can put before the [ICJ] as further evidence of genocidal intent,” which includes evidence suggesting Israel “has not meaningfully sought to comply” with the ICJ’s orders so far.  Some scholars still disagree. Dov Waxman, a professor of political science and Israel studies and the director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, wrote last year in response to Segal’s piece in Jewish Currents that accusing Israel of genocide required “stretching the concept too far, emptying it of any meaning.” Waxman has since qualified his stance, but still believes “Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip — though too often brutal, inhumane, and indiscriminate — do not meet the international legal criteria of the crime of genocide.” He told me that he “can understand why many regard those actions as genocidal” given the extent of the death and destruction in Gaza and the “bellicose and extreme rhetoric of some Israeli officials, including senior government ministers, can be characterized as potentially genocidal because of the way Palestinians are dehumanized.”  But he still finds evidence of the requisite “intent to destroy” lacking. He said “a few horrendous public statements” made by Israeli politicians serve as only “quite limited and weak” support.   “Based on my understanding of the motives behind the Israeli government’s actions, I do not think there is an intent to commit genocide,” Waxman said.  Of the scholars we cited in our previous story, he was the only one who responded to my request for new comment who still did not think Israel’s actions qualify as genocide. Does it matter if the ICJ calls it genocide? The question is how much calling Israel’s incursion in Gaza genocide will make any practical difference. It will not reverse the death and destruction. The ICJ has no means of stopping the Israeli government even if the court eventually finds it guilty of genocide. That ruling may be years away, and the ICJ’s rulings against other countries have been previously ignored.  But the word “genocide” carries a certain weight in the public consciousness.  “I do think it is really important, simply because of the symbolic status of genocide,” Verdeja said. “To be guilty of genocide is, at least in public discourse and also in terms of just global politics, something that’s such a strong condemnation that it really signals the barbarity of the Israeli state’s policy.” Such condemnation could lead to significant political changes: Should the ICJ find Israel did commit genocide, that could limit the degree to which the US and its allies can continue to support Israel, Verdeja added.  At the same time, it’s unclear how the ICJ will rule. 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Subscribe to Autocracy in America here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket CastsHosts Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev talk with Hanna Rosin about the new series We Live Here Now. Rosin, along with her co-host, Lauren Ober, recently found out that their new neighbors moved to Washington, D.C., to support January 6 insurrectionists. Rosin and Ober decided to knock on their neighbors’ door. We Live Here Now is a podcast series about what happened next. Subscribe to We Live Here Now here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | iHeartThe following is a transcript of the episode:Anne Applebaum: This is Anne Applebaum.Peter Pomerantsev: And this is Peter Pomerantsev, and we’re here with a guest today, The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin.Hanna Rosin: Hi.Applebaum: And although our series, Autocracy in America, has wrapped up, there is still a lot to do and think about ahead of the 2024 election.Pomerantsev: Hanna is the host of The Atlantic’s weekly show called Radio Atlantic, and she’s also just released a new podcast called We Live Here Now, a series.Rosin: Yeah, We Live Here Now is the story of my partner, Lauren Ober, and I discovering that we had some new neighbors, and it’s about our effort to get to know these neighbors. And it turned out, those neighbors were supporting the January 6 insurrectionists.Pomerantsev: At the end of this episode, we’ll include the entire first episode for listeners to hear. But we want to start with a little clip that gives you a sense of what first launched them into making the series. Lauren Ober: I guess it started just like any other dog walk. Hanna and I leashed up our pups and set out from our house on our post-dinner stroll. It was early November of 2023, and I remember it was unseasonably warm. We headed off down the hill from our house towards our neighborhood park. Rosin: A block past the park, Lauren spotted it: a black Chevy Equinox with Texas plates we’d seen parked around the neighborhood. Just a basic American SUV. Except for the stickers that covered the back windshield. Ober: Stickers we’re very much not used to seeing in our mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood. Our vibe is more like, Make D. C. the 51st state and No taxation without representation. These stickers were a combo platter of skulls and American flags. There was a Roman numeral for three, the symbol of a militia group called the Three Percenters, and the pièce de résistance, a giant decal in the center of the back window that read Free Our Patriots, J4, J6. Meaning, Justice for January 6. Rosin: Lauren notices every new or different thing in the neighborhood. And this car was definitely different. As we walked past it, Lauren said what she always said when we saw this car. Ober: “There’s that fucking militia mobile again.” Right after I said that moderately unneighborly thing, the passenger-side window rolled down. Cigarette smoke curled out of the car. And the person inside shouted, “Justice for J6!” Rosin: To which Lauren said— Ober: “You’re in the wrong neighborhood for that, honey.” And then the woman in the car said words I’m not gonna forget anytime soon: “We live here now. So suck it, bitch.” Applebaum: Hanna, I’ve had confrontation experiences myself.I was once at a dinner in Poland—this is a couple years ago—with old friends who suddenly started repeating a conspiracy theory about the government, and it happened to be the government that my husband had been part of. And I tried to listen politely and go like, Uh-huh, yeah, that’s true, yeah, sure. And then eventually I left the room.Rosin: Uh-huh.Applebaum: And I’m not sure I could have lasted even that long with people who weren’t old friends and were doing the same thing. So we’re not going to talk all about We Live Here Now, since many listeners may not have yet heard the podcast, but I do want you to tell me a little bit more about that experience of being shouted down in your neighborhood—or, more accurately, being with your partner as she was being shouted down. Were you never tempted to argue back?Rosin: Yeah, I mean, I really think it’s an accident of how the interaction happened. If it had happened at dinner, I guess you can temper yourself, like you just described. You could never see these people again. Like, you could ignore them or shout them down and then choose to never see them again. But because these people lived a couple of blocks away, I sort of knew I was going to see them a lot. So maybe that muted my reaction. My partner doesn’t have a mute button, but I just kind of knew that I better take a step back and think about what I want to do, because I was going to run into these people who, you know, happen to have militia stickers and are seemingly aggressive. So I just kind of needed a minute to think what I wanted to do. Without that pause, I’m not sure this story would have happened in the way that it happened.Pomerantsev: And how did you build the relationship with them? I mean, was it, was there any kind of discomfort or danger involved when you first met them? And then, but most importantly, how did you build trust? I mean, how would they learn to trust you?Rosin: You know, it’s interesting. Once you decide to step into an alternative world, it’s almost like you have to make the decision. Most of the time, we just don’t make that decision. We’re like, This is cuckoo. I’m not going. I don’t share anything in common with these people. Like, we don’t even have a shared set of facts in the way we might have 15, 20 years ago. So there’s just—like, there’s no beginning to this relationship. For whatever reason, we closed our eyes and decided to step into that alternative reality. And once you make that decision, you just do it very, very, very gingerly.In this case, they happen to do a public event, which we knew was happening every single night, and it’s out on a street corner in D.C. And it’s public space. So that actually gave us the freedom to show up at this public event. It’s outside the D.C. Jail, and they’re in support of the January 6 prisoners. The detainees are all held in a segregated wing of the D. C. Jail, so they hold a protest every single night at the exact same time. So you know, you can steel yourself up every night and say like, Okay, tonight’s the night I’m going to go to the vigil, you know?Applebaum: Can I actually ask you some more about that vigil? Because one of the things We Live Here Now does, it explores the way in which people can rewrite history, which is one of the things that happens. And you talk about how at the vigil, there are posters with faces of people who died on January 6. And each poster reads Murdered by Capitol Police,even though only one person was found to have died from a bullet fired by the police, And so there’s now a narrative that the people in jail are the good guys and the people outside of jail are the bad guys. I actually spent 20 years writing books about the history of the Soviet Union, and this is very much what autocratic regimes do: They change the way you remember history. They make heroes out of villains, and vice versa. And how, how did you see that happening and how did you come to understand how it worked? Why was it successful among the people that you were visiting?Rosin: Well, that was one of the most remarkable experiences I had—is being that close to watching revisionism happen. Like, the nitty-gritty, going back and time and, Okay, when was the first time that Trump mentioned Ashli Babbitt?,who is the woman who was shot by the Capitol Police officers? Because initially, right after January 6, many—even Trump supporters—said, you know, The Capitol Police officer did a good job. You know, He did his duty. It was a terrible day. Like, if you look at things that happened in early January, everybody was sharing the reality of what happened on January 6. And then you watch how, slowly, kind of people peel away from that reality. Trump starts trying out lines at his rallies. Oh, Ashli Babbitt was murdered. He uses the words, “they,” a lot. You know, they killed Ashli Babbitt. They did this. And at that point, the Big Lie—the lie that the election was stolen—could have faded away, like it felt like a moment where it could have just been relegated to history, and then it’s like, all of a sudden, there’s this collective decision, Oh no, we’re going to revive this. And the way we’re going to revive it is by talking first about this martyr, and then about this group of people, and suddenly black is white and white is black.And because these people who we got close to, they’re sort of innocents in this narrative. One of the main characters is Micki Witthoeft, who’s the mother of Ashli Babbitt. And just think about that. She’s a grieving mother. It’s as if her emotional-grief reality starts to align with Trump’s messaging in this perfect storm, and then all of a sudden, things that aren’t true seem, not just true, but righteous.Pomerantsev: Tell me a bit about the myth, though, because on the one hand, it’s an alternative reality, which you described so well just now, but on the other hand, isn’t it quite American at the same time? I mean, I love when you talk about, you know, how they describe themselves as “saving democracy.” They’re the true patriots. I mean, as you encountered it, did you find it completely alien myth or something that actually sort of resonated with so many American stories about themselves: rebelling against Washington, the whole—Rosin: Yes, I mean, one thing that I came to feel about the January 6 detainees, like, often it would pop into my head: them in costume, like, Okay, they’re, they’re sort of role-playing 1776 here, you know. Particularly, one of our episodes is about a jury trial. My partner was very randomly called onto a jury, as many people in D.C. are, and it happened to be a January 6 case. And not only that, but it happened to be one of these January 6 cases in which you feel that someone just kind of lost it for a day. You know, it’s a dad; he has five children; by a judge's count, extremely law abiding; been married for a long time. But then during that day, just kind of, you know, went nuts.And as you get closer to what they did that day, you do feel like there was just a rush, like a rush of sort of feeling heroic, you know, feeling patriotic, feeling like you were saving the country, feeling like you have this incredible mission. And then I think, one thing that nobody predicted is that they did keep these guys in a segregated wing of the D.C. Jail, together. We don’t usually do that. I mean, Gitmo is the other place where we’ve done that. But the D.C. Jail is largely Black. And so these guys had a reputation at that day, if you remember, as being white supremacists, so they did not want to throw them into the D.C. Jail. But the result of keeping them together, I mean, you can imagine what happened.Applebaum: So this is exactly the thing that I wanted to ask you about. I was very struck by one of the characters who you interview and describe. This is Brandon Fellows, who was a guy who was almost accidentally caught up in January the 6th. He entered the Capitol. He wound up smoking a joint in one of the offices in the Capitol. As a result, he was arrested. And because he was part of this group of prisoners, he was essentially radicalized. And that story of how the prisoners together radicalized one another, created a mythology around themselves, it reminded me of so many other moments in history when that’s happened, I mean, for both good and for bad. The IRA in British prisons radicalized; um, various jihadis and various prisons around the world are said to have radicalized that way too. But also the ANC in South Africa, who were together in a prison on Robben Island for many years. I mean, that’s how they created their cohesive movement. So it can work positively too. Weren’t you tempted to try and talk him out of it, where you—did you not want to say, “Don’t you see what’s happening to you?”Rosin: Yeah, I mean, with him, that instinct was very powerful because, you know, he’s slightly older than my oldest child. And so I—so in his case, I did have the instinct of, like, trying to shake this out of him.Like, “Don’t you see?,” like “You were in this—you were in this jail,” you know, and he was in this jail. He came in as a goofball. Then he came to see these guys as, like, fierce and tough. And by the end, he came to see them, as you said, Peter, as true patriots, so it’s not just that they were tough guys. It was like they were true and righteous and the next generation of founding fathers and he was just like, Nope, like you just don’t, you don’t get it. I’m deadly serious here. Pomeranstev: So you didn’t build a coalition with them, you didn’t convince them, you don’t try to convince them to change parties. But you spent a year with them. What is it that you found meaningful in that interaction? And why is it meaningful for all of us to hear about it? I mean, it’s fascinating, but also what is the importance of doing something like this?Rosin: I can only tell you about a limited importance, which is that over the last few years, I’ve started to read—as I bet you guys have—you know, what do you have, like, we all throw up our hands: We’re so polarized. We’re not even living in the same reality. We can’t talk to each other. You cannot go into a conversation, as much as you deeply, deeply want to, with the intention of changing the other person’s mind. That is a losing strategy. Don’t do it. It’s so hard. It’s as hard in politics as it is in a relationship. It’s very hard because we all just want to do that. And so your only option is to just open your mind, hear what they have to say, be curious, ask questions, and that’s it.Applebaum: And how do you do that without becoming angry?Rosin: It’s— [Laughs.] I mean, that’s your, they just, because I’ve been to enough couples therapy [Laughs.] that it’s like, that’s your only option. And you almost have to do it with a leap of faith that there’s something human at the end of that.Pomerantsev: So the meaning, in a way, is learning to just behave and interact in a different way.Rosin: There are surprising kind of moments of non-nastiness that arise when you approach the world from that perspective.Pomerantsev: I mean, I spend a lot of my time writing about propaganda and talking to people with all sorts of deeply warped beliefs, and at one point I realized that the only worthwhile question I could ask that would lead to a conversation that was human was, How did it start? How did you start believing in X?Rosin:Yes.Pomerantsev: And then you’d always get a very personal story.Rosin: Yes.Pomerantsev: Usually about some sort of trauma. I’m not saying that’s any kind of excuse, but it suddenly became a human story about how someone is making sense of the world.Rosin: Yes.Pomerantsev: And suddenly there was a person. Again, I never changed them. They’re still gonna do horrible things, but at least I knew they were a person. I don’t know. Maybe, in the long run, that helps us come up with better strategies to deal with it. But not immediately. It’s not a like aha moment.Rosin: Yeah. It’s not a kumbaya. It’s just like, it really is a leap of faith ’cause as you’re doing it, you feel, Am I doing something dangerous? Like humanizing this propaganda? Like, Is this wrong, what I’m doing? And you just kind of live with that doubt and you keep asking questions, you know?Pomeranstev: Yeah. But humans do lots of bad things. Humanizing doesn’t mean making it good; it just makes it human. You know, that doesn’t—it's like, Ooh, humanizing. Yeah, I think maybe the word humanizing needs to lose its positive aura. Humans are pretty awful.Rosin: That’s a pretty good idea.Pomeranstev: But they are human. [Laughs.]Rosin: So what is the point of humanizing if you remove the positive aspects? Humanizing is good because …Pomerantsev: You start to see the challenge for what it is rather than something esoteric. You know, it’s a real person doing real things. Therefore we can deal with it.Applebaum: Hanna Rosin is the co-host along with Lauren Ober of the new six-part podcast series from The Atlantic called We Live Here Now. Find We Live Here Now wherever you listen to podcasts.Pomerantsev: And we have the first episode here. Keep listening and, Hanna, thanks for talking with us today.Rosin: Thank you both.[We Live Here Now Episode 1: “We’re Allowed to Be Here”]Lauren Ober: When the neighbor incident first happened, it didn’t really feel much like anything. Or maybe we were both too stunned to take it all in.Hanna Rosin: It wasn’t until we started telling other people the story and they reacted that it began to feel like maybe we’d discovered something.Ober: I guess it started just like any other dog walk. Hanna and I leashed up our pups and set out from our house on our post-dinner stroll. It was early November of 2023, and I remember it was unseasonably warm. We headed off down the hill from our house, towards our neighborhood park.[Music]Rosin: A block past the park, Lauren spotted it: A black Chevy Equinox with Texas plates we’d seen parked around the neighborhood. Just a basic American SUV except for the stickers that covered the back windshield—Ober: —stickers we’re very much not used to seeing in our mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood. Our vibe is more like, Make D.C. the 51st state, and, No taxation without representation.But these stickers were a combo platter of skulls and American flags. There was a Roman numeral for three—the symbol of a militia group called the Three Percenters—and the pièce de résistance: a giant decal in the center of the back window that read, free our patriots. j4j6, meaning, Justice for January 6.Rosin: Lauren notices every new or different thing in the neighborhood, and this car was definitely different. As we walked past it, Lauren said what she always said when we saw this car.Ober: “There’s that fucking militiamobile again!”Right after I said that moderately unneighborly thing, the passenger-side window rolled down, cigarette smoke curled out of the car, and the person inside shouted, “Justice for J6!”Rosin: To which Lauren said—Ober: “You’re in the wrong neighborhood for that, honey.” And then the woman in the car said words I’m not going to forget anytime soon: “We live here now. So suck it, bitch.”We’ll get to who that person is soon enough. But we’re not there yet. When we first encountered the woman from the car, we had no idea who we were dealing with. I just knew I was sufficiently put in my place. “Well, okay,” I remember saying to Hanna as we walked back home.Rosin: I remember, after it happened, we walked away in total silence. That’s my memory—each of us looping in our own heads about something.Ober: I remember being mad because I lost. (Laughs.)Rosin: Right.Ober: Because I didn’t get the final word, and because I just kept thinking, like, the whole combination of it felt bad to me. It’s like, Militia stickers. Justice for J6. We live here. You just called me a name. The whole thing was very out of place. And I felt it was a little destabilizing.Rosin: Yeah, yeah. I walked home in a half hypervigilant-neighborhood-watch brain—like, Who lives here now? What are they doing here? Are we going to get into more of these confrontations?—and a half journalism brain, like, Who’s we? Where do they live? Why are there here now? Those were my two tracks when I was walking home.[Music]​Ober: I’m Lauren Ober.Rosin: And I’m Hanna Rosin.Ober: And from The Atlantic, this is We Live Here Now.Most of the country watched January 6 from a safe distance: something happening in their Twitter feeds or on their phone screens. But for those of us living in D.C., it was happening in our backyard.Donald Trump: I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.Rioter: Start making a list. Put all those names down. And we start hunting them down one by one.Person on bullhorn inside Congress: We had a disbursement of tear gas in the Rotunda. Please be advised there are masks under your seats. Please grab a mask.[Music]All Things Considered host Ailsa Chang: In Washington, D.C., a curfew has now taken effect from 6 p.m. Eastern tonight to 6 a.m. Thursday morning.Ober: So we were actually left with the wreckage of that day. We were in a militarized city. We were living under a curfew. Streets were blocked off. The windows were all boarded up. And you felt like you were living, if not in a warzone, in a dangerous place.Rosin: And there was National Guard everywhere. All the stores were closed, and there were very few regular people walking around doing regular things. And I was just thinking, Where am I? What city is this? Ober: Right. I bought a baseball bat for protection.Rosin: I remember that.Ober: Which is why, two-plus years later, it felt like this whole period of time we’d rather forget was racing back. Donald Trump was looking like he’d be the Republican nominee, and a second Trump presidency seemed possible. Plus, we had a car with militia stickers lurking in our neighborhood.Rosin: So no, we did not welcome January 6 supporters creeping back to the scene of the crime. But also, we wanted to know what they were up to.[Music]Ober: In the immediate aftermath of January 6, there were three names I associated with what happened at the Capitol: The QAnon Shaman, for obvious reasons; Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes because he seemed really dangerous, and also he had an eye patch; and Ashli Babbitt, who has everything to do with our new neighbors’ arrival in D.C.Four people died that day, but I only remember hearing about Ashli. Maybe that’s because she was the only rioter killed by law enforcement.Ashli Babbitt was a Trump diehard, so it’s not surprising she made her way to D.C. for the rally. She was a Second Amendment–loving libertarian. She wholeheartedly believed in MAGA and QAnon. During the pandemic, she was hostile about mask mandates and refused to get vaccinated. When California issued a stay-at-home order, she tweeted, “This is that commie bullshit!”Rosin: The day before her death, Ashli tweeted in QAnon speak: “Nothing will stop us....they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon D.C. in less than 24 hours....dark to light!”Ashli Babbitt: We are walking to the Capitol in a mob. There’s an estimated over 3 million people here today. So despite what the media tells you, boots on ground definitely say something different. There is a sea of nothing but red, white, and blue.Ober: On the day of the riots, she seemed genuinely thrilled to be there.Babbitt: And it was amazing to get to see the president talk. We are now walking down the inaugural path to the Capitol building, 3 million plus people. God bless America, patriots.Rosin: More like 50,000 people, give or take. And a few thousand of them went into the Capitol—or, more accurately, broke in. When the mob of protestors breached the Capitol, busting windows and breaking down doors, Ashli was right there in the mix.Rioter: There’s so many people. They’re going to push their way up here.Rosin: There are four videos shot by rioters that capture this moment in its entirety: Ashli strides down a hallway like she knows where she’s going. She’s followed by other rioters, but they’re suddenly stopped when they come to a set of doors with large window panels. Through the windows, you can make out congresspeople being evacuated away from the growing mob. The crowd Ashli is with has accidentally landed at the bullseye, the actual place where these congresspeople were about to certify the election.[Crowd noise]Rosin: On the other side of the doors is a cop with a gun, although it’s unclear if Ashli can see him. She’s the only woman in a sea of men, and she’s small, and she seems to be yelling.Ashli: It’s our fucking house. We’re allowed to be in here. You’re wrong.Rosin: “It’s our fucking house. We’re allowed to be in here. You’re wrong.”One of the rioters breaks a window, and then, out of nowhere, Ashli tries to climb through it.[Crowd noise]Rosin: The cop shoots.Rioter: Oh! Oh, shit! Shots fired! Shots fired!Rosin: She immediately falls backwards and lands on the floor. She jerks and convulses, and blood pours out of her mouth.Rioter 1: She’s dead.Rioter 2: She’s dead?Rioter 1: She’s dead. I saw the light go out in her eyes. I saw the lights go out.Rioter 2: What happened, bro? Tell the world.Rosin: And then something happens right after she dies. It’s a detail I missed at first, but it turned out to be a spark for everything that would happen since that day. People around Ashli take out their cell phones and start filming.Rioter 1: This individual says he actually saw her die. He actually saw her die.Rioter 2: I’ll post that video. I have the video. I have the video of the guy with the gun, and they’re shooting her.Rioter: Okay. I want to get with you. I’m with Infowars.com. I’m with Infowars.com.Rioter 2: “Jayden X.” Have you ever heard of that?Rosin: One person says he’s from Infowars and offers to buy footage from someone closer.Rioter 1: I want to get your info right now if you got that shot.Rioter 2: I have it all. I was right at the door.Rioter 2: Okay. I need that footage, man. It’s going to go out to the world. It’s going to change so much.Rosin: Even in the chaos they realize: A martyr was born.Ober: Rumors spread immediately that the woman killed was 25, 21, a mere teenager. In actual fact, Ashli was 35. But the details didn’t matter. She was a young, white woman in the prime of her life shot dead by a Black officer. People were quick to point out that she was a veteran—a war hero, even—purportedly upholding her oath to defend the Constitution when she died.On far-right, pro-Trump message boards post-January 6, Ashli was called a freedom fighter and the “first victim of the second Civil War.” One person wrote: “Your blood will not be in vain. We will avenge you.”Rosin: People who came to January 6 thought they were saving our democracy from evil forces trying to steal an election.Three years later, some of them still think that. And now, those same evil forces are keeping J6 “freedom fighters” in prison. Justice for January 6—that’s what those window stickers on the Chevy are about.Ober: This conspiracy has gotten more elaborate over time: The insurrection was a setup, or, The prosecution of January 6 rioters represented gross government overreach, or, The government can turn on its own citizens, even kill them.Rosin: A lot of the people who believe these things have taken their cues from one woman: Ashli’s mother. Her name is Micki Witthoeft.Micki Witthoeft: Ashli was a beloved daughter, wife, sister, granddaughter, niece, and aunt. But beyond that, she was the single bravest person I have ever known. She was the quintessential American woman. Today is a dark day for our family and this country, for they have lost a true patriot. I would like to invite Donald J. Trump to say her name—[Music]Ober: It took us a minute, but with the help of some friends, we finally figured out that Micki was our new neighbor. I wasn’t sure what I thought about having Ashli Babbitt’s grieving mother come back to the place where her daughter was killed. Why was she here, in our D.C. neighborhood? What did she want? Was there some sort of future Jan. 6 on the horizon? It all felt just a little too close for comfort.In the days after our run-in with the neighbor, I Googled ’til my eyeballs dried out. There were a lot of videos on social media that featured Micki but not a lot of solid information. I reported what I could find to Hanna.Ober: Do you want to know what the house is called?Rosin: What?Ober: The Eagle’s Nest.Rosin: Oh, stop. (Laughs.) What?Ober: Yeah.Rosin: No, we don’t have the Eagle’s Nest in our neighborhood.Ober: What does the Eagle’s Nest mean to you?Rosin: Some patriot thing.Ober: No. Well, sure, one would think, Oh, it’s patriotic, right? American Eagle.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Ober: It’s where all the eagles go. But do you know who else had a very particular property called the Eagle’s Nest?Rosin: No.Ober: Well, I’ll tell you. It’s Adolf Hitler. However, to quote Micki, who explained to HuffPost why they called the house the Eagle’s Nest:Ober: She said, We call our house the Eagle’s Nest, which some would say was Hitler’s hideout. But we’re American citizens, and we won that war, and we’re taking back the name. So this is absolutely not an ode to Hitler.Ober: Here’s what else I found out: The online videos of Micki didn’t exactly make me want to bring over a tray of homemade, “Welcome to the neighborhood” brownies. Lots of shouting and scowling and general unpleasantness.Witthoeft: Why are you all here if you’re going to let that happen? He said, Why the hell are you all here?Person 2: He said that to you? That was very unprofessional!Person 3: They’re fascists.Ober: In one clip online, Micki is being arrested for “blocking and obstructing roadways.” She was at a march to honor the second anniversary of her daughter’s death, and she walked into the street one too many times. The D.C. cops did not appreciate that, and they let her know it.It wasn’t the only time she got into it with the cops. A year later—Witthoeft: I try to show y’all respect. I’ve been arrested twice, and I’ve done it peacefully. That’s bullshit. Your man is bullshit. That’s bullshit.Officer: I wasn’t down here, so I can speak to how—Ober: There were more than a few videos of Micki and her housemates getting into dustups with D.C. folks who didn’t seem to appreciate their presence in their city.Person 1: Get the fuck outta here.Person 2: Get the fuck off of me, bitch. Get the fuck off, the fuck off. Get the fuck off.Person 3: Hey! We caught it on video.Person 2: Stop fucking touching my shit.Person 3: Get out of here, you pansy.Ober: But later, in the same video, there’s this: Our new neighbors are getting harassed by anti-J6 protestors, folks who like to chalk the sidewalk with phrases like “Micki is a grifter.” There are a number of D.C. cops on the scene. I get tense just watching it. Finally, Micki snaps and screams at them.Officer: I heard all the commotion. That’s why I got out. I can’t see—I didn’t see what happened out here.Person 2: I had to beg him to get out of his car.Witthoeft: You can tell your man that the reason I’m here is because three years ago today, y’all killed my kid. That’s why I’m here.[Music]Ober: Right. She’s a mom, and the police killed her kid. That’s why she’s here. She wants to make sure her dead daughter isn’t forgotten and that someone is held accountable for what happened.And one way to do that is to maybe get yourself arrested, or at least show up everywhere—January 6 trials, congressional hearings, the Supreme Court, rallies, marches, my neighborhood.Another way for people to take notice? A nightly vigil outside the D.C. jail, every single night for more than 700 nights.Rosin: And we mean every night, in the rain or scorching heat. Without fail, Micki and a few supporters stand on what they call Freedom Corner and talk on the phone with the J6 defendants held inside the jail.Ober: As I explained to Hanna:Ober: Every night at 7 p.m., these apparently true patriots—Rosin: Mm-hmm.Ober: —come out, and they have a vigil for all of the January 6 defendants who are currently being held in the jail, either awaiting trial or awaiting sentencing.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Ober: And every night, they get a January 6 inmate on the phone, and they put them on the speaker, and then they join in singing, like, the national anthem or “America the Beautiful,” and they’re chanting, like, “Justice for Ashli.” And the evening ends, often, with “God Bless [the U.S.A.],” Lee Greenwood.Rosin: Who’s the “they”?Ober: So there’s a small cadre of true believers who believe that the people in the D.C. jail are political prisoners.Rosin: Interesting.[Music]Rosin: Interesting is a boring thing to say. I get that. But I was only just starting to put this whole picture together, that Micki and her friends were not in D.C. just to cause chaos. They were here to push a narrative that these people—the same ones who turned our city upside down—were victims of a colossal injustice. And also, that January 6 was actually a totally appropriate exercise of freedom and liberty.And their version of the story was getting traction with some important people—actually, the most important person.Trump: I am the political prisoner of a failing nation, but I will soon be free on November 5, the most important day in the history of our country, and we will together make America great again. Thank you.Rosin: If our interactions with our new neighbors had unfolded more like the typical neighborhood showdown—my MAGA hat versus your dump trump sign—things might have been easier because that would be just straight-up neighbor warfare, pure mutual hatred.Ober: But it didn’t happen that way. Instead, two opposite dramas unfolded: (1) We got an up-close, intimate view of how history gets rewritten. Call it the lost-cause narrative for the 21st century: A group of Americans immediately sets to work retooling the history of an event through tweets and podcasts and viral video clips, in a way that distorts collective memory forever.Rosin: But then, (2) our new neighbors became real people to us. We also got an up-close, intimate view of them, their monumental grief, their sleepless nights, their deep friendship—things that make it harder to purely hate on someone.Ober: This woman, Micki Witthoeft, is many things to many people—Mama Micki to the January 6 defendants, mother of a dead domestic terrorist to others. But to us, she’s something else—she’s our neighbor.Ober: Do you want to hear something rotten?Micki: I don’t know if I do, but I will.Ober: After months of getting to know Micki, I felt like I needed to confess something. She had been telling me how people in the neighborhood had generally been nice to them, except for this one time. One of her roommates, Nicole, had been sitting in the car, and these two women walked by and said something totally rude, and—I know, you’ve already heard the story before.Ober: Nicole sitting in the car—that was me. And I’m fully disgusted with myself and embarrassed. Like, because that’s not how I want to be treated, and that’s not how I want to think about people. But I did it.Micki: Oh, well, I’m surprised you—I’m impressed that you admitted that to me. I really am. That’s going to be interesting when I tell Nicole.Ober: Since that incident, I’ve spent a lot of time with Micki trying to understand her cause, her politics, and her anger. I’ve had many moments where I thought: What the hell am I doing, getting all caught up in their revisionist history of January 6? But what I can tell you is that Micki is not who I thought she was.She is every bit as fiery as she comes off in speeches and confrontations with people who want her out of this city. After nearly a year of knowing her, I’m still terrified of her. I have never before in my life met a person with such penetrating eyes, and she wields them to great effect. If she is staring you down, I promise you, you will find no relief.Ober: So the window rolls down, and I guess Nicole said, you know, “Justice for J6!” Right? Reflexively, in two seconds, I go, “Well, you’re in the wrong neighborhood for that.” Right? Now, I feel like you would appreciate that because sometimes things pop out of your mouth that maybe you didn’t think about. I am a person who is very guilty of that, as my mouth runs away with me.So, I said that, and she goes, “We live here now. So suck it, bitch.” (Laughs.)Micki: That’s my Nicole. (Laughs.)Ober: And I was like, Well, okay.[Music]Rosin: When we first ran into the militiamobile, we didn’t know anything about Micki and her crew. We thought anyone could be living in that house, with that car. Maybe it was an actual militia headquarters with a cache of weapons in the basement. Maybe it was just some wacko whose patriotism had gone totally sideways.Ober: But now, after nearly a year of reporting this story, we know so much more. And in the rest of the series, we are going to take you through this upside-down world we landed in—where we found ourselves talking conspiracies.Micki: I don’t know what I believe them capable of. Is it eating babies and drinking their blood? I don’t think so. But I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what they’re up to.Ober: How you can suddenly find yourself joking with January 6ers about militias?Nicole: If you’re going to come down here, you’ve got to know your militias straight.Ober: You know, I can’t—there are too many splinter groups and, you know.Nicole: There’s factions. There’s levels. There’s color coding. (Laughs.)Ober: Listen. When the gay militia happens, I’m there, okay? When that happens. Until then—Nicole: Well, we’re a country of militias, you know.Ober: And wondering, What could possibly be coming for us?Rosin: Like, how long are you going to stay in D.C.?Brandon Fellows: I plan to stay ’til, like, January 7. (Laughs.)Rosin: That feels vaguely threatening.Fellows: I could see why you would say that.Rosin: That’s coming up on We Live Here Now.Ober: We Live Here Now is a production of The Atlantic. The show was reported, written, and executive produced by me, Lauren Ober. Hanna Rosin reported, wrote, and edited the series. Our senior producer is Rider Alsop. Our producer is Ethan Brooks. Original scoring, sound design, and mix engineering by Brendan Baker.This series was edited by Scott Stossel and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Art direction by Colin Hunter. Project management by Nancy DeVille.Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.The Atlantic’s executive editor is Adrienne LaFrance. Jeffrey Goldberg is The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief.Nicole. And then did I say something like, Well, bitch, I live here now, or something?Ober: Very close to that. “We live here now, so—”Nicole: Get used to it?Ober: No.Nicole: Suck it? Fuck it?Ober: No. You’re right on the “suck it.”Nicole: (Laughs.) I don’t know.Ober: “Suck it,” what? “Suck it,” who?Nicole: Suck it, fascist? (Laughs.) So much more fascist than me. Don’t tell me what I said.Ober: You said, “Suck it, bitch.”Nicole: Oh! Okay. Okay.

Who’s going to win the presidential election? My answer, as a journalist writing about politics who gets asked this a lot, is always, “It’s a coin flip.” That’s certainly what forecasting models based on polling suggest. As I write this, the Economist gives Donald Trump a 56 percent chance; FiveThirtyEight gives him a 51 percent chance; Nate Silver gives him 53.1 percent. That’s not exactly 50-50 but it’s pretty close. But this year, a different way of judging the odds has become more popular than ever: prediction markets. These are real-money markets where people can bet on the ultimate victor of the presidential election, among other elections and events, from politics to sports to movies. While academic-sponsored markets like PredictIt and the Iowa Electronic Markets have been around for a while (decades in the latter case), two major new markets have emerged this cycle. One is Kalshi, the first non-academic prediction market to be officially legal in the United States after the company beat regulators in court who tried to block it from allowing betting on elections. Right now, their market, with over $50 million bet in total, indicates that Trump has a 59 percent chance of victory. But Kalshi is comparatively tiny next to Polymarket, an all-crypto market accepting bets from all over the world. It’s presidential market has over $2.3 billion invested and counts Elon Musk among its fans. (Technically, Polymarket disallows Americans from betting on it, but any moderately tech-savvy person with a virtual private network can get around that. As of Wednesday, it has started cracking down on US trading a bit.) Right now, it claims higher odds for Trump than anywhere else: 61.9 percent. Like a lot of economists and political scientists, I’ve long been a big fan of prediction markets. They provide a useful complement to polling by summarizing conventional wisdom about candidate odds, and also function as a tax on bullshit. There’s a lot of cheap talk in political punditry, and I’m generally of the belief that if you say things like “Trump will definitely win Florida by 8 points,” good etiquette requires you to bet money on that proposition. Making the bet means you’re putting your own money behind your prediction, and if you have to do that, you’re probably going to make fewer garbage predictions. But these markets haven’t had a test like 2024 before, and seeing them operate with billions behind them is giving us a sense of how they’ll work at scale — including to what extent they can be manipulated to produce a certain outcome. The big question: Can we trust these things? Prediction markets for beginners People have been betting on elections for centuries. Henry David Thoreau memorably noted in “Civil Disobedience” how often betting accompanied voting. The economists Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf have studied presidential election markets in the US that ran at large scale from 1868 to 1940; “betting activity at times dominated transactions in the stock exchanges on Wall Street,” they find. In 1916, the peak year of these Wall Street markets, betting reached $290 million in today’s dollars. These markets do not work like typical sports gambling. Your neighborhood bookie (or, these days, FanDuel or DraftKings) sets odds on her own, obviously consulting what other bookies are setting but fundamentally deciding for herself what to charge. When you bet with her, you are betting against them, not against other bettors, and a good bookie will set odds such that they consistently profit. Polymarket, Kalshi, PredictIt, and other prediction markets are genuinely markets: rather than betting against the house, you are buying “shares” that pay out if a particular event happens in the future. The market sells the shares to start, but then the trading is done between traders, not between traders and the house. The market-maker exists to broker transactions. That means odds can change much more quickly and fluidly than with a normal bookie. It’s more like a futures contract than a sports bet. This structure does mean you have to be careful looking at these numbers. When you look at a site like Polymarket, it’s tempting to look at the headline numbers (hmm, 61.7 percent for Trump) and assume that this represents what bettors on the site think the odds of a Trump victory are. What it really means is something like that, but a little bit subtler. As the pseudonymous finance blogger Quantian explains, the real purpose of a prediction market is to reach an equilibrium at which the price of a “share” in a given candidate matches demand for those shares. This equilibrium can mean the price exactly matches what people in the market think the probability of that candidate winning is, which is what you’d want the price to be if the markets are to be useful for forecasting. But those two can also diverge, especially if the market is restricted in various ways. That said, economists Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz have found that, in practice, prediction market prices are close to participants’ aggregated beliefs, and you can set a kind of confidence interval and be reasonably sure that participants’ beliefs are within it. Zitzewitz notes that this is more of a problem with markets like PredictIt, which caps how much investors can put in at a relatively low level. Those rules can lead to major mispricings because they make it much harder to bet against low-probability events. “In a prediction market where you don’t really have those constraints,” Zitzewitz noted in a phone call, “then we’re much more likely to get a price equal to some average of beliefs.” Meanwhile, be careful to never equate prediction market prices with polling results, as one since-corrected New York Times article did: These units are not comparable pic.twitter.com/cLnOM0GWE1— Thomas Woodside ? (@Thomas_Woodside) October 16, 2024 Polls do not give you a “chance of winning”; for that you need an actual model like FiveThirtyEight’s, the Economist’s, or Nate Silver’s. Do betting markets work? The basic theoretical case for betting markets is the same as the case that normal markets are efficient. If shares of, say, Nvidia are mispriced, then you can make money by betting the price will move. In a market where millions of people leveraging trillions of dollars are all acting that way, there probably won’t be too many obvious mispricings. Any ones that once existed are quickly exploited by some investors to make money. That’s a nice theory, though one challenged by the emergence of “meme stocks” whose prices seem totally out of whack with their actual value. The better case for prediction markets is that they’ve worked well in practice. Wolfers, Zitzewitz, and Erik Snowberg reviewed the evidence in a 2012 paper, and it’s fairly compelling. When it comes to forecasting economic outcomes (like economic growth or inflation), “macro derivatives” (a kind of prediction market for these outcomes) do as well or better as surveys of professional forecasters. A paper by David Rothschild looking at markets during the 2008 presidential and Senate elections found that early in the election, prediction markets were significantly more accurate than polls; closer to the election, they were roughly equal. A 2008 paper by a team at the Iowa Electronic Markets, the longest-running prediction market in the US, found that the average error of polls (1.91 points) was higher than for markets (1.58), even late in the cycle. A lot of companies have also adopted internal prediction markets to help make decisions. Zitzewitz and Bo Cowgill examined markets at Google, Ford, and an anonymous third company. These markets covered topics like “demand, product quality, deadlines being met, and external events.” Zitzewitz and Cowgill then compared the markets to the predictions of internal experts; the average error of the markets was 25 percent smaller. In a very different context, economists Anna Dreber, Thomas Pfeiffer, Johan Almenberg, and Magnus Johannesson set up prediction markets where psychologists could make bets on whether specific pieces of psychology research would replicate when other researchers tried to reproduce it. They found that the markets were effective at predicting which studies would replicate and outperformed simple surveys of experts. Economists Lionel Page and Robert Clemen marshaled evidence from nearly 1,800 prediction markets for a 2012 paper. They found that markets looking a year or more in the future were deeply flawed; they usually didn’t have enough traders to generate a price or they had systematically biased prices. But markets became increasingly well-calibrated as they got closer to the event in question.  Note that presidential elections are maybe the hardest context for judging prediction markets. If a market is “well-calibrated,” then, when looking at all the dozens or hundreds of markets it’s run, markets where an outcome has a 70 percent probability should see that outcome occur 70 percent of the time; markets where it has 20 percent odds should see that a fifth of the time; and so on.  To do that kind of analysis, you need a lot of markets and predictions. Presidential elections are one-offs, and aside from the Iowa markets, there haven’t been modern election-betting markets going back for more than a handful of elections. Polymarket, for instance, is only on its second presidential cycle, so we have no way of knowing if it, specifically, is well-calibrated in predicting presidential elections specifically.  Are the markets being manipulated? So prediction markets are fairly accurate in general. Why are some people so opposed to them, then? In the US, the main opposition to betting markets like Kalshi has come from a handful of Democratic senators led by Jeff Merkley (D-OR). “Billionaires and large corporations can now bet millions on which party controls the House or Senate and then spend big to destroy candidates to protect their bets,” Merkley bemoaned after the court ruling allowing Kalshi to operate election markets. The story of the “French whale” on Polymarket seemed to give credence to these fears. About four accounts on the market (Fredi9999, PrincessCaro, Michie, and Theo4) have pumped about $45 million into bets on Trump since the beginning of September. That’s not a ton in the scheme of a market of over $2 billion, but it’s enough to raise eyebrows. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have written about it, but the best reporter on the topic is the pseudonymous Domer a.k.a. JustKen (he uses a shot of Ryan Gosling in Barbie as his avatar), another major Polymarket trader who was curious just who he was betting against. Domer did some digging and linked the four accounts to a Frenchman named “Michel;” it seems like they were being controlled by the same person. “My best guess is it is a wildly risky-loving uber-wealthy Frenchman who is pretty damn sure that Trump is going to win,” Domer concluded. But it could also, in theory, be an uber-wealthy Frenchman who is trying to manipulate the market to make Trump’s odds go higher. This is an often-hypothesized problem with prediction markets: someone could rush in with money to boost a particular candidate’s odds, which could then lead to media coverage and public perceptions that think the candidate is a favorite, which could in turn make them the favorite. The nature of the markets is that if you do this on one market, you will probably have effects on all markets. If Polymarket gives Trump 65 percent odds and Kalshi gives him 55 percent odds, you can make risk-free money by buying Trump at Kalshi and Harris at Polymarket; if you only have to spend 55 cents to get a dollar if Trump wins, and 35 cents to get a dollar if Harris wins, then you can spend 90 cents to get a dollar if either Trump or Harris wins (and there’s basically 100 percent odds that one of them will win). This is called arbitrage, and it tends to close gaps between the markets over time. A common argument from supporters of prediction markets is that they’re resistant to this kind of manipulation. If someone injects a huge amount of money into a market to make it look a certain way and that appearance is at odds with the underlying reality, then there’s money to be made taking the other side of that bet. That’s especially true on sites like Kalshi and Polymarket, which have larger investors, like hedge funds.  If I think Harris has a 60 percent chance of winning and Polymarket thinks it’s 35 percent, I’m not going to sink my life savings into Harris contracts. Sure, that bet is profitable in theory, but there’s still a 40 percent chance that I lose everything. But hedge funds exist more or less entirely to make bets like that, and have much deeper bankrolls and risk tolerances. That means they can help prevent manipulators from swinging markets. Sure enough, around 10 pm ET on Tuesday a single trader ​(Ly67890) bought over $2.1 million in “Harris wins” shares, indicating that at least one counter-whale has emerged to take the other side of the bet. Past attempts to manipulate markets have tended to end badly for the manipulators. In 2012, a “Romney whale” who spent heavily trying to prop up Mitt Romney’s odds in prediction markets wound up losing $4-$7 million. 2008 saw a similar attempt to prop up John McCain’s odds, which led to a crackdown from the now-defunct market Intrade. In Domer’s words, “those people got BTFO” — blown the fuck out.  Rhode and Strumpf, the economic historians, have done the most careful academic investigation of manipulation I’ve seen, and found, “In the cases studied here, the speculative attack initially moved prices, but these changes were quickly undone and prices returned close to their previous levels. We find little evidence that political stock markets can be systematically manipulated beyond short time periods.” It’s impossible to know whether French traders are actively trying to manipulate the market, or simply have a genuine belief that Trump will win and are putting huge amounts of money behind that belief. I asked Rajiv Sethi, a professor of economics at Barnard College, Columbia University, who writes a newsletter on prediction markets, what could explain the markets giving higher probabilities than models like FiveThirtyEight or Silver. “There are two possible explanations,” he told me. “Markets could be absorbing information faster than models. They see stuff that could be moving the models, so the price rises, and then the model adjusts a couple of days later. … There’s an alternative explanation that the market just adds a premium to the model.” That is, the traders could just be a bit more pro-Trump than the models overall. It’s very very hard to know in real time which of these views is right. Sethi has put together some very preliminary evidence by creating virtual traders who buy and sell shares on prediction markets based on what the models from FiveThirtyEight, Silver, and the Economist are saying. None of these traders, he finds, made money; all lost money, by about the same amounts on Polymarket, and by a larger amount for Silver than other models on PredictIt. “Does this mean that models are performing poorly relative to markets? Tentatively, yes,” Sethi writes. “But this could change quite dramatically—in either direction—over the next few days.”  The real promise of prediction markets In some ways, I find presidential elections the most boring use case for prediction markets. Such elections are probably the single event for which we have the most popular interest in and information around predicting. We already have polling and very sophisticated polling-based forecasts that tell us a lot about the race. The website Pollyvote has a very nice rundown of the literally dozens of forecasts available based on polls, models like FiveThirtyEight’s and Silver’s, political scientists’ models, and so on.  Do we really need prediction markets on top of those? Maybe not. But the general idea of using markets to predict hard-to-predict events has merit outside an election context. Synthesizing information from a diverse array of sources is hard, and prediction markets show a lot of promise at that task.  Take natural disasters. Events like hurricanes, typhoons, and earthquakes have huge humanitarian and economic effects, and while we have some statistical models that can predict them a bit, these don’t exactly provide actionable guidance for businesses, residents, insurance companies, and other people with a stake in disaster-prone regions. Getting decent markets in place could help businesses prepare for supply-chain disruptions and give residents a strong signal that they need to get the hell out, or at least invest in more resilient housing. The issue is that betting on where is going to have a hurricane next, and how bad it’s going to be, feels a bit ghoulish (though it’s not really any more ghoulish than the odds that actuaries have to sort through every day). It’s certainly not fun, like betting on sports or the presidential election. I fear that means that the most high-value prediction markets might wind up not only not making their brokers money, but will have to be subsidized: insurance companies, say, would pay for a market where meteorologists help sort through hurricane odds, or the National Institutes of Health could subsidize a market where medical researchers bet on the results of clinical trials, giving them a better sense of which drugs seem most promising and worth investing in. To date, prediction markets have been driven by two main forces: a sober-headed assessment of ways in which they can be a useful tool to understand the world and pure degenerate gambler instinct. As someone with a bit of the latter, I totally get how it’s fun. But if prediction markets are going to be of real social value, we need more of the sober force driving things as well.

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