SyFeed RSS Reader - add sources and read your favorite news.

Vox - All

The antipoverty agenda under Trump isn’t all lost

vox.com

Protesters rally against then-Labor Secretary nominee Andrew Puzder in 2017. | Jeff Curry/Getty Images There is no sugarcoating it: Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday is a major setback for many antipoverty policies. With a Republican majority in the Senate (and likely in the House as well), there’s little doubt that spending cuts will be up for debate, and tried-and-failed ideas like imposing work requirements on welfare recipients will be back on the table. Throughout the campaign, Trump promised that he wouldn’t cut Social Security. But his proposed changes to the program — like cutting taxes on Social Security benefits — would likely result in reducing benefits sooner rather than later. Other tax-cutting ideas, like his “No Tax on Tips” plan, would likely be a bigger payoff for big businesses than for workers because it could push wages down. None of that means, however, that there’s only room for pessimism. As my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote, Trump’s first term showed that any major cuts would have a hard time getting passed, even with a Republican majority. And there’s also reason to believe that some programs could even get passed, like some version of an expanded child tax credit that has had bipartisan support in the past. (Vice President-elect JD Vance, for example, has supported expanding the child tax credit.) The election results on Tuesday also showed signs of hope — a roadmap for what an antipoverty agenda could look like under a second Trump presidency. Because while Democrats lost the presidential race, voters didn’t necessarily reject their policies. In various states, voters supported progressive priorities through ballot measures, including minimum wage hikes, paid sick leave, and expanded labor rights. If Democrats want to have a productive four years under Trump, there’s a lot they can do at the state level — if not in the legislatures, then at the ballot box. One positive election outcome? Voters raised the minimum wage. In five states, voters got to have a say in their minimum wage laws. In Missouri, for example, voters passed a minimum wage hike, raising it from $12.30 per hour to $15 by 2026. The new law pegs the minimum wage to inflation, which means that workers don’t have to wait for another law to pass to keep up with rising costs. More than 562,000 workers will see their wages rise as a result of the law, according to the Missouri Budget Project. Alaskans also voted on raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, up from $11.73, and the measure is on track to pass. It would increase earnings for nearly 10 percent of the workforce, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In California, voters were asked to raise the state’s minimum wage to $18 per hour, but the results are still too close to call. In Arizona, voters protected worker pay by overwhelmingly rejecting a measure that would have allowed employers to reduce base wages for tipped workers. In Massachusetts, however, there was a different story. Voters didn’t approve a ballot measure that would have supported tipped workers. Tipped workers in the state are now paid $6.75 per hour, but had the measure passed, they would have eventually been paid the standard minimum wage, which now sits at $15. The benefits of a higher minimum wage are clear: Workers at the bottom automatically see their incomes rise. But efforts to raise the minimum wage often face opposition because business interests argue that they would result in job losses or increased prices. In the case of Massachusetts, the proposal was strongly opposed by restaurant lobbying groups. The evidence points to a different reality. In states that have increased the minimum wage, there was little to no impact on the number of jobs. Some studies have even shown that a hike in the minimum wage can also lead to higher employment in certain labor markets in part because they attract more workers. And states that have gotten rid of subminimum wages have seen lower poverty rates among tipped workers than states that haven’t. Recent research from the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, found that a higher minimum wage did not necessarily lead to significantly higher prices. After California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers up to $20 per hour earlier this year, employment remained stable and prices didn’t dramatically change. According to the study, popular menu items were about 3.7 percent more expensive — about a 15-cent increase for a $4 hamburger. The next four years will be about the small wins It’s worth noting that during Trump’s first term, when Democrats had control of the House, the former president signed some major antipoverty measures into law, including rental assistance, boosted unemployment benefits, and stimulus checks. Of course, that was prompted by a pandemic, a global disaster that we hopefully won’t see a repeat of anytime soon. So that kind of policy at the federal level is highly unlikely to pass in the next four years. That’s why Democratic lawmakers and antipoverty advocates have to focus on the state level to deliver meaningful improvements to people’s lives. The ballot measures on Tuesday, some of which also included provisions that require employers to offer their workers paid sick leave, showed that the public has an appetite for policies that would reduce poverty. And while voters in Massachusetts rejected abolishing the subminimum wage for tipped workers, they passed a ballot measure that allows rideshare drivers to unionize. Democrats should capitalize on that because it can genuinely make a big difference. Even though the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 per hour, hasn’t changed in 15 years, at least 30 states and Washington, DC, have implemented a higher minimum wage. Sometimes, major breakthroughs don’t come from one major legislative overhaul from Congress. They can also be a series of small wins. And we should take them wherever we can. This story was featured in the Within Our Means newsletter. Sign up here.

Trump’s tariffs could tank the economy. Will the Supreme Court stop them?

9 h

vox.com

President-elect Donald Trump’s tariffs are unwise, but assuming that he implements them in compliance with federal law, they are not unconstitutional. | Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images After winning the 2024 election in part due to high inflation early in President Joe Biden’s term, President-elect Donald Trump wants to enact policies that would lead to the very same kind of inflation that doomed Democrats. Though Trump inherits a strong economy and low inflation, he’s proposed a 10 to 20 percent tariff on all imports, and a 60 percent tariff on all imports from China. The Budget Lab at Yale estimates that this policy alone could raise consumer prices by as much as 5.1 percent and could diminish US economic growth by up to 1.4 percent. An analysis by the think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics, finds that Trump’s tariffs, when combined with some of his other proposals such as mass deportation, would lead to inflation rising between 6 and 9.3 percent. If Trump pushes through his proposed tariffs, they will undoubtedly be challenged in court — and, most likely, in the Supreme Court. There are no shortages of businesses that might be hurt financially by these tariffs, and any one of them could file a lawsuit. That raises a difficult question: Will this Supreme Court permit Trump to enact policies that could sabotage his presidency, and with it, the Republican Party’s hopes of a political realignment that could doom Democrats to the wilderness? The legal arguments in favor of allowing Trump to unilaterally impose high tariffs are surprisingly strong. Several federal laws give the president exceedingly broad power to impose tariffs, and the limits imposed by these statutes are quite vague. A presidential proclamation imposing such tariffs wouldn’t be unprecedented. In 1971, President Richard Nixon imposed a 10 percent tariff on nearly all foreign goods, which a federal appeals court upheld. Congress has since amended some of the laws Nixon relied on, but a key provision allowing the president to regulate importation of “any property in which any foreign country or any national thereof has or has had any interest” remains on the books. The judiciary does have one way it might constrain Trump’s tariffs: The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has given itself an unchecked veto power over any policy decision by the executive branch that those justices deem to be too ambitious. In Biden v. Nebraska (2023), for example, the Republican justices struck down the Biden administration’s primary student loans forgiveness program, despite the fact that the program is unambiguously authorized by a federal statute. Nebraska suggests a Nixon-style tariff should be struck down — at least if the Republican justices want to use their self-given power to veto executive branch actions consistently. Nebraska claimed that the Court’s veto power is at an apex when the executive enacts a policy of “vast ‘economic and political significance.” A presidential proclamation that could bring back 2022 inflation levels certainly seem to fit within this framework. The question is whether a Republican Supreme Court will value loyalty to a Republican administration, and thus uphold Trump’s tariffs; or whether they will prefer to prop up Trump’s presidency by vetoing a policy that could make him unpopular and potentially invite the Democratic Party back into power. After the Court’s decision holding that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes, it is naive to think that this Court’s decisions are driven solely – or even primarily – by what the law and the Constitution actually have to say about legal questions. But that does not mean that this Court will necessarily strike down a Republican tariff policy that could do long term damage to the GOP. The federal laws governing tariffs give the president an enormous amount of power Tariffs are often viewed as economic weapons that the United States can use to combat other nation’s activities that undermine US interests. For this reason, federal law gives the president significant power to impose new tariffs after an appropriate federal agency determines that deploying such a weapon is justified. One striking thing about these laws, however, is that they focus far more on process than on substance. Federal tariff laws tend to lay out a procedure the federal government must follow before it can authorize a new tariff, but they place few explicit restrictions on the nature of those tariffs once the process is followed. The Trump administration must follow certain processes to create new tariffs, but so long as it follows that process it has broad latitude over tariff policy. Consider, for example, Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. This law requires the US trade representative, a Cabinet-level official appointed by the president, to make certain findings before their power to issue new tariffs is triggered. But specific findings the trade representative must make before acting are quite vague. The power to issue tariffs can be triggered if the trade representative finds that a foreign country is engaged in activity that “is unjustifiable and burdens or restricts United States commerce,” or that is “unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts United States commerce.” So that’s not much of an explicit limit on tariffs — the government’s power to issue them is triggered if a Cabinet official determines that a foreign nation’s behavior is “unreasonable.” Once the trade representative makes this determination, their powers are quite broad. The government may “impose duties or other import restrictions on the goods of, and, notwithstanding any other provision of law, fees or restrictions on the services of, such foreign country for such time as the trade representative determines appropriate.” As my colleague Dylan Matthews notes, “Trump used this power to impose sweeping tariffs against China. Biden has made liberal use of this power, too, expanding tariffs on steel, batteries, solar cells, and electric vehicles from China.” Another statute gives the president similarly broad authority to impose tariffs after the commerce secretary conducts an investigation and determines that a foreign good “is being imported into the United States in such quantities or under such circumstances as to threaten to impair the national security.” In his first term, Trump used this to tax imports of steel and aluminum. And then there’s the authority that Nixon used in 1971 to issue broad new tariffs on a variety of imports. In its current form, this law allows the president to act only after they declare a national emergency “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” But the law doesn’t define terms like “national emergency” or “unusual and extraordinary threat.” And, once such an emergency is declared, the president’s power is quite broad. This is the law that also permits the president to regulate importation of “any property in which any foreign country or any national thereof has or has had any interest.” It’s important to emphasize that, while these laws impose few substantive limits on tariffs, they do require Trump to jump through certain procedural hoops — and his administration struggled with such procedural barriers in his first term. In 2020, for example, a 5-4 Supreme Court rejected the administration’s attempt to eliminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows hundreds of thousands of undocumented young immigrants to live and work in the US, due to a paperwork error. Still, assuming the second Trump administration is staffed with competent lawyers who can navigate procedural hurdles more deftly this time, federal law places few explicit limits on the president’s power to issue tariffs. How the Court could veto Trump’s tariffs, if a majority of the justices want to do so The strongest legal argument against Trump’s proposed tariff policy involves something called the “major questions doctrine,” a power that the Supreme Court gave itself in recent years, which has only ever been used to block policies handed down by the Biden administration. The Court has never explained where this major questions doctrine comes from, and has never attempted to ground it in any statute or constitutional provision — although some individual justices have written concurring opinions that attempt to do so. When summarizing this fabricated legal doctrine, the Court often quotes a line from Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA (2014), which states that “we expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” But the justices have only provided vague guidance on just how “clearly” Congress must write a statute if it wants to give broad policymaking authority to an agency, so it is unclear if this Court would follow a statute permitting the president to tax “any property” that “any foreign country” has “any interest” in. The major questions doctrine is a new legal concept, which is poorly defined and which has never been used to block any policy by a Republican president — or, indeed, any president not named “Joe Biden” (some scholars argue that the Court applied an early version of the doctrine in FDA v. Brown & Williamson (2000) to block a Clinton administration policy, but the Court’s reasoning in that case bears only a passing resemblance to its reasoning in its Biden-era decisions). Because this doctrine is so ill-defined, a lawyer can only guess at whether this Court will apply it to the Trump administration at all, or specifically to Trump’s tariff policies. Still, there is both a principled argument for why it might apply to Trump, and a cynical one. The principled one is that the law should be the same regardless of which party controls the White House. So, if the Republican justices insisted on vetoing Biden administration policies they deemed too ambitious, they should also veto similarly ambitious Trump administration policies. Under this argument, the major questions doctrine may still be bad law that the Republican justices pulled out of thin air, but the least they can do is apply it equally harshly to presidents of both parties. The cynical argument, meanwhile, is that Democrats got crushed at the polls, despite low inflation and a strong economy, seemingly in part because they held power during a period of high inflation. If Trump gets to implement his tariffs, that would also likely trigger a period of similarly high inflation, and that would be bad for the political party that controls the Supreme Court. So what should the Supreme Court do? Trump has proposed many policies that violate the Constitution. If he follows through on his threats to have his political enemies arrested, that would violate the First Amendment and may violate the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that law enforcement must have “probable cause” to make an arrest. Depending on how Trump conducts his deportation policies, they may violate constitutional due process guarantees. His anti-transgender policies could violate constitutional protections against discrimination, and some of his policies targeting incarcerated transgender people could violate the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments.” But there’s nothing in the Constitution that prohibits tariffs. Tariffs are a common part of US economic and foreign policy. Federal laws that long predate the Trump administration give the president broad authority over tariffs. And there’s even a precedent, from the Nixon administration, for the kind of sweeping tariffs that Trump says he wants to implement. The coming legal fight over tariffs presents a dilemma. A decision against the tariffs would consolidate more power in an unelected Supreme Court, and breathe more life into a legal doctrine that has no basis in law. A decision for the tariffs, however, would cause needless misery to millions of Americans. The Constitution itself is pretty clear about what should happen in this case. When a duly elected president violates the Constitution or a federal law, it’s the Supreme Court’s job to step in. But when the president merely enacts an unwise economic policy, the Court is supposed to play no role whatsoever — even if this policy is likely to hurt the nation or the political party that controls the Court. Trump’s tariffs are unwise, but assuming that he implements them in compliance with federal law, they are not unconstitutional. In any event, it’s far from clear what these justices will do. But, if Trump does try to implement the kinds of tariffs he touted on the campaign trail, a legal showdown over whether he can actually do what federal law says he can do is almost certainly inevitable.

The debate over why Harris lost is in full swing. Here’s a guide.

1 d

vox.com

Kamala Harris speaks at Howard University in Washington, DC, on November 6, 2024. | Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images Democrats have faced a bitterly disappointing defeat, and the debate is on about why that happened. Amid the opportunistic finger-pointing and evidence-free assertions that Vice President Kamala Harris could have won if only she had done this or that, there is a genuine search for explanations about what happened. The answer Democrats find most persuasive could greatly influence the party’s direction as it tries to win again. This debate will clearly go on for some time, and disentangling causality is difficult. But one way to think about it is to break up the question. How much of the defeat was about Harris’s weakness as a candidate or her campaign strategy? How much was about Donald Trump’s strengths? How much was about Joe Biden’s record? How much was the Democratic Party brand generally? And how much was due to larger structural factors like a global anti-incumbent trend? It’s possible that all of these played some role in the outcome, especially because issues like inflation can resonate across them all. But let’s go through them. Was Harris an unusually weak candidate? Any candidate who loses tends to get defined, in retrospect, as an obvious loser. So naturally, lots of the Democratic finger-pointing has been pointing at Harris. But how convincing is it? Harris had some real strengths: her record as a former prosecutor, her formidable fundraising, and the fact that she was a fresh face. But many had grave doubts about her prospects all along. Harris’s political rise in deep-blue San Francisco, and later statewide in California, came by cultivating support among Democratic elites; she had never had to run in a swing state and therefore never developed a political style designed to appeal to swing voters. It was far from clear what those swing voters would make of her when she entered the 2024 race. (The one time before this year that she faced a decent Republican opponent — her first run for California attorney general, in 2010 — she barely won.) Her campaign strategy was cautious and defensive. In her prior presidential campaign and during the vice presidency, she’d done several high-profile interviews that went poorly, which spurred her to avoid such interviews. In this bid, she was happy to prosecute the case against Trump on the debate stage, but seemed much less comfortable when it was her being grilled. She often spoke in talking points and platitudes. There was also her record. When Harris was trying to win the 2020 Democratic primary, she ran to the left, taking several policy positions (like banning fracking) that did not seem politically tenable. Trump’s team used one clip from that campaign, when she touted how she’d worked to ensure transgender inmates in California could access gender-affirming care, in a heavily funded attack ad. It concluded with the line: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Her campaign strategy hinged on trying to tack to the center, disavowing or simply avoiding her past positions, sending out signals to the business community that she’d be friendlier to them, while using former Rep. Liz Cheney as a Republican validator. She did not break with the Biden administration or the mainstream Democratic consensus on any issue of significance. She did not run as a bold populist or progressive, either. Finally, there’s gender and race. Many have wondered whether the voter backlash against her was due to sexism — particularly due to preliminary numbers suggesting the swing against her was most intense among men. The New York Times reports that the Trump team’s ads often showed Harris “laughing or dancing in a colorful blouse and pink pants,” because Trump’s goal was “to make her look like a lightweight.” But is Harris getting too much of the blame? Evidence suggests the guy she replaced at the top of the ticket, Joe Biden, would have done much worse. One post-election poll found Trump would have beaten him by 7 percentage points nationally. Perhaps she did a decent job of playing a bad hand: the Biden administration’s record. Was it Biden’s fault? Biden’s initial attempt to run for reelection — before it was curtailed by his disastrous debate — limited the time and options available to Harris. But the bigger problem may have simply been that she was his vice president, and his administration was very unpopular. Blueprint, a Democratic polling initiative, published research showing that two of the three most effective arguments for pushing swing voters away from Harris were that “inflation was too high under the Biden-Harris administration” and that “too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration.” Polling all year has shown that inflation and immigration were Democrats’ biggest vulnerabilities. So part of the party’s second-guessing will naturally involve whether Biden should have made different policy choices to produce different outcomes in those areas. Biden did not cause inflation, but his American Rescue Plan did make it worse, which resulted in higher prices and necessitated bigger interest rate cuts than would have happened otherwise. His administration was also slow to adjust, and though a “soft landing” without a recession eventually resulted, voters hated the enduring high prices. On the border, too, Biden only belatedly pivoted. After a huge increase in the number of unauthorized immigrants arriving at the border in 2021 and onward, Democrats in blue states and cities struggled to deal with the logistics of so many arrivals, and public backlash brewed. Late in 2023, Biden tried to pass a border security bill through Congress, but failed — in part due to opposition from Donald Trump. In mid-2024, the combination of a deal with Mexico and new executive orders seemed to finally cut down on border crossings. But it’s possible Biden could have done more earlier, limiting the effectiveness of immigration as an attack on Harris. Finally, Israel’s war in Gaza bitterly divided the Democratic coalition. There was probably no way to make everyone happy here, and polling does not show it as a top reason swing voters turned against Harris. But the ugly controversy over Biden’s support for Israel (and Harris’s support for Biden’s policy) may have hurt her in Michigan and cut down on the left’s enthusiasm for her. It’s unlikely to have been decisive, but it certainly didn’t help. Was Trump an unusually strong candidate? The political conventional wisdom has generally been that Trump is a weak candidate who’s been holding Republicans back — that his 2016 win was a fluke reliant on the Electoral College; that he was quite unpopular as president; that voters rejected him and his party in 2018, 2020, and (sort of) 2022; and that the GOP was taking a massive risk by nominating him again after he tried to steal the last presidential election and was indicted four times. But Trump may have been unusually well-positioned to take advantage of dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s record on the economy and immigration. Trump’s persona as a celebrity businessman, one who many voters view as especially savvy about the economy, has been an advantage for him in polls since his first campaign. That wasn’t enough to save him amid the chaos of 2020, but given what’s ensued since, many Americans have looked back on Trump’s governing record more fondly. Voters have given him retrospective credit for the strong economy and low inflation environment of 2017 through 2019, while not really blaming him for the pandemic. Focus groups again and again came back to the idea that voters hated the Biden economy and thought Trump could fix it. Indeed, Trump’s outperformance of many down-ballot Republican candidates in key races — in part due to split-ticket voting, in part due to Trump voters simply not voting down-ballot — suggests there was a significant bloc of “I don’t like Republicans much, but the economy was better under Trump” voters. On immigration, too, there was a stunning swing of public opinion to the right during Biden’s term, as border arrivals soared, which may have played to Trump’s advantage. Was this a backlash against the Democratic Party for going too far left? One theory floating around is that the results show the public is punishing the Democratic Party for having moved too far left. Josh Barro made this argument in a Substack post, citing poor Democratic governance in blue states and cities as well as “woke” far-left policies on crime, schooling, and trans rights as likely causes of public frustration. Perhaps this explains some of the disproportionate shifts against Harris we saw in deep-blue states like New York, as well as progressive prosecutors losing and a tough-on-crime ballot proposition passing in California. A counterpoint to this is that Democrats’ swing-state Senate candidates did well — several of them won despite Harris losing their states — and that even amid the backlash in New York, Democrats flipped several House seats in New York. That could be read to suggest the problem had less to do with the Democratic Party and more to do with the top of the ticket. Still, Democrats did likely lose the national popular vote as well as the presidency, so it’s hard to argue that the party’s political positioning is optimal. Was it just due to a global trend? Finally, another school of thought holds that perhaps the explanation for the outcome doesn’t lie in the United States at all. Perhaps it’s just the latest example of a worldwide trend of incumbents doing poorly in democracies holding elections in the post-pandemic years. Inflation, as a worldwide trend caused by supply-side disruptions and foreign crises, is a big part of the reason for that global struggle. “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened,” John Burn-Murdoch reported for the Financial Times. “It’s possible there is just no set of policies or personas that can overcome the current global anti-incumbent wave.” Still, it is worth keeping in mind that Trump won quite narrowly, by just 2 percentage points or less in the decisive swing states. On the one hand, that could suggest Democrats did a surprisingly good job among structural headwinds, starting from behind and closing the gap as much as possible — even if it wasn’t ultimately enough. On the other hand, it could suggest that more could have been done. Was it really fated that there was absolutely nothing Democrats could have done over the past four years to improve their margin by 2 more points, however strong the headwinds? Whatever the answer, Democrats have two years until their next chance to take back a branch of the federal government — and plenty to figure out in the meantime.

Conspiracy theories are spreading about Trump’s win. They’re false.

2 d

vox.com

Voters line up to cast their ballots at a voting location at the Farmersville Elementary School on Election Day in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. | Samuel Corum/AFP/Getty Images In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, online misinformation claiming the election was rigged in his favor has proliferated — including theories about missing votes and voting machine dysfunction. As was the case with election denialism following the 2020 election, these conspiracy theories about election fraud are false. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal body that oversees risks to election systems, there haven’t been signs of meddling or hacks on machines affecting the race outcome. “Importantly, we have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure,” CISA director Jen Easterly said in a statement. While it’s true that the current total vote count is less than it was in 2020, that’s not because votes are missing —a number of ballots are still being tabulated and the final count isn’t yet available. It’s worth noting there’s a big distinction between 2020 and the misinformation being spread this time around. During the last cycle, Trump was one of the chief people perpetuating lies about the election being stolen and falsehoods about fraud. Powerful voices in the GOP — including senators and House members — echoed the claims. This cycle, Vice President Kamala Harris has already conceded the election, and Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden, have emphasized the need for a peaceful transfer of power. The misinformation this week instead appears to be coming from online observers — many of them small accounts — disappointed in the outcome of the election, or eager to revive claims of election denialism from 2020. There’s no evidence to back up the “missing ballots” conspiracy theory One conspiracy theory that’s spread online is that there are votes missing this cycle because the count so far is lower than what it was in 2020. In reality, that’s because votes are still being counted — particularly in populous states, like California, that rely heavily on mail-in ballots. Observers on both sides of the aisle have floated this theory. Those sympathetic with Democrats argue that it’s evidence that Trump cheated and that votes are missing from the final count. Those sympathetic with Republicans say it’s more evidence that something went awry in 2020 and that extra votes were counted that year. Neither is correct, experts emphasize. “Those are both lies. Those are both complete misinterpretations of the data,” David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works on election administration, told Vox. Claim: There were 20 million fewer votes cast in 2024 than in 2020 Reality: The final count for this election is still not yet in and could take weeks. That’s because a number of states including California, Nevada and Arizona are continuing to process mail-in ballots. As a result, comparing the current vote totals with those in 2020 isn’t an accurate approach. “Thanks to slow counting of ballots mostly out west, there are still millions of votes to be added to the ultimate totals,” UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen told Vox. “When all is said and done, turnout will likely be on par with turnout in the last election.” The changing vote totals is evidence of this dynamic. As Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer of the Georgia secretary of state office, noted on Friday, the difference in vote totals between 2024 and 2020 has already changed: While there was a difference of 20 million votes on Wednesday, it went down to 15 million votes on Thursday as more ballots were counted. The difference in election numbers between 20&24 continues to drop. On Wednesday morning the difference was 20 million, yesterday it was down to 15 million yesterday, it’s down to about 12.5 million now as votes are still being tallied, especially out West. This is the process. pic.twitter.com/qA9qdJu3AL— Gabriel Sterling (@GabrielSterling) November 8, 2024 As of early Friday afternoon, an estimated 91.8 percent of votes had been counted, according to the New York Times. That included a total of 144.7 million votes, including 69.2 million for Harris and 73.5 million for Trump. Given that estimate, there should be a total of roughly 157.6 million total votes cast, once the full count is in. That figure is similar to the 2020 final vote total. When 100 percent of votes were counted in 2020, 155.5 million total votes were cast including 81.2 million for Biden and 74.2 million for Trump. A conspiracy theory about swing states is false, too Another claim that’s emerged centers on how Harris lost key swing states including Michigan and Wisconsin — but Democrats won other seats, including Senate seats in those places. Because some voters in these states appear to have split their tickets, that’s prompted some online observers to push theories that there’s something amiss with voting machines or other parts of the election process. Claim: Democrats losing the presidency, but winning other seats in swing states is evidence there’s something awry Reality: Even though they’ve become less common over time, split-ticket voters still exist. Recall that in 2020, Biden won most of Maine’s electoral votes, while Republican Sen. Susan Collins also won the state. That year, a sizable proportion of the state backed both Biden and Collins. This cycle, that same dynamic was apparent with voters electing Democrats Tammy Baldwin and Elissa Slotkin to the Senate, and Trump to the presidency in Wisconsin and Michigan. “There were Trump-Stein voters in North Carolina, there were Trump-Slotkin voters in Michigan, there were Trump-Gallego voters in Arizona,” Becker says. There’s also evidence that a segment of voters in places like Wisconsin may have supported Trump, but skipped the Senate question altogether. Historically, split-ticket voters have voted in this way because they see supporting different parties as an effort at moderation or putting checks on each party. In some cases, issues with candidate quality could also turn voters away: In North Carolina, for example, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein likely benefited because his opponent, Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, was under fire for making inflammatory statements. The presence of voters who either split their ticket, or didn’t vote in down ballot races, is not a sign of fraud, however. There are layers of election security Both Becker and Hasen note that post-election audits will be conducted to determine if there were any discrepancies in vote counts, or in election machine functionality. In these audits, officials do a hand count of a selection of paper ballots to ensure that the results being reported by the machines are accurate. Those audits should safeguard against any potential errors in machines — though, again, there hasn’t been any evidence that such issues affected the outcome. Broadly, though, both experts emphasize that the US election system is trustworthy, and that the process went smoothly this year. “The election was well run,” Hasen stressed.

A Trump second term could bring another family separation crisis

2 d

vox.com

Miami, Families Belong Together, Free Children border immigration demonstration. | Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to launch a mass deportation program starting on day one of his second term. That could have devastating consequences for the millions of people residing in “mixed status” households: those in which both undocumented immigrants and people with permanent legal status reside. Trump has said that he would rely on an 18th-century law to carry out mass deportations and that he intends to first target “known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members.” Vice President-elect JD Vance has set an initial goal of 1 million deportations. A representative for the Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment about whether any exceptions would be made for undocumented immigrants who have lived in the US for a long time or who have immediate family here, including US-citizen spouses and children. There are many such people: The US has an estimated 4.7 million mixed-status households, according to a 2024 Center for Migration Studies report. Roughly 500,000 people in those households may have hoped for new protections against deportation through a Biden administration program that would have cleared the way for undocumented spouses and stepchildren of US citizens to apply for legal status. That program was struck down in federal court on Thursday. If Trump gets his way, his deportation program threatens to rip families apart in what could be a new iteration of his first administration’s policy of separating immigrant families. However, Tom Homan, Trump’s former director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and current immigration adviser, has also proposed that families could be deported together, apparently including US citizens. It is not clear whether he was suggesting that they would go voluntarily together. There are clear practical challenges associated with implementing a mass deportation program on the scale Trump is promising. But if he manages to overcome those hurdles, such a program could wreak lasting psychological damage on millions of American-born children in mixed-status families, place economic strain on their communities, and even weaken the US economy. The familiar damage of family separation Research on the effects of Trump’s previous policy of separating immigrant families sheds light on the potential fallout from breaking up mixed-status families through mass deportations. In his first term, Trump adopted what was called the “zero tolerance policy” for undocumented immigrants arriving at the southern border. Parents were sent to immigration detention to await deportation proceedings. Their children, meanwhile, were sent to separate facilities operated by the Department of Health and Human Services and, in some cases, released to other family members in the US or to foster homes. (Previous administrations, in most cases, would not have detained the parents or children, releasing them together into the US.) At least 5,000 families were separated before a California federal court ordered the federal government in June 2018 to reunify the families affected and end the policy. As of May 2024, some 1,400 still had not been reunited, despite an ongoing Biden administration effort to do so. The harm the policy would inflict was well-known to Trump officials at the outset. Commander Jonathan White, who previously oversaw the government’s program providing care to unaccompanied immigrant children during the first Trump administration, told Congress that he had repeatedly warned the officials who concocted the policy that it would likely cause “significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child.” A September 2019 government report confirmed those effects, finding that immigrant children who entered government custody in 2018 frequently experienced “intense trauma,” and those who were “unexpectedly separated from a parent” even more so. In 2021, a group of pediatricians concluded in a study that separating families “constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment that rises to the level of torture.” As Vox previously reported, psychologists have seen that childhood trauma manifested in three main ways: disruptions to social attachments, increases in emotional vulnerability, and, in some cases, post-traumatic stress disorder. Those symptoms could be short-lived or they could persist; they could also not even manifest until a child enters their teen years or adulthood. Any of them could significantly hinder a child’s later success in academics and in the workplace. The family separation caused by mass deportations would look different from family separation at the border, and whether the psychological effects on separated children are more or less extreme will depend on their circumstances. What is clear, however, is that mass deportation would cause family separation at a scale far larger than anything Trump tried in his first term in office. “This is orders of magnitude higher as far as families that are going to be split apart, and the kind of life-altering consequences of that will be visited upon 5.5 million US-born children,” said Matthew Lisiecki, a senior research and policy analyst at the Center for Migration Studies. He and his co-researcher Gerard Apruzzese conservatively estimate that a third of American-born children in mixed-status families, including 1.8 million who live in households with two undocumented parents, would remain in the US even if their household members were deported. That would inflict not just psychological suffering, but also a hefty financial cost: Children who remain in the US would see their median household income drop by nearly half, from $75,500 to $39,000, if their undocumented household members were deported, Lisiecki and Apruzzese found. Other family members or public social services would have to pick up the cost of raising them, which the researchers estimate at $116.5 billion. The loss of their parents’ productivity — and the $96.7 billion they contribute annually in taxes — could also hurt the US economy. “The kind of trauma experienced as part of that is something that these Americans will be living with every day of their life from here on out,” Lisiecki said. “I don’t think we have the experience at that scale to say what that means for the lives of those kids as they grow up and move forward.” Whether Trump can actually deliver on his promises of mass deportations is a big question mark. He has said that the program would have “no price tag,” suggesting that the budget is unlimited, but he would need the support of Congress to make that happen. It’s not yet clear that he’ll have the numbers to increase the immigration enforcement budget, especially given that control of the House is still undecided. But even if implemented on a small scale, the consequences for affected mixed-status families would be dire.