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"I got married in my 20s ... to the biggest star in the world," the rapper said, calling Carey's fame "in a different stratosphere" than his.

Social Democrats won 52 seats in the 141-seat parliament, ending the four-year rule of the conservative Homeland Union government.

It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t draw overflowing praise.

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

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

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

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

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A clash between Proud Boys and counterprotesters breaks out, in November 2020. Researchers say that the most socially connected people are more willing to say they’d use political violence. Even before two people attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, national security experts and law enforcement were warning that the United States needed a plan to contend with the possibility of political violence on Election Day.  Now, in the final weeks of the campaign, researchers have just published new findings about the social lives of people who are likely to endorse using political violence, and be willing to use it themselves.  The results, based on a nationally representative survey of more than 8,000 Americans, may seem counterintuitive. Basically, people open to the idea that political violence is justified tend to exist at opposite ends of the social spectrum. Those who report having no strong personal or work connections were 2.4 times more likely to say political violence is justifiable than people who said they have 1–4 close relationships. That’s not necessarily surprising, given the recent history of mass shooters and politically motivated assailants who’ve been described by their broader networks as loners. What’s weird, though, is that people with lots of close connections were also a little more likely to endorse political violence. People who said they had 50 or more strong relationships were 1.2 times more likely to endorse political violence.  And here’s where it gets a little concerning: The people with no social connections weren’t on average any more likely to say they would be willing to personally commit political violence, even if they believed it was justified. But the people with lots of close relationships? They were 1.5 times more likely than the others to say they’d be willing to be violent for a political cause themselves.  What’s going on with those super socially connected people? Julia Schleimer, the researcher who led the study, told Vox over email that, compared to the people with just a few close connections, the 50+ cohort tended to be white, higher in income, slightly more educated, and older. But that’s also true of the demographic in the middle (which reported 10–49 social connections) and they weren’t especially open to the idea of political violence.  In other words, there were no demographic factors about the group that jumped out to the researchers. “One limitation of this study is that we don’t have details on the nature or characteristics of people’s social networks, which likely matters a great deal and is an area for future study,” Schleimer said. But prior studies “give us reason to expect that people with very large social networks may be at greater risk for political violence, if those networks are characterized by antisocial norms, outgroup contempt, and extreme views.” That’s particularly true, she said, when the social networks are homogenous. Sometimes those groups form in person, but increasingly, they also develop online, like the Proud Boys and other far-right groups who organized in the days after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss and stormed the Capitol on January 6.  This research, done by University of California Davis’s Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) builds on data published earlier this year about Americans’ beliefs in political violence. The good news from the earlier work is that by and large, a vast majority of Americans are opposed to political violence under any circumstances. The more worrying news? A small proportion of Americans are open to the idea that political violence is sometimes justified. “I personally think that large-scale political violence is really, really unlikely. I feel more sanguine about that prediction, given our 2024 data,” Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the program, told Vox this summer. “But sporadic outbreaks, particularly if the battleground states remain really close — is it possible? Sure. Might there be attempts to intimidate election officials? Absolutely.” The Violence Prevention Research Program applies a public health approach to issues like gun violence and political violence — meaning they look for interventions that can try to discourage them from happening. The new findings, Schleimer said, suggest that it’s important to develop approaches that target both those who are very lonely and those who are deeply connected, in, for example, extremist ideological groups. For the lonely, social skills training, community centers, cultural activities and more open and accessible cities can all be helpful. And both groups benefit from anti-violence messages from influential public figures and on social media. For the socially connected people, having a trusted figure who can support them as they begin opening up to different perspectives and challenging the beliefs of their ideology can be especially helpful. The ideas sound really simple, but the researchers’ previous work suggests that getting someone to reject political violence is perhaps easier than you might think. “For the would-be combatants, a big number would switch if their family asked them not to, or friends, or even some media sources,” Wintemute told Vox. “We can create a climate of nonacceptance for political violence. And in doing that, we can expect that it will work.” Their findings are encouraging, in that respect. But reaching every person who might be open to political violence, in a highly divided country, with this many guns? That’s the tricky part.

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Test your wits on the Slate Quiz for Oct. 28, 2024.