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Most jurisdictions are not planning to post uniformed police at polling stations, because tradition and local laws keep officers at a distance to avoid an impression of voter intimidation.

Given this year's tensions, and the fact that the police themselves are a major issue in the election, the question of their presence at polling places has become a partisan flashpoint in some places.

Democrats in Miami complained about a uniformed police officer wearing a Trump face mask at an early-voting location, and he faces potential discipline by his department.

New Jersey is considering last-minute legislation to restrict the presence of officers at polling places, a debate that quickly acquired partisan overtones. A similar dispute broke out in North Carolina, where the Board of Elections issued a memo reminding uniformed police officers to stay away from polling places, and state Republicans objected.

"We want to respect the concern [about voter intimidation]," Newton says. But he says because voters have other ways to cast ballots, "it's not a valid issue, that someone has to face down a uniformed law enforcement officer to vote in North Carolina."

One unresolved question in Michigan is whether private citizens will be allowed to carry firearms openly around polling places. The state's open carry law is generally quite permissive, but Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson issued a directive saying visible guns would not be allowed at the polls or other election-related offices this year. But police chiefs have cast doubt on whether they have the legal grounds to enforce such an order, and it's also attracted a lawsuit.

Away from the polls, police departments are planning to have more officers on hand on Election Day, especially in cities that saw unrest over the summer.

Governors are in charge of their state Guard forces, but a president can "federalize" the Guard and take control from a governor. That has happened in rare occasions in the 1950s and '60s during school integration.

"From those lessons learned over the summer, we are planning for that to be a feature of peaceful protests," on Election Day, Brown said at a press conference last week.

National Guard soldiers around the nation will take part in security operations for the election — but only for cybersecurity, assisting state officials by trying to prevent foreign governments and others from interfering with the vote. The National Guard, like the active military, does not want to get involved in physical security at the polls, leaving that up to poll workers and if need be local police.

Military officials tell NPR they want to maintain their apolitical stance, and not get involved in partisan politics, saying uniformed soldiers at the polls would lead to charges the military favors one candidate over another.

Military officials don't anticipate any particular problems of violence at the polls themselves, but they do say that with the bitter campaign, street protests and the rise of armed groups, violence could occur after the election, regardless of who wins.

If violence erupts and local police are unable to handle it, a governor could activate Guard units

Chicago endured extensive looting and property damage over the summer, something police superintendent David Brown believes was coordinated by what he calls "agitators" embedded in legitimate protests.

And a president can invoke the Insurrection Act and send in active troops. That, too, is rare. In 1992, California Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush to send in active troops to deal with protests after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper in June publicly opposed using the Insurrection Act, saying Guard troops would make more sense since they come from the local communities they would protect. That angered the president, who sources say threatened to fire Esper but was talked out of such a move so close to the election.

President Trump has added to the election tensions by suggesting on numerous occasions that he might not accept the results of the vote, unless it is "fair." And that has led to speculation the president might try to hold onto power, and the military might be called on to remove him. Such talk is strongly dismissed by the nation's top military officer, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"Usually the story for a typical election in recent years has been that the early vote is Democratic and the Election Day vote is Republican," he said. "And it looks as though we're going to have the same story this year, and we're going to have to wait to see what happens with that Election Day vote before we can really say what's going to happen."

"Typically, when we talk about early voting, we're talking about Democrats voting in person early and Republicans voting by mail," McDonald said. "This election, those roles are reversed. But when you look at the overall electorate, there are many more people voting by mail than in person early in most states."

The shift could be at least in part due to President Trump's consistent false claims that voting by mail leads to widespread fraud, whereas Joe Biden's campaign has been aggressive in urging supporters to vote early, whether in person or by mail.

the numbers of young people voting early have skyrocketed, particularly in states that will be critical for Biden and Trump to win, such as Michigan, Florida and North Carolina.

Young people could wield significant political power: Millennials and some members of Generation Z make up 37% of eligible voters, roughly the same share of the electorate that baby boomers and older voters ("pre-boomers") make up, according to census data analyzed by the Brookings Institution.

As early voting began, the pent-up voting interest showed as long lines formed in states such as Georgia and Texas, with some voters waiting for hours. Election officials had warned that some in-person voting locations would face longer lines as some jurisdictions have had to consolidate polling places and adjust logistics to accommodate social distancing during the pandemic.

"There is no place in the United States of America where two-, three-, four-hour waits to vote is acceptable and just because it's happening in a blue state doesn't mean it's not voter suppression," she said. "If this was happening in a swing state, there would be national coverage."

That's some 15 million more pre-election votes than were cast in the 2016 election, according to the U.S. Elections Project

With about a week still remaining until Election Day, Americans have already cast a record-breaking 62 million early ballots, putting the 2020 election on track for historic levels of voter turnout.

In 2019, McDonald predicted that 150 million people would vote in 2020's general election, which would be a turnout rate of about 65% — the highest since 1908. But he's going back to the drawing board. "I have increasingly been confident that 150 [million] is probably a lowball estimate," he said Monday. "I think by the end of the week I'll be upping that forecast."

voters have cast more than 45% of the total votes counted in the 2016 election.

"It's good news, because we were very much concerned about how it would be possible to conduct an election during a pandemic," he said, citing concerns that mail-in ballots would be returned by voters en masse at the conclusion of the early voting period, overwhelming election officials. "Instead, what appears to be happening is people are voting earlier and spreading out the workload for election officials."

Some states are quickly approaching their 2016 vote totals. In Texas, for example, nearly 7.4 million early votes had been cast as of Sunday, marking 82% of the state's total votes in 2016.

Montana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia have also reached 65% or more of their 2016 vote totals.

Normally

The motion noted that four justices had already indicated where they stood when the court deadlocked on Oct. 19. Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said they would have granted a stay blocking the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision.

Neither side gave reasons

“the Constitution reserves a special role for state legislatures in federal elections,”

Republican lawmakers, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign challenged the settlement in federal court, saying the board had exceeded its power. By a 12-to-3 vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled against them

“All ballots must still be mailed on or before Election Day,”

The state court said the extra time was needed because of the coronavirus pandemic and delays in mail service.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — said they would have granted requests from Republican lawmakers and the Trump campaign to block lower court rulings allowing the longer deadline.

The Pennsylvania Republican Party had asked the justices to temporarily block a ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that allowed election officials to count some mailed ballots received up to three days after Election Day.

Democrats have consistently pushed for more lenient rules when it comes to mail-in ballots and how and when they are counted. Republicans have resisted such changes, with many of them arguing that the relaxed rules could open the process to abuse and fraud.

“That question has national importance, and there is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the federal Constitution.”

The state court ordered a three-day extension for ballots clearly mailed on or before Election Day and for those with missing or illegible postmarks “unless a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that it was mailed after Election Day.”

In response, Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, a Democrat, said a provision of the State Constitution protecting “free and equal elections” allowed the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to extend the deadline.

“All ballots must still be mailed on or before Election Day,” Judge James A. Wynn Jr. wrote. “The change is simply an extension from three to nine days after Election Day for a timely ballot to be received and counted. That is all.”

“In the past three years alone, the board has twice extended the absentee-ballot receipt deadline after hurricanes hit the state’s coast,” its brief said. “No one challenged those extensions.”

very conservative voters are more likely to allude to a sense of outrage over having their public conduct restricted, rather than caution about the economic implications of the shutdown.

Republican lawmakers in Michigan, who had backed an earlier, less restrictive executive order, blasted the governor. They moved to strip Ms. Whitmer’s power to declare a state of emergency under a 1945 law.

“Here’s my message today: OUR Governor IS DESTROYING OUR HEALTH BY KILLING OUR LIVELIHOODS!” the State Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, tweeted this month.

ew other states outside the northeast have been as hard hit by the virus as Michigan, which recorded 2,226 deaths as of Friday, and where the intersection of race, presidential politics and Ms. Whitmer’s vice-presidential prospects have turned the perennial battleground into a political tinderbox.

the images of nearly all-white protesters demanding the governor relax restrictions while hoisting Trump signs and Confederate battle flags, as the virus disproportionately impacts Michigan’s black residents, will only further cleave the state.

Less noticed is another flash point. A number of white Michiganders — many of them affluent but some firmly in the middle-class — have summer homes “up north,” as the sprawling upper tier of the state’s lower peninsula is called. Ms. Whitmer’s order that people not travel between their residences — meant to protect rural towns and rural hospitals from being overwhelmed with the virus — has particularly inflamed those state residents eager to get to their cottages.

By contrast, North Dakota’s overall vaccination rate is 42 percent. California has administered at least one shot to 56 percent of residents, and Kansas 47 percent.

Incarcerated people are at a much greater risk from Covid-19 than the general public, but many say that they are wary both of the vaccines and of the prison medical staff members who administer them.

Kevin Ring, a former inmate who is president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group that advocates for changes in sentencing laws, said that peer pressure also had an effect in some prisons.

“You could have no one taking it, but then if everyone’s taking it and then you’re in this small group of people — the peer pressure could work in a pro-vaccine way,” he said.

A significant majority of ballots cast so far in Pennsylvania -- 82% -- come from White voters. Black voters make up the second largest share of those early ballots at 11%, followed by Hispanic voters at 4% and Asian voters at 3%.

President Donald Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden, Vice President Mike Pence, and Sen. Kamala Harris will all appear in Pennsylvania at some point today.

More than 14 million ballots have already been cast in these five states, which could be crucial in determining the next president.

It's no coincidence that all the candidates are stopping in Pennsylvania today. There are a lot of voters who still have not cast a ballot in the state that was the lynchpin to Trump's 2016 victory.

Democrats have dominated the pre-election vote in the Keystone State. They currently make up 66% of those ballots.

Polling shows Republicans nationwide strongly prefer to vote in person on Election Day, which the Trump campaign thinks will be enough to recapture the state's 20 electoral votes.

At 83% of early voters so far, White voters make up a smaller share of the early voting electorate compared to the 88% they were at this point in 2016

So far, 13% of Pennsylvania's early voters are under 30, and 38% are 65 or older. More younger voters have been casting ballots in Pennsylvania as the campaign comes to a close. Last week, 11% of the commonwealth's voters were under 30, and 42% were 65 or older.

Texas and Hawaii have already surpassed their total turnout from the 2016 general election. In eight more states, the pre-election vote represents at least 90% of their 2016 total vote -- Montana, Washington, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, Florida, New Mexico and Tennessee.

Democrats hold a smaller lead over Republicans in pre-election ballots cast than they did on the day before the 2016 election. Back then, they had an eight-point lead. Currently, it's six points, with Democrats at 37% and Republicans at 31%.

Younger voters make up a larger share of North Carolina's early voters this year than at this point in 2016. Fifteen percent of the state's early voters so far are under 30, almost double the 8% at this time four years ago. That number continues to grow. One week ago, voters under 30 made up 12% of North Carolina's early voters.

Almost 56% of ballots already cast come from women in the Tar Heel State, and men comprise about 44%. This is roughly on par with the gender breakdown at this point in 2016.

Republicans want to hang onto Michigan's 16 electoral votes, while Democrats are working to bring the state back into the fold.

Black voters have expanded their share of pre-Election Day ballots cast from about 9% at this time in 2016 to 12% currently.

Women in Pennsylvania account for nearly 57% of ballots already cast, and men account for about 43%.

Slightly more than 56% of ballots cast so far in the Wolverine State are from women and almost 44% are from men.

Wisconsin has seen a large decrease in the share of early votes from people 65 or older, but the state hasn't seen as much of an increase from voters under 30.

By race, Wisconsin's early voters are similar to that of four years ago, with White voters representing the vast majority -- about 88% -- of those who've cast their ballots so far. Black voters represent about 5% of those early voters, Hispanic voters 3% and Asian voters 2% -- all on par with this time in 2016.

The racial breakdown of Ohio's early voters is almost identical to this time in 2016. Eighty-six percent of ballots already cast have come from White voters. Black voters comprise about 11% of those early ballots, with Hispanic voters accounting for about 2% and Asian voters about 1%. Younger Ohioans have increased their share of the early vote from 7% at this point in 2016 to about 12% now. These voters below the age of 30 have also continued to turn out during the last week of the campaign -- one week ago, they made up 9% of early voters.

Nearly 2,000 refugees from Syria have relocated to the United States since 2012, the New York Times reports and President Barack Obama has said that the U.S. will accept 10,000.

North Carolina and Idaho governors said they oppose the admittance of Syrian refugees but have not said they wouldn't accept them. Massachusetts' governor said he wants to know more before accepting them and Nevada's governor has not said either way but said he is requesting a review from the federal government.

"I think I prefer others who have a better grasp in my view of the challenges we face," McCain said, adding that he will stay neutral through the duration of the primary.

suggesting he'd need to separate himself from the top of the ticket. Kinzinger, a Jeb Bush supporter, said he was "very concerned" about the rhetoric from Trump and what it would mean in a general election.

"I think his tone has been bad -- it's not an inclusive tone," said Kinzinger, a leading moderate. "Only 30-something percent, maybe of Americans identify as Republicans,

"What she ultimately is trying to do is talk about how do we have a message that's inspiring, inclusive, hopeful, optimistic and that unites the country," Ryan said.

They want to harness the energy of the grassroots that is powering the candidacies of Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz,

Nowhere is that more urgent than the race for the Senate, where 24 GOP seats are in contention, including in states like Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Florida. To stay in the majority,

Our presidential candidates are out there beating each other up at the moment, and that's going to solve itself at some point during the process,"

McConnell's remarks comments came after the choice of the GOP leader and House Speaker Ryan -- South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley

"We don't want to have another President like this one who divides our country," Ryan told reporters.

North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, a member in the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said Haley was a "very articulate speaker, a very persuasive speaker."

I think the American people don't want that -- whether you are an unaffiliated voter, Democrat of Republican they want it to be about what affects them on Main Street not necessarily what affects those who end up in Washington, D.C."

"If Republicans are afraid to bring their standard-bearer's policies up for votes, Democrats will hold Republicans accountable by seeking floor votes on Trump's policies ourselves," Reid said.

"What's good for the goose is good for the gander," McConnell said.

Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, an ally of party leaders, said congressional Republicans are very mindful that whoever the nominee is "going to be is the most important single factor in whether or not we retain majorities in the Senate and the House."

"telling everyone it's going to be 'awesome or great and huge' is not going to cut it all the way through November."

their own alternative health care reform proposal, a major overhaul of the tax code

But multiple members and aides said no decisions were made about whether the House and Senate will actually vote on new proposals they intend to unveil in 2016 to contrast with Democrats.

Trump would listen to their ideas, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California,

Still, by promoting conservative ideas, they believe, it will be enough to differentiate Republican lawmakers from the likes of Trump.

"What we are trying to do is ensure that our members are well-positioned to make their argument about why we need to continue to have a Republican majority,"

A new ABC News national poll released Sunday had Clinton 12 points up on Trump, clinching the support of 50% of likely voters nationwide. CNN's Poll of Polls gives the Democratic nominee a nine-point edge. The mounting evidence seems to be fueling a realization in the Trump camp that he may be too far behind to catch up — with hundreds of thousands of ballots already cast in some early voting states.

"I never want to look back," he said. "I never want to say that about myself."

"Now even though we're doing pretty good in the polls, I don't believe in the polls anymore," he said.Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway admitted the campaign's struggling position Sunday, but was loathe to give Clinton any credit for her lead.

'We are behind'

He's showing that he will continue to lash out, is happy to settle scores with GOP critics like House Speaker Paul Ryan while he still can, and will use the media spotlight to wage his own personal battles before the American people

But Trump characteristically stole his own headlines, threatening to sue women who accused him of sexual assault after the election and lambasting the media for rigging the race against him.

Speaking with Jake Tapper Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," Conway declined to say if she knew that her boss would weave such a personally focused tirade into his Gettysburg speech.

"He wasn't off message," she said. "That is his message."Increasingly, Trump supporters are forced to cherry pick polls that show their candidate competitive, or to place their faith in crowd sizes and enthusiasm on the trail, metrics that often seem attractive to lagging campaigns.

"I think a lot of folks think that the polls don't reflect reality," Vance said on CNN's "Smerconish" on Saturday. "If Trump loses, as the polls tell us he will, I do think a lot of folks are going to be very surprised."

"I do think there is a Brexit out there ... I am almost positive there is a Brexit out there. I don't know how big it is, I think that remains to be seen," Andre Bauer, the former Republican Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina said on CNN on Thursday night.

CNN's Jeff Zeleny reported on Sunday that Clinton had already reached out to some Republican senators, including allies from her days on Capitol Hill, saying she hopes to work with them to govern. And in another sign the campaign is looking to the future, her running mate, Tim Kaine, named Wayne Turnage as his transition director.

"We don't want to get ahead of skis here, so we're just as focused on Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, other states as we have ever been," Mook told Tapper. "We have a very clear message to our supporters: Let's double down, nose to the grindstone, and keep working."

Representative John Katko of New York was the first Republican to publicly announce that he would back impeachment. Not holding the president accountable for his actions would be “a direct threat to the future of our democracy,” he said.

Mr. Newhouse also offered a mea culpa, chiding himself and other Republicans for “not speaking out sooner” against the president.

After nearly three decades supporting Republican presidential candidates -- the last Democrat Georgia supported was Bill Clinton in 1992 -- its vote for Biden seemed like a surprise, but it came after a remarkable grassroots campaign to get new voters to the polls and years of demographic shifts that have created a more diverse population.

Barack Obama turned two previously red southern states blue in 2008. But while Virginia has stayed in the Democratic column in each successive presidential election and now seems as reliably blue as any other US state, North Carolina veered back to Republicans, although it has remained at the top of Democrats' target list.

The outcome of the twin Senate runoffs in Georgia on January 5 will hold some indication and test the turnout operation Stacey Abrams undertook with her organization The New Georgia Project after she narrowly lost the 2018 governor's race there.

"We have seen dramatic turnout among communities that typically are not at the top of mind for candidates. We have seen them be engaged, be encouraged and we have seen them turn out," Abrams told CNN on Election Day in November.

What we have seen in the last decade is that in statewide elections in Georgia is that Democrats have been increasing their margins. They've been garnering more votes. They've been narrowing the gap between them and the Republican Party. So if they were going to continue on that trajectory, it was only a matter of time before Democrats were going to pass Republicans in terms of the vote. Winning the presidential election is only one data point, so I can't, I can't create a trend just yet with respect to that. What I suspect we're entering into is an era of increased competition where I'm expecting that we're going to continue to see very narrow margins between Democratic and Republican candidates in statewide elections, where Democrats win some elections and Republicans some elections.

Southern whites were a firm part of the New Deal coalition and that starts to change after the Civil Rights Movement. It didn't happen overnight. It took a long period of time. It culminated in the 2000s, at the beginning of the decade, with Sonny Perdue's gubernatorial victory and a change in party of the control in the state House of Representatives. And then it culminated by the 2010s at the end of the decade, when all of the statewide offices were won by Republican candidates.

We also have to credit the effort of both the Democratic Party and outside groups in reaching out to likely Democratic voters, getting them registered to vote and then getting them educated and mobilized so that they actually turn out to vote.

What we've seen happen in the last 20 years in the state is, one: the size of the African American vote makes up 30% of registered voters in the state. Given the fact that they are 90% Democratic in their voting behaviors, that means they make up the majority of Democratic voters in the state.But you can't win with 90% of 30% of the population, so you need a nontrivial number of White voters. And unlike neighboring states, Georgia is in a position where Democrats can get 30% of White voters.Georgia, unlike South Carolina or Alabama or Mississippi, has a very fast-growing Asian American and Hispanic population.While the Black electorate grew in the 2000s, the growth has been the most Asian American and Hispanic voters in the 2010s. They were 3% of all of registered voters in 2012, they were 6% of registered voters in this election cycle, and they also break Democratic. And if you get everybody to turn out to vote, you can put a winning electoral coalition together of African American, Asian American, Hispanic and liberal White voters.

Atlanta being a financial hub, a tech hub, a hub for the arts.

Atlanta is attracting well educated professional types of voters who are more Democratic in their orientation

In particular, Georgia is more Democratic now because it's got growing populations of color who are predisposed to be Democratic in orientation.This is not to say that 20 or 40 or 50 years from now that these populations are still going to be Democratic in orientation. A lot can change.

In any case, the fear of nuclear war has been around since the time of Hiroshima, but also, there are other fears. If we don’t get climate policy right, will we all be cooked? Or will climate-induced disruptions lead to great power war, nuclear conflict? Will changing technology — the AIs — take over? Whatever, we live in a time of existential fear, and foreign policy and all kinds of national policy questions get invested with these ultimate questions.

What makes democracy work under those circumstances tends to be senses of identification with elites, with different social-political groups. The glue that holds a democratic society — the cultural glue, intellectual glue, spiritual glue — becomes much more important

In terms of mass societies and democracies and large cultural groups, it’s profoundly destabilizing. You have that problem, that existential fear, which some people respond to by denial, some people fall into extremism — lots of responses, but you can see that.

Then the other thing is that, in a large democratic society like ours — 300-plus million people — if political power was divided equally among all 300 million Americans, it would mean that no one had any power.

Politics is less about, if we raise the sales tax half a percent, is that a good thing or a bad thing on balance? It’s more about, can we save the planet? Can we save human civilization? When people face those kinds of questions without some kind of grounding in some kind of religion, faith, it’s actually . . . There are individual people who can keep their psychological balance in the face of that. There are not many.

The American political-studies belief since World War II has essentially been, democracy is the only stable form of government. Everywhere democracy is inexorably rising, and every other form of government is incredibly unstable. This bears very, very little relationship to the facts outside of Western Europe, let’s say the world of NATO plus Japan and Australia.

to do foreign policy well

Which American president has best understood the Middle East, and then worst? MEAD: Interesting. Nobody’s gotten it totally. I’d say George H.W. Bush and Richard Nixon probably are the two, in my mind, who best understood what they were dealing with.

COWEN: What is it they had that maybe the others didn’t? MEAD: What they saw in the Middle East is that America has both hard-power goals and what you could call soft-power, idealistic goals in the Middle East, that our hard-power goals are vital, and they are achievable. Our soft-power goals are important but largely unachievable. What they did was, they set about dealing with what was essential, and they both did it pretty successfully.

The American academy is actually a terrible place for coming to understand how world politics works.

COWEN: Sorry. Is Germany still part of the Western Alliance? MEAD: Well, in the sense it’s been for some time. I remember that Kennan’s goal for Germany was to have a united, neutral, disarmed Germany at the heart of Europe. In some ways, [laughs] Kennan’s goal looks, maybe, closer than ever.

Look, I think Germany is a country whose basic economic model is now under question. The German model — and it’s very important in understanding that country — is based on the availability of cheap energy from Russia and large markets in China.

Again, let’s remember that the German establishment is more terrified of ordinary German public opinion than even the American liberal establishment is terrified of the Trumpists. You don’t have to look all that deeply into history to see why that would be the case. Providing stability, affluence, and employment for the mass of the German people is a key test of the legitimacy of the German state.

Really, ever since we failed to break up the large German corporations after World War II, that German establishment has been the motor of the astonishing success of postwar Germany. Now, suddenly, that engine is running out of fuel on the one hand, and its key customer, China, regardless of anything about human rights or geopolitics, the goal of the Chinese economic development strategy is to end its dependency on capital goods imported from countries like Germany by becoming an exporter of high-tech capital goods.

China’s development plans, much more than its Taiwan policy or its human rights, is a gun pointed at the head of German business. So, where do they go? It’s not clear where they go. I don’t think it’s clear to them where they go. That means that a fundamental element of the American alliance system is in a completely new place.

I think what we have to be doing in terms of analyzing where German foreign policy goes is to think a little bit less about ideology or things like the German anti-war sentiment or these kinds of things. Yes, these are all there, the Russian soul, all of that. It’s there, but really, how is Germany going to make a living? That’s the question that has to be answered, and that will drive Germany’s orientation in foreign policy.

I think, in our society, the ebbing of religion among some, certainly not all, Americans has tended to dissolve these bonds and leads, in all kinds of ways, both on the left and the right, to some of the sense of suspicion, of paranoia, a lack of trust, and declining support for democracy.

COWEN: How would you describe that advantage? MEAD: I don’t really believe in disciplines. I see connections between things. I start from reality. I’m not trying to be anti-intellectual here. You need ideas to help you organize your perceptions of reality. But I think there’s a tendency in a lot of social science disciplines — you start from a bunch of really smart, engaged people who have been thinking about a set of questions and say, “We’ll do a lot better if we stop randomly thinking about everything that pops up and try, in some systematic way, to organize our thinking of this.”

I think you do get some gains from that, but you see, over time, the focus of the discipline has this tendency to shift. The discipline tends to become more inward navel-gazing. “What’s the history of our efforts to systematize our thinking about this?” The discipline becomes more and more, in a sense, ideological and internally focused and less pragmatic.

I think that some of the problem, though, is not so much in the intellectual weaknesses of a lot of conventional postgrad education, but simply almost the crime against humanity of having whole generations of smart people spend the first 30, 35 years of their lives in a total bubble, where they’re in this academic setting, and the rule . . . They become socialized into the academy, just as much as prisoners get socialized into the routines of a prison.

COWEN: Do you think of it as an advantage that you don’t have a PhD? MEAD: Huge advantage.

COWEN: For our final segment, a few questions about the Walter Russell Mead production function. How much did growing up in South Carolina influence your views on foreign policy? MEAD: I think it’s affected my views of America, and that, in turn, affects my views. Growing up in the segregated South during the civil rights era, where, on the one hand, my father actually knew Martin Luther King and marched with him and was involved in a lot of things; but then I had relatives, older relatives who were very much on the other side. That gave me a certain sense of I could love my grandfather even though he voted for George Wallace.

MEAD: Yes. All right. The fact that I could love him while really disliking his politics helps me understand . . . I think it helps understand some of the divisions in America even today and gives you a more human rather than a strictly ideological look.

But there’s also this: that the South and the White South — which, of course, is where I come from — has had the experience of both being defeated and being wrong. That’s something that a lot of American political culture doesn’t have — your WASP Yankee patricians. I think neoconservatism reflected a sense of people who’ve never been wrong and never been beaten, at least in their own minds. There’s a hubris that comes with that.

Historically, one of the roles of Southern politics — think of William Fulbright during the Vietnam War — both for good and bad reasons, doubt that this American ideological project can be transferred, partly because they know America is bad at reconstruction. The failure of reconstruction, both in terms of the White South and the Black South after the Civil War, is a lesson that you get growing up in the South. And so you have an inherent sense of the limits of America’s ability to transform societies. That’s important.

COWEN: Your foreign policy understanding — what did it learn from going to Groton?

MEAD: Well, I learned a lot there. On the one hand, Groton is a place that prides itself on its tradition of producing foreign policy leaders: Dean Acheson, the Allsopp brothers, Averell Harriman, Franklin Roosevelt. That wonderful book, The Wise Men by David Halberstam — actually, my history teacher is in there. There’s a whole scene that could be from our fourth-form 10th-grade history class.

You got the sense of being part of a tradition, and you got the inside view. The way we were taught American history was in no way idealized. Just, say, reading something like the 1619 Project didn’t come to me as a shock. “Oh my gosh, there was slavery, there was injustice in America.”

In fact, one of the teachers at Groton used to take aside some of the boys — it was an all-boys school at the time — and explain to them how their family fortune was made. He might say, “Well, George, we’ve been reading a lot about war profiteers in World War I. You need to know that your grandfather . . .” Et cetera, et cetera. Unfortunately, none of my grandparents had participated in such things, so there was no need to explain to me the family fortune, as there wasn’t one.

More than that, though, I was at Groton ’65 to ’70. Those were the years of the Vietnam War. The national security adviser at the time, McGeorge Bundy, was the chair of the Groton Board of Trustees, so I had a close-up look at the aggressive self-confidence of the WASP establishment meeting the Vietnam War and beginning to come to grips with what was going wrong.

Those two visions of the inner workings of the American foreign policy elite, and then the ringside seat at the crisis of the old American foreign policy elite, have been profoundly important in my thinking about the world.

COWEN: You meet young people all the time. How do you spot the next Walter Russell Mead? What do you look for?

MEAD: Well, first of all, I’m hoping for somebody who’s a lot better than me. I’m looking for someone — what is it? Whose sandals I am unworthy to buckle. And I would say that I look for, first of all, curiosity, intense curiosity. I look for an understanding that the personal and the political are mixed, that character matters. You can learn about the world by coming to understand your own psychological flaws and distress, and vice versa.

That history matters a lot, and that you can’t know too much history. Now, you have to digest it, but you can’t know too much history. A hunger for travel. I think too many foreign policy types don’t actually get out into the field nearly as much as they should. Curiosity about other cultures. A strong grounding in a faith of your own, which can be a secular ideology, perhaps, in some cases, but more often is likely to be a great religious tradition of some kind.

I’m a Christian. I could wish that everyone was, but my friend Shadi Hamid is a Muslim, and I think his Muslim faith actually helps him navigate and understand the world, and I certainly have lots of Jewish friends in the same circumstance. Again, we’re ending up where we started, maybe, but a religious faith, connected to one of the great historical traditions, gives you a degree of insight and potential for self-criticism that are absolutely crucial to foreign affairs.

titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.

Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.

states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.

In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.

“Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned

The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.

The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”

Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?

Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters).

cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”

The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France,

The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive

My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.

The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina

Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.

If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?

Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side.

Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right.

She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals

Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently.

Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.

Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values

conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”

As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals

Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.

Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.

We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity)

Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.

For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).

What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them

Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles

Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:

I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).

Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world

Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.

I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?

There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanatio

A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.

I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:

t’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier

They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.

Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.

Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?

It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”

The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.

there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:

While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments

For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.

“political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective

We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”

In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”

Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.

Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.

In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:

society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.

The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”

While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.

or each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative positio

Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarizatio

Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.

Describing their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.

The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer sugges

— or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.

One protester remains in a critical condition after a "civilian on civilian" shooting, police said.

Mr Scott was the third black man killed by US police in a week. Such shootings have sparked nationwide protests.

Governor McCrory declared the state of emergency as rioters clashed with police, breaking windows and setting small fires.

"Any violence directed toward our citizens or police officers or destruction of property should not be tolerated," he said.The demonstrators are angry that Mr Scott, 43, was killed

Officers say he was repeatedly told to drop his handgun before he was shot but his family say he was reading a book, as he waited for his son to be dropped off by the school bus.

It is legal to openly carry a handgun in North Carolina, but a special permit is required to carry a concealed weapon.

olice were serving an arrest warrant on another person when they say they saw Mr Scott get out of a car with a handgun.

Several journalists were also reportedly attacked. A reporter and cameraman for Charlotte's WCNC-TV were taken to hospital and a CNN journalist was tackled on live TV, local media report.

Police in Charlotte defended their actions in the death of Mr Scott by insisting he had been repeatedly warned to drop his gun.

Though the report found no evidence that high-level university officials knew about the fake classes, it faulted the university for missing numerous warning signs about what was going on and said it had “failed to conduct any meaningful oversight” over the increasingly out-of-control African studies department.

Ms. Crowder required that students turn in only a single paper, but the papers were often largely plagiarized or padded out with “fluff” like page after page of quotations, the report said. She generally gave the papers A’s or B’s after a cursory glance. The classes were widely known as “paper classes” because of the one requirement for completion.

In the meeting, two members of the football counseling staff explained to the assembled coaches that the classes “had played a large role in keeping underprepared and/or unmotivated players eligible to play.” To emphasize this point, they presented a PowerPoint demonstration in which one of the slides asked and then answered the question, “What was part of the solution in the past?”“We put them in classes that met degree requirements in which … they didn’t go to class … they didn’t have to take notes, have to stay awake … they didn’t have to meet with professors … they didn’t have to pay attention or necessarily engage with the material,” the slide said. “THESE NO LONGER EXIST!”

Indeed, the report said, “the fall 2009 semester — the first in over a decade without Ms. Crowder and her paper classes — resulted in the lowest football team G.P.A. in 10 years, 2.121.” Forty-eight players, it went on, earned semester G.P.A.'s of less than 2.0.

. That January, after a pair of terrorist attacks in Paris, pundits and conservative officials propagated a discredited myth about Shariah-run zones in European cities off limits to non-Muslims.

Hashtags like #KillAllMuslims trended on Twitter. A month later, three Muslim youths were shot dead in their North Carolina apartment in what many people said was a hate crime.

An examination of anti-Muslim hatred in the last few years can easily devolve into a laundry list: armed demonstrators picketing at a mosque in Phoenix

Ben Carson compared Syrian refugees to “rabid” dogs. Ted Cruz called for allowing only Christian refugees to enter the United States. And Donald J. Trump, whose statements on Islam seem to be read directly off paranoid chain emails, first stated that American Muslims celebrated the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks (a discredited falsehood), then, after the San Bernardino, Calif., shootin

all Muslims should be barred from entering the United States

At a news conference, Hazem Bata, the Islamic Society’s secretary general, said: “I’m not here to focus on the negative, because once you start focusing on the negative, you start to take on a victim’s mentality. And as Muslims in America, we refuse to be victims in our own country.

e is a fine line between stoic resilience and irresponsible passivity. Muslims in America face a growing threat

Earlier this month, he claimed the president has “deliberately weakened America.” Donald Trump said Obama’s passport wasn’t American. Now, to compete with Trump, Rubio is saying Obama’s heart isn’t American

Instead, he began his answer by praising Trump for having “tapped in to some of that anger that’s out there about this whole issue because this president has consistently underestimated the threat of ISIS.”

Rubio declared that, “When I’m president. If we do not know who you are, and we do not know why you are coming when I am president, you are not getting into the United States of America.”

When asked in late November about Trump’s call for closing mosques, Rubio said, “It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down any place—whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an Internet site—any place where radicals are being inspired.”

For years now, the Ann Coulter wing of the Republican Party has been pillorying Rubio for having supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

When profiled on the cover of Time in 2013, Rubio let it be known that his mother had told him in Spanish, “Don’t mess with the immigrants, my son...They’re human beings just like us, and they came for the same reasons we came. To work. To improve their lives. So please, don’t mess with them.”

So instead of defending his past support of legal immigration, Rubio abandoned it.

“The issue is a dramatically different issue than it was 24 months ago,” he began. “Twenty-four months ago, 36 months ago, you did not have a group of radical crazies named ISIS...The entire system of legal immigration must now be reexamined for security first and foremost.”

Yet on the stage in North Charleston, Bush showed some decency, maybe even courage. Asked about Trump’s plan to impose a religious test on entering the country, he warned that, “You cannot make rash statements and expect the rest of the world to respond as though, well, it’s just politics. Every time we send signals like this, we send a signal of weakness, not strength.

But for Rubio, it is just politics. Unlike Bush, he possesses the political talent to effectively challenge the paranoia and bigotry coursing through today’s GOP.

His strategy for defeating Trump is to ape Trump.

“There are circumstances in which it is going to be a really good option or maybe the best option,” said Dr. Matthew Daley, a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Colorado’s Institute for Health Research and a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent vaccine advisory committee.

One of Dr. Gaskin’s church’s members, Patricia Cooper, a teacher in Washington, D.C., said that President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to claim credit for a vaccine last year and the label “emergency use authorization” suggested to her that the federal government may have rushed its reviews of vaccines, leaving her jittery about their safety. But she said she was eager to get a vaccine, especially Johnson & Johnson’s.

Mr. Allen said that Oregon was creating similar distribution plans for Johnson & Johnson and Moderna because both vaccines can be stored in refrigerators for the short term. The state is treating the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as the one with “special considerations,” with its stricter shipping requirements and large packages of vials more suited to mass vaccination sites, he said.