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U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for selecting border wall construction sites, contended in a statement last week that locations chosen for new border barriers are “areas of high illegal entry.”

The Biden administration has not made clear precisely what plans it has for the wall. But in February, after temporarily suspending building activities, President Biden rescinded the national emergency that his predecessor used to justify advancing construction.Democratic members of Congress from border states, including Veronica Escobar of Texas and Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico, wrote to Mr. Biden this month urging him to cancel all remaining construction contracts and divert remaining funds to removing portions of the wall in places with “particularly destructive environmental damage and destruction of sacred sites.”

ven with the halting of new construction, parts of the federal bureaucracy are slowly continuing forward with the land acquisition process, alarming some landowners who had hoped Mr. Biden would heed their fears about the prospect of living in the barrier’s shadows.

It’s not just Georgia. In Arizona, Republicans are pushing for control over the rules of the state’s elections. In Iowa, the G.O.P. has installed harsh new criminal penalties for county election officials who enact emergency voting rules.

Nationwide, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are angling to pry power over elections from secretaries of state, governors and nonpartisan election boards.

In Georgia’s new voting bill, the State Legislature is looking to strip Mr. Raffensperger of his role as the chair of the State Election Board and make him an ex-officio member without a vote.

If the bill becomes law, the State Election Board, under control of the Legislature, would have more authority over these county boards, including the ability to review and fire their members.

Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said Republicans were engaged in an “all-out effort to change the voting rules in lots of ways that would allow for greater opportunity for them to challenge the eligibility of electors,” and that the party would “add micromanagement by state legislatures to the process of running an election.”

State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican who has been a chief sponsor of the bills in Georgia, did not respond to requests for comment.

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, has not weighed in publicly on the changes to election administration and oversight.

The threat of increased punishment seemed to be directed at three county election officials in the state, who last year chose to mail absentee ballot applications to all registered voters in their counties, drawing the ire of state Republicans.

Bobby Kaufmann, the Republican state representative in Iowa who sponsored the voting bill, said the county auditors’ actions were “as much the inspiration for the bill as anything,” pointing to their decisions to mail out ballots with prepopulated information.

In Arizona, the Republican-controlled Legislature is pursuing multiple paths to tip the scales of election oversight.

Ms. Hobbs, who was the target of many Republican attacks after the 2020 election, said that purely partisan politics were at play in the bills.“The Legislature wasn’t interested in control over elections until I got here and happened to have a ‘D’ by my name,” she said.

Efforts in other states to muddle with the mechanics of elections have gone beyond state legislatures. In Michigan, the state Republican Party has indicated that it is unlikely to ask a G.O.P. member of the State Board of Canvassers who chose to certify last year’s election results to return to his post.

It is nearly assured that almost all of these bills will face legal challenges from Democrats, who have signaled that combating the efforts to restrict voting will be a top priority through both federal legislation and the courts.

Courage cannot be explained by a single variable. Politicians whose communities have suffered disproportionately from government tyranny may show disproportionate bravery in opposing it. Mr. Romney, like the Arizona Republican Jeff Flake — whose opposition to Mr. Trump likely ended his senatorial career — belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was once persecuted on American soil. In the fevered days after Sept. 11, the only member of Congress to oppose authorizing the “war on terror” was a Black woman, Barbara Lee.

In Arizona, astronaut Mark Kelly (D) has proven to be a dynamite fundraiser, ending September with $9.5 million in the bank -- more than Joe Biden had on hand at the same time for his presidential bid. And Republicans continue to worry about Arizona Sen. Martha McSally's (R) abilities as a candidate.

And then there are a slew of other races in states -- Georgia, Texas, Iowa -- where Trump won by single-digits in 2016 and where Democratic challengers are likely to be well-funded enough to be in a position to capitalize if a) the national political environment goes even more south for Republicans or b) the GOP incumbents make a major mistake or slip-up between now and next November.

To be clear: Democrats are not favored to retake the Senate -- particularly given the fact that Jones is a near-certain loser unless Republicans nominate Roy Moore (which they might do!). But the last few months have made clear that what once looked like a long-shot bid by Democrats for the Senate majority has turned into a much more plausible possibility.

In their suit, which named the vice president as the defendant, the Republican plaintiffs argued that a 19th century law spelling out how Congress should handle the count is unconstitutional, because it directs Pence to tally the electoral votes as they've been reported by the states.

In a court filing, Pence himself had told the judge that he was the wrong person to sue.

But the objections are virtually guaranteed to fail, since they require a majority in both chambers.

The lawmakers convened Wednesday evening, after hours of delay, in a show of defiance. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she had consulted with fellow congressional leaders, the Pentagon, the Justice Department and Vice President Pence before concluding that Congress should move ahead with the ceremony interrupted earlier in the day by rioters provoked to action by Trump at a morning rally.

As lawmakers returned to work following the riot, the tone of the debate turned more somber and impassioned than before the interruption, with a number of Republicans who had planned to slow the proceedings with objections announcing they would stand aside.

Both chambers picked up Wednesday night where they had left off before the evacuation, considering a challenge to Biden’s 11 electoral votes in Arizona. The Senate rejected the challenge by 93 to 6 and the House by 303 to 121.

That sparked an exchange of words between Republicans and Democrats sitting behind Lamb that nearly led to blows before aides intervened.

Lawmakers then moved to reconvene the joint session and complete the counting of the remaining states, setting up a final confirmation of Biden’s victory at 3:45 a.m. — nearly 21 hours after the proceedings began.

Earlier in the day, the ceremonial reading of the electoral votes had just begun when pro-Trump rioters rushed the building at around 2 p.m., forcing the evacuation of both chambers of Congress. For hours, rioters rampaged through the Capitol complex. One woman was fatally shot in the building.

Still, the outcome of the congressional proceedings had been clear from the start, particularly after Pence announced he would reject pleas from the president to use his role as the session’s presiding officer to hand a win to Trump.

While lawmakers huddled in an undisclosed location during the siege, Republican leaders pressed their members to abandon their plans to challenge the electoral vote. Several senators said they would no longer object, notably Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), who had embraced the challenge as part of the hard-fought Senate election she lost Tuesday.

The congressional process was supposed to be a mere procedural checkpoint on the way to Biden’s oath-taking later this month. Biden won the popular vote on Nov. 3 and, last month, the electoral college met in each state capital, as stipulated in the U.S. Constitution. Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.

According to an 1887 law that governs the process, any member of the House of Representatives, joined by a senator, can object to an individual state’s electoral tally, prompting a two-hour debate, followed by a vote in each chamber

three Democratic members are expected to leave office to take on roles in the new Biden administration: Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana (2nd Congressional District) to be White House senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement; Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico (1st Congressional District) to be Secretary of the Interior; and Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio (11th Congressional District) to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Democrats: 222Republicans: 211

There will be 60 freshmen in the 117th Congress. Seventeen of those seats flipped during the 2020 general election, with Republicans picking up 14 seats and Democrats picking up 3.

Eleven of the Republicans who picked up seats defeated Democrats who flipped seats in the wave year of 2018, while one GOP pickup came from the defeat of long-time Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, one came in an open seat (Iowa's 2nd) and one was in a Libertarian-held seat (Michigan's 3rd District).

Total 2020 flipped House districts: 17

Total Women: 118

Republican Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, born August 1, 1995, will be the youngest member of this Congress at age 25. He takes that title from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York who, at 31, is now the chamber's second youngest member.

The 117th Congress will see a record number of women in the House, and a record number of Republican women.

Republicans: 51 (including Sen. Kelly Loeffler)Democrats: 48 (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats)

There will be 7 new senators at the start of 117th Congress, including Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, who was sworn in in December.

Total women: 26 (will decrease to 25 when Padilla replaces Harris)

Total states with two female senators: 5 (will decrease to 4 when Padilla replaces Harris)

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, born on December 31, 1979, remains the Senate's youngest member at 41.

Total Black members in the House and Senate: 61

The 117th Congress will have the largest number of Black members in the history of the House and in the history of Congress. The 58 representatives are a new record for the House, while the record-high three in the Senate remains the same, at least until Harris resigns to become vice president.

Total Latino members in the House and Senate: 44

Fourteen newly elected veterans will be joining the House this year, according to the University of San Francisco and the Veterans Campaign. That's down from the 18 veterans who were first elected in 2018, but up slightly from the three cycles before that.

Similarly, the CBS poll found that voters said the debate made them think better of Mr. Biden by a margin of 38 percent to 32 percent, while just 24 percent said the debate made them think better of President Trump and 42 percent said the debate made them think worse of him.The results are kind of useful. Historically, the winner of these polls tends to gain in the real polls over the next week. John Kerry, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton all picked up a couple of points after debate performances that instant polls suggested they won.

No sign of a shift. Sunday morning’s polls look about the same as everything else we’ve seen over the last two weeks: Joe Biden enjoys a commanding national lead, with a significant if somewhat smaller lead in the battleground states likeliest to decide the election.

Biden ahead in Pennsylvania. We’ve been waiting and waiting for the final polls of Pennsylvania, and now they’re finally starting to arrive. So far, they tell a clear story: Mr. Biden still holding a meaningful lead, though it’s a little tighter.

Arizona: Plan B? If Mr. Biden falls short in Pennsylvania, his best backup plan may be Arizona. It’s not a state that has gotten a lot of polling attention this year from the big hitters, but the final Times/Siena poll of the state shows Mr. Biden up by six points, 49 percent to 43 percent. It’s the same as his lead in our poll of Pennsylvania.

Florida is Florida. If Mr. Biden’s up eight or nine nationally, you’d sure think he’d figure out how to scratch out a narrow win in Florida … right? Maybe not. The final polls still show a tight race in the perpetually competitive state, and we have a bit of a split decision in the final polling today: NYT/Siena shows Mr. Biden up by three, ABC/Post shows Mr. Trump up by two, and St. Pete Polls (the rare robopoll that really tries to do a good job) shows Mr. Biden up by a point.

The study reveals, for the first time, the genetic sequence of the virus that may have infected Mr. Trump and dozens of others, researchers said.

In a study released on Thursday, the C.D.C. cited genetic sequencing and intensive contact tracing that documented an super-spreading event at a high school retreat in Wisconsin.

The genomes believed by these researchers to be connected to the White House outbreak do not identify a recent geographic source, in part because they are unusual.

The results show that even weeks after it was identified, the White House outbreak would be better understood by sequencing samples of more people who were infected.

Viruses constantly mutate, picking up tiny, accidental alterations to their genetic material as they reproduce. Few mutations alter how a virus functions. But by comparing patterns of mutations across many genetic sequences, scientists can construct family trees of a virus, illuminating how it spreads.

But the Trump administration is not known to have conducted its own genetic analysis of people infected in the outbreak. The White House declined to respond to questions on genetic sequencing of Mr. Trump and the cluster of aides and officials who tested positive or became ill.

Scientists not involved in the research who reviewed the results agreed with the conclusion that the two samples sharing rare mutations strongly suggested they are part of the same outbreak.

“These genomes are probably going to be identical or nearly identical to the genome that infected the president,” said Michael Worobey, head of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

For months, the White House minimized the threat of the virus and eschewed basic safety precautions at official events, like wearing a mask or keeping people six feet apart.

At least 11 people who attended a Rose Garden celebration on Sept. 26 for Judge Barrett, which included an indoor event without masks, became infected with the coronavirus, including Mr. Trump.

The work is convincing, and it is the best way to piece together the progression of such an outbreak, said David Engelthaler, head of the infectious disease branch of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona, where he and colleagues have sequenced thousands of genomes to track the spread of the coronavirus, including devastating outbreaks at Native American reservations in the state.

A New York Times/Siena College poll of Florida released on Sunday showed Mr. Biden with the support of 54 percent of the state’s Latino voters, compared with 62 percent for Mrs. Clinton four years ago. He and Mr. Trump were basically tied among Hispanic men in the state

Mr. Biden is competitive among Latino voters, and could still win Florida based on his strength with educated whites.

But he would be in better shape, campaign aides privately acknowledged, if the campaign had reached out earlier to recruit infrequent voters and soften Mr. Trump’s support among Hispanic men in the state.

“The Biden people have done a good job in playing catch-up, but it is always the same, every cycle,” said Chuck Rocha, who runs Nuestro PAC, a pro-Biden committee that has raised $9 million for Spanish-language advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts. “Everybody only does Latino outreach in the last couple of weeks of the campaign. That has to change.”

The coronavirus has also been an impediment, said Mr. Castro, the former secretary of housing and urban development under President Barack Obama and now an adviser to Mr. Biden. “Latino voters like in-person contact,” he said.

The overall problem is rooted not only in the party’s inconsistent efforts to reach Latino voters, but also in the particulars of Mr. Biden’s primary campaign. It was a cash-poor operation that was focused on Black voters, a group long courted by the former vice president that turned out to be critical to his primary victory.

Still, the party has seen some successes. The Democratic National Committee invested heavily in microtargeting Puerto Rican voters through the purchase of call lists in 2019, and Mr. Biden owes his surprising strength in Texas and Arizona to strong support from Latino voters.

Democratic officials say they expected that nine million Latino voters will have gone to the polls early by mail or in person, up from 3.7 million in 2016.

Democrats have also recently begun pouring money and resources into outreach efforts, with donors pumping $28 million into three independent expenditure groups aimed at increasing Latino turnout in the past two months.

Thanks to those funds, the Biden campaign has been able to increase its Spanish-language media buys in the closing weeks, with six-figure expenditures booked in Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania, a spokesman said.

But much of the Democrats’ resources in the closing days is being devoted to providing basic voting information to registered Latino voters, rather than funding a deeper dive into the voter files to reach more voters, or a big effort to change the minds of wavering male voters, party officials said.

On Saturday, Veronica Escobar, the Democratic congresswoman from El Paso, spent 20 minutes on the phone with a young Mexican-American woman in Texas who was outraged at Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic and frightened by his rhetoric — and had no intention, whatsoever, of voting.

Democrats are relying on many Latino voters to go to the polls on Election Day, as they have tended to do in the past.

In 2016, its first time publicly releasing polls, Trafalgar was the firm whose state surveys most effectively presaged Mr. Trump’s upset win. A veteran Republican strategist, Mr. Cahaly even called the exact number of Electoral College votes that Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton would receive — 306 to 227 — although his prediction of which states would get them there was just slightly off.

“People do not seem embarrassed to support Mr. Trump,” Mr. Cox said. In the past four years, studies seeking to quantify a so-called “shy Trump” effect in surveys have generally found little evidence to support it.

ut he’s not saying what they are. Mr. Cahaly releases almost no real explanation of his polling methodology; the methods page on Trafalgar’s website contains what reads like a vague advertisement of its services and explains that its polls actively confront social desirability bias, without giving specifics as to how. He says that he uses a mixture of text messages, emails and phone calls — some automated, and some by live callers — to reach an accurate representation of the electorate.

“social desirability bias”: the tendency for respondents to say what they think an interviewer wants to hear, not what they actually believe.

“It is wildly inappropriate not to tell me, not only what modes you use to draw your sample, but how specifically you did it,” he said. His general rule: “If somebody’s not transparent you can generally assume they’re crap.”

In 2010, Mr. Cahaly was arrested and taken to court for violating a law against using automatic calling machines — known as robocalling — to conduct polls. The charges against him were eventually dropped, and he later successfully sued a state law enforcement agency, causing South Carolina’s prohibition on robocalls to be declared unconstitutional.

Mr. Cahaly said he was doing legitimate polling, aimed at truly understanding voters’ opinions — and getting what he called “dead-on” results. During the 2016 Republican primaries, he was early to spot a surge of enthusiasm from many working-class voters who had long felt alienated from politics and helped power Mr. Trump’s ascent.

“I kept getting these stories about people who showed up to vote and didn’t know how to use the voting machines, they hadn’t voted in so long,” Mr. Cahaly said. So he began to look into who those people might be, and used data available online to create a list of roughly 50 lifestyle characteristics — including, for instance, whether they owned a fishing license — to identify the sorts of low-engagement voters who were turning out in droves. He used that data to make sure he was reaching the right kinds of respondents as he polled off the voter file in advance of the general election.

Mr. Cahaly feels no need to reveal his techniques, despite the near-universal doubt about his work from his peers. “I’ve given away enough; I’m not giving away any more,” he said, arguing that it had been a mistake to even tell the public about his “neighbor question,” which some other firms have since adopted in their own surveys.

There will be a few later-night states out West that are worth keeping in mind: Nevada, which Mr. Trump has sought to pull back from the Democrats, and Arizona, which Mr. Biden has been trying to put into the Democratic column.

If Mr. Biden does not win any of those three states (or Texas, where most of the state polls close at 8 p.m.), that will ratchet up the importance of the so-called blue wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which Mr. Trump flipped from Democrats in 2016 and where polls show Mr. Biden ahead.

Florida officials have already processed the state’s record-breaking early vote, which has been almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.

Now, with the president expecting no definitive winner on Tuesday night, and his campaign lawyers trying to use state rules to stop the counting of mail-in votes after Election Day, he has no plans to deliver any sort of concession.

. A win in Florida would keep him in the race, but attention would then turn immediately to the Northern battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

The White House has invited 400 people to the East Room and was planning for everyone attending to be tested for the coronavirus. There was no official invitation sent to many guests invited: The president’s secretary called them to extend the invitation personally. But officials said they expected a lot of attrition and were not certain how many people would show up.

Many people in the president’s circle think he is likely to lose. A brief burst of optimism a few weeks ago has settled into concern about their own careers, post-Trump. Coupled with expectations of large protests around the White House, and the coronavirus, it was not seen by all invitees as the see-and-be-seen event of the year.

Mr. Biden is expected to deliver remarks sometime late Tuesday night or Wednesday morning from Wilmington, Del., but if the result remains in flux he may wait.

Mr. Biden, after a campaign premised largely on the idea of returning to presidential norms, would be stepping far out of character if he too called himself the winner before results were known in enough states.

Control of the Senate is also among the biggest issues being decided Tuesday, with the result going a long way toward determining the contours of the federal government for at least the next two years.

Polling suggests Democrats are favored to pick up seats held by Senators Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona, and lose the one held by Senator Doug Jones of Alabama.The other big tossup contests are in Maine and North Carolina, where the Republican Senators Susan Collins and Thom Tillis face fierce challenges from the Democrats Sara Gideon and Cal Cunningham.

With control of the House unlikely to change, the ability of Democratic candidates for Senate in these states to outrun Mr. Biden may determine the shape of Congress next year.

The first thing to watch for is what the two candidates do if Mr. Biden wins Florida.

If Mr. Trump holds on to Florida, watch out for the lawyers. There are likely to be legal challenges — mainly from Mr. Trump — to early votes cast across the country. Mr. Trump has laid the groundwork with his unfounded warnings about voter fraud and by dispatching lawyers ready to challenge the legitimacy of votes cast. And if Pennsylvania is close, expect that state to be ground zero for legal action that could keep this election unresolved right through Thanksgiving.

Signs of a Biden win: If the polls are right and the count is on track, Mr. Biden is probably getting a Wisconsin and Nevada call on election night. Georgia’s another possibility — if Mr. Biden is going to win the state, he has probably caught up to Mr. Trump by now. If the night’s going really well for Mr. Biden, maybe he’s still competitive or even leading in Iowa, Ohio or Texas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyMichigan and Pennsylvania? Well, we’re just going to have to wait and see. Of the two, Michigan seems more plausible.Exactly where will the count stand in Michigan and Pennsylvania if Mr. Biden’s on track for victory? It depends on how many absentee ballots they get through, of course. If they haven’t counted many mail ballots, Mr. Trump could even lead by double digits.The better measure: Focus on any counties that manage to wrap up their count. I’d guess some will get pretty close. If Mr. Biden’s winning, he will start to outrun Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 showing in the counties that get through their mail votes. That could be the tell.Signs of a Trump win: If the president’s on track, the race in Nevada and Wisconsin might be too close to call. Even if he eventually loses Wisconsin, he might hold on to the lead all the way until we get the absentees from Milwaukee. He probably already got the call in that long list of states where Mr. Biden’s hoping to squeak out a win, like Ohio and so on.The most important sign would be a lead in Pennsylvania and Michigan. In Pennsylvania, it could easily be a double-digit lead, depending on just how many absentee ballots have been counted. With Mr. Biden holding such a commanding lead among the third of the electorate that voted early, a Trump win most likely involves a double-digit victory on Election Day — and a double-digit lead in the count, late into the night.

This is euphemism. There was no issue with the election. State legislatures passed laws, courts interpreted them, and officials put them into action. This was true in states Trump won, like Texas and North Carolina, as much as it was in states he lost. It almost goes without saying that the real issue, the reason Republicans are actually unhappy, is that Biden is president and Democrats control Congress.

During that same period, 29 states had, on average, at least one federally declared disaster a year somewhere within their borders. Five states have experienced at least 20 disasters since 2011.

The numbers exclude disaster declarations related to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Climate change is here,”

“Every single taxpayer is paying for climate change.”

By focusing on federally declared disasters, the report is able to equalize those differences, offering something close to a true accounting of which places are most exposed to climate shocks they cannot cope with on their own.

At the top of that list are five counties that have each experienced, on average, more than a disaster a year since 2011. Those counties are concentrated in two areas: Southern Louisiana (where counties are called parishes) and eastern Kentucky.

Louisiana outpaces the rest of the United States in another regard. Over the past decade, the state has received more federal disaster money per capita — $1,736 for each resident — than anywhere else in the nation, the report found. Only New York State comes close, at $1,348.

Since 2011, California has received 25 federal disaster declarations, including for wildfires in 2017 and 2018 that resulted in $2.5 billion in federal money to rebuild public infrastructure. Mississippi and Oklahoma have each suffered 22 disasters. Iowa has had 21, mostly for severe storms and flooding

Not every type of disaster is associated with climate change. For example, it’s unclear whether there is a link between rising temperatures and earthquakes. But scientists have become increasingly convinced that a warming world is contributing to worsening floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events.

The data also shows the areas least exposed to unmanageable climate shocks, at least so far. States in the Midwest, including Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan, are among those with the smallest number of federal disaster declarations, with an average of roughly one disaster every two years.

At the bottom of the list is Nevada, which has had just three federal disaster declarations since 2011. Next door, Arizona has had just six. Yet, Nevada and Arizona ranked highest for heat-related deaths from 2018 to 2021, according to the report

“Heat has the highest mortality of all climate impacts, but their disaster declarations were so low,” Ms. Chester said. The reason: Federal disaster declarations focus on property damage more than direct human consequences like illness, injury or death.

“By better understanding risk,” she said, “we can more effectively take action together to accelerate resilience and adaptation in our nation’s most at-risk and disadvantaged communities.”

To pay for that new spending, Rebuild by Design proposes, states should impose a 2 percent surcharge on insurance premiums.

Using an insurance surtax to pay for disasters is a strategy that is already in use, in a sense. As the report notes, Florida levies surcharges on private insurance policies to make up for shortfalls in its state-run insurance program — something that’s likely to happen in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.

Rebuild by Design suggests reversing the chronology. Rather than taxing insurance payments to pay for disaster recovery, a state would come up with additional funds before a storm, then use that money to better prepare communities before a disaster strikes, perhaps making it unnecessary for the federal government to declare a disaster at all.

Phoenix, our hottest city, endured 53 days above 110 degrees and suffered more than 300 heat-related deaths in 2020. But Phoenix exists as a major American city only because the popularization of air conditioning after World War II spurred a population explosion there — from fewer than 250,000 in 1950 to more than 4.5 million in 2022

We have to treat air conditioning like the necessity it’s become, making sure that everyone who needs it has access to it.

A few years ago, the federal Energy Star program recommended setting home thermostats to 78 degrees, a recommendation that was not well received. The consensus seemed to be that a warmer house wasn’t worth the savings on energy costs. But what if we thought of a little extra sweat as saving the planet — and ourselves — from the cost of energy?

the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history.

“very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation.’”

he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s

the “MAGA movement”—as the U.S. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following

Virginia has voted like a blue state at the presidential level, and Arizona and Georgia have moved from red to purple. With these three states shifted into those categories, the two “nations” are almost equal in eligible voting-age population, and the blue advantage in GDP roughly doubles, with the blue section contributing 48 percent and the red just 35 percent.)

This divergence itself creates enormous strain on the country’s cohesion, but more and more even that looks like only a way station

the underlying political question of the 2020s remains whether majority rule—and democracy as we’ve known it—can survive this offensive.

Podhorzer defines modern red and blue America as the states in which each party has usually held unified control of the governorship and state legislature in recent years.

By that yardstick, there are 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states

the red nation houses slightly more of the country’s eligible voting population (45 percent versus 39 percent), but the blue nation contributes more of the total U.S. gross national product: 46 percent versus 40 percent

it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country—with or without majority support

The hardening difference between red and blue, Podhorzer maintains, “empowers” the 10 purple states (if you include Arizona and Georgia) to “decide which of the two superpower nations’ values, Blue or Red, will prevail” in presidential and congressional elections

that leaves the country perpetually teetering on a knife’s edge: The combined vote margin for either party across those purple states has been no greater than two percentage points in any of the past three presidential elections

That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.

One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights.

Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex intimate relations and marriage.)

Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.

The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980.

Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in per capita income.

red states, as a group, are falling behind blue states on a broad range of economic and social outcomes—including economic productivity, family income, life expectancy, and “deaths of despair” from the opioid crisis and alcoholism.

other measures that show those places in a more favorable light

Housing is often more affordable in red states; partly for that reason, homelessness has become endemic in many big blue cities. Red-state taxes are generally lower than their blue counterparts. Many red states have experienced robust job growth

And red states across the Sun Belt rank among the nation’s fastest growing in population.

blue states are benefiting more as the nation transitions into a high-productivity, 21st-century information economy

red states (apart from their major metropolitan centers participating in that economy) are suffering as the powerhouse industries of the 20th century—agriculture, manufacturing, and fossil-fuel extraction—decline.

The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red,

The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower.

Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate.

Per capita spending on elementary and secondary education is almost 50 percent higher in the blue states compared with red

All of the blue states have expanded access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while about 60 percent of the total red-nation population lives in states that have refused to do so.

All of the blue states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal level of $7.25, while only about one-third of the red-state residents live in places that have done so.

Right-to-work laws are common in the red states and nonexistent in the blue, with the result that the latter have a much higher share of unionized workers than the former

No state in the blue section has a law on the books banning abortion before fetal viability, while almost all of the red states are poised to restrict abortion rights

Almost all of the red states have also passed “stand your ground” laws backed by the National Rifle Association, which provide a legal defense for those who use weapons against a perceived threat, while none of the blue states have done so.

During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.

Jim Crow segregation offers an important reference point for understanding how far red states might take this movement to roll back civil rights and liberties—not that they literally would seek to restore segregation, but that they are comfortable with “a time when states” had laws so “entirely different” that they created a form of domestic apartheid.

The flurry of socially conservative laws that red states have passed since 2021, on issues such as abortion; classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and LGBTQ rights, is widening this split. No Democratic-controlled state has passed any of those measures.

he documents a return to historical patterns from the Jim Crow era in which the dominant party (segregationist Democrats then, conservative Republicans now) has skewed the playing field to achieve a level of political dominance in the red nation far beyond its level of popular support

Undergirding that advantage, he argues, are laws that make registering or voting in many of the red states more difficult, and severe gerrymanders that have allowed Republicans to virtually lock in indefinite control of many state legislatures

how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart.

History, in my view, offers two models

bedrock differences dating back to the country’s founding are resurfacing. And one crucial element of that, he argues, is the return of what he calls “one-party rule in the red nation.”

in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states

Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats

Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”

The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell

it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.

NHTSA said it has an “active investigation” of Autopilot. “NHTSA generally does not comment on matters related to open investigations,” NHTSA spokeswoman Veronica Morales said in a statement. In 2021, the agency adopted a rule requiring carmakers such as Tesla to report crashes involving their driver-assistance systems.Beyond the data collection, though, there are few clear legal limitations on how this type of advanced driver-assistance technology should operate and what capabilities it should have.

“Tesla has decided to take these much greater risks with the technology because they have this sense that it’s like, ‘Well, you can figure it out. You can determine for yourself what’s safe’ — without recognizing that other road users don’t have that same choice,” former NHTSA administrator Steven Cliff said in an interview.“If you’re a pedestrian, [if] you’re another vehicle on the road,” he added, “do you know that you’re unwittingly an object of an experiment that’s happening?”

Banner researched Tesla for years before buying a Model 3 in 2018, his wife, Kim, told federal investigators. Around the time of his purchase, Tesla’s website featured a video showing a Tesla navigating the curvy roads and intersections of California while a driver sits in the front seat, hands hovering beneath the wheel.The video, recorded in 2016, is still on the site today.“The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons,” the video says. “He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”

Musk made a similar assertion about a more sophisticated form of Autopilot called Full Self-Driving on an earnings call in July. “Now, I know I’m the boy who cried FSD,” he said. “But man, I think we’ll be better than human by the end of this year.”

While the video concerned Full Self-Driving, which operates on surface streets, the plaintiffs in the Banner case argue Tesla’s “marketing does not always distinguish between these systems.”

Not only is the marketing misleading, plaintiffs in several cases argue, the company gives drivers a long leash when deciding when and how to use the technology. Though Autopilot is supposed to be enabled in limited situations, it sometimes works on roads it’s not designed for. It also allows drivers to go short periods without touching the wheel and to set cruising speeds well above posted speed limits.

Identifying semi-trucks is a particular deficiency that engineers have struggled to solve since Banner’s death, according to a former Autopilot employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Tesla complicated the matter in 2021 when it eliminated radar sensors from its cars, The Post previously reported, making vehicles such as semi-trucks appear two-dimensional and harder to parse.

“If a system turns on, then at least some users will conclude it must be intended to work there,” Koopman said. “Because they think if it wasn’t intended to work there, it wouldn’t turn on.”Andrew Maynard, a professor of advanced technology transitions at Arizona State University, said customers probably just trust the technology.“Most people just don’t have the time or ability to fully understand the intricacies of it, so at the end they trust the company to protect them,” he said.

When I printed these confessions in Hoax, I wrote that everyone at Fox was “profoundly afraid of losing the audience and the resulting piles of cash.” I cited the former morning-show producer, who told me, “We were deathly afraid of our audience leaving, deathly afraid of pissing them off.”

why the new legal filing by Dominion is such a showstopper. We can read exactly what the leaders and stars of Fox News really think. This is my biggest takeaway: In the days after Biden won the election, while Trump tried to start the steal by shouting “Stop the Steal,” the most powerful people at Fox News were not concerned about the health of U.S. democracy. They were concerned about Fox’s brand and their own bottom line.

here were spontaneous celebrations in major cities and long faces across Fox’s airwaves. The consensus view both inside and outside the network was that Fox’s acknowledgment of reality—and specifically its early projection that Biden had won Arizona—had turned the audience against the network.

According to the Dominion filing, Carlson texted his producer that weekend and said, “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We're playing with fire, for real....an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”

One snippet of texts shows Scott telling Lachlan that viewers were “going through the 5 stages of grief.” Angling to impress her boss, she said the Arizona projection was damaging, “but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”

inside Fox, which is first and foremost a provider of entertainment, respect meant something else. Reading the texts and emails, I was reminded of another thing the Fox & Friends producer had said. “We were deathly afraid” of the audience, he admitted, “but we also laughed at them. We disrespected them. We weren’t practicing what we preached.”

That’s what Dominion is arguing in the legal realm—that Fox’s leaders were saying one thing privately and another thing publicly.

The other crucial metric Fox leaders were watching, of course, was the Nielsen ratings chart. The Dominion filing contains snippets of conversations from later in November that showcase Hannity’s alarm. “The network is being rejected,” he texted Carlson and Ingraham, to which Carlson responded, “I’ve heard from angry viewers every hour of the day all weekend, including at dinner tonight.” So they each found ways to wink and nod to voting irregularities and unfair systems—showing “respect” to viewers by actively misinforming them.

In a separate thread, on November 24, one of Hannity’s producers cited minute-by-minute ratings from the prior week’s episodes and said, “Our best minutes from last week were on the voting irregularities.” The conspiracy-laden segments continued on Fox through December, the ratings improved, and the country’s political divide deepened

Inside Fox, the prime-time stars and senior executives raged against the network’s reporters not because they doubted that Biden had won, but because the truth was too disturbing to the audience that had made them rich. Fox’s postelection strategy, the texts and emails suggest, was to stop rubbing Biden in its viewers’ faces. But in their effort to show their viewers “respect,” they ultimately disrespected both their audience and the American experiment they claim to protect.

the United States could halve by 2030 the oil used in cars and trucks compared with 2005 levels by improving the efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles and by relying more on cars that use alternative power sources, like electric batteries and biofuels.

New York State — not windy like the Great Plains, nor sunny like Arizona — could easily produce the power it needs from wind, solar and water power by 2030

“You could power America with renewables from a technical and economic standpoint. The biggest obstacles are social and political — what you need is the will to do it.”

“There is plenty of room for wind and solar to grow and they are becoming more competitive, but these are still variable resources — the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow,” said Alex Klein, the research director of IHS Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm on renewable energy. “An industrial economy needs a reliable power source, so we think fossil fuel will be an important foundation of our energy mix for the next few decades.”

improving the energy efficiency of homes, vehicles and industry was an easier short-term strategy. He noted that the 19.5 million residents of New York State consume as much energy as the 800 million in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa)

a rapid expansion of renewable power would be complicated and costly. Using large amounts of renewable energy often requires modifying national power grids, and renewable energy is still generally more expensive than using fossil fuels

Promoting wind and solar would mean higher electricity costs for consumers and industry.

many of the European countries that have led the way in adopting renewables had little fossil fuel of their own, so electricity costs were already high. Others had strong environmental movements that made it politically acceptable to endure higher prices

countries could often get 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar without much modification to their grids. A few states, like Iowa and South Dakota, get nearly that much of their electricity from renewable power (in both states, wind), while others use little at all.

America is rich in renewable resources and (unlike Europe) has the empty space to create wind and solar plants. New York State has plenty of wind and sun to do the job, they found. Their blueprint for powering the state with clean energy calls for 10 percent land-based wind, 40 percent offshore wind, 20 percent solar power plants and 18 percent solar panels on rooftops

the substantial costs of enacting the scheme could be recouped in under two decades, particularly if the societal cost of pollution and carbon emissions were factored in