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• 2016 Distilled

  Trump's Latest Gambit: Early-Voting 'Buyer's Remorse'

  Yes, some states allow people to re-do their ballots ahead of Election Day. But hardly anyone does.

  • Russell Berman
  • Nov 2, 2016
• Most Popular on The Atlantic

  • The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton

    • David Frum

    Why support a candidate who rejects your preferences and offends your opinions? Don’t do it for her—do it for the republic, and the Constitution.

    If the polls are correct, many disaffected Republicans are making their peace with Donald Trump in the final hours of the 2016 campaign. The usual term for this process is “returning home.” This time, we need a new phrase. The familiar Republican home has been bulldozed and replaced by a Trump-branded edifice. It will require long and hard work to restore and rebuild what has been lost.

    Between now and then, however, there is a ballot to face. Last week, I advanced the best case I could for each of the available options. Now, however, comes the time for choosing—and for explicating the reasons for that choice.

    Those attempting to rally reluctant Republicans to Trump seldom waste words on the affirmative case for the blowhard businessman. What is there to say in favor of a candidate who would lie even about his (non) support for a charity for children with AIDS?

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  • Trump's Health Plan: Pay Your Own Medical Bills Using Money You Saved

    • James Hamblin

    The candidate called a special ‘meeting’ to discuss the future of medicine. Here’s how that went.

    Five disgruntled Republican physicians and one nurse warmed up the conference room at a Hilton DoubleTree hotel in Pennsylvania yesterday. All were members of the U.S. Congress, gathered for a rally that Donald Trump would call “a meeting talking about health care.”

    On the day that health-insurance enrollment began for 2017, the Trump campaign chose to keep the focus on medicine. Health-insurance premiums will be increasing in exchanges for some two to five percent of Americans this year. The U.S. has the most expensive health-care system in the world and needs a great deal of improvement. The candidate has been hostile toward the current health-care system and toward Hillary Clinton’s proposals, but has offered almost nothing in the way of solutions. Perhaps today was the day for a plan.

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  • Is Donald Trump Outflanking Hillary Clinton?

    • Ronald Brownstein

    The Democratic nominee faces the risk that she has overestimated her hold on the states most central to her strategy.

    Hillary Clinton’s easiest path to an Electoral College majority does not include Ohio, Florida, or North Carolina.

    Yet those three states all rank at the very top of the list of locales where she has invested the most time and advertising spending, especially in the campaign’s critical closing weeks. By contrast, the campaign has devoted very little advertising or time from Clinton and her top surrogates in several of the states that are part of her core strategy for reaching 270 Electoral College votes—among them Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado, Virginia, and New Mexico.

    The Clinton team’s decision to focus so much more attention on states that it wants to win—as opposed to those it believes it needs to win—represents one of the central, if often unremarked upon, choices of the 2016 election. It has allowed her to play offense for most of the general election, while forcing rival Donald Trump to spend most of his energy defending states more indispensable to his strategy than to hers.

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  • Why Do Millennials Hate Groceries?

    • Derek Thompson

    Because they prefer chips from CVS and going out to restaurants. And, increasingly, so do their parents.

    Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that twenty- and thirtysomethings are bidding adieu to yet another cultural mainstay of the Baby Boomer generation—shopping trips to supermarkets. With an abundance of options on the streets and at their fingertips, young shoppers are eating out at restaurants and bars, ordering in on their phones, or snagging groceries at convenience stores, such as CVS, and superstores, such as Walmart.

    Supermarkets, meanwhile, are stuck in a middle that is being hollowed out by choice and technology. “I don’t think we’ve seen shopping change so dramatically ever,” Marty Siewert, senior vice president for consumer and shopper analytics at Nielsen, told reporter Heather Haddon.

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  • A Black Church Burned in the Name of Trump

    • Emma Green

    Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi, was reportedly set on fire and spray painted with the words “Vote Trump” on Tuesday night.  

    Updated November 2 at 12:27 p.m. EST

    A black church in Greenville, Mississippi, was set on fire on Tuesday night. Fire fighters arrived to find Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church “heavily engulfed in flames,” Mayor Errick Simmons said in an interview;  the fire took nearly an hour to contain. No one was in the church at the time, and no one was injured. On the side of the church, beneath the blackened windows and roof, the words “Vote Trump” have been spray painted.

    The fire is being investigated as a hate crime, Simmons said. Federal authorities, including the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives, are helping local authorities with the investigation, which is part of the standard procedure for church fires. “We’re very cautious in this climate, in this day and time, to make sure we’re very deliberate in investigating matters like this,” Simmons said. This fire was “a direct assault on people’s right to free worship,” he said, and later added during a press conference, “I see this as an attack on the black church and the black community.”

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  • Mel Gibson Is Not Sorry

    • Megan Garber

    Indignant, yes, his appearance on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert suggested. But the disgraced star’s apology tour has been, overall, strikingly lacking in actual apologies.

    “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,” Mel Gibson, drunk and angry, muttered to a police officer on the evening of July 28, 2006. It was a comment that would make the famous man, for several years, infamous, but it was by no means the only evidence that darkness might lurk behind that wide Gibsonian grin. The actor and Oscar-winning director has also been recorded making disparaging remarks about Latinos and African Americans (guess which words he used for each?) and about gay men. He fumed, after the journalist Frank Rich criticized his film The Passion of the Christ, that “I want to kill him … I want his intestines on a stick … I want to kill his dog.” Gibson called a female police officer “sugar tits.” He referred to an ex-girlfriend as a “pig in heat.” He hit her. And then he told her, “You fucking deserved it.”

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  • The Problem With the GRE

    • Victoria Clayton

    The exam “is a proxy for asking ‘Are you rich?’ ‘Are you white?’ ‘Are you male?’”

    Updated on March 2, 2016

    Early one Saturday morning last year, Christian Vazquez hopped on his bicycle and pedaled from his Highland Park home to the campus of Cal State, Los Angeles, one of many designated testing facilities for the Graduate Record Examination. The GRE, as it’s better known, is a test required for admission to what may amount to thousands of Master’s- and doctoral-degree programs—from astronomy and English to journalism and zoology—in the United States.

    Vazquez, 24, who studied for the GRE over the course of about four months using a free study guide, was already an academic success story. Raised in east L.A. by a mother who worked full-time as a bank-loan processor, he was the first person in his family to attend college. During his undergraduate education, Vazquez lived at home and commuted via bike or bus to California State University Northridge four days a week, a two-hour trip each way, and paid his way through school by working as a cashier at a Kohl’s department store. Vazquez graduated in 2013 with a B.A. in English, earning mostly As. When he went job hunting, he had one thing in mind: “I knew I wanted a job where I made an impact on other people’s lives,” he says. He ended up with two part-time positions, as a teaching assistant at an elementary school helping mainly at-risk Latino children and as a tutor at Pasadena City College, where he also enrolled in literature and writing classes for fun. On his commutes to work, Vazquez dreamed of a grander future: becoming a college English professor.

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  • How Sociopathic Capitalism Came to Rule the World

    • John Paul Rollert

    Corporate executives haven't always believed that transactions must have winners and losers. But that’s not Donald J. Trump’s view.

    The stories we tell ourselves, far more than the evidence of scientific analysis, determine how we interpret the world around us. Accordingly, the fate of capitalism rests in no small measure on the real and imagined characters whose ethics and efforts, at any given time, seem to embody the system. Whether the system is identified with Bill Gates or Bernie Madoff, Horatio Alger or Gordon Gekko, opinions about how exactly capitalism works, no less than its moral fitness, reflect the heroes and villains who drive these tales.

    Whichever of these two designations best describes Donald J. Trump, he is clearly a chief protagonist, the world over, in the contemporary tale of capitalism. This has been clear enough since at least the spring of this year, when the man known to millions around the world for the lurid catchphrase “You’re fired!” became the first political novice from the business world to become a major party nominee for president since Wendell Willkie in 1940.

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  • Today's News: Nov. 2, 2016

    • The Editors

    The Cubs are World Series champions, two officers shot in “ambush-style attacks” in Iowa, and more from the United States and around the world.

    —For the first time in 108 years, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. More here

    —A suspect is in custody in the fatal shooting of two Des Moines-area police officers. Our live blog here

    —We’re live-blogging the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).

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  • The Different Stakes of Male and Female Birth Control

    • Julie Beck

    A clinical trial of contraceptives for men was halted because of side effects—side effects that women have dealt with for decades.

    In the past couple decades, scientists have been slowly moving toward developing birth control for men. A recent clinical trial of an injectable hormone contraceptive for men showed super promising results: It was 96 percent effective at preventing pregnancy, which it did by lowering sperm counts. Unfortunately, the trial was discontinued early by an independent committee, which determined that the side effects were such that “the risks to the study participants outweighed the potential benefits.”

    The side effects in question? “Mood changes, depression, pain at the injection site, and increased libido.”

    Hm. Hmmmmmmmm. Hm. Let’s review some of the possible side effects of currently available birth-control options for women, shall we? Here’s just a sampling.

    Continue Reading

  More Popular Stories
• Business

  The Fed Holds Steady Before the Election

  At its November meeting, the U.S. central bank has voted not to raise interest rates, although many believe a hike in December is likely.

  • Bourree Lam
  • Nov 2, 2016
• 2016 Distilled

  Is Donald Trump Outflanking Hillary Clinton?

  The Democratic nominee faces the risk that she has overestimated her hold on the states most central to her strategy.

  • Ronald Brownstein
  • Nov 2, 2016
• Business

  Why Obama Told Ohio to Go to Taco Bell

  The president’s get-out-the-vote pitch shrewdly invoked a chain with centrist appeal.

  • Adam Chandler
  • Nov 2, 2016
• Newsletter

  

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Election Reaches Its Crescendo, Obama Warns Against Innuendo

  The president said “we don’t operate on innuendo” in his first public remarks about the FBI’s decision to review additional Clinton-related emails.

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• 2016 Distilled

  A Black Church Burned in the Name of Trump

  Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi, was reportedly set on fire and spray painted with the words “Vote Trump” on Tuesday night.  

  • Emma Green
  • Nov 2, 2016
• Business

  How Sociopathic Capitalism Came to Rule the World

  Corporate executives haven't always believed that transactions must have winners and losers. But that’s not Donald J. Trump’s view.

  • John Paul Rollert
  • Nov 2, 2016
• Technology

  ‘Scum,’ ‘Madman,’ and Other Words Used Most in Trump Coverage

  A computer analysis of 60,000 articles about the presidential race finds distinct language referring to the Republican and Democratic nominees.

  • Adrienne LaFrance
  • Nov 2, 2016
• Writers
  • Russell Berman
    Trump's Latest Gambit: Early-Voting 'Buyer's Remorse'
    Nov 2, 2016
  • Adam Chandler
    Why Obama Told Ohio to Go to Taco Bell
    Nov 2, 2016
  • Emma Green
    A Black Church Burned in the Name of Trump
    Nov 2, 2016
  • Adrienne LaFrance
    ‘Scum,’ ‘Madman,’ and Other Words Used Most in Trump Coverage
    Nov 2, 2016
  • David Frum
    The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton
    Nov 2, 2016
  All Writers
• 2016 Election

  The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton

  Why support a candidate who rejects your preferences and offends your opinions? Don’t do it for her—do it for the republic, and the Constitution.

  • David Frum
  • Nov 2, 2016
• 2016 Distilled

  Trump, Clinton, and Emails: The Latest Election Updates

  Hillary Clinton is again facing scrutiny over her use of a private email server—and Donald Trump is capitalizing on it.

  • The Editors
  • Nov 2, 2016
• 2016 Distilled

  What CNN Got Right About the Presidential Race

  Brian Stelter has delivered the lessons in media literacy that the American public so desperately needs.

  • Dan Gillmor
  • Nov 2, 2016
• 2016 Election

  Don't Let the FBI Decide the Election

  The question of who becomes the president of the United States should be answered by voters, not federal agents.

  • Adam Serwer
  • Nov 2, 2016

• A Third-Party Voter Makes His Case (and I Dissent)

  A reader in New York writes about the way he is casting his vote. He also asks a question, for…

  • James Fallows
  • Nov 1, 2016
  • Notes
• Politics Daily

  The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Paul Ryan Voted for Trump, but He Doesn’t Want to Talk About It

  The House Speaker said he voted for the Republican nominee during early voting last week.

  • Elaine Godfrey and Candice Norwood
  • Nov 1, 2016
• Business

  What Percentage of Employees Check Work Emails From Home?

  An investigation

  • Jeremy Venook
  • Nov 1, 2016

• Sympathy for Comey

  Fallows is swamped at the moment, partly to finish a cover story for our upcoming issue, so he passed along…

  • Chris Bodenner
  • Nov 1, 2016
  • Notes

• The Disturbing Details of Trump’s Alleged Voter-Intimidation Efforts

  Democrats have filed nearly half a dozen lawsuits against the Republican presidential nominee and his party about “ballot security” efforts. It seems the old days of poll watching never ended.

  • Emma Green
  • Nov 1, 2016
• 2016 Election

  The 2016 Presidential Election: A Devil's Glossary

  Dictionary, n. A comprehensive index of the words politicians use to lie

  • David A. Graham
  • Nov 1, 2016
• 2016 Election

  What Happens If Republicans Refuse to Replace Justice Scalia?

  Senators Ted Cruz and Richard Burr and some conservative legal scholars are arguing that if a Democrat wins the election, the Senate should refuse to confirm anyone.

  • David A. Graham
  • Nov 1, 2016

• There's Simply No Comparison Between Clinton's Flaws and Trump's

  The Democratic nominee’s shortcomings should not blind voters to the catastrophe they’d invite by electing her cruel, undisciplined, erratic opponent.

  • Conor Friedersdorf
  • Nov 1, 2016
• Technology

  How Twitter Bots Are Shaping the Election

  Between the first two presidential debates, a third of pro-Trump tweets and nearly a fifth of pro-Clinton tweets came from automated accounts.

  • Douglas Guilbeault and Samuel Woolley
  • Nov 1, 2016