Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump has been very clear about the shape of his revenge against the mainstream media. He’s mused, a few times, about throwing reporters in jail if they refuse to leak their sources. He’s talked about taking away broadcast licenses of networks he’s deemed unfriendly. He’s made it clear that he will notice if any member of the press gets too free with their critiques and do his best to get in their way. These last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten a signal that maybe his threats are having an impact. Both The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times had prepared endorsements of Kamala Harris, and their owners asked them at the last minute not to run them. Media reporters floated the obvious question of whether the owners backed off to appease Trump.

In this episode, we talk to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic. This year, The Atlantic made the decision, rare in its history but consistent during the Trump years, to endorse a presidential candidate. (You can read the magazine’s endorsement of Kamala Harris here.) Goldberg talks about navigating both pressures from owners and threats from the administration. And we discuss the urgent question of whether the media, pummeled and discredited for years by Trump, is ready for a second Trump administration.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Journalists who have covered Donald Trump’s rallies—and I am one—know that it’s an uncomfortable situation. He’ll be giving a speech and mention the “fake media” or talk about reporters as the “enemy of the American people,” and then the crowd will all turn towards the press area and start pointing and booing.

Trump has said he would jail reporters who don’t reveal sources or take away broadcast licenses for outlets he doesn’t like. So there’s been a longtime standoff between the free press and a possible future president—which, in these last few days leading up to the election, has gotten a lot more real.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Recently, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, at the 11th hour, decided not to endorse a political candidate, because their owners asked them not to. Both of these papers were going to endorse Kamala Harris, so the last-second decision certainly makes it look like they were backing off to appease Trump.

Motives aside, though, this moment raises an urgent question: Can The Washington Post; the L.A. Times; us, The Atlantic; all of American journalism stand up to a second Trump administration? Today, days before the election, we have with us our own editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to talk about what’s at stake in this endorsement story.

Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: As you know, the L.A. Times and The Washington Post made news for announcing they would not be endorsing in this presidential race. What was your reaction to that news?

Jeffrey Goldberg: My reaction was that they are not masters of excellent timing. If they had decided that, which is a perfectly fine position to take—and in retrospect, I kind of, sort of wish we took that position in 2016.

Rosin: You do?

Goldberg: Kind of. I just said, “kind of, sort of.” That, I think, connotes ambivalence. Look—I see both sides of the issue, but that’s not the issue right now with the L.A. Times or The Washington Post.

If you’re going to decide that, decide it deliberately. Decide it, well, I would say, any time except two weeks before the most contentious and possibly closest election in American history.

The timing was exquisitely bad. I mean, you could not have chosen a worse time to make these decisions, and it’s mind-boggling.

Rosin: So what you’re saying is: It’s perfectly legitimate for us to have a debate and for newspapers, internally, to have a debate about whether endorsements or not are appropriate. Because, you know, Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, gave reasons in his op-ed for why he didn’t think endorsements were appropriate. So that’s a totally legitimate debate. It’s just that the timing of it is not right.

Goldberg: Yeah. The timing was awful in that it created mistrust, anger, anxiety. It’s way too late to make that decision. I mean, there’s a separate issue. I do believe that it’s the owner’s prerogative to decide if a newspaper should endorse X person or Y person.

Put aside the practical arguments, which, you know—does it really change anybody’s mind? Does it really do anything? I think it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to say that no journalism organization should speak in that kind of declarative voice.

You have a bunch of columnists. You have opinion writers. You have all kinds of people, podcasters. They should talk about what they think is going on in the election. They could talk about who they think is better and who is worse. I get all the sides of it. It’s just—it’s a little late in the process to announce that you’re not going to endorse.

Rosin: The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos—he did defend the decision in his op-ed, saying, Americans don’t trust the news media, and this is a move to restore that trust. Setting the timing aside for a minute, what do you think of that defense?

Goldberg: Horseshit. I think it’s horseshit. I thought the whole first three, four paragraphs of that were horseshit, blaming the victim. I mean, it’s true. It’s true. The media is very, very low in polls of trustworthiness, lower than even Congress at this point, but there’s a reason for that. And a very large reason is that there’s a concerted, multiyear, billion-dollar campaign to undermine public trust in traditional modes of American journalism.

I mean, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are just two of the people who are organizing a campaign to make sure that Americans don’t trust fact-based journalism. Fact-based journalism doesn’t work for them, and so they are literally killing the messenger. And so for Jeff Bezos to write that we, in the press, have a problem and that no one trusts us, without alerting people to one of the huge reasons why, strikes me as ridiculous.

Rosin: I see. So it’s horseshit because (A) it doesn’t apply to The Washington Post—The Washington Post is not part of the problem—and (B) he didn’t elaborate in any even remotely brave way about what he meant.

Goldberg: There’s a war going on against the quote-unquote mainstream media. People who do not want to be investigated by mainstream journalists, by investigative reporters who are professionally trained to uncover things that powerful people don’t want uncovered—the powerful people have organized themselves in a way to make sure that no citizen trusts The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the networks, the Associated Press, Reuters, plus a whole bevy of other investigative outfits.

They want to destroy our ability to communicate to people that we’re trying—I mean, look: I’m not saying that we always get things right. We don’t always get things right. But they have a vested interest in making sure that people don’t trust those outlets, because those outlets are investigating them. And for Jeff Bezos—who is part of the oligarchic class, obviously—for Jeff Bezos to write this op-ed or have it written for him without acknowledging this fundamental fact seemed to be absurd.

Rosin: So readers, as we know, reacted by canceling their subscriptions, 250,000 so far. And I have—

Goldberg: Which is crazy.

Rosin: Crazy. I have many friends who work on the Post. It’s adding up to what? Is it a tenth or an eighth of their subscription base?

Goldberg: I think it’s 10 percent of their subscription base.

Rosin: Which has already been waning over the last many years.

Goldberg: Well, I mean, it did grow. I mean, it grew in the Trump era. A lot of people believed them, as they should have, when they said that Trump was a threat to the democratic order and to the American idea. They made their motto literally “Democracy dies in darkness.”

A large number of people who were opposed to Trumpism became subscribers. What do they think is going to happen to those subscribers? The feeling of betrayal. I mean, I’ve talked to so many people who canceled or were thinking of canceling. The feeling of betrayal was deep in ways that I was even surprised. And here was an example of Jeff Bezos not understanding the consequences of his decision making.

Rosin: One obvious conclusion—or even mild conclusion—is that Jeff Bezos is concerned about what Trump thinks, which leads me to think that if Trump wins, lots of newspapers might have to account for that in their decision making and thinking. Like, it feels like that’s how a chilling effect comes to be, is that you have to take into account what Trump thinks, even if it’s minor. Like, I’ll lose some customers, or I won’t get this contract or another contract, that you have to be thinking about that, and that becomes part of the decision making.

Goldberg: Yeah. Look: no reason to disbelieve Bezos when he says that the meeting between Trump, Trump’s people, and the Blue Origin—his space company—the CEO of that space company that happened that same day was coincidental. He didn’t even know. He runs a very large organization. That’s completely plausible that he had no idea that the timing was just terribly bad for him.

The larger point is: If you have multifarious business dealings with the federal government, and you’re worried about a revenge-minded president with authoritarian predilections, it’s asking a lot of a CEO not to take the threat that that president poses into account when you make decisions, which suggests to me that he’s not equipped to be the owner of a newspaper.

The owner of a newspaper should place him or herself in a structurally oppositional frame of mind, which is: You have to be counter-opportunistic. Oh, the government’s gonna cut my $3 billion contract. Screw them. I’m going to do what’s right, and I’m going to stand up for the newspaper.

If you’re not equipped to own a publication, you really shouldn’t. You just really shouldn’t. And, you know, the shame of this is that, from everything I could see and everything that we all could see, he was pretty good at owning The Washington Post for a while.

Rosin: Well, that makes me wonder if the industry, as a whole, is ready for a possible second Trump administration. I mean, what you just described sounds like a kind of steeling and bravery that you have to be prepared for. And if Jeff Bezos, who has a huge amount of power, you know—like, if he loses a chunk, what does it matter?

If he can’t do it, doesn’t that make you worry about the industry in general?

Goldberg: Well, it depends, person to person. I mean, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is the owner of the Los Angeles Times, is in a different category. He and his family, apparently, just believe in meddling. I mean, they believe that—look: Let me take one step back and note that ownership in the American system—ownership of a publication or a quality publication or a putatively quality publication in the American system—is very complicated and counterintuitive.

You buy a thing. As a rich person, you buy a publication, a business, and then you have to promise not to interfere with the running of the business. That’s the way it’s worked, traditionally. You have to—literally, there’s no other business that I could think of where, you know, you go out and buy a bakery, and the first thing the bakery manager tells you is, Do not tell us what kind of bread to make, and if you do, all your employees are going to excoriate you publicly. You’d kind of be like, Well, I thought the fun part of owning a bakery is getting them to make bread I like, you know. And that’s what journalism is, and this is my relationship with our owner at The Atlantic.

You know, she turns over to me decision making on all editorial matters. We have a relationship of trust, and we communicate, and I use her as a sounding board all the time, and it’s a healthy relationship. But she accepts the line that our culture has devised and that a healthy democratic culture devises so that ownership is separate from editorial.

Rosin: Right. Okay. Earlier this month, The Atlantic endorsed Kamala Harris, which is the fifth time that the magazine has made an endorsement: Lincoln, LBJ, and then three times in the last three elections, all while Trump was the candidate and while you’ve been editor in chief.

Goldberg: Well, the first time, actually, was becoming editor, but I wasn’t yet editor. I had a lot to do with the editorial, but just technically speaking.

Rosin: Okay, so why did you break the mold here?

Goldberg: The Atlantic promises its readers that it’s going to be of no party or clique. That’s written to the founding manifesto of The Atlantic, written in 1857 and signed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne and all the rest. And, you know, I do not want to screw with those guys, right? (Clears throat.)

I just don’t want their ghosts haunting me. So we try very, very hard to be of no party or clique. But to me, the issue of Donald Trump is not an issue of party. I believe, and I think The Atlantic has expressed this belief in its journalism for 160-plus years: We believe that a strong conservative party, a strong conservative strain in American thinking, and a strong liberal strain—that makes a democracy healthy.

Let these ideas battle it out, and let the people decide who has the better idea. So we are a big tent, where we try to have differing opinions, but we don’t support a particular party. And if Hillary Clinton in 2016 were running against Mitt Romney, John McCain, Marco Rubio, you know, Jeb Bush—name the list—we would have felt no urge whatsoever to endorse.

But I looked back, and others looked back at the 1964 endorsement of Lyndon Johnson to try to understand what that was about. And it was not about Barry Goldwater’s positions on taxation or about privatization of government resources or even, in a way, foreign policy. It was about his demeanor. It was about his character. It was about his extremism.

And so the endorsement of LBJ was less an endorsement of LBJ than a warning about Barry Goldwater’s characterological defects. So when the subject of Trump comes up, we’re not looking at what he thinks we should do about the taxation of tips, or even his position on NATO, as ridiculous as I personally find it.

It’s about his honesty. It’s about his mental fitness. It’s about his moral fitness. It’s about his racism. It’s about his expressed misogyny. It’s about all those things. So it’s not about party. It’s not about ideas. It’s about behavior and disposition and the threat that he poses.

And so in 2016, and then again, for reasons of consistency, if nothing else, in 2020 and now in 2024, we felt a need to endorse—again, not because he’s a conservative, because he’s not actually a conservative.

Rosin: Now, in any of these times, did you ever have doubts—like, real, serious doubts that you should do it?

Goldberg: No. Again, in retrospect, getting into it, I understand where, you know, if Bezos had announced a year ago, You know what? We just don’t want to do this anymore—I totally understand the arguments for not doing it. We did it with Hillary. And remember: We were also, like everybody, in shock, in a kind of shock.

People who cover politics and know American politics—we were shocked that the Republican Party chose this person to be its standard-bearer four years after it picked Mitt Romney and eight years after it picked John McCain. How is this even possible?

So in that shock, in disbelief, I think we are more predisposed to say, You know what? This is so abnormal that we must say something. Then once you say it in 2016 and you see what he’s done over four years, then in 2020, how is it not possible to do the same thing? And then after January 6, 2021, it seemed pretty obvious to me that we would have to keep going with these anti-endorsements.

Rosin: And in your mind, does that shift the magazine’s position to less of an observer-critic and more of a participant in the election?

Goldberg: The magazine is a participant in the election in that members of the writers collective of The Atlantic are pretty clear, in many different ways, about how they feel about Donald Trump, what they think about Donald Trump.

And by the way, we’re not a resistance magazine, and I’ve said this over and over again. If we could run pro-Trump material that could pass through our fact-checking process, I would print it. Our goal is to say things that are true, right?

And so we do have pieces, from time to time, that come in that do argue that “X Trump policy is smart.” We ran a piece recently by H. R. McMaster, his former national security advisor, who said, You know what? Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some of the things that he’s done may be for the wrong reasons. Maybe he executed them stupidly. But these ideas are good ideas.

So we’ll run pieces like that. Again, it just has to get through fact-checking. So yes—it’s a definitively different kind of decision when you speak in an institutional voice, no byline, and say, The Atlantic believes that X person should be president and not Y person.

And yes, you can create an image out in the world that you are now aligned with a party. That’s why I’m so sensitive on this question of being of no party or clique, because this is not about Republican—

If, in the next election, the Republicans nominate, God knows, near anybody, I don’t feel, you know—as long as they adhere to basic notions of rule of law, as long as they exercise self-restraint in their behavior and speech, as long as they haven’t been proven to try to have overthrown the government.

I mean, I was down there on January 6. I saw, I heard his speech. And then I walked down to the Capitol. I know what he did. You know, there’s two candidates in the race right now. One tried to overthrow the government; the other didn’t. It’s not that hard to say, as an institution, We’re against overthrowing the government.

And so yeah, there are consequences to all these decisions, but I’m comfortable with the decision. As I said, there’s a part of me that wishes that we hadn’t gotten involved in that, but I’m also proud of the fact that we took these stands.

Rosin: In what?

Goldberg: In institutional endorsement.

Rosin: Like, if you could avoid it, you would?

Goldberg: Well, look: The Atlantic. I mean, one of the lessons of looking back at The Atlantic, you know, one of the great mysteries, by the way—I haven’t been able to figure this out: 1860, The Atlantic endorses Lincoln for president. 1864, no endorsement. It’s like, What does a guy have to do?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right.

Goldberg: You know, jeez louise. I don’t know. I mean, I would love to find the papers, if there are papers, that communicate why they didn’t run an endorsement. (Laughs.) But anyway, you go from 1860 to 1964. You jump 104 years into the future before they endorse again. You know, as the editor in the Trump presidency, in the Trump era, I’ve got to say, Hmm, for 105, 104 years, they managed not to endorse. That means something. And so, you know, obviously, there’s going to be ambivalence in my thinking.

Rosin: Okay. Time to leave Lincoln and enter the future. After the break, we talk about what a second Trump era might look like.

[Break]

Rosin: All right. So you’ve touched on some of the stakes. Let’s contemplate an actual Trump era. Like, we’re living in a Trump era. You yourself have faced specific—well, I’ll take that back. The Atlantic has faced specific threats—

Goldberg: No. You could say me. It’s true.

Rosin: —from Trump. And, specifically, in response to your reporting. So in 2020, you reported that Trump called veterans and fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” which has clearly remained on Trump’s mind. Your recent reporting that he wished he had “the kind of generals Hitler had” also struck a chord. He’s not a fan. He’s interested in settling scores. Do you actually run through scenarios about the actual things that the magazine could face under a Trump presidency?

Goldberg: Sure. I don’t want to go into specifics, but there are, obviously—and again, I’m not trying to be dramatic here. I don’t expect storm troopers to come and try to padlock the doors of The Atlantic on January 20 if Trump should win or Trump should seize power in some manner or form.

But there are, obviously, ways that someone bent on revenge could take his revenge, not just on The Atlantic but a lot of the press and other institutions in American life. So of course we think about it. But you know, there’s exactly zero choice here. If you find out something that’s true, and it’s relevant for your readers, you just gotta—I don’t mean to sound self-righteous or anything, but that’s literally the job. So you’ve got to do it, regardless of what the threat may be.

Rosin: I mean, I actually do think about what it looks like, because this is a relatively new situation for Americans, for American journalists. I do have trouble imagining what it would look like to operate in that kind of atmosphere. Like, how does a president get in the way of American journalism?

Goldberg: Right. I mean, look: There are—I’m not talking about us, specifically, now—but there have been discussions broadly across journalism. Obviously, one thing that Trump has talked about again and again is changing the libel laws, right? And this would require the Supreme Court to overturn a decision made in the 1960s about what constitutes libel.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if they—and people who are supportive of Trump fund efforts to make it harder for journalists to do their jobs vis-à-vis, you know, nuisance lawsuits and trying to get legislation changed and trying to get the Supreme Court behind this legislation that would make it much easier to win libel suits against journalism organizations.

So there’s that. That’s a threat. There are other things that can happen, obviously. Something that’s been talked about a lot is the use of the IRS against enemies. I mean, obviously, in normal-behaving administrations, you’re not allowed to politicize the tax-auditing process, but I don’t put that past them, obviously.

There are a bunch of things that you can do that don’t involve, you know, frog-marching journalists to jail. I go back to this point: They’re helping to create an atmosphere that’s comprehensively hostile to work that previous American presidents—I’m going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson now—previous American presidents understood was indispensable to the smooth functioning of democracy. Which is to say: have a robust, independent press that could not be punished, jailed, silenced by a government.

Rosin: So that’s the thing that I most worry about, is the shifting understanding of facts and truth. In your conversation with Barack Obama a couple of years ago, it was very interesting. He talked about how, in his campaign, he used to be able to show up in places, say swing-voter places, and convince people to change their minds about him.

And then he told you that he doesn’t really think that that would be true anymore, because there’s a world where new information, a new fact, a truth—it doesn’t really move people. And I wonder if you think journalism is in a similar position. Like, we used to be able to show up and give people new information, new facts, and we would hope that those things would move them. And now it seems to work less that way.

Goldberg: Well, yeah. I’ll give you an example from my own work to buttress your point. So four years ago, I published a story based on sources that Donald Trump has repeatedly used the terms suckers and losers to describe American war dead and American war wounded.

Obviously, a very damaging story. And the criticism from the White House—Donald Trump’s White House at the time—was, Well, you don’t have any evidence. You don’t have any people on the record or using their names, so it’s all made up. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that became the discourse. Right?

Last year, John Kelly came out—John Kelly, former chief of staff, former Marine general, chief of staff to Donald Trump in his White House—came out and said, on the record with his name: Oh yeah. That’s true. He used to say “suckers” and “losers” all the time. He’s confirmed it to any number of publications. He confirmed it on the record to me. And so what I get, even today, are people saying, Well, you never proved it.

And I said, Well, actually, John Kelly’s now said that he’s heard Donald Trump. They say, You’ve never had any sources on the record. Well, John Kelly says it happened. Well, John Kelly’s a liar.

And it’s like, Okay, it doesn’t matter. My point is: It seems not to matter when you present people with what you consider to be evidence or what, in traditional journalism modes, is considered evidence. It doesn’t matter anymore. People are impervious to new information if it doesn’t conform to what they would like to believe.

And so we see that writ large, where, you know, the bubble around a certain group of people in America—let’s say the hardcore Trump voters—the bubble is impermeable, right? There’s no way of penetrating and saying, No. You said you wanted more evidence. Here’s evidence.

Nope. That evidence—that’s a deep fake. That evidence—nope. The person who says it to you is lying.

Rosin: Yes, Jeff, but that’s our tool. Like, that’s what we got. That’s what we do. Like, what we do is evidence, facts. We present those evidence and facts, and if those just drop dead to the ground, then what’s our role? Like, what are we doing?

Goldberg: Well, first of all, I never give up, because why would you give up trying to convince people (A)?

(B) and look: I do think this is a unique proposition of The Atlantic at this moment. I understand 30 percent of the people in America are really not going to believe, or say they don’t believe, The Atlantic at this moment. So we’re writing for the 70 percent, but I also think we’re writing for the 30 percent.

I think just because you’re banging your head against the wall doesn’t mean that wall is not eventually gonna crack. And we have to find new ways of communicating, new ways of buttressing our reporting.

I also believe that people change all the time. And just because this is the pattern, and this is the path we’re on, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be this way forever. I mean, I guess I’m optimistic in the sense that I think, you know, we’re in a fever period right now and that the fever will break.

You know, my colleague—our colleague—Caitlin Flanagan, always says that “the truth bats last.” And I hope she’s right. It’s just harder and harder.

I mean, this calls back to a little bit of the Jeff Bezos piece in which he doesn’t acknowledge that the reason the press is mistrusted is because powerful people are trying to get ordinary citizens to mistrust the press—for their own selfish business reasons or political reasons. So we just have to keep going.

I have a lot of criticism of publications—let’s call them elite publications—that are written for, let’s say, the 20 percent most liberal portion of America and don’t even try to get to other people anymore. Like, maybe it’s a great business model. And fine. You know, everybody should do their thing. Whatever.

But I don’t feel like The Atlantic is that. I think we have to try to build a bridge between, let’s say, these two bubbles: You know, the bubble in which quote-unquote mainstream media lives and the bubble in which the hardcore Trump supporters live. It’s a frustrating question because I don’t know the answer. I haven’t heard anybody come up with a formula for this, but we’re just gonna have to keep trying because the alternative, giving up, is pure nihilism to me.

Rosin: Yeah. Well, we are days before the election. We’ve lived through a Trump presidency. People are talking about this Trump presidency returning without the guardrails of the last one. So how do you see our role, your role in that kind of administration?

Goldberg: I imagine that a coming theoretical second Trump administration is going to be somewhat to very different from the first one in that—I mean, you’ve heard all these clichés before: There will be no grown-ups. Trump and his people know how to manipulate the workings of government better. The velociraptors have learned how to turn the door handles.

You’ve heard all of the lines about it. So we can have more drama and more threats to the constitutional order and more threats to what we used to think of as normative political behavior. But I don’t see our role changing, in the sense that we’re just gonna write about it every day. And we’re gonna cover it.

And, you know, I’ve said this to the staff before: The point of journalism—or the satisfaction of journalism—is not necessarily in changing the world for the better. If you change the world through your journalism to bring more light and truth and justice into the world, great. But you can’t wake up every day assuming that’s what’s going to happen, because most of it is frustrating, just like any job in the world is going to be frustrating. And progress, however you define it, is going to be incremental, and you’re not going to see it for a while, and so on.

But I think to myself, Look—we’re in a democratic emergency. I want to be able to tell myself, as an old man, that I did everything that I could do to try to bring the country back to some kind of normalcy, to hold people who are behaving abnormally accountable.

And I want, especially, the younger people at The Atlantic to think to themselves that, 40 years from now, 50 years from now, when their grandchildren say, What did you do in that antidemocratic era? I want them to be able to say, I did everything that I could do. And that’s important to me. I held my own standards up. I held the standards of my magazine up. And I invested, in a non-nihilistic way, in the future of this country, in the future of the ideas that animate it.

And, you know, that’s enough. All you can do is try using your journalism techniques, using the techniques of journalism to bring more illumination to the things that, in this case, a Donald Trump might do.

So all we can do is go to work and write about what they’re doing and cover what they’re doing and hold it up to the light and let people judge for themselves if what they’re doing is good or bad. So, you know, it’s anticlimactic in a way. It’s not overly dramatic. The thing that we can do is go to work and do our jobs, the jobs that we were trained to do.

We were not expecting, people my age, your age, whatever—we’ve been in journalism for a while, never really expecting a presidency like the first Trump presidency and certainly what could be a second Trump presidency. Never really expecting anything like this, but here we are.

So just cover the hell out of it, and make sure that you have put into the public record truth and reality and evidence, and, you know, tell truth to power. You know, you can’t do anything more than that. And so all we’re going to do is just do what we do.

Rosin: I really appreciate that. I feel exactly the same way. There are words out there like anxious, afraid, apathetic. I don’t feel any of those things. I feel alert.

Goldberg: Alertness is great. We have the tools to alert people to these changes. We don’t have to sit there just passively or impotently. So work as hard as you can to bring as much information and analysis to people who need it. That’s great—great to have a job, great to have a role.

Rosin: Thank you for being inspirational, Jeff.

Goldberg: You want me to sing outtakes from Sound of Music?

Rosin: I wouldn’t mind if you could stand on the desk while doing it. It would be even better.

Goldberg: “Climb Every Mountain?” I’ll sing “The Battle Hymn of the”—look: If we have another Trump presidency, we’re gonna get the staff every morning on Zoom to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” together.

Rosin: Sounds good. I’ll practice.

Goldberg: Yeah. I’m sure people are gonna really enjoy that.

Rosin: Sounds good. (Laughs.) All right, Jeff. Thank you so much for joining us.

Goldberg: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Happy Halloween. Get lots of candy. And don’t forget to vote. Thank you for listening.

The Los Angeles Dodgers clinch the 2024 World Series after recovering from 5-0 down to beat the New York Yankees 7-6 at Yankee Stadium and seal a 4-1 series victory.

Ohtani fandom has boosted tourism in Los Angeles and more Japanese-language tours of Dodgers Stadium

The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are at the centre of a heated debate about endorsement and press freedom.

The Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov was a zealous defender of all human rights, but there was one he spoke about as a first among equals: the right to emigrate. This was, he wrote, “an essential condition of spiritual freedom.” The power to vote with your feet, to exit if you so choose, gave the individual a veto over the state. So many other rights are important for an open society—expressing your political views, worshiping freely, assembling without constraint—but all have much less meaning if (as in the Soviet Union) you can’t even decide where to live.

I find myself, in these nail-biting days before the election, prioritizing in much the same way. What rights matter most? What conditions are necessary for a democratic society to exist and persist? What material makes up the floor on which we all stand?

The freedom to dissent ranks near the top for me—and reading the recently published memoirs of Alexei Navalny, an intellectual descendant of Sakharov, only made it seem more precious; you can pay with your life under a government that cares little for this freedom. Luckily, we in the United States live—for the time being—in an open society, and if you want to know what dissent looks like in such a society, the past year has offered a pretty good illustration. The American left, in its anger over the administration’s laissez-faire approach to Israel—and in response to the horror taking place in Gaza—has protested loudly, disruptively, and without cease. Certainly there have been excesses, but these activists have also shown very clearly that, in a democracy, protest can shift opinion (if not yet policy).

But I’m also afraid that these dissenters—progressives and, crucially, hundreds of thousands of Muslim Americans in those all-important Midwest swing states—are approaching the election with a self-defeating plan, one they surely think of as a continuation of this protest. It is not. By neglecting to consider democracy’s basic conditions, they might end up undermining their ability to ever protest again.

They are livid over Kamala Harris’s steady military support for Israel, and they are grieving over the tens of thousands of civilians killed in Gaza. We have all spent a year watching unrelenting carnage—and for Arab American voters in particular, the victims in the rubble are (or could be) friends and family members. Their attitude is not just ideological. It is visceral. It is personal. “I feel very guilty,” one Michigan voter, Sereene Hijazi, told The New York Times. “A lot of Arab Americans feel guilty because, like, we’re here, we’re safe, but it’s our tax dollars that are killing our relatives and people we know.” As a response, Hijazi has made her choice for 2024: the third-party candidate Jill Stein.

[Read: How the Trump resistance gave up]

This is the plan: Either opt out of voting, choose a third-party candidate, or pull the lever for Donald Trump, all as a form of protest. Any of these choices would, if they happened on a large enough scale, have the effect of swinging the election to Trump. If that seems unlikely, consider the fact that one activist is already taking credit for pressuring a national newspaper to pull a Harris endorsement. Nika Soon-Shiong, the daughter of the owner of the Los Angeles Times, has said that her father’s controversial decision was “an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.” (Patrick Soon-Shiong has denied that his daughter had any influence over his move.)

For some, their protest vote or abstention will be a matter of revenge, punishing Harris for her position. And as an emotional reaction to mass death, this is understandable. But these voters would also be punishing themselves. Regardless of whether you think Trump would do more to protect Palestinian lives—an absurd notion, on the evidence—a more fundamental issue is at stake.

Many of Harris’s rallies have been interrupted by demonstrations. A protest was set up outside the Democratic National Convention to demand that a pro-Palestinian speaker be allowed to address the delegates (a request that was denied). Campuses have been boiling over with encampments, occupations, and physical confrontations. If this year of protest has not nudged policy much—though Harris’s rhetoric is noticeably different from Joe Biden’s in many respects—it has lodged the issue of Gaza in the American consciousness. A recent Pew poll from early October found an uptick since last December in the number of Americans who think Israel has gone too far in its military response.

In other words, protest matters. But we should not take for granted that we will always be able to protest. Trump has made it clear how he views dissent. He has mused about throwing protesters in jail. He wants to revive the 1792 Insurrection Act so he can sic the military on those who might object to his policies. His defense secretary Mike Esper said that Trump proposed shooting demonstrators in the legs during the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd.

This avowed, even gleeful, willingness to violently suppress any dissent from what Trump calls the “enemy within” is the main reason 13 of his own former staffers signed a letter warning about Trump’s “desire for absolute, unchecked power.”

[Read: The people who don’t read political news]

Back in May, when Biden was still the Democratic candidate for president but the progressive anger was no less intense over Gaza, Jewish Currents, a progressive magazine, organized a panel discussion for those on the left unsure of how they might vote in the upcoming election. One comment, from Waleed Shahid, the former spokesperson and communications director for Justice Democrats, cut through the tone of sorrowful worry. When he was asked whom he would vote for if he was living in a swing state, he didn’t hesitate with this answer: “When you’re voting for an elected official in this country, you are voting for the conditions under which you would organize.”

Those conditions should be front of mind; they make everything else possible—and there is only one way to guarantee them.

To those who think that Trump would prove to be a better choice for peace in the region and the fate of Palestinian lives, I’m not sure what to say. His entire approach to Israel can be boiled down to what he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a call this month: “Do what you have to do.” Forget caring about Palestinian lives; he has reduced the very word Palestinian to a slur, lobbing it at his political rivals. I would like to remind Amer Ghalib, the Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, who is endorsing Trump because of the former president’s vague promise to “end the chaos” in the Middle East, of two words: Muslim ban. This policy of excluding anyone from a Muslim country, even tourists, from entering the United States is now one Trump wants to expand.

And if this isn’t convincing enough, remember that there are factions that would apply pressure on President Harris over this issue. If the country is inching toward a more pro-Palestinian stance, the struggle will take place within the Democratic Party. Harris is movable. Who among the Republicans will put pressure on Trump to care about Palestinians? Tom Cotton? Marco Rubio? Stephen Miller?

Gazans are still dying. And this makes it hard to think first about maintaining democratic norms. The instinct is to scream, which in this case might mean choosing Stein or Trump or no one at all. But a scream is a reflex, not a strategy. The left and those who care about the Palestinian future need to live to fight another day on this issue, and to do so they need to exist in a country where it is possible to fight at all.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are one win away from clinching their second World Series in five years, after a 4-2 victory over the New York Yankees gave them a 3-0 lead in the best-of-seven series.

In this extremely tight presidential race, the big surprise of the fall campaign has turned out to be the failure of two major newspapers to deliver expected endorsements of Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump. With voting well under way in many states, the Los Angeles Times’ owner and The Washington Post’s publisher made inexcusably late announcements that they had become suddenly disenchanted with the entire notion of endorsing presidential candidates.

Withholding support for Harris after everything that both newspapers have reported about Trump’s manifest unfitness for office looks to me like plain cowardice. Although I served on the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board for 18 years, I believe one can reasonably question the value of endorsements. Still, the timing here invites speculation that these papers are preparing for a possible Trump victory by signaling a willingness to accommodate the coming administration rather than resist it.

At each paper, the editorial board had readied a draft or outline of a Harris endorsement and was waiting (and waiting and waiting) for final approval. On Wednesday, the L.A. Times editorials editor, Mariel Garza, told her team, including me, that the owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, would not permit any endorsement to run. She then resigned in protest.

As thousands of angry Times readers canceled their subscriptions, Soon-Shiong publicly claimed on X to have asked the editorial board to write an analysis of “all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate” during their respective White House tenures. But he said the board “chose to remain silent.”

Nonsense. We made no such choice. We were ready to endorse Harris, and Soon-Shiong’s post on X was the first time I or my fellow editorial writers had heard anything about a side-by-side analysis. Having been so casually thrown under the bus, I resigned Thursday. My colleague Karin Klein also announced that she would step down.

On Friday, the Post publisher and CEO, William Lewis, published a statement that his paper, too, would not endorse in the presidential race, now or ever again. A member of the Post editorial board resigned. Subscribers canceled.

[Read: Don’t cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.]

Remember, this is the same news organization that, during the first Trump administration, adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” It can also die in broad daylight. In this year’s race, a non-choice ignores Trump’s singular unfitness for office, demonstrated time and again through his dishonesty, his false claims to have won the 2020 election, his criminal convictions, his impeachable offenses, his race-baiting, his threats of retaliation against his opponents, and many other features that make him a danger to the nation.

Lewis and Soon-Shiong both explained that they wanted to let voters make their own decisions.

I hear some version of that irritating statement every four years, although it typically comes from readers who ask why editorial boards don’t just deliver the facts, the way news stories are supposed to, leaving judgment up to readers. Publishers and newspaper owners ought to know better.

Editorials express a newspaper’s institutional viewpoint, based on a clearly articulated set of values and expressed by logical (and sometimes emotional) arguments supported by evidence. In a process unique in journalism, they are shaped by daily back-and-forth discussions among editorial writers. The editorial board is separate from the newsroom, where reporters are supposed to keep their opinions to themselves.

Endorsements and other editorials are a lot like a lawyer’s closing argument to a jury after a long trial with numerous witnesses and exhibits. They remind readers of everything they’ve read, seen, and heard, and then they assemble it all in a persuasive presentation. They make a case. And then readers decide.

The Times editorial board went more than three decades without endorsing in presidential races, largely because readers and the newsroom were so outraged by the endorsement of Richard Nixon for reelection in 1972 that publishers were too cautious (or rather, too chicken) to again take a stand. But soon after I arrived at the Times, the editorial board promised to start endorsing for president again in the 2008 primary. We argued—in an editorial, of course—that if we purported to support transparency, voter engagement, and civic participation, then we had an obligation to make a decision and vigorously defend our choice.

In a pre-endorsement series of editorials, we invited readers to examine a set of foundational ideas such as “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness,” and to question how those and other principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution applied to current challenges. Then we measured the primary candidates against those values, and made our case for the relatively unknown Barack Obama.

Some critics argue that editorials don’t change anyone’s vote, but that’s not the point. Even voters who already have made up their mind often look for a well-reasoned explanation of why their choice is the right one. And let’s not be so certain that a strong argument on an editorial page, even one from California or the District of Columbia, won’t affect the outcome of a close race that could be won or lost by just a few votes in one precinct in Pennsylvania.

[Paul Farhi: Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?]

Soon-Shiong’s alternative, a non-choice pro-and-con matrix, wouldn’t be an editorial. It would be as if an attorney decided not to bother with a closing argument and said instead, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here are some reasons you should rule for my client, and also a bunch of reasons to rule against him.” Nor does the proposed side-by-side analysis of Trump’s and Harris’s policies make much sense on its own terms. Trump as president was the top policy maker during his time in office. Harris, as vice president, has not been a policy maker at all, so the comparison would be inept. An editorial board would identify that flaw immediately. Soon-Shiong may have missed it, but I find myself wondering whether he wanted to direct the outcome of the endorsement.

In short-circuiting the Times editorial board, Soon-Shiong’s message has become only more incoherent. He said Thursday that his goal was to avoid political division. But his adult daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, said in a series of X posts and in a Saturday New York Times story that the family met and collectively decided against endorsing Harris to protest the vice president’s support for Israel. Not true, Patrick Soon-Shiong told the Los Angeles Times on Saturday.

“Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion,” but not for the Times, he said.

Instead of a forthright, well-argued editorial, readers are left with an indecipherable message and journalistic failure. Someone ought to write about it. It might make a good editorial.

The trees have a job: to blush their leaves orange or red and then drop them to the lawns and pavements below. If you are one of the many millions of Americans who own their homes, you may soon be faced with the question of what to do with all that foliage. Maybe you will rake your leaves into piles. Maybe you will let them decay into the ground. And maybe—just maybe—you will risk your hard-earned reputation by gusting them away with a leaf blower.

For decades now, the dust and din of blowing leaves has infuriated Americans, sometimes to the point of violence. “The gas leaf blower is by all measures, and without dispute, harmful,” a New York Times op-ed announced in 2022, summing up the new consensus. Although the blower’s squall rages and enrages year-round, pushing snow, grass, and dirt alike, autumn gives it special purpose. The very first commercial blower, from the 1970s, was touted on these grounds: “In fall, it rounds up a yardful of leaves in no time.” That makes now a perfect time for me to say what nobody else would dare to: The leaf blower—that is, the machine itself, as it’s used for blowing leaves—is a force for good.

But Americans are also right: In many ways, leaf blowers are truly terrible. They are loud, which is irritating to those far away and can damage the hearing of anyone nearby. And they’re inhospitable: Blowers hurtle dirt and debris, along with other particles, through public space; they create a gale unnecessary for sidewalks.

This is why America has witnessed a fearsome blower blowback for about as long as we’ve had blowers. In the 1980s, some homeowners’ associations and municipalities started trying to curb the things. Cities moved to ban them entirely. In 1997, Los Angeles passed an ordinance to limit their use within the city. The entire state of California now prohibits the sale of new gas-powered blowers, which is the type that The Atlantic’s James Fallows helped banish from Washington, D.C.

The more recent efforts to get rid of blowers have focused on the combustion engines used in many models. These pollute the air as much as an automobile. In recent years, an alternative has emerged in the form of cleaner, electric blowers, with lithium-ion batteries for power, that are strong enough to push a mound of dried-out vegetation to the street. But even if these new devices can solve the blower’s air-pollution problem, they do not address its many other irritations. Battery blowers can be just as loud as those that run on gas, according to Kris Kiser, the president and CEO of the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute. Testing finds that some may hit 90 decibels—that’s louder than city traffic—when they’re producing enough air pressure to, well, blow stuff. And just like the old-fashioned blowers, their blasts end up spreading dirt and dust and leaves well beyond their users’ targets.

Yet the blower’s many faults must be weighed against the elemental fact that evicting fallen leaves from your property in late October is a heinous chore, and one that cannot be accomplished easily via mulcher, mower, rake, or bonfire. A leaf blower, though, is as suited to this purpose as a toaster is to browning bread: It is a magnificent, purpose-built device for sending yard detritus from one place to another. I’ll grant that there would be certain benefits, to the Earth and to our own well-being if we could move all of our leaves by hand. The same is true of travel: Walking to another state would do far less damage to the world than flying in an airplane. But the convenience of a blower, like the convenience of jet-propelled flight, is sometimes worth the cost.

But leaf blowers, like airplanes, can be grossly overused. The problem that a blower solves so beautifully—the need for clearing leaves—is, or should be, limited in time: Several blowing sessions should suffice, sprinkled in from October to December. I submit that the case against the blower has less to do with leaves than with all the other things that people like to push around with air, at all the other times of year.

[Read: Your TV is too good for you]

In particular, it has to do with grass. Consider the “mow and blow,” a standard offering for yard work, in which a crew will trim a lawn, then blast it clear of clumps of trimmings with artificial wind. A crew that did a “mow” but not the “blow” would have to spend a lot of time collecting clippings, as well as dust and dirt, in bags and then disposing of them. That’s why gardeners in Los Angeles, who made their living from this work, were among the most vocal opponents of that city’s blower ban during the ’90s. (The city and its landscapers skirmished for years.) Even to this day, the loudest, most annoying blowing comes from this commercial work, Kiser told me. Yard-service companies may end up using four to eight blowers at a time, as early as 5 o’clock in the morning. “That’s where you get in trouble,” he said.

Demand for this noisy work is high: Some 40 percent of U.S. households with lawns hired out yard services in 2017. During the pandemic, American homeowners started doing more of their own yard maintenance, Kiser told me, and some bought leaf blowers of their own. That trend may now be over, but blower sales are still increasing worldwide, especially as new battery-equipped models become more powerful. In other words, the blowing bubble may still be growing.

[Read: How Starbucks perfected autumn]

Excessive use of blowers, not the tools themselves, should be taken as the villain here. The “mow and blow” could be extinguished, or at least scaled back. Homeowners and the people they hire ought to blow much less often, and for shorter durations. They could bag their grass, or cut it frequently enough that the clippings remain modest and would not have to be dispersed by air. This would allow everyone to save their clamor for the autumn, when the blower’s power and fitness for purpose could be fully, gloriously, and temporarily unleashed.

Some will ask why this temperance with blowing should be limited. Why not have a full-year ban instead? Why not keep our fallen leaves in place, as a habitat for bees, butterflies, and moths? For that matter, why not abandon our water-hungry yards entirely? These fights seek moral victories. But a practical solution will yield better results, because yards and landscaping are still entrenched in American life. We just need ways to tend to them that are environmentally and socially aware.

My premise is simple: Leaf blowers are for blowing leaves, and little else.

Well, it’s that time again: Millions of Americans are stress-eating while clicking “Refresh” on 538’s presidential forecast, hoping beyond hope that the little red or blue line will have made a tiny tick upward. Some may be clutching themselves in the fetal position, chanting under their breath: “There’s a good new poll out of Pennsylvania.”

The stakes of this election are sky-high, and its outcome is not knowable in advance—a combination that most of us find deeply discomfiting. People crave certainty, and there’s just one place to look for it: in the data. Earlier humans might have turned to oracles or soothsayers; we have Nate Silver. But the truth is that polling—and the models that rely primarily on polling to forecast the election result—cannot confidently predict what will happen on November 5.

The widespread perception that polls and models are raw snapshots of public opinion is simply false. In fact, the data are significantly massaged based on possibly reasonable, but unavoidably idiosyncratic, judgments made by pollsters and forecasting sages, who interpret and adjust the numbers before presenting them to the public. They do this because random sampling has become very difficult in the digital age, for reasons I’ll get into; the numbers would not be representative without these corrections, but every one of them also introduces a margin for human error.

Most citizens see only the end product: a preposterously precise statistic, such as the notion that Donald Trump has a 50.2 percent—not 50.3 percent, mind you—chance of winning the presidency. (Why stop there? Why not go to three decimal points?) Such numerical precision gives the false impression of certainty where there is none.

[Read: The world is falling apart. Blame the flukes.]

Early American political polls were unscientific but seemingly effective. In the early 20th century, The Literary Digest, a popular magazine in its day, sent sample ballots to millions of its readers. By this method, the magazine correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election from 1916 until 1936. In that year, for the contest between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alf Landon, the Digest sent out roughly 10 million sample ballots and received an astonishing 2.4 million back (a response rate of 24 percent would be off the charts by modern standards). Based on those responses, the Digest predicted that FDR would receive a drubbing, winning just 41 percent of the vote. Instead, he won 61 percent, carrying all but two states. Readers lost faith in the Digest (it went out of business two years later).

The conventional wisdom was that the poll failed because in addition to its readers, the Digest selected people from directories of automobile and telephone ownership, which skewed the sample toward the wealthy—particularly during the Great Depression, when cars and phones were luxuries. That is likely part of the explanation, but more recent analysis has pointed to a different problem: who responded to the poll and who didn’t. For whatever reason, Landon supporters were far more likely than FDR supporters to send back their sample ballots, making the poll not just useless, but wildly misleading. This high-profile error cleared the way for more “scientific” methods, such as those pioneered by George Gallup, among others.

The basic logic of the new, more scientific method was straightforward: If you can generate a truly random sample from the broader population you are studying—in which every person has an equally likely chance of being included in the poll—then you can derive astonishingly accurate results from a reasonably small number of people. When those assumptions are correct and the poll is based on a truly random sample, pollsters need only about 1,000 people to produce a result with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

To produce reasonably unbiased samples, pollsters would randomly select people from the telephone book and call them. But this method became problematic when some people began making their phone numbers unlisted; these people shared certain demographic characteristics, so their absence skewed the samples. Then cellphones began to replace landlines, and pollsters started using “random-digit dialing,” which ensured that every active line had an equal chance of being called. For a while, that helped.

But the matter of whom pollsters contacted was not the only difficulty. Another was how those people responded, and why. A distortion known as social-desirability bias is the tendency of respondents to lie to pollsters about their likely voting behavior. In America, that problem was particularly acute around race: If a campaign pitted a minority candidate against a white candidate, some white respondents might lie and say that they’d vote for the minority candidate to avoid being perceived as racist. This phenomenon, contested by some scholars, is known as the Bradley Effect, named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley—a Black politician who was widely tipped to become governor of California based on pre-election polling, but narrowly lost instead. To deal with the Bradley Effect, many pollsters switched from live callers to robocalls, hoping that voters would be more honest with a computer than another person.

But representative sampling has continued to become more difficult. In an age of caller ID and smartphones, along with persistent junk and nuisance calls, few people answer when they see unfamiliar numbers. Most Americans spend much of their time online, but there are no reliable methods to get a truly random sample from the internet. (Consider, for example, how subscribers of The Atlantic differ from the overall American population, and it’s obvious why a digital poll on this site would be worthless at making predictions about the overall electorate.)

These shifts in technology and social behavior have created an enormous problem known as nonresponse bias. Some pollsters release not just findings but total numbers of attempted contacts. Take, for example, this 2018 New York Times poll within Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District. The Times reports that it called 53,590 people in order to get 501 responses. That’s a response rate lower than 1 percent, meaning that the Times pollsters had to call roughly 107 people just to get one person to answer their questions. What are the odds that those rare few who answered the phone are an unskewed, representative sample of likely voters? Zilch. As I often ask my undergraduate students: How often do you answer when you see an unknown number? Now, how often do you think a lonely elderly person in rural America answers their landline? If there’s any systematic difference in behavior, that creates a potential polling bias.

To cope, pollsters have adopted new methodologies. As the Pew Research Center notes, 61 percent of major national pollsters used different approaches in 2022 than they did in 2016. This means that when Americans talk about “the polls” being off in past years, we’re not comparing apples with apples. One new polling method is to send text messages with links to digital surveys. (Consider how often you’d click a link from an unknown number to understand just how problematic that method is.) Many pollsters rely on a mix of approaches. Some have started using online “opt-in” methods, in which respondents choose to take a survey and are typically paid a small amount for participating. This technique, too, has raised reasonable questions about accuracy: One of my colleagues at University College London, Thomas Gift, tested opt-in methods and found that nearly 82 percent of participants in his survey likely lied about themselves in order to qualify for the poll and get paid. Pew further found that online opt-in polls do a poor job of capturing the attitudes of young people and Hispanic Americans.

No matter the method, a pure, random sample is now an unattainable ideal—even the aspiration is a relic of the past. To compensate, some pollsters try to design samples representative of known demographics. One common approach, stratification, is to divide the electorate into subgroups by gender, race, age, etc., and ensure that the sample includes enough of each “type” of voter. Another involves weighting some categories of respondents differently from others, to match presumptions about the broader electorate. For example, if a polling sample had 56 percent women, but the pollster believed that the eventual electorate would be 52 percent women, they might weigh male respondents slightly more heavily in the adjusted results.

[Read: The asterisk on Kamala Harris’s poll numbers]

The problem, of course, is that nobody knows who will actually show up to vote on November 5. So these adjustments may be justified, but they are inherently subjective, introducing another possible source of human bias. If women come out to vote in historically high numbers in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, for example, the weighting could be badly off, causing a major polling error.

The bottom line is that modern pollsters are trying to correct for known forms of possible bias in their samples by making subjective adjustments to the data. If their judgments are correct, then their polls might be accurate. But there’s no way to know beforehand whether their assumptions about, say, turnout by demographic group are wise or not.

Forecasters then take that massaged polling data and feed it into a model that’s curated by a person—or team of people—who makes further subjective assessments. For example, the 538 model adjusts its forecasts based on polls plus what some in the field call “the fundamentals,” such as historical trends around convention polling bounces, or underlying economic data. Most forecasters also weight data based on how particular pollsters performed in earlier elections. Each adjustment is an educated guess based on past patterns. But nobody knows for sure whether past patterns are predictive of future results. Enough is extraordinary about this race to suspect that they may not be.

More bad news: Modern polling often misses the mark even when trying to convey uncertainty, because pollsters grossly underestimate their margins of error. Most polls report a plus or minus margin of, say, 3 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval. This means that if a poll reports that Trump has the support of 47 percent of the electorate, then the reported margin of error suggests that the “real” number likely lies between 44 percent (minus three) and 50 percent (plus three). If the confidence interval is correct, that spread of 44 to 50 should capture the actual result of the election about 95 percent of the time. But the reality is less reassuring.

In a 2022 research paper titled “Election Polls Are 95 Percent Confident but Only 60 Percent Accurate,” Aditya Kotak and Don Moore of UC Berkeley analyzed 6,000 polls from 2008 through 2020. They found that even with just one week to go before Election Day, only about six in 10 polls captured the end result within their stated margin of error. Four in 10 times, the polling data fell outside that window. The authors conclude that to justify a 95 percent confidence interval, pollsters should “at least double” their reported margins of error—a move that would be statistically wise but render polling virtually meaningless in close elections. After all, if a margin of error doubled to six percentage points, then a poll finding that Harris had 50 percent support would indicate that the “true” number was somewhere between 44 percent (a Trump landslide) and 56 percent (a Harris landslide).

Alas, the uncertainty doesn’t end there. Unlike many other forms of measurement, polls can change what they’re measuring. Sticking a thermometer outside doesn’t make the weather hotter or colder. But poll numbers can and do shift voting behavior. For example, studies have shown that perceived poll momentum can make people more likely to vote for the surging party or candidate in a “bandwagon” effect. Take the 2012 Republican primaries, when social conservatives sought an alternative to Mitt Romney and were split among candidates. A CNN poll conducted the night before the Iowa caucus showed Rick Santorum in third place. Santorum went on to win the caucus, likely because voters concluded from the poll that he was the most electable challenger.

The truth is that even after election results are announced, we may not really know which forecasters were “correct.” Just as The Literary Digest accurately predicted the winner of presidential races with a deeply flawed methodology, sometimes a bad approach is just lucky, creating the illusion of accuracy. And neither polling nor electoral dynamics are stable over time. Polling methodology has shifted radically since 2008; voting patterns and demographics are ever-changing too. Heck, Barack Obama won Indiana in 2008; recent polls suggest that Harris is losing there by as much as 17 points. National turnout was 55 percent in 2016 and 63 percent in 2020. Polls are trying to hit a moving target with instruments that are themselves constantly changing. For all of these reasons, a pollster who was perfectly accurate in 2008 could be wildly off in 2024.

In other words, presidential elections are rare, contingent, one-off events. Predicting their outcome does not yield enough comparable data points to support any pollster’s claim to exceptional foresight, rather than luck. Trying to evaluate whether a forecasting model is “good” just from judging its performance on the past four presidential elections is a bit like trying to figure out whether a coin is “fair” or “rigged” from just four coin flips. It’s impossible.

[Read: The man who’s sure that Harris will win]

The social scientists Justin Grimmer, Dean Knox, and Sean Westwood recently published research supporting this conclusion. They write: “We demonstrate that scientists and voters are decades to millennia away from assessing whether probabilistic forecasting provides reliable insights into election outcomes.” (Their research has sparked fierce debate among scholars about the wisdom of using probabilistic forecasting to measure rare and idiosyncratic events such as presidential elections.)

Probabilistic presidential forecasts are effectively unfalsifiable in close elections, meaning that they can’t be proved wrong. Nate Silver’s model in 2016 suggested that Hillary Clinton had a 71.4 percent chance of victory. That wasn’t necessarily “wrong” when she lost: After all, as Silver pointed out to the Harvard Gazette, events with a 28.6 percent probability routinely happen—more frequently than one in four times. So was his 2016 presidential model “wrong”? Or was it bang-on accurate, but an unusual, lower-probability event took place? There’s no way of knowing for sure.

The pollsters and forecasters who are studying the 2024 election are not fools. They are skilled analysts attempting some nearly impossible wizardry by making subjective adjustments to control for possible bias while forecasting an uncertain future. Their data suggest that the race is a nail-biter—and that may well be the truth. But nobody—not you, not me, not the betting markets, not Nate Silver—knows what’s going to happen on November 5.

The Los Angeles Dodgers enjoy a 4-2 win over the New York Yankees to take a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven World Series.