Americans are headed to the polls today, to cast their ballots in a crucial election. People are anxious, hopeful, and scared about the stakes of the election and its aftermath. But this is not the only such electoral test that American democracy has faced. An earlier contest has much to say to the present.

The presidential election of 1800 was a crisis of the first order, featuring extreme polarization, wild accusations, and name-calling—the Federalist John Adams was labeled “hermaphroditical” by Republicans, and Federalists, in turn, warned that Thomas Jefferson would destroy Christianity. People in two states began stockpiling arms to take the government for Jefferson if necessary, seeing him as the intended winner. Federalist members of Congress considered overturning the election; thousands of people surrounded the Capitol to learn the outcome; and an extended, agonizing tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr took 36 votes to resolve in the House of Representatives.

We’re not looking at a replay of the 1800 election; history doesn’t repeat itself. But two key components of that electoral firestorm are speaking loudly to the present: the threat of violence, and the proposed solution to the electoral turmoil after the contest’s close.

The unfortunate truth is that democratic governance is often violent. When the promises and reach of democracy expand, it almost always brings an antidemocratic blowback, sometimes including threats and violence. Black men gaining the right to vote during the Civil War was met with bluntly hostile threats, intimidation, and voter suppression during Reconstruction. The advancing demands for the civil rights of Black Americans in the 1960s led to vicious beatings and murders. In both eras, white Americans who felt entitled to power—and who felt threatened by the expanding rights and opportunities granted to racial minorities through democratic means—resorted to violence.

[Elaine Godfrey: The real election risk comes later]

At the end of the 18th century, the Federalists were the party of extreme entitlement. They favored a strong central government with the power to enforce its precepts and were none too comfortable with a democratic politics of resistance, protest, and pushback. They wanted Americans to vote for their preferred candidates, then step aside and let their betters govern.

When Jefferson and Burr—both Democratic Republicans—received an equal number of electoral votes, the Federalists were horrified. They faced the nightmare choice between Jefferson, a notoriously anti Federalist Republican, or Burr, an unpredictable and opportunistic politico with unknown loyalties. They largely preferred Burr, who seemed far more likely to compromise with the Federalists.

Tied elections are thrown to the House of Representatives to decide, with each state getting one vote. Given this chance to steal the election, Federalists inside and outside Congress began plotting—perhaps they could prevent the election of either candidate and elect a president pro tem until they devised a better solution.

Federalist talk of intervention didn’t go unnoticed. Governors in Pennsylvania and Virginia began to stockpile arms in case the government needed to be taken for Jefferson. This was no subversive effort; Jefferson himself knew of their efforts, telling James Madison and James Monroe that the threat of resistance “by arms” was giving the Federalists pause. “We thought it best to declare openly & firmly, one & all, that the day such an act [of usurpation] passed the middle states would arm.”

Ultimately, there was no violence. But the threat was very real—a product of the fact that Federalists felt so entitled to political power that they were unwilling to lose by democratic means. And losing is a key component of democracy. Elections are contests with winners and losers. Democracy relies on these free and fair contests to assign power according to the preferences of the American people. People who feel entitled to power are hostile to these contests. They won’t accept unknown outcomes. They want inevitability, invulnerability, and immunity, so they strike out at structures of democracy. They scorn electoral proceedings, manipulate the political process, and threaten their opponents. Sometimes, the end result is violence. In the election of 2024, this is the posture adopted by former President Donald Trump and his supporters. As in 1800, a steadfast sense of entitlement to power is threatening our democratic process.

The election of 1800 was just the fourth presidential contest in American history, and only the election of 1796, the first without George Washington as a candidate, had been contested. After the crisis of 1800, some people sought better options. Unsettled by the uproar of 1800, at least one Federalist favored ending popular presidential elections altogether. Thinking back to the election a few years later, the Connecticut Federalist James Hillhouse proposed amending the constitutional mode of electing presidents. The president should be chosen from among acting senators, he suggested. A box could be filled with balls—most of them white, one of them colored— and each senator who was qualified for the presidency would proceed in alphabetical order and pull a ball from the box. The senator who drew the colored ball would be president. Chief Justice John Marshall, who agreed that presidential contests were dangerous, declared the plan as good as any other.

Most people didn’t go that far, but Federalists and Republicans alike understood that the threat posed by fiercely contested partisan elections could be dire. Although the presidency had been peacefully transferred from one party to another, the road to that transfer had been rocky. Stockpiling arms? Threats of armed resistance? Seizing the presidency? The entire nation rocked by political passions, seemingly torn in two?

One Republican asked Jefferson in March 1801: What would have happened if there had been the “non election of a president”? Jefferson’s response is noteworthy. In that case, he wrote, “the federal government would have been in the situation of a clock or watch run down … A convention, invited by the republican members of Congress … would have been on the ground in 8 weeks, would have repaired the constitution where it was defective, and wound it up again.”

The political process would save the nation. A convention. Perhaps amending the Constitution. The solution to the crisis, Jefferson argued, lay in tried-and-true constitutional processes of government. As he put it, they were a “peaceable & legitimate resource, to which we are in the habit of implicit obedience.”

[David A. Graham: How is it this close?]

And indeed, that is the purpose of the Constitution, a road map of political processes. As Americans, we agree to abide by its standards or use constitutional and legal political means to change them. When people attack the Constitution—threaten it, ignore it, violate it—they are striking a blow to the constitutional pact that holds us together as a nation. We don’t often think about this pact, or even realize that it’s there—until it’s challenged.

Which brings us to the present. Today’s election presents a stark choice. Americans can either respect the basic constitutional structures of our government, or trample them with denial and lies. The Constitution is far from perfect. It needs amending. But it is our procedural starting point for change.

By voting, you are signaling your belief in this process. You are declaring that you believe in the opportunities presented by democracy, even if they sometimes must be fought for. Democracy isn’t an end point; it’s a process. This election is our opportunity to pledge our allegiance to that process—to the constitutional pact that anchors our nation. The choice is ours.

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Why are people frustrated by high levels of immigration? As refugee crises proliferate, this has become a central political question. In order to justify anti-immigration policy or rationalize restrictionist sentiment, commentators and elected officials have repeatedly returned to one hypothesis: Immigration must be bad for American workers.

There’s just one problem: This hypothesis is wrong. Economists have studied this question repeatedly, in a variety of contexts and in every segment of the population, and they have found that the demand effect consistently outweighs the supply effect. Simply put, when immigrants come to a place looking for jobs, they also demand goods and services—thus creating jobs for native-born workers. Immigrants need legal services and taxi drivers; they need groceries and cars. The question has always been which effect is bigger. And the literature has resoundingly answered that the demand effect wins out.

This doesn’t explain away all immigration worries. But it should force politicians to seriously reckon with why xenophobia exists instead of resigning themselves to treating new immigrants as an economic burden, when, for example, they were actually the “sole source of growth in the U.S. working-age population in 2021 and 2022.”

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I’m joined by my colleague Rogé Karma who recently dove into the economics literature, originally expecting to find some negative effects on wages, only to be repeatedly struck by the truth: Anti-immigration sentiment has no economic justification.

“I think there is a lot of this deep discomfort with non-materialist explanations,” Rogé argues. “I think one of the most revealing things here is that the demographic that is most opposed to immigration are older folks living in rural areas, many of whom are retired. And the people who tend to be most supportive of immigration are working-age people living in big cities where immigrants are more common. So if you thought, Okay, this is a product of the people who immigrants are directly competing with … you would think, Oh, this would show up where the immigrants are, and it doesn’t.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: It’s Election Day, and in place of any exit-poll astrology, we’re going to talk about something that’s been a driving force in the campaign: immigration, specifically the research about the relationship between immigration and wages.

A common line bandied about in politics is that immigration reduces the wages of native-born Americans. It’s most commonly been pushed by restrictionists on the right, like J. D. Vance and Donald Trump.

J. D. Vance: And then I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers. A lot of people will go home if they can't work for less than minimum wage in our own country. And by the way, that will be really good for our workers who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day’s work.

Donald Trump: Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African American and Latino workers.

Demsas: However, I’ve noticed a growing openness to the idea that immigration hurts American workers, not just from longtime restrictionists, but also from Democrats and liberals who are scarred by their loss in 2016 and fretting over the possibility of losing the 2024 election. But sometimes a lot of smoke is just a smoke bomb.

[Music]

This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I’m your host Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic, and today I’ve asked my colleague Rogé Karma to come on the show. We’re going to talk about a recent deep dive he did into the economics literature on the relationship between immigration and wages.

The common thinking goes: If you increase the supply of labor, then you’ll reduce the price of that labor. If immigrants simply weren’t allowed in, then companies would be forced to pay American workers high wages. It seems so obvious, so why does study after study find this to be so wrong?

[Music]

Rogé, welcome to the show!

Rogé Karma: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Demsas: This is one of those episodes where I’m actually having trouble deciding which narrative is the conventional narrative.

Karma: (Laughs.) It’s because you’ve been steeped in the economic literature for far too long.

Demsas: Exactly. But there’s the conventional wisdom in academic circles that immigrants do not reduce native-born wages. But that’s not, I think, the average person’s perception of this, especially if they’re listening to politicians who, on both sides of the aisle, will be kind of making these arguments.

So I want to walk through the evidence together here because, Rogé, you recently wrote a piece, and you’ve spent a big chunk of time this year diving into the research space and really trying to figure out what’s going on. Like, Where is the evidence actually leading us? And I want to start with the Mariel Boatlift. Can you tell us what that is and then what economist David Card found when he looked into it?

Karma: Of course. And the first thing I will say is: I do think there is a little bit of a man-on-the-street, common-sense view that goes something a little bit like, Well, given that there is a fixed pool of jobs in a country, if you add a bunch of foreign-born workers, they’re going to take those jobs from natives. And if you just apply Econ 101, as the supply of a good goes up, like labor, then the price of that good, i.e. wages, falls. And so I think there is a little bit of an intuitive sense that more immigrants would mean lower wages and lower employment prospects. And I think this was actually the conventional view on both sides of the aisle for much of the 20th century, in much of the economics profession for much of the 20th century, until this study came along and shattered the consensus.

And so what happened was: In 1980, Fidel Castro lifted Cuba’s ban on emigration. And that caused about 125,000 Cubans to migrate from Mariel Bay in Cuba to Miami, Florida, and about half of them settled there, which represented a 7 to 8 percent increase in the Miami workforce, which is 25 times the amount that the workforce expands due to immigration in the U.S. every year. So this is a huge change, an incredibly large change.

And years later, what the economist David Card—who will go on to win a Nobel Prize for his work in empirical economics—what he realizes is that this created a perfect version of what economists call a “natural experiment,” that because of this big one-time influx of immigrants to Miami, you could compare the trajectory of native-born wages in Miami to a variety of other cities that prior to the boatlift had similar employment and demographic trends. These include Atlanta, Los Angeles, etcetera. And I think the view was, Look—if there’s any place you’re going to see the negative effect of immigration on wages, it’s going to be with this unprecedented, large, random shock.

And that’s why the finding that Card comes to is so surprising, because he finds that the boatlift had virtually no effect on the wages of native-born workers, including those without a college degree. If you look at a chart of the wages of workers in Miami compared to most of these other cities in the U.S. at the time, there’s almost no difference. You can’t even tell the boatlift happened. And I think what that points to—and the big, overarching explanation that I think the common-sense wisdom got wrong—is that immigrants aren’t just workers. Immigrants are also consumers. They buy lots of things, like healthcare and groceries and housing.

And so at the same time that they are competing with Americans for jobs, they’re also creating more demand for those jobs. They’re creating more employment opportunities. And when you increase the demand for labor, that pushes wages up, even if you increase the supply of labor that pushes wages down. And we can talk about some ways in which this was later challenged and complicated, but I think that’s the big missing piece of the common-sense take.

Demsas: Yeah. I think there’s a level to which you have to really draw out how this works in the real world, because people come, and they’re like, Okay. Now there’s more people who want to eat at McDonald’s. You have to hire more people on shift to service that demand. There are more people demanding taxi cabs. There are more people who now need immigration-lawyer services, so that means you need more legal assistants. That means you need more paralegals. That means you need more janitors cleaning the buildings because they’re expanding into new office space.

There’s a level to which this positive flow is not intuitive to people, because it’s so downstream of the initial event, which is: People are here looking for jobs. It’s the immediate, first thing they see happening.

Karma: Exactly. But it’s funny because when we think about this in a slightly different context, it’s very intuitive. For example, you don’t see Republican politicians going to high-school or college graduations and yelling at graduates or complaining that all of these graduates are about to undermine the wages or employment prospects of adults in the labor force.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Karma: And that’s because we understand, when it comes to native-born people, like, Wait—population growth doesn’t necessarily mean less for everyone. And so I think when you take this to a slightly different context, it’s like, Oh, wait. This actually does make a lot of sense.

Demsas: Well, I think there’s one thing that I really want to draw out here. Because if you’re an individual person who’s—let’s say you are a high-school graduate. You are working in the types of service-sector jobs that are usually competing with immigrants. Maybe on net what you’re saying makes sense for the entire labor market, but doesn’t it change when you look downstream at the people who are the most likely to be competing with new immigrants for jobs?

Karma: This is exactly the right question. When I mentioned the complications earlier, this is where they come in. There is an argument that has come up in response to the Card paper and its response to a lot of the natural experiments on this. And I should say, also, in addition to the Mariel Boatlift study, there were similar experiments in the subsequent years in Israel, in France, in Denmark that all came to very similar results.

But then there was a backlash set of critiques, which was just this: Okay. On average, wages might not be affected, but what about the least-skilled, the least-educated workers? And, particularly, what about those without a high-school degree who work in the professions that are most likely to be competing with these new immigrants, most of whom—if we’re talking about, at least, undocumented immigrants—are less skilled themselves?

And this was the critique made, and has been long made, by a Harvard economist, George Borjas. And in 2015, he went back to the Card study, and he looked specifically at this group of high-school dropouts. And he found—or, at least, at the time, it seemed like he found—that actually there was a sizable negative effect on this smaller group. And again, this was the explanation: Okay, maybe on average it works out, but the supply-and-demand effects of immigrants are asymmetric.

Immigrants who are unskilled, who come into a country—they compete only with a certain subset of the least-skilled workers, but they’re spending their money broadly. So they might get a job as a lettuce picker or construction worker, but they’re spending their money on a lot more than just housing and lettuce. And so on net, they end up hurting these less-skilled workers more.

Demsas: It’s an inequality story too. All of us get the benefits, especially those of us in high-skilled jobs that aren’t really experiencing this competition, but they’re not concentrated for the lowest income.

Karma: And this is the most, I feel, poignant critique because, yes, this makes higher-skilled workers better off, but it hurts the least of us. And what is really interesting, though, is that Borjas’s debunking of Card has since been debunked.

Demsas: Oh, my gosh. Recursive debunkings. (Laughs.)

Karma: I know. This is all the fun of an academic debate. It has all the titillating content we want.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Karma: So if you look at what Borjas did, what’s interesting is he didn’t just look at high-school dropouts. He also excluded from his sample women, nonprime-age workers, and, most confusingly, Hispanics, which is sort of absurd. And his justification was that these exclusions left only the workers that were most directly competing with the Marielitos. But it left a total sample of just 17 workers per year.

Demsas: I find this fact so insane. It’s one of those things where I don’t understand what the point of extremely rigorous journal processes for econ journals are if they’re allowing something like this to go by unnoticed, unflagged.

Karma: And I think the reason is because at that point, it’s really hard to tell the difference between an actual empirical finding and just statistical noise.

Demsas: I mean, it’s 17 people.

Karma: It’s 17 people. It’s this extremely specific and hard-to-justify group. And then, what’s interesting is there’s a couple follow-up studies, one of which finds that the effect that Borjas found was because of a change in the way that the census counted Black workers and Black individuals.

Demsas: Oh, yeah.

Karma: And if you just take the way that they were measuring it before, the entire effect goes away.

Demsas: Even with those 17, the sample size?

Karma: Even with those 17.

Demsas: Wow. Okay.

Karma: But I think the broader critique is, Wait. This is ridiculous. Let’s just actually do what the critique says, which is: Let’s just look at all workers who don’t have a high-school degree. And when you actually look at that, Card’s original findings hold up. Actually, workers that lack even a high-school degree didn’t have their wages negatively affected.

And in the subsequent years after this debate, there have been other natural-experiment studies that have found the same thing. One that I really think was done quite well was on Puerto Rican immigrants after Hurricane Maria who came to Orlando. It found the same effect. It actually found, to your point, that while wages for construction workers, specifically, actually did become depressed a little bit, that was offset by a boost in the wages for leisure and hospitality workers. And so, actually, one wrinkle to this story is that maybe some sectors might experience a little bit of this. But on net, it won’t affect the entire skill group. The entire skill group ends up pretty well off. And I think this, for me, was a very counterintuitive finding. And when I asked economists about it, the leading explanation is what was described to me as “specialization plus scale.”

On paper, it looks like—and the assumption has long been—immigrants without a high-school degree are perfect substitutes for native workers without a high-school degree. But it turns out that that’s actually not true. And I think the restaurant industry is a good example of this. Take fry cooks: A bunch of new immigrants come in, and they take jobs as fry cooks working in restaurants. That might depress the wages of local-born fry cooks. But what also happens is: Because the cost of labor has gone down for fry cooks, and because now there’s all this more demand for restaurant services, you get restaurants expanding. You get more restaurants opening up.

And what happens when restaurants open up? They don’t just have to hire more fry cooks. They hire more waiters and waitresses and bartenders and chefs. And it turns out that a lot of new immigrants can’t fill those roles, because they don’t have the English skills or the tacit cultural knowledge to do so. And so, actually, if you were a native-born worker and you just stayed a fry cook, you might have seen your wages depressed, but you’re actually far more likely to have gotten a job in one of these professions that is now more common, that actually pays more, because immigrants have entered.

Demsas: So you get promoted.

Karma: Exactly.

Demsas: I think the other group of people that people often point to as being harmed by this are actually recent immigrants, right? It may be the case that there’s not a substitution effect between native-born workers and foreign-born workers. But if you are the first person off the Mariel Boatlift, and then the thousandth person is coming off, you guys are probably competing.

I always find this a bit of a weird argument because people usually talking about this are immigration restrictionists. Are they taking the position of the most-recent immigrants who’ve come to this country?

Karma: Yeah. Don’t you care about all the other immigrants?

Demsas: Yeah. Yeah. What’s going on there?

Karma: That is a really good point. And I should say, just because these studies don’t find much of an effect on native-born wages of natives of all skill levels does not mean that immigration has no cost at all. And I think this is actually one of the most-important, most-consistent findings, is we do see a pretty sizable effect on the wages of other immigrants, in large part because they don’t have the substitution effect.

Another cost is inequality. A lot of these studies find that, even though a lot of lower-skilled native workers aren’t affected, immigration ends up boosting the wages of higher-skilled workers, in part because immigrants are also demanding the services of, let’s say, architects or computer programmers, etcetera. And so it’s not a huge change in inequality, but it does slightly exacerbate inequality.

And then I would say the third one is what I talked about earlier, which is if you look sector by sector. It’s very possible that a construction worker or a worker in a specific sector where a lot of immigrants come in might experience some wage losses. That is very possible. Even if the aggregate effect on an entire skill group is not negative, you can see concentrated losses.

Demsas: But this is just true of all effects, right? If the average effect is positive, 50 percent of people are below the average of all things.

I think the thing that I’m getting at here is—and one of the things I really liked about your approach to this—that you were very, very careful to try and be as fair as possible to both sides of this debate. And what I’m hearing is that there’s so much reaching you have to do to really find serious costs to immigration. Even when you do, it’s like, Slightly exacerbate inequality. Maybe there are certain industries where you have some impacts, but those people are also benefiting from the growth, and they’re also benefiting from substitution effect, etcetera.

And it’s not to just pooh-pooh all that, but I think it’s really interesting to talk about why there’s such an intense desire to find this effect. And I don’t know if you have a thought on why this narrative is so important to people, because there are other reasons that people could say they’re anti-immigration, but there’s a real desire to make it about wages. There’s a real desire to make it about economics.

Karma: Yeah. I will say: I want to definitely talk about these different reasons. And I’d be very interested in your theory, too, and I have my own. I will say, one good-faith reason for this concern, one that I think will be brought up a lot is, Well, what about when we look at history?

And so it is true, and lots of folks, including David Leonhardt, liberal columnist at The New York Times, has pointed out that during this mid-century, quote-unquote, golden-age period—1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—you saw really high wage growth for the working class. You saw a really big reduction of inequality, really fast rise in living standards, and also very low immigration. And then from the 1980s on, you see much higher levels of immigration, and you see wage stagnation for the median worker. You see an exacerbation of inequality. And so I think one thing is, If we look at history, maybe these experiments aren’t capturing everything. They’re only looking at one city at a time. And when we look at the broad sweep of American history, it really does look like this is happening.

And I think that is a critique that’s important to take seriously. But at the same time, one of the golden rules of social science is “Correlation does not equal causation,” right? There were a lot of things happening starting in the 1970s and ’80s that also affected workers, also affected inequality—everything from technological change to globalization to the weakening of labor unions and concentration of corporations. And I think a lot of those other things were going on, and I think two data points are really instructive here.

Demsas: Well, before you get into that, I actually think you’re being super generous to this argument, which I think is your MO here. I think it’s important to be intellectually generous at the front part. But I want to be very clear here: This is not looking at the broad sweep of American history. This is looking at the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s, and going, Huh. This extremely transformative time in American history, where there’s tons of growth happening because World War II is ending. Also, the World War II production, in general—lots of stuff happens, of course, following that, anti-growth stuff that we’ve talked about in this podcast in the past.

And I think it’s kind of weird and, I think, feeds into the question I was even asking you earlier about, like: There’s such an intense desire to make this true, and when you look back at the foreign-born share of the population in the United States over, actually, our long term, in 2023, 14.3 percent of Americans are foreign-born, and that’s in line—and lower—than large parts of the 19th century. So what you see in American history, when looking at the foreign-born share of the population, is: You see we’re at roughly 14.8 percent, even throughout the 1800s. You see a massive dip start to happen during the Great Depression—normal. People kind of stop emigrating when that happens. And then you don’t really see a catch-up happening until very recently.

And so there’s a level to here where I’m like, If Leonhardt and others want to make this critique, they need to then explain the entirety of the 1800s in American economic history. And I think there’s a desire not to really wade into that debate, because they’re just pointing at a simple correlation and going, I’m sure this explains it. I actually don’t find this even minimally persuasive.

Karma: I know. I think you’re totally right. And also, you don’t even have to go back to the 1800s. You can just go back, I don’t know, the past four years, where we’ve had a huge, massive surge of undocumented immigration. And at the same time, we’ve had wages at the very bottom of the income distribution rise at their fastest pace since the 1940s, a huge reduction in wage inequality.

And so even if you’re going to make the correlation argument, it’s like, Wait. The last couple of years sort of disproved this. And even over this time period that Leonhardt and others are talking about, what you have is: The places that receive the most immigrants are the places that have the least wage stagnation. It’s Texas. It’s Florida. It’s the Acela corridor. And so I think you’re right. I really wanted to put that out there because I think it is a very common argument, but it’s not one I find remotely persuasive.

Demsas: There’s one other thing that I think other folks point to a lot, and I’m going to ask you to explain it, because you’re explaining all these studies for me so nicely. But the National Academy of Sciences has a study called the “Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.” I feel like this is a calling card for a lot of folks who are pro–immigration restriction. What does it say, and what’s important about that study?

Karma: This was a large report that looked at, or at least purported to look at, a bunch of different studies that claim to be a sort of meta-analysis of a lot of the immigration literature and tried to come to a conclusion on what it all says. And the big conclusion that they came to was, when we look on average, wages are not affected, especially when we look in the long term. But there was a disagreement within the panelists over, specifically, high-school dropouts. And there’s a chart that often is linked to or is often brought up by immigration restrictionists. It is table 5-2.

Demsas: Oh my gosh, you know exactly where it is.

Karma: It shows a lot of negative numbers. And the thing that I will often remind people is: That chart is basically talking about high-school dropouts. Okay, put that aside. There are a lot of studies on there that seem to show negative effects. One of them is the Borjas study that we talked about earlier. And George Borjas was actually one of the panelists on this report, which may indicate or may give you a hint of why it turned out the way it did. But when you actually go through and look at these studies, most of them are not the kind of high-quality, natural-experiment study we’re talking about. A lot of them just focus on Black men, Hispanic men—like, very particular subgroups.

And then, also, a whole bunch of these studies are in a category of, what they’re called, “skilled-cell studies.” And these studies are different, right? They’re not looking at a specific causal link created by a natural experiment. What they’re saying is, We’re going to just look at the entire group of unskilled workers in the United States. We’re going to look at immigration flows, and then we’re going to make a bunch of assumptions, and a bunch of assumptions about the substitutability of native-born and foreign-born workers, about how fast capital adjusts. And based on those assumptions, we’re going to make big claims.

And so there was this famous other Borjas paper in the early 2000s that made the claim that when you do one of these studies, it shows really intense negative effects. And so this report that is often used, and I know this is so wonky, is just—

Demsas: We love wonky here.

Karma: Yes. But I think it is just a case study, in that listing a bunch of studies with varying qualities, looking at varying different groups, is just not the most-accurate way to do things. And then, yeah, I could go on. There are lots of other problems with it, but I just think that that is one of the ones that frustrates me the most and frustrates a lot of the economists who I spoke to for this piece.

Demsas: I asked you a question earlier, and now I’m just going to give you the answer that I have to it, which is this question about why it’s so persistent, people desire it. One of my theories for this is that there’s a real desire to sane wash anti-immigrant sentiment.

When large parts of the population hold opinions, and particularly when they are different than the kinds of people who are in media or are in elite spaces—like, most people who work in media are living in cosmopolitan cities, have gone to college, have often maybe interacted with people who are from foreign-born countries repeatedly throughout their lives because they’re, like, living in New York or Chicago or L.A. or something like that. And as a result, like, they are not really in touch with some of the more common anti-immigration sentiments, and as a result, they feel kind of uncomfortable being like, Well, they’re all racist and xenophobes. They don’t want to sound like that. And so in order to look at this sentiment in the country and go, like, Well, I don’t want to call them a bunch of people who hate immigrants, I need to find some more material explanation for their opposition to it.

And I think it’s weird here, because I actually think it’s important to take very seriously what people are saying. Like, there are people who have serious cultural concerns with people coming into the country. And some of those things, I find not reasonable, and some of them I find—I don’t find really any of them reasonable, but I understand why someone would feel that way without having to be a bad person. Like, do I wish that people didn’t have those attitudes? Sure. But I think that they’re not lying when they tell you the things that are actually concerning them. And you write something really nicely on this, in your piece, and I'll let you say it, but can you just talk to us a little bit about what surveys of public opinion actually find in regards to people’s opposition to immigration?

Karma: Well, first of all, I think that analysis is really spot on. I think sane washing is a good descriptor. The one that I haven’t had is often a veneer of respectability. And I think there is a lot of this deep discomfort with nonmaterialist explanations, in part, also, because—especially, if you’re thinking about, let’s say, center-left folks—if you’re part of a political party that you think needs to respond to people’s views on immigration, it’s much easier to say, Well, look—we already believe in raising worker wages.

And so, all of a sudden, if immigration gets looped into the set of values that we already believe, we’re then comfortable to give in to people’s instincts here. Whereas if it feels like pandering to darker forces, I think that makes liberals, especially, less comfortable with doing it. And I think to your point, though, it’s like: If we don’t acknowledge those darker forces, it’s not always great. And I think what you’re getting at, too, is in this piece, consistently what you find in sort of surveys of public opinion is that it’s not primarily material explanations that explain things. It’s things—a lot of them are about cultural difference, about violations of social norms, about crime, about national identity.

And I think one of the most-revealing things here is that the demographic that is most opposed to immigration are older folks living in rural areas, many of whom are retired. And the people who tend to be most supportive of immigration are working-age people living in big cities where immigrants are more common. So if you thought, like, Okay, this is a product of the people who immigrants are directly competing with are the most anti-immigrant, you would think, Oh, this would show up where the immigrants are, and it doesn’t. And so I think that really speaks to it.

I think the other thing that really speaks to it is, like, have you just listened to the Republican Party? Like, Donald Trump and J. D. Vance will occasionally mention wages, especially when it’s Stephen Miller talking to The New York Times, when it’s J. D. Vance in a vice-presidential debate or talking to a New York Times interviewer. That’s when they will bring up this wages argument. When they are speaking to an audience that they know is very center or left, they will, like, bring up this wages argument. But if you listen to the guy at the top of the ticket, right, it is, These folks are “poisoning the blood of our country.” It is portraying immigrants as a sort of psychopathic horde of murderers. It’s spreading conspiracy theories about pet-eating immigrants. Like, it’s very hard to take seriously that this is actually the main concern when the leader of the party who is anti-immigration is, like, so openly pointing to a very different set of issues.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: why less immigration would mean a poorer quality of life in America.

[Break]

Demsas: I think one of the things that I also find reasonable for why people struggle is the Econ 101 explanation you give right at the beginning is intuitive. And it shows up in many different parts of our econ reporting, this question of thinking outside of partial equilibriums, right? If you were to just say, I’m looking at just the impact of immigrants on wages, holding equal all other effects on the population, on the economy, then you would see negative downward pressure on wages.

But economists don’t do that. Our lives aren’t lived in partial equilibriums. We live in general equilibrium. There are multiple different markets working together at all times. And you have to look at not just what’s happening with the effect on the labor markets, what’s happening in the effect on the housing market, the consumption of random household goods. And so I think that that’s really difficult to do in normal conversation. And what I think is really funny is that now—you kind of foreshadowed this—there’s a big push to blame immigrants for the housing market, and it’s like, Oh, the only time immigrants are consumers of anything is when they’re consuming housing. Otherwise they’re just competing with you for wages. They’re not buying anything else.

What I wanted to ask, though, is about this other argument that people also make, which is: Okay—maybe you’re right that in the world that we live in, given that immigration is always happening, companies can rely on there going to be some level of immigration. They’re used to a high level of immigration happening. You don’t see these negative effects on wages. But in a world where you were to just, like, really, really tamp down—really, really stop immigration from coming in—companies would have to reshape how they’re doing their hiring practices. The entire American economy would change if it wasn’t reliant on foreign labor.

And so this idea that there are these, quote, jobs Americans won’t do isn’t true. They would do them at a price. They would do them if the wages were better, if the working conditions were better, and that we should strive for these higher-quality jobs. And companies that can’t do that, well—they should just not do that anymore. They should just literally stop relying on foreign labor. And so I think that how you respond to that is really important because, you know, I do think a lot of people are starting to, like, fixate on that argument.

Karma: This has actually been one of the largest justifications for what Donald Trump has called the largest deportation effort in American history that he wants to enact when he’s in office. Any of his advisors are talking about this. They talk about: This is going to force employers to hire workers at higher wages, to give them better jobs, and that’s a big reason why we should do it. So I think it’s a really important one to address.

And what’s nice is we actually have some really good empirical studies on this. We don’t just have to guess as to what would happen and assume as to what would happen. My favorite of these studies, although there are a few, looked at the Secure Communities program, which was a DHS program that deported about 500,000 immigrants between 2008 and 2014, so during the Obama administration. And the way that this happened was: It happened sort of semi-randomly across communities, such that it created a sort of natural experiment where you could look at how it affected communities where it had happened and how it affected not-yet-affected communities.

And the findings were shocking even to me because I would think, Okay, maybe when you get rid of a lot of these workers, there’s just going to be more jobs available.

Demsas: It’s like a shock.

Karma: It’s such a big, immediate shock. But what the authors find is that for every 100 immigrant workers who are deported, there are actually nine fewer jobs for natives. And this isn’t just temporary jobs. This is, like, permanently, there are fewer jobs for natives in the community, unemployment goes up, and wages slightly fall. And I think this kind of finding is repeated across different examples through American history.

There’s another great study of the H2B program, which allocates low-skilled workers to companies, and also finds that when companies aren’t allocated those workers, they don’t hire a bunch of natives. They actually just produce less. And so what happens when immigrants are ripped away from these communities is the interconnected web of employment and workers whose jobs depended on each other all gets torn up, right? Businesses close. Businesses have to stop producing as much. There are just less child-care services. There are less meals served. There are less houses built—either for reasons of: Employers actually can’t have a viable business with higher labor costs, whether it’s because natives don’t always want to do these jobs, or whether it’s just because, for the reasons we talked about earlier, there’s just a lot of benefits from the specialization of labor that occur when immigrants are in a place.

One way I think about this is sort of the opposite of the story that we were talking about earlier. When we talked about immigrants coming in and creating the specialization plus scale, that just happens in reverse. Instead of businesses expanding, and therefore being able to hire more natives because they’re expanding, businesses are shrinking. They’re shutting down. They’re closing. And when that happens, native-born workers get caught in the crossfire. When there’s less demand for your services as a restaurant, and your costs are higher, and so you have to close down, you’re not just getting rid of your immigrant workers, you’re getting rid of all the native-born workers who are working there too. And so I think that’s what these studies are finding, is you just can’t neatly remove immigrants from communities without having huge backfiring effects on the native-born.

Demsas: Yeah. I think it’s even useful to play it out in the best-case scenario. I think the best-case scenario for the folks who are making this argument is that there’s this short-term harm, but then you just need to let the economy play out and develop new businesses to figure out new business models that work. And in the best-case scenario, you’re talking about a poorer country. You’re talking about a country where your output, your growth is literally less. And that sounds very abstract, but we’re talking about less stuff. You have less money. You can buy fewer things. You can buy a worse quality of life. Your housing is probably worse. Even the basic stuff where you’re talking about, Can you afford child care?—fewer people can do that.

A lot of things are worse when the output declines, when it’s harder for businesses to try new things, when there’s difficulty with dynamism in the economy, where you can’t start a bunch of different kinds of businesses quickly, see what works, and have that kind of churn. And so I think it’s even difficult to conceptualize: When people are making this argument, they’re saying, We should take on the costs of being a poorer country for the sake of national homogeneity of where you were born.

And so I think that that’s the trade-off we’re talking about here. It’s not that America would cease to exist, right? There are a lot of countries who follow the sort of principles we’re talking about here, where they are really strict on who gets to come in, and they’re just poorer than America. And I think that that’s the really clear trade-off that I think often restrictionists won’t make baldly.

Karma: First of all, even the best-case scenario you’re talking about is one that has actually no empirical evidence. It’s all theoretical. So that’s the first point. The second is that this gets back to, I think, your point about general versus partial equilibriums, too. Because when we’re even just looking at these wage or employment studies, they’re holding a lot constant. And everything they’re holding constant also changes in an actual scenario where you deport millions of immigrants.

So there is another great study from the economist Ben Jones and a few others looking at immigrants and entrepreneurship. And they looked at basically every single business that opened up between 2005 and 2010 and looked at basically the country of origin of the person who started that business. And they found that immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start new businesses than native-born individuals.

And when they actually did the math, they found that immigrants, by entrepreneurship alone, are creating far more jobs than they take. One response to that would be, Oh, okay. Well, maybe this is high-skilled immigrants. Maybe this is the Google-founder kind of effect. But actually, they found that there was no difference in the rate of entrepreneurship between individuals from OECD countries and from non-OECD countries. And if you just think about this for a second, think about the people who end up coming here, the amount of risk they have to take, the perseverance that it takes to, like, actually get to the U.S.—it wouldn’t be surprising that these people are, like, more intrepid and more entrepreneurial.

Demsas: Just huge selection effects. Like, if you can make it through the Darién Gap, what does that say about you?

Karma: Exactly. And so that’s one effect that is completely lost in a lot of these studies. One of my favorite studies of this is one that was done in Denmark, because in Denmark, what is interesting—unlike in the U.S., where you have to just look at a specific city—Denmark has data on individuals for the entire country. It’s a pretty small country. And so researchers can actually track what happens to every single individual worker when new immigrants come in. And that gives you a sort of accuracy that you don’t necessarily get with the natural-experiment studies in the U.S., at least at a countrywide basis. And what they found is that native-born—even less-skilled native-born—workers end up responding to immigration by entering higher-paying occupations, by moving to higher-opportunity cities, and by actually getting better education, such that they actually had higher wages as a result of it.

And so I could go on. You could talk about the amount of women who are able to be in the workforce because of immigrants providing child care. Like, you can list this out, and there are all these ways in which even these studies are missing the sort of beneficial effect that immigrants are having that you would be taking away if you just suddenly got rid of all these people, in addition to this atrocious humanitarian effects.

Demsas: I find that the Danes—like, I wanted some sort of poll on their privacy concerns. I’m just like, Do you guys not care? I mean, like, I think it’s great. I would be pro-this everywhere, but I’m just surprised that countries are able to do this. There would be a revolt in America.

Karma: Even if the data is anonymized, I’m like, The data the researchers got was anonymized, but the data the government has is not anonymized.

Demsas: We don’t even let the government share data like that. Like, the IRS can’t just send the Treasury Department, like, all the data they have on people’s tax returns.

Karma: But you know what? You know what? Great for the Danish for doing it, too, so we can learn more about immigration through them.

Demsas: So true. But so the thing that’s interesting is: We’ve made a bunch of arguments here about why this is actually really positive for the economy. But regardless of that, there’s been a backlash, and we’re seeing that right now. I mean, this is airing on Election Day, and so we’re, I’m sure, in the future, just pacing nervously to see what’s going on.

Karma: (Laughs.) Apologies to anyone who was listening to this looking for a soothing distraction.

Demsas: But this has been probably the most-important issue of this election. Maybe inflation is another one. But the two most-important issues. I did an episode earlier this year with John Burn-Murdoch where we talked about the sense that Americans are very xenophobic and this narrative that they hate immigration—they hate immigrants—and that’s, like, just a fact of the world, and that all immigration has basically been this plot by elites to shove it down our throats. And, of course, we explored how a lot of that narrative is really overblown and underestimates just how strong pro-immigrant sentiment is in America, particularly relative to other countries.

And I still stand by that analysis, but there has been a shift in public opinion, even in the past year. You’ve seen polls come out that have really indicated that there’s been a backlash effect to the high levels of immigration that are kind of returning us to the 1800s averages.

And so first, can you just talk us through that backlash? What are the numbers there? What are we seeing?

Karma: Totally. The thing that first drew my attention to this was, as you were saying: The way this has impacted the election is that you’ve just seen such a hard right turn in the rhetoric from candidates on both sides. And I remember listening to Trump in 2024, making 2016 Trump sound like JFK in just how crazy he was. And then looking at the Democratic side, where the message went from, in 2020, Joe Biden promising to restore moral dignity to our asylum system, and then in 2024 Kamala Harris saying that, Actually, no. She is the one that will fortify the border, not Trump.

Demsas: Do not come.

Karma: Do not come. And underlying this is quite possibly the most dramatic shift in public opinion that I’ve ever seen. So going back to the 1960s, Gallup asks Americans every year this question: Do you think immigration should be increased, kept the same, or decreased? In 2020, only 28 percent of Americans said that immigration should be decreased. Actually, more Americans said it should be increased. By 2024, just four years later, the percentage of those who wanted it decreased had nearly doubled to 55 percent, the first time that there had been a majority of Americans who wanted immigration decreased since the early 2000s.

And just to put this shift in context, I think when Americans think about big public-opinion shifts, they think of gay marriage. And they think of the increasing support for gay marriage. Support for gay marriage, according to Gallup, increased about 20 points over the course of around a decade, maybe eight or nine years. This shift we’re talking about was nearly 30 points in four years. It makes gay marriage look gradual and small by comparison. And this immigration shift is most concentrated among Republicans, but it’s also Democrats. It’s also independents. And it’s especially been sharp in the past year.

Demsas: This is one of those things where I think it’s really important for people who, like myself, are in favor of high levels of immigration, first of all, to accept that, at some level, if you get that, you will have some negative effects, but I think also to really narrow in onto people’s specific concerns.

So I did an article earlier this year. It’s called “Something’s Fishy About the ‘Migrant Crisis.’” And basically, I was just like, Okay, there are high levels of immigration in a lot of places in this country. But not every place in this country is experiencing backlash, right? Like, you’re hearing these stories in New York and Chicago about people sleeping on the floors of police stations in Chicago. In New York, I had, like, an affordable-housing lawyer tell me—she was a very liberal person telling me that she was kind of concerned because there were migrants in the street in midtown Manhattan who were just, like, lying on the ground.

And there’s a lot to which I’m like, You know, if these people who are talking to me are some of the most-liberal people on immigration are expressing kind of like, Well, we can’t handle this. Like, we obviously can’t handle this, it indicates a very specific problem, right? Like, people—these New Yorkers, Chicagoans—they’re not afraid of immigrants or foreign-born people. There’s huge levels of foreign-born share in New York and Chicago. And the number of people that were entering we’re talking about, you know, that were coming in and demanding services from local government were a very small fraction of this.

So I was trying to understand what was going on there, and I really came down to the specific concerns people have. People don’t want to see local tax dollars being spent on newcomers to their city, if they feel like they need things that the city’s not actually taking care of. They don’t want to see their schools being used as shelters instead of being used in order to service, you know, their kids. And there’s just kind of general sense that, like, Now there are people sleeping on the streets. There’s nowhere for them to be housed. Like, It’s actually reducing my quality of life a bit. Clearly, there’s a sense of it being overwhelmed.

But then when I looked in places like Miami and Los Angeles, and in Texas and in Houston—Miami and Houston, in particular—I was like, There are way more immigrants who have come through a Houston, in Texas, than have come through a Chicago. So why are we seeing such backlash?

And I came to like two reasons. One is that many of the immigrants were not able to get work permits. The other thing that’s really important here is the Greg Abbott busing program. Because, most people, they come into the country, and, you know, what happens? They have networks that they’re following. Like, either they have populations of people that they’re able to get help from, or there are even people who are kind of recruiting them as they’re kind of coming over, like, Oh, we need work. We need people to come do this. And so there’s a level to which, like, there’s a natural flow to where they end up.

Greg Abbott has, I think, maybe the most-effective political stunt in American history—I genuinely think, like, reshaped the entire conversation on immigration by doing this. And then he says, Okay, I’m gonna bus people—effectively breaking these kind of natural shifts—to Democratic cities. And when people kind of show up randomly, there’s, like, of course, this massive transaction cost that’s enacted. And, you know, Texas is a border state, and I think, at some level, I kind of understand. They’re like, Oh, everyone should have to experience what it’s like to have all this kind of flow of people coming in. But Texas has boomed as a result of this too.

So anyway, I think the real thing that’s important here is that people who are in favor of immigration have to address these specific concerns. You have to make sure that there is, like, actually a clear, orderly process by which people are being resettled. If there’s not, I mean, that’s going to lead to backlash, even from people who are in favor of immigration. And the most frustrating part of my reporting is learning the Biden administration had basically abdicated their responsibility to try and help with the resettlement process of people across the country, because they were afraid of being blamed. And to me, I’m like, Well, you were still blamed. So I’m not sure it worked out for you.

Karma: Everything you’re describing here, I think, falls under the banner of what has been called either, colloquially, “chaos theory” or, more academically, the “locus of control theory” of immigration, which is that populations tend to be able to handle high amounts of immigration if they think the process is orderly and fair, and they become much more likely to oppose immigration when they see the process is chaotic and unfair and disorderly.

You know, you have a great example in that piece of the U.K., post-Brexit, having very high levels of immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment decreasing. Something you see in the U.S. is that even as you have these massive shifts in the amount of immigrants people want let in, when you ask questions like, Do you believe undocumented immigrants make a contribution to society? or, Do you support a path to citizenship for nondocumented immigrants? and even, Should it be easier to immigrate to the U.S.? people’s views actually haven’t changed nearly as much. And they remain more pro-immigrant than they were in 2016, which speaks to the fact that what people are upset about here—they’re not suddenly xenophobic. They don’t suddenly hate immigrants. A lot of what’s happening is that they’re responding to the chaos of the process.

I think my favorite part of that piece that you wrote was this point that you made about how there’s a way of looking at Greg Abbott’s busing program as working, in the sense of, like, Look—didn’t this prove his point? He said that liberal cities should have to handle this, and he proved that they couldn’t. But the process by which he did it was engineered to achieve that outcome, right? You point out in that piece that there are 3 million foreign-born people in New York City, in a city of 8 million, and they’ve been bused a couple tens of thousands. And it has led Eric Adams to say, like, New York is falling apart. That does not mean that New York can’t handle that amount of immigrants. The specific process by which this happened was engineered to achieve an outcome of chaos. And that’s what people are responding to.

Demsas: Well, let’s leave it on an optimistic note. Always our last question: What is something that you originally thought was good on paper but didn’t pan out in real life?

Karma: So this is quite a pivot from what we were talking about earlier. Last year I got engaged to my girlfriend.

Demsas: Oh my gosh, yes! Congratulations!

Karma: That was not the thing that was—

Demsas: Oh god.

Karma: That would be bad. But the way I did it was: It was our five-year anniversary, in Rome, very romantic. I knew I wanted to propose in front of the Pantheon, which was my partner’s favorite building in Rome.

Demsas: She’s an architect.

Karma: She’s an architect, yes. But I didn’t want to do it when there were a bunch of crowds around, so I was like, How can I figure out a way to get us there, like, early in the morning? And so I decided, in a decision that looked very good on paper, to book a Vatican tour for, like, 9 a.m. And so I was like, Oh, I’ll propose, and then we’ll go on this tour of the Vatican, and it’ll be, like, really cool. And it’ll be, like—we’ll see the Sistine Chapel. Sounded great. Looked good on paper.

It turns out that immediately after you have one of the most emotionally riveting experiences of your life—

Demsas: (Laughs.) You don’t want to go on a tour!

Karma: The last thing you want to do is go on a three-hour tour of the Vatican where you have to wait until the last 15 minutes to see the Sistine Chapel. We’re just, like, so badly just wanting to get out of there and be with each other, and we were just in such a great mood, only to have, like, the biggest buzzkill in the world be the Vatican.

Demsas: This is so funny, Rogé. I didn’t know the story. Wait. I can’t believe—so you went on the tour?

Karma: We went on the tour. I wish so badly I would have said, Let’s just forget the tour. But we were in such good spirits after. We’re like, This is going to be so great. Like, actually, looking back, I’m like, Was that even good on paper? I don’t think so.

Demsas: I was actually with you. I was like, Okay, yeah. Then you had a fun tour.

Karma: Like, a nice walking tour, architecture tour—probably great. When you’re, like, confined to the Vatican and just looking at, like, our guide—she was great, but she was just explaining every little thing, and we’re just like, We don’t want to be in public with a million people. We just want to be with each other. This is very strange.

Demsas: I think this is my favorite “good on paper” yet. This is unreal. (Laughs.)

Karma: I put a lot of thought into this, and I was like, This one was bad. This is not my best. It’s a funny story now.

Demsas: Yeah.

Karma: You know, I look back on it—I’ve looked back on it very fondly. So yeah, that’s my “good on paper” story.

Demsas: Thank you so much, Rogé. Thanks for coming on the show.

Karma: It’s been a pleasure being here. Thanks so much for having me.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

We Americans are a vulnerable and divided people. The election today isn’t just about choosing which politicians should lead us; this is only one issue before us. We have to decide what sort of country we want to be, and how we want to be understood—by ourselves, and by the world.

Domestic political differences are usually superficial and temporary. But the divide we’re seeing doesn’t seem like a momentary rift. We have to heal our deeper rifts and remember that we are one people. If we don’t address these rifts, we will be a country in perpetual crisis, suffering from economic instability and social turmoil. And we will be weak in the face of our actual adversaries. These adversaries know how to exploit our weaknesses. If we don’t try to bridge our internal differences, we’re handing our enemies a gift.

In the Army, I saw firsthand the power of unity in the most challenging possible circumstances. I served, fought, and sometimes risked my life alongside people who didn’t share my background or beliefs. We had no choice but to break down the walls that separated us, to set aside our differences and focus on what bound us together: our mission and our loyalty to one another. Those experiences taught me that respect and understanding aren’t luxuries—they’re survival skills. They’re what make us strong in the face of adversity. What I try today to convey to my fellow Americans, especially those who didn’t serve in uniform and didn’t learn on the battlefield that nothing at all really divides us, is that we need to spend much less time tangling ourselves up in anger and distrust.

[Peter Wehner: How to prevent the worst from happening]

On the day in Afghanistan when I was wounded, and when three of my fellow soldiers, and a  civilian American-government employee, made the ultimate sacrifice, nothing divided me from my fellow citizens. Nothing at all. But back home, we are driven by a cycle of rhetoric that pushes us further apart. We’ve allowed ourselves to be pulled into silos of belief, where headlines and sound bites define who we are and whom we see as “other.” But we cannot let these forces tear us apart. We must find a way back to one another, not just for our children’s sake but for our own survival as a nation.

I learned something else in battle: We are all dependent on one another. I trusted people of different religions, different backgrounds, different beliefs—and they trusted me. We understood that we were one unit, and that we had to refuse to let anyone or anything break that bond. What is true for an Army unit is true for the nation: We must not let anyone break us apart.

This isn’t just about politics. It’s about our identity. We can’t afford to lose sight of what makes us strong: our ability to work through our differences, to respect one another even when we disagree. Our enemies know this. They know that the easiest way to weaken America is to fuel division from within, to make us believe that we’re enemies rather than partners. If we want to keep them from using this division against us, we have to reclaim the value of national unity.

Our greatest strength lies not in agreement, because we’re always going to disagree. We don’t even have to like one another. I learned in the Army that liking one another matters less than loving one another. We have to love what we have in common, even if we disagree. Our strength is in our shared commitment to one another as Americans. We have to listen to one another, we have to commit to not tearing one another down, and we have to show one another that we’re bigger than our differences.

After the votes are counted, we’ll have a choice to make. We can let our anger fester, exacerbating the kind of division that benefits only those who would see us weak. Or we can take this moment to turn toward one another, to seek understanding over judgment, to stop letting anyone—politicians, pundits, news channels—tell us whom we should hate or fear.

[Read: Election Day is just the beginning]

This isn’t easy work. It takes courage to open ourselves to perspectives that challenge our own. But we owe it to ourselves, to our neighbors, and, yes, to the next generation, to try. Our enemies would love nothing more than to see us fail. Let’s deny them that satisfaction. Let’s be the nation we know we can be—strong, resilient, and united, not in perfect agreement, but in purpose and respect for one another.

Now is the time to rise above what divides us, and reclaim our common goal. This election is not an ending, but a beginning—a moment to choose a path of empathy, resilience, and respect. The challenges we face—from threats abroad to struggles here at home—demand a unity that transcends politics. We cannot afford to see one another as enemies; our true strength lies in our ability to hold together even in disagreement. America was built on the resilience and diversity of its people, on a willingness to struggle and compromise to find common ground. Let us commit, today and every day, to building a nation where our differences deepen our resolve, where our shared purpose makes us strong. If we truly believe in America, we must believe in one another. Our future depends on it.

There are millions of Americans living abroad. Why don’t most of them vote?

Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove me wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student standing near me had on a hoodie that read Jesus Christ. It was late September, and several hundred of us were here to see the conservative movement’s youth whisperer. Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was in Missoula for a stop on his “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” in which he goes from college to college doing his signature shtick of debating undergraduates. He invited anyone who disagreed with him to come up one by one and take their shot, in a carnivalesque “step right up” style.

I had not traveled to Montana simply to see Kirk epically own college kids. (That’s not a hard thing to do, and in any case, I could just watch his deep catalog of debate videos.) I’d made the trip because I had the feeling that Kirk is moving toward the heart of the conservative movement. Few Republicans have as much purchase with all factions of the party. In Montana, Kirk delivered a simple message. “Now, all of you—I’m sure you’re feeling this: Things are unaffordable,” he said. “They’re out of reach. It is harder than ever to be able to have the American dream … and that is because of Kamala Harris.” Days before the Missoula event, however, Kirk had said that Haitian migrants “will become your masters” should Donald Trump lose the election, that “this election is literally about” whether Americans will be “allowed to fight back against invading armed hordes,” and that “swarms of people want to take our stuff, take women, and loot the entire nation.”

I arrived in Montana thinking that Kirk’s code-switching was part of a cynical move to expand his reach. He hosts one of the most popular news podcasts in the country, and his YouTube channel is a clout machine. But I came away realizing that Kirk is less of an influencer than an operator. While he spoke, volunteers moved around the crowd asking people if they were registered to vote. Later in the day, Kirk appeared at an event with Tim Sheehy, the GOP candidate trying to defeat Senator Jon Tester. Kirk bragged that Turning Point had registered 100 new voters that day. (A spokesperson for Turning Point USA did not respond to multiple requests for comment or an interview with Kirk.)

Kirk’s apparatus has gone from a conservative youth-outreach organization to an all-encompassing right-wing empire—one that has cultivated relationships with influential conservative faith groups, built out a powerful media arm, and hosted rallies for Trump and other top Republicans. It has allowed Kirk to wedge himself into a powerful role: He is the gatekeeper of a bridge between mainstream conservatism and its extreme fringes. Instead of merely serving as a roleplayer on the right, Kirk now leverages his influence to bend conservatism closer to his own vision. Kirk has power, and he knows it.

For a while, Kirk embraced a vanilla brand of conservatism. He founded Turning Point USA in 2012 to fortify a small but stable conservative youth movement with a focus on free markets and limited government. The group wanted to reach young people where they were, which included college campuses but also the internet. Early Turning Point memes read as though the organization had hired a Popsicle-stick-joke writer to make bland, conservative-minded witticisms. Kirk’s Twitter account featured mundane perspectives, such as “Taxes are theft” and “USA is the best country ever.”

Even as Trump began to take over the Republican Party, Kirk relentlessly extolled free-market capitalism and repeatedly praised markets as a near-panacea to America’s problems. Though personally Christian, he said that politics should be approached from a “secular worldview.” In 2018, he said that he understood that most people “don’t want to have to live the way some Christian in Alabama” wants them to. He would probably have never described himself as an LGBTQ ally, but he was also not known to go out of his way to bash trans people or speak out against the gay “lifestyle.”

This approach did not please everyone on the right. In 2019, the young white nationalist Nick Fuentes encouraged his followers, called Groypers, to show up at Turning Point events and troll Kirk for not being far enough to the right. “You have multiple times advocated on behalf of accepting homosexuality,” a man in a suit with a rosary around his hand said at one event to Kirk, who was sitting onstage next to a gay Turning Point USA contributor. “How does anal sex help us win the culture war?” Another person used the Q&A time to tell Kirk that “we don’t want centrists in the conservative movement.”

Something began to change around the end of Trump’s first term. Kirk hasn’t just followed the rest of his party to the right. He is now far more conservative than much of the mainstream GOP. Christianity in particular has become a dominant feature of Kirk’s rhetoric and Turning Point USA. Kirk’s position on religion has veered from “We do have a separation of Church and state, and we should support that” (his words to the conservative commentator Dave Rubin in 2018) to “There is no separation of Church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction” (his words on his own podcast in 2022).

In 2021, he established Turning Point Faith, a division of his organization that he has used to make significant inroads with hard-right evangelical churches and their leaders, many of whom have lent their pulpits to Kirk. He has laughed off accusations that he embraces Christian nationalism. Liberals fret about a “disturbing movement of ‘Christian nationalism,’” he said in 2022. “Do you know what that’s code for? That’s code for: You’re starting to care, and they’re getting scared.” But there aren’t a lot of other ways to describe his goal of eroding the barriers between Church and state, and Turning Point Faith’s mission of returning America to “foundational Christian values.”

Kirk has also embraced rhetoric that was previously the territory of white nationalists, making explicit reference to the “Great Replacement” theory, the conspiracy that immigration is a plot to dilute the cultural and political power of white people. Since 2022, he has posted that “Whiteness is great,” and that there is an undeniable “War on White People in The West.” On his podcast, he has accused an ambiguous “they” of “trying to replace us demographically” and “make the country less white” by using an “anti-white agenda” of immigration to enact “the Great Replacement.” Because of “them,” he’s said, “the dumping ground of the planet is the United States southern border.” Some other Republicans now dabble in Great Replacement rhetoric, but Kirk has avoided being outflanked on the right: He’s attacking Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “a huge mistake.”

Some of Kirk’s rightward shift is potentially driven by him astutely putting his fingers to the wind of what’s bubbling among the base. In Montana, the crowd was most energetic when Kirk delved into points about how immigrants and trans people are making America worse. When I went out of the crowd to stand under a tree nearby, I heard a mother talking to her small daughter. “You don’t want to go over there. There’s liberals,” she said, gesturing at the fringes of the crowd, where people were observing Kirk with dour expressions. She then parroted stuff I usually see only in the most unsavory corners of the far-right internet: “They want to kidnap you and brainwash you and probably molest you.”

Late last month, Trump came out onstage with pyrotechnics blasting in front of him and dozens of Turning Point logos behind him. Kirk and his group were hosting a rally in Duluth, Georgia, for the former president. “He’s a fantastic person, the job he does with Turning Point,” Trump said of Kirk during the rally. “I just want to congratulate and thank him. He’s working so hard.”

Kirk had spoken to the crowd of roughly 10,000 just before Trump took the stage. He used the platform to explicitly suffuse the event with a nod to Christian conservatism. “We are here in a state that is a very Christian state,” Kirk said. “A state that loves God and loves Jesus.” He led the crowd in a “Christ is King” chant.

Despite Kirk’s embrace of the far right, he has continued to gain standing in the establishment wings of the right. He sat down with J. D. Vance at a Turning Point event in September, and again on Halloween. Kirk has had public conversations with high-profile conservatives such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt. Kirk has spent much of this year campaigning for Republican politicians. He has gone to Nebraska, where he tried to get the legislature to change how the state awards Electoral College votes, and to Ohio, where Republicans are trying to win a Senate seat.

Unlike other, sycophantic portions of right-wing media, Kirk isn’t simply a hanger-on to the conservative elite. When he can, he will try to bend elected officials toward his political vision. On multiple occasions, Kirk has publicly gone after Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Last January, several months after Johnson was elected as House speaker, Kirk posted a podcast episode titled “You Deserve Better Than What the GOP Is Giving You.” Johnson, he said on the show, was “a disappointment.” A few minutes later, he added: “Speaker Johnson is trying to gaslight you. Dare I say, he’s just lying.”

In March, Johnson went on Kirk’s show to kiss the ring. Kirk approached the conversation cordially and in good faith, but he also didn’t shy away from directly criticizing the speaker. Kirk pressed Johnson on why he hadn’t shut down the government last year and dismissed the speaker’s explanation that it would have been politically damaging: “We have been hearing that excuse for 11 years.”

Kirk’s ability to dress down one of the party’s most important members is a testament to how much power he has accrued. People like Johnson sign up for this because older politicians see Millennials such as Kirk as whispers to the rest of their generation, sometimes just because they’re younger, Jiore Craig, a senior fellow at ISD Global who has researched Kirk and Turning Point USA, explained to me: “There is this nervousness that he offers something about the internet and young people that politicians don’t know.” The belief that he can turn out young people makes politicians go to Kirk even as he tries to big-dog them, Craig said. It’s not just his appeal to youth either; alienating Kirk may mean losing an avenue to faith leaders and the broader audience he has amassed. Whether Republicans like it or not (and some don’t), they have to deal with him. This is how he has the freedom to walk around noxious far-right politics and then step back into the polite mainstream with impunity.

Even at 31, clad in saggy suit pants, Kirk has the affect of an eager college conservative. He lacks Tucker Carlson’s resolute confidence and corresponding bored disdain. He lacks the poise and charisma of far-right influencers such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. But to think of Kirk as only a media figure is to miss the point.

Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, who is writing a book about Kirk and Turning Point USA, argues that Kirk’s relationships and organizations have become so robust and far-reaching that besides Trump, Kirk is the most important person in the conservative movement. “No matter who wins in November, he will be the kingmaker,” Boedy told me.

Kirk doesn’t have an outright edge in many of the fields he trades in: Carlson and others have more popular podcasts, there are more prominent figures within the conservative faith movement, and there are better-funded conservative groups. Still, almost no one else has the relative prominence and relationships he does across so many areas. “It’s like Rush Limbaugh with six other tentacles,” Boedy said.

Kirke is all but ensured to sit in an important position on the right for years to come. He is in charge of much more than helping the right win youth voters. He has a relatively prominent political-media empire that he can use to push his ideas forward—one that works in tandem with the rest of his apparatus. His years of relationship-building with faith groups cannot be replicated by would-be challengers overnight. At least for now, Kirk has convinced Republicans that his political project is divinely ordained.

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Americans across the country are getting ready to wait.

Knowing the winner of the presidential election by tomorrow night is a real possibility. But the race could also take several days to be called, as it did in 2020, and some House races are likely to take days. In most other modern presidential elections (leaving aside the recount of the  2000 election), news outlets have declared a winner within hours of the polls closing. But in this week’s election, the closeness of the race and the popularity of mail-in voting could lead to a longer timeline. Amid all the unknowns, one American tradition may get lost: the social ritual of Election Night.

Over the generations, Election Night has brought Americans together and prepared them to accept the outcome of a race. Many voters missed out on that gathering in 2020, in part because they were in pandemic isolation. And as my colleague Kate Cray wrote at the time, “Watch parties and their kitschy decor don’t necessarily fit with an election in which many voters fear the collapse of democracy.” A communal gathering was even less appealing to liberals “still traumatized by 2016,” Kate noted. This year, Americans of all political loyalties are finding the election anxiety-inducing: A recent survey from the American Psychological Association found that 69 percent of polled adults rated the U.S. presidential election as a significant source of stress, a major jump from 52 percent in 2016 (and a slight bump from 68 percent in 2020).

Still, some Americans are preparing for classic election watch parties at friends’ homes or in bars. But this time around, voters’ self-preservational instincts are kicking in too. A recent New York magazine roundup of readers’ Election Night plans in the Dinner Party newsletter included streaming unrelated television, drinking a lot, and “Embracing the Doom Vibes.” For some, prolonged distraction is the move: The cookbook author Alison Roman suggests making a complicated meal. Even party enthusiasts seem wary: In an etiquette guide about how to throw a good Election Night party with guests who have different political views, Town & Country suggested that “hosting a soiree of this nature in 2024 is like setting up a game of croquet on a field of landmines.” One host suggested giving guests a “safe word” to avoid conflict.

Election Night was once a ritual that played out in public—generally over the course of several days, Mark Brewin, a media-studies professor at the University of Tulsa and the author of a book on Election Day rituals, told me. A carnival-like atmosphere was the norm: People would gather at the offices of local newspapers to wait for results, and winners’ names were projected on walls using “magic lanterns.” Fireworks sometimes went off, and bands played. With the popularity of radio and TV in the 20th century, rituals moved farther into private spaces and homes, and results came more quickly. But even as technology improved, “this process is always at the mercy of the race itself,” Brewin explained.

Election Night rituals of years past weren’t just about celebration. They helped create the social conditions for a peaceful reconciliation after impassioned election cycles, Brewin said. In the 19th century, for example, once an election was called, members of the winning party would hand a “Salt River ticket” to the friends whose candidates lost (Salt River is a real body of water, but in this case, the term referred to a river of tears). The humor of the gesture was its power: It offered people a way to move forward and work together. Such rituals marked the moment when people “stop being partisans and become Americans again,” Brewin said.

That concept feels sadly quaint. This week, Americans are bracing for chaos, especially if Donald Trump declares prematurely that he won or attempts to interfere in the results of the race. An election-watch gathering might seem trivial in light of all that. But Americans have always come together to try to make sense of the changes that come with a transfer of power, and doing so is still worthwhile—especially at a time when unifying rituals feel out of reach.

Related:

Is this the end of the Election Night watch party? How to get through Election Day

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s followers are living in a dark fantasy, Adam Serwer writes. Inside the ruthless, restless final days of Trump’s campaign The “blue dot” that could clinch a Harris victory How is it this close?

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris will finish her last day of campaigning in Philadelphia, and Donald Trump will host his last rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A Pennsylvania judge ruled that Elon Musk’s America PAC can continue with its $1 million daily giveaway through Election Day. Missouri sued the Department of Justice in an effort to block the department from sending federal poll monitors to St. Louis.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores the appliances we’ve relied on for decades, and those that claim to usher in new ways of living—with varied success.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Jacopin / BSIP / Getty; Velimir Zeland / Shutterstock.

A ‘Crazy’ Idea for Treating Autoimmune Diseases Might Actually Work

By Sarah Zhang

Lupus, doctors like to say, affects no two patients the same. The disease causes the immune system to go rogue in a way that can strike virtually any organ in the body, but when and where is maddeningly elusive. One patient might have lesions on the face, likened to wolf bites by the 13th-century physician who gave lupus its name. Another patient might have kidney failure. Another, fluid around the lungs. What doctors can say to every patient, though, is that they will have lupus for the rest of their life. The origins of autoimmune diseases like it are often mysterious, and an immune system that sees the body it inhabits as an enemy will never completely relax. Lupus cannot be cured. No autoimmune disease can be cured.

Two years ago, however, a study came out of Germany that rocked all of these assumptions.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

David Frum: No one has an alibi. Donald Trump’s hatred of free speech The shadow over Kamala Harris’s campaign The institutions failed. Xi may lose his gamble. Samer Sinijlawi: My hope for Palestine

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Mourn. We’ll never get a universal cable, Ian Bogost writes. It’s the broken promise of USB-C.

Watch. Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live, but another segment that night made a sharper political point, Amanda Wicks writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

One peek into Americans’ mental state on Election Night comes from their orders on food apps. In 2016, Election Night alcohol demand on Postmates was nearly double that of the prior Tuesday—and that demand spiked again at lunchtime the next day. For the delivery app Gopuff, alcohol orders were high on Election Night in 2020—especially champagne and 12-packs of White Claw. And, less festively, orders for Tums and Pepto Bismol rose too. However you pass the time waiting for results this year, I hope you stay healthy.

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

After the 2016 elections, critics blamed Facebook for undermining American democracy. They believed that the app’s algorithmic News Feed pushed hyperpartisan content, outright fake news, and Russian-seeded disinformation to huge numbers of people. (The U.S. director of national intelligence agreed, and in January 2017 declassified a report that detailed Russia’s actions.) At first, the company’s executives dismissed these concerns—shortly after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg said it was “pretty crazy” to think that fake news on Facebook had played a role—but they soon grew contrite. “Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it,” Zuckerberg would say 10 months later. Facebook had by then conceded that its own data did “not contradict” the intelligence report. Shortly thereafter, Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of News Feed at the time, told this magazine that the company was launching a number of new initiatives “to stop the spread of misinformation, click-bait and other problematic content on Facebook.” He added: “We’ve learned things since the election, and we take our responsibility to protect the community of people who use Facebook seriously.”

Nowhere was the effort more apparent than in the launch of the company’s “war room” ahead of the 2018 midterms. Here, employees across departments would come together in front of a huge bank of computers to monitor Facebook for misinformation, fake news, threats of violence, and other crises. Numerous reporters were invited in at the time; The Verge, Wired, and The New York Times were among the outlets that ran access-driven stories about the effort. But the war room looked, to some, less like a solution and more like a mollifying stunt—a show put on for the press. And by 2020, with the rise of QAnon conspiracy theories and “Stop the Steal” groups, things did not seem generally better on Facebook.

[Read: What Facebook did to American democracy]

What is happening on Facebook now? On the eve of another chaotic election, journalists have found that highly deceptive political advertisements still run amok there, as do election-fraud conspiracy theories. The Times reported in September that the company, now called Meta, had fewer full-time employees working on election integrity and that Zuckerberg was no longer having weekly meetings with the lieutenants in charge of them. The paper also reported that Meta had replaced the war room with a less sharply defined “election operations center.”

When I reached out to Meta to ask about its plans, the company did not give many specific details. But Corey Chambliss, a Meta spokesperson focused on election preparedness, told me that the war room definitely still exists and that “election operations center” is just another of its names. He proved this with a video clip showing B-roll footage of a few dozen employees working in a conference room on Super Tuesday. The video had been shot in Meta’s Washington, D.C., office, but Chambliss impressed upon me that it could really be anywhere: The war room moves and exists in multiple places. “Wouldn’t want to over-emphasize the physical space as it’s sort of immaterial,” he wrote in an email.

It is clear that Meta wants to keep its name out of this election however much that is possible. It may marshal its considerable resources and massive content-moderation apparatus to enforce its policies against election interference, and it may “break the glass,” as it did in 2021, to take additional action if something as dramatic as January 6 happens again. At the same time, it won’t draw a lot of attention to those efforts or be very specific about them. Recent conversations I’ve had with a former policy lead at the company and academics who have worked with and studied Facebook, as well as Chambliss, made it clear that as a matter of policy, the company has done whatever it can to fly under the radar this election season—including Zuckerberg’s declining to endorse a candidate, as he has in previous presidential elections. When it comes to politics, Meta and Zuckerberg have decided that there is no winning. At this pivotal moment, it is simply doing less.

Meta’s war room may be real, but it is also just a symbol—its meaning has been haggled over for six years now, and its name doesn’t really matter. “People got very obsessed with the naming of this room,” Katie Harbath, a former public-policy director at Facebook who left the company in March 2021, told me. She disagreed with the idea that the room was ever a publicity stunt. “I spent a lot of time in that very smelly, windowless room,” she said. I wondered whether the war room—ambiguous in terms of both its accomplishments and its very existence—was the perfect way to understand the company’s approach to election chaos. I posed to Harbath that the conversation around the war room was really about the anxiety of not knowing what, precisely, Meta is doing behind closed doors to meet the challenges of the moment.

She agreed that part of the reason the room was created was to help people imagine content moderation. Its primary purpose was practical and logistical, she said, but it was “a way to give a visual representation of what the work looks like too.” That’s why, this year, the situation is so muddy. Meta doesn’t want you to think there is no war room, but it isn’t drawing attention to the war room. There was no press junket; there were no tours. There is no longer even a visual of the war room as a specific room in one place.

This is emblematic of Meta’s in-between approach this year. Meta has explicit rules against election misinformation on its platforms; these include a policy against content that attempts to deceive people about where and how to vote. The rules do not, as written, include false claims about election results (although such claims are prohibited in paid ads). Posts about the Big Lie—the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—were initially moderated with fact-checking labels, but these were scaled back dramatically before the 2022 midterms, purportedly because users disliked them. The company also made a significant policy update this year to clarify that it would require labels on AI-generated content (a change made after its Oversight Board criticized its previous manipulated-media policy as “incoherent”). But tons of unlabeled generative-AI slop still flows without consequence on Facebook.

[Read: “History will not judge us kindly”]

In recent years, Meta has also attempted to de-prioritize political content of all kinds in its various feeds. “As we’ve said for years, people have told us they want to see less politics overall while still being able to engage with political content on our platforms if they want,” Chambliss told me. “That’s exactly what we’ve been doing.” When I emailed to ask questions about the company’s election plans, Chambliss initially responded by linking me to a short blog post that Meta put out 11 months ago, and attaching a broadly circulated fact sheet, which included such vague figures as “$20 billion invested in teams and technology in this area since 2016.” This information is next-to-impossible for a member of the public to make sense of—how is anyone supposed to know what $20 billion can buy?

In some respects, Meta’s reticence is just part of a broader cultural shift. Content moderation has become politically charged in recent years. Many high-profile misinformation and disinformation research projects born in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection have shut down or shrunk. (When the Stanford Internet Observatory, an organization that published regular reports on election integrity and misinformation, shut down, right-wing bloggers celebrated the end of its “reign of censorship.”) The Biden administration experimented in 2022 with creating a Disinformation Governance Board, but quickly abandoned the plan after it drew a firestorm from the right—whose pundits and influencers portrayed the proposal as one for a totalitarian “Ministry of Truth.” The academic who had been tasked with leading it was targeted so intensely that she resigned.

“Meta has definitely been quieter,” Harbath said. “They’re not sticking their heads out there with public announcements.” This is partly because Zuckerberg has become personally exasperated with politics, she speculated. She added that it is also the result of the response the company got in 2020—accusations from Democrats of doing too little, accusations from Republicans of doing far too much. The far right was, for a while, fixated on the idea that Zuckerberg had personally rigged the presidential election in favor of Joe Biden and that he frequently bowed to Orwellian pressure from the Biden administration afterward. In recent months, Zuckerberg has been oddly conciliatory about this position; in August, he wrote what amounted to an apology letter to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, saying that Meta had overdone it with its efforts to curtail COVID-19 misinformation and that it had erred by intervening to minimize the spread of the salacious news story about Hunter Biden and his misplaced laptop.  

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, used to donate large sums of money to nonpartisan election infrastructure through their philanthropic foundation. They haven’t done so this election cycle, seeking to avoid a repeat of the controversy ginned up by Republicans the last time. This had not been enough to satisfy Trump, though, and he recently threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison for the rest of his life if he makes any political missteps—which may, of course, be one of the factors Zuckerberg is considering in choosing to stay silent.

Other circumstances have changed dramatically since 2020, too. Just before that election, the sitting president was pushing conspiracy theories about the election, about various groups of his own constituents, and about a pandemic that had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. He was still using Facebook, as were the adherents of QAnon, the violent conspiracy theory that positioned him as a redeeming godlike figure. After the 2020 election, Meta said publicly that Facebook would no longer recommend political or civic groups for users to join—clearly in response to the criticism that the site’s own recommendations guided people into “Stop the Steal” groups. And though Facebook banned Trump himself for using the platform to incite violence on January 6, the platform reinstated his account once it became clear that he would again be running for president

This election won’t be like the previous one. QAnon simply isn’t as present in the general culture, in part because of actions that Meta and other platforms took in 2020 and 2021. More will happen on other platforms this year, in more private spaces, such as Telegram groups. And this year’s “Stop the Steal” movement will likely need less help from Facebook to build momentum: YouTube and Trump’s own social platform, Truth Social, are highly effective for this purpose. Election denial has also been galvanized from the top by right-wing influencers and media personalities including Elon Musk, who has turned X into the perfect platform for spreading conspiracy theories about voter fraud. He pushes them himself all the time.

In many ways, understanding Facebook’s relevance is harder than ever. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that 33 percent of U.S. adults say they “regularly” get news from the platform. But Meta has limited access to data for both journalists and academics in the past two years. After the 2020 election, the company partnered with academics for a huge research project to sort out what happened and to examine Facebook’s broader role in American politics. It was cited when Zuckerberg was pressed to answer for Facebook’s role in the organization of the “Stop the Steal” movement and January 6: “We believe that independent researchers and our democratically elected officials are best positioned to complete an objective review of these events,” he said at the time. That project is coming to an end, some of the researchers involved told me, and Chabliss confirmed.

The first big release of research papers produced through the partnership, which gave researchers an unprecedented degree of access to platform data, came last summer. Still more papers will continue to be published as they pass peer review and are accepted to scientific journals—one paper in its final stages will deal with the diffusion of misinformation—but all of these studies were conducted using data from 2020 and 2021. No new data have or will be provided to these researchers.

When I asked Chambliss about the end of the partnership, he emphasized that no other platform had bothered to do as robust of a research project. However, he wouldn’t say exactly why it was coming to an end. “It’s a little frustrating that such a massive and unprecedented undertaking that literally no other platform has done is put to us as a question of ‘why not repeat this?’ vs asking peer companies why they haven't come close to making similar commitments for past or current elections,” he wrote in an email.

The company also shut down the data-analysis tool CrowdTangle—used widely by researchers and by journalists—earlier this year. It touts new tools that have been made available to researchers, but academics scoff at the claim that they approximate anything like real access to live and robust information. Without Meta’s cooperation, it becomes much harder for academics to effectively monitor what happens on its platforms.

I recently spoke with Kathleen Carley, a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, about research she conducted from 2020 to 2022 on the rise of “pink slime,” a type of mass-produced misinformation designed to look like the product of local newspapers and to be shared on social media. Repeating that type of study for the 2024 election would cost half a million dollars, she estimated, because researchers now have to pay if they want broad data access. From her observations and the more targeted, “surgical” data pulls that her team has been able to do this year, pink-slime sites are far more concentrated in swing states than they had been previously, while conspiracy theories were spreading just as easily as ever. But these are observations; they’re not a real monitoring effort, which would be too costly.

“Monitoring implies that we’re doing consistent data crawls and have wide-open access to data,” she told me, “which we do not.” This time around, nobody will.