The Daily

After days of uncertainty, Joe Biden has been elected president, becoming the first candidate in more than a quarter of a century to beat an incumbent. His running mate, Kamala Harris, is the first woman and woman of color elected vice president. Mr. Biden’s win is set to be contested — President Trump said in a statement that “the election is far from over.” Today we host a roundtable of three Ti...

When President Trump took to the podium in the White House briefing room Thursday evening to give a statement on the election count, he lied about the legality of the votes against him in key battleground states and called into question the integrity of poll workers, laying a conspiracy at the feet of Democrats. Both the Republican establishment and the conservative news media have been split in t...

By the end of election night, the results in six key states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — were still to be called. On Wednesday, as mail-in ballots were totaled up, Joe Biden gained ground, taking Michigan and Wisconsin and placing him within striking distance of the Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. The count is still in progress in many p...

The U.S. presidential election is a lot closer than the polls indicated. Millions of votes, many in key battleground states, are yet to be counted. Florida — which went for President Trump — is the only bellwether to have confirmed its result. Other crucial states, including Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, are yet to be called. For the moment, it looks like both Mr. Trump and Joe Biden will n...

This episode contains strong language. At the heart of one race for the Wisconsin State Assembly are some of the same political cracks splitting the U.S. as a whole. Some believe keeping businesses running is a priority during the coronavirus pandemic; others think keeping people safe and healthy should be given precedence. What do the different approaches reveal about Wisconsin politics and about...

The Daily is going live today! Join us at 4 p.m. Eastern time for our first-ever Election Day broadcast. You can listen at nytimes.com/thedaily and on The New York Times iPhone app. Michael Barbaro and Carolyn Ryan, a deputy managing editor at The Times, will call our correspondents for the latest on a history-making day. We’ll get live updates from key battleground states and break down the state...

There are many permutations of the U.S. presidential election — some messier than others. Joe Biden’s lead in national polls suggests he has a number of paths to victory. If states like Florida or Georgia break for him early on, then the Trump campaign could be in for a long night. The task for President Trump is to close those paths. If he can hold Florida and quickly add the likes of Arizona and...

At 16, Reginald Dwayne Betts was sent to prison for nine years after pleading guilty to a carjacking, to having a gun, and to an attempted robbery. “Because Senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been following her political rise, with the same focus that my younger son tracks Steph Curry threes,” Mr. Betts said in an essay he wrote for The New York Times Magazine. He had h...

Florida’s seniors played an important role in President Trump’s victory there in 2016. Older voters, who are mostly conservative, make up around 25 percent of the swing state’s electorate and turn out in astonishing numbers. They are also disproportionately affected by the pandemic, and polling suggests that Joe Biden is making inroads with Republican-leaning older voters. In Florida’s conservativ...

This episode contains strong language. With an election in which uncertainty may abound, concerns are swirling around the possibility of political violence. Experts and officials — including those charged with the security of polling stations and ballot counting facilities — have been taking extra precautions. Americans across the political spectrum appear to be preparing themselves for this possi...

Local news in America has long been widely trusted, and widely seen as objective. But as traditional local papers struggle, there have been attempts across the political spectrum to create more partisan outlets. Few can have been as ambitious or widespread as the nationwide network of 1,300 websites and newspapers run by Brian Timpone, a television reporter turned internet entrepreneur. He has sai...

What does the specter of the 2000 election mean for the upcoming election? The race between George W. Bush and Al Gore that year turned on the result in Florida, where the vote was incredibly close and mired in balloting issues. After initially conceding, Mr. Gore, the Democratic nominee, contested the count. What followed was a flurry of court cases, recounts, partisan fury and confusion. It woul...

In America’s increasingly divided political landscape, it can be hard to imagine almost any voter switching sides. One demographic group has provided plenty of exceptions: white suburban women. In the past four years, the group has turned away from the president in astonishing numbers. And many of them are organizing — Red, Wine and Blue is a group made up of suburban women from Ohio hoping to swi...

During months of pandemic isolation, Wesley Morris, a critic at large for The New York Times, decided to grow a mustache. The reviews were mixed and predictable. He heard it described as “porny” and “creepy,” as well as “rugged” and “extra gay.” It was a comment on a group call, however, that gave him pause. Someone noted that his mustache made him look like a lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P.’s legal def...

At the start of Thursday night’s debate its moderator, Kristen Welker of NBC News, delivered a polite but firm instruction: The matchup should not be a repeat of the chaos of last month’s debate. It was a calmer affair and, for the first few segments, a more structured and linear exchange of views. President Trump, whose interruptions came to define the first debate, was more restrained, seemingly...

The winner-take-all system used by the Electoral College in the United States appears nowhere in the Constitution. It awards all of a state’s electors to the candidate with the most votes, no matter how small the margin of victory. Critics say that means millions of votes are effectively ignored. The fairness of the Electoral College was seriously questioned in the 1960s. Amid the civil rights pus...

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have invested a significant amount of time and money trying to avoid the mistakes made during the 2016 election. A test of those new policies came last week, when The New York Post published a story that contained supposedly incriminating documents and pictures taken from the laptop of Hunter Biden. The provenance and authenticity of that information is still in quest...

In the struggle to control the U.S. Senate, one race in North Carolina — where the Republican incumbent, Thom Tillis, is trying to hold off his Democratic challenger, Cal Cunningham — could be crucial. North Carolina is a classic purple state with a split political mind: progressive in some quarters, while firmly steeped in Southern conservative tradition in others. Two bombshells have recently up...

This episode contains strong language. In the last decade, elections have tightened in Arizona, a traditionally Republican stronghold, as Democrats gain ground. According to polls, Joe Biden is leading in the state — partly because of white suburban women moving away from President Trump, but also because of efforts to activate the Latino vote. Will that turn states like Arizona blue? And do enoug...

Jim Dwyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times, died earlier this month. He was 63. Throughout his nearly 40-year career, Jim was drawn to stories about discrimination, wrongly convicted prisoners and society’s mistreated outcasts. From 2007, he wrote The Times’s “About New York” column — when asked whether he had the best job in journalism, he responded, “I believe I do.” D...

In the second of a two-part examination of the presidential candidates’ policies, we turn to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s agenda and how he plans to govern a nation wracked by a public health and economic crisis. The themes of Mr. Biden’s Democratic primary campaign were broad as he eschewed the policy-intensive approach of opponents like Senator Elizabeth Warren. But the onset of the pandemic helped sha...

In a two-part examination of the policies of the president and of the man seeking to replace him, Joe Biden, we first take a look at what Donald Trump said he would do four years ago — and what he’s actually accomplished. On some of the big issues, Mr. Trump has been the president he told us he was going to be, keeping commitments on deregulation, taxes, military spending and the judiciary. But ot...

It was a 12-hour session. Twenty-two senators took turns questioning Judge Amy Coney Barrett on her record and beliefs. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, evoked personal experience of life before Roe v. Wade and asked Judge Barrett whether she would vote to overturn abortion rights. On that question, Judge Barrett demurred — an approach she would take to other contentious issues, i...

In March, Congress pushed through a relief package that preserved the U.S. economy during the pandemic. It felt like government functioning at its best. But now, that money is running out and bipartisanship has given way to an ideological stalemate. While Republicans balk at plans for further significant government spending — even those coming from the White House — Democrats are holding out for m...

Most Americans say that abortion should be legal with some restrictions, but President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, signed a statement in a 2006 newspaper advertisement opposing “abortion on demand.” Her accession would bolster a conservative majority among the justices. How did that happen? According to Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, abortion righ...