A pair of election forecasters on how to approach the final days of the campaign.

Every presidential campaign features a breakout star, and in 2024, there might be two: Lakshya Jain, co-founder of Split Ticket, and Logan Phillips, founder of Race to the White House. They are two of the nation’s top election forecasters and both have muscled their way into the crowded conversation of polling analysts, arguably led by Nate Silver.

In an interview for the Playbook Deep Dive podcast, they talked why the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is a real toss-up and why polls sometimes do a terrible job of capturing certain slices of the electorate — particularly people who didn’t vote in 2020 but may vote this year.

There are serious stakes to the election, including democracy issues and abortion rights — but the intense, vitriolic polarization we’re experiencing now is largely based on our perceptions about each other, according to research from Johns Hopkins University professor Lilliana Mason

Mason, a professor of political science at the university’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s Agora Institute, says this type of division, which she calls affective polarization, doesn’t require us to have wildly different policy disagreements to hate each other. Instead, she told Vox, “it’s based on feelings,” as well as misunderstandings about which groups, and what kind of people, are on the other side.

A pro-Harris campaign ad encouraging women to break with their Trump-supporting partners at the ballot box is striking a nerve amid signs of a growing national gender gap in the high-stakes presidential race.

Vote Common Good, which encourages evangelical and Catholic voters to break from the GOP, aired an ad voiced by actress Julia Roberts reminding women “you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know” — prompting pushback from several prominent conservatives who criticized it for calling on wives to lie to their husbands.

Consider the fact that almost all software in the world is written in English. What I mean is that the built-in functions of nearly every programming language (“print,” “if,” “else,” “for,” “class,” “return,” “continue”) are English words, or abbreviations of them. Every coder in the world, whether Chinese or French, Israeli or Bangladeshi, learns to speak at least some English because of this. English speakers are far from the most populous group of people on Earth, and yet all coders everywhere learn to speak our language. This is true because America won. To code is to submit to a staggering American civilizational victory, to acknowledge, just a little bit, the indisputable dominance of America—our people, our technology, our ideas, and, you better believe it, our words.

One byproduct of this staggering civilizational victory is that the Chinese military almost certainly uses open-source software that is primarily maintained by American and Western programmers. And I would be willing to bet that programming languages (themselves very often a form of open-source software) invented by Americans are a fundamental enabler of all sorts of Chinese weapons.

As we explored the implications of this significant milestone adopted by the UNGA, we gathered feedback from the futures community regarding the Pact for the Future and its commitments.

Three critical issues urgently require resolution, and a basic consensus should be pursued immediately: Artificial General Intelligence, Climate Change, and Peace and Security. If a firm, practical consensus is not reached on these issues, much of the Pact will remain precarious and at risk of existential irrelevance. There must be a global mobilization—across civil society, science, business, think tanks and NGOs, and the broader public—pressing for compliance with the Pact and empowering the UN to generate feasible, actionable plans for each member state. Moreover, further contributions from the futures community will be essential to define long-term strategies that better anticipate future challenges, and the community is willing to continue contributing.

In conclusion, we wish to express our appreciation for the extensive efforts and diverse content encompassed in the Pact for the Future and its annexes. We join many others in hoping that this Pact will serve as a powerful catalyst for change, guiding humanity toward more long-term, integrated, and sustainable pathways, ensuring that future generations inherit a world that is not only viable but also thriving.

Being mindful refers to the quality of awareness you bring to your experiences – specifically, nonjudgmental attention focused on what’s happening right now.

Be present. Anxiety can draw you into an uncomfortable spiral of “what-ifs” about the future. When you make a point to be present, you remind yourself what is actually happening right now, rather than letting hypothetical fears take over.

Why it matters: Trump is keeping a list of CEOs and corporations he believes have wronged him or backed his rivals. Business leaders wary of retribution have been reaching out and playing nice.

Reality check: Business leaders are calling Trump, but he’s still seeing the lowest level of financial contributions from Corporate America in a century, Sonnenfeld says.

The bottom line: Even if CEOs of America’s major corporations aren’t fans of Trump, they don’t want to be on his bad side if he wins back the White House.

Next week’s presidential election isn’t just a referendum on Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. It’s also a measure of the influence the world’s richest man wields over American democracy.

Elon Musk, the South African-born tech and business titan, has spent at least $119 million mobilizing Trump’s supporters to back the Republican nominee. His social media platform, X, has become a firehose of pro-Trump propaganda. And he’s playing a starring role in Trump-style rallies in critical battleground states.

When an increasingly unstable Donald Trump took his increasingly unhinged campaign to Arizona last night, how did the crowd respond to this image of violence against Liz Cheney?

They cheered. They joined their master in the sick thrill of voyeuristically imagining an act of violence against an American political opponent.

One reason demagogues are so dangerous is that their moral sickness is contagious