Online hate is spilling into the real world, AFP warns
AFP Commissioner KrissyBarrett began her late-night appearance at the Senate estimates hearing noting “a heaviness that hangs across Australia” after the alleged attack on independent MP HelenHaines.
Lone actors are being motivated by a convergence of personal grievances, mental health vulnerabilities and ideological concerns …
What helped keep us safe in recent times, such as our geography, analogue systems and far away criminals, has been impacted by fully integrated technology, social media and artificial intelligence.
We hear about the devastating impacts of racism from communities every day. But many experiences go unreported or uncounted, and our systems often do not capture the full picture.
This is not about collecting more data to prove racism exists. We already know it does. It is about making inequality visible, holding institutions to account and giving communities greater agency over their data to drive real change.
The judge handling the Justice Department's bid to block certification of Alaska's Senate race if the Republican narrowly loses showed skepticism of DOJ's legal strategy.
Despite the agency's human resources department saying he hadn’t even been onboarded, Jeremy Lewin oversaw the destruction of USAID. It’s not clear he had the legal authority to do so.
A government watchdog is considering a probe into the Home Office’s use of ChatGPT technology to process asylum claims amid concerns over the tools’ accuracy and secrecy surrounding their use.
Jess Asato’s public campaigning for victims of online abuse put her in the crosshairs of Grok’s deepfake scandal. Then the UK member of parliament became a victim of the abuse herself.
Republicans currently hold majorities in the House and Senate. How many seats must Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer flip to seize control of Congress?
Speaking to reporters on the tarmac before departing for a campaign event in Michigan, JD Vance responded to a question about President Trump’s remarks branding Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as a “jihadist.”
Vance, who has sparred with the progressive El-Sayed repeatedly on the campaign trail, took a somewhat softer tone. But he didn’t walk away from Trump’s remarks.
Talk to Republicans around Washington and battleground states about the midterms and their talking points are all but in chorus: the polls are wrong and undercounting GOP voters.
Talk to Democrats, and it’s giddy optimism mixed with an equal measure of trepidation, but for a whole other reason: all those predictions of a blue wave could give thousands of their voters permission to stay home.
“We’ve all been burned,” says one former staffer on Democratic campaigns.
The polls currently show Democrats may be on the verge of anhistoric blowout. President Donald Trump has the lowest approval ratings of his two terms in office and threatens to be a drag on most Republicans on the ballot. Democrats are in a strong position to snag a majority in the House and the Senate is still in play, but ideological fractures and a party brand that’s in the gutter stand to undermine their showing. Republicans, meanwhile, are on track to outspend Democrats in some pivotal races.
A particularly messy election season could mean the polls are way off—or mostly on target.
Why the polls might be wrong
House speaker Mike Johnson, left, stumps for Rep. Gabe Evans, who is in a closely watched race against Democrat Manny Rutinel, on Oct. 22, 2026, in Longmont, Colo. —Hyoung Chang—The Denver Post
"I'm telling you, these polls are off. All of them. They use faulty analysis," said House Speaker Mike Johnson over the weekend, as he fights to save the House and his job.
It’s been the drumbeat of the GOP talking-head circuit in recent weeks, as party leaders try to buck up a decidedly unenthusiastic base with talk of rigged surveys that overcount Democratic voters. That enthusiasm gap is quantifiable; about three-quarters of Democratic voters say voting this year is “extremely” important while roughly 6 in 10 Republicans say the same, according to Associated Press polling.
And yet, there is some truth to the notion that pollsters have trouble with Republicans, who are more likely to ignore pollsters’ calls or even mislead them. Past pre-election surveys have repeatedly over-hyped Democrats’ chances of winning. In the last three presidential races, the election results underestimated Trump’s strength heading into Election Day. Republicans are emphasizing that trend, even though similar errors don’t usually occur in midterm election years. “Let’s ask Hillary Clinton how fake the fake polls are. We don’t pay those polls any mind,” rapper Nicki Minaj recently said aboard Air Force One in a video clip posted by a senior White House official. “Obviously, they are to deter our voters from going out and casting their vote.”
More recently, some polls have been off, but not in a way that necessarily helps the Republicans’ argument. Last year’s polling in New Jersey’s and Virginia’s gubernatorial races actually underestimated Democrats’ chances; both went blue.
No matter how loudly Republican talking heads say the polls are overcounting Democrats, that historically is just not the case in years when a presidential race is not on the ballot.
The polls have been pretty accurate in recent midterm elections, and when they’ve been off, it hasn’t always been in Democrats’ favor. In 2022, Democrats narrowly outperformed expectations, leading to a Red Wave that proved smaller than Republicans had hoped. While that was portrayed as a big polling miss by some, in reality, the polls were largely on track, despite some regional exceptions.
A big reason why polls are more accurate in midterm elections is because figuring out who is most likely to make it to the polls is less of a challenge for pollsters. In off-year, low-turnout elections, politics doesn't dominate the zeitgeist. “SNL isn’t opening with a skit on the Nebraska Senate race,” another Democratic strategist says. In other words, it’s easier to pinpoint those voters who are dialed into an election when the White House isn’t in play. After all, many people can’t even name their member of Congress, let alone have a strong opinion on them. As much as Trump keeps saying he’s on the ballot this fall, he objectively is not.
Both sides are acting like the polls are accurate
While Republicans insist polls are underestimating their support, their allocation of resources suggests they believe what the polls in key battlegrounds are telling them. For instance, as polls showed Democrat Roy Cooper well ahead of Republican Michael Whatley in North Carolina’s Senate race, Republicans largely pulled their funding, a clear sign they believed that Cooper’s victory is all but assured.
But the current environment remains unsettled at best. How else to explain that red states like Texas, Iowa, and even Kansas may actually elect a Democrat to the U.S. Senate? Even so, Republicans are dismissing polling trends in many battlegrounds, and instead citing selected polls that show them still in contention or at least within the margin of sampling error.
Nationally, the generic ballot certainly favors Democrats and Trump is undeniably a drag on Republicans who have to stand with their party’s leader or face his wrath. Some Republican nominees have turned out to be lackluster and underperforming national party leaders’ expectations. Others, such as Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio’s race for Governor, have stepped in it and seem unable to clean their shoes. (So badly did a Ramaswamy attack ad backfire, the non-partisan Cook Political Report last week moved that race from a “Toss Up” to “Lean Democrat.”)
We’re on the verge of taking back control of the House,” Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said over the weekend. But first, Democrats understand, they have to show up and not take the polling as permission to stay home on Election Day.
That’s not to say Democrats are fielding an immaculate set of candidates. A misfire in Maine’s Senate race forced the party to swap candidates after the nomination had seemingly been settled. National Democrats didn’t get their favored candidate in Michigan’s Senate race either. The polling in both states shows tighter contests than Democrats had hoped for.
Still, there’s no bigger megaphone in politics right now than Trump, and he is barnstorming the map trying to turn out his people, the folks who are widely understood to eschew pollsters’ calls. While Trump appears to be a drag on the national ticket, he still is popular with his base. A CNBC poll released Monday shows the President with an 82% approval rating among Republicans and at 90% among those who identify with the MAGA movement. Those are numbers that has Republicans praying at least that poll is correct.
On November 3, the Supreme Court will hear St. Mary Catholic Parrish v. Roy, which squarely presents the question of whether the Constitution authorizes discrimination by religious schools. | Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
For years, the Supreme Court has flirted with the question of whether religious conservatives may simply ignore laws prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ Americans. The Court’s Republican majority frequentlyrulesin favor of business owners and institutions that refuse to serve gay or trans people. But these cases often rely on ad hoc reasoning that seems designed to give religious conservatives a narrow win without resolving broader questions about whether people with anti-LGBTQ religious views have an absolute right to violate civil rights laws.
On November 3, however, the Court will hear St. Mary Catholic Parrish v. Roy, which squarely presents the question of whether the Constitution authorizes discrimination by religious schools. Given the Court’s past behavior in similar cases, it’s hard to imagine St. Mary ending in anything other than a victory for religious groups that wish to exclude sexual or gender minorities.
The case also presents another, related question: When does the Constitution require states to subsidize religious institutions? The Republican justices’ recent decisions suggest that they are eager to make taxpayers spend a great deal more money to promote religion.
The case concerns a Colorado law that pays for preschool education for all 4-year-olds in the state. Families with eligible children may choose from a broad range of private and public schools, including religious schools. But the state also bars schools that participate in this program from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Religious preschools that discriminate may continue to operate in Colorado. Although Colorado does have a broad ban on anti-LGBTQ discrimination, that ban exempts places that are “principally used for religious purposes.” So the sole issue in St. Mary is whether Colorado’s taxpayers must fund religious schools that engage in discrimination.
Until fairly recently, the question of whether a state would fund religious education was up to the state itself. In 2002, the Court ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that states had broad leeway to decide whether to fund religious education. They could, if they chose to, set up private school voucher programs that include religious schools. But they could also choose only to fund secular education.
In Carson v. Makin (2022), however, the Supreme Court abandoned this permissive approach. The casestruck down a Maine program that offered private school tuition vouchers to students in sparsely populated areas where it was not cost-efficient for the state to operate a public school. Maine law provided that these vouchers could only be used at “nonsectarian schools,” but the Court’s Republican majority held that school voucher programs must include religious schools.
The Colorado preschool program at issue in St. Mary, in contrast to the program in Maine, does not bar any school from participating because it teaches religion or is affiliated with a particular faith. The program merely requires all participating schools — be they Catholic, protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or secular — to comply with an anti-discrimination law.
The question in St. Mary, in other words, is whether religious schools can not only demand taxpayer funding, but also demand exemptions from generally applicable rules that apply to all other schools that accept that funding — essentially requiring taxpayers to pay for institutions that discriminate.
The St. Mary plaintiffs want the Supreme Court to join together separate lines of religion cases
The Court’s Republican majority has spent more than a decade remaking how the Constitution approaches religion — or, at least, rewriting the Court’s own precedents interpreting the Constitution’s provisions governing religious rights.
One of those provisionsguarantees everyone the right to “free exercise” of their own faith, while the other prohibits the government from creating an “establishment of religion.” Broadly speaking, the Court’s recent decisions have read the first provision expansively, while simultaneously reducing limits on the government’s ability to advance religion — or even holding that the government is constitutionally required to fund religious institutions.
The St. Mary plaintiffs ask the Court to marry two branches of its recent religion decisions — one of which governs when people who object to a law on religious grounds are exempt from following it; the other asks when the government must fund religious schools.
The first branch involves the Constitution’s free exercise clause, and this Court has fairly consistently held that, whenthe interests of religious conservatives conflict with LGBTQ Americans — or, really, anyone who takes a relatively liberal approach to sexuality — religious conservatives win. If you are a religious conservative, and you want an exemption from a law barring discrimination against LGBTQ people, this Court will make up a reason why you should win.
That said, while this Court consistently favors religious conservatives over queer people, the Court’s cases governing when a person of faith is exempt from a law that they object to on religious grounds are fairly incoherent and have not articulated clear legal rules.
In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Court held that these exemptions are not available when someone challenges a “neutral law of general applicability,” meaning that the law applies with equal force to both religious and non-religious people or institutions.
But Smith is, to put it mildly, not a beloved decision. Congress tried, semi-successfully, to overrule it when it enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. And the Court’s most recent religion cases often read like the justices are looking for an excuse not to follow Smith.
In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), for example, the Court ruled in favor of a Christian baker who refused to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples. But the Court grounded that decision in facts very specific to the case, and Masterpiece Cakeshop offers judges little guidance on how they should decide other religion cases that don’t involve these unusual facts.Similarly, in Fulton v. Philadelphia (2021), the Court dodged a showdown over whether to overrule Smith and again resolved the case based on facts that were unique to that case.
These are just two examples of the Court finding ways to not follow the rule it laid out in Smith, without overruling Smith or otherwise announcing a broad legal rule that governs free exercise cases.In their brief to the justices, the St. Mary plaintiffs list “at least eight different categories of cases where Smith does not control.”
It appears that the Court has kept Smith in this strange limbo state — neither overruled nor followed in many cases — because several of the justices aren’t sure what legal rule should exist in its place. Indeed, in a concurring opinion in Fulton, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said outright that, while there are “serious arguments that Smith ought to be overruled,” she wasn’t yet prepared to do so because she wasn’t sure “what should replace Smith.”
Still, the one thing that is clear from this Court’s recent precedents is that religious conservatives routinely prevail over LGBTQ Americans. The current Court has not disturbed decisions from the 1980s that held that religious business owners must pay taxes and comply with workplace regulations such as the minimum wage, but it consistently comes up with a reason to permit religious conservatives to engage in anti-LGBTQ discrimination whenever that issue comes up.
That’s bad news for same-sex couples in Colorado, and a sign that the St. Mary plaintiffs are likely to prevail.
The current crop of justices appear to be either unable or unwilling to come up with a coherent legal doctrine that can guide judges hearing religious liberty cases.
The second line of cases at issue in St. Mary, meanwhile, deal with government subsidies. Nearly a quarter century ago, the Supreme Court held that states may fund religious education if they choose, but that they aren’t required to do so. The Court’s current majority, by contrast, handed down a series of decisions suggesting that separation of church and state is itself unconstitutional. These decisions culminated in Carson, which held that states that offer vouchers to pay for private school tuition must allow these vouchers to be spent at religious schools.
So, realistically, there’s little chance that the plaintiffs in St. Mary will not succeed. If you accept both Carson and the Court’s decisions elevating religious conservatives over LGBTQ people, then it’s not like these plaintiffs’ argument is much of a stretch. It is nothing more than the logical next step in the Court’s broader efforts to shield religious conservatives from anti-discrimination laws, while also requiring nonbelievers to fund those conservatives’ schools.
Carson established that a state violates the Constitution’s free exercise clause when it denies a government subsidy to a religious school. Meanwhile, the Court’s cases involving religious exemptions to the law are doctrinally incoherent, but the one theme that does unite them is that religious conservatives should not have to follow laws protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination.
It is likely, in other words, that Colorado taxpayers will soon be constitutionally required to fund schools that refuse to serve the children of same-sex couples — or that otherwise engage in anti-LGBTQ discrimination that violates Colorado law.
The Court is likely to hand down another ad hocdecision that doesn’t explain how judges are supposed to approach religious liberty cases
That suggests that Barrett’s confusion over what should replace Smith has not abated, and that her confusion is shared by at least some of her colleagues. Notably, her concurring opinion in Fulton was joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. So it is likely that the Court is dodging the question of whether to overrule Smith because it’s hard to form a majority for a new approach that does not include either Kavanaugh or Barrett.
But until the Court develops a new framework governing when religious objectors may ignore generally applicable laws that apply equally to secular and religious actors, the Court’s religious liberty cases will remain a muddled mess.
Which does not mean that St. Mary will be an insignificant decision — it’s obviously a very big deal if the Supreme Court rules that taxpayers are constitutionally required to fund schools that discriminate against LGBTQ families. But the current crop of justices appear to be either unable or unwilling to come up with a coherent legal doctrine that can guide judges hearing religious liberty cases.
Instead, they keep making up reasons why LGBTQ people must lose each individual case.
Rubio’s decision not to meet Narendra Modi last week was seen by some as a snub – but by focusing on business leaders and oil, the secretary of state made American priorities clear. Plus: the artist bringing a female perspective to men’s clothing
When the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, visited India for the second time this year, headlines concentrated on who he met and where he went.
The fact that Rubio bypassed New Delhi and did not meet the prime minister, Narendra Modi, during his trip last week, and instead traveled to the financial capital, Mumbai, where he met India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar (pictured top with Rubio), and business leaders, did not go unnoticed. Nor did his decision to travel to Jamnagar, the small Gujarati town that is home to Reliance Industries’ colossal oil refinery complex.
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