The Headlines - Early Voting Grows Among Republicans, and a Lithium Trove in Arkansas

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

Plus, the booming Halloween economy.   Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail] Today’s Episode:With Election Day 2 Weeks Away, 15 Million Voters Have Already Cast a Ballot, by Nick CorasanitiTrump Says He Has Seen No Evidence of Cheating in the Election, but Nonetheless Sows Doubts, by Michael GoldHamas’s Guerrilla Tactics in North Gaza Make It Hard to Defeat, by Patrick Kingsley and Aaron BoxermanHow Aleksei Navalny’s Prison Diaries Got Published, by Alexandra AlterArkansas May Have Vast Lithium Reserves, Researchers Say, by Ivan Penn and Rebecca F. ElliottHalloween’s Mutation: From Humble Holiday to Retail Monstrosity, by Aimee Ortiz

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Traci Mumford. Today's Tuesday, October 22nd. Here's what we're covering. With two weeks to go until Election Day, more than 15 million Americans have already voted. And many states are setting records. Georgia, Louisiana, and even North Carolina, which is still reeling from Hurricane Helene, have all had record turnout.

It's a sign that the huge boost in early voting that came with the pandemic is sticking around. Americans are embracing early voting in massive numbers. It's no longer just election day, but it's election season. Nick Corciniti is covering the election for The Times. Well, it's still way too early to try and glean any partisan advantage or a look at who's winning through the early vote data that we have so far. We are seeing one key trend emerge, and that's that more Republicans are choosing to vote early. When that comes to mail voting, Democrats are still dominating in the states where we have party registration data.

But Republicans are also making gains there. So if you were to look at Pennsylvania, you could see that in the 2020 election, Republicans only cast about 23% of the total votes by mail. This year so far, they're at about 27%. And that's important for helping campaigns know which votes are banked and which voters they still need to target. Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are pushing their supporters

to vote early this year, though Donald Trump has undermined that message at times, criticizing mail-in voting and spreading misinformation that it's rigged. At events in North Carolina yesterday, Trump said he hadn't seen evidence of cheating yet this year, but repeated his unfounded claims that Democrats are trying to. He asked the chairman of the Republican National Committee about it on stage. He's going to stop the cheating. How are you doing? Are they cheating, Michael? They're trying, but they're not going to get away with it, right?

He said, he said, no. Trump's allies have also filed a flurry of lawsuits challenging voting rules and practices around the country. That suggests a broader effort to lay the groundwork to potentially challenge the election results in November. More than a year into the war in Gaza, the Israeli military has now killed most of Hamas's top commanders, decimated rank-and-file fighters, and destroyed many of the group's stockpiles. But Hamas is still fighting back, and it's using guerrilla tactics to avoid defeat. Much of the group's vast tunnel network remains intact, allowing Hamas fighters to emerge and booby-trap buildings or set roadside bombs. They've also been refilling their arsenal by gathering up unexploded Israeli munitions and turning them into improvised explosives. And even though Israel killed the group's leader,

Yahya Sinwar, last week, its fighters have adapted to making decisions locally and independently. Sinwar, for example, hadn't had much direct control over militants in northern Gaza for almost a year. In that part of the territory, Israel has been carrying out intense bombardments and has issued evacuation orders for tens of thousands of people in the past few weeks. The escalation there comes as one former Israeli general has been pushing a dramatic proposal for northern Gaza. He wants the Israeli government to cut off all food and water to the region. He says it would force Hamas fighters to either, quote, surrender or to die of starvation. The plan has gotten some

support in the Israeli government, though human rights advocates say it would threaten the welfare of civilians and violate international law. The memoir of Alexei Navalny, the pro-democracy Russian opposition leader who died in prison earlier this year, is being published today. The book contains the journal entries he managed to write and smuggle out of prison. His widow, Yulia Navalny, helped assemble them. In the entries, Navalny wrote that he knew Vladimir Putin might succeed in silencing him, but that he was resigned to it. Navalny was the most prominent figure in the opposition movement, and in his absence, Times reporter Valerie Hopkins says the movement has been struggling. In the period after Navalny's death, all opposition-minded Russians were

grieving not only for him, but for a democratic vision of Russia. But now, about half a year since his death, the opposition has actually never been more divided, it feels like. Valerie says that tensions are high among the groups that oppose Putin, both Navalny's team and others. The groups have been beset by infighting, you know, with accusations actually that some progressive Russians have been violent against Navalny supporters, you know, just after an investigation raising questions about where the Navalny team gets their funding and accusations that they are affiliated with potentially corrupt people. It's caused a lot of consternation and frustration and trust issues, frankly.

So there are a lot of different disputes and visions for what a democratic Russia should look like and what are the compromises and political steps it's going to take to get there. But as that looks far off, it seems like the opposition has been more focused on fighting itself than the Kremlin. Officials in Arkansas, along with federal researchers, have announced that they've discovered a vast underground trove of lithium, the raw material that's critical for building batteries like those used in electric vehicles. They say there could be millions of tons of lithium under the state in brine reservoirs, essentially huge deposits of salty water. There may be even enough to meet all of the world's demand. Currently, most lithium

comes from Australia and South America, and the energy industry, encouraged by the Biden administration, has been increasingly looking for domestic sources of the metal. The question now is how to get the lithium out of the brine. One method uses huge, lake-sized evaporation ponds, but there are efforts underway to develop new technology that will use filters and other tools to extract it more efficiently with a smaller environmental footprint. Even before the huge deposit of Arkansas lithium was discovered, ExxonMobil had been drilling exploratory wells in the state. It says that by 2030, it hopes to be extracting enough lithium a year from Arkansas to power a

million electric vehicles. And finally, even in places where the leaves don't change colors, you know it's officially fall when the Spirit Halloween opens. Weak, horrific taste. From creepy clowns to spine-tingling monsters, Spirit has the scariest collection. The Halloween retail giant opens up more than 1,500 pop-up locations across the country every year, taking over vacant spots and strip malls, selling costumes, fake blood, vampire fangs,

and some truly terrifying animatronics that your neighbor inevitably buys. Come November, the stores are gone again, before people even finish the candy corn. They're part of the massive and growing Halloween economy. This year, Americans are expected to spend more than $11 billion celebrating. That amount has quadrupled over the last 20 years. About $3.5 billion of that will go to candy, roughly the same amount to costumes, and even $500 million to Halloween greeting cards, which are apparently a thing. The CEO of Spirit Halloween says the Halloween boom is thanks in part to almost every age getting in on the holiday. When he was growing up, he said you got to 12 and you stopped celebrating. But now college students and adults are in on it too. And this year, the company has announced

it's set its sights on another holiday. It's going to test a handful of spirit Christmas shops across the Northeast. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a Times investigation into the health risks of marijuana, as more Americans use more potent forms of the drug more often. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracey Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.