user: Can You Recognize These Natural Wonders?

Since Earth Day was established in 1970, the annual event has focused on raising awareness and inspiring action in the face of countless threats to the natural environment. In the years since, as climate change has come to dominate headlines, the urgency of those goals has only grown stronger.

This Earth Day, test your knowledge of some of the stunning natural wonders the holiday aims to protect, as they were captured by LIFE magazine’s master photographers.

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified the image of Ama Dablam.

Summary: From reefs to volcanoes to canyons


Problem: Where early voting hints at good news for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump

Bloomberg News's Sasha Issenberg is no fun.

In an interview with The Washington Post's Jim Tankersley, Issenberg sagely suggested that it was a questionable enterprise to read too much into early-voting numbers. Rules change between elections in states, campaigns can put more or less emphasis on turning early voters out, and more people are voting early anyway, making increases less meaningful. All true; Issenberg, who has written books about campaign turnout efforts, knows what he's talking about.

That said, early vote data is the only vote data we've got. We have a choice between eyeballing incoming data about the composition of the early-voting electorate or ignoring it. Of course we'll find out in a little over a week who won the election, but it is our duty as hyperactive election watchers to parse any morsel of data we come across. Just: responsibly.

So because we're going to do this, and with Issenberg's caveat lingering, let's start with the Upper Midwest.

On Friday, Donald Trump's senior communications adviser Jason Miller told an interviewer that the campaign thought that both Michigan and New Mexico were on the table in November. That's a bold claim; both states are considered solidly blue. In looking at the claim, though, we noticed an apparent shift toward Trump in Michigan, though public polling is spotty.

Also on Friday, news from the Hillary Clinton campaign. For the first time this cycle, Clinton is buying ads in Wisconsin, Michigan's Rust Belt neighbor to the west. Trump's electoral argument had long been that he'd be uniquely poised to bring working-class white Democrats into the Republican fold. It's an argument that hasn't really been bolstered by the numbers: Many of those voters had come over in 1980 with Ronald Reagan or otherwise migrated to the Republican Party since.

What does the early vote data say? To eliminate the problem of comparing increased returns year-over-year, we looked at the composition of the early-voting electorate by race, gender and, where available, party. (The numbers for the graphs below come from the left-leaning data organization Catalist.)

In Michigan, the early-voting electorate looks much like it did at this point in the 2012 cycle. Early voters have been slightly more female, but not substantially.

In Wisconsin, it's different. The state — the last state to firmly reject Trump's candidacy in the Republican primary — has seen an increase in the density of the white vote among early voters, and an uptick among men. That's what we'd expect an electorate that's shifting toward Trump to look like, all caveats kept in mind. (One caveat: RealClearPolitics figures that Clinton has a six-point lead given recent polling.)

That's a decent lens to look at early-vote returns: Whether the electorate looks the way we'd expect an electorate that's friendly to Clinton to look or if it looks more like one that might be friendly to Trump.

A decrease in the density of the white vote and an uptick in the Hispanic vote. Arizona, like several other states, provides party information, too, which is where the obvious good news comes in for Clinton: Compared with 2012, the early vote has seen an increase in the density of Democrats.

Not much demographic change from 2012, when President Obama won the state. But an uptick in Democrats is what Clinton supporters would want to see.

A slight uptick in the density of the Hispanic vote. A decline in the density of the Democratic vote, not as big as that among Republicans. According to Catalist, the increase of the unaffiliated vote is linked to the increase among Hispanics.

Virginia's early-vote electorate looks mostly as it did in 2012, except a slight increase in the density of the Hispanic vote. Good news for Clinton, because Obama won the state.

Compared with 2012, the density of black early voters has dropped. This may be due in part to changes in early voting laws and procedures that have limited participation.

A drop in the number of Democrats relative to 2012, and an increase in the number of Republicans.

An increase in the density of the white vote and declines among members of both major parties. Mitt Romney won the state in 2012 after Obama won it in 2008. But Catalist notes that the density of the black vote has increased in recent days.

The same has happened in Ohio. The black vote is lower than it was four years ago, but it has been increasing. The state got rid of its “golden week,” a week during which people could both register and vote. That has apparently depressed early-vote participation.

Many of these shifts are relatively minor. In comparing 2016 with 2012, we also can miss trends within states over the period that they've been voting, as with the black vote in Ohio and North Carolina. It can't be stated enough, in other words, that the grains of salt Issenberg sprinkled at the outset of this article are there for a reason. These numbers can and will shift.

But, come on. We've spent 12 months parsing head-to-head general election polling with an eye toward predicting the winner of the 2016 election. At least this time we're looking at actual voters.

Write a one or two sentence summary.

Summary:

assistant: Reading the murky tea leaves, with the appropriate caveats.