Eliana Willis

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    'I'm more enthusiastic now than in 2016': meet the voters standing by Donald Trump

    Lisa Matthews voted for Barack Obama. But just the once. The daughter of an African American mother and Puerto Rican father, the 47-year-old grew up in one of the roughest neighbourhoods of Camden, New Jersey, a struggling former shipbuilding port on the Delaware river.“Camden was predominantly black, poor, a lot of welfare recipients, single parents, and crime. Big drug trade. My father was in the military, but he left the family when I was five. My mom was a single mom at the age of 23. We lived on food stamps,” Matthews says. “I had two of my cousins killed there in the city, and my stepbrother was murdered as well. My uncle was killed by an unknown shooter in 1987. It was a tough place to grow up.”Like her mother, Matthews became a single parent at 23 and worked several jobs to stay afloat. But her absent father’s time in the military had planted a seed. Her parents were posted around the US and to Britain, and her mother talked about other places with wonder. Matthews carried that with her. “My sister and I were very interested in the world, in other cultures,” she says. In her 20s, a friend encouraged her to move to Concord, North Carolina, where she got a job in a bank. Now she lives in a large house in a plush suburb where we chat over tea and Jammie Dodgers (she still loves all things British). She’s wearing her politics on her T-shirt: “President Trump 2020, Keep America Great”.In 2008, Matthews voted for Obama, helping to swing the former slave state to America’s first black president. “I wasn’t a really liberal Democrat back then. Even Barack Obama wasn’t that liberal in 2008. I was just excited that he was black, to be honest,” she says. But by the time the next election came round, she questioned the point of an African American president.“The black community rallied around him, but what message did he have for them? He could have said, this is how me and Michelle got out of the South Side of Chicago. We can help lift people up,” she says. “Instead he was telling people they’re oppressed: ‘Let me give you a handout.’”Matthews came to think that summed up the Democrats. As she saw it, the party kept the poor dependent on welfare instead of providing paths out of poverty. She drifted toward the Republicans, although she wasn’t ready to support Mitt Romney against Obama in 2012; that year, she didn’t vote.Four years later, Donald Trump made his attention-grabbing ride down the golden escalator of his New York tower to announce a run for president. By then Matthews had become a bank fraud investigator; she now owns her own home for the first time. She voted against Trump in the primaries, thinking he didn’t stand a chance. But when he won the Republican nomination, she embraced it.“I thought he was just a great American, New Yorker businessman. He was the epitome of what America is like. Brash, throwing money around,” she says. “But I didn’t know what kind of president he would be. I was never against him, but I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I am now. Now I tell people I love Trump.”***If Trump pulls off the unexpected once again, his victory will be built on the foundation of the four in 10 voters who have consistently said they will stick with him, despite one of the most tempestuous presidencies of modern times. Voters who have excused him, explained him, even despaired of him at times, but never spurned him.The most visible of those supporters can be found at Trump’s rallies, sporting Make America Great Again hats and cheering the president’s provocations; or forming armed vigilante groups, ostensibly to defend order and history. They push Trump’s myriad conspiracy theories, including about Covid-19, even after the president caught the virus. But most of those who remain loyal are not the ultras seen on television. Neither are they easily slotted into the demographics often assigned to Trump supporters – the embittered former factory workers turning their anger on minorities and voting against their own interests.When you see the coal trains and the trucks, and people going back to work, you see people’s attitudes changeThis autumn I drove for over a month across the US – from the south to Appalachian coal country in one of the poorest states, West Virginia; and from Detroit, Michigan, once the engine of America’s industrialisation, to the upper reaches of rural Minnesota on the border with Canada – the miles of Trump signs and flags are one demonstration of the enthusiasm some of his supporters retain. The voters were as varied as the landscape. The coalmine worker who was without a job for years. The former military officer whose father came to the US illegally. The estate agent and small city mayor angry about China. The former police officer despairing at Black Lives Matter. All told me why they are determinedly sticking with Trump.***Ronald Reagan, on his way to unseating President Jimmy Carter in 1980, famously asked American voters: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The division, uncertainty and fear of 2020 makes that seem an inadequate question ahead of this election. Bo Copley, however, doesn’t hesitate to say that he is. Copley lost his maintenance job on a West Virginia coalmine a year before the last election, and gained fleeting fame in 2016 after confronting Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail over her pledge to “put a lot of coalminers out of business”. More

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    US 2020 election could have the highest rate of voter turnout since 1908

    More than 50 million Americans have cast ballots in the US presidential election with 11 days to go in the campaign, a pace that could lead to the highest voter turnout in over a century, according to data from the US Elections Project on Friday.The eye-popping figure is a sign of intense interest in the contest between Republican Donald Trump and Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger, as well as Americans’ desire to reduce their risk of exposure to Covid-19, which has killed more than 221,000 people across the United States.Many states have expanded in-person early voting and mail-in ballots ahead of election day on 3 November, as a safer way to vote during the coronavirus pandemic.The high level of early voting has led Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who administers the US Elections Project, to predict a record turnout of about 150 million, representing 65% of eligible voters, the highest rate since 1908.In Texas, the level of voting has already surpassed 70% of the total turnout in 2016. In Georgia, some have waited in line for more than 10 hours to cast their ballots. And Wisconsin has seen a record number of early votes, with 1.1 million people having returned their ballots as of this week. Voters in Virginia, Ohio and Georgia have also seen long lines at early voting sites. More

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    'Kills all the birds': Trump and Biden spar over climate in TV debate – video

    The closing moments of the final presidential debate focused on climate change. Joe Biden stressed the need to expand sources of renewable energy while again disputing Donald Trump’s claim that he intended to ban fracking, which he does not. ‘I know more about wind than you do,’ Trump retorted, drawing an exasperated laugh from Biden. ‘It’s extremely expensive. Kills all the birds’
    Humanity has eight years to get climate crisis under control – and Trump’s plan won’t fix it
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    Humanity has eight years to get climate crisis under control – and Trump's plan won't fix it

    In Donald Trump’s world – laid bare during Thursday night’s final presidential debate with his Democratic rival Joe Biden in Nashville – fossil fuels are “very clean”, the US has the best air and water despite his administration’s extensive regulatory rollbacks, and the country can fix climate change by planting trees.
    But according to the harsh realities being laid out by climate scientists, Trump’s world does not exist.
    Humanity has just eight years to figure out how to get climate change under control before the future starts to look drastically worse – multiple-degree temperature increases, global sea-level rise, and increasingly disastrous wildfires, hurricanes, floods and droughts. Doing so will mean that unless there is a technological miracle, humans will at some point have to stop burning oil, gas and coal.
    “We’re told by all the leading scientists in the world we don’t have much time,” Biden said. “We’re going to pass the point of no return within the next eight to 10 years. Four more years of this man … will put us in a position where we’ll be in real trouble,” the former vice-president said.
    Much of the media coverage of the exchange – which as usual didn’t come until the end of the debate as time was running out – will probably focus on Trump’s attacks on Biden. He called his plan job-killing, argued it would cost $100tn and not $6tn, and accused Biden of flip-flopping on fracking. The drilling method has fueled a natural gas boom in swing states such as Pennsylvania, which both candidates see as critically important to winning the election. At one point, Biden dared Trump to publish evidence of him ever saying he would end fracking, and Trump promised he would.
    Stories might quote Trump, who has denied the human-made climate crisis in a variety of strange ways, telling Biden “I know more about wind than you,” despite previously wrongly claiming wind power causes cancer. “They want to take buildings down because they want to make bigger windows into smaller windows. As far as they’re concerned if you had no window it would be a lovely thing,” Trump accused in another tangent. “This is the craziest plan that anyone has ever seen. It wasn’t done by smart people. Frankly, I don’t know how it could be good politically.”
    But perhaps the most interesting point was when the candidates were asked what they would do for people – often people of color – who are living next to polluting gasoline refineries and petrochemical plants.
    Trump pressed Biden: “Would you close down the oil industry?”
    And Biden, who might typically steer clear of such a politically controversial question, said he would.
    “I would transition from the oil industry, yes,” Biden said.
    “The oil industry pollutes significantly,” he added. “It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time.”
    Trump shot back that Biden “is saying is he would destroy the oil industry”.
    “Would you remember that Texas? Would you remember that Pennsylvania? Oklahoma? Ohio?”

    The moment was notable, including because it was the opposite of what he said about natural gas. He would not commit to any kind of end to the second half of the industry which has a fast-growing role in causing climate change.
    “We need other industries to transition to get to ultimately a complete zero-emissions,” Biden said. “What I will do with fracking over time is to make sure we will capture the emissions from the fracking, capture the emissions from gas. We can do that by investing money.”
    Speaking to reporters after the debate, Biden insisted the fossil fuel industry wouldn’t “be gone” until 2050.
    “We’re not getting rid of fossil fuels. We’re getting rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels, but we’re not getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time,” Biden said.
    Those kinds of statements illuminate why American environmental advocates have quietly worried whether Biden will do enough on climate, even as they have endorsed him and backed his plan.
    While Biden is pitching large-scale spending to both help the economy recover and put people to work in green jobs, some fear climate could get lost among his priorities or that the political roadblocks to working with Congress and getting climate efforts past a conservative supreme court would prove too difficult.
    A Trump win could be devastating to both US and global climate action, but a Biden win is not assured to significantly address the challenge either. More

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    Biden and Trump diverge sharply on major issues in final presidential debate

    The Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden assailed Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic during Thursday night’s final presidential debate, as the president attempted to reset a race that shows him trailing his opponent in opinion polls less than two weeks before election day.
    The evening in Nashville began relatively calmly, with the rivals making their closing arguments to the nation amid a pandemic that has killed more than 220,000 Americans and infected millions more, including the president. In part due to the pandemic, more than 40 million Americans have already cast their ballot, shattering records and leaving Trump an increasingly narrow window to reset the debate around his handling of the coronavirus crisis and its economic fallout.
    But Trump continued to downplay the severity of the public health crisis, defending his response and predicting that a vaccine was imminent, even though his own public health experts have said one would likely not be widely available to the American public until next summer.
    “It will go away,” Trump said, offering a rosy assessment of the pandemic’s trajectory even as cases have started rising again across the US and public health experts warn that the US is on the precipice of a dangerous new wave.
    “We’re rounding the corner,” he added.
    “We can’t keep this country closed. This is a massive country with a massive economy,” Trump said. “There’s depression, alcohol, drugs at a level nobody’s ever seen before. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”
    In contrast, Biden opened his remarks by acknowledging the grim toll of the coronavirus pandemic and warned that the nation must prepare for “a dark winter”.
    Biden said: “220,000 deaths. If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States.”

    The 90-minute debate was a far more coherent and civil affair than the first presidential debate last month, which devolved into a chaotic brawl with Trump incessantly hectoring his opponent and sparring with the moderator. The shift in tone was probably due to a rule change that required a candidate’s microphone to be muted while his rival delivered a two-minute response to the opening question on each of the six debate topics.
    On Thursday, Trump largely abided by the rules, allowing Biden to speak uninterrupted, and even complimenting the moderator, the NBC News correspondent Kristen Welker, who he spent the last week criticizing.
    Biden, too, was more restrained. When Trump made a false claim about his opponent, Biden looked skyward, as if calling on a higher power to keep him from reacting. But it didn’t always stop him.
    When Trump said Biden called his decision to impose Covid-19 related travel restrictions on China “xenophobic”, the Democrat shot back: “He is xenophobic, but not because he cut off access from China.”
    The stakes were high for both candidates, even if the debate was unlikely to dramatically redefine the contours of the presidential race. Despite the cascading public health and economic crises, Biden has maintained a steady lead over the incumbent, according to public opinion polls, while Trump has struggled to outline his vision for a second term and grapple with voters’ disapproval of his response to the pandemic.
    Despite the increasingly ugly and personal nature of the campaign, the evening featured a substantive policy debate as the candidates diverged sharply on the issues of race, immigration and climate.

    They were asked to speak directly to the black and brown Americans about racism in America. Biden said plainly that institutional racism exists and that combatting racial inequality would be a priority of his administration. Trump, ignoring the prompt, assailed his opponent for playing a central role writing the 1994 crime bill that many experts and critics say laid the groundwork for mass incarceration that disproportionately affected Black communities. Shielding his eyes to peer into the audience and concluding it was too dark to see properly, Trump was nonetheless confident that he was the “least racist person in this room”.
    Biden was incredulous. “This guy has a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn,” he said, accusing Trump of being “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history” and a leader who intentionally “pours fuel on every single racist fire”.
    In an exchange on immigration, Trump attempted to defend his administration’s decision to separate thousands of immigrant families at the southern border, even after revelations that 545 children have still not been reunited with their parents after two years apart. The president said the White House was working on a plan to reunite the children and their parents but insisted the blame lay with the Obama administration, which enforced a record number of deportations.
    Biden forcefully denied that the previous administration was responsible for Trump’s family separation policy, decrying the situation as “criminal”.
    But pressed on why voters should trust him to deliver immigration reform when the Obama administration failed to deliver on this promise, he conceded: “we made a mistake. It took too long to get it right.”

    The final moments of the debate were devoted to a discussion on climate change. Biden stressed the need to expand sources of renewable energy – while again disputing Trump’s claim that he intended to ban fracking, which he does not.
    “I know more about wind than you do,” Trump retorted, drawing an exasperated laugh from Biden. “It’s extremely expensive. Kills all the birds.”
    But at one point Biden said he would “transition from the oil industry” and replace it with renewable energy over the next several years. “That’s a big statement,” Trump said.
    Departing Nashville after the debate, Biden sought to clarify the remark: “We’re not getting rid of fossil fuels. We’re getting rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels.”

    The candidates also clashed sharply on their finances and family business entanglements.
    Citing revelations in the New York Times that Trump only paid $750 a year in federal income taxes while maintaining an undisclosed bank account in China, Biden implored Trump to “release your tax returns or stop talking about corruption”. Trump, who has not yet released his tax returns, claimed his accountants told him that he had “prepaid tens of millions of dollars” in taxes.
    In turn, Trump repeatedly leveled unsubstantiated claims about the former vice-president’s son Hunter Biden. The Democratic nominee defended his son and categorically denied the accusations as he sought to turn the conversation back to policy.
    “There’s a reason why he’s bringing up all this malarkey,” Biden said, speaking directly to the camera. “He doesn’t want to talk about the substantive issues. It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family.” More

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    Joe Biden plans special commission to suggest supreme court reforms

    Joe Biden has confirmed he would appoint a special commission to study the US court system over 180 days, if he is elected next month, to provide reform recommendations relating to the supreme court and beyond.
    In response to questions about the US supreme court during an interview for this Sunday’s 60 Minutes news magazine, the former vice-president and Democratic presidential nominee told CBS TV managing editor Norah O’Donnell that the court system is “getting out of whack” and that “there’s a number of alternatives that go well beyond ‘packing’”, ie increasing the number of seats on the nine-justice supreme court bench.
    “The last thing we need to do is turn the supreme court into just a political football, [that means] whoever has the most votes gets whatever they want,” Biden said in the interview, which airs just nine days ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
    “Presidents come and go. Supreme court justices stay for generations,” he added.

    60 Minutes
    (@60Minutes)
    Watch more of @NorahODonnell’s interview with Joe Biden, Sunday. pic.twitter.com/wJmb8MatVg

    October 22, 2020

    In keeping with the show’s election tradition, both candidates will be featured in separate interviews to spell out their plans for the country. The previews come following reports that Donald Trump abruptly ended what was intended to be an hour-long interview at the White House after 45 minutes, before chastising correspondent Stahl for her professionalism and lack of mask.
    Meanwhile, the US president has been talking about doing his own pre-emptive defense.

    Donald J. Trump
    (@realDonaldTrump)
    I will soon be giving a first in television history full, unedited preview of the vicious attempted “takeout” interview of me by Lesley Stahl of @60Minutes. Watch her constant interruptions & anger. Compare my full, flowing and “magnificently brilliant” answers to their “Q’s”. https://t.co/L3szccGamP

    October 22, 2020

    Biden vowed that if he prevails in November’s election he will “put together a bipartisan commission of constitutional scholars – Democrats, Republicans, liberal, conservative” over “180 days come back to me with recommendations” on the US court system.
    “It’s the way in which it’s being handled and it’s not about court packing,” Biden argued, adding “there’s a number of other things that our constitutional scholars have debated and I’ve looked to see what recommendations that commission might make.”
    While the Democrat kept the focus on the recovery from a pandemic and recession, Trump, meanwhile, vaguely looked forward to one goal: “To get back to normal”.
    “Get back to where we were, to have the economy rage and be great with jobs and everybody be happy,” he said. “And that’s where we’re going, and that’s where we’re heading.”

    60 Minutes
    (@60Minutes)
    Watch more of Lesley Stahl’s interview with President Trump, Sunday. pic.twitter.com/zA5q4pFxeI

    October 22, 2020

    The president then took aim at China, calling them “an adversary,” “a competitor” and a “foe” before slamming the country for giving rise to the Covid-19 outbreak.
    Interviews with their running mates, Republican vice-president Mike Pence and California Senator Kamala Harris, will also air during the broadcast. More

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    Barack Obama likens Donald Trump to 'crazy uncle' in Joe Biden rally speech – video

    Barack Obama has delivered a stinging rebuke of president Donald Trump in a speech delivered in Philadelphia while campaigning for Joe Biden. Obama criticised Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis as well as divisive behaviour including retweeting conspiracy theories that you wouldn’t tolerate from  anyone “except from a crazy uncle”. The former president also praised the positivity shown during the pandemic and recent Black Lives Matter movement . “We see that what is best is us is still there, but we’ve got to give it voice.” More

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    Russia and Iran obtained US voter data in bid to sow unrest before election, FBI warns

    Russia and Iran have obtained some US voting registration information and are attempting to sow unrest in the upcoming election, the government’s national intelligence director said in a rare news conference Wednesday night.“We have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails, designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump,” said John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence.The FBI director, Chris Wray, also spoke, saying the US will impose costs on any foreign countries interfering in the 2020 US election.Wray also warned against buying into misinformation about election results. “You should be confident your vote counts. Early unverified claims to the contrary should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism,” said Wray.Democrats immediately took issue with Ratcliffe’s emphasis that Iran was sowing disinformation to harm Trump, characterizing the intelligence director as a “partisan hack”. Ratcliffe is a former Republican congressman and Democrats have been critical of his choice to selectively declassify documents to help Trump.Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, said on Wednesday night that during a classified briefing he received on the interference “I had the strong impression it was much rather to undermine confidence in elections and not aimed at any particular figure, but rather to undermine the very wellspring of our Democracy.”“I’m surprised that DNI Radcliff said that at this press conference,” he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.Trump and many of his supporters have been among those spreading misinformation that votes aren’t going to be counted and alleging baselessly that ballots can easily be thrown out.Ratcliffe said Iran is also distributing video content “to imply that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, including from overseas” – and warned Americans not to believe the disinformation. “These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries,” he said.The news conference was held as Democratic voters in at least four battleground states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, have received threatening emails, falsely claiming to be from the far-right group Proud Boys, that warned “we will come after you” if the recipients didn’t vote for Trump.The voter-intimidation operation apparently used email addresses obtained from state voter registration lists, which include party affiliation and home addresses and can include email addresses and phone numbers. Those addresses were then used in an apparently widespread targeted spamming operation. The senders claimed they would know which candidate the recipient was voting for in the 3 November election, for which early voting is ongoing.Federal officials have long warned about the possibility of this type of operation, as such registration lists are not difficult to obtain.“These emails are meant to intimidate and undermine American voters’ confidence in our elections,” Christopher Krebs, the top election security official at the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Tuesday night after reports of the emails first surfaced.He urged voters not to fall for “sensational and unverified claims”, reminding them that ballot secrecy is guaranteed by law in all states. “The last line of defense in election security is you – the American voter.”While state-backed Russian hackers are known to have infiltrated US election infrastructure in 2016, there is no evidence that Iran, which cybersecurity experts consider to be an inferior actor in online espionage, has ever done so.Before the FBI news conference began, the top members of the Senate intelligence committee released a statement warning: “As we enter the last weeks before the election, we urge every American – including members of the media – to be cautious about believing or spreading unverified, sensational claims related to votes and voting.”The statement came from Marco Rubio, a Republican of Florida, and Mark Warner, a Democrat of Virginia.“State and local election officials are in regular contact with federal law enforcement and cybersecurity professionals, and they are all working around the clock to ensure that election 2020 is safe, secure and free from outside interference,” they said.Foreign misinformation campaigns are far from the only source of confusion and chaos as the US heads to the polls. Concerns of voter disenfranchisement have been widespread, with Republicans scoring victories Wednesday in their ongoing efforts to restrict voting rights. In a Wednesday night decision, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama officials to ban curbside voting.The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union and other challengers of the ban said that curbside voting would help the state slow the spread of Covid-19 while allowing those most vulnerable to the disease to vote safely.The plaintiff in that case, Howard Porter Jr, is a Black man in his 70s with asthma and Parkinson’s disease. “So many of my [ancestors] even died to vote,” he testified to a District Court. “And while I don’t mind dying to vote, I think we’re past that – we’re past that time.”The Iowa Supreme Court also upheld a Republican-backed law that could prevent election officials from sending thousands of mail-in ballots, by making it more difficult for auditors to correct voter applications with omitted information.Agencies contributed reporting More