Evelyn Reynolds

A looming clash between the centre and left of the Democratic party could unseat members of the “the Squad” of progressives and hand a gift to Donald Trump’s Republicans in the 2024 elections.The war in Gaza has divided Democrats like no other issue and is likely to play a key role in party primaries that decide which candidates run for the House of Representatives.Squad members including Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who accuse Israel of fuelling a humanitarian disaster, are facing potentially well-funded primary challengers. Some Democrats fear that the infighting could weaken the party’s campaign in November.“A lot of us have seen the headlines that Squad or Squad-adjacent members could be in trouble this cycle,” said Chris Scott, the co-founder and president of the Advance the Electorate political action committee (Ate Pac), which recruits and trains young progressives. “When I look at 2024, this is not the cycle where we need to be getting in a battle within our home faction.“There is a much greater threat to us all that we need to be focused on. If you’re having a progressive and centrist go against each other in an open seat, that’s one thing, but to start taking shots at your own is a dangerous precedent and I don’t think we need to fall into that trap this cycle.”The left have won some notable victories during Joe Biden’s presidency but continue to push him on issues such as climate, immigration, racial justice and Gaza, where many are dismayed by his unwavering support for Israel. On 7 October Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took about 240 hostage; Israel has since bombed and invaded Gaza, killing about 20,000 people.Ideological tensions with moderates are set to spill into the open during a primary season that kicks off on 5 March with races in Alabama, Arkansas, California, North Carolina and Texas.Bowman faces a stiff challenge from George Latimer, a Westchester county executive who is an ardent supporter of Israel and could receive a financial boost from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). Bush has competition from Wesley Bell, a county prosecutor who described Bush’s initial response to the Hamas attack as not “appropriate”.Omar will be up against Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis city council member who came within two percentage points of her in a primary last year. The lawyer Sarah Gad and the air force veteran Tim Peterson have also filed to run against Omar in the primary.Centrists smell an opportunity to put progressives on the back foot over their voting records, not just on Israel but a host of issues.Matt Bennett, a co-founder and the executive vice-president for public affairs at Third Way, said: “The Squad for the most part has been problematic for Democrats generally because their voices are outsized and very loud and they have come to define what it means to be a Democrat in swing districts, and that can be very difficult.“We are not huge fans of primaries against incumbent Democrats – often those resources can be directed more forcefully elsewhere to try to beat Republicans – but Cori Bush has done and said a lot of things that are going to be weaponised against her Democratic colleagues and so we wouldn’t be heartbroken if she’s beaten by a more mainstream Democrat in a primary.”Squad members and their allies may also have to contend with pro-Israel Super Pacs and dark-money groups spending tens of millions of dollars on attack ads in a bid to unseat them. Critics say such ads often misrepresent progressives’ views to give the impression that they are cheerleading for Hamas.The Democratic Majority for Israel Pac (DMFI Pac) recently launched a six-figure ad campaign targeting the Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the sole Palestinian American in the House and one of Biden’s most strident critics. Its narrator said: “Tell Rashida Tlaib she’s on the wrong side of history and humanity.”This week the DMFI Pac published its first round of endorsements for the 2024 election cycle, including 81 incumbent members of Congress. Its chair, Mark Mellman, said all the endorsees have demonstrated a deep commitment to the party’s values, “which include advancing and strengthening the US-Israel relationship”.The group added that, in the 2021-22 election cycle, DMFI Pac-endorsed candidates won more than 80% of their races, helping bring 21 new “pro-Israel Democrats” to Congress.Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The well-organised, and those with resources including money, are looking at the primaries as a way to settle scores.“The Squad has a target on its back. The Israeli Zionist interest have concluded that they underinvested in the last election and that a bit more would have defeated some of the candidates, including Ilhan Omar, who won by only 2%. The amount of money going in looks to be substantially larger.”The House primary stakes have been raised by 23 Democrats and 12 Republicans retiring, seeking other office or getting expelled, leaving a record number of open seats up for grabs. In Oregon’s third congressional district, Susheela Jayapal – whose sister Pramila is chair of the Congressional Progressive caucus – is running for an open seat but facing blowback for not signing a resolution that condemned Hamas.As the war continues and the death toll mounts, the issue becomes ever more rancorous. Scott, the Ate Pac president, warned: “I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these primaries get nasty.“My worry is, do we get in a fight with the primaries and start trying to do all this spending going against Democrats because we don’t agree necessarily on the same issue and then we miss the mark and come up short in some of the open seats that we should be able to easily win?”He added: “I get the frustration, but if you’re talking about possibly actively spending money to primary somebody like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or even Rashida Tlaib, one, what type of message are we sending and then two, where are our priorities overall?”Scott argues that Democrats should instead focus efforts on candidates such as Mondaire Jones, who is aiming to win back his New York seat from Republicans, and Michelle Vallejo, who is running for the most competitive congressional seat in Texas. “As a party we have to be smart about how we play these and now is not the time to fall into that warring battle of ideologies,” he said.Others share the concern about losing sight of the bigger picture and the unique threat posed by Trump and far-right Republicans. Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of the progressive grassroots movement Indivisible, said: “High-profile, expensive primary fights this cycle that exacerbate fractures within the Democratic coalition are bad for Democrats’ chances in the general election – and thus bad for democracy.“As leaders of a grassroots movement dedicated to preventing Trump from returning to power, we’ve adopted a fairly simple test for all our strategic decisions over the next 12 months: will this move help or hurt our chances of beating Donald Trump and winning a Democratic trifecta in 2024? Aipac and DMFI’s latest moves clearly fail this test.”The argument over Gaza appears to have been shifting in progressives’ direction. In a recent opinion poll for the Wall Street Journal, 24% of Democrats said they were more sympathetic to the Palestinians, 17% sided with the Israelis and 48% said they sympathise with both equally.Biden, who often hovers in the ideological middle of the Democratic party, has gradually yielded to pressure to urge Israeli restraint and has warned that the country is losing international support because of “indiscriminate bombing”. But he has stopped short of calling for a permanent ceasefire.Norman Solomon, the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said via email: “Scapegoating progressives is inevitable. That’s what corporate centrist Democrats and their allies routinely do. But primaries merely set the stage for the main event, which will be the showdown between the two parties for Congress and the White House.“Whatever the results of the congressional primaries, the momentous crossroads in the fall will determine whether the fascistic Republican party controls Congress for the next two years and the presidency for the next four. Progressives aren’t making such a calamity more likely. Biden is.” More

On a cold night in November, a man named Jefferson Davis addressed a crowd of conservative activists gathered in an American Legion hall 20 miles north of Milwaukee. In his left hand, Davis brandished an unusual prop.“In this diaper box are all the receipts for the illegal absentee ballots that were put into the Mark Zuckerberg drop boxes all over the state of Wisconsin,” said Davis.Behind him, a long table stacked with papers, binders and a small pile of doorknobs stretched across the hall. They were for theatrical effect: the doorknobs were a tortured analogy for the multiple conspiracy theories Davis had floated, and the diaper box was a visual stand-in for the ballot drop boxes Wisconsin voters used across the state in 2020. The paperwork, Davis insisted, contained the evidence of an enormous plot to steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump in Wisconsin. His audience of more than 70 people, including local and state-level elected officials, sat rapt.Davis was speaking at an event organized by Patriots of Ozaukee County, a rightwing group that vows to “combat the forces that threaten our safety, prosperity and freedoms” and compares itself to the musket-toting Minutemen of the revolutionary war.The organization is one of more than 30 such “patriot” groups in Wisconsin identified by the Guardian which claim that the last presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Many, including the Ozaukee county organization, openly embrace Christian nationalist rhetoric and ideology, arguing that the laws of the US government should reflect conservative Christian beliefs about issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.Their religious interpretation of the US’s founding has propelled these groups not only into fights over elections administration but also against vaccine requirements and protections for transgender people.Now, with the 2024 presidential election less than a year away, Wisconsin’s patriot movement and its allies are fighting for legislation that they believe will protect the state’s electoral process from fraud, and mobilizing supporters to work the polls, observe polling places and spread the word about their concerns – pushing the GOP further to the right and threatening more challenges to the voting process come election day.Patriots of Ozaukee County was created in March 2021 by local activists who were “upset about the election”, said Scott Rishel, who founded the group. He felt there was nowhere he could speak freely about the 2020 election, or things like Covid-19 vaccines and masks. Plus, he said: “We were tired of the GOP, because they’re not really an activist organization.”At the urging of a friend, he convened the group’s first meeting.“With the 2020 election and Covid tyranny, that all opened my eyes,” he told the crowd of mostly older couples at the November event. “The silent majority was killing us. It was killing our country, killing our community. And we needed to learn how to no longer be silent.”By “we”, Rishel meant conservative Christians. “Jesus Christ is my savior, my lord. It’s amazing how some people didn’t have the courage to say that – they think it’ll make people uncomfortable.”Their movement of biblically motivated patriots has since roared to life, winning some powerful allies along the way.In attendance at the Ozaukee county meeting was the state senator Duey Stroebel, the vice-chair of the state’s powerful joint committee on finance. Stroebel, who has refrained from actually endorsing Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, has nonetheless backed numerous bills to restrict voting access, invoking the heightened anxiety on the right about election security to justify their passage.Nearly two hours into the meeting, Stroebel interjected. “One thing you might want to comment on is ranked-choice voting,” he said, voicing his opposition to a bipartisan effort in the legislature to adopt the voting method used in states including Maine and Alaska that allows voters to rank their preference on multiple candidates. The method ensures the winning candidate wins a majority rather than a plurality of the vote and essentially eliminates the risk of third-party candidates spoiling an election result.“Senator Stroebel is referring to what’s called ranked-choice voting,” Davis told the crowd. “What I call it is ‘guarantee that Democrats win’.”To members of this movement, this proposal is just the latest suspicious attempt to change the voting system to steal elections.Hardline conservatives have grown increasingly convinced that the election system is rigged against them, largely because Trump has pushed those claims hard since the 2020 election. And in spite of the fact that there was no evidence of significant voter fraud in recent American elections, it has also mobilized local groups into action across the US.Amy Cooter, a Middlebury College professor whose research focuses on militias and local rightwing groups, described the rise of patriot groups across the country as “a backlash movement”. After 2020, said Cooter, local rightwing groups have been motivated largely by “the last presidential election and thoughts that it was stolen – plus concerns that future elections might similarly be”.The patriot movement in Wisconsin appears to be growing. Attendees at November’s meeting were unsurprised by the packed house: closer to 200 had attended the Ozaukee group’s last event in October, which featured a long lineup of speakers including Davis.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPatriot groups in Wisconsin have found an awkward alliance with Republican officials and prominent activists in the state. A July gathering hosted by the Barron county Republican party, located across the state in north-west Wisconsin, drew closer to 500. That event, which included free beer and a gun raffle and was promoted by patriot groups, illustrated the common cause the movement’s activists have found with the grassroots of the GOP.The Brown county Republican party – also in the north-west of the state – has hosted Constitution Alive! events, which patriot organizations advertised broadly. (A spokesperson said the local GOP is formally unaffiliated with patriot groups.)“As you know, I travel the whole state,” Davis told me in December. “And everywhere I go, I’m either asked to speak by patriot freedom groups, or Republican party chapters. And most of the time both groups show up.”Many patriot groups in the state are animated by the Christian nationalist viewpoint.Patriots of Ozaukee County declares on its website that it views as fundamental “truths” that “God is our creator” and “Jesus is our savior”. The Ozaukee county group has also hosted Constitution Alive! events touting the claim that the US constitution is a Christian document – led by the Patriot Academy organization, a Christian nationalist group that also offers weapons courses.They’re not alone. Patriots United, a group in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, exemplifies the typical rhetoric of the Christian right, describing its membership as “constitutional conservative Christians who seek to glorify and honor God” with the explicit aim of increasing “Christian influence” in local government.Another Wisconsin patriot group called North of 29 has begun to put into action the work that Davis advocates. With the help of groups affiliated with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and conspiracy theorist, the group has begun canvassing neighborhoods for voter fraud, using data that they refuse to share publicly to identify instances of suspicious activity. (A similar group in Colorado has been sued in federal court for allegedly going “door-to-door around Colorado to intimidate voters”, a practice the suit argues violates the Ku Klux Klan Act.)Most prominent elected Wisconsin Republicans have refused to outright endorse Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. But they have invoked the fears of election fraud to justify passing restrictive voting legislation that election-denying activists have clamored for.One bill, passed by the legislature and vetoed by the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, in 2022, would have made it harder for people to qualify as “indefinitely confined”, a status disabled voters can claim to receive an absentee ballot. During the 2020 election, during the peak of the Covid pandemic, the number of people who described themselves as indefinitely confined so they could vote from home increased dramatically – a fact that became a central point in conspiracy theories about the election. They’ve also tried to ban the use of private grants to help fund elections, keying off another conspiracy theory driven by money donated by Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation to local offices for election administration; Evers vetoed a bill to ban such money, but the legislature has now advanced the ban as a constitutional amendment which will be considered by voters this spring.Republicans in the legislature also unsuccessfully tried to force out Meagan Wolfe, the state’s nonpartisan top elections official who became the target of conspiracy theorists and election deniers after 2020.During his November presentation in Grafton, Davis handed out a pamphlet listing 53 issues that voters concerned about election security should focus on in Wisconsin. The priorities, which Davis and other election-denying groups across in the state have embraced, range from abolishing the bipartisan Wisconsin elections commission to requiring ballots cast in state and local elections to be counted by hand.Davis’s recommendations might prescribe technical changes to elections administration. But he cast their importance in starkly biblical terms.“I don’t know where you are with the Lord, and I mean this sincerely: you better pray,” said Davis. If the 2024 election wasn’t conducted “the correct way”, he warned, “there’s going to be you-know-what to pay.” More

The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, vetoed a bill days before Christmas that would have made it easier for people who have pleaded guilty to crimes to challenge their convictions, a measure that was favored by criminal justice reformers but fiercely opposed by prosecutors.The Democrat said the bill’s “sweeping expansion of eligibility for post-conviction relief” would “upend the judicial system and create an unjustifiable risk of flooding the courts with frivolous claims”, in a veto letter released on Saturday.Under existing state law, criminal defendants who plead guilty are usually barred from trying to get their cases reopened based on a new claim of innocence, except in certain circumstances involving new DNA evidence.The bill passed by the legislature in June would have expanded the types of evidence that could be considered proof of innocence, including video footage or evidence of someone else confessing to a crime. Arguments that a person was coerced into a false guilty plea would have also been considered.Prosecutors and advocates for crime victims warned the bill would have opened the floodgates to endless, frivolous legal appeals by the guilty.The Erie county district attorney, John Flynn, the president of the District Attorney’s Association of the State of New York, wrote in a letter to Hochul in July that the bill would create “an impossible burden on an already overburdened criminal justice system”.The legislation would have benefitted people such as Reginald Cameron, who was exonerated in 2023, years after he pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery in exchange for a lesser sentence. He served more than eight years in prison after he was arrested alongside another person in 1994 in the fatal shooting of Kei Sunada, a 22-year-old Japanese immigrant. Cameron, then 19, had confessed after being questioned for several hours without attorneys.His conviction was thrown out after prosecutors reinvestigated the case, finding inconsistencies between the facts of the crime and the confessions that were the basis for the conviction. The investigation also found the detective that had obtained Cameron’s confessions was also connected to other high-profile cases that resulted in exonerations, including the Central Park Five case.Various states including Texas have implemented several measures over the years intended to stop wrongful convictions. Texas amended a statute in 2015 that allows a convicted person to apply for post-conviction DNA testing. In 2017, another amended rule requires law enforcement agencies to electronically record interrogations of suspects in serious felony cases in their entirety.“We’re pretty out of step when it comes to our post-conviction statute,” Amanda Wallwin, a state policy advocate at the Innocence Project, said of New York.“We claim to be a state that cares about racial justice, that cares about justice period. To allow Texas to outmaneuver us is and should be embarrassing,” she said.In 2018, New York’s highest court affirmed that people who plead guilty cannot challenge their convictions unless they have DNA evidence to support their innocence. That requirement makes it very difficult for defendants to get their cases heard before a judge, even if they have powerful evidence that is not DNA-based.Over the past three decades, the proportion of criminal cases that make it to trial in New York has steadily declined, according to a report by the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. About 99% of misdemeanor charges and 94% of felony charges in the state are resolved by guilty pleas.“In my work, I know there there are a lot of circumstances where people plead guilty to crimes because they are advised or misadvised by their attorneys at the time,” said Donna Aldea, a lawyer at the law firm Barket Epstein Kearon Aldea & LoTurco. “Sometimes they’re afraid that if they go to trial, they’ll face much worse consequences, even if they didn’t commit the crime.”She said the state’s criminal justice system right now is framed in a way that makes it impossible for people to challenge their guilty pleas years later when new evidence emerges, or when they are in a better financial position to challenge their convictions. More

The battle to bring back the federal right to abortion in the US hinges on much more than just the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and winning will require proponents to be as organized and steadfast as their opponents, at least as one of the reproductive freedom movement’s most veteran voices sees it.Invoking scenes that played out all across the country after the supreme court’s Dobbs decision eliminated nationwide abortion rights, Merle Hoffman recently said: “It looks like thousands of people marching in the streets all over the country … [But] you can’t just do one action.“The pressure has to go, and go, and go.”Hoffman, 77, positioned herself at the forefront of the American reproductive freedom movement decades ago, when she helped open one of the US’s first abortion centers in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens in New York City two years before the supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision established the national right to the procedure.Hoffman recently spoke to the Guardian about how Democratic control of the White House and one of the congressional chambers has offered little resistance to Republican command of the judiciary, which allowed the supreme court’s conservative majority to overturn Roe.She believes that gaining back the ground lost since Dobbs was handed down in the summer of 2022 requires more than just voting for pro-abortion candidates.“That’s one aspect, yes,” Hoffman said.But, given that the federal levers of power are divided among the two political parties, and the procedural blocks that one branch of government can leverage on another, “don’t assume – please don’t assume – that as soon as these people get into office, they’re going to put Roe v Wade right back,” Hoffman said.“They can’t.”Hoffman highlighted how little federal-level Democrats had done to protect abortion access with Joe Biden in the White House and a slim majority in the Senate since Roe v Wade was overturned.Biden has been unwilling to pursue an expansion of the nine-seat supreme court to add liberals to the bench and better balance its 6-3 conservative majority. Meanwhile, with control of the House and Senate split by thin margins, Congress has not been able to enact national protections for reproductive rights through legislation, creating a confusing checkerboard where abortion is nearly completely banned in 14 states.Hoffman had a hand in founding Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights shortly before Roe fell, with the aim of galvanizing popular opposition to abortion restrictions.She said the thousands who participated in mass street protests in cities across the US – including Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago – then and since have had the correct approach. And she complimented the energy younger advocates brought in organizing those events and similar, unrelated ones when unrest over Roe’s fall was at its highest.But Hoffman said such demonstrations have all but vanished in terms of size and intensity as other major events, including the Israel-Gaza war that erupted in October, have taken up the progressive left’s attention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHoffman acknowledged that some believe street protests and walkouts in schools and workplaces have a limited effect within the current structure of power in the US. But she said she steadfastly believed enough actions like that, sustained over an adequate amount of time, would convince those in power to side with the majority of Americans who favor abortion rights over opposing special interests.She said reproductive rights supporters could also do more to advocate for the movement by contributing time or money to efforts aimed at improving healthcare for women who do want to have children.Meanwhile, Hoffman said, women who have had abortions but have chosen to remain silent because of the social stigma could help break that stigma by speaking up about their experiences and decisions.She likened it to LGBTQ+ people “coming out” about their sexualities, and how supportive that can be to members of their communities who feel shame and guilt in silence.“There’s an abortion closet,” Hoffman said. “The first thing you can do is come out.”Hoffman said it was perhaps most important to realize that truly taking back what was lost to Dobbs would take decades. That’s how long it took opponents of reproductive rights – as well as like-minded judges and lawmakers – to plot the seeds for the historic decision to end the right to abortion in the US.“This is a generational struggle,” said Hoffman, echoing the central point in her recent book Choices: A Post-Roe Abortion Rights Manifesto. “This is going to pass from me to the next generation to the next generation.“The opposition is extremely, extremely … relentless. They’re persistent, they’re creative – and they won’t stop until there is no abortion in this country.” More

The former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has pulled within four percentage points of frontrunner Donald Trump in New Hampshire’s 2024 Republican presidential primary, a contest which could prove closer than expected for the ex-president, according to a new poll.In an American Research Group Inc poll released on Thursday which had asked voters whom they preferred in the New Hampshire primary scheduled for 23 January, Haley earned 29% support to Trump’s 33%. That meant the gap between Haley and Trump was within the survey’s 4% margin of error after the former president had long held dominating polling leads in the race for the 2024 Republican White House nomination.Haley’s strong showing in the American Research Group Inc survey came a day after a poll from the Saint Anselm College New Hampshire Institute of Politics found she had doubled her support in the state since September, seemingly cementing her as a clear alternate choice to Trump for conservative voters. The Saint Anselm survey’s findings were more favorable to Trump, however, showing him with a 44% to 30% lead over Haley.But while Haley still has ground to gain to take the lead in the state, Trump coming in at less than 50% support “shows he has serious competition in the party”, the University of New Hampshire survey center director, Andrew Smith, has previously told USA Today.Haley’s strong poll showings appear to have drawn a mixed reaction from Trump, who is separately contending with more than 90 criminal charges as he seeks a second presidency.On one hand, he went on his Truth Social site on Friday and insulted Haley with his preferred nickname for her, writing: “Fake New Hampshire poll was released on Birdbrain. Just another scam!” He additionally spoke with rightwing radio show host Hugh Hewitt on Friday and dismissed the polls showing Haley performing well against him as “fake” and insisted he was untroubled by her as a potential primary contender.Yet citing two sources familiar with the conversations, CBS News reported on Friday that Trump had also simultaneously been asking his team about tapping Haley to serve as a vice-presidential candidate if he eventually wins the Republican primary to be the 2024 Oval Office nominee, which if accurate would be a sign that he covets capitalizing on her support. CBS said its sources had indicated the far-right reaction to a Trump-Haley ticket has been negative, however.Haley for now has been touting her recent polling performances.“Donald Trump has started to attack me,” Haley said at a campaign town hall on Wednesday in Iowa, where the caucuses that customarily kick off presidential election years are scheduled for 15 January. “He said, ‘I don’t know what this Nikki Haley surge is all about.’ Do you want me to tell you what it’s about? … We’re surging.”Haley was the US ambassador to the United Nations after Trump won the presidency in 2016, but she resigned in 2018. Prior to that, she was governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017.One of her more prominent acts as South Carolina governor was signing into law a ban on abortion which contained no exceptions for rape or incest. That ban took effect, along with similar ones in other states, after the US supreme court last year eliminated the federal right to abortion which had been established by the landmark Roe v Wade decision.Trump, for his part, faces 91 criminal charges accusing him of trying to forcibly reverse his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, illegally retaining government secrets after he left the Oval Office and illicit hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels.He has also grappled with civil litigation over his business practices and a rape allegation deemed “substantially true” by a judge.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump more recently has been on the defensive against resurfaced claims that he kept writings by Adolf Hitler – the Nazi leader who orchestrated the murders of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust – by his bed.Academics, commentators and political opponents have been quick to link Trump’s recent remarks that certain immigrants were “poisoning the blood of” the US to rhetoric used historically by Hitler, Benito Mussolini and other authoritarian world rulers.“I know nothing about Hitler,” Trump said to Hewitt on Friday. “I’m not a student of Hitler.”He then implied having at least some familiarity with Hitler’s sayings in regards to purity of blood.“They say he said something about blood,” Trump told Hewitt. “He didn’t say it the way I said it, either, by the way. It’s a very different kind of statement.” More

Democratic congressman Dean Phillips, who is challenging incumbent president Joe Biden, will keep running his long-shot bid for the White House through the summer after he’s had more time to introduce himself to voters across the US.Phillips initially planned to run in a few states for his party’s presidential nomination, focusing especially on the crucial early-voting state of New Hampshire, which was seen as a trial balloon for his candidacy. But now, Phillips told the Guardian in an interview, he is aiming for a much longer campaign.By the summer, Phillips wants to compare head-to-head polling between him and former President Donald Trump, and Trump and Biden. If Biden fares better in the matchup, Phillips would support him. If Phillips fares better, he believes Biden should throw his support toward the congressman.“Those are my intentions, and I think those should be the intentions of every Democrat. Let’s find the candidate best positioned and most likely to win,” Phillips said.Phillips’ bullishness about his odds – and his strong belief that Biden will not win against Trump again – have kept his campaign in motion. The congressman, buoyed up by a personal fortune from his family’s distilling company and a gelato brand, hasn’t been deterred by the Democratic machine backing Biden. So far, Phillips has been his own main supporter, injecting $4m into his own campaign.As the New Hampshire primary nears next month, Phillips is feeling good about his chances there. Biden isn’t on the ballot in the state because national Democrats altered their calendar to put more diverse states earlier in the primary process, though the president’s supporters will mount a write-in campaign. That gives Phillips a leg up.The state offers the “lowest cost, highest probability opportunity to surprise people and to demonstrate my campaign”, he said.Since Phillips launched his campaign in October, after months of trying to goad more prominent Democrats to challenge the sitting president, he’s been met with a chorus of simple questions about who he is and why he’s doing this.His answer is simple: “Because Joe Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump.”Phillips’ presence in the race doesn’t really change that fact at this point – polls in New Hampshire show him far behind Biden. Recent polls back up his assertion, though, that the Democratic president isn’t going into the election year strong. Neither Biden nor Trump are well liked by the electorate, despite the seeming inevitability of the repeat matchup.“You can’t win a national election with 33% approval numbers,” Phillips said, referring to a recent Pew Research Center survey on Biden’s job rating. “And I don’t understand why I’m the only one out of 250-some Democrats in Congress to simply say the quiet part out loud: he cannot win the next election.”On policy, the two Democrats don’t widely differ. Phillips’ campaign isn’t an insurgent progressive campaign designed to move the centrist president further left. The main difference is a visual one – Phillips is much younger than Biden and Trump. He’s called for a new generation to lead the country forward.In that sense, though, his campaign draws attention to one of Biden’s weakest points, though Phillips argues the age differences are “pretty obvious” and not something he’s actively pointed out. “Neither of us can change our ages or stages of life.”By running a campaign against Biden, some Democrats fear Phillips is emphasizing the president’s flaws during a vulnerable time, ultimately further hurting Democrats’ ability to beat Trump in 2024. Phillips finds this notion “absurd”, saying that his presence should help Biden if it gets the president to come out and campaign or debate, to show himself to the voters more.While Biden’s poor polling animated Phillips’ campaign, the congressman has worked to fill in some of the details about who he’d be as a president. His political career has been short: three terms in Congress after flipping a longtime GOP seat in suburban Minnesota. He’s keen on pragmatic, bipartisan politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs of now, the economy and affordability have risen as a primary focus for him, with plans to address the rising costs of healthcare, housing, education and daily expenses forthcoming, he said.He’s also changed his mind on one big issue after hearing “such horrifying, heartbreaking stories” from people since taking office: he now supports Medicare for All, as opposed to just a public option. He thinks it’s an issue on which Republicans and Democrats could work together.On the Israel-Hamas war, perhaps Biden’s weakest point within his own party at the moment, Phillips doesn’t track too far off from Biden. He is a “passionate supporter of the state of Israel” who believes the country has a right to defend itself and that the US and its allies should unify to support Israel. He also has an “equal affection for Palestinians” and believes they deserve self-determination and a state. He has argued for the release of hostages and a concurrent ceasefire.“I intend to be the first Jewish American president in our history,” he said. “And I want to be the one that signs documents that help found the Palestinian state for the first time because we cannot continue to allow this cycle of bloodshed and misery and destruction to occur any longer.”To get anywhere near the presidency, Phillips would need to overcome a Democratic party already working hard to re-elect its incumbent president. Some states, such as Florida and North Carolina, have already decided not to hold primaries for president.The structural odds bother Phillips, who sees them as anti-democratic. The political culture on both sides forces people to stay in line rather than challenge the status quo if they want to keep their careers in elected office, he said. He knows his congressional career is done because of his presidential run – he’s not running for his seat in Minnesota again. And if he loses, he presumes his political career is over too. It will be worth it to him to try to keep Trump out of the White House, he said.“We need more people willing to torpedo their careers in Congress like I did, to ensure that we do not torpedo the entire country,” he said.Given the president’s age, though, staying in the race longer could be a hedge in case something were to happen to Biden. In that instance, it’s still tough to see how Phillips would be the best man for the job, though he’d be the only mainstream Democrat who had the primary calendar on his side.Still, he hopes more Democrats will jump in the presidential race. “The water is warm. Come on in. That’s what I’ve been asking for for many, many months,” Phillips said. “It gets to a point where doing so gets harder and harder because of state ballot access. Already, I think 15 states are too late to get on the ballot. So yes, I wish that would have happened months ago.” More

The US supreme court on Friday rejected a request by the special counsel to expeditiously decide whether Donald Trump has immunity from federal prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, before a lower appeals court issued its own judgment.The one sentence denial means the case is returned to the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, where a three-judge panel is scheduled to hear oral arguments in January, and the case against Trump remains frozen pending the outcome of the appeal.In declining to leapfrog the lower court and fast-track the appeal, the supreme court handed a crucial and potentially far-reaching victory to Trump as he seeks to delay as much as possible his trial, currently scheduled for next March in federal district court in Washington.The decision almost certainly slows down Trump’s federal election interference case. Even if the DC circuit rules against Trump quickly, the former president can first ask the full appeals court to rehear the case, and then has 90 days to lodge a final appeal to the supreme court.Trump was indicted in June by the special counsel Jack Smith for conspiring to impede the peaceful transfer of power, but sought to have the charges thrown out by contending he could not be prosecuted for actions he undertook as president that were related to his official duties.The filing contended that all of Trump’s attempts to reverse his 2020 election defeat in the indictment, ranging from pressuring his vice-president, Mike Pence, to stop the congressional certification to organizing fake slates of electors, were in his capacity as president and therefore protected.At the heart of the Trump legal team’s filing was the extraordinary contention that not only was Trump entitled to absolute presidential immunity, but that the immunity applied regardless of Trump’s intent in engaging in the conduct described in the indictment.This month, his motion was rejected by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan. That set the stage for Trump, who had always expected the motion to fail, to lodge an appeal that would stay the case while the DC circuit considered the matter.Obtaining the stay was always part of Trump’s strategy – he is seeking delay because if he wins re-election before the trial occurs, he could arrange to have the charges dismissed – and his lawyers were counting on a lengthy appeals process that would buy the time.The strategy, according to people close to Trump’s legal team, involved Trump going to the supreme court and securing additional weeks or months of delay – only after weeks of delay before the DC circuit.But prosecutors attempted to preempt Trump’s ploy by asking the supreme court to bypass the DC circuit and resolve the immunity question directly. In court filings, the special counsel suggested keeping the March trial date was in the public interest.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe request from prosecutors that the nation’s highest court rule on a case before judgment by an appeals court – and force Trump to contend with the Supreme Court plank of his delay strategy months earlier than he anticipated – was unusual but underscored the gravity of the moment.On Friday, the court essentially sided with Trump, who had argued the day before for the special counsel’s petition to be denied, arguing on procedural grounds that prosecutors had no basis to appeal a trial court ruling that was favorable to them and where the government had not suffered any harm.The denial, appellate experts said, underscored the peril of allowing trial prosecutors to help frame issues before the supreme court, instead of having the solicitor general’s office – which normally argues on behalf of the government – refine arguments to the sensibilities of the justices.The emergency petition on the Trump immunity question did not involve the solicitor general’s office. Although the filing was signed by former deputy solicitor general Michael Dreeben, it also included the special counsel himself and two of his deputies, JP Cooley and James Pearce. More

Two Republican officials in Arizona got charged for delaying approval of 2022 election results – and GOP state lawmakers vowed to retaliate against the Democratic attorney general who filed the charges.Rudy Giuliani faces millions in damages for defaming two Georgia election workers in 2020 – and continued to defame them outside the courtroom.Donald Trump himself is on trial in four jurisdictions, in part because of election subversion – and and gives public speeches on how he intends to take down his political enemies if he wins again.Such is the dichotomy of American democracy at this moment: attempts to hold election deniers accountable for their actions are met with doubling down and more intense election denial.Ahead of the 2020 elections, Trump foreshadowed his plan to claim the election was stolen if he lost, which his supporters often explained away as campaign trail bluster. But he and his followers took their election lies farther than many feared, culminating in an attack on the US Capitol. Biden only made it to the White House because of a handful of steadfast Republicans in key states who refused to bow to Trump’s attempts to overthrow Biden’s victory in the vote.These day, rather than subsiding after a series of bruising losses, adherence to election denialism is now a major flank of the mainstream Republican party. Trump’s most ardent supporters, some of whom now hold public office, have even sought to reclaim the term: they agree they are in fact election deniers, and proud of it. Their continued attempts to undermine elections since, combined with vulnerabilities that haven’t been addressed, mean the US could be in for even worse this time around.That is, if Trump loses. If he wins, he’s vowed to use the Department of Justice to pursue vengeance against those who tried to hold him accountable. He’s called his political opponents “vermin”, using the language of authoritarian dictators.And if the urgent threat to American democracy extends from the most local levels of government to the courts and up to the presidency, it also comes at a time of fractured views of reality, with rampant rumor-spreading on social media.The potential for harassment, threats and violence has only grown since 2020. What was ad-hoc then is now well-worn: overturning an election in 2024 depends on more believers, especially those in powerful positions, using tactics that are well documented because they have been happening across the country for several years. The playbook is, in essence, already public.Threats from inside the governmentWhile just a few Republicans kept democracy intact in 2020, in 2024 a few could also dismantle it.Some prominent election deniers, like Kari Lake in Arizona and Tim Michels in Wisconsin, lost races that would have given them oversight of elections. But others won. One report by States United Democracy Center estimates that election deniers in 17 states are in top positions – like governor, attorney general or secretary of state – that oversee elections in some way.That means some who falsely claimed the 2020 election was rigged will help finalize results in 2024, making it much more possible for a presidential election to be overturned. If nothing else, they will almost certainly push delays in certifying election results (once a perfunctory process).At lower, more direct levels of government, where it’s also easier for the far right to find a friendly ear in elected office, election deniers could refuse to send results to their states – putting local votes in jeopardy and threatening the accuracy of election results. In 2022, local Republicans officials wouldn’t certify results in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. In Colorado in late 2023, the state Republican party told local boards not to sign off on statewide elections from November because the system was “rigged” and the process “disastrous”.A key tool of election denialism is the idea of hand counts. Grassroots groups have traveled the country since 2020 to spread word about pushing for full hand counts of ballots, finding allies like Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman, and Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock executive.Most counties do hand count a small percentage of ballots to audit machine results, but very few do it all by hand. Some officials who tried to hand count against state law in a rural Arizona county were recently charged with felonies. In California, far-right officials in Shasta county instigated a hand count, but pulled back because of a state law banning it.Despite these failures, Telegram channels push for hand counts remain active. People show up monthly at the Cochise county board meetings in Arizona, still calling for a hand count next year. Georgia saw more hand recounts in its 2023 elections despite a lack of problems with machine counting.Other election denial tactics tie up the government through excessive public records requests. One small county in Georgia recently shared that it’s struggling to keep up with the huge increase in records requests, filed by rightwing groups purportedly to try to prove fraud.And there will undoubtedly be more frivolous lawsuits. In his effort to overturn his loss in 2020, Trump filed 62 lawsuits across state and federal courts – all but one of which failed. Some groups will probably file mass voter challenges claiming a broad swath of voters aren’t eligible to cast ballots, like True the Vote did in 2020.Some Republican-led states also now have “election integrity units” that investigate claims of fraud. These units have not found evidence of mass voter fraud; instead, they mostly dig up routine instances of one-off frauds, like voting for a dead person or in multiple places. Nonetheless, the units could be weaponized in 2024 to take on broader investigations at the behest of election-denying politicians.Beyond the elections themselves, judges could further hinder anti-discrimination laws. A federal appeals court issued a shocking ruling that would hobble civil rights groups’ ability to sue over violations to voting rights laws – removing the way voting rights laws get enforced in the courts, and putting responsibility solely on the government to bring these lawsuits instead. Another Republican-led appellate court, meanwhile, is considering a threat to the Voting Rights Act itself – the landmark achievement of the civil rights movement that makes racial discrimination in voting illegal.Rampant misinformation leads to harassment and threatsWith a proliferation of social media platforms, and the increasing politicization of fact-checking, it’ll be harder to slow down viral rumors that can affect elections – with the potential for real-world harassment or even violence at the polls.Take the example of drop boxes. An effort to “watch” them in 2020 saw people camping out at polling stations in Arizona, sometimes holding guns, and intimidating voters. A judge eventually barred drop-box watchers from taking photos or videos of voters and from bringing weapons.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut an ongoing misinformation campaign culminated in the movie 2000 Mules, which inaccurately attempted to use cellphone location data to show people allegedly visiting non-profits then dropping off ballots – claiming, with zero proof, that there was some kind of massive ballot-trafficking scheme happening. That, too, ensnared real people and cast them as criminals: one man in Georgia sued after the movie claimed he was a ballot “mule” based on footage of him dropping off ballots entirely legally.In perhaps the highest-profile case of abusing election workers, the Trump ally and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was just found liable for $148.1m for lies about two former election workers in Georgia, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who testified their lives were torn apart after Giuliani and others falsely cast them at the center of a voter fraud conspiracy theory. Freeman had to move and no longer feels comfortable even using her name; Moss is too anxious to leave the house.Despite the lawsuit victory, many elections workers still feel the heat. Some have been harassed out of their jobs, or had their lives threatened – as of August, 14 people had been charged with such death threats. During the 2022 midterms, elections staff in Arizona’s Maricopa county saw messages that they would “swing for treason” and wishing them to “get cancer”. This year, elections offices in several states were sent letters containing fentanyl. Many have had to train workers to prepare for harassment.The onslaught has caused more elections workers to leave their jobs, creating high turnover that means more potential for mistakes by inexperienced people – such as in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne county, where turnover played a role in several election incidents caused by human error. These mistakes can provide further ammunition for election deniers. But at the most basic level, people may be hesitant to work as poll workers or other election helpers – critical posts for the conduct of successful elections.Social media landscape makes lies harder to stopThat same fractured social media landscape has given the far right – including big personalities such as Trump, Lindell and Steve Bannon – platforms like Telegram, Rumble and Truth Social to post content that might be flagged on more established media platforms. This creates an information ecosystem that’s outside the mainstream and difficult to track, and where heated election claims run wild. Podcasts, too – especially Bannon’s – have huge audiences and serve as a launching pad for organizing the movement and sharing plans for elections. Lindell, the pillow salesman, goes on Bannon’s podcast to share “the plan”, his step-by-step manifesto to “prevent” the stealing of elections, and to hawk his pillows.Larger platforms, particularly X (formerly Twitter), have become less interested in monitoring and stopping election misinformation, creating more potential for it to spread during a contentious election year. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022, decimated its workforce, including factcheckers, leaving the site vulnerable to increasing misinformation. He also allowed people previously banned from the platform, including conservative operatives such as Project Veritas and the disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to have their accounts back. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, now will allow political ads to claim the 2020 election was rigged or stolen; YouTube has reversed itself and now won’t take down content that makes false claims of fraud.In previous election cycles, researchers would flag misinformation and platforms would sometimes respond: for example, by amending fact-check notices to untrue statements. Government employees would sometimes flag these kinds of posts to tech companies as well – a practice that has come under intense scrutiny by conservatives in Congress, with the Republican Jim Jordan subpoenaing researchers about their work on misinformation. Courts have also restricted how the government can interact with social media companies in this way.Combined, it has a chilling effect – hindering researchers’ work on misinformation, the government’s ability to respond and social media companies’ incentives to intervene. Joan Donovan, a disinformation researcher, claims Harvard fired her because she was critical of Facebook.What comes next is already happeningOn the right, the narrative of 2020 as a stolen election never ended. Some of those who lost still haven’t conceded, and the contest for US House speaker swirled around who was far-right enough, with “election integrity” and allegiance to Trump considered key criteria.There have, however, been attempts to hold election subversion accountable.Trump faces four court cases, both criminal and civil, in several states and at the federal level.States are investigating or have charged a number of Republicans, including some lawmakers and party officials, in the “fake elector” scheme, where people sent false electoral votes to Congress naming Trump not Biden as the winner. Defamation lawsuits proliferate. Lawyers who continually file lawsuits devoid of facts have been sanctioned across the country and face investigations by their state bar organizations.The most ardent believers in election fraud won’t see criminal charges or big defamation damages decisions as evidence the narrative was wrong – just as further proof of a conspiracy. Nor have all the lies seemed to help the one party that didn’t attempt to steal the election, the Democrats: polls show Biden trailing Trump and his approval rating tanking over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war.A plague of voter apathy could deliver Trump back to the White House. If he wins, his campaign of retribution will begin, weaponizing the federal government for his personal aims. If he loses, the plan to overturn the results kicks off again – and this time, it could work. More