Evelyn Reynolds

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    Republicans in Georgia put candidates through purity tests. Now they’re facing fines

    Taxes. Vaccinations. Chickens.Republican party leaders in Catoosa county, in the north-west corner of Georgia, ran prospective GOP candidates through a battery of ideological questions, permitting some to run in the party primary while denying others.Local political purity tests have been discussed by both Republican and Democratic party officials for years, but this is the first time a county’s political body has actually attempted the feat.Perhaps that’s because of the punishing backlash now facing the six executive committee members of the Catoosa county Republican party after a lawsuit from disqualified candidates: fines of $1,000 an hour, times four for the number of Republican candidates the county’s GOP body refused to put on the ballot, times six for each of the executive committee members. That’s $24,000 an hour for the whole group until they comply with a judge’s order to put the candidates on the ballot.“The criteria they’re using is how we vote in the commission meetings,” said Vanita Hullander, a Catoosa county commissioner initially barred by the county’s GOP leaders from running for re-election as a Republican in the 14 May primary. “They’re very manipulative, and they’ve been trying to take control of the commission for a long time.”Hullander is a lifelong conservative Republican, she said. But after the county party’s executive committee questioned her about votes on local tax increases, vaccination requirements and a contentious local ordinance governing where and how residents may keep chickens on their property, it declared it would not allow her on the Republican ballot line. The group also barred three others.Others, like Jimmy Gray, a candidate for commissioner, were not barred. Notably, Gray’s stepmother, Regina Gray, is chairwoman of the Graysville precinct of the county’s party.The disqualifications would have left only one person running for the chairperson’s seat: Nick Ware, a perennial candidate with hard libertarian views.“This is my opinion: a number of people on the committee … they’re really libertarians,” said Chuck Harris, a Catoosa county commissioner who is not up for re-election this cycle. He first learned of the leanings of the county’s Republican chair, Joanna Hildreth, when Hildreth was working with a candidate who needed signatures to make a libertarian run against Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Hildreth asked the candidate, whom Harris didn’t name, to bad-mouth him to voters as she gathered those signatures.“This was a month after I signed a loyalty oath in front of Hildreth for the party,” he said. “They’ll be coming for me next.”The prospect of barring candidates for insufficient political fidelity has been raised by both parties at one point or another in Georgia and elsewhere. For example, North Carolina’s Democratic party is contending today with the state representative Tricia Cotham, who ran in an open Charlotte-area seat as a Democrat and then immediately switched parties to give Republicans a veto-proof supermajority.But a county-level process runs a risk of ideological capture by political extremists who do not reflect the politics of most voters.GOP county committee seats in Georgia are won in caucuses typically attended by no more than a few hundred voters in any given county every election cycle. (The Catoosa county Republican party happens to be holding its next county convention on 23 March.) Executive committee seats are then won by a vote of committee members. Republicans have about a five-to-one electoral advantage in Catoosa county. About 32,000 voters cast ballots in the county in 2020.Hildreth, the county’s Republican chair, is also secretary of the Georgia Republican Assembly (GRA), a political action committee dominated by libertarians who have regularly been shut out of GOP party governance positions. The GRA’s chair is Alex Johnson, who has lost multiple races for Georgia GOP leadership positions. Johnson previously proposed a state party rule allowing party delegates to block candidates for statewide office on the basis of their fidelity to “Republican values”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJohnson’s law partner, Catherine Bernard, is also Georgia’s national director for the National Federation of Republican Assemblies. The two of them are representing Catoosa county Republican party executive committee members in their defense against the lawsuit from the disqualified candidates.Bernard did not return a call seeking comment. Hildreth asked for questions to be submitted by email, but has not yet replied.In court Thursday, Hildreth was asked whether she would allow the candidates to be qualified to run for office, as ordered by the court. She said she would not and would instead appeal. Later that day the four candidates denied by the executive committee went to the party headquarters in the company of two Catoosa county sheriff’s deputies to sign qualification papers. Party members refused them entry.The Catoosa county Republican party committee released a statement late on Friday.“Draining the Swamp starts locally,” the statement reads, in part. “The Catoosa County Republican Party is fully run by Republican volunteers elected in a process open to Catoosa County voters. These grassroots citizens meet candidates, observe voting records, and work to ensure Republicans are elected to office. Catoosa County GOP is committed to ensuring that Catoosa County Republican candidates reflect the values of Catoosa County Republican voters.”The order from the superior court judge Don Thompson of the Lookout Mountain judicial circuit noted that state law does not allow subjective criteria to be used to bar a candidate from a party’s ballot line. In court, Thompson said he had chosen not to jail the executive board members because he believed they had been led astray by bad advice, and suggested that they retain new counsel.The clock on the fines started ticking at about 3.15pm on Thursday, and ended at noon Friday, after a judge ordered the county’s elections office to certify their qualification on the ballot directly. Collectively, the committee members have amassed fines just under $500,000.“The rest of the state should be scared and nervous if a small, self-appointed group of people gets to decide who to vote for on a party-type election,” Harris said. “The primary is really the election, because if you don’t have a strong Democrat or independent challenger, you basically win your election at the primary.” More

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    ‘Young and handsome’: Biden kicks off $30m ad blitz with spot addressing age

    Joe Biden’s campaign kicked off a $30m TV and digital ad blitz in key swing states on Saturday with an ad in which the president directly addresses concerns about his age.Set to run for six weeks on stations including Black- and Hispanic-owned outlets, and released shortly after his fiery State of the Union address, the 60-second spot does not shy away from what many voters say is growing concern with the president’s age. The ad, titled For You, opens with Biden in light-hearted form. “Look, I’m not a young guy. That’s no secret,” the 81-year old president says. “But I understand how to get things done for the American people.”The Biden campaign said the ad will appear on networks including ESPN and TNT throughout March Madness, during which NCAA college basketball tournaments are held across the country. It is also set to appear on Comedy Central and FX, Bloomberg reports.“I led the country through the Covid crisis,” Biden says in the ad. “Today, we have the strongest economy in the world. I passed a law that lowers prescription drug prices, caps insulin at $35 a month for seniors.”Biden then changes tack from the state of the union and addresses who in that speech he only called “my predecessor” by name. “For four years, Donald Trump tried to pass an infrastructure law and he failed. I got it done. Now we’re rebuilding America. I’ve passed the biggest law in history to combat climate change because our future depends on it,” he says.Echoing his pledge from his Thursday State of the Union speech, Biden promises to make Roe v Wade “the law of the land again”, saying Trump “took away the freedom of women to choose.”“Donald Trump believes the job of the president is to take care of Donald Trump,” Biden says. “I believe the job of the president is to fight for you, the American people, and that’s what I’m doing.”The end of the ad features an outtake as a producer off-camera asks Biden for one more take, to which Biden jokes: “Look, I’m very young, energetic and handsome. What the hell am I doing this for?”Since his address to the nation, praised by Democratic observers as a return to form and the occasion for his highest fundraising totals in recent memory, Biden has embarked on a tour of multiple states. He visits Pennsylvania and Georgia this weekend before heading to New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Michigan next week.As the country gears up for a Biden-Trump rematch, a poll released last week by the New York Times and Siena College showed that 73% of all registered voters in the US believe Biden is too old to be an effective president.Among those who voted for Biden in 2020, 26% said they strongly agree his age will make him an ineffective president for a second term.At 81, Biden is the oldest president ever to seek re-election, though Trump, at 77, is just four years younger. More

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    ‘Like choosing between a hedgehog and a porcupine’: US braces for presidential election no one wants

    In past years, the first phase of the general election has involved at least one of the presidential nominees introducing themselves to the broader public and presenting their case for taking the country in a new direction. But that has been rendered unnecessary this year: former president Donald Trump and president Joe Biden are very familiar to the American electorate – and they are broadly unpopular.“I think this is the worst election in my lifetime,” said George Argodale, a Nikki Haley supporter from Gainesville, Virginia. “It’s just terrible that we don’t have better candidates.”“That’s a sad state of affairs for our country that those are the two best candidates that we can come up with,” agreed Peggy Hudson, a primary voter in Charleston, South Carolina.Judith Smith, from Moncks Corner, South Carolina, said of Biden and Trump: “That’s like choosing between a hedgehog and a porcupine.”As the primary season sputters to an expected ending, following Haley’s withdrawal from the Republican primary on Wednesday, voters’ frustration with their general election options is palpable.According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, Biden’s approval rating now stands at 38.1%, and Trump’s rating rests at a nominally stronger 42.6%, meaning both men are disliked by a majority of Americans.Those low opinions have carried into voters’ views on the general election. A YouGov-University of Massachusetts Amherst poll conducted in January found that 45% of Americans believe a Biden-Trump rematch is bad for the country. Another 26% say the rematch is neither good nor bad, while just 29% view it as good for the nation.It’s not all for the same reason; the many voters lamenting their general election options represent a diverse array of ideological perspectives, ranging from anti-Trump Republicans to progressives outraged over Biden’s response to the war in Gaza.“On the whole, there’s a lot of ambivalence and disappointment about the prospects of a rematch,” said Jesse Rhodes, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “There’s a widespread perception among those individuals that the candidates are too old and that they tend to focus on issues that are issues of yesterday.”Conversations on the campaign trail reflect those commonly held beliefs, as a number of primary voters across multiple states said that they wished they had another option for November. Among anti-Trump Republicans, many of whom voted for Haley in their primaries, the potential re-election of the former president represents a return to the chaos that defined his first term. Echoing concerns shared by most Democrats, they predict that Trump would undermine the foundation of the US government if elected.Vincent DiMaro, an 80-year-old voter in Charleston who voted for Haley in the primary last month, cited Trump’s temperament and Biden’s age of 81 as significant liabilities for the nation’s future (Trump is 77).“I want to see the country survive, and I don’t think it will under Trump,” he said. But, he added: “I don’t think Biden is a particularly good president right now. I can’t be president. I know what my limitations are, and I’m in better shape than Biden.”Argodale voted early in the Virginia primary to cast a ballot for Haley, but he said he would have to support Biden in the general election if Trump won the Republican nomination.“I am on the conservative side of things, and [Haley] is the only viable candidate in my opinion,” he said. “[Trump] is just a terrible human being and doesn’t deserve any votes.”Although Democrats broadly agree with that assessment, some carry concerns about Biden, particularly regarding his age. Hudson acknowledged her politics lean to the left, as she previously worked for the late Democratic senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, but she cast a primary ballot for Haley in Charleston because she is “disgusted” by Trump. Hudson indicated she would support Biden in November, but she lamented the options available to voters in the general election.“Not that Joe Biden has not done a good job. He has done some very good things for this country,” Hudson said. “But I do think it is time for a new generation of leaders.”View image in fullscreenAn enthusiasm problemThe war in Gaza has presented a significant electoral vulnerability for Biden, as the president has faced intense criticism from progressives within his own party over his response to Israel’s airstrike campaign that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians.Progressive leaders in multiple states have organized campaigns to urge supporters to vote “uncommitted” or “leave it blank” instead of casting a ballot for Biden as a means of protesting his handling of the war. In Michigan, uncommitted won 13% of the vote in last month’s primary, and uncommitted captured 19% of votes in the Minnesota Democratic primary on Tuesday.Hassan Jama, an imam in Minneapolis, Minnesota, campaigned for Biden in 2020 but has joined the uncommitted campaign. When asked about his options for November, he suggested he may vote for a candidate other than Biden or Trump. Voters can cast ballots for the independent presidential candidate, Cornel West, or the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, both of whom have condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide”, or they could leave the top of the ticket blank.“We’re not voting for Trump, definitely no,” Jama said. “We have more than two choices.”Ruth Schultz, a Minnesota primary voter who has organized with MN Families for Palestine, similarly ruled out voting for Trump, but she would not yet commit to supporting Biden in the general election.“I know that I will never vote for Trump. That is a given,” Schultz said. “I want to see President Biden take a stronger stance for peace and how to get a ceasefire and to use all the tools at his disposal in order to do that. I am watching that as a voter in the general election.”The uproar among many left-leaning voters has created an enthusiasm gap between the two political parties that could pose a problem for Biden. Although many people who backed Biden in 2020 express concern about his re-election, Trump’s most loyal supporters remain as fervent as ever. According to the YouGov-UMass poll, 45% of Republicans believe the Biden-Trump rematch is good for the country, but only 21% of Democrats say the same.When speaking to Trump voters on the campaign trail, many are quick to praise him as the best president of their lifetimes, and they display no hesitation about supporting him again this fall.“I’ve been supporting him since he ran [in 2016], came down the escalator [at Trump Tower], ever since that,” said Chris Pennington, a voter from Johns Island, South Carolina. “I think he’s the best one to take on all the problems that we have.”Argodale does not support Trump, but he has seen firsthand how much devotion he can inspire. “In my social circle, there are Trumpers, so they’re diehard,” he said. “If he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, they’d still vote for him.”If Biden wants to win in November, he will have to work to narrow that enthusiasm gap or bring enough reluctant independents into his camp – or, most likely, do both.View image in fullscreenDire predictionsThe widespread disappointment among voters regarding the Biden-Trump rematch will have sweeping political consequences this fall, but their opinions on the election also offer startling revelations about Americans’ fears for the country’s future.The YouGov-UMass survey included open-ended questions that asked respondents what they believed would happen if the opposing party won the White House. The answers were both dire and specific, Rhodes said, with respondents predicting the end of democracy and a sharp rise in political persecution if their party were to lose.“The perception that victory by the other candidate would be dangerous and threatening has been rising pretty consistently for some time,” Rhodes said. “I think what’s distinctive in this election cycle is just how intense those feelings are and how personal they are.”Biden and Trump have both spoken in severe terms about what would happen if their opponent were to win, and those arguments appear to be sinking in for many voters.Nathan Richter, who voted for Biden in Arlington, Virginia, on Tuesday, was concise when asked about the possibility of Trump’s return to the White House. “Please, God, no,” he said. “I question our country’s ability to withstand another four years of Trump.”John Schuster said he plans to vote for Biden in November, but he cast a primary ballot for Haley because of his overwhelming concern about a Trump victory.“There’s no greater imperative in the world than stopping Donald Trump,” Schuster said. “It’ll be the end of democracy and the world order if he becomes president.”Biden supporters tend to frame the stakes of the election in terms of democracy and political violence, Rhodes noted, while Trump supporters’ concerns are more often shaped around a perceived threat that Democrats pose to American values. Douglas Benton, a Trump supporter from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, warned that the US would become a “third-world country” if Biden were to win reelection.“Our business is broken,” Benton said. “That’s how we became the most profitable country on the planet, is through capitalism and democracy and laws. Right now all three of those are gone.”Past elections have proven just how motivating negative emotions can be in turning out voters, which is why Rhodes believes that participation will still be high in November despite the nominees’ unpopularity.“It’s not an election that is going to inspire people on the basis of positive sentiments,” Rhodes said. “But it is an election that I strongly suspect is going to ultimately mobilize a lot of people because they believe that their vote is important for protecting themselves.”The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino contributed reporting from Moncks Corner, South Carolina, and the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang contributed reporting from Minneapolis, Minnesota More

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    Harris is reaching Democrats where Biden isn’t – on abortion and Gaza

    Standing on the arch of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Kamala Harris said she felt compelled to begin her remarks by addressing the deteriorating humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.“People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act,” the vice-president said, then stated: “Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire.” Loud, sustained applause followed, before she added, after a pause: “For at least six weeks.”The remarks, the White House was quick to note, echoed Joe Biden’s comments to a reporter days earlier and they reflected the administration’s current efforts to broker a temporary break in Israel’s offensive, to allow for the release of hostages and for desperately needed humanitarian aid to enter the besieged territory. Yet many Americans furious with Biden for his alliance with Israel heard from Harris what they felt has been lacking from the president.There was an urgency to her speech – delivered in the footsteps of civil rights marchers who were trampled, tear-gassed and beaten with whips and billy clubs as they attempted to cross the bridge – that resonated. The setting seemed to acknowledge the youth movement furious with the president that views Palestinian rights as an extension of the racial justice movement. She pointedly criticized Israel for restricting the flow of aid into Gaza and expressed compassion for the Palestinian civilians living amid the rubble on the brink of famine.As the 2024 general election contest begins, Harris has emerged as an emissary to the Democratic voters who have soured on Biden since propelling him to the White House in 2020. Over the last several months, she has embarked on a full-scale national tour to highlight the threats to reproductive rights posed by a second Donald Trump administration – an issue that Biden has been criticized for shying away from. Now, as Harris adopts a more forceful tone on Gaza, she is also becoming a leading voice on Middle East diplomacy.Both issues are poised to play a significant, if not decisive, role in the November general election. Polling shows an erosion of support among core Democratic constituencies amid widespread disillusionment with the economy, concern over Biden’s age and fury on the left at the administration’s handling of the war in Gaza.For Democrats, reminding voters about the threat Republicans still pose to abortion rights may be the best way to energize young people while winning over independents and suburban women. Outrage over Roe was credited with halting the promised “red wave” of Republican victories in the 2022 midterms; abortion-related ballot referendums have also repeatedly triumphed even in traditionally red states like Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio.But Harris has her work cut out for her. Like Biden, Harris has been viewed unfavorably throughout much of her tenure.Antonio Arellano, a spokesperson for NextGen, a national youth-focused nonpartisan voter registration and education program, called the 59-year-old Harris a “liaison” between the administration and the parts of the Democratic base that were critical to Biden’s 2020 victory but hold reservations about him now. With her college campus tour and her reproductive rights tour, he said, Harris has helped elevate issues that are top of mind for young progressives and multiracial voters.“She brings an energy of vigor and excitement to the election that I think young people can really gravitate to when perhaps enthusiasm lacks elsewhere,” Arellano said.Harris leapt into the US abortion wars within a day of the leak of the US supreme court decision overturning Roe v Wade.At a May 2022 speech at a conference for Emilys List, which works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, Harris gave a fiery speech where she repeatedly asked: “How dare they?”“How dare they tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body?” Harris asked. “How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?”Harris had spent the first several months of her vice-presidency frustrated by headlines about her apparent lack of direction, staff departures and unforced errors. Allies and experts have long seen sexism and racism in the public scrutiny of Harris, who is the first woman and the first woman of color to hold nationally elected office. The criticism seemed particularly unfair, they said, given that vice-presidents are historically overlooked.“I’m not saying that there shouldn’t have been any attention paid to management, especially when you see high-profile kinds of departures and hires,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory College. “But I think that there’s still also the question of whether or not people have paid more attention to her, and also whether or not the public has had a more visceral reaction to her because of her race and gender.”But when it came to the fight over reproductive rights, Harris’s gender, race and age and experience as a prosecutor combined to give her the edge of authenticity that Biden lacks on an issue that is increasingly critical to voters. Many of the 16 states that have enacted near-total post-Roe abortion bans do not have exceptions for rape or incest, a state of affairs that Harris has called “immoral”.“As a woman on the ticket and the first woman VP and a woman of color, and then secondly, as an AG, she is strongest when her profile is fighting and prosecuting the case. People really like her in that mode,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic Party strategist and a lead pollster on the 2020 Biden campaign. “She’s so comfortable saying the word ‘abortion’. She’s so comfortable leaning in and speaking to the repercussions.”Emilys List, which first endorsed Harris 20 years ago when she was elected as San Francisco’s district attorney, has previously committed to spending more than $10m on bolstering Harris in the 2024 elections, according to reporting from Politico; Jessica Mackler, the new president of Emilys List, said that nothing about their plan to support Harris has changed. “Supporting the vice-president is a huge part of our electoral priorities,” Mackler said.Compared to his running mate, Biden’s recent record on abortion is far more spotty. A devout Catholic, Biden has said that he is “not big” on abortion and, in Thursday’s State of the Union address, spoke at length about the procedure without ever referring to it by name. Instead, he talked of the importance of “reproductive freedom” and promised to “restore Roe v Wade as the law of the land”.When it comes to the Israel-Gaza war, Harris has begun to take a more visible role, and it appears that here, too, she may be pushing just beyond Biden’s comfort zone. NBC News reported that the National Security Council toned down parts of Harris’s Selma speech that were “harsher” on Israel. The vice-president’s office denied that her speech had been watered down.On the Monday after her remarks, Harris met with Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet who had traveled to Washington against the wishes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As she walked into the meeting, Harris denied that there was any daylight between her and the president on the conflict.“The president and I have been aligned and consistent from the very beginning,” she said.Many anti-war activists said Harris’s remarks on Gaza were too little, too late. Yet others saw it as a sign of progress – that their pressure campaign was having an impact. Nearly 100,000 Democrats in Michigan voted uncommitted in the primary, which was held just days before her remarks.“They’re feeling the pressure, and we want them to feel that pressure,” said Khalid Omar, who organized on behalf of the “uncommitted” campaign in Minnesota. “We want them to know that this is unacceptable.”Biden and Harris’s first joint campaign event of 2024, a rally in Virginia, was meant to focus on reproductive rights – but it was instead derailed by anger over the conflict in Gaza. After Harris and a Texas woman who had been denied an abortion spoke about the importance of defending the procedure, Biden took the stage. He was almost immediately interrupted by a protester who yelled: “Genocide Joe, how many kids have you killed in Gaza? … Palestine is a feminist issue!”That protester was removed from the auditorium. Another soon cried out: “Israel kills two mothers every hour!”Observers of Harris’s vice-presidency say the recent attention is recognition of the work she has been doing for months – both on domestic and foreign policy issues.“To the extent that she has found her voice, it’s because people are finally listening,” said Donna Brazile, a Harris ally and veteran Democratic strategist who teaches women’s and gender studies at Georgetown University.Last month, Biden dispatched Harris again, this time to the Munich Security Conference, where her mission was to reassure American allies rattled by Trump’s attacks on Nato. There she met with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and with Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, hours after news broke of her husband’s death in an arctic penal camp.Less than a week later, she was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a stop on her reproductive rights tour. While there, she made a surprise stop at the city’s first Black woman-owned vinyl record shop and purchased a Miles Davis album from the owner, who was thrilled by the visit.When the Tennessee legislature expelled two Black lawmakers, the White House sent Harris to Nashville, where she joined them in delivering an impassioned plea for gun control. In December, she traveled to Dubai for a UN climate summit, where she juggled wartime diplomacy – delivering at the time the sharpest commentary of any administration official on Israel’s war in Gaza – with climate policy.“Her vice-presidency has been significant both in terms of her spokesperson role and in terms of a number of significant and highly visible diplomatic assignments that President Biden has given her,” said Joel Goldstein, a historian of the US vice-presidency.There is, however, another reason why scrutiny of Harris may be intensifying: her running mate’s age.If he wins a second term, Biden would turn 86 before leaving office. A New York Times and Siena College survey found that 73% of registered voters believe Biden is “just too old” to be an effective president. The poll was conducted more than two weeks after a special counsel described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.”“The age of both Biden and Trump will focus more attention on the vice-presidential candidates,” Goldstein said.Republicans have sought to leverage concerns about Biden’s mental and physical health against Harris, casting her as an unsteady lieutenant ill-prepared to assume the presidency. In the weeks before dropping out of the Republican presidential primary, Nikki Haley argued that if Trump were to win the party’s nomination, he would lose to Biden, who would be unable to finish a second term, leading to a Harris presidency. The prospect, Haley said, “should send a chill up everyone’s spine”.But Harris is leaning in to her leading role. After the State of the Union, she headed west to Arizona, the next stop on her reproductive rights tour. On Saturday she was scheduled to campaign with Latino organizers in battleground state Nevada.To those who doubt whether the vice-president could step into the presidency, she is blunt.“I’m ready, if necessary,” Harris told NBC News on Friday. “But it’s not going to be necessary.”Rachel Leingang contributed to this report from Minneapolis More

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    Far-right Montana congressman says he’s quitting politics after ‘death threat’

    A Republican congressman from Montana has announced that he is quitting politics after he says his failed recent bid for the US senate led to “a death threat” against him as well as “false and defamatory rumors” about him and his family.Matt Rosendale, a member of the far-right House freedom caucus, signed up in February to participate in Montana’s Republican primary to challenge the Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester, in November. But Rosendale soon withdrew after Donald Trump and the National Republican Senatorial Committee each endorsed his opponent, Tim Sheehy, an aerospace millionaire and retired navy seal.He initially planned to seek re-election to the seat he has held since 2021 but encountered political headwinds. Notably, his office threatened to sue the former Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp after she appeared on the 26 February episode of the Talking Feds with Harry Litman podcast and accused Rosendale of bailing from the Senate primary because he had impregnated a staff member.In addition to a lawsuit threat aimed at Heitkamp, Rosendale’s office responded with a statement calling the congresswoman’s allegation “100% false and defamatory”.Rosendale, 63, had another prominent detractor in Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fellow rightwing extremist member of Congress who endorsed Sheehy in the Republican primary to challenge Tester. Greene called Rosendale a “grifter” and insinuated that he wasn’t truly loyal to Trump.On Friday, Rosendale said he had intended to pursue re-election to his congressional post “at the urging of many, including several of the current candidates”. But since then, his statement said, “I have been forced to have law enforcement visit my children because of a death threat against me and false and defamatory rumors against me and my family”.Rosendale’s statement didn’t elaborate but added: “This has taken a serious toll on me and my family.“The current attacks have made it impossible for me to focus on my work to serve you. So, in the best interest of my family and the community, I am withdrawing from the House race and will not be seeking office.”Rosendale said he would remain in Congress until his term expires in early 2025. Those who have signed up to run for his seat in November include Denny Rehberg, who from 2001 until 2013 served as what was then Montana’s lone congressional representative.The brief Senate run that preceded Rosendale’s political retirement was his second attempt at Tester’s seat. He ran against Tester in 2018 but lost by a little more than three percentage points.Rosendale had previously been Montana’s state auditor and in its legislature. He was among the group of conservative insurgents who made former Republican US House speaker Kevin McCarthy endure 15 rounds of votes before he was given the chamber’s gavel in early 2023.McCarthy retired last year after being ousted as House speaker in October. His replacement as speaker was the Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson, who at one point pledged to endorse Rosendale’s more recent Senate run before reportedly changing his mind when faced with backlash from within their party. More

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    The Lie Detectives: Trump, US politics and the disinformation damage done

    Most of Joe Biden’s past supporters see him as too old. An 81-year-old president with an unsteady step is a turn-off. But Donald Trump, Biden’s malignant, 77-year-old predecessor, vows to be a dictator for “a day”, calls for suspending the constitution and threatens Nato. “Russia, if you’re listening”, his infamous 2016 shout-out to Vladimir Putin, still haunts us eight years on. Democracy is on the ballot again.Against this bleak backdrop, Sasha Issenberg delivers The Lie Detectives, an examination of disinformation in politics. It is a fitting follow-up to The Victory Lab, his look at GOTV (“getting out the vote”) which was published weeks before the 2012 US election.Issenberg lectures at UCLA and writes for Monocle. He has covered presidential campaigns for the Boston Globe and he co-founded Votecastr, a private venture designed to track, project and publish real-time results. Voting science, though, is nothing if not tricky. A little after 4pm on election day 2016, hours before polls closed, Votecastr calculations led Slate to pronounce: Hillary Clinton Has to Like Where She Stands in Florida.The Victory Lab and The Lie Detectives are of a piece, focused on the secret sauce of winning campaigns. More than a decade ago, Issenberg gave props to Karl Rove, the architect of George W Bush’s successful election drives, and posited that micro-targeting voters had become key to finishing first. He also observed that ideological conflicts had become marbled through American politics. On that front, there has been an acceleration. These days, January 6 and its aftermath linger but much of the country has moved on, averting its gaze or embracing alternative facts.In 2016, Issenberg and Joshua Green of Businessweek spoke to Trump campaign digital gurus who bragged of using the internet to discourage prospective Clinton supporters.“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” Issenberg and Green quote a senior official as saying. “They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women and African Americans.”It was micro-targeting on steroids.The exchange stuck with Issenberg. “I thought back often to that conversation with the Trump officials in the years that followed,” he writes now. “I observed so much else online that was manufactured and perpetuated with a similarly brazen impunity.”In The Lie Detectives, Issenberg pays particular attention and respect to Jiore Craig and her former colleagues at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a leading Democratic polling and strategy firm founded by Stan Greenberg, Bill Clinton’s pollster. Issenberg also examines the broader liberal ecosystem and its members, including the billionaire Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn and PayPal. The far-right former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his “office of hate” come under the microscope too.Craig’s experience included more than a dozen elections across six continents. But until Trump’s triumph, she had not worked on a domestic race. To her, to quote Issenberg, US politics was essentially “a foreign country”. Nonetheless, Craig emerged as the Democrats’ go-to for countering disinformation.“It was a unique moment in time where everybody who had looked for an answer up until that point had been abundantly wrong,” Craig says. “The fact that I had to start every race in a new country with the building blocks allowed me to see things that you couldn’t.”No party holds a monopoly on disinformation. In a 2017 special election for US Senate in Alabama, Democratic-aligned consultants launched Project Birmingham, a $100,000 disinformation campaign under which Republicans were urged to cast write-in ballots instead of voting for Roy Moore, the controversial GOP candidate.The project posed as a conservative operation. Eventually, Hoffman acknowledged funding it, but disavowed knowledge of disinformation and said sorry. Doug Jones, the Democrat, won by fewer than 22,000 votes. The write-in total was 22,819.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore recently, Steve Kramer, a campaign veteran working for Dean Phillips, a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination against Biden, launched an AI-generated robocall that impersonated the president.Comparing himself to Paul Revere and Thomas Paine, patriots who challenged the mother country, Kramer, who also commissioned a deepfake impersonation of Senator Lindsey Graham, said Phillips was not in on the effort. If the sorry little episode showed anything, it showed disinformation is here to stay.Under the headline Disinformation on steroids: is the US prepared for AI’s influence on the election?, a recent Guardian story said: “Without clear safeguards, the impact of AI on the election might come down to what voters can discern as real and not real.”Free speech is on the line. Last fall, the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit – “the Trumpiest court in America”, as Vox put it – unanimously held that Biden, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FBI violated the first amendment by seeking to tamp down on Covid-related misinformation.In the court’s view, social media platforms were impermissibly “coerced” or “significantly encouraged” to suppress speech government officials viewed as dangerously inaccurate or misleading. The matter remains on appeal, oral argument before the supreme court set for later this month.Issenberg reminds us that Trump’s current presidential campaign has pledged that a second Trump administration will bar government agencies from assisting any effort to “label domestic speech as mis- or dis-information”. A commitment to free speech? Not exactly. More like Putinism, US-style.According to Kash Patel, a Trump administration veteran and true believer, a second Trump administration will target journalists for prosecution.“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel told Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you.”Welcome to the Trump Vengeance tour.
    The Lie Detectives is published in the US by Columbia University’s Columbia Global Reports More

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    US government avoids shutdown after Senate approves $460bn in spending

    The US government has narrowly avoided a partial shutdown after senators approved a $460bn package of spending bills before a midnight deadline that would have shuttered many key federal agencies.The Senate approved the six funding bills, which passed the House on Wednesday in a bipartisan vote of 339-85, on Friday evening, a vote that gets lawmakers about halfway home in wrapping up their appropriations work for the 2024 budget year.The package now goes to Joe Biden to be signed into law. Meanwhile, lawmakers are negotiating a second package of six bills, including defense, in an effort to have all federal agencies fully funded by a 22 March deadline.The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 75-22, as the chamber labored to get to a final vote just hours before the midnight deadline.“To folks who worry that divided government means nothing ever gets done, this bipartisan package says otherwise,” said the senate majority leader Chuck Schumer.He said the bill’s passage would allow for the hiring of more air traffic controllers and rail safety inspectors, give federal firefighters a raise and boost support for unhoused veterans, among other things.Had the shutdown taken effect, funding would have been paused at midnight for the departments of agriculture, commerce, energy, housing and urban development, the interior, justice, transportation and veterans affairs.A similar short-term shutdown occurred in 2018, and it had little impact on government agencies because it concluded after under six hours.Senator Susan Collins, the top Republican on the Senate appropriations committee, took to the Senate floor on Friday to urge her colleagues to support the bills and prevent a shutdown.“Do we really want a veteran who has bravely and loyally served his country, and is now trying to file a claim for benefits, to find that the Veterans Benefits Administration’s doors are closed to him or her? Is that what we want to have happen?” Collins said. “Why in the world would we want to shut down government and stop serving the American people?”Collins noted that each of the six bills had been carefully considered by the appropriations committee, so she dismissed some of her colleagues’ complaints that they had not undergone an amendment process.“I would urge my colleagues to stop playing with fire here. The House, controlled by Republicans, passed these bills as a package – the six bills – with a very strong, bipartisan vote, with the majority of the majority voting for them,” Collins said.“It would be irresponsible for us not to clear these bills and do the fundamental job that we have of funding government. What is more important?” More

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    Fani Willis and Judge Scott McAfee draw challengers in Fulton county primary

    The embattled Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, and F Judge Scott McAfee have drawn re-election opponents for the 12 May primary ballot as qualification closes for Georgia’s 2024 election cycle. Willis will also face a Republican in November.Christian Wise Smith is challenging Willis in the Democratic primary. Smith is an attorney from Sandy Springs, Georgia. and a former prosecutor who came in third in the 2020 race behind Willis and the previous Fulton county district attorney, Paul Howard.In 2020, Smith’s campaign was to the left of Willis, arguing for an end to death penalty prosecutions, an end to cash bail and the decriminalization of marijuana. He marched with Black Lives Matter activists during the George Floyd protests in Atlanta, and made the prosecution of Atlanta police officers for the fatal shooting of Jimmy Atcheson a centerpiece of his campaign. He was also critical of the prosecution of teachers in the Atlanta cheating scandal – a prosecution led by Willis as an assistant district attorney.In contrast, Willis drew support from moderate Democrats and Republicans – who are often politically irrelevant in deep blue Fulton county – who were deeply dissatisfied with Howard’s approach to prosecution in an environment of rising crime, as well as with allegations of corruption in his office. With nothing else on the ballot, Willis went on to trounce Howard in a runoff that August, replacing a 20-year-incumbent; Smith endorsed Howard.Republicans will have Courtney Kramer on the general election ballot challenging Willis. Kramer is an Atlanta attorney who assisted former president Donald Trump’s legal team in Georgia, including working with Trump lawyer Ray Smith during the “fake elector” effort that led to the indictment of Trump and 18 others by Willis’ office. Kramer is also the former executive director of True the Vote and represented the organization in court cases against Fair Fight Action, the advocacy organization founded by Stacey Abrams.Willis has been under legal fire since court filings revealed that she had been in a relationship with Nathan Wade, special prosecutor on the Trump case in Georgia. McAfee is expected to rule next week on whether she and the Fulton county office will remain prosecutors in the trial, or if instead it will be assigned to another prosecutor.McAfee, who presides over the Trump election interference and racketeering case in Fulton County, faces two challengers from the left: Robert Patillo, a progressive attorney and talk show host in Atlanta, Tiffani Johnson, a former senior staff attorney for Fulton county judge Melynee Leftridge.McAfee, 34, who served as prosecutor both in Fulton county and for the US Department of Justice, is a Federalist Society conservative appointed to the bench by Governor Brian Kemp in 2023. Judicial appointees in Georgia must subsequently run for office in order to fill the remainder of a term.Patillo, 39, has practiced civil rights law for more than 15 years in Georgia. He also has a long-running radio show on Atlanta’s WAOK, in which his occasionally-idiosyncratic political views have an airing.“There are a lot more things that are broken in the Fulton county court, that deserve attention, more than Fani and the Trump trial,” Patillo said. “There are people who have been in that jail for five years awaiting trial. Anyone who is going to be a judge needs a plan to bring these cases to court.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJohnson worked for the Davis Bozeman law firm, also notable for civil rights cases in Atlanta.Judicial races are nonpartisan in Georgia, but Fulton county has a three-to-one Democratic voter advantage. More