Evelyn Reynolds

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    An ex-congressman or a publicity-shy Republican: who will replace George Santos?

    George Santos, an overcoat draped around his shoulders like a villain’s cape, finally left Washington in December, expelled from Congress as he faced more than 20 fraud charges, and after his almost entirely fabricated backstory fell apart.“To hell with this place,” Santos declared as he exited.But while the Republican may be done with Washington, plenty of other people were soon desperate to fill his seat representing New York’s third congressional district.In Long Island, New York, the former congressman Tom Suozzi emerged as the Democratic candidate hoping to replace Santos. Quickly, Suozzi set about distancing himself from the left of his party. He has promised to “battle” the “Squad”, a group of progressive Democratic members of Congress and has discussed the “border crisis”.Mazi Pilip, a relatively unknown local politician, was chosen by a local Republican party desperate to move on from the embarrassment that Santos – whose claims that he was a successful businessman and investor, a graduate of a top New York university and a whiz on the volleyball court had all fallen apart under scrutiny – had brought.While the looming presence of Santos, who has pleaded not guilty to charges including stealing donors’ identities, has piqued national interest, the Suozzi-Pilip match-up could also provide an early insight into what the US can expect in what’s likely to be a second presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in November.With early and absentee voting due to start in the special election on Saturday – election day is 13 February – so far it seems that immigration is top of the agenda, for Republicans at least.“Joe Biden and Tom Suozzi created the migrant crisis by opening our borders and funding sanctuary cities,” Pilip said recently on X, in a post that seemed to overestimate the achievements and influence of Suozzi, who spent six fairly uneventful years in Congress before stepping down last year.Pilip has run a strange campaign that has seen her duck interviews and largely avoid the press. She has repeatedly sought to tie Suozzi, who represented the district before Santos’s disastrous tenure, to the unpopular Biden. In her telling, Suozzi is also responsible for “runaway inflation”, while Pilip has also attempted to link Suozzi to antisemitism.In a district which the Jewish Democratic Council of America estimates has one of the largest Jewish populations of anywhere in the country, US funding to Israel has proved a key issue so far. Both Pilip, an Orthodox Jew who was born in Ethiopia before moving to Israel and who served in the Israel Defense Forces before coming to the US, and Suozzi are fervent supporters of continued aid.As a largely suburban, purple area, which voted for Biden in the 2020 presidential election before, fatefully, electing Santos in 2022, the race is being closely watched, said Lawrence Levy, former chief political columnist for Newsday and executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University.“It’s almost become a cliche to say that this [district] is a bellwether, but it really is in terms of national elections,” he said. “Competitive suburbs all over the country are the places that for years now have determined who gets the gavels in Congress, and the keys to the White House.”More than 60% of registered voters in New York state believe that the influx of migrants into the state is a “very serious problem”, according to a poll by Siena College in January. The border has come to dominate the election, and the lines of attack are beginning to serve as a preview for November.“What political operatives, and candidates, and donors are looking at around the country is how the strategies and tactics and messaging, in particular, play,” Levy said.“And what that will mean for how they approach their own races, whether it’s Orange county, California; Montgomery and Bucks county [in] Pennsylvania; Oakland county, Michigan: these are our swing suburban areas that are themselves bellwethers in the national elections.”The election has certainly brought in plenty of money. Suozzi has raised $4.5m since he entered the race, Politico reported, with Pilip bringing in $1.3m. Much of the money seems to have gone to local TV channels, with New Yorkers bombarded by attack adverts from both sides.Some of Pilip’s attacks have followed the familiar path of tying her opponent to an unsuccessful incumbent. Although Pilip’s repeated claims about a “Biden-Suozzi immigration crisis” seem something of a stretch given Suozzi’s fairly modest significance in the House of Representatives, where he served on the ways and means committee and was known for his bipartisanship.In some ways, Pilip has already cleared the very low bar set by Santos. A local CBS news channel said it had verified documents showing that Pilip did, as she claimed, study at Haifa and Tel Aviv universities, and serve in the IDF, which suggests she has not invented her history in the way Santos did. (In an email, the IDF said “we cannot comment on the personal details of past or present IDF soldiers” when the Guardian asked to confirm Pilip’s service.)Pilip has run a very quiet campaign. Her largest event so far, which saw several Republican members of Congress trek to Long Island to champion their candidate, was most noticeable for Pilip not being there: she said she was observing the sabbath.There have been complaints from local journalists, including from the New York Times and NPR, that Pilip has left them off invitations to press conferences. During the opening weeks of the campaign she conducted few interviews – one notable effort was an odd video interview with the conservative new outlet the New York Sun, during which Pilip stared into the middle distance as she answered questions.Her campaign did not respond to requests for comment or requests to be added to the press mailing list. The Guardian signed up for supporter emails, and did not receive a single one in the space of five days.It’s a far cry from the attention-pursuing Santos, who recently turned up to a Trump party during the New Hampshire primary, despite not being invited; has been hawking video messages on the app Cameo; and recently insisted in an interview: “People still want to hear what I have to say.”Whatever happens in the special election between Pilip and Suozzi, there will be plenty of people interested in what it might say about the state of US politics – and what we might expect this November. More

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    Nevada: rival primary and caucuses ensure confusion … and a Trump win

    When Nevada Republicans started receiving their mail-in ballots for the state’s 6 February primary, Nikki Haley’s name was on them, but a key person was missing: Donald Trump. It’s not an accident.Instead of appearing on the primary ballot in the key swing state, Trump is participating in the separate Republican caucuses to take place two days after the primary, on 8 February. Haley isn’t participating in those caucuses. The bizarre set-up means that Nevada Republicans will be asked to vote in a primary on 6 February and then in caucuses two days later to choose their party’s nominee. Only the caucuses will determine how Nevada’s 26 delegates are awarded at the Republican national convention.The Nevada Republican party created the chaotic scheme, changing its nomination rules last year, in what many say is a thinly veiled effort to benefit Trump. The changes have made Nevada’s GOP nomination in the primary essentially irrelevant and left voters confused.“What it’s probably doing is a) creating a lot of confusion and b) gonna reduce turnout and participation, which totally undermines the purpose of the caucuses, which is for party building,” said David Damore, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.Michael McDonald, the head of the Nevada Republican party, was one of six fake Trump electors indicted by Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron Ford. Jesse Law, the chair of the Clark county Republican party who also served in the Trump administration, and Jim DeGraffenreid, a Nevada Republican National Committee member, were also charged.“​​They did it because they are controlled by Trump people, and Trump wouldn’t like it if anything were left to chance,” said Jon Ralston, a well-respected Nevada political commentator who is CEO of the Nevada Independent. “He would almost surely have won the primary, too, but with universal mail ballots and a much larger universe, it would not have been as big a margin, probably.”In 2021, Nevada lawmakers approved a measure requiring the state to hold a primary election for the presidential preference contest. But last year, the state Republican party decided it wanted to hold caucuses instead. The party said it would award all of its delegates to the winner of the caucus. It also barred anyone who participated in the primary from also participating in the caucuses. It imposed a $55,000 fee to participate and prohibited Super Pacs from intervening in the caucuses – widely seen as an attack on Ron DeSantis, who relied heavily on his Super Pac throughout his campaign before dropping out in January.Under Nevada law, all voters are automatically mailed a ballot for the primary unless they opt out. There is also in-person early voting that began on 27 January, and voters can register to vote at the polls. The caucuses, by contrast, will take place from 5pm to 7.30pm, and voters have to appear in person and show ID to participate. Unlike a primary, in which votes are cast by ballot over the course of an early voting period and entire election days, voters in a caucus must show up in person at a designated place with their neighbors, where they are then given a ballot, after which they submit it and can stay and watch it get counted.Publicly, Nevada Republicans have said the caucuses are needed to ensure the integrity of the vote, even though voter fraud is exceedingly rare. “The caucus, until we get voter ID, and we get the mail-in ballot situation under control – the only pure way to have this is through a caucus,” McDonald, the Nevada Republican chair, said in an October interview with the Nevada newsmakers podcast.McDonald, who said in 2015 he favored primaries because they increased participation, did not respond to a request for an interview.View image in fullscreenJoe Lombardo, Nevada’s Republican governor, has said he will caucus for Trump but has criticized the dual primary and caucus system as confusing and said it would disenfranchise voters.Ralston said the party’s election integrity concerns were nonsense. “They want only the base to turn out, and the smaller the turnout, the better Trump is likely to do, especially now with only [Ryan] Binkley against him and no ‘none of the above’ to choose,” he said, referring to the long-shot candidate.Haley, along with Mike Pence and Tim Scott, chose to participate in the primary last year. Trump, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Chris Christie all chose to participate in the caucuses. Because Haley is the only candidate left in the primary, she is guaranteed to win. Trump, similarly, is the only remaining major candidate in the caucuses and is guaranteed to win that contest.Haley has said she’s not participating in the caucuses because it was rigged for Trump. “I mean, talk to the people in Nevada. They will tell you the caucuses have been sealed off, bought and paid for for a long time. And so that’s why we got into the primary,” Haley told reporters during a campaign stop in Epping, New Hampshire, last month.And Trump’s campaign has gloated over its guaranteed win in the caucuses.“On February 8th, Nikki Haley will be handed her third straight loss – in Nevada. She inexplicably signed up to be included on the state Primary ballot despite the fact that she could not earn delegates in the Primary,” Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who both lead Trump’s campaign, wrote in a memo on Monday.Still, Trump allies have spread misinformation falsely suggesting the primary is unauthorized and Trump was wrongfully excluded from it. The presidential primary is required by state law – but Trump chose not to participate in the primary so he could be a candidate in the caucuses.Voters are confused about the process and why Trump isn’t on the primary ballot, said Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state.“Voters ask that question all the time,” he said in an interview. “It’s interesting because we did talk about it, we did address it, we tried to do as much mitigation as we could prior to the ballots being received. However, it’s human nature that the voter is only going to pay attention to what’s right in front of them at that moment in time.”The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that the primary is run by state officials and the caucuses are run entirely by the state GOP.Kerry Durmick, the Nevada state director for All Voting Is Local, a non-partisan group focused on expanding voting access, said she went to observe one of the first days of early voting and saw confusion.“I did see a lot of voters say, ‘Oh, I thought today was the caucus. Oh, I thought we were voting in February. Can I vote today or do I need to vote then?’” she said. “Legally the parties can handle the process however they want to. Where I’m frustrated, where All Voting Is Local is frustrated, is the lack of outreach that was done by this particular party around this particular process because this was the choice that they made.”Republicans are also reportedly still seeking volunteers to staff the caucus sites, which the party was still finalising less than a month ahead of the event, according to the Las Vegas Sun.There could be even more confusion if the dual contest system results in both candidates claiming victory in Nevada. After 6 February, Haley could claim she won the Nevada primary. Two days later, Trump will claim he won the caucuses.“To the degree that there’s any sort of media attention of the Tuesday results, it’s gonna be ‘Nikki Haley wins the Nevada primary. Oh, but Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot.’ That’s a more complicated soundbite but she can certainly spin that,” said Damore.During a rally in Las Vegas last weekend, Trump reminded his supporters to turn out, even though he’s guaranteed to win the contest. “We do want to get a good vote. We’re not going to have a lot of competition, I think. But it doesn’t matter. We want to get a great, beautiful mandate,” he said.“It’s very important for you to help educate all of our supporters that we’re not talking about the government-run, universal mail-in ballots. We don’t want mail-in ballot,” he added. “Do the caucus, not the primary. The primary is meaningless. I don’t know, maybe they’ll try and use it for public relations purposes.”Lauren Gambino contributed reporting More

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    When dead children are just the price of doing business, Zuckerberg’s apology is empty | Carole Cadwalladr

    I don’t generally approve of blood sports but I’m happy to make an exception for the hunting and baiting of Silicon Valley executives in a congressional committee room. But then I like expensive, pointless spectacles. And waterboarding tech CEOs in Congress is right up there with firework displays, a brief, thrillingly meaningless sensation on the retina and then darkness.Last week’s grilling of Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley Übermenschen was a classic of the genre: front pages, headlines, and a genuinely stand-out moment of awkwardness in which he was forced to face victims for the first time ever and apologise: stricken parents holding the photographs of their dead children lost to cyberbullying and sexual exploitation on his platform.Less than six hours later, his company delivered its quarterly results, Meta’s stock price surged by 20.3% delivering a $200bn bump to the company’s market capitalisation and, if you’re counting, which as CEO he presumably does, a $700m sweetener for Zuckerberg himself. Those who listened to the earnings call tell me there was no mention of dead children.A day later, Biden announced, “If you harm an American, we will respond”, and dropped missiles on more than 80 targets across Syria and Iraq. Sure bro, just so long as the Americans aren’t teenagers with smart phones. US tech companies routinely harm Americans, and in particular, American children, though to be fair they routinely harm all other nationalities’ children too: the Wall Street Journal has shown Meta’s algorithms enable paedophiles to find each other. New Mexico’s attorney general is suing the company for being the “largest marketplace for predators and paedophiles globally”. A coroner in Britain found that 14-year-old Molly Jane Russell, “died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content” – which included Instagram videos depicting suicide.And while dispatching a crack squad of Navy Seals to Menlo Park might be too much to hope for, there are other responses that the US Congress could have mandated, such as, here’s an idea, a law. Any law. One that, say, prohibits tech companies from treating dead children as just a cost of doing business.Because demanding that tech companies don’t enable paedophiles to find and groom children is the lowest of all low-hanging fruit in the tech regulation space. And yet even that hasn’t happened yet. What America urgently needs is to act on its anti-trust laws and break up these companies as a first basic step. It needs to take an axe to Section 230, the law that gives platforms immunity from lawsuits for hosting harmful or illegal content.It needs basic product safety legislation. Imagine GlaxoSmithKline launched an experimental new wonder drug last year. A drug that has shown incredible benefits, including curing some forms of cancer and slowing down ageing. It might also cause brain haemorrhages and abort foetuses, but the data on that is not yet in so we’ll just have to wait and see. There’s a reason that doesn’t happen. They’re called laws. Drug companies go through years of testing. Because they have to. Because at some point, a long time ago, Congress and other legislatures across the world did their job.Yet Silicon Valley’s latest extremely disruptive technology, generative AI, was released into the wild last year without even the most basic federally mandated product testing. Last week, deep fake porn images of the most famous female star on the planet, Taylor Swift, flooded social media platforms, which had no legal obligation to take them down – and hence many of them didn’t.But who cares? It’s only violence being perpetrated against a woman. It’s only non-consensual sexual assault, algorithmically distributed to millions of people across the planet. Punishing women is the first step in the rollout of any disruptive new technology, so get used to that, and if you think deep fakes are going to stop with pop stars, good luck with that too.You thought misinformation during the US election and Brexit vote in 2016 was bad? Well, let’s wait and see what 2024 has to offer. Could there be any possible downside to releasing this untested new technology – one that enables the creation of mass disinformation at scale for no cost – at the exact moment in which more people will go to the polls than at any time in history?You don’t actually have to imagine where that might lead because it’s already happened. A deep fake targeting a progressive candidate dropped days before the Slovakian general election in October. It’s impossible to know what impact it had or who created it, but the candidate lost, and the opposition pro-Putin candidate won. CNN reports that the messaging of the deepfake echoed that put out by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, just an hour before it dropped. And where was Facebook in all of this, you ask? Where it usually is, refusing to take many of the deep fake posts down.Back in Congress, grilling tech execs is something to do to fill the time in between the difficult job of not passing tech legislation. It’s now six years since the Cambridge Analytica scandal when Zuckerberg became the first major tech executive to be commanded to appear before Congress. That was a revelation because it felt like Facebook might finally be brought to heel.But Wednesday’s outing was Zuckerberg’s eighth. And neither Facebook, nor any other tech platform, has been brought to heel. The US has passed not a single federal law. Meanwhile, Facebook has done some exculpatory techwashing of its name to remove the stench of data scandals and Kremlin infiltration and occasionally offers up its CEO for a ritual slaughtering on the Senate floor.To understand America’s end-of-empire waning dominance in the world, its broken legislature and its capture by corporate interests, the symbolism of a senator forcing Zuckerberg to apologise to bereaved parents while Congress – that big white building stormed by insurrectionists who found each other on social media platforms – does absolutely nothing to curb his company’s singular power is as good as any place to start.We’ve had eight years to learn the lessons of 2016 and yet here we are. Britain has responded by weakening the body that protects our elections and degrading our data protection laws to “unlock post-Brexit opportunities”. American congressional committees are now a cargo cult that go through ritualised motions of accountability. Meanwhile, there’s a new tech wonder drug on the market that may create untold economic opportunities or lethal bioweapons and the destabilisation of what is left of liberal democracy. Probably both. Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and feature writer for the Observer More

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    ‘The weirdest campaign’: South Carolina delivers a win, but Biden still faces an uphill path

    Surprise! Joe Biden won the Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina with a high-90s percentage that would make even Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un blush.But despite the low energy and low turnout, there was a wider narrative on Saturday about representation, the changing face of the US and a rebuke to the white identity politics of Donald Trump.Biden, 81, may be a stick-in-the-mud but it was he who last year tore up the tradition, which took hold in earnest with Jimmy Carter in 1976, of Iowa and New Hampshire going first in picking the Democratic candidate for president.At his behest, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) rearranged the electoral calendar so that South Carolina would have first say in shaping the race this time. That South Carolina is also that state that revived Biden’s ailing 2020 campaign probably didn’t do its cause any harm.Still, anyone who spent parts of last month freezing in Iowa and New Hampshire after the Republican primary was reminded how demographically unrepresentative those states are. Both are about 90% white. At Trump’s campaign rallies, unsurprisingly, the whiteness appeared even more monolithic.In South Carolina, however, one in four residents is Black. The state is more in keeping with a rainbow nation where Republicans appear to be in denial that white Christians are no longer the majority. Biden’s decision to put it first was more important than any worries about enthusiasm or turnout on Saturday.“For South Carolina to go first is now a badge of honour and pride for so many folks,” Jaime Harrison, chair of the DNC and himself a Black South Carolinian, told reporters in Columbia on Saturday night. “I had one woman who was just teary-eyed with me when I was on the trail and just talking about the importance and the significance of going first.“Hearing the stories about people who could not vote and having those memories yourself and now hearing us talk about ‘the hands that picked cotton are now the hands that are picking presidents’ – that is impactful, it’s powerful, and that is the imagery that is important for the nation to see and understand.”Still, the final days before the historic vote felt somewhat anticlimactic thanks to a combination of Biden’s dominance as incumbent, feeble opposition from Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, and the lack of a Republican primary on the same day (which will take place later in the month).It was all a far cry from the blockbuster 2016 primary season, when Trump was knocking out Republican stiffs while Bernie Sanders was giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money. On Friday Kamala Harris, the vice-president, drew only a modest crowd at a university in Orangeburg.On Saturday, Democrats threw a watch party at the South Carolina state fairgrounds in Columbia, serving a buffet of meatballs, chicken, pasta, deviled eggs, fruit and vegetables. Red, white and blue flags were hung from the roof, tall blue curtains lined the walls, and the floor was carpeted blue and red. Two TV screens proclaimed “F1rst in the nati♥n”, the heart doubling as a map of South Carolina. There was a giant American flag behind the stage.The president was not present but Congressman James Clyburn, whose endorsement transformed Biden’s fortunes here four years ago, did get him on the phone and put him on loudspeaker, prompting whoops and cheers from the crowd.Biden said: “I hope you can hear me. So what happened?” Everyone laughed but then there was feedback on the mic.Harrison replied: “I think a lot of stuff happened here in South Carolina today for you, sir.” Biden asked: “What kind of turnout you got?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarrison said: “Mr President, we’re waiting to get the final numbers but from what I’m told by some folks. I think you got it.” More laughter in the room.None of it said much about Biden’s chances in November. He has already moved into general election mode, unleashing on Trump in a series of speeches. A common sentiment among his supporters in South Carolina was puzzlement – and frustration – that his booming economy is not getting the credit it deserves. Polls show that many voters, including some Black voters, agree with his likely opponent’s slogan: “Better off under Trump.”There are other headaches too. As record numbers of migrants arrive at the southern border, Biden is criticised as too soft by the right and, as he now threatens draconian measures, too Trumpian by the left. Republicans say Biden botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan and displayed a weakness that emboldened Russia, Iran and Hamas, but progressives and Arab Americans are dismayed by his apparent lack of compassion for thousands of Palestinian dead.Finally, of course, there is the age question. At 81, Biden is the oldest president in American history. Would-be rivals such as Phillips and Nikki Haley are pushing the cause of a new generation. All these variables could matter in an election likely to be decided by gossamer-thin margins in a handful of swing states.Visiting his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, on Saturday, Biden acknowledged: “It’s the weirdest campaign I’ve ever been engaged in.”But interviews with voters during primary season in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have offered a reminder of an undeniable fact: Trump remains toxic to huge swaths of the American population. They will do anything to stop him. A criminal conviction between now and November may make them redouble their efforts.America’s racial divisions will be at the heart of it again. Christale Spain, the first Black woman elected as chair of South Carolina’s Democratic party, recalled in an interview that her state’s primary following the Iowa and New Hampshire contests in past cycles meant “we were correcting the course, correcting the ship every time”.And in a speech to supporters, Harrison suggested that part of Biden’s legacy is that future Democratic candidates will have to earn, not take for granted, African American support. “We proved that the days of folks parachuting in on election day asking for our votes – those days are over,” he said. “We have an electorate that looks like today’s Democratic party and tomorrow’s America.” More

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    Biden wins South Carolina Democratic primary for presidential nomination

    President Joe Biden has again won the South Carolina presidential primary, his first formal primary win of the election season.Amid low voter turnout, the Associated Press projected that Biden also won all 55 of the state’s Democratic delegates. Another seven delegates are pledged by party leaders and elected officials, such as South Carolina’s lone Democratic congressman, Jim Clyburn. Neither Dean Phillips, the congressman from Minnesota, nor author Marianne Williamson received at least 15% of the statewide vote or 15% of the vote in any congressional district, the threshold necessary to win delegates.The president sent out a statement shortly after the results were called in his favor, specifically highlighting Black voters, who comprise 26% of state residents and a significant portion of the Democratic voting base in South Carolina.“As I said four years ago, this campaign is for everyone who has been knocked down, counted out and left behind. That is still true today. With more than 14m new jobs and a record 24 straight months – two years – of the unemployment rate under 4%, including a record low unemployment rate for Black Americans, we are leaving no one behind,” he said.“In 2020, it was the voters of South Carolina who proved the pundits wrong, breathed new life into our campaign, and set us on the path to winning the Presidency.“Now in 2024, the people of South Carolina have spoken again and I have no doubt that you have set us on the path to winning the Presidency again – and making Donald Trump a loser – again.Biden continued: “When I was elected president, I said the days of the backbone of the Democratic party being at the back of the line were over. That was a promise made and a promise kept. Now, you are first in the nation.”The Democratic National Committee changed the national election calendar last year to designate South Carolina as the first official contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, taking the privilege away from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Biden did not participate in the New Hampshire primary, which state Democratic officials held over the objections of the national committee.Marvin Pendarvis, a Democratic state representative from North Charleston, said the primary was important, regardless of turnout.“Everyone probably wondered why was it so important that we got turnout, even when we knew that Joe Biden was going to win South Carolina. It’s because we are first in the nation. It’s because we want to maintain that status going into 2028. And it is big for our party to be able to showcase why South Carolina was chosen to be first: because we are representative of the Democratic party, not only in our diversity of values, but also how we look and how we come together as Democrats.“We’re the ones that spearheaded Joe Biden to get into office in 2020,” Pendarvis added. “We’ll do it again in 2024.”South Carolina’s primaries are open, allowing any registered voter to participate, though voters much choose only one primary – Democratic or Republican – to vote in. Of South Carolina’s 3.3 million registered voters, about 13% participated in the 2016 Democratic primary, which was won overwhelmingly by Hillary Clinton, while 16% voted in the 2020 primary that separated Biden from the pack.South Carolina’s Republicans go to the polls on 24 February, when former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley faces former president Donald Trump.Biden’s statement ended on a warning about the upcoming contest: “The stakes in this election could not be higher. There are extreme and dangerous voices at work in the country – led by Donald Trump – who are determined to divide our nation and take us backward. We cannot let that happen. We’ve come a long way these past four years – with America now having the strongest economy in the world and among the lowest inflation of any major economy. Let’s keep pushing forward. Let’s finish what we started – together.” More

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    South Carolina Democratic primary 2024: track live results

    The South Carolina Democratic primary took place on 3 February, and was chosen by the Democratic National Committee as the first election contest in the 2024 election year. Joe Biden is the clear frontrunner in the primary and hopes to recapture the enthusiasm that launched his campaign in 2020.The polls closed at 7pm.Who’s runningJoe BidenBiden is the likely Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election. He announced his campaign for re-election on 25 April 2023, exactly four years after he announced his previous, successful presidential campaign. While approval for the president remains low, hovering just above 40%, political experts say he is the most likely candidate to defeat Donald Trump, who is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Biden has served in politics for over five decades and is running on a platform that includes abortion rights, gun reform and healthcare. At 81, he is the oldest president in US history.Dean PhillipsDean Phillips, a three-term Democratic congressman from Minnesota, is challenging Biden, saying the next generation should have the opportunity to lead the country. Phillips is the heir to a distilling company and once co-owned a gelato company. He entered public office spurred by fighting back against Trump.Marianne WilliamsonFailed 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, who also unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the US House of Representatives in 2014, became the first Democratic candidate to announce she was running for president as a challenge to Biden. Williamson, an author of self-help books, launched her long-shot bid with campaign promises to address climate change and student loan debt. She previously worked as “spiritual leader” of a Michigan Unity church. More

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    ‘We have to fight for democracy’: South Carolina poll workers face low turnout

    Two old men sat in the dark on a bench outside Dunston elementary school in North Charleston, South Carolina, waiting for a long day to start that would be quieter than they deserved.Few were expecting strong turnout for the Democratic primary in South Carolina on Saturday. In pre-election polls, Biden had more than 90% support. The nomination race has no drama. But people still have to vote. And the temperamental apparatus of elections has to prepare for that vote, even when it’s not cast.“We’ve got some people that come down here and really don’t know what they’re doing, and I try to help them,” said Virgil Middleton, 74, a retired truck driver and marine veteran of the Vietnam war. He fought for democracy, he said, “so that everybody can have a fair chance in the United States”.Six poll workers trundled into the school gym at 6am, one of 2,351 precincts across the state, to snip the zip ties – marked with serial numbers – on the ballot box and fiddle with the polling terminals. They solemnly swore “to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of this state and of the United States”.Up before sunrise, all would return home after dark. Take-home pay for a poll worker is about $167 for the day, said Robert Samuel Jackson, a 74-year-old retiree in North Charleston. It’s soldierly work. Four are military veterans. None are younger than 60.And all have known each other – and known Annette Green, the precinct clerk – for years.Green didn’t have much time to talk on Saturday morning, at least not until it became clear that there would be no rush of solemn voters waiting their turn. The process of uncorking a polling location requires meticulous work to stave off accusations of tampering or fraud. Every seal broken on a machine has to be accounted for. Every person who touches a machine has to be accounted for. Every ballot has to be accounted for.A few minutes before the polls opened, Green took a stack of blank ballots out of a sealed box and began counting them by hand, carefully moistening her fingers to separate each paper from the next.“We have to be here six hours before the polls open,” she said. It takes time to pack up when the polls close at 7pm, then to haul the materials back to the election office. “Then you go and get in line. You have your communication pack, your yellow bag, your black bin, your blue bin with your ballots, and then you get in line and you wait to be checked in.“They verify that you have brought back all your zero tapes, your keys, your communication pack, your thumb drive which has all the information. They make sure that you have checked in all your cohorts. And then after about an hour, you get to go home.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGreen turned the ballots over in her hand after counting them – and counted them again. She’s been doing this for 15 years. Her daughters worked with her at the polls for years, too. One is a lawyer now. The other is in law school.At 8.07am, a bit more than an hour into the voting day, Dunston elementary had yet to see its first voter.“This has never happened before,” Green said. “But this is the first time we’ve been working on Saturday.”Perhaps early voting had cut into things, she suggested.To Green, democracy means freedom.“We have to fight for democracy,” she said.“I find that to be important for young kids to learn. Democracy was not ours. We had to earn it, and we’re earning it when we teach our young children – like my daughter’s coming out here to work the election poll – it taught them how important it was for them to keep encouraging each other to get out and vote.”Green checked the first voter in at 8.21am. It was a Biden voter – as expected.“I was trying to figure out what time they were going to open,” Villa Middlesex, 72, said after voting.Fifty people had cast a ballot at Dunston elementary by 5 pm. The precinct has 1,754 registered voters assigned to it. More

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    US House to vote next week on standalone $17.6bn bill for aid to Israel

    The US House of Representatives plans to vote next week to advance $17.6bn in military aid to Israel without any accompanying spending cuts or assistance for Ukraine, according to Mike Johnson, the chamber’s speaker.Johnson announced to his fellow House Republicans on Saturday that the vote would take place, while also criticizing a parallel move in the US Senate to pair funding for Israel in its military strikes in Gaza with aid for Ukraine as it fends off Russia’s invasion. The Senate measure also aims to attach a raft of tough border and asylum measures favored by rightwingers to aid for Israel.A compromise on these various aims had been sought by a bipartisan group in the Senate that hoped to find increasingly rare common ground between Republicans and Democrats. But Johnson, a hardline rightwing Republican from north-western Louisiana, has said the Senate package would not pass the House because it is not sufficiently tough on people trying to cross the US’s southern border with Mexico.“Their leadership is aware that by failing to include the House in their negotiations, they have eliminated the ability for swift consideration of any legislation,” Johnson wrote of members of the US Senate in his letter to his House Republican colleagues. “Next week, we will take up and pass a clean, standalone Israel supplemental package.”A higher priority for Johnson is the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, with a House vote expected next week. Some Republicans have expressed reluctance to find a compromise on immigration or Ukraine given how ongoing controversy on these issues could aid Donald Trump, who holds a single-minded grip over his party as he seeks another presidency in this year’s election.It’s unclear whether the Senate would advance a bill that only provides military aid to Israel to further pursue its war against Hamas, an effort that has already reduced much of Gaza to rubble and caused a humanitarian crisis among the Palestinian population.The Democratic Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, has said he would prefer to work on an overall package that aids Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression – as well as Israel and includes a set of new immigration curbs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Joe Biden White House has signaled that it is not in favor of an Israel aid-only bill. In November, John Kirby, a spokesperson for Biden’s national security council, said that the president would veto a bill that only provides aid to Israel. More