US Politics

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday declined to join critics who accuse Israel of genocide in its actions in Gaza, but said American society should not “toss someone out of our public discourse” for doing so.Following the International Court of Justice’s order to Israel to work to prevent genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza, the Democratic representative from New York argued on Meet the Press that “large amounts of Americans” think “genocide” is the right term for what is happening in Gaza.“The fact that [the ICJ] said there’s a responsibility to prevent it, the fact that this word is even in play, the fact that this word is even in our discourse, I think demonstrates the mass inhumanity that Gazans are facing,” she said.“Whether you are an individual that believes this is a genocide – which by the way, in our polling we are seeing large amounts of Americans concerned specifically with that word. So I don’t think that it is something to completely toss someone out of our public discourse for using.”Ocasio-Cortez has condemned Hamas’s attack on 7 October “in the strongest possible terms” and has at the same time been a vocal proponent of a ceasefire in Gaza, where the Israeli military has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.“We are not just seeing 25,000 people that have died in Gaza,” she said. “We are seeing the starvation of millions of people, the displacement of over 2 million Gazans.”Some of Ocasio-Cortez’s allies in Congress, such as the progressive Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, have gone further, arguing that Joe Biden is supporting genocide in Gaza. Asked to respond, Ocasio-Cortez said: “I think what we are seeing right now throughout the country is that young people are appalled at the violence and the indiscriminate loss of life.”On the Democrats’ policy agenda and messaging, she argued that the party “can certainly do more to be advancing our vision” but added: “I believe we have a strong vision that we can run on.” She praised Biden for his promise to enshrine reproductive rights in law should he remain president and Democrats take hold of both chambers of Congress, and affirmed that Biden is the strongest candidate among current Democratic political leaders to defeat Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.“I think we can do more,” she added. “I think we need to be talking more about healthcare. Of course me, as a progressive, I want to see the age of Medicare drop – whether it’s to 50 [years old] as the president has discussed earlier, or to zero, as is my preference.” More

A lawsuit brought by Black Democrats who partnered with Republican attorneys has undone Michigan’s first independently drawn legislative maps, in a development some other Democrats have labeled a GOP “power grab”.Republicans for decades controlled all or part of the state legislature, and developed districts that a judge in 2019 characterized as a “gerrymander of historical proportions”. Democrats in 2022 took control of the state government for the first time in over 40 years after a nonpartisan independent redistricting commission implemented more balanced maps.But a Republican-majority panel of federal district court judges appointed by a Republican circuit court judge ruled in early January that the maps diluted Black voting power and were drawn based on race, thus splitting communities that would otherwise vote in a bloc.Several Michigan Democrats who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to publicly criticize members of their party expressed dismay because a Republican judiciary now controls the redrawing process, and they fear the new maps will be more favorable to the GOP.Constituents in Detroit and elsewhere in the state will suffer if the legislature is turned back over to Republicans, some Democrats said. Michigan now has its first Black speaker of the house and more Black committee chairs than it has ever had, the maps’ supporters noted, and the speaker’s district is one of those included in the lawsuit.But former Michigan state representative Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, one of the lead plaintiffs along with a group of Black voters, told the Guardian her colleagues’ arguments were “ludicrous”. The new maps carved up Detroit into more districts than before, and that destroyed Detroit’s voting bloc, she added.The lawsuit encompasses 13 senate and house districts in and around Detroit, a city that is around 85% Black. Of those, eight districts are currently represented by Black representatives or senators.“We don’t want a majority on the backs of Black people who have no voice in selecting their own representation,” she said. “If the party is suggesting that the only way they can have a majority is by selling Black people up the river, then hell no. It’s not fair.”Typically, Republicans in other states argue on the opposite side of the Voting Rights Act and 14th amendment violations, which Democrats say is evidence the party is disingenuous and capitalizing on Democratic divisions to try to destroy the maps.Michigan Democratic party chair Lavora Barnes did not respond to specific questions from the Guardian, but in a statement said she is “confident that Democrats will be able to hold the majority in the House and maintain our Democratic trifecta that has continually delivered for Michiganders”.Previously, the party in charge of the legislature drew the maps every 10 years. That changed with the 2018 passage of a citizen initiative for an independent nonpartisan redistricting commission. The commission’s new lines went into effect this year, giving Democrats a much fairer shot at control.Michigan was one of a handful of swing states to come under full Democratic control in 2022 as the undoing of Roe V Wade galvanized voters, but their majority in both chambers is razor thin. The state’s congressional districts are not affected by the lawsuit, though a second suit is possible.Among the plaintiff’s lead attorneys is John Bursch, a former state solicitor general under GOP former attorney general Bill Schuette who has represented conservatives in anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion causes.In what observers say is an unprecedented move, the federal court appointed a special master to draw new maps at the same time as the commission, reasoning that the commission was beset by infighting and incapable of redrawing legislative lines in time for the 2024 elections.With the close proximity of the 2024 primaries, the moves make sense, even if it is unprecedented, said Josh Douglas, an election law and voting rights professor at the University of Kentucky.“It just shows that courts sometimes need to be creative as an election draws nearer,” he said.The court ruled the maps violated the US constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act.The latter stems from the diminished number of majority-Black districts the commission drew because it connected the city to suburbs, which diluted the voting strength of Black voters. The districts should be at least 50-55% minority, observers say, and are currently about 35-40% minority.More importantly, the court ruled the maps violated the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause, which prohibits the use of race as the primary consideration in drawing lines. The process of drawing lines can frequently be drawn based on race, and Black Democrats in other states have have previously partnered with white Republicans.Bill Ballenger, a conservative-leaning Michigan political analyst, said the maps were “clearly” flawed, and noted the Democratic judge on the panel, Janet Neff, agreed with the GOP members. He scoffed at the notion of a “power grab”.“Of course they are saying all this, but the commission has given Republicans a lot of ammunition,” he said.The ruling was highly critical of the commission, and though Neff agreed with the majority decision, she questioned the need for a “harsh” tone in the panels’ decision. State Democrats who spoke to the Guardian said they suspected it was meant to undermine the commission’s credibility, but the commission has been beset by partisan infighting.The plaintiffs’ attorneys seized on that this week as the court continues to work out the redraw’s specifics: “The commission and its members appear more intent on cannibalizing each other than functioning as a cohesive group to draw a set of acceptable maps.”Ultimately, the issue boils down to having an effective caucus of Detroit senators and representatives, Gay-Dagnogo said. She pointed to the Detroit caucus’s success in negotiating on behalf of residents over auto insurance reform and state takeover of the city’s public school system. Even well-intentioned legislators sometimes propose policies that are bad for Detroiters, she added.“That’s the importance of having representation from your community, being well versed in those issues, and being able to get in these roles to advocate for your community,” Gay-Dagnogo said. More

On 7 January, Anne Applebaum, a historian and a staff writer at the Atlantic, retweeted a video of Russian missiles striking a Ukrainian hospital. Three days later, former US ambassador Michael McFaul, a Stanford professor and contributing columnist at the Washington Post, approvingly tweeted a sign demanding that Vladimir Putin be sent to the Hague. On 15 January, Post columnist Max Boot reminded readers that, according to the United Nations, Russia has killed more than 10,000 civilians in Ukraine.These expressions of outrage were entirely justified. What makes them odd is that more than three months into the war in Gaza, Applebaum has still not acknowledged on X (formerly known as Twitter), where she comments frequently, that Israel has attacked hospitals there. She has not done so despite a Washington Post investigation in December that found that Israel has “conducted repeated and widespread airstrikes in proximity to hospitals”, thus contributing to a public health catastrophe in which, according to the World Health Organization, only 15 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remain even partly functional.Nor would a reader know from following McFaul on X that Israel is currently on trial at the Hague, accused by South Africa of committing genocide in Gaza. Boot has addressed Israel’s war more forthrightly: He largely defends it. One of the conflict’s lessons, he argued on 20 December, “is the need for a robust defense-industrial capacity, because high-intensity conflicts always consume vast quantities of ammunition”.Applebaum, McFaul and Boot are liberal hawks. They claim to support a foreign policy devoted to defending democracy and human rights whenever possible, sometimes even at the point of a gun. (The line between liberal hawks and neoconservatives can grow fuzzy, but liberal hawks are more sympathetic to diplomacy and international institutions, and generally favor Democrats, not Republicans.) Not long ago, liberal hawks were considered a casualty of America’s military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, wars advertised as bringing freedom to long-suffering populations, which brought chaos and destruction instead. (I myself identified as a liberal hawk until those wars forced me to alter my worldview.)But in recent years, liberal hawks have regained much of their respectability and power. Their resurgence has been fueled by Washington’s turn away from the “war on terror”, which for many Americans ended when the US withdrew troops from Afghanistan in 2021, and its focus on a new cold war. Because dictatorships rule Russia and China, and because Moscow and Beijing menace vulnerable democracies on their border, liberal hawks argue that preserving freedom requires deterring America’s great power adversaries.Their argument has gained particular force since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which they see as a test case for the global struggle to come. “Liberals who once protested the Iraq War now urge Washington to dispatch more rocket launchers to defeat Russian imperialism,” the Atlantic declared in a September 2022 essay entitled, The Rise of the Liberal Hawks. Last February, Britain’s The Critic argued that the “Russian invasion of Ukraine has sealed liberal hawk ascendancy.”Liberal hawks enjoy particular influence in Washington because their worldview closely aligns with the Biden administration’s. It’s no surprise that both Applebaum and McFaul have been invited to private, off-the-record, discussions with the president. Biden and his top foreign policy advisers share Applebaum’s belief that today’s great power contest pits the “democratic world” against the “autocratic world”. As Biden put it in a 2022 speech about Ukraine, the United States and its allies must “put the strength of democracies into action to thwart the designs of autocracy”.This worldview contains important truths. Russia and China are far more authoritarian than the United States and many of its key European and Asian allies. They’re also far more authoritarian than Ukraine and Taiwan, imperiled democracies that deserve to chart their own path free from imperialistic aggression. Whether or not one agrees with the policies that Applebaum, Boot and McFaul advocate in Eastern Europe and East Asia, they’re aimed at defending liberal democracy – a commitment that extends to the United States, where all three writers staunchly oppose Donald Trump.But liberal hawks have a problem: the borderlands of Russia and China are not the entire world. In the global south, especially, the geopolitical boundaries between the US and its adversaries don’t map easily onto the moral boundaries between freedom and tyranny. When discussing countries outside of Europe or East Asia, liberal hawks often strain to shoehorn them into a worldview that associates America and its allies with democracy’s cause.In March 2022, for instance, when Applebaum delivered Senate testimony about what she called “the new autocratic alliance”, she included in its ranks China, Russia, Belarus, Venezuela and Cuba, all US adversaries, along with Turkey, an American frenemy. She never mentioned Saudi Arabia, a critical US ally that – awkwardly – scores lower in Freedom House’s most recent freedom rankings than all of the autocracies she denounced except Belarus, with whom it ties.Never have these ideological contortions been as conspicuous as during Israel’s war in Gaza. Liberal hawks often profess their commitment to human rights. Yet they haven’t called for ending a war that is killing more people per day than any conflict this century. They haven’t done so because, like their allies in the Biden administration, they are wedded to a narrative about the moral superiority of American power that this war defies.Liberal hawks want to preserve American primacy, which they associate with human progress. But Israel-Palestine reveals a harsher truth: that in much of the world, for many decades, the US has used its power not to defend freedom but to deny it. That’s why liberal hawks can’t face the true horror of this war. Doing so would require them to reconsider their deepest assumptions about America’s role in the world.Since 7 October, liberal hawks have labored to analogize Israel’s war in Gaza to Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion – a template that renders Israel an innocent victim of external aggression and places America on the side of human rights and international law. In his 19 October speech from the Oval Office, President Biden declared that “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common. They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.”Liberal hawks in the media have offered similar comparisons. In a column on 9 October, Applebaum suggested that “The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections” of a “rules-based world order”. On 3 November, McFaul described Hamas and Russia as part of an “Illiberal International” – which also includes Iran, Hezbollah and sometimes China – that “has come together again to attack democratic Israel.” Boot added on 20 December that “The wars in both Gaza and Ukraine should remind complacent western leaders that our adversaries do not share our liberal values.”When Applebaum, McFaul and Boot call Hamas an illiberal movement that does not respect international law, they are correct. Its Islamist ideology is incompatible with individual freedom and equality under the law, and it blatantly violated the rules of war when it murdered civilians on 7 October. But to depict Israel’s war as another battle between a democratic, rules-abiding west and a lawless, illiberal axis that runs from Beijing to Moscow to Tehran to Gaza City, liberal hawks must ignore elementary facts about the Jewish state.When detailing Russia’s crimes, Applebaum and Boot are fond of citing Human Rights Watch; McFaul boosts the work of Amnesty International. When it comes to Israel, however, the findings of the world’s leading human rights organizations become irrelevant. Israel is “democratic”, respects the “rules-based world order” and embodies “liberal values” – even though Human Rights Watch and Amnesty say it practices apartheid and has for more than 15 years held millions of Palestinians in Gaza in what both organizations call an “open-air prison”.When discussing America’s adversaries, liberal hawks often warn Americans not to let their ideological preconceptions blind them to the harsh realities on the ground. But when it comes to Israel, they do exactly that. In recent years, Applebaum has written eloquently about the struggle between liberal democrats and populist authoritarians in Poland, Hungary and the United States. After traveling to Israel last summer, she projected a similar dynamic onto the Jewish state. Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempted judicial overhaul, she declared, risks creating an “undemocratic Israel, a de facto autocracy”. But this storyline only works if you ignore Palestinians. For more than 70% of the Palestinians under Israel’s control – those in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, who live or die based on the actions of a government for whom they cannot vote – Israel is an autocracy right now.Among Applebaum, McFaul and Boot’s favorite epithets for Americans who disagree with them about Russia is “naive”. But when describing Israel, they conjure a fantasyland in which Palestinians either don’t exist or would soon have their own state if only they behaved themselves. On 4 November, McFaul suggested that if Hamas gave up power and released Israeli hostages it would “give new momentum to Palestinian sovereignty”. But Israel hasn’t elected a prime minister who supports Palestinian sovereignty in 15 years. And even Netanyahu’s leading centrist opponent, Benny Gantz, is careful to say that while he supports a Palestinian “entity” in the West Bank, it won’t enjoy the powers of a state.On 17 October, Boot instructed Palestinians that “the most effective resistance against liberal democracies is the most nonviolent”. In so doing, he evidently forgot that the Palestinian Authority has been collaborating with Israel to prevent unarmed resistance in the West Bank since 2005, that Israeli sharpshooters and drone operators injured roughly 36,000 protesters in Gaza during the largely unarmed Great March of Return in 2018, and that Palestinians launched a nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in 2005 – a movement Boot derided because it targets Israel, not China.As the war in Gaza has ground on, depicting Israel as the embodiment of a rules-abiding, liberal democratic west has grown harder. But despite some initial warnings, Applebaum and McFaul have largely averted their eyes. On 13 October, Applebaum quoted her Atlantic colleague George Packer, who urged Israelis not to “assume that the world’s support will last a day longer if news emerges of mass civilian deaths in Gaza.” On 29 October, she tweeted a New Yorker essay about life in the Strip. But in the months since, as news has emerged of civilian deaths on a terrifying scale, Applebaum has said little. On 29 December and again on 7 January, she retweeted news that Moscow had struck civilian targets in Ukraine. Her feed contains no acknowledgement that Israel has done the same in Gaza.Four days into the war, McFaul implored Israel to “abide by international law and minimize civilian casualties and civilian suffering.” In early November, he declared that the Biden administration was “right to pressure Netanyahu to take much greater measures to reduce civilian deaths” and even suggested that “future US aid to Israel should have conditions.” But since then, as civilian casualties have exceeded 20,000 and human rights groups have repeatedly accused Israel of violating international law, McFaul has used his X feed to neither endorse a ceasefire nor to endorse the actual legislation to condition aid voted on by the Senate.Like Applebaum, McFaul has said barely anything. On 4 December, he applauded Senator Jim Risch for decrying “Russia’s brutality and continued war crimes against the Ukrainian people”. From McFaul’s online posts, however, you’d never know that Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and even Israel’s own leading human rights organization, B’Tselem, have accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza.Boot has been more upfront. He hasn’t ignored the destruction of Gaza; he’s justified it. While acknowledging that “this is a great tragedy for the people of Gaza”, Boot alleged on 15 January that “primary blame must lie with Hamas, because it launched an unprovoked attack on Israel and uses civilians as human shields”.Depicting Hamas’s massacre as “unprovoked” – and thus akin to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – requires ignoring that Israel has been occupying Gaza since 1967 and blockading it (with assistance from Egypt) since 2007. Justifying Israel’s destruction because Hamas embeds itself among civilians would justify the mass killing of civilians in most wars against a guerilla foe because, as Mao Zedong famously declared, “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.” Indeed, the United States in the 1960s and 1970s used Boot’s argument about “human shields” to justify bombing villages that sheltered the Vietcong and Russia has employed it repeatedly to justify murdering civilians in Ukraine.Boot also dismisses South Africa’s charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza because, he argues, civilian deaths there “constitute less than 1% of the territory’s population”. He contrasts this allegedly baseless charge with the US government’s claim that China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs, which he cites with approval.But when the State Department in 2021 accused China of genocide, it didn’t allege that Beijing had killed any particular percentage of the Uyghur population. It didn’t discuss mass slaughter at all but rather “forced assimilation and eventual erasure of a vulnerable ethnic and religious minority group” through forced sterilization and abortion, forced marriage to non-Uyghurs, separation of children from their parents, denial of freedom of speech, travel and worship and mass imprisonment and torture in labor camps. By Boot’s standard, these horrors – which some scholars have called “cultural genocide” – wouldn’t constitute genocide either. In accusing South Africa of a “double standard”, Boot inadvertently reveals his own: one definition of genocide for America’s foes, another for its friends.Why do commentators who write so passionately about the human rights abuses committed by Russia and other US adversaries find it so hard to oppose a war that, according to the United Nations, is putting half a million Palestinians at risk of starvation? It’s not that Applebaum, McFaul and Boot believe America can do no wrong. To the contrary, they warn that under Donald Trump, the US could go over to the dark side and join the autocratic world.But they tell a particular story about America, and about the last century, which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict turns on its head. The story is that America’s rise to global pre-eminence ushered in a freer and more law-abiding world. Applebaum has applauded the “Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order.” Boot argues that after winning the second world war, the US avoided “pursuing our narrow self-interest” and instead created “lasting institutions such as Nato and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (forerunner of the World Trade Organization) to promote prosperity and security for all”. McFaul insists that “the US has not for many decades engaged in annexation or colonization, does not attack democracies, and does not use terrorism deliberately as a method of war”.But there are many places, especially in the global south, that do not fit this story of American power producing moral progress. The story doesn’t account for the 62 times, according to the political scientist Dov Levin, that the United States intervened in foreign elections between 1946 and 1989, nor the fact that, according to Lindsey O’Rourke’s book Covert Regime Change, many of the leftist parties the US sabotaged had “repeatedly committed themselves to working within a democratic framework, and, in some cases, US policymakers even acknowledged this fact”.The story doesn’t account for US complicity in Indonesia’s killing of roughly 1 million alleged leftists in the mid-1960s or the CIA’s role in helping apartheid South Africa arrest Nelson Mandela. It can’t be reconciled with the Nixon administration’s decision to keep arming Pakistan’s war in what became Bangladesh when America’s own chief diplomat on the ground told them that the Pakistanis were committing genocide or the Reagan administration’s insistence on supplying weapons to President Efraín Ríos Montt, who a Guatemalan court later convicted of genocide for his effort to wipe out his country’s Maya Ixil Indians.The story doesn’t explain the George HW Bush and Clinton administration’s sanctions against Iraq, which the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in that country warned were “destroying an entire society” or the Obama administration’s participation in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates’ blockade and indiscriminate bombing of Yemen, which left 18 million of the country’s 28 million people without reliable access to food.Israel-Palestine is part of a darker history about the era of American primacy that liberal hawks celebrate and wish to preserve. For decades, the United States has used its unparalleled military might and diplomatic muscle to ensure that Israel can deny millions of Palestinians the most basic rights – citizenship, due process, freedom of movement, the right to vote – with impunity.In 2020, the United States froze the assets of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, partly in retaliation for her decision to launch an investigation into Israeli war crimes. At the United Nations General Assembly, the entire world – including virtually all the democracies on earth – regularly vote to condemn Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The tally last November was 145-7. But the US renders this global human rights consensus impotent by again and again employing its veto at the security council. Many US states bar individuals or organizations that support boycotting Israel – or even merely boycotting Israeli settlements – from conducting business with state government.These are not the actions merely of Maga authoritarians. This intensive effort to protect Israeli apartheid has been broadly bipartisan and spanned many presidencies. It includes many of the politicians that Applebaum, McFaul and Boot believe embody the best of America – those dedicated to supporting Ukraine and keeping Donald Trump from re-entering the White House – chief among them Joe Biden. And since 7 October, these decades of near-unconditional US support have culminated in Biden rushing weapons to Israel even as, according to Oxfam, Israel kills more than five times as many people per day as Russia is killing in Ukraine. All this gravely undermines the moral dichotomy that structures liberal hawks’ view of the world. The more honestly one faces the horror in Gaza, the harder it becomes to draw a bright line between the way America wields its power and the way its adversaries do.In 2021, Applebaum bemoaned the fact that “a part of the American left has abandoned the idea that ‘democracy’ belongs at the heart of US foreign policy”. She speculated that the left’s emphasis on America’s sins – its alleged belief that “the history of America is the history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and not much else” – had convinced many progressives that the US lacks the moral authority to aid people suffering “profound injustice” overseas.But because Applebaum focuses on the oppression committed by America’s adversaries, she ignored the possibility that American progressives might rise up in solidarity with people oppressed by America’s friends, and that they might draw inspiration not from a celebration of America’s past virtue but from those in prior generations who struggled against American genocide, slavery and exploitation.In her 2021 essay, Applebaum criticized progressives for not producing “something comparable to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s”. They now have. If a new generation of Americans eventually turns US policy against apartheid in Israel-Palestine, as their forebearers turned US policy against apartheid in South Africa, it won’t be because they extolled American power. It will be because they confronted the “profound injustices”, committed under America’s auspices, which liberal hawks so often obfuscate or ignore.
Peter Beinart is editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York, and author of The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter More

For years, the beltway set had a standard line of advice for Democratic candidates: stick to the economy. The idea was that white, male, blue-collar voters – those magical creatures, somewhere out there in the windswept lands of the upper midwest, who always qualify in the pundit imagination as “real Americans” – would be turned off by so-called culture-war issues.These guys, we were told, didn’t want to hear about civil rights or social equality: they wanted to hear about economic growth. According to this advice, Democrats could be pro-choice, pro-racial justice, or pro-LGBTQ+ rights, but not openly, avowedly so. They had to play their progressive social positions in a minor key.It’s not clear that this advice ever really paid off for Democratic candidates. At any rate, you don’t hear it much any more. That’s because, for the past two years, Democratic electoral victories up and down the ballot have been driven disproportionately by one of those culture-war issues that candidates were typically told to avoid: abortion.American women’s anger over the US supreme court’s Dobbs ruling is the single most potent political force in America right now, and if Joe Biden wins re-election – a distinct if imperiled possibility – it will be because his campaign succeeded in making the election a referendum on Republicans’ abortion bans. There is no one issue with greater importance; there are few issues that have ever motivated voters so dramatically.You would think that this would be a gift to the Biden campaign. On paper, Republicans are almost solely responsible for the overturning of Roe and the draconian, morbid and dangerous abortion bans that have followed.Donald Trump continually brags about appointing three of the six justices who ruled to eliminate the abortion right; Republican politicians nationwide, not content with being able to ban abortion, have sought to eliminate life and health exemptions, to further restrict gestational age limits, and to impose criminal and civil penalties for things like advocating for abortion rights or transporting a patient across state lines. These are hateful, bigoted, invasive and lawless moves, ones that degrade women’s citizenship and are hated by the public. And they’re Republican moves.But the new prominence of abortion in electoral politics presents something of a conundrum for the Biden campaign: because while Republicans are vehemently anti-choice, Biden himself is not a particularly convincing abortion rights advocate.He is, at best, unenthused about the issue. Biden speaks of abortion in stilted, euphemistic terms, talking about “restoring the protections of Roe” or “a woman’s right to choose” more than “abortion”. (He did not use the word in public remarks until he was forced to after facing pressure from activists.) On the stump, he frequently ad libs, straying from prepared remarks to make his dislike of abortion clear. In one set of remarks last year, he unhelpfully offered that he was “not big on abortion”.In remarks this past week, he characterized his own position using anti-choice buzzwords, saying he was opposed to “abortion on demand”. Most of the campaigning on the issue has been passed off to Kamala Harris, admittedly a more comfortable messenger for a women’s rights platform. But outsourcing such a prominent issue to the vice-president is itself fraught with symbolic dangers: the campaign risks signaling that they consider abortion to be a second-tier issue by assigning it to their second-tier principal. And Harris is limited in what she can say by the somewhat narrow extent of the president’s comfort.And so Biden has taken on the task of marketing himself as a champion of abortion rights with all the relish of a third-grader told to eat his broccoli: he has been informed that doing so is good for him, but he really, really doesn’t want to. This week, as the Biden administration launched a series of policy and public relations efforts meant to frame the stakes of the elections for voters invested in reproductive freedom, things got off to something of a rocky start.Last Monday, on what would have been Roe’s 51st anniversary, Biden held a task force meeting in which he said that his administration would defend laws legalizing things like the FDA approval of mifepristone, which is being challenged by anti-choice lawyers in court. He said he would create a team to educate the public about when emergency abortions are legal in hospitals – a growing need in an era when more and more pregnant women are facing disastrous health risks because of abortion bans that prohibit the procedure from being used to spare them from catastrophic harm. He said he would encourage access to birth control.It was a tepid announcement, one where Biden seemed self-satisfied for doing the bare minimum. It was a policy agenda, too, that leaves all the agenda-setting power in the anti-choice movement’s hands: what the Biden campaign is offering American women – the ones who are angry and distraught, the ones that have suffered a blow to their dignity and an endangering of their safety – is that his administration might be willing to make minimal efforts to stop the people who are working maximally hard to make it worse.At a rally in Wisconsin the next day, Harris seemed more interested in describing the post-Dobbs landscape as one of a “healthcare crisis” – emphasizing, as Biden has, the stories of women denied life – and health-preserving abortions in moments of medical emergency. And it is true that the post-Dobbs world is one where it has become dramatically more dangerous to be pregnant, one where a capricious law, or a doctor’s fear of one, could cost you your life, your health or your fertility in the event that something goes wrong. And it is true, too, as Harris told the crowd, that a Republican victory would almost certainly result in a national ban on abortion – something a Republican president could effect in practice even without a filibuster-proof majority in Congress.But the campaign’s focus on these aspects of the Dobbs catastrophe – the women suffering complications from wanted pregnancies, the potential that things could get worse – does too little to grapple with the harm that’s happening right now, to women who simply do not want to be pregnant, and who deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity of citizens, not talked down to like children who cannot be trusted to act as custodians of their own bodily functions.Biden was not wrong when he said that women who were forced to become sicker and sicker during miscarriages before they were allowed to obtain abortions were subjected to an indignity. But so, too, are those who the law treats as de facto incompetent or suspicious: those who want and deserve their abortions, in Biden’s contemptuous phrasing, “on demand”.If anything, Biden is talking like he believes that abortion remains a delicate issue, as if it is something he thinks he will lose by being too strong on. But that advice, which maybe never quite worked, was from another time. It is not advice for this moment. Biden needs to change his strategy on abortion, to bring it more in line with both the sentiments of voters and the demands of our era. It is time for him to grow up, and eat his vegetables.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

Survivors of alleged childhood abuse inside the People of Praise, a secretive Christian sect that counts Amy Coney Barrett as a member, are voicing concerns that the supreme court justice’s father, who was recently promoted to a new role, may seek to block information about the group’s historic handling of sexual abuse becoming public.Barrett, a conservative justice who was appointed by former US president Donald Trump, has never publicly disclosed her participation in the covenant Christian community, which some former members have compared to a cult.Her father, Michael Coney, a Louisiana-based lawyer who worked for Shell and has been a longtime member of the PoP, was this month appointed to serve as the group’s new legal counsel. Coney is also taking the helm of a “consultation team” that, internal correspondence seen by the Guardian shows, has been dealing with “issues of concern” to the group’s 1,100 members, including “misuse of authority” inside the PoP, “lack of accountable leadership”, and “mistrust of the board”.Coney’s appointment is part of a broader shake-up inside the PoP, whose leadership has been consumed by a contentious debate over the legitimacy of the 2021 election of its current leader, Charlie Fraga. Known as the “overall coordinator”, Fraga has said the bitter fight has emerged as an “urgent threat to the unity of the community”.For survivors of alleged childhood sexual and physical abuse inside the PoP, Coney’s elevation is deeply troubling. PoP Survivors – as the group is known – has for years called for the PoP to be investigated and held accountable for its handling of historic claims of abuse. The Guardian reported last year that the FBI had interviewed several individuals who have alleged they were abused by members of the PoP, but it is not clear whether the FBI opened a formal investigation.In 2020, as allegations of abuse and emotional trauma began to emerge in press reports in the Guardian and other media outlets, the PoP hired the law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to conduct an “independent investigation” into sexual abuse claims on behalf of the PoP. The results of the investigation were never made public.PoP Survivors say the lack of transparency is unusual given how many organizations and institutions have – however reluctantly – released the results of such investigations in the past, including some Catholic Church dioceses. They worry that Coney could now have an outsized role in determining what may be released in the future.“Elevating Amy Coney Barrett’s father to a position where he can influence what goes public is a huge conflict of interest. It gives him the power to block information that might be embarrassing to her. Yet public scrutiny is exactly what’s needed in order to protect children in the group,” said a spokesperson for PoP Survivors, which has 55 members and is comprised of adults who grew up in the sect and are no longer affiliated with the group.Barrett has not been accused of wrongdoing. But at the time of her nomination to the supreme court, it was reported by the AP that the PoP had sought to erase all mentions and photos of her from its website before her meetings with lawmakers. It may have been an effort to shield Barrett from questions about the PoP’s extreme beliefs.The Guardian asked Fraga, the PoP overall coordinator, for a comment on the leadership controversy and survivors’ concerns over Coney’s promotion, but he did not respond to the request for comment.Barrett’s supreme court chambers did not respond to a request for comment.It is not only the survivor group that has challenged Michael Coney’s appointment.Nano Farabaugh, an active member of the PoP, sent a letter to the all-male board of governors on 9 January in which she called on the board to reject Coney’s appointment to replace PoP co-founder Paul DeCelles as the leader of the consultation team.In her letter, which was obtained by the Guardian, Farabaugh said the team had recently submitted its suggestions to the board about PoP’s “future direction”. It is not clear what the consultation group has proposed or whether those suggests are now being scrapped.Farabaugh said Fraga’s decision illustrated many of the concerns that were being aired by PoP members, including: “Misuse of authority, mistrust of the board, not being consulted on matters that directly affect women, not listening to men and especially the voice of women, lack of transparency, [and] lack of accountable leadership.”The PoP was founded in the 1970s as part of a Christian charismatic movement. In meetings, members are encouraged to share prophecies and speak in tongues. One former member said adherents believe God can speak through members to deliver messages, sometimes about their future.A PoP handbook states that members are expected to be obedient to male authorities, or group heads, and are expected to give 5% of their earnings to the group. Heads are influential decision-makers in members’ lives, weighing in on issues ranging from dating to marriage and determining where members should live.After a waiting period, members agree to a covenant – a lifelong vow – to support each other “financially and materially and spiritually”.The group has been criticized for endorsing discriminatory practices. Members who engage in gay sex are expelled, and private schools closely affiliated with the group – the Trinity Schools – have admission policies that in effect ban the children of gay parents from attending. Barrett has previously served on Trinity’s board of trustees.Single members are encouraged to live with other members of the community, including families with children, a practice that former members and adults who grew up in the sect say created opportunities for sexual abuse.Justice Barrett’s membership in PoP was first widely publicized in a 2017 New York Times report, which noted that Barrett’s membership in the “tightly knit Christian group” never came up in a Senate hearing to confirm her as an appeals court judge.
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This article was amended on 29 January 2024 to correct a mistyped word. The word “coveted” was meant to be “covenant”. More

The spectre of a direct US-Iranian military conflict drew closer on Sunday when the US president Joe Biden announced three US servicemen have been killed and more than 34 injured following a drone attack on a US service base on the border of Jordan and Syria. Biden blamed Iranian backed militia mainly based in Iraq for the “despicable” attack and vowed revenge.Responsibility for Saturday’s attack on Tower 22, a military outpost on the Jordanian Syrian Iraqi borders was claimed by the Iranian backed umbrella group Islamic Resistance, and the US made no attempt to disguise its belief that Iran was ultimately responsible.Four separate drone strikes had been fired at three US bases, and the US was investigating why the T-22 base’s defence mechanism did not repel the drone. Many of the American servicemen wounded have suffered traumatic brain injury, but the extent of injuries has not been disclosed. An official said the drone struck near the barracks early in the morning, which would explain the high number of casualties.US forces have faced a near-daily barrage of drone and missile strikes in Iraq and Syria since the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, but this incident draws the US much closer to a direct conflict with Iran, an outcome both sides insist they wish to avoid, but may now be unable to prevent as the incidents proliferate and escalate in impact.It is the first time American military personnel have been killed by hostile fire in the Middle East since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on 7 October, although two US Navy Seals drowned on 11 January off the coast of Somalia as they intercepted a Dhow carrying Iranian weapons bound for Houthi rebels in Yemen.The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group that claimed responsibility for the deaths at T-22, includes Kata’ib Hezbollah group, which fought against coalition forces in Iraq.The Iranian backed groups have long been trying to drive the US troops out of Iraq and Syria, but have used the war in Gaza as the backdrop to intensify these efforts and broaden the battleground.The US says its 900 troops in Syria are working alongside Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces to defeat Islamic State, the extremist Sunni group. It has about 4,000 troops in Jordan.In a statement Biden pointedly said the US will hold all those responsible to account at a time of the US choosing, and the US Pentagon made no attempt to disguise its belief that Iran is ultimately behind the attacks.Breaking the news, Biden in a statement said: “Today, America’s heart is heavy. Last night, three US service members were killed – and many wounded–during an unmanned aerial drone attack on our forces stationed in north-east Jordan near the Syria border.He added: “While we are still gathering the facts of this attack, we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.He vowed: “We will carry on their commitment to fight terrorism. And have no doubt – we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner our choosing”.Islamic Resistance released a statement saying, “As we said before, if the US keeps supporting Israel, there will be escalations. All the US interests in the region are legitimate targets and we don’t care about US threats to respond, we know the direction we are taking and martyrdom is our prize.”Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and long-time Syria expert said: “it is a huge escalation and what everyone has been worrying about”. He added “if there is not a truly decisive response to this, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps will feel wholly emboldened. This is the 180th attack since Oct 18 – it must be responded to as the game-changer that it is.”Jordan initially denied the attack occurred on its soil, and later said it took place on the border, in an indication that it does not want to become embroiled in any coming conflict.In a statement, the country condemned the “terrorist attack”, while a senior Jordanian security source told Reuters it had previously appealed to the US for air defence systems and technology to tackle drones.Washington has given Jordan around $1bn to bolster border security since Syria’s civil war began in 2011, and has recently sent more military aid to that end.In a previously recorded interview with ABC News that aired Sunday morning, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen CQ Brown said part of the US’s work is to “make sure as things have happened in the Middle East is not to have the conflict broaden”.“The goal is to deter them and we don’t want to go down a path of greater escalation that drives to a much broader conflict within the region,” he said.Republican opponents of Biden seized on the attack as evidence of the Democratic president’s failure to confront Iran as its proxies strike against US forces across the region.“The only answer to these attacks must be devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces … Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward,” said Republican senator Tom Cotton in a statement.Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, called on Biden to “exercise American strength to compel Iran to change its behaviour”; Florida senator Rick Scott said Iran was “blatantly questioning US strength and resolve”.Democrats also joined the calls for action. “Every single malignant actor responsible must be held accountable,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said.A senior official with the Iran-backed Palestinian militant group Hamas, Sami Abu Zuhri, directly tied the attack to Israel’s campaign in Gaza.“The killing of three American soldiers is a message to the US administration that unless the killing of innocents in Gaza stops, it must confront the entire nation,” he told Reuters.“The continued American-Zionist aggression on Gaza is capable of exploding the situation in the region.” More

Republicans published two articles of impeachment against homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Sunday, and plan to formally advance them on Tuesday towards a full House vote, despite two hearings failing to produce any evidence of his wrongdoing.The politically charged move comes amid a raging battle in Washington DC over immigration, with a senior Democrat announcing Sunday that senators had reached a bipartisan agreement to tighten border security, even as Donald Trump took credit for likely sinking it.The impeachment charges against Mayorkas allege, first, that he ignored laws passed by Congress and court orders, in order to pursue policies that led to a surge in illegal immigration; and second, that he breached the public trust by making false statements and obstructing oversight of the homeland security department.“Congress has a duty to see that the executive branch implements and enforces the laws we have passed. Yet Secretary Mayorkas has repeatedly refused to do so,” Tennessee Republican congressman Mark Green, chair of the House homeland security committee, said in a statement.A homeland security official responded by calling the charges “a sham” and a distraction from “other vital national security priorities”.“This markup is just more of the same political games from House homeland security committee Republicans,” the official said in a statement.“They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it. That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas.”Many Republicans have privately questioned the push to impeach Mayorkas, who would almost certainly be acquitted by the Democratic majority in the Senate, fearing it could negatively impact members of Congress running for re-election in marginal districts.No evidence was produced during two public House committee meetings to support Republicans’ allegations of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, while constitutional scholars have said the rare move to try to impeach a cabinet secretary for policy decisions was illegitimate.“If the members of the committee disapprove of the Biden administration’s immigration and border policies, the constitution gives this Congress a wealth of legislative powers to change them. Impeachment is not one of them,” Frank Bowman, a professor at the University of Missouri school of law, testified to the panel this month.Mayorkas has been a key player in the months-long bipartisan negotiations in the Senate for a border deal. Joe Biden’s administration has made concessions to Republican hardliners in an effort to secure their support for US aid for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.On Friday, the president said he would not just sign the bill, but use the authority it would grant to close the southern border the day he signed it, in order to stem the flow of migrants.“What’s been negotiated would – if passed into law – be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country,” Biden said in a statement.Connecticut Democratic senator Chris Murphy, who led his party’s negotiating team, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that a bipartisan deal had been reached and could face a vote in the coming days.“We are finalizing last pieces of text right now and this bill could be ready to be on the floor of the Senate next week. But it won’t be if Republicans decide that they want to keep this issue unsettled for political purposes,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I am hopeful that we will still have enough Republicans in the Senate who want to fix the problem at the border rather than just do Donald Trump’s bidding, but we will see over the next 24 to 48 hours.”Murphy was referring to the former president’s attempts to derail the bill as he seeks to lock down the Republican 2024 White House nomination and run an election campaign themed around Democrats’ perceived failure to solve the border crisis.Last week, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader who has long supported the push for a deal, reportedly told colleagues in a closed-door meeting that the “politics on this have changed”, while Trump took credit for trying to blow up the agreement during a campaign speech in Nevada on Saturday.“A lot of the senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming it on me. I say, that’s okay. Please blame it on me. Please,” he said.Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker and a staunch Trump ally, has said any deal passed by the Senate would be “dead on arrival” in the House. Johnson is also blamed by Democrats for reigniting the once-stalled push to impeach Mayorkas, after the speaker announced last week that he would make it a priority.In a statement, the Congressional Integrity Project took aim at Johnson and Trump for trying to block the deal while at the same time attempting to impeach Mayorkas for failing to solve the border crisis.“Let us be clear, this bogus impeachment is as wrong as it is immoral and it will blow up in their faces,” the group said in a statement.“And if Republicans from swing districts, and especially districts Biden won in 2020, think they can quietly support this nonsense without repercussions, they are as delusional as Donald Trump.” More

During the eight years he served in the Iowa state Senate, Tod Bowman was a self-described “door knocker”, trekking to the front porches and patios of constituents in the rural counties he represented to appeal for votes.They would, in turn, tell Bowman, a moderate Democrat, of their concerns – that government assistance programs amounted to a “handout”, that too many undocumented migrants were entering the country, that Barack Obama, the president for much of Bowman’s time in office, was planning to take their guns away. Occasionally, whoever opened the door would start interrogating Bowman before he even finished introducing himself.“Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” was the typical demand, Bowman remembered. The former high school teacher and wrestling coach came up with his own disarming reply: “I’m an Iowan.”By 2018, such encounters were happening more and more frequently, and that November, voters in the farms and small towns that made up Bowman’s eastern Iowa district replaced him with a Republican. While Bowman believes a combination of alienation from the national Democratic party and dislike of some bills he supported led to his defeat, he saw only one man to blame for the rising hostility he faced on the campaign trail.View image in fullscreen“Trump certainly made it almost acceptable in our psyches to name call, to lie, to manipulate, to be very aggressive instead of civil,” Bowman said in an interview at his house in the town of Maquoketa. “I really feel he’s changed politics, probably, if not forever, for a certain, significant period of time.”Beyond altering the tone of American politics, Donald Trump’s ascension to the helm of the Republican party undid progress Democrats had made in winning the trust of voters in rural areas nationwide, and many of their election victories ever since have relied on support from cities and suburbs. Whether this trend continues could prove crucial in deciding the victor of this year’s presidential election, where turnout in rural areas could tip swing states towards either Trump or Joe Biden. It will also play a role in determining control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the latter of which Republicans are trying to gain by winning seats in Montana, West Virginia and Ohio.Few states exhibit the consequences of rural voters shifting away from Democrats better than Iowa. Once viewed by the party as a swing state, Trump won Iowa decisively in 2016 and carried 31 counties that had twice voted for Obama – the most of any single state. In the 2020 election, Biden won none of them back, and the president this year is not expected to campaign for victory in the Hawkeye state.The rise of Trump also undid a fragile tie that voters had unknowingly reached in Wyoming, a town of 523 people in Bowman’s district that was, at the end of 2015, the only community in Iowa with a population of more than 500 evenly split between registered Democrats and Republicans, according to a Des Moines Register analysis.The next year, Wyoming voters overwhelming voted for Trump. So, too, did the surrounding Jones county, which supported a Republican candidate for the first time in 28 years. Wyoming voted again for the New York real estate mogul in 2020, and today, there are more than twice as many registered Republicans than Democrats in town, according to the county auditor.“People are thinking that, you know, there’s a way to make a living, and there’s a way to do things, and I think it’s caused them to change parties. They’re tired of the way that the nation has been run,” the town’s mayor, Steve Agnitsch, a Republican, said by way of explanation for why Trump did so well with his neighbors.Tony Amsler, the chair of the county Democratic party, views the once-and-perhaps-future-president as a politician whose message seemed almost tailored to Iowa. “Democrats have traditionally been progressive when it comes to social issues. Iowans are very conservative when it comes to money. Those things are something, and then comes Donald Trump,” he said.“He certainly represented those who have been disenfranchised, those who think politics wasn’t listening to them. If you add this all together, you’ve got a juggernaut, and it’s hard to change direction.”The former president was the pick of Wyoming’s Republicans last week, when the Iowa caucuses were held. In the months preceding the first-in-the-nation contest, neither Trump nor any other candidate stopped in what is nicknamed “The Christmas City” for the lights Wyoming residents string all over its Main street each year. A few blocks of houses and businesses bisected by a state highway, Angitsch described his town as a community that is avoiding the stagnation that can grip the midwestern countryside. There are new buildings in its high school, the library is open five days a week and though Wyoming’s sole grocery store closed not long ago, a Dollar General was built just down the street.As for Trump, Biden, and their ilk, few in Wyoming believe either man, or anyone else in Washington DC for that matter, thinks much about the town.“We’re in podunkville. Nobody cares about the simple people in life,” said 67-year-old farmer Steve Wherry from a barstool at Rack’s Swinging Door, Wyoming’s main watering hole, where the television was showing a local news broadcast about Trump’s angry outbursts during his defamation trial in New York City that day.Wherry had voted for Trump in the past two presidential elections, and planned to do so for a third time in November, but with all the drama he heard from the news about the former president, he was less upbeat about his candidacy this time.View image in fullscreen“I think there’s people that are not gonna vote for him because of all the trials and all that stuff that’s going on, and there’s people that don’t think that he can guide this country in the right way,” Wherry said. “He’s got himself in trouble a little bit.”Sitting on the opposite end of the bar, 71-year-old retiree Craig Taylor said Trump’s troubles were enough to make him want to vote for someone else.“He’s all about the United States and the country, but they’re just not going to leave him alone,” said Taylor, who twice voted for Trump after supporting Obama in 2008.“We need to make America great again, but we need someone better than him to do it,” Taylor said, as he cracked open a Miller Light. But who? Conspiracy theorist and vaccine opponent Robert F Kennedy Jr was appealing, but Taylor didn’t think he would get much farther. “They’re not going to let him get in,” he said.Heather Campbell, a 39-year-old human resources manager, believed she had found a candidate who cared about communities like Wyoming in Tim Scott. Campbell saw the South Carolina senator speak when he visited her workplace in a nearby town, and was impressed by how he refrained from attacking any of his rivals.But Scott ended his campaign two months before the caucuses, deepening Campbell’s disillusionment with politics. “That’s what sucks,” she said, as she picked up dinner for her family. “He didn’t have the funding, he didn’t have the media funding, and that’s not right.”How communities like Wyoming ultimately vote can have ripple effects across the county. Republicans were able to create the current conservative supermajority on the supreme court only after Democratic senators were defeated in rural states like North and South Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas and Iowa, paving the way for the appointment of justices who have limited environmental regulation and allowed states to ban abortion.“The rural skew in especially the Senate and the electoral college is really shaping our institutions in a way that I don’t think people fully comprehend,” said Matt Hildreth, executive director of progressive group RuralOrganizing.org.Three years ago in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin used strong support from the countryside to become governor of a blue state, while last year, a Democratic-aligned judge was elected to a crucial seat on Wisconsin’s supreme court, in part because of votes from the state’s smaller towns.In November, Democrats’ continued control of the Senate will hinge on the re-election of imperiled lawmakers from Montana and Ohio, both red states where rural voters are plenty. And in the expected rematch between Trump and Biden, turnout by right-leaning voters outside of population centers could determine if it is the former president or the current president at the inauguration next year.For Democrats, “You’re not looking to win some of these rural counties, you’re looking to cut the losses, maybe by two or three points, which could make a difference in a close race,” said Robin Johnson, an adjunct political science professor at Monmouth College in Illinois, who has consulted with the party on how to improve their rural support.View image in fullscreenIn his view, Democratic candidates have suffered in rural areas because they neglected campaign tactics that work. Chief among them: yard signs, which he says can greatly boost their visibility.“When I was working campaigns, you were taught that yard signs don’t vote. But in rural areas, it’s important because your neighbors notice. If you’ve got a sign up for a Democrat and you normally vote Republican, it kind of gives an okay to consider that person,” Johnson said.Two years ago, Amsler ran for a state house seat representing an area that included Wyoming. He met many voters who spoke approvingly of Biden and were supportive of his candidacy, but didn’t want to display a yard sign for his campaign.“I’m afraid of what those fanatics will do to my lawn, to my home,” they’d tell him.Amsler’s Republican opponent beat him handily, the same year the GOP gained a supermajority in the state senate, and defeated the last Democrat in its congressional delegation.“When I ran for office, I knew I would not win. I wanted to move the needle,” Amsler said. A year-and-a-half later, he’s not sure if he did. “What really concerns me is, we’ve had that real shift from purple to red.” More