US Politics

In 2017, mere months after Donald Trump settled into the White House, Joshua Green of Bloomberg News delivered Devil’s Bargain, a mordantly amusing but deadly serious take on the 45th president and his relationship with Steve Bannon, the far-right ideologue who became Trump’s chief strategist. With wit, insight and access, Green informed, entertained and horrified. More than six years later, both Trump and Bannon face criminal trials. Then again, the band may soon be back together – in the West Wing.Green is acutely aware of the economic and social cleavages that roil the US and divide Democrats ranged against the Republicans’ rightward turn. With his new book, The Rebels, he shifts his gaze to three notables of the Democratic left: two senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman from New York. Once again, Green’s work is smart, sharp and smoothly written.Warren and Sanders failed in bids to become president. In 2020, his second such primary campaign, Sanders won early contests but saw his ambitions crash in South Carolina. That heavily African American primary electorate wasn’t all that keen on Brooklyn-bred progressivism, as Sanders offered.As for Warren, she failed to win a single contest and finished third in her home state, behind Sanders and Joe Biden. What worked for her in debates, congressional hearings and the faculty lounge did not resonate with voters. A highly contentious claim to be Native American raised damning questions too.Still, Warren’s critiques of the mortgage meltdown and resulting displacements provided intellectual heft for the populist left. Furthermore, unlike Biden she was intellectually brilliant and not beholden to Delaware and its credit card giants. Warren was a harsh critic of Wall Street too. The two billionaires in the 2020 race, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, regularly felt her sting. Ditto Tim Geithner, first treasury secretary to Barack Obama and another key character in Green’s book.Warren made an impact. Green writes: “Knowing [Trump’s] commitment to economic populism was merely rhetorical, Bannon fretted that Warren would lure away blue-collar voters with a program he described as ‘populist Democratic nationalism’.”In the House, Ocasio-Cortez, who at 34 is decades younger than Warren, Biden and Sanders, is the one member of the “Squad” of progressives who possesses the tools and dexterity to play politics nationally. She is emotionally grounded.At one 2019 hearing, the congresswoman widely known as AOC filleted Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook’s ties to Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct data-harvesting and research firm owned by Bannon and the rightwing Mercer family. She also put the wood to Exxon over its early but non-disclosed knowledge about global heating and its effects.All three of Green’s subjects convey seriousness. Humor, less so. Nonetheless, the book offers a valuable recapitulation of the crack-up of the New Deal coalition, the impact of Ronald Reagan’s victories and the continued reverberations of the Great Recession of 2008.The Democrats hold the White House and the Senate but their future is unclear. Non-college graduates, regardless of race, find less to love in the historic home of working America. Green seizes on the havoc wrought by economic liberalization, financialism and expanded trade with China – factors that have driven a wedge between the Democrats and what was once their base.Convincingly, Green argues that neo-liberalism is in retrograde and that Biden is more a transitional figure than a harbinger of what comes next. Even so, Biden tacked left – instead of pivoting toward the center – as he faced Trump in 2020.In 2021, on inauguration day, Biden issued the Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. His White House intoned: “Advancing equity is not a one-year project – it is a generational commitment that will require sustained leadership and partnership with all communities.”Good luck with that. The controversial fall of Claudine Gay, the first Black president of Harvard, who came under sustained conservative fire over the Israel-Hamas war, student protest and allegations of plagiarism in her work, is just one recent illustration of how tough such terrain will remain.Green traces many Democratic dilemmas to 1980, when Reagan handily defeated an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. Afterwards, Democratic mandarins concluded that the old-time religion of lunch-bucket liberalism needed to make room for market-based economics. Reagan’s embrace of tax cuts and reduced government resonated with the public. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama came to stand as heirs of that strategic decision. But it was about more than “it’s the economy, stupid”, as Clinton would learn on the job.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Clinton told Robert Rubin, his treasury secretary, a former head of Goldman Sachs.James Carville, the guru of Clinton’s first victory, later said that were he to be born again, he wanted to be reincarnated as the most powerful thing in the world: the bond market.Green homes in on the close relationships that existed between the Obama administration and Wall Street. In 2008, for all the then Illinois senator’s talk of hope and change, he was the financial sector’s choice for president over John McCain. Green quotes Geithner’s pitch to Obama for the treasury slot, and describes how Geithner beat out Larry Summers, Rubin’s successor, to secure the job.Green also examines how in saving the financial system despite its players’ unadulterated greed and stupidity, Geithner helped incubate resentments that haunt the US today.“In a crisis, you have to choose,” Geithner said. “Are you going to solve the problem, or are you going to teach people a lesson?”In 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton, voters did the latter. Ten months from now, they may do so again.
The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

US congressional leaders have agreed on a two-tranche stopgap spending bill to keep the federal government funded into March and avert a partial government shutdown starting late next week, US media reported on Saturday.Politico, CNN and Punchbowl reported that congressional leaders have agreed on what is called a “continuing resolution” or “CR”, that would fund the government – extending two deadlines through 1 March and 8 March. The media outlets reported that House of Representatives Republicans will unveil the plan Sunday night.The agreement comes just before the 19 January first funding deadline for some federal agencies, such as the Department of Transportation. Other agencies, such as the defense department, have until 2 February.Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and House speaker Mike Johnson announced on 7 January that Congress had agreed to a $1.59tn spending deal, the first step in the process to fund the government.The agreement set up some arguments on what that funding would be spent on. Johnson said in a statement that the top-line figure includes $886bn for defense and $704bn for non-defense spending. But Schumer, in a separate statement, said the non-defense spending figure will be $772.7bn.Johnson on Thursday held private meetings with some of the hardline Republicans who have been pushing for deeper spending cuts.“I’ve made no commitment. So if you hear otherwise, it’s just simply not true,” Johnson said in response to questions over whether he was going to renegotiate his agreement with Schumer.The United States came close to a partial government shutdown last autumn amid opposition by the hardline House Republicans who ousted former speaker Kevin McCarthy over reaching a bipartisan stopgap spending deal with Schumer.Reuters contributed to this report More

John Kerry, the United States’ special climate envoy and former secretary of state and presidential contender, plans to leave the Biden administration later this winter and switch to helping Joe Biden campaign to be re-elected to the White House, Kerry’s office said.Kerry informed his staff earlier on Saturday after speaking with Biden this week, a spokesperson for Kerry told Reuters.Politics news outlet Axios first reported the news about Kerry, 80, on Saturday.Kerry was instrumental is helping to broker the 2015 Paris climate agreement, as well as the UAE consensus that calls for the transition away from fossil fuels reached in December at Cop28 in Dubai.He believes that a second term in the White House for Biden would be the “single biggest” difference for progress in the climate crisis, Axios reported, initially citing a source close to the administration.Kerry and Biden talked in the Oval Office earlier this week, after Kerry had attended the Cop28 global climate summit in Dubai late last year, and the climate envoy wants to promote the president’s climate action with a major role on the campaign trail for the 2024 election, the outlet further reported.Kerry was named as a special envoy on the climate crisis soon after Biden won the 2020 presidential election, beating Donald Trump, and began forming his team during the transition period that November.At the time, the Biden transition team said Kerry would “fight climate change full time” in the role, which for the first time would include a seat on the national security council, in an elevation of the importance of tackling the climate crisis and global heating.As President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, succeeding Hillary Clinton in the role, Kerry played a prominent role in the international effort to craft the Paris climate agreement, which committed countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid disastrous storms, heatwaves, flooding and other looming climate threats.After leaving government in January 2017 as the Obama administration was replaced by the Trump administration, Kerry became sharply critical of President Trump’s dismantling of climate policies and the decision to remove the US from the Paris agreement. Biden re-entered the accord upon taking office in 2021.Kerry ran for president in the 2004 election and won the Democratic nomination but was beaten by George W Bush that November, with the Republican president winning a second term.His election campaign was badly damaged by a pro-Bush group that smeared Kerry’s military track record as a decorated Vietnam veteran who became an anti-war campaigner.The group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, emerged in August 2004 as Kerry, then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, was doing well in the polls against Bush, who had only a domestic spell in the Texas air national guard in comparison. The group set about trying to destroy Kerry’s reputation.A Republican strategist, Chris LaCivita, who orchestrated the so-called “swift-boating” of Kerry, is now a senior aide to the Trump re-election campaign.Reuters contributed reporting More

Supporters of Donald Trump have long been forced to suspend their belief in reality: expected to believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that the one-term president won the 2020 election, hasn’t committed any crimes and is a successful businessman.But as another tight presidential election looms, the recent efforts by Donald Trump to reimagine the people imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection as “hostages”, and to downplay the horrors of that day as a peaceful protest, could have serious ramifications for democracy and his own party, onlookers have warned.Trump, who has been charged with four federal crimes in relation to the riot at the Capitol in 2021, has repeatedly sought to whitewash the event. But in recent days – and backed up by Elise Stefanik, one of the most powerful Republicans in the House – he has used the term “hostages” prominently as a description of the hundreds of people prosecuted and jailed for their actions attacking the US Capitol.The terminology worries some experts who see it as explicitly undermining the US legal system by saying its treatment of Trump supporters is illegitimate – something he has repeatedly tried to do while he faces a multitude of prosecutions himself.At rallies and television interviews, Trump and Stefanik have also pitched a novel history of January 6 that requires anyone aware of the events that day to ignore or forget what they witnessed and read.Rather than engaging in a storming of the seat of US democracy that left 140 police officers injured and four people dead, people that day acted “peacefully and patriotically”, Trump said in a recent speech in Iowa.Of the hundreds of people imprisoned for their role in the attack, for crimes including assaulting police officers, illegally entering federal grounds with a weapon and seditious conspiracy, Trump had a similarly positive spin.“Some people call them prisoners. I call them hostages,” Trump said.“Release the J6 hostages, Joe [Biden]. Release them, Joe. You can do it real easy, Joe.”In Trump’s fresh telling, the tens of thousands of people from across the US who gathered on January 6 quietly voiced their concerns about the electoral process, apparently doing nothing more than engaging in a sort of elf-like merriment.“A beautiful day,” Trump has called it, which featured “great, great patriots”.Some have already bought into the idea.“I have concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages,” Stefanik, who as chair of the House Republican conference is one of the most powerful GOP members in Congress, said in an interview over the weekend.“I believe that we’re seeing the weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump, but we’re seeing it against conservatives.”The idea that the Trump supporters charged in connection with the insurrection have been mistreated is false. An analysis by the Intercept found that, actually, federal judges “have overwhelmingly issued sentences far more lenient than justice department prosecutors sought”.And apart from being untrue, this sanitizing of political violence is particularly troubling ahead of a presidential election between Trump and Joe Biden that could be just as tight as the 2020 race.“People convicted of violently assaulting police officers and conspiring to overthrow the government are not ‘hostages’,” Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman who served on the January 6 select committee, wrote on X.“Stefanik must apologize to the families of 130 people being held hostage by Hamas right now. Her pandering to Trump is dangerous.”It’s not just Democrats who are concerned.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s outrageous and it’s disgusting,” said Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman who has been a vocal critic of Trump, told Face the Nation.“It’s a disgrace, and you cannot say you are a member of a party that believes in the rule of law, you cannot say you are pro-law enforcement if you then go out and you say these people are ‘hostages’, it’s disgraceful.”Some serving Republicans, including those in vulnerable swing districts, also distanced themselves from the hostages concept this week, in a sign that the revisionism of January 6 could become a source of division.“Not my choice of words, but to each his own,” Jen Kiggans, a Republican congresswoman who defeated an incumbent Democrat in 2022, told the Washington Post. “It’s not what I describe them as, no.”“They’re criminal defendants, not hostages,” Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican congressman whose Pennsylvania district voted for Biden over Trump in 2020.Don Bacon, a Republican whose district also chose Biden in 2020, told the New Republic: “I don’t defend people who hit cops, who vandalized our Capitol.”For Trump the claims of mistreatment appear to be a strand of his enduring complaint that the Biden administration has “weaponized” the justice department – mostly against himself.The treatment of January 6 convicts has generally taken second place behind Trump lashing out at the 91 charges he is facing, many relating to his attempts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.But even if Trump’s newfound concern for others proves to be merely an attempt to exonerate himself from blame, his supporters seem to genuinely believe his claims.In the fervid environment that is Truth Social, the social media platform Trump established in a huff after he was banned from Twitter, people have breathlessly echoed Trump’s claims about “hostages” being subjected to ill-treatment.The people convicted are variously referred to as “PRISONERS OF WAR!!!!”, victims of “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” and “political prisoners”.Trump’s base, it seems, are happy to continue to suspend disbelief. But the furore has illustrated an unwanted split in the Republican party in what will be a key year at the polls – and more broadly, the attempt to exculpate the people who stormed the Capitol has dark implications ahead of a stormy presidential election. More

Mississippi is withdrawing from a federal program to feed children during their summer break from school, the governor there announced, characterizing the decision as a way to reject “attempts to expand the welfare state”.Governor Tate Reeves, a Republican, declined to participate in the federal program that would give electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to low-income families to supplement food costs when academic classes are out of session, Mississippi Today reported.Eligible families would have received $40 a month, or a total of $120 to account for the break between school terms.However, Mississippi’s welfare agency undercut Reeves’s reasoning, saying the state does not have the capacity to administer the program.“Both [the Mississippi department of education] and [its department of human services] lack the resources, including workforce capacity and funding, to support a summer EBT program,” a spokesperson for the state human services department, Mark Jones, said.Reeves’s latest comments ignited fierce backlash.Nikole Hannah-Jones, a scholar and creator of the 1619 Project, criticized Reeves’s decision as “cruelty”.“The cruelty of being the poorest state in America and choosing – choosing – to turn down federal aid for poor children to eat,” Hannah-Jones said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.Keith Boykin, author and co-founder of the National Black Justice Coalition, said funds earmarked for welfare in Mississippi have previously gone to superfluous objectives, including the construction of a sports stadium.“Mississippi gave millions of dollars of welfare funds to former NFL quarterback Brett Favre to build a volleyball facility for his daughter’s school, but they won’t take federal funds to feed hungry children. Because helping poor kids is the kind of welfare that Republicans hate,” Boykin said on X.Reeves is one of 15 Republican governors who have rejected the federally funded food program meant to help feed children during the summer, the New York Times reported.Other states that have opted out of the program include Alabama, Oklahoma, Alaska, Florida, South Carolina, South Dakota, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming.More than 8 million children will be shut out of the federal food assistance program, which provides $2.5bn in assistance to families who qualify for free or reduced lunch.In addition to Reeves, the Iowa governor, Kim Reynolds, also announced in December that Iowa would not be participating in the program.Reynolds claimed that the federal assistance program was not a “long-term” solution. She also claimed that an EBT card “does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic”.The Nebraska governor, Jim Pillen, who has also rejected federal funding, said he does not “believe in welfare”, the Washington Post reported. More

The first time Carol Whitmore ever had sex, she got pregnant.It was 1973, and Whitmore was a teenager. Whitmore’s parents were in and out of trouble with the police, Whitmore said. When they told Whitmore they would help her raise the child, she thought, nope.Instead, Whitmore got an abortion. That same year, the US supreme court legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v Wade.“I made that choice myself, and to this day, I don’t regret it,” Whitmore told the Guardian. A half-century later, Whitmore is still staunchly supportive of abortion rights. She’s recently taken to collecting petitions in support of a Florida ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.Whitmore is also a deeply committed Republican, who has held multiple positions in Florida local government. For her, abortion rights are part and parcel of her Republican worldview.“Do you want more government overreach to tell us how to take care of ourselves?” Whitmore said. She’s not the only conservative who feels this way, she said: “Everybody I talked to says: ‘Well, we aren’t coming out publicly, but we are definitely going to sign that petition, we are definitely going to vote for that amendment to be passed.’”In the year and a half since the US supreme court overturned Roe in June 2022, Republicans have floundered over how to handle abortion. The issue is widely thought to have cost them the promised “red wave” in the 2022 midterms, as well as control of the Virginia state legislature in 2023. Abortion rights supporters have triumphed on every abortion-related ballot measure since Roe’s demise, including in states that are traditionally believed to be conservative strongholds like Kansas, Kentucky and, most recently, Ohio.Experts still have questions about the driving forces behind these victories. Was it a surge in Democratic turnout? Or Republicans breaking with their party platform on abortion? And will abortion convince Republicans to leave the GOP behind entirely?The outcome of the 2024 elections, when roughly a dozen states may vote on abortion referendums, could hinge on the answers.“It may be in the narrowest sense possible to win with only Democrats, but that’s not even on our radar,” Jodi Liggett, the senior adviser for Reproductive Freedom for All Arizona, said late last year. Liggett’s organization is championing a proposal for a 2024 abortion-related ballot measure in Arizona. “I think if anything, you’re for sure gonna need independents,” she said. “And we think people actually agree across parties, on the pure issue of who should be deciding: physicians, medical professionals and families, not politicians.”Democrats, who once avoided the issue of abortion in election campaigns, are now banking on the issue to amplify anger and turnout overall. Yet in interviews with eight Republican or formerly Republican women who support abortion rights, hailing from six states across the country, a complex portrait emerged, suggesting Republicans might not be the silver bullet that Democrats are hoping for in November.When the US supreme court first legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v Wade, neither party was unified in its position on the issue. Over the next five decades, Republicans grew increasingly opposed to the procedure. Although abortion rights are broadly popular in the United States today, support is sharply split by party: while 80% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, just 38% of Republicans say the same, according to polling from the Pew Research Center.Still, that is a significant fraction of Republicans. Men and women make up equal shares of these abortion rights-supporting Republicans – but women consistently vote at higher rates than men, making them a critical voting bloc for abortion-rights supporters to win.For Stephanie Tyler, a longtime Republican in Nevada, Roe’s overturning “was the proverbial last straw”.“I believe so fundamentally in a woman’s right to choose,” Tyler said, adding: “Any party that would make that a key piece of its platform, and then support a supreme court that obviously pushed that as a primary agenda, is not my party.”Weeks after Roe fell, Tyler dropped her affiliation with the Republican party and registered as an independent.‘There will be no Republicans left’Some prominent Republican women have started to urge the GOP to stop focusing on banning abortion so much – including Ann Coulter, the conservative firebrand not generally known for moderation. “The demand for anti-abortion legislation just cost Republicans another crucial race,” Coulter tweeted in April. “Pro-lifers: WE WON. Abortion is not a ‘constitutional right’ anymore! Please stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left.”This week, Donald Trump similarly warned that Republicans have been “decimated” over extreme abortion stances, even as he took credit for what he called the “miracle” of overturning Roe.Many of the interviewed women shared Coulter’s concern about what the GOP’s hardline stance on abortion would mean for the party’s future.Sandy Senn, a Republican state senator from South Carolina, , believes abortion should be outlawed after the first trimester of pregnancy (with exceptions). But last year, she banded together with the four other female senators in South Carolina’s state legislature – two Republicans, a Democrat and an independent – to stop a total abortion ban from passing in South Carolina. They called themselves the “sister senators”.At one point, the sister senators filibustered for three days. Their efforts worked, for a while. By the end of the year, though, South Carolina had banned abortion past six weeks of pregnancy.“You cannot have laws that are going to thumb a group of people down, because they’re ultimately not going to listen, and they’re going to find a workaround,” Senn said. “If we continue down this path – we hate gays, we hate women, we hate transsexuals – if we become the party of hate, we lose independents. We’re gonna lose young voters.”She continued: “You’re gonna see moderate Republicans walk away from the party on certain issues, or maybe not even vote top-ballot or in some elections, just because they feel like they can’t.”Gauging how many Republicans will break away from the party to support abortion rights, though, is complicated by much of the GOP’s recent tack to the far right. Kelly Dittmar, the director of research and a scholar at the center for American women and politics at Rutgers University–Camden, said that it’s become increasingly difficult to even locate moderate Republican women, either as voters or as elected officials. So many have simply left the party.“Women in general have been more likely to be liberal, and that includes among Republicans,” Dittmar said. “In surveys, it’s hard to compare Republicans over time, because you’re actually talking about a really different group of people. Instead of seeing Republican women say, ‘Oh, we don’t agree with the party’, they just don’t even come up in the count, because they don’t identify at the beginning of a survey as Republican.”Mirabel Batjer is one of those women. She left the GOP around 2010, after supporting Barack Obama for president in 2008.“I just decided that it was silly for me to pretend any longer that it was a party for me, because it certainly was not,” said Batjer, who now calls herself a “rabid liberal Democrat”. “I was almost a single-issue voter when it came to being concerned about Roe v Wade and what the supreme court could do. And I guess my fears were right.”Some Republicans, such as Kellyanne Conway, a former Trump adviser, have suggested the GOP should pivot to emphasizing contraception or risk losing in 2024. At a GOP presidential debate, candidate Nikki Haley, who has urged “consensus” on abortion, asked the audience: “Can’t we all agree contraception should be available?”But that plan might not get far in the modern Republican party. Anti-abortion activists, who have long been wedded to the GOP and have helped propel it to electoral victories across the country, have mixed views on hormonal birth control. The powerful Students for Life of America, for example, has labeled oral contraceptives and IUDs “abortifacients”, meaning that they cause abortions, which is false.This year, Senn was enraged by the introduction of a South Carolina bill to require that parents give consent before doctors can fulfill minors’ requests for medication, including birth control – in apparent defiance of a federal program, Title X, that allows minors to receive confidential family-planning help.“Here they are, making an attempt to basically keep women barefoot and pregnant, because now they don’t even want them to have birth control,” Senn said. “The bill is asinine, and women aren’t going to put up with that.”But multiple Republican women who support abortion rights said they prefer to stick with the GOP come November, even if they vote for access to the procedure in states that are holding referendums. Even those who were undecided on or opposed to Trump said that they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Joe Biden.Yuripzy Morgan, a Republican who ran to represent Maryland’s third congressional district in 2022, supports some access to abortion. But, she said, abortion is not a “primary issue of mine” when she enters the voting booth.“When I say it is a complicated topic, I don’t say that because it’s the speaking point. I’ve felt the baby kick in my tummy. I’ve given birth. I know what that feels like,” Morgan said. “One of my biggest pet peeves is when people make this a black-and-white issue.”Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, doesn’t believe women are ditching the Republican party in significant numbers because of abortion. According to her organization’s research, Republican women remain much more likely to think that abortion should be illegal in all cases.Instead, it’s Democrats who now feel more strongly than ever about supporting abortion access. Before Roe fell, most Democrats did not consider abortion their top issue; post-Roe, it’s become a litmus test for half of Democrats, according to research from the Public Religion Research Institute. If anything, Deckman says, Democrats are likely to benefit from boosted turnout among independents or relatively weak Democrats.“Generally speaking, most Republicans are opposed to abortion. That’s become the party line and party voters really feel that way,” Deckman said. “I don’t think there’s any indication that there’s mass exodus from the GOP because of the decision that happened.”Even Whitmore, the Florida woman who had an abortion in 1973, said that access to the procedure will not be a factor in her vote for president.“The president or whoever is not going to decide this issue,” she said. “It’s going to be the citizens of Florida.” More

Iowans are set to brave subzero temperatures on Monday when they arrive at their caucus sites at 7pm to formally kick off the process to choose their nominee.In terms of pure numbers, the Iowa caucuses won’t have much of a role in determining who the Republican nominee is. The state allocates 40 delegates in the Republican nominating contest, roughly just 1.6% of the more than 2,400 that are up for grabs. But that small total belies the outsized influence the state can have on US presidential politics.For more than half a century, Iowa has come to occupy a near-mythological place in American politics – becoming known as the place where underdogs can become serious contenders and where dreams of the White House can die. The rural state’s voters often reward retail politicking, giving hope to candidates who visit its 99 counties to shake hands and give stump speeches.Since the 1970s, its caucuses have been the first nominating contest in each presidential cycle. Candidates crisscross the state in hopes of exceeding expectations and gaining momentum. And while it does not always pick the eventual nominee – Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have all won there – victories there have been rocket fuel to candidates like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.While Republicans are proceeding as usual with their first-in-the-nation caucuses, Democrats have chosen to shake up their calendar this year. In a largely symbolic move since there is no competitive Democratic primary, the Democratic National Committee has stripped Iowa’s caucuses of their first-in-the-nation status after mounting concerns that the overwhelmingly white state does not reflect the makeup of the party. But a battle over Iowa’s status probably looms for 2028, when there will be a competitive primary.“Iowa is not first because it’s important. It’s important because it’s first,” said Dennis Goldford, a professor at Drake University in Des Moines and the co-author of The Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event. “The morning after the caucuses, Iowa falls off the face of the earth.”The importance of being firstIowa wound up being the first state to nominate presidential candidates largely by accident.After Democrats saw violent protests at the 1968 Democratic convention, the party moved to change the way it selected delegates to limit the power of party bosses. In Iowa, that meant holding precinct caucuses, and then conventions at the county, congressional district and state levels. In 1972, the state convention was set for 20 May because a hall was available for that day, according to the New York Times. A slow mimeograph machine meant that first stage of the process, the precinct caucuses, needed to start in January.“It was simply a historical accident,” Goldford said.The caucuses exploded in 1976. In that cycle, Jimmy Carter was not seen as a serious presidential candidate. But his campaign went all in on Iowa, betting that if he won there it would create enough momentum to make him a viable candidate. Carter earned the most votes of any candidate in the caucuses (he finished second behind “uncommitted”) and wound up winning the presidency.Gordon Fischer, a former chair of the state’s Democratic party, said there had been several efforts over the years by other states wanting to edge out Iowa. When he was chair in the early 2000s, Michigan made an unsuccessful play to go first.“As much as I like, love and respect the Iowa caucuses and what Iowans have done over the years, probably it was unrealistic to think we were going to keep it for ever,” Fischer said. “It was just too special.”The growing party divide and its consequencesThere has been a mounting push in recent years to have Democrats change their nomination schedule and strip Iowa of its place at the start of the nominating process.Allowing Iowa to go first, critics argued, gave outsized importance to a state that is overwhelmingly white and did not reflect the base of the Democratic party. It also brought a surge of Democratic attention to a state where Republicans have dominated in recent years (Trump won Iowa in 2020 by more than eight points). The push was exacerbated in 2020 when the Iowa Democratic party botched the release of the caucus results.The Iowa caucus being first also ignores Black voters, Joe Biden has argued, who have been the “backbone” of the party and should have a “louder and earlier voice in the process”, something the Democrats are trying to do by putting South Carolina as the first official contest this year.Last year, the Democratic National Committee officially stripped Iowa of its place at the front of the nominating contest. State Democrats have signaled that Iowa will try to compete again in 2028 for the first spot in the nominating contest.It’s not only bad for Iowans to lose their early status, but for the country as a whole, Fischer said. Iowa has a lot to offer Democrats: media markets are more affordable and the state often rewards candidates who campaign on the ground, de-emphasizing the outsized role of money in politics.And, perhaps crucially for the party, the state is rural, and Democrats have a problem with rural voters, who have increasingly turned toward the GOP. “Iowa gave candidates the opportunity to talk with and hear from voters that had a rural perspective. I’m not sure that’s the case with the other early states,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor Republicans, however, the caucuses don’t appear to be going anywhere.“I would be shocked if the Republicans wanted to change any of this,” Goldford said. “The Republicans now are essentially the party of rural America. It makes Iowa relevant to maintain for the Republicans and the position it’s in in the nomination process.”Because Republicans are keeping their caucuses, Fischer thinks that gives Iowa a “fighting chance” to make a case for Democrats keeping it, too.‘A nice exercise in democracy’On their face, the caucuses themselves seem to be the picture of what democracy looks like: Americans gathering with their neighbors to debate their political differences.“They force you to do that once every four years. To go and sit and actually have a civil discussion with your neighbors in a moderated atmosphere – if anybody’s seen it operate it’s a marvel,” Art Cullen, the editor of the Storm Lake Times, said. “It’s a nice exercise in democracy and healthy.”But in recent years there has been more discussion of the undemocratic aspects of the caucus. Only allowing people to caucus on a specific day at a specific time shuts out people who might have to work or who can’t find childcare, or who can’t make it because of bad weather.Fischer doesn’t agree with the criticisms of the format. Voters caucus in their own neighborhoods, in small precincts, on a date that’s set well in advance. The caucus allows for people to come together to talk politics and persuade each other for one night.“I think there’s something cool about that. I think there’s something valuable about that. I realize it’s a bit of a barrier, but I think it’s a barrier that can be overcome,” he said.President Biden criticized the caucus process in a letter to the Democratic National Committee in 2022, saying they hinder participation in the voting process.“Caucuses – requiring voters to choose in public, to spend significant amounts of time to caucus, disadvantaging hourly workers and anyone who does not have the flexibility to go to a set location at a set time – are inherently anti-participatory,” Biden wrote. “It should be our party’s goal to rid the nominating process of restrictive, anti-worker caucuses.”Cullen dismissed those concerns, and those that say Iowa is too white to hold this status in the election. He noted that it was Iowa that catapulted the candidacy of Obama, the US’s first Black president.“Spare me the ‘racist’ bullshit. It’s an excuse to get rid of us because they don’t like our airports and our hotels and they really don’t like the cold weather and have an answer about social security. Or having to answer about why two-thirds of Iowa’s counties are losing population.’“It gets criticized because you have to sit around for an hour, and, you know, who wants to spend an hour for democracy? An hour every four years,” he added. More

Bernie Sanders, America’s leading progressive politician, has issued a stark warning to Joe Biden at the start of presidential election year: be more aggressive in addressing the anxieties of millions of struggling voters or risk handing back the White House to the anti-democratic demagogue Donald Trump.In an interview with the Guardian from his home base in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders urged the Democratic president to inject more urgency into his bid for re-election. He said that unless the president was more direct in recognising the many crises faced by working-class families his Republican rival would win.“We’ve got to see the White House move more aggressively on healthcare, on housing, on tax reform, on the high cost of prescription drugs,” Sanders said. “If we can get the president to move in that direction, he will win; if not, he’s going to lose.”The US senator from Vermont added that he was in contact with the White House pressing that point. “We hope to make clear to the president and his team that they are not going to win this election unless they come up with a progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of the working class of this country.”Sanders’ warning comes at a critical time in American politics. On Monday, Republicans in Iowa will gather for caucuses that mark the official start of the 2024 presidential election.Biden faces no serious challenger in the Democratic primaries. But concern is mounting over how he would fare against Trump given a likely rematch between them in November.Recent polls have shown Trump not only doing well in key battleground states but gaining traction with demographic groups who proved vital to Biden’s 2020 victory, including Hispanic and young voters.In his Guardian interview, Sanders cast the threat of a second Trump presidency in existential terms. “It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy,” he said.He predicted that over a further four years, Trump would shift the electoral goalposts so that “many people who would vote against Trump are unable to do so. He will make it harder for young people, people of colour, to participate in the political process.”It is in that dystopian context that Sanders criticises the president’s re-election team for failing to bang the drum hard enough. “They’re not their own best advertisers, they don’t do a particularly good job in explaining what Biden has accomplished,” he said.Sanders praised Biden for the $1.9tn Covid rescue plan which he said helped avoid economic collapse during the pandemic, and for the Inflation Reduction Act which pumped money into transforming US energy away from fossil fuels. He was also effusive about Biden’s historic decision to join a United Auto Workers (UAW) picket line during the union’s strike with the three biggest carmakers, which he said made him “the strongest pro-union president that we have had, certainly, since FDR [Franklin D Roosevelt]”.But Sanders urged the White House to resist sitting back on its laurels. “The president has got to do something that’s very, very hard,” Sanders said.“He should be proud of his accomplishments, but he’s also got to say that he understands that there is a housing crisis, that people can’t afford healthcare or prescription drugs or childcare – that he’s trying, but he hasn’t yet succeeded.”Biden could find a historical template for such messaging, Sanders suggested, in Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election campaign. By then, the Democratic president had been in office for almost four years and had implemented the first two of his groundbreaking New Deal programmes.“Roosevelt didn’t go around saying, ‘Look at all I’ve done’,” Sanders explained. “He said: ‘I see a nation that is ill-clad, ill-housed. We made some progress, but I know there are enormous problems.”Critics will accuse Sanders of attempting to press his own brand of politics on to the establishment of the Democratic party. But he has credibility when it comes to presidential campaigns, having come close to securing the Democratic nomination twice and having given Biden a leg up into the White House in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Vermont senator not only rallied his millions of young supporters to vote for Biden, he also used his influence as runner-up in the 2020 Democratic primaries to push the candidate in a more progressive direction. He formed a set of “taskforces” in which top Biden and Sanders advisers worked together to forge policy agreements in several key areas including the economy, immigration and the climate crisis.In his new book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, Sanders sets out a similar progressive agenda for 2024. He calls for the Democratic party to wean itself from “corporate elites” and redirect its sights on to working-class struggles.He told the Guardian that if that does not happen, he fears that many young Americans will simply stay at home in November. “The polling is clear. Given the choice between Biden and Trump, a lot of people are saying, ‘Thank you, but no thank you’.”The danger of support for Biden fading among young voters has been enhanced by the Israel-Hamas war. The senator said that Biden’s staunch support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza could affect his standing among young progressive voters in November.He implored Biden to detach himself from Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who has taken a hard line on the military assault. “I hope that he [Biden] understands that you can be pro-Israel without supporting Netanyahu and the horrific war he is waging against the Palestinian people.”Opinion polls have shown a generational divide, with younger Americans tending to be more critical of US backing for the bombardment of Gaza. Almost three-quarters of voters aged 18 to 29 disapproved of Biden’s handling of the conflict, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll found.Sanders also faces challenges over his position on the war. Though he has become steadily more damning of the Israeli onslaught, calling it a “mass atrocity”, he continues to resist calling for a permanent ceasefire which he says would open the door to further Hamas outrages following the 7 October attack.That has strained relations with some of his army of young supporters. Asked whether he feared that the coalition he has so diligently nurtured since the 2016 presidential election was in danger of splintering, he said: “I think, at the end of the day, we’ll be all right”.The senator said he was actively working with allies to develop what he called a “progressive strategy to defeat Trump”. Central to that is “rallying the working class of this country to stand up to Trump”.He said he draws confidence from recent labor union victories, including wage increases won by the UAW and new agreements secured by the Teamsters at UPS and by Hollywood writers and actors. “We are seeing the revitalisation of the trade union movement in this country in a way that we have not seen for many, many decades.” More