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      Abortion measures are on the ballot in 10 states this year. Democrats can win them | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      If you’re tired of breathlessly following the horserace polling of the presidential and congressional races, you might consider instead breathlessly following the horserace polling of ballot initiatives to protect reproductive rights. In a sense, they’re more revealing.Pending some outstanding court challenges from Republicans – whose dogged commitment to “leaving this issue to the states” curiously disappears when they realize they’re going to lose – up to 10 states will have abortion referendums on the ballot this year. And it happens that they’ll share that ballot with competitive Senate races in states like Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Maryland.In Nevada and Arizona, which could also play a decisive role in the presidential race, a Fox News poll found that over 70% of voters in both states plan to vote in favor of codifying abortion rights.Giving voters the opportunity to vote directly on abortion rights is a strategic win for progressives on a few levels. Of course, in a time when 22 state legislatures have acted to restrict abortion access since Dobbs, it’s a powerfully effective way to protect the right to choose. It also helps keep the subject in headlines when the Trump campaign would prefer voters to be distracted by mythical, racist claims about Haitian immigrants. And perhaps most significantly, it could motivate otherwise unenthusiastic voters to show up for what seems to be yet another excruciatingly close election.Ballot initiatives are a useful exercise in revealed preference. It has long been observed that millions of Americans end up voting against their economic self-interest each election cycle. In presidential elections, voters choose candidates, not policy papers. It’s why swing voters were not compelled by the argument that Joe Biden could serve four more years as president because he “surrounds himself with the right people”.Yet when voters have the chance to vote up or down on an issue that will directly impact their lives, they aren’t in the habit of denying themselves civil rights or quality of life improvements. And in the wake of Roe v Wade getting overturned, that has proved especially true.In 2022, every state referendum on abortion was a victory for pro-choice advocates. Voters in California, Michigan and Vermont voted to enshrine reproductive rights in their respective constitutions, while voters in Kentucky and Montana decisively voted down measures that would have restricted them. This coincided with progressive overperformance in gubernatorial and congressional races, where abortion proved highly salient.Ballot initiatives on other issues have also demonstrated sizable majorities for the right progressive priorities, even in so-called conservative states. Since 2012, measures to legalize recreational marijuana have passed in over a dozen states – including Alaska, Montana, Missouri and Ohio. Meanwhile, per Ballotpedia, there have been 22 statewide measures to raise the minimum wage since 1998; they’ve all passed.In this election, too, there are opportunities for waves of support for progress in unexpected places.Take Florida (please). The citizen-led group Floridians Protecting Freedom has been tirelessly pushing for amendment 4, which would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution if it can garner 60% of the vote. One poll found that the initiative is positioned nicely to pass, with 69% support.Meanwhile, Florida amendment 3, which would legalize marijuana in the state, has already broken the record for the most money spent on any state cannabis measure, with more than $100m raised and counting. On that issue, the Republican party seems to recognize which way the smoke is blowing, since Trump has come out in favor of it.For all the talk of Florida falling out of reach for progressives, these amendments could serve as yet another signal that the left shouldn’t give up on the state. This is the same state that voted to restore the voting rights of more than 1 million felons in 2018 (despite immediate efforts that followed by the Republican government to subvert the will of the people). There is such a sizable bloc for progress, in fact, that despite Florida’s 60% threshold for constitutional amendments being the highest in the country, Republicans have proposed raising it even higher, to 66.67%.Beyond the Sunshine state, putting abortion rights front and center could also help address the Harris campaign’s nationwide challenges with younger voters. While Kamala Harris has managed to earn back some of the support that Biden lost among voters under 30, she still isn’t matching his 2020 performance.Sure, maybe touting Taylor Swift’s endorsement on Instagram or sending Barack Obama to juice voter registration on TikTok will move the needle. But with women under 45 citing abortion as their most motivating issue this election, it would seem wise to keep spotlighting a rare issue that is both persuasive to swing voters and galvanizing for young activists.At the St Petersburg campus of the University of South Florida, the 20-year-old college senior Alexis Hobbs can be found wearing a pink T-shirt behind a pink table recruiting her peers to vote “Yes on 4.”In an interview with New York Magazine, Hobbs shared just how motivated her fellow young people are to fight this fight: “They don’t want to live out their entire adulthood this way.”

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has contributed to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times More

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      Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a dog with a shovel

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      The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian.Kevin Roberts, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, is alleged to have told colleagues and dinner guests that he killed a neighbor’s pit bull around 2004 while he was working as a still relatively unknown history professor at New Mexico State University.View image in fullscreen“My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” said Kenneth Hammond, who was chair of the university’s history department at the time.Two other people – a professor and her spouse – recall hearing a similar account directly from Roberts at a dinner at his home. Three other professors also said they heard the account at that time from the colleagues who said they had heard it directly from Roberts.None recall Roberts – who worked at the university as an assistant professor from 2003 to 2005 – ever saying that the dog he allegedly said he killed was actively threatening him or his family.In a statement to the Guardian, Roberts denied ever killing a dog with a shovel. He did not answer questions about why several people say he told them that he had.“This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence. In 2004, a neighbor’s chained pit bull attempted to jump a fence into my backyard as I was gardening with my young daughter. Thankfully, the owner arrived in time to restrain the animal before it could get loose and attack us.”The people who say they heard Roberts talk about killing a dog at the time said they found the apparent admission to be unsettling and said they did not ask Roberts – who as a conservative Republican was already seen as something of an outsider among the university’s mostly liberal academic staff – to provide any more detail about the incident.“I think that probably people were not eager to engage with him over this. It sounded like a pretty crazy thing to do and people didn’t want to get into it at that point,” Hammond said.News of Roberts’s alleged comments to colleagues comes as Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and his running mate, JD Vance, have engaged in a racist and false propaganda campaign to demonize Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, by claiming that they have been killing and eating people’s pets. The xenophobic claims, which are probably meant to strengthen support among white, racist and anti-immigrant voters, have incited multiple bomb threats that have disrupted the Springfield community.Project 2025, which was written by the Heritage Foundation under Roberts’s watch, has become a focal point of the 2024 presidential election as Democrats warn that its radical policy prescriptions – such as the eradication of the Department of Education and imposing further restrictions on abortion – will serve as a blueprint for Trump’s administration if he is elected. Both Trump and Vance have sought to distance themselves from the 900-page report, with Trump claiming he had not read it. But in a foreword to Roberts’s book written by Vance, the vice-presidential nominee praises Roberts’s “depth and stature within the American Right” and says that, “in the fights that [lie] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon”.Roberts is one of the most prominent rightwing voices in Washington. He has close ties to Opus Dei, the Catholic group, and has spoken openly about how he considers the outlawing of birth control to be one of the “hardest” political battles facing conservatives in the future.Twenty years ago, Roberts – now a staunch supporter of Trump – was an academic who may have been uneasy among fellow professors who were not politically aligned with him. Yet, Hammond said, colleagues treated him with respect and kindness – including bringing food to his home after his wife had a baby – and were happy to have him working at the university.One former colleague remembers being reprimanded by Roberts after she used her university email account to tell colleagues she was going to help campaign for John Kerry, the then Democratic nominee for president, because she recalled him saying – rightly, she now admits – that it was inappropriate. But relations were generally good.Marsha Weisiger, a colleague of Roberts at the time who is now an environmental history professor at the University of Oregon, recalled being invited to dinner at Roberts’s home with her husband, and Roberts telling both of them the story about how he had hit a neighbor’s pit bull with a shovel and killed it.“My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it. If I did something horrific, I would not be telling my colleagues about it,” she said.To make matters worse, she recalled Roberts saying that the neighbor in question also had puppies and that he had considered killing them, too. Weisiger’s husband, who asked not to be named, recalled Roberts saying he had complained about the dog to the police, who were not responsive, and that the dog sometimes got into his yard.Roberts, public records confirm, was living with his wife and young family in a modest and mostly immigrant community in Las Cruces at the time, in a historic neighborhood lined with traditional adobe homes and chain-link fences.In his statement, Roberts claimed that the city later arrived and removed “more than ten dogs” from his neighbor’s property, citing animal abuse. He said he was “incredibly grateful” to animal control for rescuing the “abused animals” and was grateful that he and his daughter did not have physical contact with the dog.Roberts also identified the man who he called the “animal owner”: a native of Las Cruces named Daniel Aran who, a spokesperson for Roberts pointed out in an email, was sentenced to 78 months in prison for cocaine trafficking in 2017, more than a decade after the alleged incident occurred.Public records and the Guardian’s reporting confirm that Aran and his mother lived nextdoor to Roberts at the time that Roberts lived there.The Guardian could not independently verify whether Roberts actually killed a dog or whether Roberts’s account of his interactions with his neighbor’s dog was accurate. The Guardian has repeatedly sought out public records to try to verify the alleged accounts. The city of Las Cruces, the police and animal control authorities said public records were not available for the time frame in which the alleged incident occurred.But the Guardian did track down Daniel Aran, whose mother Norma Noriega still lives in the adobe home next to where Roberts previously lived in Las Cruces.Noriega’s family moved into their home in about 2002 with her husband and children – Denise Aran, who was about seven at the time, and Daniel, who was about 16.Daniel Aran, who has been released from prison and is now the owner of a small construction company, spoke to the Guardian from the front yard of the small stone house. Aran is lean and muscular, with a chiseled face and hardened stare.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When I was younger, I was wild. But I gave respect to get respect. Now I’m more about work and family,” he said, dusting off his clothes from a day of construction. “And I’ve always been a dog lover, an animal lover, since I was a little kid. I’ve always had dogs.”Aran said he was diligent about watching his dogs – small pit bulls – which he bred, selling the pups as a way of making money for his family’s household.When asked if he had a dog disappear around 2004, he said: “Yes, definitely, my dog, Loca, my little female”. She had been his favorite, he said.“I had one female, and that was her. She was a little, little thing like this,” he said, holding up his hands in an affectionate gesture. “She was a tiny, cute little thing.”“She went missing, and we never could find her,” he said.When he was asked by the Guardian about comments Roberts allegedly made to colleagues about killing a neighborhood pit bull with a shovel, he grimaced. “Man, you never know what’s inside someone’s head.”“I’m not here to make up stories or to say he did it,” he said. “But it was right around 2004 when all that happened, that Loca was missing,” he said. “I wish I could say, yeah, I know this fool did that. But I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that my dog went missing, and we never found her. She wasn’t at the dog catchers.”Aran also denied Roberts’s claim that dogs had been taken away from the property.“We had three dogs that we kept, and then there were puppies occasionally that I would sell,” he said.His mother, 53-year-old Norma Noriega, sitting out in the front yard, also disputed Roberts’s account.“That never happened,” she said in Spanish. “[Animal services] never came and took dogs. Sure, [the dogs] would get out on occasion, and we’d go find them and bring them back. But there was never an incident where our dogs were taken, for abuse or whatever, that is simply not true.“It was only with Loca that we could never figure out what happened. She disappeared, and we always knew it was strange that we simply never saw her again. [Daniel] went out looking for her, but she was never found,” said Noriega.The family has had a number of pit bulls over the years – Brownie and Casper were their longtime pets – but it was the disappearance of Loca that had always distressed the family.“She’s the one that disappeared. We went out looking for her, we went out to the dog catchers, and we never found her,” Aran said quietly. “And I know the dog catchers never got her.”Asked about his recollection of Roberts, Aran said: “Well, it’s been more than 20 years,” and he did acknowledge that his dogs could be noisy.“I’m pretty sure he had to have some patience,” said Aran. “But, as far as I can remember, he never came across as disrespectful,” he said.Additional reporting by Melissa Segura More

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      Trump tells supporters at campaign rally ‘if we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing’ – as it happened

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      “Our entire nation is counting on the people of this great commonwealth,” Donald Trump said about Pennsylvania.“We got to take our country back from these horrible people because, if we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” he said.Thanks for reading. Rachel Leingang’s story from the Trump rally is here:

      Former president Donald Trump delivered a speech in Indiana, Pennsylvania, telling supporters: ‘If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing.’

      JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, refused to take a stance on the scandal involving North Carolina’s lieutenant governor during a Charlotte visit.

      A key Nebraska lawmaker rejected a Trump-backed effort to change state’s electoral vote rules.

      A government shutdown seems to have been averted, with Republican speaker Mike Johnson heading off the politically damaging disruption by agreeing to a spending deal that does not include measures against non-citizen voting, which Trump had demanded.

      Kamala Harris won the endorsements of hundreds of former national security and military officials, who said Trump “has proven he is not up to the job”.

      The White House laid out how Joe Biden will spend his final months in office, dubbing it the “sprint to the finish”.
      On Twitter, Kamala Harris’s campaign also reacted to Trump’s remarks on abortion and the overturning of Roe v Wade.“Trump: Nobody should want a federal law protecting abortion rights,” reads a tweet.Donald Trump has ended his 96-minute speech in Indiana, Pennsylvania.Kamala Harris’s campaign reacted on Twitter to Trump’s pledge to close the Department of Education.Trump later started using athletes in the Olympics to make anti-trans remarks and false claims. There were no transgender athletes who were competing outside of the gender they were assigned at birth at this year’s Olympic games.“We are going to keep men out of women’s sports,” he said. “It’s so demeaning to women.”“You will no longer be thinking about abortion,” Trump said to the women in the room. “It is now where it always had to be: with the states, and the vote of the people.”“Everyone wanted abortion out of the federal government and into the states,” he said. “Six brilliant and very brave justices of the United States supreme court were able to do that for you, and they did it.”Donald Trump turned his attention to women, claiming “women are poorer than they were four years ago.”He claimed women are less healthy, less safe, and more depressed than during his administration.“I am your protector,” he said. “As president, I have to be your protector.”Donald Trump attacked Kamala Harris for her history as a prosecutor and attorney general in California, as well as the environmental policies she plans to put in place.“She wants to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles, which will destroy the Pennsylvania way of life,” he said.“As Attorney General, she destroyed San Francisco and she destroyed all of California,” Trump said. “Now she’s coming to destroy the United States of America, and we’re not going to let it happen.”Donald Trump brought Republican David McCormick to the stage. McCormick is running against the Democratic Senator Bob Casey in an uphill battle for the senatorial seat.“It’s a battle between common sense and these radical liberal policies,” McCormick said.Donald Trump continued making anti-immigrant remarks.“If Kamala Harris wins this election, she will flood Pennsylvania cities and towns with illegal migrants from all over the world, and Pennsylvania will never be the same, you will never be the same,” he said.“When I’m president, all migrant flights to Pennsylvania will stop immediately,” Trump said.He then claimed that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s, a detail in her resumé she uses to win over a powerful bloc of working-class voters.“She never worked there, and these fake news reporters will never report it,” he said.After attacking Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, the crowd in Pennsylvania chanted “send them back!”Donald Trump later attacked Venezuelan migrants, generalizing the community and calling them “lawless gangs,” while blaming them for problems in the housing market and with crime.Donald Trump returned to his claim that the city of Aurora, Colorado, has been overrun by Venezuelan immigrants. Trump has been using Aurora and Springfield, Ohio, as examples of the Biden administration’s mistakes on immigration policies.“Harris has inundated small towns all across America with hundreds of thousands of migrants,” he said.He bragged about not using a teleprompter before asking: “Do you think Springfield will ever be the same?”Trump and JD Vance, his running mate, have falsely claimed that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield – a statement that has been debunked.The former president also touched on the famed Pennsylvania steel industry.“We have to be strong and powerful again, and we must put tariffs on foreign predators,” he said. “We have to make US steel great again.”During Trump’s administration, he imposed several rounds of tariffs on steel, aluminum, washing machines, solar panels, and goods from China. He has said that, if elected, he will would impose 10% worldwide tariff and a 60% tariff on Chinese goods.Trump touched a nerve with fracking in Pennsylvania, saying Kamala Harris is planning to ban it.“If anybody here believes that she will let your energy industry continue fracking, you should immediately go to a psychiatrist,” he said.“I will get Pennsylvania energy workers pumping, fracking, drilling and producing like never before.”Donald Trump claimed that, during his presidency, foreign countries wouldn’t fight each other without his permission.“They would call me up to ask whether or not they could go to war with some other country,” he said.Trump took a stab at Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him “the greatest salesman in history” and said “he wants them to win this election so badly”.Donald Trump says he promises to deliver tax cuts, attacking Kamala Harris for her plans to raise the corporate income tax rate.“Kamala Harris is the tax queen, and she’s coming for your money,” he said. “She’s coming for your pensions, and she’s coming for your savings, unless you defeat her in November.”Trump then focused his speech on inflation, pointing to higher prices for energy and groceries.“Vote Trump, and your incomes will soar,” he said. “Your net worth will skyrocket, your energy costs and grocery prices will come tumbling down, and we will bring back the American dream, bigger, better and stronger than ever before.”Former President Donald Trump once again falsely claimed that crime is going up, by 45 percent, despite recently released FBI statistics stating otherwise.Here’s more context: More

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      Pennsylvania crucial to White House hopes, Trump says at campaign rally

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      Donald Trump returned to Pennsylvania, telling his rally attendees that their state was critical to his ability to win back the White House and encouraging them to turn out to vote, though he also called early voting “stupid stuff”.“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” Trump said, soon after taking the stage more than 45 minutes later than scheduled. “It’s very simple.”Pennsylvania swung for Joe Biden in 2020, delivering its 20 electoral votes and helping Biden secure the victory in one of the few states that help decide US elections. This year, polls on average have shown Vice-President Kamala Harris with a slight lead over Trump – though the state is clearly in play, and both candidates are campaigning through it frequently in the final two months before November.Trump has held his signature rallies significantly less this year than he did in 2016, Axios recently reported, which said his campaign promises Trump will ramp up the rallies in the final stretch. Earlier in the day, Trump listened to farmers talk about the problems they’re facing and boosted his ideas about imposing tariffs on foreign countries as a way to improve economics in the US.While he’s on the road for large rallies less, he’s increasingly known for his frequent digressions, a longtime fixture of Trump’s speaking style that appear to be increasing this year. At the rally at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on Monday, he hopped around at breakneck pace and was difficult to follow. When coherent, he painted a dark vision of America under Democratic rule and starkly laid out what he would do if he won, including mass deportations.Trump has started defending his meandering rambles as a storytelling technique called “the weave” – a sign of his oratory brilliance. Critics say his tangents about bacon sales or Hannibal Lecter, and his defense of them as intentional and smart, show a salesman trying to rebrand his disarray.After starting on claims that Harris would turn the US into Venezuela at Monday’s rally, Trump then moved into “where they cure the tar”, saying: “For the environmentalists, you know where they cure the tar, where they take the tar and they make it into beautiful oil, Houston, Texas, and it all goes flying up in the air.”Trump joked that he nearly called Pennsylvania a “state” rather than a commonwealth, saving himself from a gaffe that he claimed would invite negative headlines. He caught himself before calling it a state, though, because “I’m cognitively very strong.” He also called Harris “a very dumb person”.“Winston Churchill was this great speaker – great,” he said at one point. “I get much bigger crowds than him, but nobody ever says I’m a great speaker.”Despite his nonstop verbal wandering, he bragged about his lack of a script: “Isn’t it nice to have a president that doesn’t have to use a teleprompter?”He repeated a spate of false claims, such as that crime is up. Crime is down. He alleged he won the 2020 election by millions of votes. He lost. He wove an alternate reality where wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas do not exist because he had won in 2020.View image in fullscreenHe lashed out at Biden and Harris. He said he was again calling Biden “sleepy Joe”, regressing back to that insult instead of “crooked Joe” because he is not smart and is not acting as president any more. Harris, for her part, is a “very dumb person”, Trump said, and cannot answer basic questions.He brought up a recent interview Harris did with Oprah Winfrey, who Trump claimed “used to love me until I decided to run for politics”. He said some people believe former president Barack Obama, who Trump called Barack Hussein Obama with an emphasis on his middle name, is leading the country instead of Biden. And he surfaced the unproven claim that Harris did not actually work at McDonald’s as a student, something that recently has irked him as rightwing accounts spread rumors questioning her fast-food work history.“I’m going to go to a McDonald’s next week,” Trump said. “I’m going to go to a McDonald’s and I’m going to work the french fry job for about a half an hour. I want to see how it is.”He brought up abortion, a key liability for Trump and other Republicans after the overturning of Roe v Wade. Several states have direct ballot measures that would protect access to abortion, and Democrats have made abortion access a major plank of the 2024 race. He praised the US supreme court for overturning Roe, saying the decision took “courage”. He added that there should be unspecified “exceptions” to abortion bans.“That’s all they talk about. The country is falling apart. We’re going to end up in world war three, and all they can talk about is abortion,” he said.The stop in the critical swing state comes after two assassination attempts, including one in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. Trump will be returning to Butler in early October, some news outlets reported Monday. He displayed the immigration chart that he says saved his life from the Butler shooter during Monday’s rally, joking that he “sleeps with that page” at night. “Immigration saved my life,” he said.Later in the speech, he again railed against immigration and migrants, bringing up towns that have received increases of people in recent years and saying those places are “lawless”, full of gangs and irreparably damaged. He promised that all migrant flights to Pennsylvania and elsewhere would be ended if he wins.“You have to get them the hell out,” Trump said of migrants. More

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      Republican bid to change Nebraska voting rules to help Trump fails

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      A Republican attempt to change the electoral system in Nebraska to give Donald Trump a possible advantage in the event of a tied presidential election has been rebuffed after a state legislator refused to back the plan.Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who crossed to the Republican party this year, said he would not vote to change the midwestern state’s distribution of electors to the same winner-takes-all process that operates in most of the US.His decision followed intense lobbying from both Republicans and Democrats, who anticipated that a change in the allocation of Nebraska’s five electoral college votes could have have a decisive impact on the outcome of the 5 November poll.It reduces the possibility that the former president and Kamala Harris could be tied on 269 electoral college votes each, a scenario that would throw the final say on the election’s outcome to the House of Representatives.A tie scenario could have arisen if Trump earned five electoral votes – rather than four, as expected under the present set-up – from winning Nebraska, then won the four “Sun belt” states of North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, while the vice-president carried the northern battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.US presidential elections are not decided by the popular vote nationwide but by which candidate wins a majority of 538 electoral college votes, usually awarded to the winner of the popular vote in each state.Nebraska’s Republican legislators, egged on by Republicans on Capitol Hill, proposed to change the distribution of electors to ensure that Trump would be awarded all five electoral votes if, as expected, he wins the solidly pro-Republican state.That would have upended the status quo under which Nebraska, unlike every other state apart from Maine, splits its allocation to give two to the presidential candidate that wins the popular vote while awarding the other three on the basis of who prevails in each of its three congressional districts.The state’s second congressional district, covering its biggest city, Omaha, was won by Joe Biden in 2020, a feat Harris hopes to emulate.The spotlight had fallen on McDonnell, a former firefighter and the chair of Omaha’s federation of labour, because his support would have provided the two-thirds majority needed in the state legislature to change Nebraska’s distribution system law, which has operated since 1992.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement, McDonnell, who had seemed to wavering in recent days from his earlier vow not to vote to restore the winner-takes-all system, made it plain that he had not moved from his original position.“Elections should be an opportunity for all voters to be heard, no matter who they are, where they live, or what party they support,” he said. “I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from election day, is not the moment to make this change.”His announcement came despite a meeting with the Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, who travelled to Nebraska last week to lobby local legislators, and appeared to end plans by Jim Pillen, Nebraska’s governor, to call a special legislative session to change the law.“With Mike McDonnell being an absolute no, that kind of closes the lid,” the Republican state senator Loren Lippincott told the Nebraska Examiner newspaper.McDonnell’s stance won praise from a former ally, Jane Kleeb, the chair of Nebraska’s Democrats, who hailed him for “standing strong against tremendous pressure from out-of-state interests to protect Nebraskans’ voice in our democracy”. More

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      US Congress agrees to funding deal to avert shutdown in blow to Trump

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      US congressional leaders have agreed to a short-term funding deal in a move that averts a damaging pre-election government shutdown and also amounts to a snub for Donald Trump.The prospect of a shutdown at the expiration of the current government funding on 30 September had been looming after Republicans insisted on tying future funding to legislation that would require voters to show proof of US citizenship – known as the Save Act and backed by Trump but opposed by Democrats.After weeks of backroom maneuvering, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, announced a compromise that provides funding for another three months while decoupling it from the Save Act. Any other path would have been “political malpractice”, he added.The new package continues present spending levels while also giving $231m in emergency funds to the beleaguered Secret Service to enable it to provide added protection for Trump – the Republican presidential nominee, who has been the subject of two failed apparent assassination attempts – as well as his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, before the presidential election on 5 November.It represents a climbdown for Johnson, who had previously adhered to Trump’s demand that government funding be conditioned on passing the Save Act. The bill – has become an article of faith for the former president and his supporters due to their belief, unsupported by evidence, that electoral fraud is rife.Writing to congressional colleagues, Johnson made it clear he was bowing to the inevitable.“While this is not the solution any of us prefer, it is the most prudent path forward under the present circumstances,” he wrote. “As history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”The temporary settlement – known as a continuing resolution and which will have the effect of postponing haggling over spending until after the presidential election – was welcomed by Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, who nevertheless said it could have been reached earlier.“While I am pleased bipartisan negotiations quickly led to a government funding agreement free of cuts and poison pills, this same agreement could have been done two weeks ago,” Schumer said. “Instead, Speaker Johnson chose to follow the Maga way and wasted precious time.”Trump is believed to have been in favour of provoking a shutdown by insisting on the Save Act’s passage – believing that the Biden administration, including Harris, the vice-president, would be blamed, as he was for a five-week closure when he was president in 2018.Johnson held talks with Trump, even visiting his club in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, over how to resolve the impasse.The compromise “officially defies” Trump, Politico wrote in its Monday Playbook column, noting that the ex-president had not, at the time of publication, responded to Johnson’s move.The website Punchbowl argued that Johnson and Trump had been guilty of a political misjudgment in pushing the Save Act, suggesting that the speaker had weakened his position in the process.“The Save Act hasn’t been the political hammer that Johnson or Trump hoped it would be,” it wrote. “Thus Johnson ends up with little here. Not empty handed but close. And he’ll be negotiating a spending deal during a lame-duck session held in what’s certain to be a highly polarised post-election period with his own political future on the line.” More

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      Top staffers on Mark Robinson campaign quit after reports of offensive remarks

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      Several top employees on Mark Robinson’s campaign to become North Carolina’s next governor have quit their posts after a media report found compelling evidence that the Republican candidate previously described himself as a black Nazi, spoke favorably of reinstating slavery and shared other disturbing thoughts on a porn message forum.The departures announced on Sunday include the campaign’s senior adviser, campaign manager and finance director, among others. “I appreciate the efforts of these team members who have made the difficult choice to step away from the campaign, and I wish them well in their future endeavors,” Robinson said in a news release.One of the departing officials, Conrad Pogorzelski III, a senior adviser, helped Robinson win election as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor in 2020. Pogorzelski later became Robinson’s chief of staff and said that he “along with others from the campaign have left of our own accord”.The resignations came three days after CNN reported that Robinson had apparently authored porn forum posts which expressed a preference for Adolf Hitler over the president at the time, Barack Obama. He also reportedly called Martin Luther King Jr “worse than a maggot” and said he would “certainly buy a few” enslaved people if, as he wished, slavery were reinstated.Robinson denied that he was author of the posts and described them as “salacious tabloid lies”. He did not appear with Donald Trump at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Saturday and avoided the subject during a campaign appearance later that day at a race track in Fayetteville.Polls show that Robinson is trailing his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein, in polls. But in a statement on Sunday, Robinson said that the surveys had “underestimated Republican support in North Carolina for several cycles”.“I am confident our campaign remains in a strong position to make our case to the voters and win” in the 5 November election, he added.Stein appeared on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union and asserted that Robinson was “utterly unqualified, unfit to be the governor of North Carolina”.Lindsey Graham, Republican US senator of South Carolina, said on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that Robinson deserved a chance to defend himself against the reporting from CNN. But Graham called Robinson “a political zombie if he does not offer a defense to this that’s credible”.Senior state legislative leaders are concerned that any association with Robinson could affect their polling in November. Yet further up the political scale, those who on Sunday attended a rally in support of Donald Trump appeared to be unmoved, even as the former president endorsed Robinson as he pursues a return to the White House.Bob Judson, a 70-year-old unaffiliated voter, told the Washington Post he “didn’t put much credence” in the allegations against Robinson. “We’ve all done things in our past that we’re sorry for,” Judson said. “Some of the things are crazy.”Rose Cannon, 69, told the outlet that Robinson was a “very positive, strong man”.“Now that this has happened, I don’t know,” Cannon said. “We’ll hear through it, and see what we think.”While Trump has not responded to CNN’s claims about Robinson, his running mate, JD Vance, said it was better “to let these things play out sometimes in the court of public opinion”.Vance is due to hold a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday as the Republican presidential ticket hopes to move on from the Robinson episode. On Sunday, the Ohio US senator posted a comment on social media that sought to blame inflation on Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic presidential nominee, saying that was “my comment on Mark Robinson”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More