US Politics

Joe Biden has formally announced his campaign for re-election in 2024, asking Americans for four years to “finish this job”, possibly setting up an extraordinary rematch with Donald Trump.In a three-minute video opening with images of the US Capitol attack, Biden warned that the US remains under threat from the anti-democratic forces unleashed by his predecessor, who he beat in 2020.Biden said: “When I ran for president four years ago, I said we were in a battle for the soul of America – and we still are.”The president launched his re-election campaign on the fourth anniversary of his return to politics in 2019, when he declared his third presidential run. Since then, the political landscape has changed.The US is still grappling with the scars of a pandemic that killed more than 1.1 million and with inflation that has eased from historic highs but remains painful. Americans remain deeply divided, convulsed by the loss of federal abortion rights, near-weekly mass shootings and worsening climate disasters.Already the oldest president, Biden would be 86 before the end of a second term, nearly a decade older than Ronald Reagan was when he left the White House in 1989. Trump is 76.In his video, Biden warned that “Maga extremists” – Trump’s slogan is “Make America Great Again” – were working to strip away “bedrock freedoms”.“Cutting social security that you’ve paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy,” Biden said. “Dictating what healthcare decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they can love. All while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.”The president and his wife, Jill Biden, had made his intentions known. But Biden felt little need to rush after a better-than-expected Democratic performance in the midterm elections tamped down calls for a serious primary challenge.Ultimately, the president chose to wait until after his tour of Ireland, a three-day trip he said restored his “sense of optimism”. Returning home, he told reporters he planned to “run again”.The vice-president, Kamala Harris, the highest-ranking woman and person of color in US politics, will be Biden’s running mate again.Biden is dogged by low approval ratings and concerns about his age. Only a quarter of Americans want him to run, according to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Among Democrats, that figure is 50%. Should Biden win the nomination, as expected, most Democrats will support him.On Tuesday, Biden was due to welcome the president of South Korea. Next month, he will travel to the G7 summit in Japan. His team will begin to formalize a campaign expected to be headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware.Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a senior White House adviser and granddaughter of the celebrated labor leader César Chávez, will be campaign manager. Her principal deputy will be Quentin Fulks, a strategist who ran Raphael Warnock’s Senate re-election campaign in Georgia, a battleground state Biden won in 2020. The announcement begins a fundraising sprint. Donors have been summoned to Washington.Hours after making his candidacy official, during remarks to union workers at a conference in Washington, Biden was greeted by chants of “four more years”.“Our economic plan is working,” he said in a speech rife with references to his working-class upbringing in Scranton, Pennsylvania.“Let’s finish the job,” he said.Biden has made clear he plans to run on accomplishments in the first half of his presidency, when Democrats had majorities in Congress.Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, delivering financial assistance to those hit hard by Covid. He also approved a $1tn infrastructure bill; signed the first major federal gun safety bill in nearly 30 years; pursued initiatives to both treat veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and boost the semiconductor industry; and made Ketanji Brown Jackson the first Black woman on the supreme court.Perhaps his most significant legislative achievement to date is the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant US response to the climate crisis.But while Biden’s policies are broadly popular, he has struggled to earn credit. He has spent the last few months attempting to sell his economic policies and rally Americans before a showdown with Republicans over the federal debt limit.On the world stage, Biden has rallied a global coalition behind Ukraine in response to Russia’s invasion while seeking to strengthen US defenses against China. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, however, was among the lowest points of Biden’s presidency, even as he fulfilled a promise to end America’s longest war.Republicans greeted Biden’s announcement by assailing his handling of immigration and the economy.“Biden is so out-of-touch that after creating crisis after crisis, he thinks he deserves another four years,” said Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee. “If voters let Biden ‘finish the job’, inflation will continue to skyrocket, crime rates will rise, more fentanyl will cross our open borders, children will continue to be left behind, and American families will be worse off.”Biden must negotiate with a divided Congress, Republicans holding the House. Biden plans to use a showdown over raising the federal borrowing limit to draw a contrast with Republican economic priorities, which he argues are aligned with big business and special interests.In his campaign video, Biden warned that individual freedoms are under attack by far-right Republicans who have trampled reproductive, voting and LGBTQ+ rights.“This is not a time to be complacent,” he said. “I know America. I know we’re good and decent people.”After nearly a half-century in public life including 36 years as a senator from Delaware and eight years as the vice-president to Barack Obama, Biden called himself a “bridge” to the next generation of Democrats. But only two fringe candidates have challenged him for the nomination: the self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr.The Republican field is growing. Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, has entered the race. The South Carolina senator Tim Scott has taken steps to run. The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is widely expected to announce. Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, is also weighing a run.Trump announced his candidacy after the midterms in November. He and Biden both face federal investigations over their handling of classified information. In Biden’s case, documents were discovered at his office and home. His lawyers have stressed they are cooperating.Trump resisted efforts to retrieve materials he took to his Florida estate. But that is just one of many legal challenges he faces. Earlier this month, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal charges related to hush money payments to a porn star. He also faces investigations into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, trial over a rape accusation, and a civil suit over his business affairs.Ahead of Biden’s announcement, Trump lashed out, saying the “five worst presidents in American history” combined had not inflicted the “damage Joe Biden has done”.In his video, Biden said: “Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they’ve had to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedoms. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights.”
Joan E Greve contributed reporting. More

The US supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch made as much as $500,000 from a 2017 real estate sale, according to a new report, but did not disclose the identity of the buyer: the chief executive of a law firm with extensive business before the high court.The news represents a new headache for the chief justice, John Roberts, who Democrats want to testify over extensive media reporting about the relationship between Clarence Thomas, another conservative, and a Republican mega-donor, Harlan Crow.Gorsuch was confirmed in 2017, the first of three appointments under Donald Trump which tilted the court firmly right.He has since voted with conservative majorities in decisions including the removal of the federal right to abortion and a loosening of gun control laws.The chief executive who bought property from Gorsuch, Brian Duffy of Greenberg Traurig, told Politico, he had “never spoken” to Gorsuch. “I’ve never met him.”But news of Duffy’s $1.825m purchase of the Colorado property, of which Gorsuch was one of three co-owners and which the justice said in disclosure documents netted him between $250,001 and $500,000 after being on the market two years, followed news of Crow’s largesse to Thomas.ProPublica reported Crow’s gifts, including luxury travel and holidays, and Thomas’s failure to declare them.Amid widespread reporting about Crow’s collection of Nazi memorabilia, including paintings by Adolf Hitler, ProPublica also reported that Crow bought property from Thomas: a house in Georgia in which Thomas’s mother lives.Thomas said he was advised he did not need to declare such gifts. Crow, who also gave money to Thomas’s wife, the far-right activist Ginni Thomas, said he and his friend never discussed politics or court business.Outlets including the Guardian have shown that groups linked to Crow have had business before the court in the time of his friendship with Thomas.Calls for action against Thomas, including impeachment, are unlikely to produce results. Supreme court justices are subject to federal regulations but in practice govern themselves. But public trust in the court has reached historic lows.Politico said Duffy’s firm had been involved in “at least 22 cases before or presented to the court”, including filing amicus briefs or representing parties, while Gorsuch was on the court.“In the 12 cases where Gorsuch’s opinion is recorded,” the site said, “he sided with Greenberg Traurig clients eight times and against them four times.”Politico also noted Greenberg’s involvement in a major lawsuit over a climate change plan during Barack Obama’s presidency.Gorsuch, it said, “joined the court’s other five conservatives in agreeing with the plaintiffs – including Greenberg’s client – that the Environmental Protection Agency had overstepped its authority by regulating carbon emissions from power plants”.Gorsuch, Politico said, “did not respond to inquiries about the [property] sale, his disclosures or whether he should have reported Duffy’s identity as the purchaser”.Duffy said he did not know Gorsuch was a co-owner when he made his offer, adding: “The fact he was going to be a supreme court justice was absolutely irrelevant to the purchase.”The Democratic chair of the Senate judiciary committee, Dick Durbin, said: “We have seen a steady stream of revelations regarding supreme court justices falling short of the ethical standards expected of other federal judges and of public servants.“The need for supreme court ethics reform is clear, and if the court does not take adequate action, Congress must.”Kyle Herrig, president of the watchdog Accountable.US, said: “Without decisive action, the conservatives on the supreme court will forever tarnish its reputation in our public life.” More

It’s not surprising, but now it’s official: Joe Biden is running for re-election. In a video on Tuesday launching his bid for a second term, Biden cast his administration as standing for personal freedom, democracy and pluralism in contrast to what he called “Maga extremists”. The video emphasized abortion rights and contrasted Biden and the Democrats with unsettling images of the Capitol insurrectionists. Echoing a repeated line from his most recent State of the Union address, the president implored Americans: “Let’s finish the job.”There will be no primary. True, Biden has disaffected some members of the Democratic party’s precariously large coalition, and he has failed to capture the hearts and imaginations of Americans the way that, say, Barack Obama did. In 2020, a basketball team’s worth of Democrats entered the presidential primary – partly out of perceptions of then president Trump’s weakness, but also partly because Biden seemed like such a poor fit to be the party’s standard-bearer.He’s an old white man in a party that is predominantly female, increasingly non-white and very young. He is a moderate in a party with a resurgent left. And he is a bone-deep believer in the merits of compromise and bipartisanship, in an era where the Republican party has become anathema to cooperation, hostile to Democratic governance and committed to racial and gender hierarchies that are not worth compromising with. He seemed like a man out of time, responding to the political conditions of a different era; it was unclear, then, that he could see the country as it really was, unclear that he could confront the true threat.As he announces his re-election campaign, four years after he threw his hat into the ring for 2020, Biden has quieted these fears, if not disproved them. The left, leaderless after Bernie Sanders’s defeat in the 2020 primary, has not formed a cohesive bloc, and their pressures on the Biden administration have been noble but sporadic. Congressional Republicans hamstrung most of Biden’s agenda, causing him to abandon, in particular, promises he made to help Americans get affordable childcare; but he still managed to pass a large infrastructure bill, as well as Covid relief.The pandemic has largely receded, and both deaths and new infections are down. Inflation is slowing, and jobs numbers are encouraging. The economy, while not perfect, seems to be benefiting from the stability of Democratic leadership, with stock prices no longer beholden to wild fluctuations in the aftermath of an errant comment or impulsive tweet from Trump.When Russia invaded Ukraine, unleashing horrific humanitarian catastrophes on the people there and endangering other European allies, a trap was laid that could have easily drawn the United States into war. Biden and his administration have deftly kept us out of it. The president who once seemed like an out-of-touch old man has been successfully rebranded as an affable grandfather whose gaffes are thoughtless but aggressively well-meaning.Even major missteps do not seem to have meaningfully injured Biden. The administration was shockingly tone-deaf and ill-prepared following the US supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, having little in the way of policy proposals to reduce the humanitarian and dignity harms imposed on American women – and at one point, trying to appoint an anti-choice judge to a lifetime seat, before withdrawing the nomination under pressure.Despite the primacy Tuesday’s campaign announcement gave abortion rights, Biden has generally seemed uncomfortable and incompetent on the issue, even as women face degradation and medical emergencies inflicted at the hands of conservative states; he has largely shied away from directly addressing abortion, and shunted it off to his unpopular, largely powerless vice-president, Kamala Harris – whose own marginalization within the administration is a signal of how little he values the issue.Even since Dobbs, Biden has been entirely unwilling to confront the federal judiciary – a captured and unaccountable extremist rightwing body that will foil his whole agenda, and gradually eliminate both pluralist society and representative democracy, if it is not reformed. Yet the Republicans’ virulent misogyny and bald sadism on abortion seems poised to be a boon to Democrats anyway: it was mostly abortion that drove voters to give a worse-than-expected showing to Republicans in the 2022 midterms, and to allow Democrats to keep control of the Senate.In that sense, the political fallout of the Dobbs decision may serve as a good model for the Democrats’ emerging 2024 strategy: they don’t need to be especially good, because the Republicans are so cruelly and chaotically worse. The Republican party is in shambles – internally divided; married to gruesome and unpopular policies, particularly on gender, that alienate voters; branded as violent, antisocial and creepy. There’s still a long way to go, but the Republican party seems only slightly less eager to anoint Trump as their nominee than the Democrats have been to appoint Biden.It very well may wind up being a rematch of the 2020 election – only now, Trump is even weaker, even more marginal, even more disliked, linked forever the memory of the January 6 violence and devoid of what was once his novelty and comedy and reduced to a rambling catalogue of personal grievances. With an opponent like that, it might not matter much if all that Biden has to offer is a series of charming anachronisms, or grinning photo ops in his aviators.All the Republicans have to offer is sex obsession and cheesy fraud, parading a series of candidates for state and federal office who talk like a collection of snake-oil salesmen and gun fetishists. Biden isn’t going into 2024 particularly strong. But right now, the Republicans are particularly weak.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and civil rights activist who broke down racial barriers, has died aged 96.As well as performing global hits such as Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), winning a Tony award for acting and appearing in numerous feature films, Belafonte spent his life fighting for a variety of causes. He bankrolled numerous 1960s initiatives to bring civil rights to Black Americans; campaigned against poverty, apartheid and Aids in Africa; and supported leftwing political figures such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.The cause of death was congestive heart failure, his spokesman told the New York Times. Figures including the rapper Ice Cube and Mia Farrow paid tribute to Belafonte. The US news anchor Christiane Amanpour tweeted that he “inspired generations around the whole world in the struggle for non-violent resistance justice and change. We need his example now more than ever.”Bernice King, daughter of Dr Martin Luther King, shared a picture of Belafonte at her father’s funeral and said that he “showed up for my family in very compassionate ways. In fact, he paid for the babysitter for me and my siblings.” The Beninese-French musician Angélique Kidjo called Belafonte “the brightest star in every sense of that word. Your passion, love, knowledge and respect for Africa was unlimited.”Belafonte was born in 1927 in working-class Harlem, New York, and spent eight years of his childhood in his impoverished parents’ native Jamaica. He returned to New York for high school but struggled with dyslexia and dropped out in his early teens. He took odd jobs working in markets and the city’s garment district, and then signed up to the US navy aged 17 in March 1944, working as a munitions loader at a base in New Jersey.After the war ended, he worked as a janitor’s assistant, but aspired to become an actor after watching plays at New York’s American Negro Theatre (along with fellow aspiring actor Sidney Poitier). He took acting classes – where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Walter Matthau – paid for by singing folk, pop and jazz numbers at New York club gigs, where he was backed by groups whose members included Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.He released his debut album in 1954, a collection of traditional folk songs. His second album, Belafonte, was the first No 1 in the new US Billboard album chart in March 1956, but its success was outdone by his third album the following year, Calypso, featuring songs from his Jamaican heritage. It brought the feelgood calypso style to many Americans for the first time, and became the first album to sell more than a million copies in the US.The lead track was Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), a signature song for Belafonte – it spent 18 weeks in the UK singles chart, including three weeks at No 2. His version of Mary’s Boy Child was a UK chart-topper later that year, while Island in the Sun reached No 3. He released 30 studio albums, plus collaborative albums with Nana Mouskouri, Lena Horne and Miriam Makeba. The latter release won him one of his two Grammy awards; he was later awarded a lifetime achievement Grammy and the Academy’s president’s merit award.Bob Dylan’s first recording – playing harmonica – was on Belafonte’s 1962 album, Midnight Special. The previous year, Belafonte had been hired by Frank Sinatra to perform at John F Kennedy’s presidential inauguration.Belafonte maintained an acting career alongside music, winning a Tony award in 1954 for his appearance in the musical revue show, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, and appearing in several films, most notably as one of the leads in Island in the Sun, along with James Mason, Joan Fontaine and Joan Collins, with whom he had an affair. He was twice paired with Dorothy Dandridge, in Carmen Jones and Bright Road, but he turned down a third film, an adaptation of Porgy and Bess, which he found “racially demeaning”.He later said the decision “helped fuel the rebel spirit” that was brewing in him, a spirit he parlayed into a lifetime of activism, using his newfound wealth to fund various initiatives. He was mentored by Martin Luther King Jr and Paul Robeson, and bailed King out of a Birmingham, Alabama, jail in 1963 as well as co-organising the march on Washington that culminated in King’s “I have a dream” speech. He also funded the Freedom Riders and SNCC, activists fighting unlawful segregation in the American south, and worked on voter registration drives.He later focused on a series of African initiatives. He organised the all-star charity record We Are the World, raising more than $63m for famine relief, and his 1988 album, Paradise in Gazankulu, protested against apartheid in South Africa. He was appointed a Unicef goodwill ambassador in 1987, and later campaigned to eradicate Aids from Africa.After recovering from prostate cancer in 1996, he advocated for awareness of the disease. He was a fierce proponent of leftwing politics, criticising hawkish US foreign policy, campaigning against nuclear armament, and meeting with both Castro and Chavez. At the meeting with Chavez, in 2006, he described US president George W Bush as “the greatest terrorist in the world”. He also characterised Bush’s Black secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as being like slaves who worked in their master’s house rather than in the fields, criticisms that Powell and Rice rejected.He was a frequent critic of Democrats, particularly Barack Obama, over issues including Guantanamo Bay detentions and the fight against rightwing extremism. He criticised Jay-Z and Beyoncé in 2012 for having “turned their back on social responsibility … Give me Bruce Springsteen, and now you’re talking. I really think he is Black.” Jay-Z responded: “You’re this civil rights activist and you just bigged up the white guy against me in the white media … that was just the wrong way to go about it.”He continued to take occasional acting roles. In 2018, he appeared in the Spike Lee movie BlacKkKlansman. In 2014, 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen announced he was working with Belafonte on a film about Paul Robeson, though it wasn’t developed.Belafonte was married three times, first to Marguerite Byrd, from 1948 to 1957, with whom he had two daughters, activist Adrienne and actor Shari. He had two further children with his second wife, Julie Robinson: actor Gina and music producer David. He and Robinson divorced after 47 years, and in 2008 he married Pamela Frank, who survives him. More

LaTosha Brown: ‘Biden can hold together a big tent’After surviving the Trump debacle, it was important that we had an administration that could re-establish some level of credibility in the political arena. Given the volatility of the current political environment and the depth of political division in America, Biden has demonstrated he is able to hold together a big tent of diverse groups and push an agenda.We need political leadership from someone who believes in democracy, can navigate the intense political polarization of this moment, and bring some sense of civility back to American politics.While I remain a critic of Biden’s criminal justice reform policies, it is astounding, given the obstructionist efforts of the Republican party to block any measurable progress, that he has been able to get so much of his agenda through a deeply divided Congress. Whether or not one agrees with all his policies, he has been an effective president.We live in a country that is riddled with “isms” – including ageism. Aside from the false and fear-based narratives planted by rightwing Republicans, there is nothing in Biden’s leadership, decision-making or policies that indicates he is incapable of leading or serving as president.
LaTosha Brown is the co-founder of Black Voters Matter
Jill Filipovic: ‘Safety beats idealism’It pains me to say this, but Joe Biden should run for re-election.Biden was toward the bottom of my picks during the 2020 Democratic primary. He’s a moderate Democrat, and he’s lackluster when it comes to the issues I care most about: women’s rights, abortion rights, LGBT rights, immigration. While Biden has become more adept at using the right language on these issues, his administration’s policies have ranged from largely absent (abortion) to terrible (immigration).Still: he should run, and I will vote for him if he does.The specter of another Donald Trump presidency, or a Ron DeSantis presidency, is a national emergency. Trump attempted to foment a coup; he is on the campaign trail making clear that, if he wins, he will lean even harder into American fascism than he did the last time around. DeSantis, who seems less and less likely to win the Republican nomination by the day, is well into the process of turning Florida into an authoritarian state, where the government is seizing everything from the right to one’s own body to the right to knowledge.Biden has proven he is capable of beating Trump. He’s also been a surprisingly good president, pushing through legislation that fights climate change, supports American job growth, and helped Americans stay afloat during the pandemic.There are other candidates I would be excited about: Senator Elizabeth Warren; Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer; and Congresswomen Katie Porter and Ayanna Pressley. But I worry that any of those women would lose to Trump, despite their superior intelligence and qualifications.Joe Biden is not the most thrilling choice. But he’s the safest one. And with the country facing a grave threat from Donald Trump, safety beats idealism.
Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness
Osita Nwanevu: ‘Too late to change course’Is it a good idea for Biden to run again? Well, let’s think through what would happen if he didn’t. While most Americans and a substantial proportion of Democrats don’t want to see him in office again, bowing out would still take most of his party by surprise. Harris hasn’t cemented herself as a natural successor; a chaotic, unwieldy, and wide-open primary would begin immediately. There’d be a mad scramble for donors and attention followed by months and months of doubtlessly amusing heat and noise that would end with the nomination of a candidate that would be perhaps unknown to most of the public and lack the advantages of incumbency.Republicans would argue that Biden’s about-face reflected a lack of confidence in Democratic accomplishments and the Democratic agenda; many Americans, already rather unimpressed with Biden’s substantively respectable legislative record, would probably agree.There might have been an opening for an alternative ⁠– if Biden had signaled that he’d step away last year or even earlier in his term, there would have been more time for a primary field to develop and introduce itself to the electorate in an orderly way. But it’s simply too late now. Joe’s the guy, for better or for worse.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist
Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘There appears no real successor to Biden’If the goal is the surest route to beat Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, or whatever Republican emerges out of the 2024 primary, then the answer to whom the Democrats should run should be clear. Joe Biden is an incumbent who just beat a sitting president in an election less than three years ago.Even if he doesn’t always take advantage of it, Biden commands the White House’s bully pulpit. And, amid the backdrop of an improving economy, Trump’s legal issues, and the public outrage at the Republican party’s crusade against abortion rights, he would enter any contest as a favorite.Still, we should be very clear that Biden will only be favored to win an election because of the people he’s up against. The president is unpopular, he hasn’t made good on his self-proclaimed “New Deal-sized” ambitions, and a large majority of Americans don’t want him to run again.Yet at the national level, there appears to be no real successor to Biden. Even if health were to prevent him from running again in 2024, among mainstream Democrats Kamala Harris is also unpopular and plagued by reports of mismanagement within her office. On the left, the situation is just as bleak. Bernie Sanders is even older than Biden, and none of his vaunted successors, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have proven electorally viable beyond deep-blue districts or managed to emulate the Vermont senator’s plainspoken class-warrior language.Hopefully, that will change by 2028. In the meantime, however, both centrist and progressive Democrats alike have a lot of work to do cohering a base and getting candidates ready to contest for power. Biden may be the best answer to 2024’s stupid question – and that’s an indictment of the Democratic party’s last few years.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

In a swing state that’s likely to decide the next presidential election, two new third parties want to get on the ballot and other groups want to remake the way votes are cast and counted.Arizona, which voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 as the state has grown more purple, could see big shifts to its political establishment in the next year, all premised on the idea that the dominance of the two main political parties creates dysfunction and prevents progress on issues that matter to voters. That has Democrats and Republicans here worried.One new party, No Labels, gathered enough signatures to put candidates on the ballot in 2024. Another new party, Forward, is starting to gather signatures to get ballot status.Separately, a coalition of voting groups has surveyed voters to understand their thoughts on ranked-choice voting and open primaries in an effort to run a 2024 ballot measure that would greenlight the concepts in Arizona.While similar efforts are afoot in other states and nationwide, Arizona provides a fertile place to experiment with attempts to reimagine elections.About one-third of Arizona voters aren’t registered with a political party. Both major parties try to court these independent voters to build winning coalitions. In recent years, Democrats have been more successful at amassing independent support, though Republicans dominated for decades before that.The state also has one of the country’s most prominent independents – Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the former Democrat who left the party earlier this year and hasn’t said whether or how she’ll run to keep her seat in 2024.Because of its new status as a swing state, donors are now much more interested in spending money in Arizona. This influx of cash means more groups can afford to gather signatures and promote ballot measures, both of which can cost millions in Arizona.And with a state Republican party that’s affixed to the far right, there’s an opening for centrist and center-right candidates who could seek support from moderate Republicans and right-leaning independents.The level of extremism and dysfunction shows why a two-party system with closed primaries doesn’t work, said longtime consultant Chuck Coughlin, who is working with Save Democracy Arizona, a group advancing ranked-choice voting in Arizona.“You did experience the same election I just did, did you not? You did experience this overwhelming feeling of joy with candidates you had to choose from?” he joked about the vitriolic 2022 campaigns. “The obvious answer is because the system is so badly broken right now.”The rise of third partiesPaul Bentz, a Republican consultant and pollster in Arizona, said the dissatisfaction with the two main parties has created a lane for third parties. One big hurdle, though, is that independents often pride themselves on their lack of party affiliation.“What independents do care about is the candidates, and they want to choose based on the issues,” Bentz said. “So if this gives a platform for an alternative individual to present different issues and let independents choose them, that would be something that’s very attractive to them. But there is no independent party because independents specifically don’t want to be part of a party.”No Labels, a centrist party founded in 2010, so far has ballot status in Alaska, Oregon, Colorado and Arizona, though the group wants to be on the ballot in 22 states by the end of the year, spokesperson Maryanne Martini said.It’s not clear if the party will run any candidates in Arizona next year. Martini said the group isn’t actively recruiting candidates at this point.Soon after No Labels gained ballot status, the Arizona Democratic party sued to try to get it removed. Democrats overall have been more vocally concerned than Republicans about these incoming centrist parties, fearing they will peel off votes from the left and spoil races for Democrats.In its lawsuit, the Arizona Democratic party alleges No Labels isn’t following requirements for political parties and didn’t follow laws for signature-gathering, so it shouldn’t be recognized as a party in the state.“Arizonans deserve better and voters deserve to know who is behind this shadowy organization and what potentially nefarious agenda they are pushing,” the Arizona Democratic party spokesperson Morgan Dick said when the lawsuit was announced.Martini called the lawsuit “undemocratic and outrageous”.“If either party in Arizona is worried about a No Labels candidate taking votes away from them, we think they should focus more on appealing to the growing commonsense majority they often ignore and less on filing baseless lawsuits to try to kick competitors off the ballot,” she said.The Forward party, a moderate party co-chaired by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, has legal status in six states and is working toward it in nearly two dozen others this year. In addition to gathering signatures, the party is hosting community events in Arizona to build support, said Chris Hendrickson, the state lead for the party.At a kick-off event in March, four Democratic members of the Arizona house of representatives declared themselves “Forward Democrats”. They aren’t leaving their party, but they support Forward’s mission. Last year, Forward endorsed Democratic US senator Mark Kelly and independent congressional candidate Clint Smith.“I don’t think the objective is to push out any one party or another,” Hendrickson said. “We really need to have four or five legitimate parties who all bring something to the table.”A lot of the consternation over centrist parties relates to the 2024 presidential election. Democrats worry a third-party candidate could cost them the presidency and throw the election to Republicans, possibly to Trump.No Labels said it “is not running and will not run a presidential campaign”. The Forward party also said it won’t run a presidential candidate in 2024 and is primarily interested in state and local elections.Tony Cani, a Democratic consultant, said the third parties would serve more to hurt Democrats than dismantle a two-party system, though he understands voters’ interest in ending two-party dominance.“The problem is adding minor parties doesn’t put an end to a two-party system,” Cani said. “It just creates new minor parties that will end up with the same chance of winning elections as the Libertarian and Green parties.”A push for ranked-choice votingOther groups want to see the way Arizonans vote change to allow more moderate candidates to win elections and force the parties to run more broadly appealing campaigns.Ranked-choice voting comes in different forms, but typically asks voters to rank candidates in order of their preference. If a voter’s top choice doesn’t get enough votes, their second and subsequent choices are counted until someone gets more than 50% of votes. The system sometimes necessitates an open primary election, where voters don’t need to select which party’s primary to participate in.Coughlin, the consultant who’s working on a potential ballot measure, said the group is still surveying voters to understand whether a measure could be successful. So far, the groups are looking at a final-five version of voting, where all candidates appear on one primary ballot and the top five move to a general.“Our goal is to make sure that nobody can win in a primary and that all of the decisions are made in November and that we create the greatest amount of competition possible,” he said.Ranked-choice voting confuses some voters, but the idea of open primaries tends to get more support. Partisan, closed primaries are now paid for by taxpayers in Arizona, and focus groups have strongly favored defunding them, Coughlin said.To gather enough signatures and then run a campaign to support a ranked-choice ballot measure would cost around $20m. Coughlin said the group would need to start collecting signatures by August.Though Save Democracy Arizona may not shoot for a ballot measure next year, the idea of ranked-choice voting has Republican lawmakers pushing proposed laws to stop the effort.Republicans in the legislature sent a question to the ballot for next year that would prohibit anything but the kind of primary elections Arizona has now. That means there could be measures to approve ranked-choice voting and to prohibit it on the same ballot.They also approved a bill that prohibits ranked-choice voting at any level in Arizona, though that proposal was vetoed. The Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, said the bill was unnecessary as the practice isn’t used in Arizona, and that ranked-choice voting “is used successfully elsewhere in the country”. More

E Jean Carroll is an 80 year-old former journalist who, until she accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her, was best known as an advice columnist for Elle magazine for 26 years.The column was praised for its forthright writing including Carroll’s view that women should never build their lives around men and the compassion of her replies to readers seeking advice. Elle terminated Carroll’s contract in 2019. She said the magazine fired her because of her dispute with Trump. Elle denied it.Born in Detroit and raised in Indiana, Carroll began writing for leading magazines of the era, including Rolling Stone and Playboy, after drawing attention with a “witty literary quiz” about Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald for Esquire.Carroll left her husband and moved to New York where she established herself as “feminism’s answer to Hunter S Thompson”. By the mid-1980s she was writing for Saturday Night Live. A decade later she turned the advice column into a television talk show, Ask E Jean.Carroll was well known within New York’s literary set. But she is now likely to be best remembered for her book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, and for suing Trump. The book describes the alleged assault by the now former president and attacks by other men, including the former chief executive of CBS Les Moonves, who was forced out over allegations of sexual harassment. More

North Dakota on Monday adopted one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the US as the Republican governor Doug Burgum signed legislation banning the procedure throughout pregnancy, with slim exceptions up to six weeks’ gestation.In those early weeks, abortion would be allowed only in cases of rape, incest or medical emergency, such as ectopic pregnancy.“This bill clarifies and refines existing state law … and reaffirms North Dakota as a pro-life state,” Burgum said in a statement.Last year’s US supreme court ruling overturning the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide has triggered multiple state laws banning or restricting the procedure. Many were met with legal challenges. Currently, bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy are in place in at least 13 states and on hold in others because of court injunctions. On the other side, Democratic governors in at least 20 states this year launched a network intended to strengthen abortion access in the wake of the supreme court decision that eliminated women’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy and shifted regulatory powers over the procedure to state governments.The North Dakota law is designed to take effect immediately, but last month the state supreme court ruled a previous ban is to remain blocked while a lawsuit over its constitutionality proceeds. Last week, lawmakers said they intended to pass the latest bill as a message to the state’s high court signaling that the people of North Dakota want to restrict abortion.Supporters have said the measure signed Monday protects all human life, while opponents contend it will have dire consequences.North Dakota no longer has any abortion clinics. Last summer, the state’s only facility, the Red River Women’s Clinic, shut its doors in Fargo and moved operations a short distance across the border to Moorhead, Minnesota, where abortion remains legal. The clinic’s owner is still pursuing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of North Dakota’s previous abortion ban.It’s expected that this new ban will also be the subject of legal challenges.Republican Senator Janne Myrdal, of Edinburg, sponsored the latest state legislation.“North Dakota has always been pro-life and believed in valuing the moms and children both,” Myrdal said in an interview. “We’re pretty happy and grateful that the governor stands with that value.”Liz Conmy, a Democratic representative, voted against the bill and said she had hoped Burgum would not sign it.“I don’t think women in North Dakota are going to accept this and there will be action in the future to get our rights back,” Conmy said. “Our legislature is overwhelmingly pro-pregnancy, but I think women in the state would like to make their own decisions.” More