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      Elon’s politics: how Musk became a driver of elections misinformation

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      When Elon Musk took over as owner of Twitter, researchers and elections officials feared a rampant spread of misinformation that would lead to threats and harassment and undermine democracy.Their fears came true – and Musk himself has emerged as one of its main drivers.The tech billionaire has cast doubt on machines that tabulate votes and mail ballots, both common features of US elections. He has repeatedly claimed there is rampant non-citizen voting, a frequent Republican talking point in this election.Musk, the ultra-wealthy owner of Tesla and other tech companies, is scheduled to interview Donald Trump on Monday, where they are sure to find common ground on these election conspiracies. Musk is a vocal supporter of the former US president and current Republican nominee. He has restored the Twitter/X accounts of people banned under previous ownership, dismantling the platform’s fact-checking and safety features. Trump’s X account, which was suspended after the January 6 insurrection, was restored as well, though Trump has not returned actively to the platform.“Electronic voting machines and anything mailed in is too risky. We should mandate paper ballots and in-person voting only,” he wrote on X in July.Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer responded, asking if he could give Musk a tour of the large Arizona county’s facilities and run through the mail voting processes.“You can go into all the rooms. You can examine all the equipment. You can ask any question you want. We’d love to show you the security steps already in place, which I think are very sound,” Richer said.It wasn’t the only time Richer has sought to correct election misinformation Musk had shared. He previously tried to fix misunderstandings of Arizona voter data and rules for proof of citizenship.Social media platforms overall have taken less aggressive stances on fact-checking election falsehoods after an ongoing campaign by Republican lawmakers and their allies to attack the ways information was flagged by elected officials and researchers and how platforms responded.“I think X really kind of sticks out as a place where that change has been striking, and for it to come from the very top kind of just shows how much of an issue it is,” said Mekela Panditharatne, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s elections & government program.Musk shared a video that used an AI-generated voice for Kamala Harris, which raised concerns that it could fool some people into thinking it was real. Musk and the video creator defended it as parody.He has also written multiple times claiming that non-citizens are voting in US elections, which is illegal except in a few local elections. There are few instances of non-citizens voting, or even registering to vote. In late July, he shared a video of Elizabeth Warren talking about a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented people living in the US. “As I was saying, they’re importing voters,” he said, a nod to “great replacement” theory.Grok, the platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot that Musk has billed as an “anti-woke” antidote to left-biased chatbots, has spread false information that ballot deadlines had passed in nine states, meaning the vice-president couldn’t get on the ballot in those places, which is untrue. Secretaries of state are urging Musk to fix this issue for the chatbot that doesn’t have election information guardrails that other chatbots, like ChatGPT, do.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s important that social media companies, especially those with global reach, correct mistakes of their own making – as in the case of the Grok AI chatbot simply getting the rules wrong,” Minnesota secretary of state Steve Simon told the Washington Post. “Speaking out now will hopefully reduce the risk that any social media company will decline or delay correction of its own mistakes between now and the November election.”Off the platform, a political action committee Musk created is mining personal information from voters in key states in what appears to users to initially look like a voter registration portal, CNBC reported. America Pac, a pro-Trump group backed by Musk’s enormous wealth, is targeting swing states voters. The data scraping is now being investigated by at least two states.Despite his endless claims about election fraud, Musk told the Atlantic this month he would accept the results of the 2024 election – with a caveat.“If there are questions of election integrity, they should be properly investigated and neither be dismissed out of hand nor unreasonably questioned,” he said. “If, after review of the election results, it turns out that Kamala wins, that win should be recognized and not disputed.” More

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      ‘She makes us proud’: Harris raises over $12m in California as Pelosi welcomes her home

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      Kamala Harris returned home to the San Francisco Bay area for a Sunday fundraiser that drew top California Democrats and captured more than $12m for the conclusion of a swing state tour by the vice-president and her running mate, Tim Walz.Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and California governor Gavin Newsom attended the event in San Francisco at the Fairmont Hotel, where nearly 700 people had purchased tickets that cost at least $3,300 and as much as $500,000.“This is a good day when we welcome Kamala Harris back home to California,” Pelosi said of the former US senator, attorney general and district attorney from the state.“She makes us all so proud. She brings us so much joy. She gives us so much hope,” Pelosi said at the fundraiser. She went on to describe Harris as a person of “great strength” and someone who is “politically very astute”.Harris and Walz, the Minnesota governor, have just finished a tour of multiple political swing states, packing rallies with thousands of people and building on the momentum that has propelled her since she took over at the top of the Democratic ticket.Pelosi, the longtime lawmaker and Washington power broker, is credited with helping usher Joe Biden out of the presidential race.The president, 81, stepped aside last month after a poor debate performance against Donald Trump sparked turmoil within the Democratic party and concerns that he could not beat the former president nor complete a second four-year term.Pelosi’s comments in a television interview suggesting that Biden had not yet decided whether to step aside were viewed as giving an opening to worried Democratic lawmakers to urge him to leave even as Biden said he was staying.Pelosi has praised Biden’s achievements while criticizing his former campaign. On Sunday she connected Harris, 59, to the accomplishments of Biden’s administration.“She knows the issues. She knows the strategy. She has gotten an enormous amount done working with Joe Biden,” Pelosi said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris acknowledged the enthusiasm but cautioned against getting caught up in it.“We can take nothing for granted in this critical moment,” she said, after thanking Pelosi for her friendship and support. “There is so much about the future of our country that has relied on leaders like Nancy Pelosi that have the grit, the determination, the brilliance to know what’s possible and to make it so,” Harris said.“The energy is undeniable,” Harris said of her campaign. “Yes, the crowds are large.”Her campaign hauled in $36m in the 24 hours following Walz’s selection as running mate and raised $310m in July, according to a campaign spokesperson.Harris, making her own case against Trump, said that if Trump got back into office, he would sign a national ban on abortion into law and warned that California would not be immune. Trump has sought to distance himself from Republican efforts to ban abortion, saying it should be up to individual states.Harris noted that some states’ laws don’t include exceptions for rape and incest, and said it’s “immoral”. “When this issue has been on the ballot, the American people have voted for freedom,” Harris said. More

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      Trump and Vance are unmatched in ‘the Olympics of lying’, says Pete Buttigieg

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      The Republican presidential ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance might be slipping in the polls, but remains unmatched in “the Olympics of lying”, according to transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.The senior Democrat was responding Sunday, the final day of the Paris Olympics, to remarks by the Ohio senator criticizing Tim Walz for misstating his military service in an interview six years ago.The Minnesota governor, announced this week as running mate to Democratic candidate and vice-president Kamala Harris, served 24 years in the army national guard, but never in a combat zone, which he seemed to suggest in the 2018 interview.In an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Buttigieg assailed Vance, himself a former marine corps journalist, for disparaging Walz’s military record at a rally this week and moments earlier on the same show.“I watched that interview and watched JD Vance present himself as suddenly very particular about precision in speech and very concerned about honesty,” Buttigieg said.“He’s running with Donald Trump, somebody who has set records for lying in public life. He just gave a press conference where fact-checkers estimate that he told 162 distortions or lies. That, frankly, is just impressive in terms of being able to physically do that. It’s like the Olympics of lying.”It was quite the zinger from Buttigieg, a former intelligence officer in the US navy reserve who has established a reputation for eloquent takedowns of Republican political positions.“The fact a veteran wants to go out and disparage another veteran just goes against certainly everything I learned during my time in service,” he said.“The fact they have to go back to find a clip from 2018 to find the one time that he slipped up when he talks about the weapons of war that he carried and said something instead about carrying a weapon in war, it’s kind of an exception that proves the rule in terms of how hard you have to look to find Tim Walz saying anything that isn’t precise and accurate.”On State of the Union, Vance insisted he was not impugning Walz’s military service, but “the fact that he lied about his service for political gain”.“I think that’s what Tim Walz did. That’s what I was criticizing. And, yes, I do think it’s scandalous behavior,” he said.A statement from the Harris-Walz campaign on Saturday turned Vance’s earlier criticism around. “Governor Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country. In fact, he thanks Senator Vance for putting his life on the line for our country. It’s the American way,” it said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He did handle weapons of war and believes strongly that only military members trained to carry those deadly weapons should have access to them, unlike Donald Trump and JD Vance who prioritize the gun lobby over our children.”Buttigieg, on CNN, also condemned Vance’s much-maligned commentary that senior Democrats were “a bunch of childless cat ladies”. As part of his clean-up effort for those remarks, Vance claimed Sunday he was not criticizing people for not having children, but for “being anti-child”.“I don’t know which part of that is worse, the lie that he just told when he says he never criticized people for not having kids, because of course he very much did, including Kamala Harris and me and a lot of other people, millions of Americans, in fact, who he disparaged as childless cat ladies,” said Buttigieg, who has two adopted sons with his husband.“The other part, just as troubling, is saying that anybody who disagrees with him is anti-child. It’s part of just who he is, right? He seems incapable of talking about a vision for this country in terms of lifting people up, or building people up, or helping people out.” More

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      The Guardian view on the politics of joy: Democrats are embracing the sunny side | Editorial

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      “Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Tim Walz told Kamala Harris in his first speech after agreeing to become her running mate. He has continued to invoke the emotion, describing himself and Ms Harris as “joyful warriors” against opponents who “try and steal the joy”. Donald Trump has attacked Ms Harris’s ready laughter, but the Democrats are embracing an upbeat coconut-and-brat-meme atmosphere while Republicans invoke American carnage.Rarely have two presidential campaigns had such contrasting moods. Asked by a reporter what made him happy, Mr Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, retorted that “I smile at a lot of things including bogus questions from the media”, and that he was “angry about what Kamala Harris has done to this country”. Mr Trump – along with other rightwing populists globally – has channelled fear and rage to extraordinary effect.“Visceral states and feelings appear at the forefront of the political conversation” in this era, writes Manos Tsakiris, director of the University of London’s Centre for the Politics of Feelings. Voters are less rational and more emotional than we like to believe. Feelings may also have different effects upon different parts of society. US research suggests that dissatisfaction with politicians is more likely to send white voters to the polls and minority voters to other forms of activism.In the past, Democrats have tried to counter lies and loathing with facts. Though fear of Mr Trump motivated voters in 2020, warnings about his return have not proved as effective. People can be indifferent or passive in the face of threats such as the climate crisis. (In contrast, deliberative democracy – such as citizens’ assemblies or community activism – can generate a sense of political agency and re-engage them.) Giving people something to fight for, not just against, may be potent. But there is more research on how emotions such as anger affect politics than there is on emotions such as hope.Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva beat Jair Bolsonaro’s dark vision of Brazil in 2022 with hope, and Rahul Gandhi walked the length of India with a message of love and solidarity, an appeal that cost India’s divisive prime minister, Narendra Modi, his parliamentary majority this year. In Britain, the joy of the Liberal Democrats’ successful election campaign bubbled over. But critiques of “cruel optimism” and “hopium” note that invoking positive emotions can sometimes encourage people to feel good about bad political choices. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos won the Filipino presidency in 2022 with a feelgood social media campaign glamourising his family and his father’s dictatorship.In the US, Ronald Reagan’s sunny “morning in America” advert won plaudits, but Hubert Humphrey’s “politics of joy” didn’t win the Democrat the presidency. For Ms Harris – like Humphrey, a vice-president aspiring to the top job – urging voters to get happy when they’re worrying about bills could be counterproductive. The wrongfooted Trump campaign appears to be pivoting towards attacking her record.Ms Harris seems to recognise the problem, tempering the buoyant mood by acknowledging that grocery prices are too high, for instance. But if a recession hits, striking the right note will be even tougher, and policy will be still more pressing. The Democrats are hoping for the best – but even in a short campaign, vibes will only carry them so far. More

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      Jill Stein reportedly seeks Palestinian Americans as potential running mate

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      Green party presidential nominee Jill Stein is seeking Palestinian Americans as potential running mates for her long shot White House bid, according to reports.Speaking to NBC on Friday, several potential candidates said that they had multiple conversations with Stein about the vice-president position.Stein, who is expected to announce her running mate next Friday, has been a fierce critic of Israel’s ongoing deadly war on Gaza which has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians since Hamas’s attack last October that killed 1,200 Israelis.One candidate is Noura Erakat, a prominent human rights lawyer and professor at Rutgers University. On Friday, Erakat took to X to announce that Stein’s team “approached me to run as her vice-presidential candidate & I am seriously considering it”.“The [Kamala] Harris team is demanding our votes to ‘save our democracy’ but has been oblivious to the fact that supporting a #genocide poses the most significant threat to it,” Erakat added.Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the Washington DC-based American-Arab anti-discrimination committee, announced that he has also been approached by Stein’s team, calling it an “honor to be considered for the VP position”.“Since the start of the genocide I have made a commitment to stick to our shared principles, even if this means being disinvited from meetings, losing access, and being sidelined by establishment,” Ayoud wrote on X.“Dr Stein has consistently held the right position on Gaza, Palestine, and human rights throughout this campaign. Being considered is a testament to the fact that there are still politicians and candidates out there who value integrity and the willingness to stand on the side of justice,” he added.Another among the people interviewed for the job is Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, NBC reports. According to the outlet, Hammoud’s spokesperson confirmed that Stein had asked if he was interested in being considered for the position before realizing that the 34-year old is too young to be eligible for the position. Under the US constitution, vice-presidents are required to be at least 35 years old.Speaking to NBC, political activist and comedian Amer Zahr revealed that he has also spoken with Stein about the position.“I am honored by the consideration and I think it’s important that the Stein campaign is making that kind of direct outreach to Palestinian Americans and Arab Americans, especially in Michigan,” Zahr said.“It shows that, unlike the Harris campaign, she is serious about addressing the core issues in this campaign,” he added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionZahr’s comments came after Harris sparked criticism earlier this week over her handling of anti-war demonstrators who protested during her rally in Detroit, Michigan.In response to the demonstrators who chanted, “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide,” Harris, who does not support an arms embargo on Israel, raised her eyebrows and said, “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”“She could have said, ‘I hear you, we’re going to address this, and if you want it to get better, elect me instead of Donald Trump,’” Zahr told NBC, calling Harris’s response “really disrespectful.“But instead she suggested we want to help get Trump elected … as if we owe her something and she doesn’t owe us,” he continued. More

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      ‘Maybe I’ve gotten worse’: Trump’s attempt at discipline unravels

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      His name was spelled out in bright lights reminiscent of a Broadway show. Donald Trump thanked God for sparing him from an assassin’s bullet. To thousands of devoted fans, the carefully stage-managed Republican national convention felt like the coronation of a man poised for victory over an ageing, ailing incumbent.But Trump’s long and grievance-filled address that night hinted at trouble to come. For months his US presidential election campaign had been praised as tighter, smoother and more professional this time around. Then, when Democrats upended the race by replacing Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as their nominee, the wheels came off.For the past three weeks the former president has been lashing out, pushing lies, hurling insults, trialling nicknames, trafficking in racism and trotting out nonsense as he struggles to regain the narrative from Vice-President Harris.“The campaign is disciplined; their candidate is not,” said Frank Luntz, a consultant and pollster who has a long track record of advising Republican campaigns. “Their candidate is single-handedly destroying his chance for re-election. This is the weakest Democratic nominee in terms of record in a long time but [Trump’s] insistence on making the attacks personal and vicious are blunting their impact and, in fact, backfiring on him.”Although Trump has amply demonstrated his inability to change, he seemed easier to rein in when times were good. The leaders of his third consecutive White House campaign, the veteran operatives Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, earned applause from Republicans as the former president steamrollered opposition during this year’s primary elections.The new sense of command and control seemed to hold as Trump, 78, held a consistent edge over 81-year-old Biden in opinion polls. The Republican nominee’s preposterous riffs about sharks and Hannibal Lecter on the campaign trail raised eyebrows but did nothing to blunt his momentum.Even criminal charges and convictions were rapidly turned into opportunities to raise money and galvanise his base. When Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania last month, and responded by raising his fist and urging supporters to “fight”, headline writers asked: “Did Donald Trump just win the election?”Some wondered if the brush with death would produce a softer, more contemplative candidate. But seasoned Trump watchers pointed out that there have been many false dawns and, ultimately, Trump is always Trump. His 92-minute convention address in Milwaukee recycled old false claims and recriminations and was by the far the longest of any nominee in history.Three days later, everything changed. Bowing to pressure from fellow Democrats, Biden announced that he would not seek re-election and threw his weight behind 59-year-old Harris, around whom the party quickly coalesced. A Trump campaign that had been honed to target Biden’s age was suddenly wrongfooted and trying to define a new opponent. His running mate JD Vance described it as “a political sucker punch”.John Zogby, a pollster and author of Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should, said: “The campaign was much more disciplined than last time and so disciplined that it had its message perfected, which was ‘Sleepy Joe’ and ‘Crooked Joe’. It was all based on Joe Biden. To a large degree Vance was correct when he said they were sucker-punched because this is a whole new situation.“Age and mental acuity are off the table. It’s all going to be about Kamala Harris’s record but she’s in a much better position to control that message than Biden would be. You do see Donald Trump flailing here and being reduced much more to those one-liners – and you wonder if people are getting tired of hearing them.”LaCivita and Wiles appeared to lose control of their candidate. Trump tossed around strange nicknames for his rival such as “Laffin’ Kamala Harris” and “Kamabla”. He unleashed a tirade on his Truth Social platform, describing her as too “low IQ” and “dumb” to debate him. His speeches have become increasingly unhinged.At a rally in Atlanta, he castigated Brian Kemp, the Republican Georgia governor whose support he needs in the swing state. Speaking to evangelicals in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump said: “Christians, get out and vote just this time. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”At a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, Trump turned on his interviewers and falsely questioned Harris’s mixed race heritage, saying: “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Thursday, Trump again demeaned Harris’s intelligence, falsely claimed that no one died at the US Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021 and asserted he had a bigger crowd that day than Martin Luther King when he spoke at the 1963 March on Washington.The Republican also insisted that he continues to lead Harris but polls suggest otherwise as the Democratic nominee and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, ride a wave of voter energy and enthusiasm. She raised $310m in the month of July alone, comfortably ahead of Trump’s $138.7m.Luntz said: “Right now she’s the frontrunner. Right now I think Trump’s gonna lose because he’s incapable of sticking to a message about inflation or immigration. His administration is considered much more successful on the two issues that matter to people yet he’s now tied with or losing to the vice-president of that administration. Why is that? It’s he himself.”The withdrawal of Biden following his dismal debate performance in June did not take Republicans entirely by surprise. Speakers at the convention often referred to the “Biden-Harris” administration in their speeches and the Trump campaign had prepared anti-Harris videos to swap in just in case Biden stepped down sooner.Their central argument is that Harris carries the baggage of Biden’s biggest failures on border security – she was tapped to lead efforts to tackle the migration challenge – as well as inflation and foreign policy. It is a message that needs to be prosecuted with scalpel-like precision. But Trump has come at the problem with a jackhammer.Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist based in Columbia, South Carolina, said: “In the words of Britney Spears, oops! he did it again. While all these people want to remake who Donald Trump really is, he consistently shows us who he is and we should learn that old lesson from the south: there’s no education in the second kick of the mule.”The new Trump turns out to be the same old Trump. Reflecting on the assassination attempt during a recent rally in Minnesota, the former president commented: “They all say, ‘I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him.’ No, I haven’t changed. Maybe I’ve gotten worse, actually.” More

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      Biden says it was his ‘obligation to the country’ to drop out of presidential race

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      Joe Biden has said it was his “obligation to the country” to drop out of the 2024 presidential election and prevent what he said would be “a genuine danger to American security” if Donald Trump won a second term of office.The US president gave his reasoning for stepping aside in at-times an emotional interview with CBS News on Sunday, his first since quitting the race in July. He explained that losing the confidence of senior House and Senate Democrats, who feared his unpopularity would hurt them at the polls in November, had weighed on his mind.Ultimately, Biden said, it was a combination of circumstances that led him to make his momentous decision not to seek re-election, which subsequently saw Vice-President Kamala Harris taking over the Democratic ticket and catching or surpassing Trump in several battleground states, according to new polling data.“Although I have the great honor to be president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do the most important thing you can do, and that is we must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he said.Biden said he did not take the decision lightly, and made it in consultation with his family at home in Delaware. At the time, he said, he still believed he could win in November, but events had “moved quickly” after weeks of pressure and growing unease inside his party that, at 81, he was too old for the rigors of a second term.Those fears were heightened by his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June. “I had a really bad day in that debate because I was sick. But I have no serious problem,” Biden said, denying he was impaired by any cognitive issue.“The polls we had showed that it was a neck and neck race, it would have been down to the wire. But what happened was a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was gonna hurt them in the races and I was concerned if I stayed in the race that would be the topic.“I thought it would be a real distraction. [When] I ran the first time I thought of myself being a transition president. I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get out of my mouth. Things got moving so quickly. And the combination was… a critical issue for me still… is maintaining this democracy.”Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the senior Democrats whose cooling support for Biden was believed to have hastened his decision, gave her own interview Sunday to MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki.“I did not think we were on a path to victory,” she said, adding that she “wanted the decision to be a better campaign so that we could win”.Pelosi praised Biden as a “pre-eminent” president. “He’s right there among the top few, a very consequential president,” she said.Biden became emotional as he recalled a promise he made to his late son Beau about remaining in politics. “He said, ‘I know when it happens, you’re gonna want to quit. You’re not gonna stay engaged. Look at me. Look at me, Dad. Give me your word as a Biden. When I go, you’ll stay engaged. Give me your word.’ And I did.”Later in the interview, recorded last week with CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa in the White House treaty room, Biden expressed his fear for the country if former US president Trump won in November.“Mark my words, if he wins watch what happens. He’s a genuine danger to American security,” he said, adding that he was “not confident at all” there would be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump lost.“We are at an inflection point in world history. We really are. The decisions we make in the next three or four years are going to determine what the next six decades look like, and democracy is the key.“That’s why I made that speech in Johnson Center about the supreme court. The supreme court is so out of whack, so I propose that we limit terms to 18 years. There’s little regard by the Maga (make America great again) Republicans for the political institutions. That’s what holds this country together. That’s what democracy is about. That’s who we are as a nation.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe president also had praise for Harris and Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor she named this week as her running mate.“If we grew up in the same neighborhood, we’d have been friends. He’s my kind of guy. He’s real, he’s smart,” Biden said of Walz.“I’ve known him for several decades. I think it’s a hell of a team.”He said he would be campaigning with Harris in the weeks before the election, and was working with Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro, at one time a frontrunner to be Harris’s vice-presidential pick, on winning the key swing state.“I’m going to be campaigning in other states as well. I’m going to do whatever Kamala thinks I can do to help most,” he said.Other topics during the interview included Biden’s belief that a ceasefire and peace deal in Gaza were still possible before he leaves office in January, despite escalating civilian casualties there and in Lebanon.Asked how he thought his presidency would be remembered, Biden cited leading the country out of the Covid-19 pandemic and economic successes.“When I announced my candidacy I said we’ve got to do three things, restore the soul of America; build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down; and bring the country together. No one thought we could get done, including some of my own people, what we got done,” he said.“The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying: ‘Joe did it!’” More

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      Nancy Pelosi continues to exercise ultimate power over Democrats

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      When you’ve lost Nancy Pelosi, you might as well clear out your desk.Amid all the chaos and whiplash in US politics over the past few weeks, one law remained constant: Pelosi is uniquely influential and has the power to make or break careers – even those of American presidents.The former House speaker did more than anyone else to re-engineer the race for the White House, breathing new life into her Democratic party and sending Donald Trump’s Republicans into a tailspin.Pelosi, 84, publicly encouraged 81-year-old Joe Biden to make a decision about his re-election campaign when he had already insisted he had no plans to step aside. Once he did drop out and endorse Kamala Harris, Pelosi scored another victory when former congressman Tim Walz was named as running mate.If Biden, a friend of Pelosi for 40 years, nurses a grudge about being shoved aside after his jarring debate performance, she might quote The Godfather: “It’s not personal … it’s strictly business.” The California congresswoman insists that her number one priority is ensuring her old nemesis Trump never returns to the White House.“I don’t think that President Biden would have stepped back without Nancy Pelosi’s influence,” said Susan Page, author of Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power. “He had made it clear that he didn’t want to. He had, in fact, announced that he was going to stay in the race.”Despite that, when Pelosi appeared on the MSNBC network’s Morning Joe programme – of which Biden is known to be regular viewer – she implied the matter was far from closed. “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” she said. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”Pelosi denies that her intervention on Morning Joe was part of a grand plan to force Biden’s hand. But in an interview with the New Yorker this week, she did state with unusual candour: “I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation. They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen.”Pelosi also rejected reports that she had been working the phones to mastermind a pressure campaign against the president. “I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next.”Still, Pelosi’s private conversations with Biden himself appear to have been crucial in assessing the risk of losing not only the White House but also Congress, which she cares about deeply.Page, who is Washington bureau chief of USA Today, continued: “Nancy Pelosi is more comfortable with the exercise of power than anyone I’ve ever covered and that was exhibited when she called Biden himself and had that tough conversation about whether he had a real prospect to win.”Finally Biden gave in and announced that he would not seek reelection, much to the relief of his party. He and Pelosi have not spoken since. When Page, interviewing Pelosi this week for USA Today, asked if the episode has affected her relationship with Biden, the former speaker replied: “You’d have to ask him.”Pelosi reportedly spoke to Harris, a fellow San Francisco Democrat, by phone within hours of Biden exiting the race and endorsed her the following day with “immense pride and limitless optimism for our country’s future”. The rest of the Democratic party quickly fell into line, avoiding a messy internal contest for the nomination.Some, however, caution against overestimating Pelosi’s influence.Elaine Kamarck, a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee and former White House official, said: “She’s pretty powerful, but I don’t think this is all about Nancy Pelosi. This is about the state party chairman in 50 states in the United States. It’s about 4,000 delegates who all came to the same conclusion. It’s about the House members. It’s a lot about congressman [James] Clyburn.“Put it this way: there’s way too much being made of one person. The entire party came to this conclusion on their own. We simply ran out of time. It was ridiculous to assume that there was going to be a national campaign for delegates mounted with two months to go. That was never going to happen. Nobody got into the race; nobody even whispering about getting into the race. This was the logical conclusion and as many people said, ‘Well, this is after all what we have vice-presidents for.’”When it came to choosing Harris’s own potential vice-president, Pelosi has said she thought any of the contenders would have been strong choices. But she made no secret of her enthusiasm for former House members to counter the way that, in her view, presidents tend to be more deferential to the Senate. Walz was a member of the House from 2007 to 2019 before becoming governor of Minnesota.Page commented: “She is famously loyal to people who have served in the House of Representatives because that has always been her place. She has huge regard for the House and disregard for the Senate, among other places with which she is often battling. When Walz was in the House, he was one of her majority makers. He served in a district that Democrats wouldn’t necessarily be expected to win and so that made him especially important to her.”Pelosi, whose husband Paul was attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant in their San Francisco home in 2022, is now House speaker emerita but will seek another term – her 20th – in November’s elections. The events of this tumultuous summer have underlined her status as the most powerful woman in American history, an accolade that might soon pass to Harris. What makes her so effective?Page said: “She listens more than she talks and that was true in this case as well. She listened to Democratic members of Congress who had concerns about Biden. She didn’t, I don’t think, try to marshal them; she was a hub that they knew they could call and talk to about that.“She’s also completely fearless. She’s a tough interview because she doesn’t care if you like her and she doesn’t care what you want to know. She knows what she cares about, what she wants to say, and that’s what she’s going to say. Some of the vulnerabilities that many politicians have, she doesn’t have.“That’s one reason she didn’t really aspire to the presidency and probably would have had trouble getting there. She was made for being a legislative leader, working behind the scenes, and that’s what she’s done in a way that’s been pretty historic.”This week, Pelosi spoke with reporters and columnists about her new book The Art of Power, My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House. According to an Associated Press account, she repeatedly declined to detail her conversations with Biden during the difficult transition.“At some point, I will come to terms with my, to peace, with my own role in this,” she said. “I think that part of all of our goals in this was to preserve his legacy, a fabulous legacy, that would go right down the drain if Bozo got elected to the White House.”Asked if her book title was an intended dig at Trump’s The Art of the Deal, Pelosi replied: “Nothing that I do has anything to do with him, except his downfall.” More