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      Georgia counties are mandated to certify elections, judge rules

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      Election certification is a mandatory duty, not discretionary, for county election officials in Georgia, a judge ruled on Tuesday, rejecting assertions made by a Republican elections official that elections board members could refuse to certify an election based on their suspicions of fraud or error.Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, brought the suit earlier this year after abstaining from a vote to certify the May primary election. The America First Policy Institute, a legal thinktank that was formed by former Donald Trump advisers in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss to help lay legal groundwork for his potential return to office, joined the suit.Adams refused certification after claiming she had been denied access to a long list of elections documents. But Robert McBurney, Fulton county superior court judge, ruled that Adams was entitled to review documents quickly, but failing to provide those documents was not grounds for denying the certification of an election.“If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so – because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud – refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” wrote McBurney in his ruling. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.”The law uses the world “shall”, meaning certification is an order, McBurney wrote.“To users of common parlance, ‘shall’ connotes instruction or command: You shall not pass!” he wrote.Adams is the regional coordinator for south-eastern states in the Election Integrity Network (EIN), a national group that has recruited election deniers to target local election offices. EIN was founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere.Adams’s suit aimed to overturn longstanding Georgia precedent that the act of election certification is “ministerial”, an administrative activity marking the end of an election. Elections disputes in Georgia have historically been managed through investigation by local district attorneys, the attorney general’s office and ultimately in court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA bloc of Trump-aligned Republicans on Georgia’s state elections board have rejected that interpretation of the law and implemented changes to election policies allowing for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” by local elections officers before certification. Those changes are under challenge by Democratic leaders in separate court cases. More

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      ‘Childless cat ladies’ is a political catchphrase that doesn’t match reality − Democrats and Republicans have similar demographics and experiences when it comes to parenthood

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      Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance infamously said in 2021 that the Democratic Party is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made” – and do not have a “direct stake” in the future of the United States.

      Three years later, after Vance’s selection as Trump’s vice presidential pick, these comments resurfaced and quickly became a cultural touchstone.

      In July 2024, Vance clarified his controversial comments, saying that what he meant was that the Democratic Party has become anti-family and anti-child.

      At a September 2024 campaign event alongside Donald Trump, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed Vance’s sentiments about Democrats being anti-family. “My kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” she said.

      The single cat lady theme was amplified further when singer Taylor Swift used it to sign off on her Instagram endorsement of Harris.

      While the cat lady framing is new, politicians making parenthood and family a centerpiece in their appeals to the American public has a long history.

      As we show in our 2012 book, “The Politics of Parenthood,” and subsequent research, politicians have been using messages about parenthood as a way to appeal to voters since the 1980s.

      Content analysis of party platforms and speeches by presidential candidates reveals that both parties have devoted more and more time and space to making the case that they are the true pro-family party. Republicans argue that lower taxes and smaller government strengthen American families, while Democrats argue that strengthening social welfare programs represents the best way to support families.

      Despite the parties’ contrasting pro-family messages and the image conjured by Vance’s childless cat lady comments, Republicans and Democrats are not really that different when it comes to their actual experiences having and raising children.

      Our analysis shows that the age at which Americans have children, how many children they have and whether parents work outside the home are surprisingly similar across partisan lines.

      A woman attends a CatCon event in Pasadena, Calif., in August 2024 and wears a ‘Childless cat ladies for Kamala’ shirt.
      Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

      Democrats and Republicans find parenting rewarding

      To explore whether there are differences between Republicans and Democrats in terms of their families, we analyzed data from the 2022 General Social Survey, which had 4,149 respondents. GSS is a nationally representative and well recognized survey of American adults that has been conducted since 1972. We also analyzed data from a 2022 Pew survey of 3,757 mothers and fathers focused on parenting in America.

      This data shows that both Republicans and Democrats deeply value their roles as parents. In the Pew survey, 87% of parents said that their role as a parent is the most important or one of the most important aspects of their identity. Our analysis shows this is true for parents in both parties – 86% of Democrats and 88% of Republicans said they value their role as parents as the most or one of the most important aspects of their identity.

      Similarly, our analysis of the Pew data reveals that Democrats and Republicans both enjoy being parents – 84% of Republicans say they find parenting enjoyable most or all of the time, compared with 81% of Democrats.

      That said, contemporary parenting is also challenging.

      The 2022 Pew survey showed that 29% of parents describe raising children as stressful most or all of the time. And 42% of parents report that raising children is tiring all or most of the time. Our analysis shows that this is equally true for Republicans and Democrats.

      Indeed, the stresses of modern parenthood led the U.S. surgeon general in August 2024 to issue a public health advisory about parents’ declining mental well-being.

      One of the reasons for this stress is that most parents today are balancing parenthood with work. The Republican Party has long embraced “traditional marriage,” meaning a marriage between a man and a woman, where the mother stays home to raise the children. Yet the reality is that most moms have jobs outside the home. In our analysis of the 2022 Pew data, we find that about the same portion of Republican moms – 67% – work outside the home as Democratic moms, who totaled 69%.

      Both Republican and Democratic moms do more parenting

      Another way that the experience of parenthood is similar across partisan lines is that moms spend more time parenting than dads. Pew asked parents with partners and spouses about the division of labor around a variety of child care tasks in 2022.

      In our analysis of the full set of this data, which Pew provided us, we found that 77% of Democratic mothers and 80% of Republican mothers report doing more than their spouse or partner when it comes to managing their children’s activities. And 60% of Democratic mothers and 58% of Republican mothers report providing more comfort and emotional support to their children than their spouses or partners do.

      This may account for why the Pew data reveals that mothers, more so than fathers, report parenting being tiring most or all of the time – 47% for moms, compared with 34% for dads. Once again, our analysis shows that mothers’ higher levels of fatigue hold true for both Republican and Democratic mothers compared with Republican and Democratic dads.

      To assess the demographics of parenthood, we analyzed the 2022 General Social Survey data and found that Republicans and Democrats start their families at a similar age, just as they did a decade ago.

      On average, male and female Democrats are 26 when they have their first kid, while Republicans are 25. Higher levels of education are associated with starting families later, but this is true for those in both parties.

      Looking at women specifically, we find that Democratic women have their first child at 25 years old, and Republican women at 24. There is no evidence that Democratic women – more so than Republican women – are delaying having children so that they can pursue their careers, as suggested by Vance and Sanders in their critiques of the Democratic Party and Harris specifically.

      It is true that Americans are having fewer children compared with a few decades ago. But this drop in having children is nearly universal in high-income democracies, even despite some government policies that seek to increase the birth rate in the U.S.

      Our analysis reveals that the gap between Republicans and Democrats on this issue is modest. On average, Democrats are having 1.53 children, compared with 1.86 for Republicans.

      And the 2022 General Social Survey data shows that Democrats do report having no children at a modestly higher rate than Republicans, but it is men – more than women – who report being childless at higher rates. Among Americans over 40, 22% of Democratic men and 16% of Republican men have no kids, compared with 17% of Democratic women and 10% of Republican women.

      Despite political rhetoric suggesting there is a deep partisan divide among Americans on issues of families and child-rearing, the data tells a different story. It paints a picture of Americans, whether Democrats or Republicans, as remarkably similar in the basic demographics of parenting, as well as in their views about the joys and challenges of parenthood. More

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      On crime and justice, Trump and Harris records differ widely

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      Though crime and criminal justice policy are central issues in many elections, that’s not true in 2024. Surveys show that relatively few American voters rank crime as their most important concern.

      Yet both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris say they take those problems seriously. Trump and the Republicans have focused attention on the problem of illegal immigration and the crimes that he says immigrants commit.

      Harris, as The Economist noted, “is using her history as a prosecutor in San Francisco to burnish her tough-on-crime bona fides.” She has mentioned that background in connection with immigration, drug policy and corporate wrongdoing.

      As someone who studies crime and justice in the United States, it is clear to me that there are substantial differences between the two candidates, though each of their records contains some interesting twists and turns.

      Kamala Harris gives her first news conference as attorney general of California in November 2010.
      AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

      Kamala Harris, the prosecutor

      Harris has a long record of working in the criminal justice system. She worked in the Alameda County district attorney’s office in California, starting in 1990, where she specialized in child sexual assault cases. She then served as district attorney in San Francisco from 2004 to 2010 and as attorney general of California from 2010 to 2017, when she was elected to the U.S. Senate.

      Axios reported that during her term as district attorney, “the number of violent crimes rose steadily in the city of San Francisco during her first five years in office then fell 15% in her last two years.” And when she served as the state’s attorney general, “the violent crime rate in the state was 439.6 per 100,000 residents the year before she took office and fell to 396.4 by 2014. … However, violent crime surged to 444.8 in 2016 during her last year in office to a six-year high,” Axios reported.

      In both offices, Harris undertook a number of reforms in criminal justice policy.

      For example, in San Francisco she developed a “Back on Track” initiative“ that aimed to help nonviolent drug offenders between the ages of 18 and 30. According to The New York Times, its key promise was that ”after a full year of employment, education, community service, regular meetings with a supervising judge and crime-free behavior, the charge would be expunged from the offender’s record.“ It was generally well received, especially among progressives.

      When Harris became the state’s attorney general, she reformed California’s approach to school truancy by focusing on the parents of truant children. As The New York Times reported, she threatened them ”with fines or even imprisonment if they did not ensure that their children attended class.“ FactCheck.org found that as a result of her policy, ”district attorneys reported prosecuting 3 to 6 … cases per year,“ on average.

      Considering Harris’ record in California, The Desert Sun (Palm Springs, California) said Harris ”earned a reputation as tough on sexual abuse, human trafficking and organized crime, and did not shy away from pursuing incarceration.“

      Throughout her career, Harris has been an opponent of the death penalty. During her first campaign for San Francisco district attorney, she promised that she would never seek a death sentence no matter how heinous the crime. She stuck to that promise, but as attorney general she went to court to defend death sentences that had been imposed under prior administrations.

      The Los Angeles Times said her decision to do so was an appropriate one for the attorney general, ”putting professional responsibility over personal politics.“

      CNN summarized her record on capital punishment by saying it ”broke hearts on both sides.“

      Donald Trump speaks at a meeting about prison reform in 2018.
      AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

      Donald Trump’s record as president

      Trump, by contrast, was a strong proponent of the death penalty during his time in the Oval Office. In March 2018, he directed the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty in cases involving drug traffickers. The department also vigorously pursued new death penalty prosecutions in other areas and defended existing death sentences in court.

      After a long time without any federal executions, the Trump administration carried out 13 of them in the last seven months of his term. ProPublica said Trump’s administration ”executed more federal prisoners than any presidency since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s” and more than the prior 10 presidents combined.

      In other areas, the Trump administration stepped in to stop some criminal justice reform initiatives. For example, according to ABC News, Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, stopped former President Barack Obama’s effort to end prison privatization, and then began distributing contracts for new privately run detention centers.

      But during his presidency, Trump was not consistent in being tough on crime. For instance, in March 2018, he signed an executive order creating the Federal Interagency Crime Prevention and Improving Reentry Council. He charged it with identifying ways “to provide those who have engaged in criminal activity with greater opportunities to lead productive lives” and to develop “a comprehensive strategy that addresses a range of issues, including mental health, vocational training, job creation, after-school programming, substance abuse, and mentoring.”

      The Biden administration built on and extended those efforts.

      And in December 2018, Trump supported the so-called “First Step Act,” which passed Congress with bipartisan support. It funded efforts to reduce the likelihood that inmates would be convicted again after their release, including by providing addiction treatment, mental health care, education and job training.

      Trump also commuted the sentences of more than 90 people and pardoned more than 140 others. His use of clemency power was quite controversial, as some of its beneficiaries were Trump associates, such as Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort, who led Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and had committed financial fraud.

      As far as the crime rate during Trump’s presidency, the Dallas Morning News reported that “During the first three years of Trump’s presidency, the violent crime rate per 100,000 population … fell each year. But, the Morning News – citing Politifact – said that in 2020, “the violent crime rate spiked,” though it was slightly lower than it had been in Obama’s final year in office.

      Crime and criminal justice in the next administration

      The next president will have choices to make about the crime and justice policies that the federal government will pursue and about whether to emphasize reform or harsh punishment. He or she will also have to decide whether, and how, the federal government should use grants and other funding, guidelines and enforcement to further those goals.

      Their records suggest that Harris and Trump would make very different choices about those and other crime and criminal justice issues. More

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      Harris and Trump are tied in the polls – so I conducted my own less traditional research | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Polls! What are they good for? Absolutely nothing, except for driving yourself bonkers. Oh look: Donald Trump is up by two points. Wait, it looks like Kamala Harris is up by five points. Yikes, now Trump is up by one-nineteenth of a point. Now, according to a much discussed NBC News poll that came out on Sunday, Trump and Harris are neck and neck.As the US election draws closer, I have developed a severe case of poll-tigue. Can we just give the damn things a rest already? As we all know, polling is an inexact science at the best of times. More importantly, pretty much all the results of recent Trump-Harris polls have been within the margin of error. The fact that this new poll shows Harris tied with Trump (within the margin of error) while a poll in September showed that Harris was leading Trump (also within the margin of error) might signal that the Harris honeymoon is officially over, but ultimately, it’s not that big a deal. You can scrutinise the numbers ad infinitum, but when it comes down to it, the truth is that nobody knows what is going to happen in November other than it’s (probably) going to be very close. Polls are basically astrology for political nerds at this point.Speaking of which, professional astrologers have their own murky methods for predicting the outcome of elections and they seem just as confused as everyone else. Laurie Rivers, a political analyst turned astrologer with more than 235,000 TikTok followers, told the Economist she sees Harris winning “overwhelmingly”. Meanwhile, Amy Tripp, another influential astrologist, has said Trump will win and she can make “objective” forecasts because she is an Aquarius.I’m not an Aquarius, but I’ve also been dabbling in some “objective” forecasting. I recently devised two unorthodox polling methods, the results of which I will exclusively present in this column. In terms of methodology, both surveys were conducted by me in Philadelphia – the biggest city in Pennsylvania, which is probably the most important swing state in the US. In other words: very serious stuff.Let’s start with Arwa’s Little Walk poll. On Monday I counted all the political signs I saw displayed in people’s houses on the 10-minute walk from my house to my child’s preschool. The final tally? Twenty-six Harris/Walz signs, zero Trump signs and one sign for “Giant Meteor 2024”. (That sign did not belong to me, but I share the sentiment.) In short: a giant meteor has a better chance of winning my little stretch of Philadelphia than Trump. What does this mean? Well, it means I live in a liberal bubble. And, also, that I might be on some kind of neighbourhood watch list now because I peered into so many strangers’ windows.We’ll call the next experiment the Rascal Eats a Treat poll. I put a brown treat in one hand (representing Harris) and a pink treat in another (representing Trump), then I asked my dog Rascal to pick a hand. Much to Rascal’s delight, I conducted this experiment multiple times. And guess what? Every single time he picked the Harris indicator. At first I thought that meant my dog was a savant trapped in a chihuahua’s scruffy little body. Then, of course, I realised Rascal could smell the difference between the treats and simply preferred one artificial flavour to the other. As an objective Aries, I will admit that this poll would probably not stand up to serious scrutiny.That said, the Rascal treat test is not quite as ridiculous as it might sound. The Busken Bakery in Cincinnati has been running a presidential Cookie poll since 1984. It sells cookies with candidate’s faces on them and the highest-selling cookie candidate has won nine out of 10 elections (2020 was the outlier). A random bakery has been right just as many times as Allan Lichtman, the distinguished professor who is famous for his 13 “keys” to the White House. (Lichtman got 2020 right but 2000 wrong.) And the bakery has certainly done better than many pollsters.In all seriousness – and before the Guardian gets inundated with complaints from the Association for Preserving the Reputation of Political Polling – I should clarify that polls aren’t a complete waste of time. The latest NBC poll is yet another reminder that the US is a deeply divided country and this election will be won on the margins. And my own polls show that Rascal is a dog of discerning taste. More

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      Pelosi says she still hasn’t spoken to Biden since pressuring him to drop out

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      Nancy Pelosi has admitted she still has not spoken to Joe Biden since her crucial intervention in July led to his decision to drop out of the presidential race, following a disastrously frail performance in a debate against Donald Trump.The former speaker of the House told the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland on the Politics Weekly America podcast that although she continues to regard the US president as a great friend and longtime political ally, she felt a cold political calculation was necessary after the evidence of Biden’s failing mental acuity.“Not since then, no,” she said when asked if she had spoken to Biden since. “But I’m prayerful about it.”She added: “I have the greatest respect for him. I think he’s one of the great consequential presidents of our country,” she said. “I think his legacy had to be protected. I didn’t see that happening in the course that it was on, the election was on. My call was just to: ‘Let’s get on a better course.’ He will make the decision as to what that is. And he made that decision. But I think he has some unease because we’ve been friends for decades.”“Elections are decisions,” she added. “You decide to win. I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity … So when you make a decision, you have to make every decision in favor of winning … and the most important decision of all is the candidate.”Pelosi admitted that some in Biden’s campaign may not have forgiven her for her role in limiting Biden’s legacy to one term, but that a Trump victory would have equally reflected terribly on his legacy.Known as a uniquely influential House speaker, particularly during a Biden administration that passed major legislation on infrastructure and climate, Pelosi was widely seen as a senior Democrat willing to indicate that Biden should reconsider his bid for re-election when the polls showed Trump beating him badly.After Biden did step aside, Pelosi then encouraged the party to endorse Kamala Harris – and scored yet another victory when the vice-president named former congressman Tim Walz as her running mate.Pelosi has also been a longtime thorn in Trump’s side, frequently antagonizing him into posting long rants about her on social media, and publicly ripping up his State of the Union speech in 2020 on the podium of the House of Representatives, calling it a “manifesto of mistruths”.Explaining her unique ability to hold together a fragile coalition of centrist and progressive Democrats, Pelosi explained that she thought “leadership is about respect, about consensus building”, while deriding Trump’s ability to do anything of the sort, particularly with his hateful rhetoric towards immigrants, who he has described as “poisoning the blood of this country”.“I hardly ever say his name,” she says of Trump, instead describing him as “what’s-his-name”.“I think [Trump is] a grotesque word … You just don’t like the word passing your lips. I just don’t. I’m afraid, you know, when I grew up Catholic, as I am now, if you said a bad word, you could burn in hell if you didn’t have a chance to confess. So I don’t want to take any chances.“It’s up there with like, swearing.”In her new book, The Art of Power, Pelosi describes being the first woman speaker of the House, and her disappointment at the failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president in 2016, but says she remains optimistic that Harris will make history where Clinton could not.“I always thought America was more ready for a woman president than a woman speaker of the House,” she told the Guardian. “The Congress of the United States is not a glass ceiling there. It’s a marble ceiling. And it was very hard to rise up there. But the public, I think, is better disposed … In Congress, they would say to me: “Understand this, there’s been a pecking order here for a long time of men who’ve been waiting for openings to happen and take their turn.” And I said: “That’s interesting. We’ve been waiting over 200 years.”She praised Harris, however, for not running as “the first woman or first woman of color. She’s running on her strength, her knowledge of policy and strategy and presentation and the rest. And I think that’s a different race than Hillary Clinton ran.”Noting that more women support Harris and more men support Trump by considerable margins, Pelosi said: “The reason that there’s such a gender gulf is because there’s such a gulf in terms of policies that affect women.”“A woman’s right to choose is a personal issue. It’s an economic issue, but it’s also a democracy issue. This is an issue about freedom, freedom to manage your own life.”“What is a democracy? It is free and fair elections. It’s a peaceful transfer of power. It’s independent judiciary and is the personal freedoms in the bill of rights of our constitution. And he is assaulting those by particularly harshly on women, harshly on women. Did you see the other day? He said Kamala Harris was retarded. This is a person running for president of the United States.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Has he no respect for the office? Has he no decency about how to communicate?”Pelosi spoke about her fear of political violence, noting that misinformation spread by Trump had caused an atmosphere in which US disaster response agency Fema had to withdraw rescue workers from parts of North Caroline hit by a hurricane after reports of trucks of militia saying they were hunting Fema workers.“This is springing from the top,” she said of Trump’s role in fomenting political violence. “He’s taking pride in doing it. Don’t take it from me, take it from him.”After an armed assailant attacked her husband, Paul Pelosi, in their home after breaking in with an intent to harm her, many Republicans made jokes – including Trump’s son Donald Jr, who suggested he would dress as Paul Pelosi for Halloween.“When it happened, what was so sad for my children and grandchildren was that [some Republicans] thought it was a riot – they were laughing and making jokes … his son, all those people making jokes about it, right away. We didn’t even know if he was going to live or die.”Asked if she agreed with the recent remarks of the former chairperson of the joint chiefs, Mark Milley, a Trump appointee, that Trump was “a fascist to the core”, Pelosi said:“Yes, I do. I do. And I know it’s interesting because Kamala Harris says, I’ve prosecuted people like Trump. I know men like that. No, I know him,” she said, stressing Trump.“There’s one picture of me leaving the Roosevelt Room at the cabinet meeting. And I’m pointing to him and I’m saying, I’m leaving this meeting because with you, Mr President, all roads lead to Putin. [Milley’s] comment, ‘fascist to the core’, speaks to the actions that he has taken. Trivialize the press, fake news – that is a tactic of fascist governments.”She added that a possible repeat of January 6 was a key reason for the importance of Democrats at least winning the House in 2024. “Hakeem Jeffries must have the gavel, which means that we have the majority of the votes to accept the results of the electoral college for the peaceful transfer of power.”‘“Nobody could have ever seen an insurrection incited by the president of the United States. But an outsider, as a loser in this election, once again, he might try that.”Later in the interview, Pelosi said Trump’s name, then caught herself. “I said his name. Oh my gosh. I hope I don’t burn in hell.” More

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      US election briefing: Harris airs clips of her opponent while Trump hosts a ‘musical-fest’

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      With just over three-weeks until voting begins, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump both campaigned in Pennsylvania, which promises the most electoral votes of any swing state. The Guardian’s poll tracker has Harris ahead by one point in the state.Harris spoke in Erie, a county that is one of the state’s most reliable bellwethers – its “boomerang” electorate has backed the election winner in the last four races. Harris played clips from Trump’s recent media appearances and condemned his call for the military to be deployed against opponents he labelled “the enemy within”. “He considers anyone who doesn’t support him, or who will not bend to his will, an enemy of our country,” Harris said at the rally. “This is among the reasons I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America”.Trump meanwhile took questions from voters at a town hall in Philadelphia, but was twice interrupted by medical emergencies in the room. The former president then called for the event to be turned into a “musical-fest” and it continued with Trump standing on stage for 40 minutes, swaying to hits from his campaign playlist – including Hallelujah, November Rain and Nothing Compares 2 U – before walking off into the crowd. Fox News reporter Bryan Llenas called it a “very strange Trump Town Hall”. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung called it a “love fest” and “something very special”.Here is what else happened on Monday:

      Kamala Harris will do a sit-down interview with the broadcaster Fox News on Wednesday. The interview with Fox News’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, comes as Democrats have increased their presence on Fox News, part of a media spree and outreach to undecided voters.

      Donald Trump railed against a just released biopic about his life, in a social media screed early on Monday, calling it a “cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job” meant to thwart his presidential candidacy.

      Kamala Harris has revealed a plan to give Black men more economic opportunities, as anxiety mounts in her campaign that some in the Black community are less supportive of the Democratic presidential ticket than in recent elections, and may sit this one out – or support Donald Trump.

      The White House said on Monday that the United States has been closely tracking Iranian threats against Trump for years and it warned of “severe consequences” if Tehran was to attack any US citizen. “We consider this a national and homeland security matter of the highest priority, and we strongly condemn Iran for these brazen threats. Should Iran attack any of our citizens, including those who continue to serve the United States or those who formerly served, Iran will face severe consequences,” said White House national security council spokesperson Sean Savett.

      Arab Americans in Michigan are deserting Democrats over Gaza, according to reports. In past elections, Arab Americans were a solidly Democratic voting bloc, especially in the years after 9/11 and given Trump’s overtly anti-Muslim rhetoric. But with Kamala Harris reportedly “underwater” in Michigan, Muslim and Arab American communities across Michigan could play a major role in the outcome of the presidential election.

      The Arab American Political Action Committee said on Monday it could not endorse Harris or Trump, citing what it called their “blind support” for Israel in wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

      A man arrested on gun possession charges near a Donald Trump rally in California on Saturday, said that he was a major supporter of the former US president and would never harm him. “Yes, I’m 100% a Trump supporter,” the man, Vem Miller, told Fox News Digital in an interview.

      If Donald Trump wins the election, he is expected to pursue a spree of executions that could fast-track the cases of people on federal death row, and threaten the life of a man with a longstanding innocence claim. Advocates for people on death row fear a second Trump term could be worse than his first, which saw an unprecedented 13 federal executions. Under Trump, more people incarcerated in the federal system were put to death than under the previous 10 presidents combined, a staggering number that raised grave human rights concerns. More