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      The US right keeps accusing Democrats of ‘communism’. What does that even mean? | Jan-Werner Müller

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      The Trump campaign, flanked by an army of online trolls commanded by Elon Musk, has been struggling to settle on an attack line against the Democratic ticket. Of course, a decade or so ago no one would have thought a candidate unable to think of nasty nicknames had a problem; but Donald Trump has made us all ask stupider questions and have stupider thoughts. If in doubt, though – and no matter what any Democrat actually does or says – the Republican party will level the charges of “socialism” and “communism” against them.To state the obvious: free lunches – ensuring that poor kids won’t go hungry – are not communism. The one time in recent history that the US clearly resembled the Soviet Union – empty shelves and long lines outside shops – was under Trump; to be sure, other countries also had supply chain problems during Covid-19, but the former president proved exceptionally irresponsible and incompetent. But there’s another, less obvious similarity with the late Soviet Union in particular: the experience of being at the mercy of bureaucrats. No, not the DMV, but vast private corporations with quasi-monopoly power, something with which Trump’s Republican party, unlike the Biden administration, is evidently fine.Ever since the New Deal, the US right has relied on an ideological mixture as incoherent as it is toxic, with charges of communism freely interspersed with accusations of fascism. Into that mixture, US reactionaries sprinkle what is politely called “anti-elitism” but often enough amounts to thinly disguised antisemitism. Musk and the Republican ideologues now regularly portray Kamala Harris as controlled by secret “puppetmasters”, the Soroses (son and father) in particular, bent on advancing a “globalist” or “cultural Marxist” agenda.Most rightwingers would struggle to explain what these terms really mean; but then again, for many of them politics is not a philosophy exam, but a contest over what can incite fear and hatred of dangerous Others threatening supposed “real Americans”. One fairly simple, almost intuitive throughline, however, is the notion that Real America wants individual freedom, while Real America’s enemies are collectivists bent on creating all-powerful bureaucracies whose business is not business, but telling people what to do. (That is also why, when pressed, rightwingers will inevitably identify “bureaucrats” and the “managerial class” as core members of the “liberal elite”.)The truth is that much of day-to-day life in the US is horrendously bureaucratic: filling out “paperwork”, spending hours on hold, being at the mercy of individuals who might be reasonable when they have a good day (and respond to the plea “Can I talk to you like a human being?”) or simply use discretion to say no when they happen to have a bad day. Europeans never believe this could be the reality in the land of the free, because European pro-business parties like to sell them the story that every day in the US, somebody starts the equivalent of Microsoft in their garage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, plenty of Americans do not see that US businesses can be bureaucratic nightmares because, to be blunt, they know nothing else. Often unable to travel for financial reasons, they accept red scare tales about countries they’ve never seen. Democrats are complicit in encouraging a nationalism that makes the case for reform unnecessarily difficult: if people are constantly told by both parties that theirs is the greatest country ever, why mobilize for fundamental change?Capitalist bureaucracies are maddening, but the madness has a method: it’s driven in part by fear of liability (something Democrats are reluctant to address properly) but above all by the hope that frustrated customers will eventually just give up and let the insurance claim go, rather than spend another two hours on the phone listening to the automated message: “Your call is important to us.” Corporate power has increased enormously in recent decades, partially based on the rightwing doctrine that monopolies are OK as long as they benefit consumers. Bureaucratization has also increased in areas where the state, driven by neoliberal ideology, has tried to engineer competition in public services – in the process creating ever-larger bureaucracies devoted to measuring and surveillance. George W Bush’s No Child Left Behind is a prime example.The Biden administration has at least tried to change course on monopoly power, under the leadership of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, whose career started with an attack on the mistaken pro-monopoly theory. The government has gone after “junk fees” such as exorbitant credit card late fees; most recently, with its Time is Money initiative, the White House is confronting predatory capitalists using red tape to extract time and, ultimately, money from powerless customers unable ever to “speak to a representative”. Meanwhile, just as with the upside-down reasoning about monopolies, distinguished defenders of the little guy such as Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina have twisted themselves into justifying junk fees.True, daily indignities and frustrations in dealing with private-sector bureaucrats are trivial compared with the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism. But it’s not trivial to want to make life just a little fairer by reducing the power of private actors to behave like dictators.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist More

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      The strangest insult in US politics: why do Republicans call it ‘the Democrat party’?

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      The Democratic party? Robert F Kennedy Jr’s never heard of it.On Tuesday, the former presidential candidate issued his latest condemnation of the “Democrat party”, endorsing a bizarre linguistic tradition among haters of the institution. As Donald Trump told a rally in 2018: “I call it the Democrat party. It sounds better rhetorically.” By “better”, of course, he meant “worse”, as he explained the next year: he prefers to say “the ‘Democrat party’ because it doesn’t sound good”.In removing two letters from “Democratic”, the former president is adopting a jibe that’s been around since at least the 1940s. Opponents of the party long ago decided, for some reason, that this brutal act of syllabic denial would shame their opponents. Democrats don’t seem particularly devastated by the attack, but Republicans and those who love them have stuck with it. We hear it regularly from party luminaries such as JD Vance, Mike Johnson and Nikki Haley; pragmatic independents like RFK Jr; and media voices across the vast spectrum from Fox News to Infowars. Last week, even Tulsi Gabbard, once a Democratic presidential candidate herself, wrote an op-ed proudly describing her departure from the Democrat party and support for Trump.But even if the misnaming doesn’t exactly leave liberal snowflakes in tears, it does serve a purpose, says Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s a marker of affiliation – an indicator of the media a person consumes and the politicians they listen to. She recently heard a friend remark on “Democrat party” policies and asked why they used the term; the friend wasn’t even aware they had done it. “Language is contagious, especially emotionally charged political language,” Holliday says. “Most of the time, we don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to think very hard about every single word that we’re using. We just use it because it’s what other people do.”That lack of awareness “shows how normalized it’s become”, says Larry Glickman, Stephen and Evalyn Milman professor in American studies at Cornell University, who likens the term to a “schoolyard taunt”. It suggests the party is “outside the mainstream of American politics so much so that we’re not even going to call them by the name they prefer. We refuse to give them that amount of respect.”It’s part of a familiar pattern, as Holliday has written: “Intentionally calling a set of people by something other than their official and preferred form of reference is a common tactic of opposition that is designed to confer disrespect.” If someone named Christopher prefers not to be called Chris, and you do it anyway, it’s pretty clear you’re being rude – regardless of your politics, she says. And she and Glickman both point out that we’re seeing a new version of the same unpleasant phenomenon when it comes to the pronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name. Almost half the speakers at the Republican convention got it wrong, according to the Washington Post. At a July rally, Trump said he “couldn’t care less” if he mispronounced the word. Eventually, Harris’s grandnieces, ages six and eight, felt compelled to offer a lesson at the Democratic convention this month.Such bullying may be a Trump trademark, but its origins are a bit fuzzy. According to Glickman, the term first came to prominence in 1946 thanks to a congressman named Brazilla Carroll Reece, who headed the Republican National Committee. Unlike Trump, Reece saw himself as a liberal – at least according to that era’s definition of the term; still, he wasn’t a fan of the New Deal or other recent developments. He used the term to indicate that what was once the Democratic party no longer existed: it had been commandeered by “radicals”. In 1948, the Republican party platform left off the “ic” in “Democratic”, and in 1952, a newspaper columnist asked: “Who has taken the ‘ic’ out of the party of our fathers?” Senator Joseph McCarthy, meanwhile, helped popularize the term.Over the decades, the Democratic party became associated with liberal policies, and eventually, “the ‘Democrat party’ slur became a condemnation of liberalism itself”, Glickman wrote. The phrase was a huge hit in the 90s and 2000s; Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and George W Bush played it on repeat. By the following decade, Trump was mandating the word: “The Democrat party. Not Democratic. It’s Democrat. We have to do that.”Removing the “ic” does seem to suggest the party isn’t about democracy. But if that’s the goal, Glickman wonders: “Why not call it the undemocratic party? Like Trump used to say the Department of Injustice.” And anyway, as they’ve proved since 2020, democracy isn’t high on the list of Republican values. Instead, Glickman suggests, it’s more about a “babyish” tendency to misname people. Also, as Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker in 2006, “it fairly screams ‘rat’.”So what should Democrats do? Is it time to start calling Republicans Republics? Licans? Relics? President Harry Truman tried “Publicans”, and it clearly didn’t take off. Perhaps it’s best, especially considering that many people don’t even know it’s an insult, to just keep ignoring it. Getting mad would be taking the bait. “This would be constructed as Democrats are weak pedants who can’t take a joke and they’re policing our language and see how they’re so heavy-handed with regulation?” Holliday says.So Democrats can let the attempts at bullying continue. Trump and his gang clearly need to blow off some steam; might as well be through the world’s tiniest, oddest insult. More

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      The forces of loneliness can cause political instability. And threaten democracy | V (formerly Eve Ensler)

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      I have been thinking about fascism long before I even knew I was thinking about it. I lived for years inside the mind, the home, the terror of my tyrannical father who used violence as the methodology to sustain his power over every aspect of our existence. In order to achieve that power he separated and divided us. He isolated us, used us against each other and made us lonely.Hannah Arendt wrote about loneliness in the Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951: “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.”In 2023, the US surgeon general declared that loneliness was the most serious mental health crisis facing Americans. This loneliness is a form of existential dislocation. It creates persistent anxiety, depression, depersonalization and distrust. It is not unlike an ongoing, low-level collective panic attack. A constant buzzing of unrest. Enemies are lurking everywhere. The ecosystem in which we live, the culture feels poisoned and uninviting. We no longer recognize the world as our world. We become withdrawn, estranged, feeling helpless and abandoned. Mainly all our time and energy is spent protecting ourselves, proving we have a right to be here, living defensively. It occupies our attention, our creativity. It’s exhausting.I think of what Toni Morrison wrote of racism: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”I wonder what is the specific psychological impact of Project 2025 – of knowing there are fascist forces who openly and proudly devised a 920-page “policy bible” meant to undo every hard-earned right, every safeguard that protects women, African Americans, workers, elderly, the infirm, LGBTQ+ folks, immigrants, Muslims – essentially everyone.What happens to our hearts and our capacity for connection and trust when we are encased in a field of malevolence and hatred which daily threatens our stability and peace? To know people mean to harm us, that they have no shame putting that desire on paper. What does this do to our psyches? How do our bodies process such hate, violence and cruelty? Who do we have to become in order to survive?Indigenous people and Black people have lived for hundreds of years in this landscape of precarity, capture, terror and violence. Now we are in late-stage patriarchy, where autocrats are being born and bred at the speed of light; where workers’ rights are being dismantled and child labor laws are weakened; where diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory programs that protected civil rights are being annihilated; books banned and history erased; where genocide is an acceptable practice to maintain domination; where rape is celebrated and bragged about as a form of control; where women are being pushed back into the dark ages (the 50s) and all the regulations that protect the Earth, the air, the water are unraveled.Fascism is a society-wide mental affliction. It’s in the culture, on the streets with Nazi gangs and raging men wrapped in American flags, in the new draconian laws passed by a rightwing supreme court denying voting rights or giving the president extreme powers. It’s in the outright lies being told by Trump scapegoating Black and brown immigrants, accusing them of crimes they never committed. On college campuses where students are arrested for protesting against the slaughter of women and children in Gaza. It’s in in the 64,000 babies born of rape last year in America because their mothers were denied abortions by states demanding more and more control over their bodies.The antidote to fascism is consciousness and education, which is why they want to terminate the Department of Education. We must learn the nature of fascism, what it is, how it operates now in 2024. Then we must name and expose it, call out the oppression, the hate, the misogyny and racism as it is happening. This can be terrifying, which is why we cannot do it alone. For so long our movements have been siloed and divided by hunger for scant resources, a feeling of powerlessness and invisibility, a hierarchy of suffering and a lack of vision and understanding that everything is interrelated and interdependent.Community and solidarity are our most powerful tools to fight fascism. They create a safe context for us to share so we can know that what we are witnessing and experiencing is real. They catalyze our strength to refuse the forces unraveling our freedoms. They propel us to fight for another way where people are treated with dignity, justice, respect and care.We have a vision of what 2025 should be like, too – it will be when we finally come together, united to end these forces of loneliness and hatred that have been dividing us all along.

      V is a playwright, author and founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against all women and girls and the earth and One Billion Rising. Her latest book Reckoning is just out in paperback. She guest edited this series on fascism. More

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      Harris and Trump accept debate rules, including allowing mics to be muted

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have accepted the rules for the presidential debate in Philadelphia, due to air on ABC next week, the network said on Wednesday – including muted mics when the other candidate is speaking.ABC News said in a release that Harris, the Democratic nominee, and Trump, her Republican rival, “have qualified for the debate under the established criteria, and both have accepted the following debate rules”.The Trump and Harris campaigns had been in dispute over the debate guidelines, including over whether microphones should be shut off when it was not a candidate’s turn to speak. The Harris campaign had previously pushed for live, or “hot”, microphones, arguing that it would “fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates”. Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, had been pressing for them to be turned off.The statement released by ABC made it clear that candidates’ microphones would be live only for the candidate whose turn it is to speak – and muted when the time belongs to another candidate.It also said the debate would last 90 minutes and have two commercial breaks, and would be administered by two seated moderators, the ABC anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis, who would be the only people asking questions. There will be no audience in the room.Trump, in characteristically capricious style, had threatened to pull out of the debate, claiming he would not be given a fair opportunity. Last week, he posted on his Truth Social network that ABC News was “fake news” and attacked its “so-called Panel of Trump Haters” after seeing the Republican senator Tom Cotton interviewed by Jonathan Karl on ABC’s This Week.The debate will take place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, an institution dedicated to the study of the United States constitution. Pennsylvania, with 19 electoral college votes, is one of the election’s most critical swing states and Trump has visited extensively in recent weeks and months.The other rules ABC News said had been agreed upon with the two sides include: no opening statements, and closing statements will be two minutes per candidate; candidates will stand behind podiums for the duration of the debate; props and prewritten notes are not allowed on stage; no topics or questions will be shared in advance; and candidates will not be permitted to ask questions of each other.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionABC also said Harris and Trump would be given the opportunity to give two-minute answers to questions, two-minute rebuttals, and one extra minute for follow-ups, clarifications, or responses.Trump won the coin toss to determine podium placement and the order of closing statements, ABC said, in a flip that was held virtually on Tuesday. Trump chose to select the order of statements, and offer the last closing statement. Harris selected the right podium position on the screen, meaning Trump will be on the left. More

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      Harris vows to make US tax code ‘more fair’ in New Hampshire speech – live

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      Kamala Harris says she will make the US tax code “more fair” while also prioritizing investment and innovation.“Billionaires and big corporations must pay their fair share in taxes,” she tells her supporters. “That’s why I support a billionaire minimum tax and corporations paying their fair share.”She says that while her administration will ensure that the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share, it will also tax capital gains “at a rate that rewards investment in America’s innovators, founders and small businesses”.
      If you earn a million dollars a year or more, the tax rate on your long-term capital gains will be 28% under my plan. Because we know when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad based economic growth, and it creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.
      Kamala Harris’ campaign has accepted rules for the upcoming debate with Donald Trump.The rules for the 10 September meeting of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates will include muting microphones, a source told Reuters.The campaigns had disagreed over whether microphones should be shut off when it isn’t a candidate’s turn to speak. Harris’ campaign had previously advocated for live microphones, arguing that it would “fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates”.Here’s footage of Kamala Harris’s remarks on the Georgia school shooting from earlier today:Tim Walz and the Harris campaign have trolled JD Vance over the GOP vice-presidential nominee’s awkward encounter at a doughnut shop:The Democratic vice-presidential candidate said: “Look at me, I have no problem picking out donuts.”The remark is a reference to Vance’s recent visit to a doughnut shop during which the GOP candidate stumbled while ordering, saying he’d get “whatever makes sense”.Tina Smith, a US senator from Minnesota, has also weighed in:Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will travel to Ground Zero in New York to commemorate the September 11 attacks, the White House has just announced.The president and vice-president will also visit the Flight 93 memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, officials said in a press release. Donald Trump is also reportedly considering a stop at the 9/11 memorial in New York on the anniversary, according to the New York Times.A Republican-led House committee sent a subpoena to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, seeking documents and communications related to a vast fraud scheme conducted by a non-profit that used pandemic relief funds meant for feeding kids.NBC News first reported the subpoenas, which were sent to Walz; Minnesota’s commissioner of education, Willie Jett; the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack; and the agriculture inspector general, Phyllis Fong.The House committee on education and the workforce wrote to Walz to say it had been investigating the Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota department of education’s oversight of federal child nutrition programs and Feeding Our Future, the group that is alleged to have stolen more than $250m in pandemic funds.The subpoena does not seek an in-person appearance from Walz before the committee. It sets an 18 September deadline for turning over documents.Five of the people involved in the scheme were convicted for their roles earlier this year in a trial that included an attempt to bribe a juror with a bag full of $120,000 in cash left at her home. In total, 70 people have been charged in relation to the scheme.The Harris campaign has not said whether Kamala Harris supports requiring automakers to build only electric or hydrogen vehicles by 2035 – a position that she held during her 2020 presidential campaign.According to Axios, the Harris campaign has sent contradictory signals about her position on a mandate for automakers, a key issue in pivotal battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where many autoworkers are based. The report says:
      In a lengthy ‘fact-check’ email last week that covered several issues, a campaign spokesperson included a line saying that Harris ‘does not support an electric vehicle mandate’ – suggesting she changed her previous position, without elaborating.
      When asked to clarify Harris’s position, the campaign declined to comment, according to the report.The Trump campaign said it raised $130m in August, ending the month with $295m cash on hand.The fundraising was slightly lower in August when compared with the previous month; the Trump campaign said it raised $138.7m in July and had a cash-on-hand total of $327m at the end of July.When Kamala Harris mentioned Donald Trump during her campaign speech in New Hampshire, a member of the audience shouted “Lock him up”.Harris responded by saying that “the courts will handle that and we’ll handle November”.Kamala Harris says she will make the US tax code “more fair” while also prioritizing investment and innovation.“Billionaires and big corporations must pay their fair share in taxes,” she tells her supporters. “That’s why I support a billionaire minimum tax and corporations paying their fair share.”She says that while her administration will ensure that the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share, it will also tax capital gains “at a rate that rewards investment in America’s innovators, founders and small businesses”.
      If you earn a million dollars a year or more, the tax rate on your long-term capital gains will be 28% under my plan. Because we know when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad based economic growth, and it creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.
      Kamala Harris says she will also invest in small businesses and innovators throughout America, noting that “talent exists everywhere in our country” but that not everyone has access to the financing, venture capital or expert advice.She says that if elected, her administration will expand access to venture capital, support innovation hubs and business incubators, and increase federal contracts with small businesses. Small businesses in rural communities will be a particular focus, she says.Kamala Harris says she will also help existing small businesses to grow, by providing low- and no-interest loans to small businesses that want to expand.She also pledges to “cut the red tape that can make starting and growing a small business more difficult than it needs to be”.For example, Harris says she will make it cheaper and easier for small businesses to file their taxes.
      Let’s just take away some of the bureaucracy in the process to make it easier for people to actually do something that’s going to benefit our entire economy.
      Kamala Harris moves on to talking about what she calls an “opportunity economy”, which she envisions is a one “where everyone can compete and have a real chance to succeed”.She says America’s small businesses are an “essential foundation to our entire economy” and that she wants to see 25m new small business applications by the end of her first term, if she is elected.To help achieve this, Harris says she will lower the cost of starting a new business. It costs about $40,000 to start a new business, she says, and the current tax deduction for a startup is just $5,000.Harris proposes to expand the tax deduction for startups to $50,000, which she says is essentially “a tax cut for starting a small business”.Kamala Harris, speaking at a campaign event in New Hampshire, begins her remarks by talking about the high school shooting in Georgia.“We’re still gathering information about what happened, but we know that there were multiple fatalities and injuries,” Harris told her supporters. “Our hearts are with all the students, the teachers and their families.”She said Wednesday’s shooting is “a senseless tragedy on top of so many senseless tragedies”, adding that it is “outrageous” that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether they will come home alive.
      It’s senseless. It is. We’ve got to stop it, and we have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all.
      Kamala Harris has just taken to the stage at a campaign event outside a brewery in New Hampshire, where she is reportedly expected to announce her economic plans including a smaller increase in taxes on capital gains.Harris is speaking from behind bulletproof glass enclosure, after the Secret Service added protective measures for outdoor campaign events in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July. More

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      Republican-led House panel subpoenas Tim Walz over $250m Covid relief fraud

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      A Republican-led US House committee sent a subpoena to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, seeking documents and communications related to a vast fraud scheme conducted by a non-profit that used pandemic relief funds meant for feeding kids.NBC News first reported the subpoenas, which were sent to Walz; Minnesota’s commissioner of education, Willie Jett; the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack; and the agriculture inspector general, Phyllis Fong.The US House committee on education and the workforce wrote to Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, to say it had been investigating the US Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota department of education’s oversight of federal child nutrition programs and Feeding Our Future, the group that is alleged to have stolen more than $250m in pandemic funds.The subpoena does not seek an in-person appearance from Walz before the committee. It sets an 18 September deadline for turning over documents.Five of the people involved in the scheme were convicted for their roles earlier this year in a trial that included an attempt to bribe a juror with a bag full of $120,000 in cash left at her home. In total, 70 people have been charged in relation to the scheme.Walz’s increased prominence in national politics has brought fresh scrutiny of his role as Minnesota’s top executive and whether the state education department, which is under his purview, should have caught the fraud.The committee’s Republican chairwoman, Virginia Foxx, wrote to Walz: “You are well aware of the multimillion-dollar fraud that has occurred under your tenure as governor.”A spokesperson for Walz said the Feeding our Future case was “an appalling abuse of a federal Covid-era program”.“The state department of education worked diligently to stop the fraud and we’re grateful to the FBI for working with the Department of Education to arrest and charge the individuals involved,” the spokesperson said.Walz has previously defended the department but acknowledged there were improvements to be made in oversight, after a state audit found the department’s lacking oversight “created opportunities for fraud”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“There’s not a single state employee that was implicated in doing anything that was illegal. They simply didn’t do as much due diligence as they should’ve,” Walz said after the audit report.Foxx claimed the committee had made voluntary requests to Minnesota’s education department for documents but “has been unable to obtain substantive responsive materials”.Walz’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      ‘We captured magic’: the telenovelas reaching Latino voters in swing states

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      “Una chingona always knows when to use her own voice.”So begins the first installment of a telenovela geared toward young Latina voters. Chingonas, which means empowered women in Mexican Spanish, are the target audience for the non-profit Poder NC Action – a Latino North Carolina-based voter engagement group. This year, the largest ever cohort of young North Carolina-born Latinos will be eligible to vote in a presidential election.The unique eight-part series released last month on YouTube was created to close the gap between registration and turnout for Latino voters, who have historically voted less than some other groups, in the key battleground state. In the short films, the main character Alexia is a young Latina who goes from struggling to voice her opinions with her community and family to encouraging strangers to turn out to vote.“We captured magic somehow,” Irene Godinez, the executive director of Poder NC Action, said about the telenovelas. “The fact that 18-year-old boys to a 70-something-year-old woman feel seen in this and are excited about it is unheard of.”Now, the films’ reach has extended beyond North Carolina, with voter engagement organizations in California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Texas, Georgia and Colorado featuring them on social media platforms. The videos appear in Hulu and YouTube TV ads; the non-profit Voto Latino will use them in a digital public service announcement ahead of the election, and in the fall, Latino fraternal chapters, such as Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, Inc and Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, Inc, will screen the telenovelas on campuses around the country.Nationwide, an estimated 36.2 million Latino voters will be eligible to vote this year, nearly 15% of the electorate, according to Pew Research Center. Godinez foresaw the large swath of eligible voters coming to age when she launched the non-profit in 2020: “My calculation was, if we start talking to them right now that they’re in high school and we can get them in as volunteers,” said Godinez. “Then by the time that they become actual voting age, they’ll be not only informed, but they’ll be willing to inform their peers.”Before Poder NC Action’s inception in 2020, political parties and advocacy groups did not invest in voter engagement efforts for Latino voters in North Carolina, said Godinez. She sought to create culturally relevant voter engagement initiatives that spoke directly to young Latino voters.“The people who absolutely are being neglected, it doesn’t mean that they’re not interested,” Godinez said. “It just means that no one has made an effort to reach out to them.”The organization’s strategy has been to focus on courting around 150,000 Latino voters who have voted twice or less since registering to vote in 2016. Their outreach consists of political mailers, phonebanking, canvassing, and monthly social hours where voters meet local politicians.In 2020, Poder NC Action hand delivered 4,000 voter information cards throughout the state, made over 1m calls, delivered over 1m mailers, and worked with 130 young Latino volunteers. Godinez said that their efforts helped North Carolina Latino voters become 40% of the overall Latino voter turnout in 2020.And in 2022, a quarter of the organization’s targeted voters voted in the midterm election. The organization is taking cue from its members on whether they will endorse a presidential candidate. “It’s even likely that we would endorse Kamala Harris,” Godinez said, “but it will boil down to what our membership determines”.In February, Poder NC Action hosted a Barbie movie-themed event where volunteers escorted the 50 attendees down a pink carpet that led to a barbie photo booth so they could post photos on social media. It was the second time that the organization hosted the voter registration event called Ballots y Belleza, where attendees get free beauty services including makeup and waxing as they study sample ballots and volunteers inform them about voting issues. In September, the group will host another Ballots y Belleza event for Latinx Heritage Month that focuses on the theme “Poder (Power) is our Heritage, too,” said Godinez.View image in fullscreenThe event was inspired by a 15-year-old who begrudgingly attended one of the group’s social hour events with an older sibling last summer. The teen told Godinez that she would willingly sit through a daylong civic engagement meeting if she could simultaneously get her nails done. “We wanted to create a space where folks could come and learn and build community with each other,” Godinez said, “and then create some sort of connection with us as well”.Following Poder NC Action’s events, attenders have told Godinez that they feel “seen” in her programming. “Organizations create different types of programming tailored to voters, but they do it as if voters are different from their loved ones. They don’t look at voters particularly as an extension of themselves,” Godinez said. “We see our families in our voters. We see ourselves in our voters.”The work that Poder NC Action is doing to engage Latino voters could serve as a model for organizations in other states throughout the nation, said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic party strategist and president of consulting firm Solidarity Strategies. As a consultant to the organization for the past six years, Rocha said that Poder NC Action’s work stood out because it was rooted in the Latino community: Poder NC Action is run by a Latina woman, while the staff, consultants and artists that work on products are also Latino.“There’s lots of Spanish ads made by congressional candidates or governors candidates, but it’s just made by their same white consultants, normally translated from English,” Rocha said. “They’re all well-meaning, but it just doesn’t have the same look and feel when it’s made from the community, by the community, for the community.”At the end of September, Poder NC Action will launch another telenovela series that focuses on reproductive justice. Starting in mid-October, the organization will host a mobile Ballots y Belleza on a party bus where young voters will receive beauty services at historically Black colleges and universities, as well as public universities around North Carolina.Ultimately, Godinez hopes that Poder NC’s initiatives will help inspire a new generation of voters to become civically engaged. “We’re creating a paper trail of everything so that we can share it with organizations that our values align no matter where they are, so that way, if something is working well here, there’s no reason that we would hold on to it and not share it.” More

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      Anti-Trump Republican group spends $11.5m in ads in ‘blue wall’ states to boost Harris

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      Republican Voters Against Trump, the group of disaffected Republicans devoted to stopping Donald Trump from returning to the White House, is stepping up its efforts with an $11.5m ad buy in critical battleground states.The group is rolling out a new advert featuring former Trump voters vowing never again to back him. They give a range of reasons for their decision, ranging from Trump’s role in instigating the US Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021, his demeaning of women and his 34 felony convictions.The ads are being focused on the three so-called “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which Joe Biden won in 2020 and which Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice-president and the Democratic presidential candidate, must retain in November. The group will be investing $4.5m in Pennsylvania, $3m in Michigan and $2.2m in Wisconsin, the Hill reported.Ads will also be placed in Arizona and Nebraska, along with about 80 billboards strategically located in swing states that promote former Trump voters who now intend to vote for Harris.The executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump, Sarah Longwell, told MSNBC that the thinking behind the ad buy was to give former Trump voters who are thinking about switching to Harris a “permission structure”. She said that focus groups had shown a “tremendous openness” among some Trump voters to backing the vice-president.“We are taking Trump-voting voices and elevating them so it sends a signal to other Trump voters who are Kamala-curious,” Longwell said. “They are interested in voting for her either because Donald Trump presents such a threat, or because people are bored by Trump – they are bored with all the drama and tired of the insults.”The Guardian’s poll tracker underlines how painfully close the presidential race is within the seven or so key battleground states that are likely to decide the outcome of the 5 November election. Harris is now up on Trump in all the blue wall states – by 0.5% in Pennsylvania, 1.1% in Michigan and 1.4% in Wisconsin – but those figures are well within the margin of error, meaning the contest is essentially neck-and-neck.The launch of the new adverts tallies with a push by the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign to highlight former Republicans who have endorsed the Democratic ticket.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt last month’s Democratic national convention in Chicago, several Republican speakers were invited on to the main stage, including Trump’s former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham and Adam Kinzinger, a former Congress member from Illinois who sat on the January 6 House committee. More