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      Early ballots burned in suspected attacks in Washington and Oregon

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      Hundreds of early ballots cast for the US presidential election have been burned in two suspected attacks in Washington and Oregon, exacerbating tensions ahead of next Tuesday’s knife-edge contest.Police said Monday that the fires in the two states were believed to be connected and that a vehicle involved had been identified, according to the Associated Press.Firefighters went to the scene after smoke was reported coming from a ballot drop box in the city of Vancouver in Washington state at 6.30am on Monday, according to local media.KATU, a local television channel, reported capturing footage of responders releasing a pile of burning ballots to the grounds. The ballots continued to smolder after the flames had been doused.Hundreds of ballots were believed to have been inside when smoke was reported billowing from the box, which had last been emptied at 8am on Sunday. KATU reported that only a few of the ballots deposited there after that had been saved.The elections auditor for Clark county, the local authority administering the boxes, said voters who had cast their ballots into it after 11am could seek new voting documents at a link on the county’s election web page.“There is absolutely zero place in our democracy for political violence or interference against our fellow citizens, election workers, or voting infrastructure … Our right to vote needs to be protected under all circumstances. We can’t yield to intimidation, and we must continue to stand up against unpatriotic acts such as this one,” said local congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.She requested law enforcement officers be in place overnight at all ballot drop boxes in the county until election day, saying: “South-west Washington cannot risk a single vote being lost to arson and political violence.”The fire was reported after a similar incident in nearby Portland in Oregon, where police say an incendiary device was set off inside a ballot drop box close to a building hosting the Multnomah county elections division.Security staff extinguished the fire before police arrived. The device was deactivated and removed by the local bomb squad.The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned of ballot drop box destruction in a September memo obtained by Property of the People, a public records watchdog group. The agency said in an intelligence brief that election infrastructure will be seen as an “attractive target for some domestic violent extremists”, with drop boxes as a “soft target” because they are more accessible.Social media posters in forums frequented by extremists have shared ideas for attacked drop boxes, the agency said, including “road flares, fireworks, petroleum fuel, linseed oil and white phosphorus, cement or expanding foam, bleach or other chemicals, and farm machinery”. Other methods could include putting up fake signs to claim a drop box is out of order, putting up decoy drop boxes or putting “timed explosives” into drop boxes. They have also discussed ways to avoid law enforcement detection.“Damaged ballot drop boxes could temporarily decrease voting opportunities and accessibility and intimidate voters from casting votes if safety concerns arise in the vicinity of a targeted or damaged ballot drop box,” the DHS wrote in the intelligence brief. “Successful ballot drop box destruction could inspire others with related grievances to conduct similar actions.”The incidents came days after a US Postal Service mail box containing a small number of ballots was set on fire in Phoenix, Arizona, last Thursday.Police arrested a 35-year-old man who they said admitted to the crime while he was in custody. They also said he had told them his actions had not been politically motivated and he had committed the offense with the purpose of getting himself arrested.The Guardian has reported that far-right election denial groups supporting Donald Trump have been monitoring election drop boxes as part of their activity in the run-up to next week’s poll, when officials are bracing themselves for disruption and challenges to the vote tallies. More

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      Therapy-speak and 80s hairstyles: will Harris’s Brené Brown sit-down swing white female voters?

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      In the quest to win over white female voters – 53% of whom showed up for Donald Trump in 2020 – Kamala Harris made her case on a podcast hosted by one of their beloved avatars, the vulnerability researcher Brené Brown. The episode, released on Monday, was a mostly fluffy discussion about leadership, trauma and the notion of voting as agency in an uncontrollable news cycle.Brown, a University of Houston professor and bestselling author who has spent two decades studying social sciences, became an overnight celebrity after giving a 2010 Ted Talk called “the power of vulnerability”. One could argue the talk, which birthed Brown’s Oprah-approved speaking empire, also spawned our culture’s current obsession with therapy-speak.Brown’s mottos, such as “courage over comfort” and “what we know matters, but who we are matters more”, align with Harris’s oft-maligned tendency toward a self-help speaking style and vibes-only posturing. Brown’s podcast, Unlocking Us, leads the relationship genre on Apple Podcasts. The vice-president’s campaign might have also hoped that an endorsement from Brown, a 58-year-old church-going Texan, will swing undecided white female voters – a crucial demographic that would help shore up Harris’s record support among women and counterbalance Trump’s popularity with men.That’s not to say Brown’s own politics are inscrutable: she reportedly donated to the White Women for Kamala Harris fundraiser, and she kicked off the episode by declaring herself an “unapologetic Harris/Walz supporter”. Thus began an hour-long chat about “courageous leadership”.Harris spoke about the importance of family and friends as a support system for leaders. She spoke lovingly of her mother, a late cancer researcher, and of her lifelong girlfriends whom she considers just as valuable, if not more so, than romantic partners – a line that probably resonated with gen Z women, who increasingly prioritize platonic relationships, and the many older women who are learning to live alone. When asked about her two biggest values in a leader, Harris called out “fairness and justice”. “That’s so powerful,” Brown cooed back.With just a week to go before election day, as she struggles to communicate policy issues with voters, Harris cycled through her greatest hits. While speaking on reproductive rights, she said she was the first sitting vice-president to have visited an abortion clinic. She imagined Trump in the Oval Office on the first day of his second presidency drafting an “enemies list”, unlike the “to-do list” she would be looking at – he’ll stew while she gets to work. In this vein, much of the conversation focused on fear of another Trump presidency. Using a favorite therapy buzzword, Harris said Americans were “traumatized” by the “cruelty” of Trump’s Maga movement. “Trauma blunts our senses,” and voting blue was a way to take back some of the power, she said.Harris seems to genuinely enjoy speaking to people in these lower-stakes, conversational formats, and some of her standout bits with Brown appeared off the cuff. We learned that her college nickname was “C Cubed”, which stood for “cool, calm and collected”. And despite having what Brown described as a “Depeche Mode haircut” in her 20s (a closely cropped, asymmetrical look), Harris said she was never big on the goth sound – though her husband, Doug Emhoff, loves the group.Except for the two women’s emphatic support of abortion rights, the chat came off as cozy and largely apolitical. That tactic could play well with Unlocking Us listeners, who probably come to Brown’s lovey-dovey podcast as an escape from the hyper-partisan news cycle. Harris seemed, if not the candidate you want to have a beer with, then the pleasant-enough person sitting next to you at an airport bar sipping on a glass of chardonnay.Positioned against Trump’s macho posturing, which reached an apex this weekend with an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast and the racist Madison Square Garden bonanza, Brown’s interview with Harris was like a cardigan on the first day of fall. And we know how much white women love fall. More

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      Washington Post writers say don’t dump subscriptions over non-endorsement

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      The furore over the Washington Post’s decision to forgo a presidential endorsement continued on Monday, with writers for the newspaper pleading with subscribers not to cancel as it would only hurt journalists who did not make the call.The newspaper owned by the multibillionaire Jeff Bezos was thrown into a pre-election inferno on Friday when it announced that it would abandon a five-decade convention of making a formal presidential endorsement.Reaction was swift, with the famed Watergate investigative duo Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein slamming the decision as “surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process” ahead of the 5 November election.But there are developing signs of a pushback to calls to cancel Washington Post subscriptions, with writers for the newspaper pointing out that doing so was ultimately counterproductive.Dana Milbank, an opinion columnist, said he could not endorse the calls to cancel. He said that would not hurt Bezos, who already lost $77m on the Post in 2023, because the paper is just “pocket change” to the businessman who also owns the online retailer Amazon and aerospace company Blue Origin.“But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me,” Milbank wrote. “The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be.”But he added that if the non-endorsement was “the beginning of a crackdown on our journalistic integrity … my colleagues and I will be leading the calls for Post readers to cancel their subscriptions, and we’ll be resigning en masse”.Milbank pointed out that Bezos had typically not interfered with the Post before the newspaper’s brass refused to run an endorsement of Kamala Harris in the upcoming election. The non-endorsement policy was announced shortly before executives of Blue Origin met with Donald Trump as the Republican White House nominee campaigns for a second presidency.From outside the Post, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X: “Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don’t want oversight, does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers and make decisions with which you may disagree, and will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account.”By mid-Monday, reports indicated that more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post, according to NPR. The publication noted that the number was “about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well”.But some argue it would be better to cancel subscriptions to Bezos’s Amazon Prime service.The mood in the Washington Post was still “pretty furious”, an employee there told the Guardian on Monday. And there were moves toward greater union involvement.The employee confirmed that workers were worried that subscription cancellations could ultimately boomerang on them with further job losses.The Post’s non-endorsement decision was made public by Will Lewis, the paper’s publisher and chief executive officer since January. He said that Bezos “was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft” of the spiked Harris endorsement.“I do not believe in presidential endorsements,” Lewis – who previously rose through the ranks of British newspapers and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire – wrote in a statement on Sunday. “We are an independent newspaper and should support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”Nonetheless, under Lewis’s leadership, the Post has issued endorsements this election cycle, including in a US Senate seat race in Maryland.Within hours of the announcement on Friday, 11 Post opinion columnists co-signed a column condemning the decision as “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe progressive senator Bernie Sanders alluded to multibillion contracts Amazon holds with the federal government, including the Department of Defense, to explain the decision. Sanders said Bezos “is afraid of antagonizing Trump and losing Amazon’s federal contracts” if the former president returns to power. “Pathetic,” Sanders said.On Monday, Michelle Norris, an opinion contributor at the Post, said she would resign, calling the decision “a terrible mistake” and “an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976”.Norris follows Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large, who left the paper after the non-endorsement announcement.David Hoffman, an editorial board member who recently accepted a Pulitzer for a series on “the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age”, is also said to be resigning.Among those to cancel Post subscriptions since Friday is the former Republican congresswoman turned Trump critic Liz Cheney. She accused Bezos – who owns the paper through a for-profit subsidiary of an investment fund Nash Holdings LLC – of being “apparently afraid” to endorse “the only candidate in the race who’s a stable responsible adult because he fears Donald Trump”.The Oscar-nominated actor Jeffrey Wright and the West Wing actor Bradley Whitford also posted that they had canceled.The Post’s controversy erupted days after the Los Angeles Times made a similar call to block an endorsement of Harris. The LA newspaper also faced a wave of subscription cancellations.But the LA outlet has sought to cast its non-endorsement decision as more straightforward, with its billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, framing the matter as an attempt at neutrality.On Saturday, his daughter Nika Soon-Shiong, a progressive political activist, said the decision was motivated by Harris’s continued support for Israel as it wars in Gaza.“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,” she said in a statement. More

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      It’s easy for the British to insult Donald Trump – but here’s why it’s a very bad idea | Simon Jenkins

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      Is it wise for Britons to heap abuse on Donald Trump? At present he is the marginal favourite to win next week’s US presidential election – with Britons strongly behind his opponent Kamala Harris. But is overt hostility sensible?Most recent polls show two out of three Britons want Harris to win, including a majority even of Conservatives. The Labour party sent about 100 activists to aid Harris in some swing states. The UK media is almost universally hostile, calling Trump crass, illiterate, vulgar, coarse and fascist. He is identified with the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian Project 2025, which he has disowned. Only Reform UK is for Trump. Surely dignity would counsel respect for an ally’s internal democracy, and caution in alienating the leader of Britain’s most powerful ally.First, what’s new? Britain’s Labour and the US’s Democratic party have bonded for decades, including canvassing and attending each other’s conferences. As a student I once campaigned for Mayor Lindsay in New York, and I have a free tie to prove it. The US has itself interfered in Latin American elections since time began. Russia interfered on Trump’s behalf in 2016, with Operation Lakhta, though Trump denied it. Moscow blatantly interfered in elections this month in Moldova and Georgia.A different question is whether it is wise. Americans can refer to Trump as a fascist, but such facile parallels do little beyond enraging their subjects. More to the point, British opinions on the matter are more likely to evoke the reaction of “mind your own business”. Trump’s first term of office might have had its alarming moments, but the US constitution saw him off – just – and may yet do so again.In 2017, Trump welcomed the British prime minister, Theresa May, to the White House, and rather endearingly held her hand. The British press sniggered. When the BBC asked him a viciously biased question, claiming to represent “our viewers”, he was able to laugh it off. In the same outgoing spirit, he invited Keir Starmer to dine with him for two hours last month and congratulated him on his election success. These may be merely the courtesies expected of public figures, but Trump adhered to them.American presidents are complicated. They are political leaders, but they are also heads of state. Diplomatic custom accords them a certain dignity. In Trump’s case, diplomacy must tilt in the same direction. Britons were annoyed when Barack Obama expressed a strong opinion on the side of remain in the Brexit referendum. But when Boris Johnson sought a trade deal in Washington to compensate for withdrawing from the EU single market, he got short shrift. Trump is threatening to go a step further and impose a punishing 10% tariff on all British exports to the US.This is something Starmer could well do without. He is proposing to penalise American non-doms in Britain in the budget. He may also need to react to a Trump withdrawal of US aid to Ukraine, and his demand for a step-change in British defence spending. Other things being equal, personally insulting the president in such circumstances seems plain stupid.Trump represents a periodic surge in US rightwing populism. It is a turning against the supposedly liberal east- and west-coast governing elites. Its politics is proletarian, xenophobic, protectionist and conservative. This may not be to every Briton’s taste, though Britain saw a similar surge in Reform UK’s vote at this year’s election, disguised by it splitting a Conservative majority vote.Such results are the privilege of the franchise. Liberal democrats can bewail them, but they must respect the winners – even if the losers sometimes do not. They must also treat with the winners in the rough and tumble of international politics. Ostracism is never the answer. Disrespecting the outcome of democracy is the shortcut to disaster.

      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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      ‘Zombie-like’: the US trade agreement that still haunts Democrats

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      More than 30 years have passed since President Bill Clinton persuaded Congress to ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and yet the trade agreement still infuriates many voters and hangs over Kamala Harris’s – and the Democrats’ – chances in this year’s elections.Zombie-like, Nafta just keeps coming back, decades after many Democrats believe it should have died. At the Republican convention, Donald Trump attacked Nafta, calling it “the worst trade agreement ever”. In speech after speech, Nafta is a topic Trump turns to as he seeks to woo the voters in the pivotal blue-collar communities of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – many of whom remain angry about the job losses it caused.There were early warning signs. “A lot of people were saying Nafta was going to be a disaster economically,” said David Bonior, a former Democratic congressman from Michigan who led the congressional fight to defeat Clinton’s push for Nafta. “I could see it was going to be a disaster politically, too.”Nafta acted like a slow-motion poison for Democrats. After Congress ratified it in 1993, year by year more factories closed and more jobs disappeared as manufacturers moved operations to Mexico to take advantage of that country’s lower wages. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank, estimates that the US lost 682,000 jobs due to Nafta, which largely eliminated tariffs between the US, Mexico and Canada.“It’s a lingering issue in Michigan,” said Ron Bieber, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, the US’s largest federation of unions. “Everyone knows someone here in Michigan who lost their job due to Nafta. The door was cracked open to outsourcing before Nafta, but Nafta threw the door open after it was passed.”JJ Jewell, who works at a Ford axle plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, was born two years before Nafta was ratified. The trade pact has been part of the background of his life, he says. Jewell said he often discussed trade problems with other auto workers, even when they didn’t directly discuss Nafta. “It’s an issue,” he said. “Nafta helped expedite the loss of jobs from our country to a country where wages are cheaper. I have friends, family members, neighbors who lost their jobs as a direct result of Nafta. It still affects things decades later.”While Trump talks tough on trade and protecting factory jobs, Jewell said that Trump, while president, fell badly short in his vows to bring back manufacturing jobs. “It’s empty promises,” he said.Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the country’s main labor federation, agreed, saying that Trump’s tough words on trade have done little for workers. “This is an example of Trump’s rhetoric not matching reality,” Shuler said. “He talks a good game, but there’s no action to back it up. When he had the ability to make a difference, when he was president, he went to different places and pretended to be a savior, and you followed up and you saw that those plants closed and jobs were moved to Mexico. He did nothing to fix it.”Seeing all the lingering discontent about Nafta, many Democrats say it’s unfair for Trump and others to blame their party for the agreement. The idea for Nafta arose under Ronald Reagan, they say, and George HW Bush negotiated the deal, both Republicans. More Republicans in Congress voted to ratify Nafta than Democrats. The vast majority of Senate Republicans also voted for it, while most Democratic senators voted against ratification.Still, Bonior said that Clinton and his administration “get the blame because their top guy was for it”, he said. “Clinton was instrumental in making it happen.”Many workers who lost jobs due to Nafta were able to find other jobs, said Bonior, but their pay was 20% less on average. “Lifestyles were enormously downgraded in my district,” said Bonior, who served as House majority whip. “Clinton bought into Nafta, but a lot of working-class people saw that as a betrayal.”On Nafta, Clinton won strong backing from economists and corporate America. Brushing aside labor’s warnings that Nafta would speed the loss of jobs to Mexico, nearly 300 economists on the right and the left, including several Nobel Prize winners, signed a pro-Nafta letter, saying: “The assertions that Nafta will spur an exodus of US jobs to Mexico are without basis.”Many economists argued that Nafta would increase the number of manufacturing jobs in the US because the nation had a higher-skilled, more productive workforce than Mexico and would thus, in theory, gain factory jobs in an expanded free-trade zone. Pro-Nafta forces also argued that the closer economic integration of the US, Mexico and Canada would create a North American powerhouse to counter China’s fast-growing economic power.Jeff Faux, a former president of the Economic Policy Institute, said many economists failed to realize something important that was happening when Nafta was negotiated: “The US was losing its manufacturing base. It was deindustrializing.”Faux, one of the most outspoken economists against Nafta, said Clinton embraced Nafta because he was eager to present himself as a different type of Democrat and “was trying to ingratiate himself with the business community”. “Clinton saw Nafta as an opportunity to present himself as not just another liberal Democrat,” Faux said. “It was the beginning of the notion that came to dominate the Democratic party that its future is not in working people, that it’s in professionals, in women, in minorities and various ethnic groups. They wanted to put together a new coalition, and labor would be a thing of the past.”Michael Podhorzer, a former AFL-CIO political director, said many blue-collar workers remain angry about Nafta because it was such a departure from President Franklin Roosevelt’s emphatically pro-worker Democratic party. Podhorzer said: “Nafta is the catchall for a series of things that Democrats did that showed they had a greater concern for business interests and a kind of insensitivity to the consequences that accelerating deindustrialization would have on people’s lives.”Trump was shrewd to seize on Nafta, he said: “It’s a way for him to sort of wave a flag, but it doesn’t actually mean he’s on the workers’ side. It channels pretty effectively the frustration that many Americans feel in seeing their jobs go offshore or to Mexico or seeing their communities hollowed out or seeing fewer economics prospects for their kids.”In the view of many labor leaders and workers, the Democrats doubled down on misguided trade policy when Clinton successfully pushed Congress in 2000 to approve normal trade relations with China. That move encouraged many US corporations to outsource operations to lower-wage China, with one study finding that the country lost 2m jobs, including 985,000 factory jobs, because of the normalized trade relations with China. The number of factories in the US also declined by 45,000 from 1997 to 2008, with many workers blaming Nafta and the China trade deal.What’s more, many unions faulted Barack Obama for pushing for another free trade agreement: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a pact with 12 Pacific Rim countries. TPP’s supporters said the deal would increase US exports and build a powerful economic bloc to counter China. TPP was signed in 2016 under Obama’s presidency, but soon after Trump became president, he withdrew the US from TPP, preventing it from taking force.“Obama wasn’t great shakes on trade either,” Bonior said. “A lot of working people said they had enough. They decided we’re not going to be with the Democrats any more, and Trump came along and filled the void. That was very smart for Trump to do.”In a 2016 campaign appearance in Pittsburgh, Trump made a major speech on trade that denounced Nafta and cited several Economic Policy Institute studies that criticized the trade pact. Lawrence Mishel, who was the institute’s president at the time, said: “Trump never really explained what he would do about Nafta or trade. He ended his speech with a call for deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, which was far more pro-Chamber of Commerce than pro-worker.”While Joe Biden voted to ratify Nafta when he was a senator, labor leaders say the president’s current pro-worker stance on trade shows that he recognizes his Nafta vote was a mistake. For Bonior, it might be too little too late.“Biden has been very good on working-class issues. Biden is trying to make up for his vote on Nafta,” Bonior said. “But a lot of working-class people are turned off so much to the Democrats that they’re not hearing of the things Biden and Harris have done for them. They’re not listening. They’re gone. I don’t know if we’ll ever get them back.“They’re to some degree mesmerized by Trump even though Trump has never been for working people,” Bonior continued. “Those plants he said he would restore – he never did any of that.”Many union leaders slam Trump for a speech he gave in Youngstown in which he told thousands of workers that he would bring back all the factory jobs that Ohio had lost. “They’re all coming back,” he said. They didn’t. And when General Motors closed its huge assembly plant in nearby Lordstown, Ohio, in 2019, Trump did little to stop the plant closing or bring back the lost jobs.“He said all those jobs would be coming back, and then he did nothing,” said Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW). “The auto industry abandoned Lordstown, and Trump did nothing.”When Trump was running for president in 2016, he vowed to renegotiate Nafta, and he followed through, reaching a new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2018. Labor leaders had attacked Nafta not only for encouraging companies to move factory jobs to Mexico and but also for failing to effectively protect Mexican workers whose employers had violated their right to unionize or other rights.Union leaders agree that USMCA created a stronger mechanism to crack down on labor violations by Mexican companies, although the Trump administration negotiated that improved enforcement mechanism only after the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and House Democrats demanded that Trump go further in the negotiations. But under USMCA, often called “Nafta 2.0”, US companies have continued moving manufacturing operations to Mexico.Even though USMCA made only minor changes to Nafta, Trump called it, “the best trade deal ever made”. For her part, Harris was one of 10 senators to vote against USMCA, saying it didn’t improve Nafta sufficiently.Faux said many workers applaud Trump on trade because “he did something” about it by renegotiating Nafta, while “the Democrats did nothing”.Labor leaders have differing views of USMCA. David McCall, president of the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers, said: “I think Nafta 2.0 was helpful. It’s gotten some better labor protections.”But the UAW’s Fain was merciless in attacking USMCA. “I like to call it Trump’s Nafta,” Fain said. “Trump’s Nafta only made problems worse. Trump’s Nafta only gave the billionaires more profits. Trump’s Nafta only killed more American jobs. Trump’s Nafta only shipped more work to Mexico.”Both Harris and Trump say they will renegotiate USMCA if elected. Trump also says he will protect factory jobs by imposing a 20% tariff on all imports, but the Steelworkers’ McCall says that’s a terrible idea. “I don’t think the solution to the problem is to have tariffs for the sake of having tariffs,” McCall said. “That’s protection. I think trade is a good thing. It’s an economic stimulator.” He said the US should use tariffs not in a blunderbuss way, but to “punish cheaters or countries that dump their various products”.McCall said the Biden-Harris administration had had a far better strategy for protecting factory jobs. “It’s the first time in generations that we’ve had an industrial policy in this country,” he said, praising three important laws passed under Biden: the infrastructure law, the green energy law and the Chips Act to encourage semiconductor production. McCall said those laws, along with Biden’s targeted tariffs “against countries that cheat”, give the US “an opportunity to be the most productive producers of many products”.While many blue-collar workers like Trump’s views on trade, McCall said: “He’s not a friend of unions or labor. For Trump it’s all about him, not about the person that’s working on the job: the steelworker, the electrical worker, the teamster or the UAW member.” More

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      ‘A once-in-a-generation change’: Oregon’s biggest city prepares for monumental overhaul of government

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      When voters in Portland, Oregon, head to the polls next month, they will be tasked not only with selecting new leaders, but also the implementation of a monumental overhaul of the city’s government.Two years ago, residents moved to fundamentally alter their local government structure and adopted what experts have described as some of the most “expansive voting reforms” undertaken by a major US city in recent decades. Come November, the city will use ranked-choice voting to elect a mayor and a larger, more representative city council as Portland moves from a commission form of government to one overseen by a city administrator.The shake-up comes after challenging years for Portland in which the city of 630,000 grappled with a declining downtown, rising homelessness, a fentanyl crisis, growing public drug use and the continued economic impacts of the pandemic years.While some news coverage has portrayed the shift as Portlanders rejecting the city’s historically progressive values, those involved with the project counter that residents are embracing democratic reforms that will lead to a more equitable government better equipped to solve the city’s problems.“It was really clear that this system was, as operated, very inequitable,” said Jenny Lee, managing director of Building Power for Communities of Color, a non-profit that was a key proponent of the effort.“And the challenges in governing are going to be felt the most by those who already have been marginalized in our political system.”Now the city waits to see what the “once-in-a-generation” change will mean for its future.Since 1913, Portland has used a commission form of government. The commission consisted of five people elected citywide and who were responsible for passing policies and also acting as administrators in charge of city departments.The system was briefly popular in other major US cities, but then largely abandoned, said Richard Clucas, a political science professor at Portland State University.“Most cities who adopted that form of government realized there were problems with it,” he said. “Someone may be good as a legislator but it doesn’t make them good as an administrator.”View image in fullscreenAnd Portland’s system had long failed to adequately represent different demographics in the city, Lee said. The city’s elected officials historically have been white men from more affluent areas where residents are more likely to have a higher income and own their homes, according to the Sightline Institute. In 2017, only two people of color had ever been elected to the city council.Under the charter system, simple decisions – such as where to put a bike lane – were politicized, said Shoshanah Oppenheim, the charter transition project manager.“It was based on the political tide,” said Oppenheim, who is also a senior adviser in the city administrator’s office.For more than a century, Portlanders rejected attempts to reform the commission system, but that changed when the 10-year review of the city charter coincided with upheaval and challenges of the pandemic years.The pandemic exacerbated the existing limitations of the city’s form of government, according to a report from Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation chronicling Portland’s reforms.Meanwhile, Portland was the site of widespread racial justice protests and an ensuing federal crackdown, the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic was slow, and residents grew increasingly disillusioned with their leaders’ ability to make meaningful progress tackling homelessness and drug abuse.Those challenges created an opportunity to have meaningful conversations about elections and government, Lee said.Clucas echoed that sentiment: “I think the public was looking and happy to take on some sort of change.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCommunity leaders had spent years educating themselves about electoral reform, and saw an opportunity to create change in the city, the report stated.With support from community organizations and local activists, the commission brought a measure before voters that would make key changes to the city’s system, allowing voters to rank local candidates in order of preference, expand the city council from five to 12 representatives elected from four newly created districts, and move to a system of government overseen by a professional city administrator.Despite criticism about the complexity of the measure and opposition from political leaders and the business community, 58% of voters approved the package of reforms proposed by the commission.Although the timing coincided with major changes and social issues, Lee said the reforms were not reactionary and instead an example of Portland being willing to try new things, which ties into Oregon’s long history of democratic reforms aimed at making government more participatory.“It was a message about change, but it was definitely a hopeful one,” she said. “It was always about these changes will make our government more effective and equitable.”The city has spent the last two years preparing for a project unlike anything Portland has seen before,Oppenheim said. “We had a really short timeline … It’s been an all-hands-on-deck approach,” she said. “There is no playbook. We are making it up as we go along.”Next month, voters will decided among more than 100 candidates for 12 council seats and 19 candidates for mayor. A recent poll from the Oregonian suggested a once-longshot candidate, whose campaign has focused on ending homelessness, is well positioned to win.In a poll of roughly 300 voters from early October, before election packets were sent out, two-thirds responded that they understood how voting works very well or somewhat well. People tend to understand the system right away given that they rank things every day, Oppenheim said.The city has also developed a voter education program to inform residents about the changes and trained operators on its information line how to explain ranked-choice voting.The hope is that voters will feel the increased power of their vote, Lee said. “Every vote has a lot of power. Your constituents’ voices really matter. Their second- and third-choice rankings actually really matter.”After the election, the other major test comes next year when Portland’s new government takes the reins. “We want to be ready on day one so all the city business can continue,” Oppenheim said.“Portlanders have huge expectations for change and we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do things better,” Oppenheim said. “They want a more representative government. We have it in our power to deliver that.” More

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      Is Kamala Harris alienating progressives as she courts anti-Trump Republicans?

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      As the daughter of a man who drove George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Liz Cheney seemed a strange political bedfellow for a Democratic candidate intent on reclaiming disaffected Arab support in one of the US presidential election’s key battlegrounds.But Cheney, the former third-ranking Republican in Congress before her career was derailed by her enmity with Donald Trump, was cast in precisely that role with Kamala Harris last week.The pair, whose ideologically conflicting views on abortion and a host of other issues would once have put them at loggerheads, appeared together in the vice-president’s trawl for votes in critical swing states, including Michigan. The state is home to a large ethnic Arab voting bloc that still remembers Dick Cheney’s controversial role as Bush’s vice-president but is now reassessing its traditional pro-Democratic sympathies amid anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.Trump, who has suggested that Cheney should be tried by a military tribunal for her congressional role in investigating his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, mocked it as a political gift.“Arab Voters are very upset that Comrade Kamala Harris … is campaigning with ‘dumb as a rock’ War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man that pushed Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to War with every Muslim Country known to mankind,” he posted on his Truth Social platform.The argument – however warped in its expression – summarises one part of Harris’s conundrum in Michigan. She faces a serious hurdle after the Uncommitted movement, a pro-Palestinian protest group that is calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza war and an arms embargo on Israel, declined to endorse her as she has sought to steer a careful middle path on the issue. The movement won more than 100,000 votes in Michigan when it contested last February’s Democratic primary against Joe Biden when he was still the party’s nominee.“I don’t think having Liz Cheney on the team helps at all, because she doesn’t bring a flock of votes with her,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute and a member of the Democratic National Committee.Yet the endorsement from Cheney – along with that of her father, who has also publicly backed the Democratic nominee – highlights a broader aspect of Harris’s campaign; to win, she is relying on the public support of high-profile anti-Trump Republicans to persuade enough hitherto GOP voters to set aside old habits and vote for her on 5 November.To that end, Harris’s coalition tent has expanded to include a broad swath of anti-Trump Republican refuseniks, including members of his former administration who have pledged themselves to the Democratic nominee in the interests of stopping him.Among them are Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary, Olivia Troye, a national security adviser to Mike Pence, Miles Taylor, a former homeland security department chief of staff, as well as Adam Kinzinger, a former Illinois congressman who – like Cheney – served on the House of Representatives committee investigating the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by a Trump-incited mob.Other Republican Harris-endorsers include Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general in the Bush administration and a man generally acknowledged as a legal architect of the US torture programme used in the post-9/11 “war on terror”. And last week, Fred Upton a former Michigan congressman who served for three decades before retiring in 2022 after voting to impeach Trump over January 6.Harris’s campaign has welcomed them all, though few so warmly as Cheney.The strategy has been accompanied by Harris moving to the centre by jettisoning previously held leftwing positions such as Medicare for all and support for a fracking ban, while embracing a tougher stance on immigration, Trump’s most emblematic campaign theme.Prominent Democrat progressives like the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the outspoken House member for New York, have remained quiescent in the interests of maintaining a united front – until now.Sanders, who had previously defended the vice-president’s retreat from progressive policies as “pragmatic” and essential to “win the election” broke cover last week, warning that her embrace of Republicans risked “losing the working class”.“The truth of the matter is that there are a hell of a lot more working-class people who could vote for Kamala Harris than there are conservative Republicans,” Sanders – who has spoken at two dozen campaign events for Harris in October alone but, unlike Cheney, not appeared on a podium with her – told the Associated Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“She has to start talking more to the needs of working-class people.”Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, a leftwing group founded as a spin-off of Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid, told AP that Harris’s approach could cost her 10% of the progressive vote – with some possibly casting a ballot for Trump.Zogby agreed. “Having an entire campaign focus on winning over quote-unquote moderate Republicans – and Liz Cheney is not a moderate Republican,” makes voters anxious, he said. “When somebody hears Liz Cheney being considered for a cabinet position, that makes people go into the panic mode. It may actually cost votes.“There is an importance in reaching moderate Republicans. [But] the definition of a moderate Republican is not somebody who rejects Donald Trump. It’s somebody who espouses policies that are themselves moderate in terms of their economic and foreign policy agenda.”But Mark Bergman, a veteran Democratic operative who has liaised with Republicans who have offered Harris their support, said that such ideological distinctions overlooked the personal risk many were taking by publicly disavowing Trump.“These people were not asked by the campaign. They took it upon themselves to act,” Bergman said. “By speaking out, they are putting a target on their backs. They deserve our utmost respect. There are lists of people [to be targeted if Trump wins] floating around. These are real conversations.”John Conway, strategy director of Republican Voters Against Trump – a group canvassing conservative-leaning voters to back Harris on the grounds that a second Trump presidency would endanger democracy – said it was a “false choice” to cast Harris’s embrace of dissident Republicans as a trade-off with maintaining her Democratic base.“This election is going to be decided by what the independents and centre-right swing voters do,” he said. “If Kamala Harris can win enough of them, she can win Pennsylvania, Michigan [and] Wisconsin and reach 270 electoral college votes.”For the strategy to succeed, Conway argued, Harris needed the example of GOP grandees of Cheney’s stature to win over diehard Republicans repelled by Trump but fearful of crossing a psychological barrier by voting Democrat.“It’s really important that she get all the endorsements from the right she can. So when somebody like Liz Cheney says, ‘I feel the same way you do. I’ve been a Republican like you’ve been. I’m going to get there on Kamala Harris, because we need to make sure that Donald Trump can never be president again,’ I think that does help [persuade] reluctant Republican voters.” More

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      After a hurricane, Democrats try to snatch rare victory in swing state North Carolina

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      Eric “Rocky” Farmer is stoking a bonfire of what’s left of his life. Billows of smoke rise from a mound of debris burning in front of what he once called his home – a large two-storied house that is now a contorted mass of twisted metal and broken beams.When Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina last month, the North Fork New River that runs beside his property broke its banks, rising more than 20ft. The raging waters lifted up a mobile home from upstream as effortlessly as if it were a rag doll, slamming it into the corner of his house and causing the structure to crumple.Farmer, 55, will have to dismantle the mess and rebuild it, largely with his own hands. “It’s a bad scene, but we’ll get back up,” he said, sounding remarkably serene.Farmer’s struggle has now become entangled in the painfully close and hyper-tense election in North Carolina. The state is one of seven battlegrounds that will decide the outcome of the presidential race on 5 November.Several tracker polls, including the Guardian’s, show the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris to be neck-and-neck in the state.With polls so tight, the impact of Hurricane Helene has made a complicated election look as mangled as Farmer’s house. What the disaster does to turnout, and with that to the candidates’ chances, could tip the race.Amid the wreckage of his home, Farmer is taking a philosophical approach. “Politics is like mother nature,” he said. “You just watch what it does from the sidelines, then deal with the consequences.”Though he plans to vote on 5 November, he is still not sure whether that will be for Trump or Harris. “Guess I’ll go with the lesser of the two evils – they’re both evil as far as I’m concerned,” he said.View image in fullscreenThe hurricane that struck on 26 September hit the Appalachian mountain region of western North Carolina hard, killing at least 96 people. Many roads are still closed and thousands of people have been displaced or remain without power and running water.More than 1.2 million voters live in the stricken region – about one in six of the state’s total electorate. The obvious fear is that turnout will be depressed.“Nobody’s talking about politics here, because it doesn’t matter,” said Shane Bare, 45, a local volunteer handing out donated coats. “If you can’t flush your toilet or get to your mailbox, you could care less about the election.”Bare expects he will vote in the end, probably for Trump, whom he doesn’t much like but thinks has the edge on economic policy.Other voters are more upbeat about the election. Kim Blevins shared her passion for Trump as she was picking up free tinned food and bottled water from a relief station in Creston.“If Trump doesn’t get in, it’s going to be worse than the hurricane,” she said. “It’ll be world war three. Kamala Harris wants to make us a communist country.”Harold Davis, 68, a Harris supporter salvaging lumber from the side of the river, told the Guardian that he also cares more than ever about the election. “It’s so important. Maga is really Mawa – Make America White Again – and the sooner we can get back to treating everyone as equals the better,” he said.For Trump, the stakes in North Carolina could not be greater. For decades, the state has veered Republican, only backing Democrats twice in almost half a century (Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008).If Trump can take the state, as he did four years ago by a razor-thin 75,000 votes, along with Georgia and Pennsylvania, he will return to the White House. Without it, his path is uncertain.“It’s very hard for us to win unless we’re able to get North Carolina,” Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has said.Trump descended on North Carolina for two days this week, scrambling between Asheville in the storm zone to Greenville and Concord, and then Greensboro. He has been busily spreading lies about the hurricane response, accusing the Biden administration of refusing aid to Republican voters and falsely claiming that federal money has been redirected to house undocumented immigrants.His frenetic schedule and lies are perhaps indications of Trump’s anxieties about the impact of the hurricane on his electoral chances. Of the 25 counties hit by the disaster, 23 voted for Trump in 2020.“Outside the cities of Asheville and Boone, which are pretty Democratic, most of the hurricane area went strongly for Trump in 2020. So if turnout is down because of the disaster, it is likely to hit Trump most,” said David McLennan, a political scientist at Meredith College who runs the Meredith opinion poll.Republicans in the state have drawn comfort from the record-breaking early voting. In the first week of in-person early voting, almost 1.6 million people cast their ballots, surpassing the total crop of early votes in 2020.Four years ago, Republican early voting slumped in the wake of Trump’s false claims about rampant fraud. But this year’s record-smashing turnout suggests that the party has now put that behind it – Republicans and Democrats are virtually tied in their early voting numbers.“Despite all the challenges, people have shown they are determined to come and vote, a lot of them specifically against Kamala Harris,” said Matt Mercer, communications director for the North Carolina Republican party. “So we are feeling optimistic.”In the tranquil tree-lined suburbs on the north side of Charlotte, the effort to squeeze out every vote for Kamala Harris is entering its final heave. Here, sandwiched between the solidly Democratic city and the heavily Trumpian countryside, the suburban voters, women especially, could hold the key.Fern Cooper, 83, standing at the door of her detached suburban house, said she was powerfully motivated to vote because of her disdain for Trump. As a former New Yorker from the Bronx, she’s observed his flaws up close.She recalled how he was gifted huge sums of money from his real estate father; how he called for Black young men known as the Central Park Five to be executed for a rape they did not commit and for which they were later exonerated; how he treated his first wife, Ivana Trump, badly.“I know everything about Trump,” she said. “He’s not getting my vote.”Hannah Waleh, 66, is also all-in for Harris, for more positive reasons: “She will bring change, she is real, not a liar. She is for the poor and working-class people.”Waleh, a medical technician, has been urging her colleagues at her hospital and church to get out and vote early for the Democratic candidate: “I’m begging them. If everybody votes, I’m sure she will win.”View image in fullscreenShe might be right. The Meredith poll has tracked the extraordinary transformation in the race after Harris took over the Democratic nomination from Joe Biden.“Biden was losing North Carolina,” McLennan said. “Harris’s entry into the race returned the state to being 50-50 again – it’s back to being purple.”It is one thing bringing North Carolina back into contention and quite another to win. Part of the challenge is that, according to the poll, 2% of voters are still undecided, a tiny slice of the electorate that both campaigns are now frantically chasing.“I’ve never seen undecideds that low so close to the election,” McLennan said.They include Faith and Elizabeth, both 27, who have erected a 15ft Halloween skeleton on the lawn outside their house in the Charlotte suburbs. They told the Guardian that the most important issue, in their view, is abortion and the rights that women have already had taken away from them under Trump.And yet they still haven’t committed to voting for Harris. “We want to be certain,” Faith said.The Democrats are prioritising such suburban women, including those who formed part of the 23% of Republicans who backed Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary. They are doing so by focusing on abortion rights, with the Harris-Walz campaign warning that the state’s current restrictive 12-week abortion ban would be tightened under a Trump administration to a total nationwide abortion ban.They have also sought to tie Trump to extreme Republicans further down the ballot. The main target is the Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, who has described himself as a “Black Nazi” and has been revealed to have made extreme racist remarks.During the past 18 months, Democrats have invested in the state, opening 28 offices with more than 340 staffers. They have even pushed into rural counties that previously had been assumed to be beyond the party’s reach.“The Democrats have prioritized getting the party’s message out in more rural parts – on the grounds that a vote from rural areas is just as useful as from the city,” said Jason Roberts, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Bolstering the party’s ground game is a vast alliance of non-profit progressive organizations such as the Black-led group Advance Carolina and Red Wine & Blue, which works with suburban women. The alliance, which playfully calls itself Operation We Save Ourselves, has a goal of knocking on 4m doors to promote candidates with progressive values – the largest independent program of its sort in North Carolina’s history.If hard work were all it took to win presidential elections, Harris would already have one foot inside the Oval Office. But anxieties continue to swirl around the Democratic ticket, led by concerns that early turnout from African American voters, who in past cycles have swung overwhelmingly Democratic, is lower this year than at the same stage four years ago (37% in 2020, compared with 20% today).As the months remaining until election day turn into days, and days into hours, the Harris-Walz campaign will be making last-ditch efforts to persuade Black voters to get out and vote – voters like Christian Swims, 21, a student at community college, who would be voting in his first presidential election.If he votes at all, that is.“I don’t follow the election much,” he said. “My friends don’t talk about it. People round here aren’t very political.”Or Joseph Rich, a Fedex worker, 28. “I don’t know too much about Trump and Kamala Harris,” he said. “I’ll read up on them, but now I’m not sure.”Time is running out for Democrats to connect with voters like Swims and Rich. Whether or not they succeed could make all the difference. More