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      Will white women abandon Republicans and vote for Kamala Harris?

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      White female voters have been the backbone of the GOP for decades – but polls indicate their support for the party may erode this November, thanks to younger white women who are moving left at breakneck speed.In the weeks after the 2016 presidential election, after Donald Trump stunned the world by defeating Hillary Clinton, media outlets seized on white women to explain his shock win. Forty-seven per cent of white women voted for Trump, while 45% backed Clinton, according to an analysis of validated voter files by the Pew Research Center.Trump’s success with white women highlighted a longstanding truth: this group votes for Republicans. Over the last 72 years, a plurality of white women have voted for the Democratic candidate in only two presidential elections – in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson won 44 states, and in 1996, when Bill Clinton ran in a three-way race. Trump’s lead with white women even grew in 2020, when 53% supported him. In contrast, 95% of Black women voted for Joe Biden in 2020, along with 61% of Hispanic women, Pew found.But quite a bit has changed since 2020 – especially for women. The US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, transforming abortion rights into a major election issue. Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic candidate from Joe Biden, becoming the first woman of color to secure a major-party nomination for president. All this raises the question: will 2024 be the year that white women, who make up almost 40% of the national electorate, finally join women of color in supporting the Democrats?Well, not necessarily. But the gap very well may shrink.There are signs that younger white women are peeling off from the GOP – a trend that is linked to a steady drift by all young women to the left.“Young women of color and young white women, in my research, are pretty uniformly liberal and feminist,” said Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the recent book The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy. “I think Harris’s selection as the nominee now – as opposed to Biden – has really further made them enthusiastic about voting. So I strongly suspect that young, white women voters are going to defy the longer-term trend of white women in general voting for Republicans.”Young women are increasingly queer, increasingly secular and getting married later in life – all characteristics that tend to be linked with liberalism and support for the Democratic party. (People who identify as liberal are very likely to be Democrats, though the inverse is not necessarily true – not all Democrats identify as liberal.)Between 2011 and 2024, liberal identification among white women rose by 6%, according to a Gallup analysis shared with the Guardian. Such identification also rose by 6% among Black women, but fell by 2% among Hispanic women.Gen Z is the most diverse generation of Americans yet, but Gallup research suggests that doesn’t explain young women’s leftward drift. Between 2017 and 2024, 41% of white women between the ages of 18 and 29 identified as liberals – 2 percentage points more than their peers of color.Young women are also unusually involved in politics. Women have long outvoted men, but in 2020, 60% of 18- to 29-year-old white women voted – more than any other group of youth voters, according to an analysis of AP VoteCast data by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Fifty-five per cent voted for Biden.Trump’s 2016 victory may have something to do with these trends. Raised by Democratic-leaning independents, Chloe Fowler said Trump’s election was a critical inflection point in her political evolution. She was a sophomore in high school when Trump won; the day after, somebody in her school hallway shouted gleefully: “Grab ’em by the pussy!”“Things like that stick with us,” recalled Fowler, who is white. A few months later, her mom took her to the Women’s March in Omaha, Nebraska. “That was a very pivotal moment for me, honestly – doing a bunch of chants with her and wearing the pink cat ear hats.”Fowler is now the vice-president of Nebraska Young Democrats. The 23-year-old has been phone-banking furiously in her home district – Nebraska’s second congressional district, which may end up deciding whether Trump or Harris becomes president.‘Why is this race so close?’A 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll in September found that white women narrowly prefer Harris to Trump, 42% to 40%. (The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 1%.) The remaining 18% can make or break the election, of course. The gender gap between white women and white men is larger. Fifty per cent of white men prefer Trump, with only 36% supporting Harris.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA majority of Black women support Harris, that poll found, as do pluralities of Hispanic and Asian American women.Jane Junn, a political science professor at the University of Southern California, says what is often misunderstood as a “gender gap” between male and female voters is really a race gap. While women as a whole may end up voting for Harris – a September New York Times/Siena poll showed that 54% of women planned to vote for Harris, compared with 40% of men – white women, Junn predicted, will remain Republicans in 2024. “If all of a sudden, the white women were like: ‘Oh, my God, I’m burning my bra and my Barbie shoes and my long fingernails and all the plastic sprays I put into my body’ – we’re not seeing that,” Junn said. “Why is this race so close? It’s so close because these groups remain fairly consistent in their partisan loyalty.”Polling from Galvanize Action, an organization that seeks to mobilize moderate women – especially in the critical “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – has found the race in a dead heat among moderate white women, who are split 43% to 44% in favor of the former president. These women, who Galvanize Action defines as not ideologically entrenched as Democrats or Republicans, account for more than 5 million voters in those three states.Trump has the edge when it comes to these women’s top issues of the economy and immigration, but the women polled by Galvanize Action trust Harris more on democracy and reproductive freedom.“Even among women who say that economy or democracy is their No 1 issue, a good segment of those people also say: ‘I’m not going to vote for anyone that won’t protect abortion,’” said Jackie Payne, Galvanize Action’s executive director and founder.Democrats are hoping that abortion rights-related ballot measures – which voters will decide on in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Nevada and Nebraska’s second congressional district – will spur turnout among their base. However, white women may in effect vote split-ticket, simultaneously voting for a pro-abortion rights measure and for Republicans. More than half of white women voted for Ohio’s 2023 abortion-related ballot measure – but more than 60% of white women supported Mike DeWine, the Republican governor who signed a six-week abortion ban into law, in 2022, just months after Roe fell.“This is going to be all about turnout. This is going to be a very, very close election,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. “The Democratic party counts on women. They count particularly on Black women to turn out. Will they be more energized?” More

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      Both Trump and Harris are swinging to the ‘center’. What does that even mean? | Moira Donegan

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      Who, exactly, could be an undecided voter in 2024? It’s not as if the candidates do not draw a sufficient contrast. There can be few people alive these days, let alone few registered voters in America, who do not know much more than they ever thought they would about the habits, history, and inner psyche of Donald Trump, who has now been a singularly domineering force in national politics for nearly a decade. The Harris campaign has been trying to play their candidates’ comparative newness on the national stage as an asset, rigorously keeping her from saying much of substance, but Kamala Harris, too, is by now a well-known figure: once a popular and high profile senator from the country’s biggest state, she moved on to a busy, energetic, and extremely visible vice presidency.The candidates are about as familiar to Americans as they’re going to get; anyone still saying they are “undecided” now, just four weeks out from the election, seems like the sort who has been paying so little attention that they’re not likely to remember to vote at all.And yet it is this undecided voter, that irresistible phantom in American politics, who both candidates seem to be chasing as the race enters its final weeks. Both candidates seem, for lack of a better term, to be trying to cast themselves as making a pivot to the center, seemingly in a bid to convince this imaginary voter – the one who is apparently torn between a center-left bureaucrat of obvious competence and a raving, racist narcissist who wants to be a dictator and has already tried – to pick them. If such a person exists, I’m not sure that I, for one, would place much value in their esteem. But the campaigns are making a different calculation.On the Republican side, Trump, never one to miss an opportunity for cynicism and dishonesty, has tried to cast himself, in somewhat feeble and unconvincing terms, as a moderate on abortion. He has tried to say that his position is that abortion should be left to the states (which conveniently elides several of his past statements, as well as leaving unacknowledged the homicidal and sadistic policies that many states have enacted). Now, his wife is shilling a book in which she claims, with conspicuously convenient timing, that she is personally pro-choice. At the vice-presidential debate, Trump’s surrogate, Ohio senator and pronatalist activist JD Vance, spoke in patronizing terms about women who need to be given “more options” – not the option to have an abortion or dictate the fate of their own bodies or the course of their own lives, of course, but the option to drop out of the workforce to stay home and raise babies.The lies, obfuscation, and euphemism from the Trump camp are an effort to conceal the substance of their anti-woman policies behind a slick style of obscurantism. Distressingly, it might be working: polls show that many voters wrongly believe that a second Trump presidency would not further erode abortion rights.Harris, for her part, has been seeking to court the imagined undecided voter by bear-hugging Republicans – sometimes literally. On Thursday, she held a rally in Ripon, Wisconsin – the birthplace of the Republican party – to campaign alongside former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has endorsed Harris. The women stood together in front of large signs that said “Country Over Party.” The official pitch was that Trump is a great enough threat to democracy that figures who agree on little else can unite to oppose him out of a sense of patriotic duty. But the appearance also seemed to signal Harris’s bid to attract Trump-skeptical conservatives, and to lessen her liberal California image in favor of a moderate, conciliatory one.But if the two candidates seem to be looking to gain the same kind of voters, they face very different risks in trying to court them. Trump is the charismatic leader of a personality cult whose voters respond to his efforts to ignite their grievances and largely seem to ignore his own repeated and well-documented lies and contempt for them. This has always been Trump’s paradox: that he is loved by a base of support that he himself seems to profoundly disrespect, and that, in the eyes of his followers, his transparent self-interest only serves to make him more trustworthy, more authentic, with each of his lies seeming to evoke a larger truth.As Trump has ostentatiously tried to pivot to the center on abortion, there has been some grumbling from the anti-choice movement, which has been not a little bit disturbed by the way their cause has become a political liability for the Republican party. But for all the anti-choice set’s dissatisfaction with Trump’s recent statements, there has never been any real risk that they would withhold their votes from him. Their loyalty is permanent.Not so for Harris. In the Trump age, the Democrats have cobbled together a coalition too large and internally contradictory to be sustainable – consisting, as it does, of people with fundamentally different worldviews, opposed interests, and a great deal of mutual mistrust. Harris’s efforts to win over Republican voters will run a much greater risk of alienating her party’s progressive base, many of whom see Republican policy preferences as a threat to their civil liberties and way of life. The day after she appeared on stage with Cheney in Wisconsin, Harris met with leaders of the Arab and Muslim communities in Flint, Michigan, many of whom have been distraught at the horrific suffering in Gaza and outraged by the Biden administration’s complicity in Israel’s increasingly reckless and aggressive actions.Their votes will be crucial to her victory in Michigan, an essential swing state. But it’s not clear how much the meeting will do to reassure them. Back in Wisconsin, Harris had taken time out of her rally with Liz Cheney to specifically thank the former Vice President Dick Cheney – the architect of the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. He, too, has endorsed Harris.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot review – a head of state lost without a script

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      As we’re reminded every four years, the US, while purporting to be a republic, is more like an elective monarchy. Presidents campaign as partisans, but once inaugurated they’re expected to transcend politics; draped in the flag, their task is to exemplify the national character. Although nowadays the country is too fractious to be personified by any individual, in less schismatic times Ronald Reagan managed the feat – as American author Max Boot argues in his generous yet sharply perceptive biography – because he was “a mainstream, generic, nonhyphenated American, Midwestern born”. “Mr Norm is my alias,” Reagan said. “Average will do it.”But was Reagan amiably bland or somehow blank? Boot finds him to be incapable of introspection, so emotionally withdrawn that he remained unknowable to everyone but his second wife Nancy, whom he called “Mommy”. While preaching “family values” Reagan neglected his offspring, and when his daughter complained he insisted: “We were happy, just look at the home movies,” relying on the camera to vouch for his parental affection. Although he was benevolent enough – as a teenage lifeguard at a lake in Illinois he saved 77 swimmers from drowning, and as governor of California he often sent personal cheques to citizens who wrote to him about their problems – Boot thinks that he had no real comprehension of other people. This limited his range as an actor; affable and superficial, in his Hollywood films he could only play versions of himself. It also explains what Boot regards as the most shaming failure of his presidency, which was his prudish refusal to confront the Aids epidemic.View image in fullscreenReagan grew up as a New Deal Democrat but acquired a horror of the welfare state during a few dreary weeks he spent filming in London in 1948. Socialism, so far as he understood it, consisted of drab, underlit shop windows and watery meals; complaining that the English “do to food what we did to the American Indian”, he exempted himself from rationed austerity by having steaks flown in from New York to be cooked at the Savoy. Otherwise, Boot suspects that he lacked ideological convictions, and his earlier careers as a radio announcer and a Hollywood contract player dictated his conduct after he graduated to politics. When he ran for re-election as president in 1984, he appointed his campaign manager as his director and compliantly recited whatever the Teleprompter told him to say.Reagan performed with aplomb as head of state; he had little interest in serving as the nation’s chief executive, and relied on aides whom he called his “fellas” to articulate policies and implement them. Boot pays more attention to Washington intrigues than Reagan ever did, but his book is best when he looks away from backroom plotting. The account of John Hinckley’s assassination attempt in 1981 is alarming and also moving. Nearer to death than was disclosed at the time, Reagan put the panicked surgeons at their ease by making jokes; during his recovery in hospital he got down on his knees to clean up a mess in the bathroom, reluctant to delegate the dirty work to a nurse.Boot gives crises an edge of wry amusement. Nuclear summits with the Russians were envenomed by Nancy Reagan’s reaction to the immaculately styled, intellectually haughty Raisa Gorbachev. “Who,” fumed the outclassed first lady, “does that dame think she is?” In an episode that threatened to topple Reagan, the gung-ho Colonel Oliver North was put in charge of illegally selling arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages, and travelled to Tehran with a chocolate cake as a token of his government’s goodwill. The bearded revolutionary guards, amused by American naivety, wolfed down the cake but released no captives.View image in fullscreenBoot, a lapsed conservative, is disgusted by the current horde of Maga Republicans. Even so, he admits that Trump’s most blustery slogan originated with Reagan, who led his own crusade to “make America great again”. A pair of Trump’s eventual fixers lurked on the fringes of Reagan’s first presidential campaign: Roy Cohn and Roger Stone arranged for an endorsement that enabled Reagan to win the usually left-leaning state of New York. But the candidate himself always denied knowledge of such deals, and when Boot catches Reagan twisting the facts – for instance by reminiscing about his military valour during a war that he actually spent in Hollywood – he treats him as a self-deceived fabulist, not a liar.For Trump, making America great means aggrandising and enriching himself. Reagan, to his credit, had no such mad, greedy conceit, and in 1994, in a handwritten note informing his “fellow Americans” that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, he touchingly excluded himself from the “bright new dawn” that he predicted for the country. Later, unsure of who he was or what he had been, he wondered at the reaction of passersby when he was taken for supervised walks near his home in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. “How do they know me?” he asked his minders. The erstwhile celebrity had declined into nonentity; Mr Norm was at last truly anonymous, at least to himself.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot is published by WW Norton (£35). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      Trump marks 7 October anniversary and criticizes ‘weak’ Biden and Harris

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      Donald Trump marked the first anniversary of the 7 October Hamas terrorist attacks, which he called “one of the darkest days in all of history”, with a commemoration for victims and hostages at his golf resort in Miami on Monday night, but swiftly turned the event into an attack on Kamala Harris.He also repeated a previous claim that the attack on Israel would never have happened if he was still in the White House.Blaming Harris and Joe Biden for the “weakness” he said gave Hamas the confidence to launch the attack, the Republican presidential nominee told a crowd of about 300 supporters, mostly from the Jewish community, that a wave of anti-Israel sentiment which he said was sweeping the US, and wider world, could be blamed on their administration.“Almost as shocking as 7 October itself is the outbreak of antisemitism that we have all seen in its wake,” he said.“The anti-Jewish hatred has returned … and within the ranks of the Democratic party in particular. The Republican party has not been infected by this horrible disease, and won’t be as long as I’m in charge.”The attacks, which left 1,200 people dead and an additional 250 taken hostage by Hamas, provided “a moment in horrible history”, he said.“It seemed as if the gates of hell had sprung open and unleashed their horrors unto the world. We never thought we’d see it … and a lot of that has to do with leadership of this country.”After claiming the attacks would not have taken place had he been elected to a second term, Trump said he would restore the closeness with Israel he insisted the US had lost, despite Biden and Harris both expressing support for the country’s right to defend itself.“If, and when, they say, when I’m president, the US will once again be stronger and closer [to Israel] than it ever was. But we have to win the election,” he said.“What is needed is more than ever unwavering American leadership. The dawn of new, more harmonious Middle East is finally within our reach. I will not allow the Jewish state to be threatened with destruction. I will not allow another Holocaust of the Jewish people. I will not allow a jihad to be waged on America or our allies, and I will support Israel’s right to win its war.”Trump’s fire and brimstone delivery was at odds with remarks earlier in the day from Harris, his Democratic opponent in November, who paid tribute to those who lost their lives, but also spoke of ensuring Israel had what it needed to defend itself.Biden expressed sorrow for suffering on all sides of the conflict in the Middle East, and in a statement condemned a “vicious surge in antisemitism in America” since the attacks.Trump’s address began more than two hours later than billed. He joked about a bumpy flight from New York, and his concern for Florida from Hurricane Milton, a category 5 storm predicted to slam into the state on Wednesday.His supporters, some wearing yarmulkes with the former president’s name embroidered on them, cheered as he took the stage of the ballroom at Trump National in Doral.He spoke against a backdrop of six American and Israeli flags, and images of the almost 1,200 victims, including 46 Americans, killed by Hamas one year ago. A succession of speakers and guests, including two Holocaust survivors, Jewish religious leaders and Republican politicians, lit remembrance candles as they took the stage.Along one wall, rows of candles sat in front of photographs of the dozens of people taken hostage. Each name was marked by the word “kidnapped” in capital letters.View image in fullscreenTrump has presented himself as Israel’s strongest, most outspoken defender, but has also drawn criticism for his previous comments. A year ago, in the days following the terrorist attack on the Nova music festival, he called Hezbollah, the Lebanese group closely allied to Hamas, “very smart”, and Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant “a jerk”.Speaking at an event in Florida last October, Trump said Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not prepared, and that Israel’s enemies were “smart, and, boy, are they vicious”.The White House condemned his comments as “dangerous and unhinged”.Trump also raised eyebrows last month when he claimed he was “the most popular person in Israel”, and bemoaned a lack of support from Jewish voters after polls showed him below 40% with them.Insisting he had been “the best president by far” for Israel, he said: “Based on what I did … I should be at 100%.” Trump did not repeat the boast on Monday.Some supporters in the audience in Miami were pleased to hear Trump speaking forcefully in defense of Israel.“Kamala Harris will stand for Hamas. She is no friend of Israel,” Ben Fisher, a Miami resident, said. “Donald Trump speaks the way a strong leader should. He knows if your country is attacked you cannot let that go, if it’s the attack on the festival or the missiles from Tehran.”Harris spoke earlier in the day at the vice-presidential residence, promising that if elected next month she would “always ensure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself”.Unlike Trump, she resisted the opportunity to make political remarks, focusing instead on victims by telling the story of two Americans who died, and naming each of the seven Americans taken by Hamas to Gaza, four of whom are still believed to be alive. More

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      Fema chief warns ‘dangerous’ Trump falsehoods hampering Helene response

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      A slew of falsehoods about Hurricane Helene, including claims of funds diverted from storm survivors to migrants and even that Democrats somehow directed the hurricane itself, have hampered the response to one of the deadliest hurricanes to ever hit the US, the nation’s top emergency official has warned.Misinformation spread by Donald Trump, his supporters and others about the hurricane has shrouded the recovery effort for communities shattered by Helene, which tore through five states causing at least 230 deaths and tens of billions of dollars of damage. Many places, such as in western North Carolina, are still without a water supply, electricity, navigable roads or vital supplies.“It’s frankly disappointing we are having to deal with this narrative, the fact there are a few leaders having a hard time telling the difference between fact and fiction is creating an impedance to our ability to actually get people the help they need,” Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), told MSNBC on Monday.Trump has accused Joe Biden’s administration of “abandoning” people to the crisis and, baselessly, of being short of disaster relief funds due to money spent on undocumented migrants. Such claims are “frankly ridiculous” and creating a “truly dangerous narrative that is creating this fear” among affected people, Criswell said.In multiple rallies in the past week, Trump has accused Biden and Kamala Harris of favoring migrants over disaster-hit areas. “They stole the Fema money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season,” Trump has said.“Kamala spent all her Fema money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal immigrants.” Trump added the places worst hit are “largely a Republican area so some people say they did it for that reason”.JD Vance, Trump’s Republican running mate, echoed this theme on Monday, telling Fox News that Fema’s focus on migrants is “going to distract focus from their core job of helping American citizens in their time of need”. Last week, Stephen Miller, a far-right Trump adviser, said that “Kamala Harris turned Fema into an illegal alien resettlement agency”.Fema does, in fact, have a housing program that offers shelter to migrants leaving detention but this is separate from its disaster relief program. “No money is being diverted from disaster response needs. None,” the White House has stated.In remarks on Monday after speaking to Criswell by phone, Harris urged politicians to stop “playing games” with lives at stake. According to the White House pool, the vice-president said: “There’s a lot of misinformation being pushed out there by the former president about what is available, particularly for the survivors of Helene. First of all, it’s extraordinarily irresponsible. It’s about him, it’s not about you. The reality is Fema has so many resources that are available to those who desperately need them.”Congress recently provided an extra $20bn for disaster relief but Biden has warned that more funding will be needed to help the long-term recovery of places increasingly assailed by powerful storms fueled by global heating.Other conspiracy theories and erroneous claims have swirled online and in areas affected by Helene, such as the assertion that Fema will give only $750 to individuals as a loan (it is, in fact, a grant, and can be followed by further claims for more than $40,000) or that the agency is seizing people’s land.Fema has, unusually, put up a web page to counter these claims, with a spokesman saying the misinformation is “extremely damaging” to response efforts as it deters people from seeking assistance. “We are going to continue to message aggressively so everyone understands what the facts are,” he said regarding the looming Hurricane Milton, which is set to hit Florida.Some social media posts spreading misinformation about the hurricanes called for militias to be formed to confront Fema workers, while other posts contained antisemitic hatred aimed at figures such as Esther Manheimer, mayor of Asheville, North Carolina, a city badly affected by the storm.“It’s surprising to me how this is developing but unfortunately it seems antisemitic hate speech is becoming more common in the United States today,” Manheimer said.“I’ve tried to steer clear of X and other platforms but there is a lot of misinformation that people tend to believe. We’ve had people in the community reaching out to ask if false things are true because folks are intentionally misleading them.”Manheimer said that Asheville, including her own home, still lacks running water but is being “overwhelmed” with support by Fema to clear roads and get power back on.More than 130,000 customers in western North Carolina were still without electricity Monday, according to poweroutage.us.“People have lost everything here and the last thing we need is for people to spread false information,” she said. “There are talking points being distributed throughout the Republican party that just aren’t correct. They seem to think spreading misinformation will help win this election.”One of the more outlandish claims about the hurricane came from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist Republican congresswoman who previously claimed that Jewish lasers from space caused forest fires. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene posted on X about the hurricane last week. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said: “There is no mechanism to control a hurricane and no evidence that anyone was trying to modify it. This is just a crazy conspiracy theory.”“While humans don’t ‘control’ the weather we are affecting the weather. Human activities, mainly the emission of greenhouse gases, did indeed make Helene more destructive.”He added: “If she wants humans to stop affecting the weather she should support phasing out fossil fuels.”So far, Biden has declared the federal government will pay for the entire cost of activities such as debris removal, search and rescue and food supplies for Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The president has also already approved disaster help for Florida ahead of Milton’s arrival.This approach has garnered some rare praise for Biden from Republican governors of affected states, with some Republican lawmakers calling for the conspiracy theories to abate.“Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet about the floods,” Kevin Corbin, a Republican state senator for western North Carolina, posted on Facebook last week. “Please don’t let these crazy stories consume you or have you continually contact your elected officials to see if they are true.” More

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      Kamala Harris pays tribute to victims of 7 October attacks on first anniversary

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      US politicians on both sides of the aisle issued statements marking the anniversary of the 7 October attacks, with Kamala Harris paying tribute to the victims and calling, in their honor, to “never lose sight of the dream of peace, dignity, and security for all”.Outside the vice-presidential residence, Harris, accompanied by her husband, spoke of the nearly 1,200 people, including 46 Americans, killed in Israel one year ago.She mentioned a singer from Missouri who died shielding her son from bullets, an academic and peace activist who studied in Seattle, and a dancer from California who was killed at the Nova music festival.Harris expressed a commitment to “always ensure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself” and named each of the seven American hostages still held in Gaza, including four still believed to be alive.“We must uphold the commitment to repair the world, an idea that has been passed on throughout generations of the Jewish people and across many faiths,” she added. “To that end we must work to relieve the immense suffering of innocent Palestinians in Gaza who have experienced so much pain and loss over the year.”Earlier, Joe Biden commemorated the anniversary with a candle-lighting ceremony at the White House on Monday.The US president was joined by Jill Biden and Rabbi Aaron Alexander, who said a short prayer. Biden did not speak at the ceremony, but he paid tribute earlier in a statement to “the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust” and condemned the “vicious surge in antisemitism in America” since the attacks.“The October 7 attack brought to the surface painful memories left by millennia of hatred and violence against the Jewish people,” he said, before also referencing the suffering of Palestinians.“I believe that history will also remember October 7 as a dark day for the Palestinian people because of the conflict that Hamas unleashed that day. Far too many civilians have suffered far too much during this year of conflict.”Harris also nodded to the more than 40,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s year-long war in Gaza.“I am heartbroken over the scale of death and destruction in Gaza over the past year – tens of thousands of lives lost, children fleeing for safety over and over again, mothers and fathers struggling to obtain food, water, and medicine,” she said in a statement. “It is far past time for a hostage and ceasefire deal to end the suffering of innocent people.”The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, also spoke out on Monday, using the occasion as an opportunity to attack Biden and Harris. Speaking at a pro-Israel rally in Washington DC organized by the Christian group Philos Project, he called the attacks of 7 October “the worst terrorist attack since 9/11” and an attack not only on Israel and Jewish people but “on Americans”.“It is disgraceful that we have an American president and vice-president who haven’t done a thing,” he said. “Vice-President Harris, our message is: ‘Bring them home.’ Use your authority to help bring them home.”Vance then criticized what he described as the “pro-Hamas” protests happening across the country on Monday and the students that he said are “supporting Islamic radicals, destroying property, and threatening Jewish students and professors”.Meanwhile, Donald Trump paid a visit to the Ohel, the gravesite of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, in New York City on Monday. The site is considered a pilgrimage destination by many Orthodox Jews – a group that widely supports the former president, in contrast with other Jewish Americans who tend to vote Democratic.Trump is scheduled to speak later on Monday at a remembrance event at his golf course in Doral, Florida.He is widely expected to turn the event into an attack on his rival. In recent weeks, he has said that he has been “the best president by far” for Israel, and that Jewish voters supporting Harris “should have their head examined”. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned over Helene weather conspiracy theory

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      Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is facing condemnation following several conspiratorial comments amid the devastation of Hurricane Helene that seemed to suggest she believed the US government can control the weather.In a post last week shared with her 1.2 million X followers, the US House representative from Georgia wrote: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”Greene does not specify to whom “they” is referring, but she has a history of promoting conspiracy theories around the federal government and other groups.She appeared to double down on these comments with a post on Saturday, sharing a clip from a 2013 CBS News broadcast about experimental efforts to induce rain and lightning using lasers. “CBS, nine years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather,” Greene wrote, apparently mistaking the year of the broadcast.Greene, who is no stranger to misinformation including once raising the idea of Jewish space lasers being behind wildfire outbreaks, was met with a wave of criticism for her blatantly false statements.The US government’s top disaster relief official condemned on Sunday false claims made about Helene and its relief efforts, stating that such conspiracy theories, including those made by Donald Trump as he seeks a second presidency, are causing fear in people who need assistance and “demoralizing” the workers who are providing assistance.“It’s frankly ridiculous, and just plain false. This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” said Deanne Criswell, who leads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people, and that’s what we’re here to do.”Shawn Harris, who is running for Greene’s congressional seat, condemned the incumbent’s comments.“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conspiracy theories are sickening, but she does it to distract from her failed effort to block crucial funding for Fema as Hurricane Helene was making landfall,” Harris wrote in a post on X.Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and popular internet personality, seemed to poke fun at Greene’s comments while also factchecking her false claims.He suggested on X that some conspiracy theories turn out to be true – but added: “I can assure you that the Hurricane Helene weather modification theory is not one of them.“I would know, too.”In an email to his supporters, the Republican US senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina also seemed to condemn conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene, though he did not specify the rightwing source of the theories.“The destruction caused by Helene is incomprehensible and has left many communities in western North Carolina absolutely devastated. The last thing that the victims of Helene need right now is political posturing, finger-pointing, or conspiracy theories that only hurt the response effort,” the email stated.In an opinion piece on Saturday by its editorial board, North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer criticized Trump because of his falsehoods over the government response to Helene, saying the state’s affected parts were “not a political football” and “not a campaign opportunity”.Criticism of Greene’s conspiracy theories even made it to the sports world, with the tennis legend Martina Navratilova using her platform to call out not only Greene as well as Trump’s running mate in November’s election, JD Vance. Vance had praised Greene at a rally just hours after she posted her conspiracies.“Marj is even more stupid than we thought possible,” Navratilova wrote on X. “And Vance is not stupid – he is just a cowardly sycophant. Which is actually worse.”Greene is also facing criticism for her hypocrisy of peddling conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene while she was photographed in attendance at the University of Alabama’s home football game against the University of Georgia with Trump on 28 September. She reportedly left her state of Georgia to attend the game in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while Helene devastated communities across the state she was elected to represent. More

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      Warren and Dean demand Coke, Pepsi and General Mills stop ‘shrinkflation’

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      It’s becoming a common experience for Americans going to the grocery store: your bag of chips seems lighter, your favorite drink comes in a slimmer bottle, and you’re running out of laundry detergent more quickly than usual. And yet things are staying the same price.On Monday two Democratic lawmakers launched an attempt to get to the bottom of the phenomena, accusing three major companies, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and General Mills, of shrinking the size of products while charging consumers the same price – a price-gouging practice known as “shrinkflation”.Senator Elizabeth Warren and US representative Madeleine Dean allege in letters to the CEOs of the three companies that they have participated in shrinkflation, subtly decreasing the size of cereals and sodas sold in stores.General Mills decreased its box of “family size” Cocoa Puffs from 19.3 ounces to 18.1 ounces over the last few years, the letter alleges. Meanwhile, PepsiCo downgraded the size of Gatorade bottles from 32 ounces to 28 ounces.Companies often say that decreases in size can be attributed to changes in packaging that are unrelated to pricing or the economic environment. PepsiCo told NBC News in July that their 28-ounce bottle has been around for years and that the company had planned to widen its distribution as part of a long-term strategy.But many remain skeptical at the widespread variety of products that seem to be shrinking.“Shrinking the size of a product in order to gouge consumers on the price per ounce is not innovation, it’s exploitation,” Warren and Dean said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this price gouging is a widespread problem, with corporate profits driving over half of inflation.”People on social media have been talking about the slimming down of products for months, with users posting about their shrinkflation experiences with side-by-side pictures of products before and after shrinking.“Major corporations are trying to gaslighting us, trying to make us believe that what we’re seeing is not real,” said TikTok user Melissa Simonson in a video from March, where she points out the sizes of drinks, cereals, chips, orange juice, gum and laundry detergent, among other grocery store items, have gotten smaller.Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and General Mills did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the letters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Bureau of Labor Statistics, which calculates the US inflation rate each month, says its economists try to incorporate any instances of shrinkflation into its inflation calculations. For example, if a tub of 64-ounce vanilla ice cream was priced at $5.99 in January, then the price-per-ounce is $0.093. If in February, the tub remains the same price, but shrinks to 60 ounces, the price-per-ounce has gone up, representing a kind of price increase.Warren and Dean also used the letters as an opportunity to blast the companies for paying less taxes on higher profits after Donald Trump’s corporate tax cuts in 2017. The lawmakers cited a recent report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that said Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and General Mills all paid taxes at a rate of 15% or under from 2018 to 2022, despite making billions in profit.“We strongly oppose these corporate tax giveaways, and have fought to pass tax increases on big corporations, including the 15 percent minimum tax on billion-dollar corporations,” the lawmakers said in their statement. “No corporation should pay a lower tax rate than working Americans – especially when that same corporation turns around and gouges consumers on the other end through shrinkflation.” More