Democratic national convention 2024

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    Democratic voters want Kamala Harris to stand up for Palestinians. Will she? | Judith Levine

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    Palestinians are used to being unheard. The 1917 Balfour Declaration committed Great Britain to creating a Jewish state in Palestine without mentioning the people who comprised the majority of the people living there. At least four United Nations resolutions of monumental consequence to Palestine – including the ones that established the borders of Israel in 1948 and expanded those borders after the 1967 war – were passed by a body that still does not recognize a sovereign Palestinian entity, much less a state, with voting-member status.Numerous bilateral agreements between Israel and its neighbors spelled out the Palestinians’ fate but did not include them in the negotiations. Donald Trump’s 2020 “deal of the century” was a Hanukah gift to Benjamin Netanyahu that, among other things, opened the way for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and canceled the Palestinians’ right of return.Since the assault on Gaza began, Joe Biden has been unable to acknowledge the horrors on the ground without asserting his administration’s “rock-solid and unwavering” support of Israel. The US president’s rare expressions of sympathy for the people under the bombs elide cause or solution. A short passage about civilian death and displacement in his 2024 State of the Union address ended with: “It’s heartbreaking.” To the UN general assembly in September he declared: “Innocent civilians in Gaza are also going through hell … Too many families displaced, crowding in tents, facing a dire humanitarian situation.” He named only one agent of the devastation. The Gazans, he said, “didn’t ask for this war that Hamas started”. Meanwhile, he evinces impotence to deliver what Gaza is asking for, in the voices of wailing mothers and the images of flattened cities: an end to it.So the 2024 Democratic national convention was neither the first nor the worst time Palestinians had been erased by somebody claiming to be on their side. After months of negotiations with the people who organized 700,000 primary voters to withhold their endorsements of Biden until he vowed to force an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by stopping arms shipments, the convention denied a five-minute speaking slot to one Palestinian. After welcoming such deplorables as Georgia’s mercilessly anti-abortion former Republican lieutenant and the chief legal officer of the union-busting Uber to the stage, there was no more room under the big tent.When a definitive “no” reached the demonstrators camping in wait outside the arena, they were deflated if not surprised. For some, enough was enough. Muslim Women for Harris immediately disbanded. “Something kind of snapped,” said Georgia state representative Ruwa Romman, the slated speaker. Romman was not in Chicago for the convention, by the way. She was at a conference scheduled to coincide with it, on a panel called Voices You Will Not Hear at the Convention.After Chicago, uncommitted movement activists huddled over what to do next. Despite the rebuff, the convention was hardly a bust. The movement sent 30 uncommitted delegates; 300 Harris delegates declared themselves ceasefire delegates. The panel on Palestinian human rights was among the best attended events. Some of the biggest applause followed condemnations of Israel’s assaults and support for Palestinian liberation. People were milling around in anti-war T-shirts and keffiyehs.These activists may have been uncommitted primary voters and delegates, but they were committed enough Democrats to stump before the primary and run as delegates. The movement had “mobilized people of [conscience] previously apathetic to the democratic process to civically engage in this election”, the uncommitted website states. “We cannot afford to have this base permanently disillusioned or alienated in November.” They’re as scared shitless as every other sentient human about a second Trump presidency. The struggle continues.Intense debate produced a plan. Uncommitted primary voters had sent a loud message through what they did not say. The strategy continues: turn around a history of being silenced by deploying the power of silence. To pressure the Harris-Walz campaign to signal that a new Democratic administration would assume a new stance toward Israel, uncommitted declined to endorse the ticket. Instead, it is urging people to vote “against Trump” and fascism, and not for a third party, a de facto vote for Trump. This will not be easy; canvassers on the streets are encountering reliable Democratic voters, especially the young, brown or Black, waffling about going to the polls at all. But any experienced anti-war activist knows how hard it is to end a war.For the Democrats, the decision to censor the Palestinian voice was not just morally wrong. It was politically stupid. The Harris campaign must know that of those three-quarters of a million uncommitted ballots, 100,000 came from Michigan, the state that is home to the country’s largest Arab American community and that Biden won by 154,000 votes in 2020. Critical to Harris’s victory, Michigan is considered a toss-up.Aside from stupid, it was unnecessary. In May, Data for Progress found that seven in 10 likely voters, including 83% of Democrats, supported a permanent ceasefire. A majority of Democrats believed Israel is committing genocide. More recently, a poll by the Arab American Institute showed “significant gain and very little risk for Harris” in demanding Israel agree to an immediate ceasefire or calling for a suspension of US arms shipments. Either stand would increase her support by at least five percentage points, pulling in reluctant and undecided voters, including a plurality of Jewish Democrats, AAI says.As the Israel Defense Forces pummel Beirut and bulldoze shops, schools and sewer pipes in the West Bank – punishing unnumbered civilians in pursuit of unnamed terrorists – the US is shocked and confused when the Israeli prime minister raises a middle finger to another temporary truce, this one with Hezbollah. On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen rehearses the tautology behind this passivity. “The United States does have enduring leverage over Israel,” he explained. “But an ironclad alliance … built around strategic and domestic political considerations … means Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut – let alone cut off – the flow of arms.” The world’s most powerful nation cannot use its leverage because it won’t use its leverage.A President Kamala Harris could use it. But first she needs to get elected. And to get elected, she’d better open her ears to the silent din – and speak up fast.

    Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept, and the author of five books More

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      ‘I know the dangers of a Trump presidency’: Palestinian solidarity groups pressure Harris as election looms

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      In the days leading up to last month’s Democratic national convention (DNC), some pro-Palestinian groups and individuals expressed cautious excitement about Kamala Harris’s ascent to the candidacy. Representative Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said that there was “a sense that there’s an opening” with the vice-president, referring to a possible shift in US policy on Israel’s war on Gaza, while others voiced more measured optimism.However, following the convention, during which party officials refused to allow a Palestinian to speak on the main stage, and where Harris hawkishly affirmed her support for arming Israel, many of those groups’ initial hope has turned into a belief that Harris will remain in line with Joe Biden’s Israel policies. The result has been a splintering of sorts: some organizations are still attempting to push Harris toward a more anti-war stance; others have decided to support Harris through the election regardless, citing the risk of a Donald Trump presidency.Muslim Women for Harris-Walz, a group that formed in early August in support of Harris, disbanded after the DNC, saying that it could not “in good conscience” continue to support the candidate. But a week later, the organization changed its position, writing in a statement: “With less than 70 days until the November election, we have to be honest with ourselves about what is at stake here for Muslim women.”In a statement to the Guardian, Muslim Women for Harris-Walz said that the group had received an outpouring of support from Muslim and Arab Americans who shared its desire for a change in Gaza policy, but who also urged the organization to not give up on the ticket.“As Muslims, it is our duty to advocate for what is right and against what is wrong, and that often requires nuance and pragmatism. We continue to try and do the best that we can with what we have. We believe that Muslim Women for Harris-Walz has, and will continue to, play a positive role in these elections, including in our ability to advocate for the causes that matter to Muslim Americans.”But some Palestinian solidarity groups have disagreed with this approach. Tarek Khalil, a board member for the Chicago chapter of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), said he didn’t understand Muslim Women for Harris-Walz’s decision to backtrack and support the Democratic nominee.“I don’t know the logic behind that,” Khalil said. “If the logic behind disbanding [initially] is ‘You’re part of this administration that’s enabling this genocide and you’re doing nothing about it,’ that still remains true today.”Khalil added that he and others involved in the Palestine solidarity movement remain critical of Harris and the Democratic party at large, especially as the vice-president has not provided any policy shifts away from the Biden administration.“We are against the policies of this administration,” he said. “With Kamala Harris being the head of the ticket, we believe that because she has not provided any new agenda, any new vision, any new policy prescription, it’s just a different person expressing the same views.”Khalil also condemned the Democratic party’s platform as “utter hypocrisy”, citing the various horrors that are taking place in Gaza with US support.“The Democratic party platform talks about ending poverty and homelessness, healthcare as a human right and [having] more affordable housing,” he said. “Those very values and policies are being destroyed in Gaza right now, with US taxpayer money and US-made weapons.”If Trump is re-elected, Khalil said that AMP had “nothing concrete” planned. “Our grassroots organizing, our advocacy work, our educational work, all of that would just have to stay at its pace and, if need be, intensify,” Khalil said. “We’d stay the course.”The Muslim American and Arab American vote will play a crucial role in swing states during the upcoming election. In 2020, Joe Biden won Michigan, where 278,000 Arab Americans live, by just 154,000 votes. And in Georgia, where the Arab American population is at least 57,000, Biden won by 11,800 votes.During this year’s Democratic primaries, more than 700,000 voters across the nation cast uncommitted ballots or the equivalent to signal to Biden their dissatisfaction with his Middle East policy. Following a Michigan campaign where more than 100,000 voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” in February, the Uncommitted National Movement has since spread to two dozen states. The movement sent 30 uncommitted delegates to the DNC and has demanded that the US adopt an arms embargo and support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza in recent months.Following the convention, a survey of nearly 1,200 Muslim American voters found that respondents were evenly split in their support of Harris and the Green party candidate, Jill Stein, at 29% each.‘A retrenchment of efforts’As a Muslim and Palestinian American organizer, Georgia-based Ghada Elnajjar said that two months away from election day she remains undecided on whether she’ll cast a vote for Harris or Stein. While Elnajjar hoped that Harris would chart a new course on US’s Gaza policy, she expressed disappointment that Harris’s plans mirror Biden’s. “Unless President-elect Harris distinguishes herself from the current administration’s policy on Israel and Gaza,” Elnajjar said, “then nothing really changes in terms of how I’m approaching my selection.”When DNC leaders didn’t allow Ruwa Romman, the first Muslim woman elected to the Georgia house of representatives, to speak during the convention, it was “soul-crushing” for Elnajjar.“It was a huge disappointment and a letdown for many voters,” she said. “This was an opportunity for them to show that they want our votes.”Romman said that following the DNC she has seen “a retrenchment of efforts”. People who had been ambivalent or even optimistic about Harris before the convention are now suggesting that they will not vote at the top of the ticket or that they will vote third party.“These elections are determined by such tight margins in swing states,” Romman said. “There’s definitely a lot of anger [in] the community about what is happening. I’m really worried we’re not going to be able to win Georgia.”On 10 September, the civil liberties organizations Cair-Georgia, Georgia Muslim Action Committee, Georgia Muslims and Allies for Peace, and Indian American Muslim Council launched a campaign called “No Votes for Genocide. No Peace, No Peach,” to signal an ultimatum to the Harris-Walz campaign.The groups say they will withhold support for the ticket in the coming election if the Biden-Harris administration does not adopt an arms embargo on Israel, halt arms shipments to Israel and publicly demand a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank by 10 October. “We are Georgia voters who oppose Donald Trump and his bigotry, and have a desire to fight far-right fascism at home and abroad,” the group said in a press release. “At the same time, we will not tolerate the funding and enabling of a genocide.”‘I know the dangers of a Trump presidency’Layla Elabed, an Uncommitted National Movement founder, sees the DNC’s refusal to allow a Palestinian American to speak as a glaring mistake for the Democratic party and the Harris campaign. The US is complicit in its continued support of Israel, she said, which is only able to continue its siege on Gaza with US backing. “[Harris] continues to contradict herself by saying that she supports Israel’s rights to defend themselves,” Elabed said, “but also is working really hard for a ceasefire, but has no plans to stop or condition the fire that our government sends to Israel.”Harris’s campaign told Uncommitted leaders that they met with Palestinian families in February. But Elabed said that another meeting is needed with Palestinian families and Uncommitted leaders now that more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October. The Harris campaign has not yet agreed to the request.“If Vice-President Harris wants to signal to voters, not just Arab Americans or Muslim Americans, but to anti-war voters that she plans to work in good faith [toward] Palestinians deserving freedom and liberty and the right to self-determination,” said Elabed, “then I think that it would be a misstep for her not to meet with Palestinian American families now or Uncommitted leaders.”As the Uncommitted National Movement continues to await a meeting with Harris, Elabed said that the group will continue to pressure the Biden administration and the Harris-Walz campaign to adopt an arms embargo and to support a permanent ceasefire. She said she didn’t want Donald Trump to win the presidential election, but she believed that the Democratic party must also change course on Gaza policy in order to win the election.“I 100% understand and know the dangers of a Donald Trump presidency,” said Elabed. “That is why the uncommitted movement has worked so diligently about showing the Democratic party that they were going to be in trouble because of this disastrous Gaza policy under Biden. They might not have the support from their Democratic base in order to beat Trump in November.” More

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      Why is alleged predator Bill Clinton still welcome in the Democratic party? | Moira Donegan

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      One of the grim lessons of the #MeToo movement and its long backlash is this: whether someone finds a sexual abuse allegation credible largely depends on their pre-existing opinion of the man accused. When a woman comes forward with an account of a man’s mistreatment of her – be it humiliating boorishness, violent rape or any of the range of degradations and hurts that fall along the wide spectrum between – the listener’s response is fairly predictable. If they hate the accused man, they’ll believe his accuser. If they like him, they’ll say it’s bullshit.This rule holds, I am sorry to say, even for women who identify themselves as feminists. It held for Gloria Steinem, the famed feminist now in her 90s, who in 1998 defended Clinton amid his slew of sex scandals and abuse allegations in the pages of the New York Times, dismissing the allegations against him as trivial and making an unconvincing case that the offense she took at similar allegations against Clarence Thomas was different. It held true, most famously, for Bill Clinton’s wife, the liberal feminist icon Hillary Clinton, who has remained silently beside her husband throughout each of the allegations against him – and retained her feminist credibility despite her loyalty to an allegedly abusive man that I can only describe as canine.People who like Bill Clinton, or who find him convenient for their own goals, have a long history of underplaying the multiple allegations of sexual harassment and violence that he faces from at least four women. They say that Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who sued Bill Clinton for sexual harassment after the then governor brought her to his hotel room, propositioned her and exposed himself, is lying – even though Jones has multiple corroborating witnesses, and even though her story has not changed in more than 30 years.They say that Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says that Clinton raped her in a hotel room in 1978, when he was Arkansas attorney general, is lying, too – even though Broaddrick, like Jones, told multiple people of Clinton’s attack at the time.They say that Monica Lewinsky, the 22-year-old unpaid intern whom Clinton carried on an affair with in the White House when he was 49 and the most powerful person in the world, technically consented to the sex acts that Clinton asked her to do – an insistence that betrays a startlingly simple-minded and willfully obtuse understanding of sexual ethics.They echo Clinton’s denials of wrongdoing in all these cases, against all these women. That is, at least, what they say when they acknowledge the allegations about Bill Clinton’s conduct at all. Mostly, they ignore them – as Bill Clinton has, as his wife, Hillary Clinton has, and as Bill Clinton’s popular legacy seems to do.Bill Clinton’s supporters ignore his accusers because they can. These women’s dignity, their equality and their right to control their own bodies matter less to them than their esteem for Bill Clinton – less than whether he can deliver a few votes, make a zinger on television or look nice in a suit.On Wednesday night, the third night of the Democratic national convention, the whole party ignored these women when they gave Bill Clinton, a multiply accused alleged sexual harasser and rapist, a rousing welcome at Chicago’s United Center. The former president was given a prime-time speaking spot, trotted out like a prize and applauded like a hero.Are these people not embarrassed? Do they not, at least, take note of the hypocrisy involved? After all, the 2024 election is quickly shaping up to be about gender, with the boorish Trump, creepy, sex-obsessed JD Vance and the radically anti-choice Republican party turning the contest into a referendum on the status of women in American society. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee who will seek to become the nation’s first female president on election day, has taken on the mantle of the women’s struggle – not only in the symbolism of her candidacy, but in the tenor of her advocacy, in which she has championed the “freedom” of women to control their own bodies and lives.These are noble goals, ones that the Democrats can be proud of pursuing; but they are not commensurate with celebrations of an alleged rapist, with pomp and obsequiousness trotted out for a man who allegedly habitually sexually harassed women who worked for him and carried on an affair with an intern young enough to be his daughter. Sexual abuse, too, is hostile to women’s freedom – the freedom of women to live, work and participate in public without the threat of sexual force. This is a kind of gendered freedom that Bill Clinton has made it abundantly clear that he does not respect.The call for women’s freedom from rape, abuse and harassment has always been the least popular and most politically fraught feminist cause. Abortion has always had more appeal to male voters as a political issue. Misogynist men – in a tradition that extends from the Playboy founder (and alleged rapist) Hugh Hefner to Barstool Sports founder (and alleged perpetrator of sexual assault) Dave Portnoy to former president (and alleged rapist) Bill Clinton – have long supported abortion rights, in part because they understand abortion not as a matter of women’s fundamental freedom and dignity but as a matter of men’s increased sexual access to women and decreased responsibility for the resulting pregnancies.These prurient, sexually entitled misogynists are not all Republicans – rape, and its apologism, have always been bipartisan endeavors – but they are not the kind of voters that Democrats should be courting. A bargain in which women’s right to end a pregnancy is made in exchange for men’s right to rape, harass and abuse women is not an acceptable one. We can do better: we can reach for a version of America in which women are truly free and equal, endowed with all the bodily sovereignty, self-determination and sexual autonomy that men are. That’s not the world that Bill Clinton represents, and it’s not a world that a party that insists on celebrating him can deliver.Bill Clinton has been out of office for nearly three decades. In that time, his once-rosy status as a liberal hero has thankfully dimmed, even if his alleged history of sexual abuse has not played a sufficient role in the reassessment of his reputation. Liberals now rightly look back at Clinton’s crime bill with horror; his devastating cuts to the welfare system were punitive and cruel, hurting women and children the most. He modeled a vision of a conservative Democratic party, one less committed to its principles than in cynically trading them away for a chance at power.His vision of change has failed, and his political project has been revealed as morally bankrupt. It’s not clear that he can even deliver many votes; a large swath of the American electorate is now too young to remember much of his presidency, aside from the sex scandals. It’s time for Democrats to send the old man home. And to tell him to keep his hands to himself.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Kamala Harris’s rise has energized many Asian Americans. Could these ‘unmeasured’ voters swing battleground states?

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      “America, the path that led me here in recent weeks, was no doubt … unexpected. But I’m no stranger to unlikely journeys. My mother, Shyamala Harris, had one of her own … traveling from India to California, with an unshakeable dream.”With these words, Vice-President Kamala Harris began her acceptance speech on the final night of an epic convention, embracing the unprecedented means by which she had arrived at the Democratic presidential nomination, and elevating her identity as the daughter of an immigrant mother from India.For those of us who had never imagined that in our lifetimes we might have an Asian American president, this was a staggering moment – not least because the discourse leading up to this convention had been so badly derailed by Donald Trump’s bizarre questioning of Harris’s biracial identity. In the wake of Trump’s allegation that Harris had “only promoted her Indian heritage” in the past, until she had decided to “turn Black”, there was whispered concern from some corners of the Asian community that Harris might be forced to downplay her mother’s ancestry while reaffirming her father’s Caribbean roots.The concern was unnecessary. Like most people of multiracial background, Harris has always been both/and, not either/or, celebrating both her Black and Asian birthrights with equal pride – and in the run-up to the convention, Black and Asian Americans have celebrated along with her.An internet-shattering Black Women for Harris Zoom call drew 44,000 attendees and raised $1.5m in three hours. Three days later, a South Asian Women for Harris online rally, headlined by the US representative Pramila Jayapal and the actor/producer Mindy Kaling gathered a crowd of 9,000 and equaled its predecessor’s $1.5m in the same span. It paved the way for a cascade of other Asian American events, packed with energetic and enthusiastic participants such as the actor and comedian Ken Jeong, who exhorted at the online AANHPI Men for Kamala event: “This is our time – this is our moment!”The excitement that Jeong and many fellow Asian Americans are feeling over Harris’s rise has been unmeasured. I mean that both metaphorically and literally, because when it comes to the major entities tracking the state of the election, the polls aren’t measuring it.For decades, there’s been a term used for Asian Americans in the electoral process, and it begins with O. (No, not “Oriental”, though, yes, that too.) The term is “Other”, as in the miscellaneous bin into which pollsters cast any non-white, non-Black, and non-Latino person in their data samples, turning us into unidentified trimmings from the Democratic donkey or Republican elephant – enigmatic bulk filler for the political sausage.View image in fullscreenLumping us into the undifferentiated Other might have made some sense when Asian Americans were a tiny fraction of the population and an even smaller one of the electorate – say, in 1980, when Asians made up 1.5% of the US population, about 3.7 million people, and represented roughly a million registered voters.But that was then; this is now. Asian Americans, who have consistently been the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the US over the past half-century of census tallies, now make up 6.2% of the population, or 21 million people, at least 15 million of whom are eligible to vote. That’s bigger than the national voting-eligible populations were for Latino or Black Americans in 1980, when both groups were already being broken out in voter surveys and targeted by campaigns. And in battleground states like Pennsylvania (769% growth since 1980, to 612,567) and Georgia (2,246% growth since 1980, to 610,257), the Asian population has soared, making us critical swing voters in those critical swing states. In fact, an analysis by the electoral consultant TargetSmart suggests that the entire victory margin for Joe Biden in 2020 in such states may have come from the surging Asian American vote.Yet still today, even with the growing influence of an Asian American Democratic presidential nominee, in many major polls, Asian Americans remain “othered”.Pollsters are quick to blame language issues (although three-quarters of Asian Americans speak proficient English, about the same rate of fluency as in the Latino population), difficulty in finding willing respondents, and a lack of culturally sensitive surveys and data tools. The reality is that, with proper investment and effort, all of these challenges can be readily addressed. The fact that they largely haven’t been comes down to a single awkward truth: Asian Americans have never in US history been seen as salient to this nation’s political discourse.Of course, it’s an uphill battle to be seen as “politically relevant” when you’re part of the only group that’s ever been explicitly excluded from this country based on race. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited non-resident Chinese from entering the US, and 35 years later, that ban was expanded to an “Asiatic Barred Zone” that included nearly all of Asia. This exclusion was a prelude to outright hostility. Throughout the 20th century, the US would find itself in conflict with Asians, waging military campaigns against enemy forces in Japan in the 40s, Korea in the 50s, and Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, and then engaging in ugly trade wars against a resurgent Japan in the 70s and 80s and a fast-rising China in the 90s and 2000s.Given that for most of this nation’s modern history, Asians have been excluded as undesirables or vilified as enemies, it’s hardly surprising that even after the Hart-Celler Act swung open the US’s doors to immigration in 1965, many newcomers kept their distance from politics and other professions in the spotlight – such as journalism and entertainment – and advised their offspring to do the same. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, they said. Better to be silent than scrutinized and found wanting. Better to be invisible than targeted. Those of us who pursued such professions often did so over the skepticism or condemnation of our parents.That wasn’t the case for Kamala Harris, whose Jamaican father and Tamil Indian mother raised her within Oakland’s Black activist community and seeded her with a passion for service through the example of her maternal grandfather, PV Gopalan, a lifelong civil administrator who oversaw refugee relief in Zambia and served as joint secretary to the government of India during the 1960s. Together, they encouraged her from childhood on to step into the harsh glare of public scrutiny, and to embrace politics as a career.View image in fullscreenAnd Harris’s example has resonated widely, including among others who have made similar decisions to take on jobs that make them socially visible.At the recent Asian American Journalists Association convention in Austin, Texas, Aisha Sultan, an opinion columnist for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, shared how Harris’s ascension had “given her hope in very dark times”.“All of us Asian American journalists who had to break into predominantly white spaces, we know what she had to go through to get here,” she said. “So we know it’s possible, and now I’m absolutely going to manifest this. I’m not going to accept anything other than President Harris.”Sultan’s excitement was echoed by the former ABC news producer Waliya Lari, now communications director for Pillars Fund, a non-profit that seeks to build visibility for Muslim Americans. “The day after Harris became the nominee, I got very emotional,” she said. “I was thrilled to be able to tell my girls: ‘Look at that. That’s someone just like you.’ They say you can’t be what you can’t see. Well, now they’re seeing it.”Because for those of us who have been American all along but often haven’t been perceived as such, the elevation of an Asian American president means that pollsters, political campaigns and policymakers alike will need to acknowledge that we’re Other no longer. And as Ken Jeong says, this is our moment – because the first wave in a rising tide of younger voters is finally ready and eager to see an Asian American in the Oval Office. As data pulled from the Asian American Foundation’s Staatus Index survey shows, while just 34% of Americans 65 and older and 42% of those aged 45-64 are “very comfortable” with an Asian American in the White House, a majority of those aged 16-44 say they’re ready for that to happen, and have been since Harris was elected vice-president.You can’t be what you can’t see. But it isn’t just about seeing, it’s about being seen – and for the first time, on the biggest of possible stages, in the brightest of possible spotlights, we’re finally being seen. More

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      ‘Georgia’s ours to lose’: Trump and Harris camps zero in on swing states

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      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump brace themselves for what promises to be an ugly and bruising sprint to the finishing line in November, both presidential candidates’ campaigns are turning their sights back on the handful of desperately close swing states where the battle is likely to be decided.Georgia is coming into view as a critical battleground for both leaders as they struggle to gain voters’ attention in an epochal election. On Wednesday, the vice-president will travel from the White House to southern Georgia to hold her first campaign event in the state with her recently anointed running mate and former high school football coach, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.The duo will go on a bus tour of the region, attempting to reach out to diverse voting groups including rural areas where the former president is strong, as well as suburban and urban districts in Albany and Valdosta, where large Black communities are among their target demographics. On Thursday night, Harris is scheduled to cap the tour with a rally in Savannah, where she will talk to Georgians about the stakes of this election.The intense focus on Georgia by the Democratic campaign underlines that they are not resting on their laurels after what most commentators have agreed was a pitch-perfect convention in Chicago last week. Despite the pronounced bounce in popularity that Harris has enjoyed since she dramatically switched with Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket five weeks ago, the race remains essentially neck and neck.The latest poll tracker by 538 for Georgia puts Trump 0.6% ahead of Harris in Georgia, with Harris on 46.0% and Trump on 46.6%. That is bang in the middle of the margin of error – and suggests that the state is open territory for the two candidates.In Sunday’s political talkshows, Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is one of Trump’s closest surrogates, underlined the importance of Georgia to Trump’s re-election hopes. “If we don’t win Georgia, I don’t see how we get to 270,” he told CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.Graham added that he would be accompanying Trump to what he called a “unity event” in Georgia soon. He predicted that if Trump played the right game in the state he would win.“I do believe Georgia’s ours to lose. It’s really hard for Harris to tell Georgians that we’re on the right track – they don’t believe it,” Graham said.The problem for Graham and other top Republican advisers is that Trump frequently blatantly ignores their guidance. In his most recent trip to Georgia, Trump ranted about the state’s Republican governor Brian Kemp, whom he still blames for failing to back him in his attempt to subvert the 2020 election – and whose support he now needs to prevail in November.Graham implicitly admitted to CNN the trouble that the attack on Kemp had caused but insisted: “We repaired the damage, I think, between Governor Kemp and President Trump.“He’s going to put his ground game behind President Trump and all other Republicans in Georgia.”Three days after the Democratic convention, which went off in a blaze of red, white and blue balloons and an ecstatic response from delegates, the Harris-Walz campaign is now laser-focused on that same ground game. The key is to turn the palpable surge in energy that exploded from the Chicago convention into hard work making calls and knocking on doors in Georgia and the other six battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The chairperson of the campaign, Jen O’Malley Dillon, released new data on Sunday which she said demonstrated the positive impact of the convention throughout the battleground states. Chicago marked the biggest week so far in Harris’s nascent pitch for the White House, she said, with volunteers signing up for almost 200,000 shifts during the week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMoney also continues to pour in, with the campaign raising $540m in five weeks – a record in US presidential campaign history. About $82m of that was received during convention week.O’Malley Dillon said that it was all a sign of Harris building on her momentum: “We are taking no voters for granted and communicating relentlessly with battleground voters every single day between now and election day – all the while Trump is focused on very little beyond online tantrums.”A leading Harris surrogate, the Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis, appeared on Fox News Sunday to try to convince right-leaning voters and undecided independents that they could safely back Harris. “She’s come to the middle,” Polis said, when asked about some of the more progressive policies Harris previously espoused but has since dropped – including a ban on fracking and Medicare for all.Polis added: “She’s pragmatic. She’s a tough leader. She’s the leader for the future.“She’s going to be a president for all the American people.”As the euphoria of the convention fades, Harris has already begun to face tougher questions, notably when will she expose herself to tougher questions by facing an interviewer. The Democratic candidate has so far studiously avoided a sit-down with any major news outlet.Quizzed himself about Harris’s resistance to being questioned, Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, told CNN: “As this campaign goes on, she’ll be sitting for more interviews”.“She’ll be engaging in debates,” Booker said. “I think she wants to do more.”With the battleground states all still essentially anyone’s to win, there are growing fears that Trump might be tempted to unleash another conspiracy to overturn the result should he narrowly lose in November. There are numerous indications that Trump and his Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters may be laying down the foundations of a challenge.At a rally last week in Asheboro, North Carolina, Trump said: “Our primary focus is not to get out the vote – it’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we have all the votes you need.”Trump’s running mate, the US senator from Ohio, JD Vance, was asked by NBC News’s Meet the Press whether he believed the election would be free and fair. “I do think it’s going to be free and fair,” he replied.Then he added: “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that happens. We’re going to pursue every pathway to make sure legal ballots get counted.” More

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      ‘This is my political home’: how 30 ceasefire delegates changed the Democratic convention

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      Asma Mohammed organized the uncommitted movement in Minnesota because she “was seeing children who look like my son be massacred”.June Rose, an uncommitted delegate from Rhode Island, joined the cause because they were raised as an orthodox Jew, kept away from Palestinians and taught that the occupation of Palestine was for their safety. Then Rose went to Palestine. “And I realized that not one single child needs to die in order to keep me safe,” they said.Abbas Alawieh, a leader of the movement, kept coming back to his experience as a 15-year-old in south Lebanon, where he said he survived US-funded Israeli bombings. “I remember what those bombs feel like when they drop. I remember how your bones shake within your body. I remember what they smell like. I remember what the dust feels like when it fills the room after a bomb drops and I can’t even see my own hand in front of my own face,” he said.At the Democratic national convention in Chicago this week, uncommitted delegates repeatedly shared the personal reasons they had decided to start an anti-war movement within the Democratic party – and what Kamala Harris needs to do to win back the voters they represent, who don’t agree with the Biden administration’s policy of sending more weapons to Israel as a disproportionate number of civilians in Gaza are being killed.Over the course of the four-day convention, the delegates pushed for a Palestinian American speaker to get time on the main stage – a request the Harris campaign denied – leading to an impromptu sit-in and, ultimately, the support of lawmakers, hundreds of delegates, and far more attention to the cause.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenThese are Democrats. Most are activists, seasoned at turning out their communities to vote. Alawieh was a congressional staffer for multiple members of Congress. He was a staffer on 6 January 2021, he said, when rioters flooded the US Capitol building in Washington DC. “I don’t need to be convinced how dangerous Trump is,” he said.There’s no chance Mohammed changes parties because of this. “Imagine me, a hijabi Muslim woman, walking into the [Republican national convention] right now. It would never happen. This is our party. That’s why we are working on our own party. This is my political home. That’s why we are working on the inside.”At the Chicago convention, most Democrats focused on joy and celebration, rallying around Harris after a slog of an election abruptly changed course a month ago.But there was a convention within the convention, so to speak, of hundreds wracked with grief and despair over the ongoing war in Gaza, which has taken at least 40,000 Palestinian lives and left hundreds of thousands of people starving, sick and injured. Attendees could go from hearing a doctor describe children – the only remaining members of their families – covered in burns, then walk a few feet away into a display about coconuts, a nod to a meme-ified Harris quote.The juxtaposition made Dr Thaer Ahmad, a doctor who grew up in the Chicago area known as Little Palestine, sick to his stomach. Ahmad worked in a hospital in Gaza early this year, and said he will never forget what he saw. First, a bomb would go off, shaking the hospital. Minutes later, families would pour into the doors of the emergency department.“We didn’t have any beds because the hospital was already totally full, so we’re seeing five-year-olds, six-year-olds on the ground, some of whom have already been killed, are already dead, and others who are shrieking in pain who have had a limb blown off and we don’t even have any pain medicine to give them,” he said. “And you’re just sort of looking around a room that’s full of bleeding and suffering patients, some of whom will die while you’re sitting there trying to figure out what your next move is. And you’re lost.”Ahmad was among a handful of doctors who shared, time after time, what they saw in Gaza hospitals with reporters and convention attendees. He came to Chicago, he said, “to essentially spoil the party”.“I can’t come in one place and talk to you about the five-year-old and the six-year-old and the family and the house, and then see somebody get up there on the main stage and just sort of pretend like we’re in la-la land,” he said. “I mean, it’s so hard to even listen to. It’s just very cringy, to be honest, and to be fair, that’s how I’ve felt for a lot of the last several months.”Using the system for changeStarting in Michigan, Democratic activists hatched the grassroots plan to vote “uncommitted” instead of for Biden in the Democratic primary earlier this year. The idea spread to other states, with nearly 800,000 voters selecting some version of an uncommitted vote on their ballots.This protest vote would send a message that voters demanded a change on Gaza for Biden to get their votes. In some of the states, uncommitted won enough votes to earn delegates to the convention. Those delegates, organizers planned, would use their power inside the party process to win over committed delegates, amplify their voices and, hopefully, get Harris’s attention – and action.Throughout the campaign, the group has kept its sole focus on getting a ceasefire and arms embargo. Before the convention began, they added the call for a speaker on the main stage, first suggesting a doctor who had worked in Gaza and a Palestinian American leader, as a way to bring attention to the issue.Tens of thousands of people also took to the streets outside the convention throughout the week, but the delegates didn’t join them. Their focus has been on working the system inside, finding allies among other Democratic activists and officials.View image in fullscreenThe Democratic party included the uncommitted delegates in the convention process – to an extent. They were allowed a space for press conferences, but it was in a far-flung corner of a building beyond the main action during the day – people would not accidentally happen upon this room. They were granted a panel on Palestinian human rights, a first of its kind, but it was scheduled for the last slot of the day, after shuttles started departing to the United Center.The speaker request was shut down, without much reason given for why.The Harris campaign later defended the decision not to allow a Palestinian speaker by saying the party had given the uncommitted movement lots of ways to engage in the convention process already. The delegates disagreed.“The scale is just completely out of whack when we’re talking about room space versus when we’re talking about a Palestinian American getting to speak at the convention, or when we’re talking about meaningful policy change, an immediate, permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo,” Rose said.But much of the process still worked: the 30 uncommitted delegates convinced more than 300 Harris delegates to sign a pledge to become ceasefire delegates, building their power tenfold. And, as the week wore on, and the speaker request languished, prominent progressive elected officials including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Greg Casar, started joining the public call for a Palestinian on the main stage and helped internally to send that message to the Harris campaign and Democratic party.Finding alliesThe caucus and council meetings offered to the group did not lend themselves to organizing large groups – they were essentially panel discussions. Instead, the delegates fanned out around the convention, at morning breakfast meetings where all convention attendees had to pick up credentials each morning, at press conferences, in the hallways outside panels, in the crowded walkways at the United Center.They stayed visible. Their shirts, emblazoned with bright red flowers, said “democratic majority for Palestine”. Their pins, in red font, said “ceasefire delegate”. They wore white-and-black keffiyehs, some of which said “Democrats for Palestinian Rights”.View image in fullscreenOn the first day, they handed out flyers for a historic event: the first time the convention had allowed a panel on Palestinian human rights. Outside the panel, delegates asked those attending to sign on to their petition, to join them in the ceasefire cause even if they were already pledged to Harris. The panel itself drew a few hundred people, who listened as a doctor who had worked in Gaza described children blown apart by US-funded bombs and as a Palestinian American shared the stories of the more than 100 family members she had lost.Inga Gibson, an uncommitted delegate from Hawaii, said other middle-aged women, her peers, would come up to her as she sat in the hall. They said their kids were challenging them – ”What are you going to do about this, Mom?” – and telling them they might not vote because of Gaza, Gibson said. She convinced several to sign on to the petition as ceasefire delegates.On Tuesday, while a few delegates sat on a bench in a broad hall not far from where people had lined up to buy Democratic merchandise, a person with a “save the children” pin walked up. “I love your pin,” Mohammed said, then started talking about becoming a ceasefire delegate. At another point, someone walked up and said: “I appreciate what y’all are doing.” “Are you a delegate?” Mohammed asked.On Wednesday morning, she said, a man came up to her and said: “Is that a ceasefire shirt?” She thought he was going to be upset. “What does a ceasefire even mean?” he continued. She started to reply when he added: “I’m going to stop you right there. I’m a Jewish American, and I hate that they’re doing this in my name,” Mohammed recounted. He signed on as a ceasefire delegate after their conversation.Time to sit inAlawieh’s hands had a slight shake as his voice cracked with emotion on the third day of the convention, after several press conferences where he had shared that he was waiting for a call to greenlight the main stage speaker and again recounted his story of surviving bombings as a teenager.Standing amid dozens of reporters and delegates outside the United Center, he made an impromptu personal decision: he would just sit and wait.He pulled his phone out in the middle of the press conference, calling his contact with the Harris campaign. “I’m someone who works within the system and I was asking a very reasonable ask, not to be suppressed,” he told the person on the phone. “I’ve run out of options from my position as a delegate so I’m leaning into my power as an everyday citizen and I’m sitting here, and I’m not going anywhere.”View image in fullscreenIn between the United Center, which displayed images of Harris and running mate Tim Walz bathed in bright red, white and blue lights, and a CNN Politico tent where journalists and politicians partied, the uncommitted movement started their sit-in.About a dozen ceasefire delegates slept overnight on the pavement outside the United Center on the penultimate night of the convention, grabbing a few moments of sleep where they could. Mohammed was one of them. Asked how she was feeling the next morning, she said: “Really tired. Holding out hope.”By the next day, the final day of the convention, Harris’s team still had not budged. The movement set a 6pm deadline, which passed.The work they’d done inside had convinced hundreds of their fellow Democrats, but it hadn’t swayed the Harris campaign enough to grant a speaker on the main stage. And the speaker, they pointed out, had not been going to give a radical speech: Ruwa Romman, a Georgia state representative and one of the speakers the uncommitted delegates had suggested, wrote about her Palestinian grandfather’s influence on her life and called for people to unite behind Harris and push for an end of the war in Gaza.As political elite spoke inside, Romman gave her speech to the cameras gathered outside instead.View image in fullscreenAlawieh said he was certain her speech had gotten more media attention this way than it would have if she’d been given a short slot on stage earlier in the week. “I would put all my money, she would not have had this many cameras pointed at her,” he said.The uncommitted movement then issued a demand to Harris to come meet them in their communities, in Michigan, to talk about a ceasefire and arms embargo. They gave a deadline of 15 September. The speaker request may not have been granted, but the uncommitted delegates cast their work at the convention as a success, leaders told reporters that evening.The uncommitted delegates decided to go inside the arena, where their party was about to hear from Harris herself. They weren’t going to disrupt the process – something party officials had worried about throughout the week. Instead, the delegates linked arms and weaved through the crowded hallways attempting to get to their seats. They stopped and stood in a circle, singing “ceasefire now”.View image in fullscreenOutside, helicopters whirred overhead as the uncommitted movement packed up the rest of the sit-in. They put away the snacks and water. They rolled up banners that said “not another bomb”. They packed away extra ceasefire T-shirts and keffiyehs and an errant cheesehead, the preferred headgear of the Wisconsin delegation.View image in fullscreenStanding outside as the sun moved lower in the sky, Layla Elabed, one of the co-founders of the movement, said that her belief in the democratic system hadn’t been shaken.“Power, for me, is with people,” Elabed explained. “Because often it isn’t electeds who wake up one day and decide that, oh, we should have a policy change that actually speaks to the most marginalized people, the most displaced people, the people without the most resources.“Black folks didn’t get the Civil Rights Act because those who were in office decided one day and woke up and said, oh, we should do this. It is because people mobilized and organized and advocated and put so much pressure on policymakers and moved those policymakers to make that right decision. That’s what we’re going to be doing.” More

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      As Republicans flail from ‘one stupid jackass thing to another’, Harris strives to define vision

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      As Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for US president, and 100,000 red, white and blue balloons floated down from the rafters, Charlene Dukes’ eyes filled with tears. “It was when she spoke about her family, her upbringing, which is so similar to many of us,” said Dukes, a Black woman from Maryland.“Many of us were not born with a silver spoon in our mouths,” added Dukes, who said the prospect of the US electing a woman of colour as president for the first time in its 248-year history left her feeling “euphoric”.Harris’s address got a thunderous reception in a packed sports arena in Chicago on Thursday night, crowning a pitch-perfect week for Democrats and whirlwind month that turned the presidential election on its head. Some had feared a repeat of the chaotic and violent 1968 convention in the same city; instead the feelgood factor was closer to the 2008 version in Denver that anointed Barack Obama.In speech after speech, party leaders characterised Harris as a historic figure, the embodiment of hope, “the president of joy” – and predicted that she would defeat Donald Trump’s “politics of darkness” once and for all. Delegates walked the streets of Chicago in idyllic weather with a spring in their step, thrilled that their party had been rejuvenated and revivified.But having preached to the converted, Harris is about to face a tougher crowd. Even after six weeks in which everything went right, she enjoys only a fragile lead in opinion polls entering the final sprint. Trump has urged his supporters to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Harris told hers: “When we fight, we win!” Now both are facing the fight of their political lives.Democrats are not only buoyed up by their new ticket of Harris and running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota with dad, football coach and midwestern appeal: after years of soaring prices, the Federal Reserve has nearly conquered inflation without triggering a recession, a feat few economists predicted.The number of people crossings into the US has fallen dramatically since Joe Biden’s asylum crackdown and stricter enforcement in Mexico, although migration can be cyclical and, as the weather cools, it is possible the numbers will begin to climb.Despite the positive trend lines, across the four-night arc of the convention, Democrats’ most prominent voices cautioned against overconfidence. Michelle Obama, the former first lady, told delegates: “No matter how good we feel tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day, this is going to be an uphill battle.”Ex-president Bill Clinton, whose wife Hillary’s bid to become the first female president was thwarted by Trump in 2016, added: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident.”Implicit in the warning words was the question hanging over the convention: can the Harris honeymoon last?More than a month after 81-year-old Biden stepped aside and endorsed her, Harris has barely started to outline detailed plans that she would pursue as president to address challenges such as immigration, crime and the climate crisis.She faces a crunch test on 10 September when she goes head to head with Trump, a notoriously unorthodox opponent, in a televised debate. As Biden discovered in June, a bad debate performance can change the entire trajectory of a race.Harris has also yet to hold a press conference or give an in-depth media interview to face difficult questions about her leadership style, her significantly changed policy positions in recent years, and the focus on gender and race that looms over her historic candidacy – a topic she was careful to swerve past in her acceptance speech.John Anzalone, a pollster who has worked for the last three Democratic presidential nominees, said: “We can’t put our heads in the sand. She’s a Black woman. The bar is going to be higher for everything and guess what that means: even mistakes are going to be magnified. Every campaign is going to have mistakes.”Harris’s allies acknowledge that she remains largely undefined in the minds of many voters, having operated in Biden’s shadow for much of the last four years. The relative anonymity offers both opportunity and risk.David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, said: “The thing about vice-presidents, the downside is, nobody knows who you are. The upside is, nobody knows who you are and so you get a chance to define yourselves.”Speaking on a panel organised by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report on the sidelines of the convention, Axelrod added: “She is a turn-the-page candidate, and the fight right now is whether the Trump folks can push her back into the box of being an incumbent and hold her accountable for the things that Biden has done, or whether she can continue on this path as the choice to turn the page.”Harris used her acceptance speech to promise to pass a middle-class tax cut, support Ukraine and Nato, and push for a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza. But for now, her team feels no urgency to publish a comprehensive policy platform or sit for media interviews that might jeopardize positive vibes that have produced a flood of campaign donations and a growing army of swing-state volunteers.During a series of meetings throughout the convention week, her advisers cast her policy agenda as a continuation and expansion on Biden’s first-term achievements, though at times with a different emphasis. While Biden spoke often of job numbers, Harris has focused on the cost of living and proposed a ban on price gouging.Harris has also dropped opposition to fracking and support for Medicare for All, which were defining features of her doomed 2020 presidential campaign. Her aides insist her values remain the same but that she has embraced more moderate policies out of pragmatism. Progressives are also looking for clues that she will take a tougher line against Israel over its war in Gaza.View image in fullscreenSarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and Trump critic, said: “The extent to which she has been able to shake off Biden’s negatives immediately has been incredible. She doesn’t own his economy, as best I can tell, and she doesn’t own Gaza. This is where I’ve been generally impressed with her and where Biden struggled as a communicator. These are complicated issues that require nuanced explanations and she’s capable of giving those explanations.”The campaign promises a clash of styles. A former prosecutor, Harris devoted a broad chunk of Thursday’s speech to nailing Trump’s narcissism, hostility toward women’s reproductive freedom and embrace of autocrats. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut numerous other Democrats used mockery and ridicule to make Trump seem small, likening him to a spurned boyfriend, a neighbour who keeps running his leaf blower and a tenor warming up with “Me me me me me”. Walz has led the way in branding Trump and his allies “weird”.For his part, the former president has been struggling to find an effective line of attack. The Republican nominee has adopted a kitchen-sink approach against Harris that includes attacks about her racial identity (“Is she Indian or she is Black?”), her intelligence (“stupid”, “dumb”), her laugh, her record as vice-president and her history as a “San Francisco liberal”.Longwell, founder and publisher of the Bulwark website, added: “‘San Francisco liberal’ is a buzzword that [for] conservatives strikes right at their hearts. Or even people who are centre-right. People know exactly what it means – and by that I mean they have no idea what it means but they understand what it feels like and it’s bad, so that is the thing she’s got to push off.”Frustrated Republicans have gone public to urge Trump to focus on policy rather than identity politics. They argue that he still enjoys the upper hand on immigration and inflation, although Harris has closed the gap in polling. But the Trump campaign is still struggling to adapt to its new, younger opponent.James Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, said: “The thing that’s most amazed me is how utterly caught off-guard they were and how they still can’t seem to get their sea legs. They can’t settle on an attack. Fox [News] is just lost – they go from one stupid jackass thing to another stupid jackass thing.”Speaking after a tour of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago, Carville added: “Can they get it back? Maybe, sure, good chance. But right now they’re spitting blood. They’ve been hit in the mouth. I’m hoping that the country decides we just want something different and has, believe it or not, something different.”The Trump campaign had been structured to attack Biden’s age and mental acuity. The switch to Harris has turned the tables, with Trump, 78, the oldest major party nominee in history and Harris, 59, representing a fresh start.Patrick Gaspard, a former official in the Obama White House, said at a media event organised by Bloomberg: “They are pretzeling themselves trying to figure out how to attack Kamala Harris because she has this powerful and unique and interesting advantage that we have never seen before in our politics. She is an incumbent but she’s also a change candidate right now in this election. She’s been able to seize the banner away from Donald Trump.”Gaspard, who has known Harris since the 2007-8 Obama campaign and describes her as a “Swiss army knife” able to appeal to voters in every context, added: “The Republican party will struggle for the next 75 days to impose some governing discipline on Donald Trump, [the US representative] Marjorie Taylor Greene and many others who are going to continue to go after Kamala Harris with misogynistic, racist, ethnic, xenophobic tropes.“They’re going to struggle with that and they’re going to fail miserably because [Trump] is a candidate who is incapable of being conditioned to a new kind of behaviour. There is no message discipline there. The challenge that they have: Donald Trump is a far better candidate in 2016 than the guy who’s standing on the stage today.”But in a deeply divided country, the election remains too close to call. Not even an attempted assassination or change of nominee has moved the needle more than a few percentage points. Independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s decision to suspend his campaign and endorse Trump will not be a gamechanger either.Most people have made up their minds. According to an ABC News/ Washington Post/Ipsos survey, just 12% of voters are potentially persuadable this election, and they tend to be less engaged: roughly one in four of them say they are certain to vote in November compared with nearly two-thirds of Americans overall.Dan Kanninen, battleground director for the Harris-Walz campaign, told reporters at a Bloomberg event that the electoral map has neither expanded nor shrunk since Biden’s withdrawal: “The race is not fundamentally changed. The enthusiasm is incredible. The fact we’re connecting with some voters in different ways is obvious and shows up in some of the research that you’re all seeing as well. But the race is still very, very tight.”Harris, who with Walz starts a bus tour of swing state Georgia on Wednesday, has clawed back the losses caused by Biden’s low approval rating. But she has 11 weeks left to define herself not merely as the inheritor of the anti-Trump coalition but as an inspiring figure in her own right. Joy alone will not be enough.Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, said in an interview: “I don’t think we’re at a sugar high. Where she is now is where Democrats should be but it’s not high enough to win. So to me the bigger question is not so much: ‘Is all this enthusiasm going to go away?’ as ‘Is she going to be able to get beyond just the coalescing of the base and get that next 2, 3, 4%?’”Asked whether she would dare to predict the outcome on 5 November, Walter gave a one-word answer. “No,” she said, with a hearty laugh. More

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      Tactical ad breaks and lies: rightwing coverage of DNC is exactly as expected

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      As the Democratic party enjoys the afterglow of an exuberant national convention, the rightwing media has settled on consistent counter-programming: complaining about “joy”, hyping up pro-Palestinian protests and expressing a newfound concern for the treatment of Joe Biden.The coverage, which has at times avoided the more pointed Democratic criticisms of Trump by cutting to ad breaks, has also including the criticism of women both for smiling too much and not smiling enough, and the coining of a new name for Barack Obama: “Barack-Stabber”.There has also been the bizarre revival of the racist Obama birther conspiracy theory by a Fox News host, as well as the straight-faced claim by a Republican-supporting news host that it is “all vengeance at this year’s DNC [Democratic national convention]”.In short, it’s been days of coverage that will be unfamiliar to anyone lucky enough to be outside the rightwing media bubble, and depressingly recognizable to those who dip into conservative coverage.“The words that we hear on the ground over and over is [sic]: ‘Trump, Trump, Trump’, and that Harris and Walz are full of joy,” Daniel Baldwin, a reporter on the hard-right OANN news channel, reported on Tuesday.Baldwin, who seemed quite upset, added: “Guess what: vibes and joy don’t put fool … food on the table. They don’t bring prices down, they don’t clean up the streets, they don’t do any of that.”Others in the rightwing media complained that the joy was insincere. Sean Hannity, a staunch Trump supporter and one of Fox News’s most celebrated hosts, told his audience on Tuesday: “The convention has been full of a lot of hate, instead of the politics of joy, which you’ve been promised.”Laura Ingraham, another Fox News stalwart, sang from the same hymn sheet as she claimed that Kamala Harris’s “joyful branding is a cover for something far more sinister”.“I like to call it socialism with a smile. It’s a seething disdain for tens of millions of Americans who still support Donald Trump,” Ingraham said, adding that the DNC is not about “love or optimism: it’s about hatred and retribution”.“There’s not much joy in this convention hall, certainly not compared to what we say at the RNC,” Ingraham added.Ingraham’s analysis was apparently unironic, but the idea that the Republican national convention was happy and joyful will come as a surprise to anyone who was there.The Republican event saw Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, claim that Americans were being “murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released”, while Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, warned that “millions of illegal aliens” should not be allowed to “harm our country”, as attendees waved signs reading: “Mass deportation now.”When it came to joy, at times it seemed like conservative media didn’t quite know what line of attack they were supposed to be using.“Hillary Clinton, she’s the most joyless person I think who has ever walked on this earth,” Matt Schlapp, a Republican political operative, told Newsmax on Monday.But minutes later, Schlapp performed an about turn on how much happiness women should express.“Kamala Harris came out on the stage … all the laughing, it’s like she got into the sherry or something,” Schlapp complained, in comments highlighted by Desi Lydic on The Daily Show.As well as questioning joyfulness and levity, the right wing has focused on protests rather than what was going on in the convention hall. That caused problems for the likes of Fox News and Newsmax at the start of the week, when a smaller than expected group of people congregated peacefully in Chicago. Fox News still tried valiantly to make the protests seem more of a thing, but the channel was outshone by One America News Network.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn OANN, the host Kara McKinney claimed: “DNC protests are spiraling out of control” over footage of pro-Palestinian activists calmly holding a flag and a crowd standing quietly behind a fence.Away from the protests, a common feature was anguish at Democrats’ treatment of Joe Biden – a man who rightwing media has spent years accusing of ill-defined crimes and senility.On Newsmax, one guest complained that Biden was mentioned “maybe twice”, “as they shoved him out in the dark of the night on the first night”, while an OANN host claimed Biden had been “buried at the end of the night”.Fox News’s The Five took a similar angle, portraying senior Democrats as nefarious plotters. A chyron on the show dubbed Obama “Barack-Stabber Obama”, as the host Jeanine Pirro lamented that Biden spoke on the first day of the convention and then “was exiled to California”.Michelle Obama didn’t escape unscathed either. A chyron under one discussion of the former first lady: “Michelle Obama snubs Biden in her DNC speech”, while Nancy Pelosi was also criticized, just for good measure.As the week wore on, it became clear that one tactic for news channels was just to ignore certain things happening at the convention. When a video was aired at the DNC about about the January 6 insurrection, Fox News cut to an advert for a landline telephone.When three women, including one who had been raped as a child, took the stage to discuss their experiences with pregnancies, miscarriages and abortions, Fox News skipped the segment entirely, Media Matters reported. Instead, the network had its male chief political analyst, Brit Hume, pontificate on the issue, and offer more faux Biden outrage, on air.“What does it say about the modern state of the Democratic party that it could not ask these abortion speakers to stand aside to make room for the president of the United States to speak at a reasonable hour tonight?” was Hume’s take.Among the critical analysis of the term “joy”, the wailing over Biden’s speaking spot and the ongoing female smiling debate, at least Fox News offered something more familiar to its viewers: the revival of the more-than-a-decade-old Obama birth certificate conspiracy theory. The idea, which Trump pushed even before he was a presidential candidate, posits that Obama was not born in the US, and therefore should not have been US president.Ignoring the fact that Obama has published his birth certificate, and that he has not been president for eight years, Jesse Watters, a primetime Fox News host, declared on the channel that he was going to send someone called Johnny to investigate.Obama is “definitely going to interfere in this election”, Watters said.“That’s why we’ll be sending Johnny to Hawaii to get the truth about the birth certificate – this time we will dig deep and find out what really happened.” More

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      Backlash erupts over criticism of Tim Walz’s emotional son: ‘families are everything’

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      For Gus Walz, the Democratic national convention in Chicago last week may not have been the light, good vibes fest that it was for adults in the 17,000-seat Chicago arena.The intense emotional response of vice-president hopeful Tim Walz’s son to seeing his father on stage – “That’s my dad!” – thrust him into the spotlight as the convention’s breakout star and with them raised the issue of nonverbal learning disorders, ADHD and an anxiety disorder that the 17-year-old is reported to experience.The conservative commentator Ann Coulter posted an article on X about Gus’s reaction, captioning it: “Talk about weird …” But the backlash against the mean-spirited post was swift. “He’s 17” trended on the platform and Coulter – unusually – took the post down.“I can see why a child loving their parents would feel foreign to you,” wrote Obama staffer-turned-liberal podcaster Tommy Vietor.It’s never been easy as the child of a high-profile US candidate, but the latest crop of presidential or vice-presidential hopeful offspring may be getting it worse than most, and there is no avoiding the spotlight of both traditional media and social media. Ella Emhoff, stepdaughter of Kamala Harris, is a Brooklyn-based knitwear designer and said to have a hand in her stepmum’s attuned campaign ear to generation Z. The prospective first daughter appeared nightly during the convention, along with Walz, as did Donald Trump’s kids at the Republicans’ convention in July. Chelsea Clinton was in Chicago for her parents’ speeches.Presidential offspring are firmly a part of political electioneering strategy, for better or worse. In 1950, Harry S Truman threatened to beat up a Washington Post music critic who wrote that his piano-playing daughter, Margaret, sang flat. John F Kennedy’s young children featured prominently in reporting of Camelot; Nixon’s daughter got married in the White House.The trail goes on, says the veteran Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, largely as a function of the White House press corps responding to the demands of public interest, with presidential siblings also playing a part, often troubled.“Children and families are a more prominent part of our politics than they’ve ever been – they’re part of the American political storytelling in the modern era,” Sheinkopf says, “because family represent goodness, community and stability and people who don’t have families don’t conform to those churchly American standards.”Which may help to explain the controversy stirred up over JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comments several weeks ago or the anger over Joe Biden not accepting four-year-old Navy Roberts, daughter of Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts, into the family fold.“It’s part of the American mythology that families are everything,” Sheinkopf adds. “Children and families are significant in the discussion of American politics. Always were, always will be.”But there are also cautions to observe, among them a long history of disappointing or tragic or even criminal outcomes, such as John F Kennedy Jr, who died in a self-piloted plane crash, Eric Trump and Don Jr, fined in the family’s $250m fraud trial, and more recently Hunter Biden, who goes on trial for tax fraud next month.In a 2013 book, All the Presidents’ Children, the historian Doug Wead wrote of a 40-page, 1998 study he had been encouraged to write by George Bush, whose son George W also became president.“I struggled to find a positive slant to a very dark picture,” Wead wrote in the book’s preface. “Despite the cruel examples that preceded them, each new generation of president’s children has been filled with hope and almost naive ambition.”During the convention, Chasten Buttigieg, husband of the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, posted on X that he hopes to inspire his children “so much that when they see me speak of the dreams and passion I have for my country they are moved to tears like Gus Walz was”.The introduction of Gus Walz is significant to the discussion of neurodiversity, which has played a backseat to issues of gender and racial diversity, says Nancy Doyle, a UK psychologist specializing in the neurodivergent conditions.Doyle says neurodivergent people tend to be highly sensitive and experience life at the extreme ends – as Gus Walz appeared at the sight of his father – that was “joyful to watch” as well casting a welcome spotlight on different people’s experiences.“It gives us an opportunity to discuss the issue,” says Doyle, who characterizes neurodiversity as an area that is as politicized as gender and diversity. “Expressing emotion is seen as weak because there are so many messages in society to repress, ignore or overcome emotional thinking.”“You’ve got a cultural narrative that makes us want to police our emotions in a certain way, and then you’ve got Gus who’s letting it all hang out and totally going for it. It made everyone go, ‘Wow, what’s that?’”While speakers at the convention spoke frequently of a threat posed by a second Trump presidency, they spoke often of “joy” at a Harris-Walz ticket more frequently than they spoke of “freedom”.“Tonight is about joy,” said the New Jersey senator Cory Booker. “Our nominees, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, they bring the joy.”But it was left to the younger Walz to fully inhabit that emotion, says Doyle, and it was a valuable counter to a perception that emotional reactions of children with neurodiverse characteristics are always negative. “What we saw was a pure expression of joy and a valuable counter-narrative to challenge that stereotype,” Doyle says. More