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      Fulton county election board faces $10,000 a day fine for not appointing Republicans

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      The Fulton county commission in Georgia will be fined $10,000 a day for violating a court order to appoint two Republicans associated with Trump-aligned groups pushing voter fraud conspiracies to the county’s election board.The county charter states that commissioners “shall” appoint two Republicans and two Democrats nominated by their respective county party chairperson, for two-year terms. When commissioners rejected the nomination by Fulton county’s Republican party chair, the superior court judge David Emerson issued an order requiring the board to appoint them.In a civil contempt case that threatened jail time, Emerson found the Democratic commissioners have “been stubbornly litigious and acted in bad faith in its conduct prior to this litigation by its failure to comply with clear local legislation which forced the plaintiff to file this action,” Emerson’s ruling Wednesday states. Emerson awarded attorney’s fees to the Republican plaintiffs.The plaintiffs were seeking an order of both civil and criminal contempt for failing to comply with the order. Civil contempt has historically meant an ever-increasing series of daily fines until the board complies with the order. But a finding of criminal contempt would have meant jail time until enough Democratic commissioners agree to vote for the appointment.The Fulton county Republican party chair, Stephanie Endres, nominated Jason Frazier for a term and renominated Julie Adams to serve another term.Frazier is among the most prolific challengers of voter registrations in Georgia, and unsuccessfully sued Fulton county in federal court in 2024, attempting to force the board of registration and elections to purge nearly 2,000 Fulton county voters from the state’s rolls before the presidential election.Adams is a member of an election-denial activist network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere. As a member of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, Adams refused to certify the May 2024 primary, which led to a Fulton county court case that ultimately compelled her to affirm the election.That case loomed large in court today. The court in Adams v Fulton county held that the act of certification was ministerial – a requirement, not a choice – because of the language in the law, noted Thomas L Oliver III, an attorney for the Republicans.Facing the court’s order, Adams ultimately complied, Oliver said. “Now they want to be on the other side of that argument. It’s pretty rich,” he added.In a previous ruling, Emerson said: “The court finds that the ‘shall’ as used here is mandatory, and the [board of commissioners] does not have discretion to disapprove an otherwise qualified nominee.” Emerson cited the mandatory nature of the language in the Adams case as applicable to the commissioners as well.Don Samuel, the county’s attorney, argued that the commissioners were refusing to complete the appointment because they were hoping to overturn the lower court’s order on appeal, and making the appointment would render an appeal moot. The ministerial function implicit in the language of the law of an elected official and an appointed official is a legal distinction for the appellate court, he said.“They are not defying this court out of disrespect of this court in any way,” Samuel said, acknowledging how their refusal to comply with the order looked in light of Democratic arguments about federal administration officials’ defiance of court orders. “We can’t help but read in the paper about the defiance of the judiciary,” he said. “We are not, despite the plaintiff’s overbroad argument here, we are not in defiance of the order. We’re trying to protect our rights in appeal.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFulton county has seven elected commissioners, five of whom are Democrats. The lawsuit only named those five: Dana Barrett, Mo Ivory, Khadijah Abdur-Rahman, Marvin Arrington and chair Robb Pitts. Pitts, Abdur-Rahman and Arrington did not vote on the appointment, leaving Barrett and Ivory to vote against it for a 2-2 tie.Social media messages from Ivory and Barrett were presented in court, in which the two Democrats pledged not to make the appointment.“Those who oversee elections must be fully independent and accountable,” Ivory said on Instagram.“No judge can compel any elected official to vote in any way,” said Barrett, also on Instagram. “Our elections are under attack in this country … This is just another arena where they’re trying to chip away at free and fair elections.”The law governing appointments to election boards in Georgia is an inconsistent patchwork. In neighboring Dekalb county, the chief judge of the county’s superior court is the appointment authority. Earlier this year, the judge allowed one controversial Republican nominee to be appointed while denying another. In Republican-controlled Cherokee county, an affluent northern suburb of Atlanta, county commissioners rejected the nomination of the county’s Democratic party to the election board, opting instead to find a Democrat they preferred to serve. More

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      Democrat flips Iowa state senate seat and breaks Republican supermajority

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      A Democratic candidate has defeated an extremist Republican in a state senate election in Iowa, claiming that voters are “waking up” to realise Donald Trump’s party “sold the working class a bill of goods”.Catelin Drey flipped Iowa state senate district 1, beating Christopher Prosch in a special election held on Tuesday to fill the seat of the late senator Rocky De Witt.Prosch had aligned himself with Trump’s Maga movement, floating conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and climate crisis. He also compared abortion access to the Holocaust.But Drey, a 37-year-old marketing executive, won with 55% of the vote to Prosch’s 44%, representing a swing of more than 20 points from Trump’s performance last year in the district, which covers most of Sioux City.Describing herself as “thrilled” with the result, Drey said on Wednesday: “We delivered a message that resonates with voters. People right now are frustrated with the way things are going. Iowa’s economy is last in the country, we’re last for maternal healthcare providers per capita, and people are ready for a change.”Asked whether the outcome delivered a verdict on Trump’s Maga agenda, Drey said: “It speaks to the level of authenticity and transparency that’s necessary to win in this environment. People want to make a connection with their candidate and they want to believe that person is going to be looking out for their best interests.”The founder of the grassroots organisation Moms for Iowa added: “Folks are waking up to the fact that Republicans in Iowa and, frankly, across the country have sold the working class a bill of goods and they are ready for policies that actually work for them.”Despite Democrats’ struggles in Washington, this is the second Iowa state senate district they have flipped this year, after a January victory in a district Trump won by more than 20 percentage points.Democrats have consistently overperformed in special legislative elections across the country, including winning another Trump-friendly seat in the state senate in Pennsylvania in March.The trend potentially spells trouble for Trump before next year’s midterm elections for the US House of Representatives and Senate. An Economist/YouGov poll last week found that 40% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the presidency while 56% disapprove. Republicans have also faced rowdy town halls in their congressional districts.Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said: “As Trump and Republicans wreck the economy and erode democracy with power-grabbing schemes, Democrats’ special election wins should send a flashing warning to the GOP: voters are rejecting the failing Maga agenda and leaving Republican candidates in the dust.”Drey had raised $165,385 and spent $75,066 on the campaign as of 21 August, the Des Moines Register newspaper reported, while Prosch raised $20,020 and spent $18,425 as of the same date. Both candidates received substantial in-kind support from their state parties.The Democratic National Committee (DNC) also deployed 30,000 volunteers for “get out the vote” efforts and hosted text and phone banks in conjunction with the Iowa Democratic party for Drey’s campaign.Ken Martin, chair of the DNC, said: “Iowans are seeing Republicans for who they are: self-serving liars who will throw their constituents under the bus to rubber-stamp Donald Trump’s disastrous agenda – and they’re ready for change.“They are putting Republicans on notice and making it crystal clear: any Republican pushing Trump’s unpopular, extreme agenda has no place governing on behalf of Iowa families.”Republicans poured scorn on the intervention by national Democrats as a sign of desperation.Jeff Kaufmann, chair of the Iowa Republican party, said: “National Democrats were so desperate for a win that they activated 30,000 volunteers and a flood of national money to win a state senate special election by a few hundred votes.“If the Democrats think things are suddenly so great again for them in Iowa, they will bring back the caucuses.”Drey’s victory breaks a Republican supermajority in the Iowa state senate for the first time since the 2022 election. The new chamber margin is 33 Republicans to 17 Democrats. This gives Democrats the ability to block governor Kim Reynolds’s picks for state agencies, boards and commissions.Matt McDermott, a Democratic pollster and strategist, on the X social media platform posted: “If you’re wondering why Republicans are rigging maps, this is what they’re afraid of.” More

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      What the Democrats can learn from Gavin Newsom’s Trump mockery | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      Gavin Newsom’s recent mockery of Donald Trump proves that imitation isn’t always the sincerest form of flattery. Amid the ongoing battle over congressional redistricting, Newsom’s pitch-perfect posts about Trump’s “TINY HANDS” and California’s “PERFECT MAPS” have been wildly entertaining, and, at least by one measure, wildly successful – the posts have garnered millions of views and counting.While it’s refreshing to see a prominent Democrat unapologetically standing up to the current administration, Newsom’s jabs also reinforce the staying power of Trump’s blustery and incoherent style. And they reveal the degree to which the attention economy has disrupted our focus and degraded our language.Trump continues to benefit from the steady decline in the American attention span driven by social media. His style of short, punchy, inflammatory language – and his strategy of flooding the zone with a new federal freak show day after day – is engineered to succeed in this chaotic environment. But some recent online victories seem to indicate that progressives can also win on this battlefield if they deploy the right combination of profane style and policy substance.It’s possible the Trump era would never have been inaugurated without the concurrent smartphone era reshaping attention spans and media habits. One survey has found that Americans check their phones an astonishing 144 times daily, and about 40% of adults report being “almost constantly online”. As a result, Americans are reading less. In 2024, less than half of adults said they had picked up a book in the past year, continuing a consistent downward trend.The MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes has analyzed this regression in his book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (a story that millions of Americans could benefit from understanding, if only they were still reading). He argues that the relentless competition for attention erodes thoughtful discourse while incentivizing the most thoughtless voices. It has contributed to mental health crises, the decline of journalism, and political polarization. It also fueled the rise of Donald Trump, who long ago proved himself to be a malignant savant of attention manipulation.Trump’s understanding of the new media ecosystem propelled all three of his presidential campaigns. In 2016, he received an estimated $5.6bn worth of free media. By that September, the word Americans associated the most with Hillary Clinton was “email”, while they connected Trump with “speech”, “president” and “immigration”.Fast forward to 2024, and he kept courting online attention with stunts such as working a choreographed 30-minute “shift” at McDonald’s. He dominated news media with mendacity which demanded journalistic coverage, such as his promotion of the xenophobic falsehood that Haitian migrants were eating Ohio pets. As Hayes wrote, Trump’s approach to politics over the last decade has been the “equivalent of running naked through the neighborhood: repellent but transfixing”.Now, Trump is not just benefiting from but intentionally accelerating these reversals. He has defunded and harassed leading research universities, censored historical exhibits at museums, and created Truth Social – an imitation of Twitter that has emerged as a playground for conspiracy theorists.He is attempting the governmental equivalent of a lobotomy.These setbacks have led progressives to increasingly understand that electoral victory requires digital dominance. And squaring up with Trump on social media appears a prerequisite for rallying the public around any political vision. As one strategist put it while praising Newsom’s Trump impersonation: “Democrats are over being the ‘nice guy’ party.”Already, there is some delightful needling of the right easily found in the proverbial social media haystack. The streamer Hasan Piker has been described as a “gateway drug” for progressive politics, while his engaging brand of explicit quips led GQ to name him “the hottest left-wing political commentator online”. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez streamed herself playing the game Among Us with Piker before the 2020 election, she almost broke a livestreaming record on the Twitch platform, drawing about 440,000 concurrent viewers.Elected Democrats are also taking off their virtual gloves. The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, responded to Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico by threatening to rechristen Lake Michigan “Lake Illinois”. In an example of game respecting game, Zohran Mamdani’s strategy of speaking directly to voters through social media received unlikely praise from Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene is less a fan of the Texas representative Jasmine Crockett, who went viral for describing Greene as having a “bleach blond, bad-built, butch body”. And in Maine, the oysterman and Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner is drawing headlines for a pugnacious campaign launch video in which he declares: “The difference between Susan Collins and Ted Cruz is at least Ted Cruz is honest about selling us out and not giving a damn.”Still, talking the talk also requires walking the walk by implementing bold, authentically progressive initiatives. One of Newsom’s Trump-mocking posts announced an aggressive redistricting plan to counter Republican gerrymandering in Texas. Bernie Sanders has endorsed that move, just as he endorsed Mamdani, whose affordability agenda represents another ambitious stance to match pugilistic rhetoric.Otherwise, adhering to the philosophy of “when they go low, we go high” risks failing to meet voters where they are. It seems Americans seek a fighter on their behalf and at their side.“THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.” More

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      Judge rules Utah’s congressional map must be redrawn for the 2026 elections

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      The Utah legislature will need to rapidly redraw the state’s congressional boundaries after a judge ruled on Monday that the Republican-controlled body drew them in violation of voters’ rights.The current map, drawn in 2021, divides Salt Lake county – the state’s population center and a Democratic stronghold – among the state’s four congressional districts, all of which have since elected Republicans by wide margins. District court judge Dianna Gibson declared the map unlawful because the legislature circumvented a commission established by voters to ensure districts aren’t drawn to favor any party.New maps will need to be drawn quickly for the 2026 midterm elections. Lt Gov Deidre Henderson, the state’s top elections official, asked the courts for the case to be finalized by November to leave time for the process before candidates start filing in early January. But appeals promised by Republican lawmakers could help them run out the clock to possibly delay adopting new maps until 2028.The ruling creates uncertainty in a state that was thought to be a clean sweep for the GOP as the party is preparing to defend its slim majority in the US House. Nationally, Democrats need to net three seats next year to take control of the chamber. The sitting president’s party tends to lose seats in the midterms, as was the case for Donald Trump in 2018.The US president has urged several Republican-led states to add winnable seats for the GOP. In Texas, a plan awaiting governor Greg Abbott’s approval includes five new districts that would favor Republicans. Ohio Republicans already were scheduled to revise their maps to make them more partisan, and Indiana, Florida and Missouri may choose to make changes. Some Democrat-led states say they may enter the redistricting battle, but so far only California has taken action to offset Republican gains in Texas. More

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      The senate race in Iowa that could signal a blue wave for the 2026 midterms

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      He has compared abortion access to the Holocaust and pushed conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 2020 presidential election and climate crisis. Christopher Prosch is betting that Maga still rules in the US heartland.On Tuesday, the far-right Republican will take on Democrat Catelin Drey in a special general election for Iowa state senate district 1 after the previous incumbent, Republican Rocky De Witt, died in June.A victory for Drey would break Republicans’ supermajority in the state senate and deny governor Kim Reynolds the ability to stack agencies and courts with Maga loyalists. It would also give Democrats fresh hope that a blue wave is forming before next year’s midterm elections.State legislatures rarely gain the limelight but have emerged as vital power players in recent years on issues such as abortion rights and, this week, gerrymandering in Texas and California. They have also become petri dishes for the Republican party’s embrace of extremism in the age of Donald Trump.Prosch is founder of Felix Strategies, a public relations firm based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, whose work includes “strategic communications for Christian conservative leaders and organizations”. He was a canvasser for Kristi Noem in her congressional race in 2010 and has consulted on numerous campaigns since.“He is deep in the Maga Trumpland,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC). “He is the kind of candidate that not that long ago would have never seen the light of day on a ballot. He said … a litany of all the Maga perspectives and points of view and beliefs.”Following his nomination, Prosch reportedly began deleting contentious posts from his social media and affiliated accounts, according to the Iowa Starting Line news site, which took screenshots and published several of them.Hosting a podcast two years ago, Prosch equated the Holocaust with reproductive freedom. “Who was worse?” he asked. “The Nazi Germans who killed 10 million Jews and many other people? Or the left’s policies to target an entire generation of babies to death.” He also opined that victims of rape or incest should carry pregnancies to term.Prosch has used social media to share conspiracy theories about the safety of vaccines and a cover-up of what caused the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.He has championed the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Joe Biden and, in 2022, his firm Felix Strategies posted a message that said: “Global cooling..global warming..climate change…whatever they’re calling it, it’s all a lie!”Prosch’s own website describes him as “a strong pro-life conservative who believes life is a precious gift from God that must be protected”. It also expresses support for Trump’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, drive “woke” ideology out of schools and bar transgender athletes from school sports.The Republican proposes eliminating Iowa’s state income tax and “is dedicated to raising his children in a loving, strict Christian home”, the site says. “Christopher believes that leaders should be guided by the principles found in the Bible and the Constitution.”Prosch did not respond to emailed requests for comment.His opponent, Drey, is a 37-year-old marketing executive and founder of the group Moms for Iowa, a grassroots organisation focused on curbing gun violence and championing reproductive rights. She has served on local boards and statewide political committees and wants to increase state education funding in the district.Speaking from Sioux City, which is at the heart of senate district 1, Drey said: “The No 1 concern that folks in senate district 1 right now have is Iowa’s affordability crisis and I think folks across the country would feel that. We’ve seen policies come down from the federal level, as well as the state level, that are making it very difficult for people to make ends meet here.”Iowa’s Republican administration has made it harder for local municipalities to spend money to benefit their communities, Drey added, with middle and working classes paying more than their fair share in taxes and struggling to afford a house.Democrats have been soul searching since they lost the White House and both chambers of Congress last November. A range of voices from the centre and left of the party have coalesced around a focus on the cost of living, likely to be exacerbated by Trump’s tariffs and tax-and-spend legislation known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.But the party, whose approval rating is at a historical low, is also wrestling with an image problem of being seen as too elitist and out of touch. On Friday, the thinktank Third Way urged Democrats to stop using words such as “microaggression”, “safe space”, “existential threat”, “birthing person” and “Latinx”, which it argues make the party seem out of touch with regular voters.Drey said: “The biggest frustration for the working class is certainly feeling left behind by the ‘coastal liberal elite’ and, as much as I may identify with the overall policy goals of said coastal elites, I am a regular person who lives and works in this community. I see the way that bad policy affects my family and my neighbours.“If the Democrats can get back to a message that is, ‘We are of you and from you and we understand what it is like to want to strive for a beautiful life,’ then I think that is what resonates with people. Trying to convince folks that things are actually better when they’re not feeling that is tone deaf, to be quite frank. This is a party that can work from the bottom up in terms of shifting the balance of power and making life better for the folks that need it.”Drey has valuable support on the campaign trail from JD Scholten, an Iowa state representative who is also a professional baseball pitcher for a minor league team, the Sioux City Explorers. Art Cullen, a leading newspaper editor in Iowa, said: “He’s popular in Sioux City and he’s been door knocking for her.”Cullen believes that the election will be more of a referendum on the governor, Reynolds, than on Trump. “People are sick of Kim Reynolds,” he continued. “People are getting tired of the wackiness: banning books, making a big to-do over trans people.“Republicans are concentrating on all that stuff and not on, how good are our schools and why are our property taxes so high? The Republican-dominated legislature punted and went home without addressing rising property taxes.”Senate district 1 has a history of swinging between parties, with Democrats winning it in 2018 and Republicans reclaiming it in 2022. Last year, the district supported Donald Trump by an 11-point margin. Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats in the district by 38% to 31%.Republicans had a two-thirds supermajority in the state senate prior to the death of De Witt at the age of 66. If Democrats prevail on Tuesday, they would have the ability to block the confirmation of Reynolds’ picks for cabinet positions and judges.Democratic candidates have over-performed in recent state legislative elections, flipping Trump districts in Iowa and Pennsylvania. A third win would continue the momentum before next year’s midterm polls for the US House of Representatives and Senate.Williams of the DLCC said the party is looking to Tuesday to demonstrate that “Democrats can win elections – we can connect with voters on economic issues and they can trust us on them – and that Republicans are in trouble. This president’s policies and approach are deeply unpopular and Republicans will not be rewarded at the ballot box for it.” More

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      Trump is wrong about crime – but right about the fear of it | Austin Sarat

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      In most of America’s largest cities, crime, especially violent crime, is down. But the fear of crime is increasing.Donald Trump has made a career out of ignoring the reality of crime rates and of stoking that fear. Well before he entered politics and throughout his political career, he has talked about city life as life in a proverbial jungle.In 2022, he talked frequently about the “ blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities” and said: “Cities are rotting, and they are indeed cesspools of blood.” And he never strays far from that playbook.On 11 August, the president returned to his demagogic characterizations of America’s urban areas when he deployed national guard and federal law enforcement agents to the streets of Washington DC. He said the city was awash in “crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor”.He claimed that “crime is out of control in the District of Columbia”. In fact, violent crime in the District of Columbia is the lowest it has been in more than three decades.But Trump didn’t just ignore the data. He leaned into a different problem in Washington: fear of crime.Referring to Washingtonians who like to jog, the president said: “People tell me they can’t run any more. They’re just afraid.”And he was not content to target just the nation’s capital. “You look at Chicago,” he said, “how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities in a very bad – New York is a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that any more. They’re so far gone. We’re not going to let it happen.”Never mind that, like Washington, as CNN reports, Chicago, Baltimore and other cities also have had “substantial declines in 2024, 2025 or both”.So far, Democratic political leaders have repeated those statistics as if that in itself will carry the day. In so doing, they are repeating a mistake made by Joe Biden when he asked people to focus on economic statistics that showed declines in the rate of inflation rather than their lived reality.Unfortunately, the statistics matter much less than the fear of crime. That fear is a real problem, and Democrats need to acknowledge and respond to it.Let’s start with the District of Columbia. A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted in mid-August found that 31% of Washingtonians said crime was an “‘extremely serious’ or a ‘very serious’” problem in the District. Last year, the same poll found that number to be 65%. Some of this decline can be attributed to the fact that residents of the city overwhelmingly oppose what the president has done and don’t want to be seen as lending it legitimacy.But however you measure it, fear of crime is not just a District of Columbia problem.In New York City, 75% of residents say that crime is a serious problem. As an essay posted on Vital City puts it: “Whatever crime statistics show, most of us are worried that it could happen to us. That feeling is nebulous and hard to overcome … We the people say crime is a serious problem, and most of us will continue, for now, to look over our shoulders and worry when someone we love leaves home.”National surveys suggest that “Americans’ fear of crime is at a 30-year high”. Other survey evidence highlights the fact that “73% say crime has ‘some’ or ‘major’ impact on how they live their lives”. Among Black and Hispanic Americans, that number is even higher.Not surprisingly, many Americans now favor long prison sentences for convicted criminals.Explanations vary for the paradox that as crime rates fall, fear of crime persists.Crime stories often dominate local news coverage, and the more gruesome the crime, the greater the coverage. That is why fear of crime is driven not by a dispassionate examination of data but by the power of individual stories of victimization.That pattern is intensified by social media. Studies have shown that social media usage stokes crime fear.Demographics also matter. Crime fears are greater among older people, and, as the population ages, those fears increase.Fear of crime is also associated with a generalized sense of disorderliness in our communities and the world. And, as the economist and criminal justice scholar John Roman argues, because “our collective tolerance for disorder is declining”, our fear of crime is increasing.Of course, it doesn’t help that Trump uses the bully pulpit and his public visibility to emphasize and exaggerate the crime problem as part of his authoritarian project. But blaming Trump for the fear of crime problem is not any more of a winning political strategy than reciting the latest data on falling crime rates.Democrats can’t and shouldn’t run away from either the crime problem or the fear of crime problem. They will have no credibility in offering responses to the former until they establish credibility on the latter.They would be well-advised to tackle the fear problem openly and to embrace responses, like investing in programs that repair public spaces and revitalize neighborhoods, while also being clear that people who fear crime have reason to want to see more police on the street.Trump knows the potency of the fear of the crime problem. That’s why he boasted that after his deployment of national guard in Washington, DC, “People are feeling safe already … They’re not afraid any more.”But we don’t need the national guard to do what local police can do when they are well-trained, responsive to the needs of all communities and well-resourced. The best long-term response to the president’s agenda for American cities is to make sure that the people who live there have more confidence in their safety and less fear of crime.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      The Democrats are in deep trouble in the US – and Labour is on the way to joining them | Nesrine Malik

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      The measure of a political party’s failure lies not in how many agnostics and opponents it fails to convert, but in how many loyalists it fails to preserve. The endorsement of new, unnatural voters – Latinos in the US for Donald Trump, or Tories voting for Labour for the first time – might deliver big electoral swings but is ultimately not sticky. And these votes are only meaningful if the bedrock is solid. That bedrock is the people who consistently show up, no matter what, from generation to generation, for a party. And the Democrats are losing them.In extensive research published last week tracking voter registration, the New York Times identified an alarming pattern. The Democratic party has been “haemorrhaging” voters since way before election day. In the states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost to Republicans in all of them in the years between 2020 and 2024. By the time Kamala Harris took over from Joe Biden, the party had already shed more than 2m votes in those states, and Republicans had gained 2.4m. This is part of a “four-year swing” that amounts to 4.5m votes. In a chilling conclusion, the report states that “few measurements reflect the luster of a political party’s brand more clearly than the choice by voters to identify with it”.The signs get worse the more closely you look. It’s not just a decline in new registered voters, but a hacking away of those natural voters who parties can easily rely on. Some of the sharpest declines were among young voters who came out emphatically for Joe Biden in 2020, then swung towards Trump in 2024. An assumption that voters who are young, Black or Latino would register mostly in the Democrats’ favour was no longer safe.The most striking thing about these revelations is how long and consistent the turn-off has been: “There is no silver lining or cavalry coming across the hill,” said one voter registration analyst, “this is month after month, year after year.” They show how during the last election, when the Democrats were battling with the damage of a belated handover from Biden to Harris, and a swirl of other challenges, the party was already on the back foot, hostage to a years-long disillusionment. And if you look at some of the reasoning for Democrat abandonment from last year, the same conclusion heaves into view – the Democrats rested on their laurels, and Trump attacked. The vibe contest was between business as usual, and the promise of something different.The result is a cratering of Democrat support that cannot be filled in overnight, or even over the next three years, especially with the party seemingly in disarray, and with a lo-fi leadership in Chuck Schumer accused of being “unwilling and unable to meet the moment”. It’s not about the unique, mendacious bewitching of voters by Trump, but something broader. Centre-left parties seem trapped by their inability and unwillingness to articulate values in ways that go beyond just saying the other guys are bad for democracy, by identifying a vision of what and who they are for.They are operating in a world where traditional coalitions around class, labour and identity are dissolving, where high barriers to home ownership, social mobility and job stability have been erected, and the relationship between hard work and prosperity, or even viability, has been severed. Combine that with an online and media ecosystem that trades in attention and feeling, and you have a political climate that requires policy intervention and campaigning edge.Instead, as summed up by Gabriel Winant after Trump’s victory, Kamala Harris had “stretched her coalition into incoherence” in a “grab bag” of policies “sharing no clear thematic unity or coherence”. This is the result of both a lack of direction, and of a party that now houses both the powerful and those at the losing end of that power, which can only mean a lop-sided capture by the former. Or, as chillingly observed by Anton Jäger: “Bankers and warmongers predominate in Democrat ruling circles, the indebted and the marginalised among its rank-and-file.” This reminds me of Keir Starmer’s drive to cast Labour as “pro-business, pro-worker and pro-wealth creation”. You cannot have coherence when the interests you represent, or claim to represent, are by definition antagonistic.This brand tension has an analogue in a smaller but no less revealing way in the UK, where students are abandoning Labour. University Labour clubs are disaffiliating from the party, Labour’s youth membership has collapsed, the tail of a longer falling out with Labour leadership over Gaza. But this is a broader confrontation between young voters and a party that has failed to stand for any clear moral principles that appeal to the idealism so necessary to create not only future voters, but activists and campaigners. On Gaza, Labour is anti-starvation, but also anti-protest.And both the Democrats and Labour are positioning themselves antagonistically to those whose sharper expressions of political vision are hugely popular with those who are abandoning them. Senior Democrats might still not endorse New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who is posting stunning polling leads. Labour disciplines MPs for rebelling against benefit cuts, even as hundreds of thousands of people register their support for a new party.But as new and future voters are lost, the lion’s share of the windfall goes to those on the right and extreme right who have already mastered the gamification of politics, and the ability to summon fever dreams of threats that must be dealt with and prosperity that is just around the corner. “Elections are won from the centre” goes the old adage, but increasingly the centre itself has changed as the world becomes not a place of wide-tent compromise, but of irreconcilable differences. And I would venture another formulation – elections are won in the past. By the time it becomes apparent that remote and complacent centrist politics is not even managing to convince its own tribes, it will be too late. Some would argue it already is.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump ‘manufactured crisis’ to justify plan to send national guard to Chicago, leading Democrat says

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      Donald Trump has “manufactured a crisis” to justify the notion of sending federalized national guard troops into Chicago next, over the heads of local leaders, a leading Democrat said on Sunday, as the White House advanced plans to militarize more US cities.Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and a New York Democratic congressman, accused the US president of “playing games with the lives of Americans” with his unprecedented domestic deployment of the military, which has escalated to include the arming of troops currently patrolling Washington, DC – after sending troops into Los Angeles in June.The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, said any such plan from Trump was perpetrating “the most flagrant violation of our constitution in the 21st century”.Late on Friday, Pentagon officials confirmed to Fox News that up to 1,700 men and women of the national guard were poised to mobilize in 19 mostly Republican states to support Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown by assisting the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) with “logistical support and clerical functions”.Jeffries said he supported a statement issued by the Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, that Trump was “abusing his power” in talking about sending the national guard to Chicago, and distracting from the pain he said the president was causing American families.The national guard is normally under the authority of the individual states, deployed at the request of the state governor and only federalized – or deployed by the federal government – in a national emergency and at the request of a governor.Jeffries said in an interview with CNN on Sunday morning: “We should continue to support local law enforcement and not simply allow Donald Trump to play games with the lives of the American people as part of his effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he’s deeply unpopular.”He continued: “I strongly support the statement that was issued by Governor Pritzker making clear that there’s no basis, no authority for Donald Trump to potentially try to drop federal troops into the city of Chicago.”The White House has been working on plans to send national guard to Chicago, the third largest US city, dominated by Democratic voters in a Democratic state, to take a hard line on crime, homelessness and immigrants, the Washington Post reported.View image in fullscreenPritzker issued a statement on Saturday night that began: “The State of Illinois at this time has received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention.”Trump has argued that a military crackdown was necessary in the nation’s capital, and elsewhere, to quell what he said were out of control levels of crime, even though statistics show that serious and violent crime in Washington, and many other American cities, has actually plummeted.Talking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday the president insisted that “the people in Chicago are screaming for us to come” as he laid out his plan to send troops there, and that they would later “help with New York”.“When ready, we will start in Chicago … Chicago is a mess,” Trump said.Johnson, in an appearance on Sunday on MSNBC, said shootings had dropped by almost 40% in his city in the last year alone, and he and Pritzker said any plan by the White House to override local authority and deploy troops would be illegal.“The president has repeated this petulant presentation since he assumed office. What he is proposing at this point would be the most flagrant violation of our constitution in the 21st century,” Johnson said.California sued the federal government when it deployed national guard and US marines to parts of Los Angeles in June over protests against Ice raids, but a court refused to block the troops.Main target cities mentioned by Trump are not only majority Democratic in their voting but also run by Black mayors, including Washington, DC, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Oakland.Rahm Emanuel, a Democratic former Illinois congressman, chief of staff to former president Barack Obama, and a former mayor of Chicago, also appeared on CNN on Sunday urging people to reflect that Trump, in two terms of office, had only ever deployed US troops in American cities, never overseas.Emanuel said if he was still mayor he would call on the president to act like a partner and, although crime was coming down, to “work with us on public safety” to combat carjackings, gun crime and gangs and not “come in and act like we can be an occupied city”.He added about Trump’s agenda: “He gave his speech in Iowa, he said ‘I hate’ Democrats, and this may be a reflection of that.” The speech was in July, when Trump excoriated Democrats in Congress who refused to vote for his One Big Beautiful Bill, the flagship legislation of the second Trump administration so far that focuses on tax cuts for the wealthy, massive boosts for the anti-immigration agenda and benefits cuts to programs such as Medicaid, which provides health insurance for poor Americans. 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