Democrats

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The US is ‘absolutely’ ready for a female president, Harris says in NBC interview

      by

      Kamala Harris said that she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, insisting that Americans care more about what candidates can do to help them, rather than presidential contenders’ gender.The vice-president’s statement came during an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson, who asked whether she thought the country was ready for a woman, and a woman of color, to be in the Oval Office. “Absolutely,” Harris said. “Absolutely.”“In terms of every walk of life of our country,” Harris said, “part of what is important in this election is really, not really turning the page – closing a chapter, on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.“The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us and what the American people want in their president is a president for all Americans,” she said.Harris was asked why she hasn’t leaned into the historic nature of her candidacy – that she is a woman of color running for the presidency.“I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”“That is why I spend the majority of my time listening and then addressing the concerns, the challenges, the dreams, the ambitions and the aspirations of the American people,” Harris continued, saying that Americans deserve a president focused on them, “as opposed to a Donald Trump, who is constantly focused on himself”.Harris also said she was aware that Trump might potentially try thwarting the presidential election results, noting that her team “will deal with election night and the days after as they come”.Harris said that she is focused on campaigning over the next two weeks while noting “we have the resources and the expertise and the focus” on any potential threats to election results. Jackson noted that Trump declared victory before all the votes were tallied in 2020.Trump, who has refused to accept the 2020 election results and claimed the race was stolen, has been stoking fears with unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud in the 2024 cycle. “This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo the free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol, and 140 law enforcement officers were attacked, some who were killed. This is a serious matter,” Harris told Jackson.Trump supporters on 6 January 2021 stormed the US Capitol in an effort to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s victory. That day, four people died at the Capitol and a police officer working during the insurrection died several days later; four other police officers posted at the building on 6 January 2021 committed suicide, according to CBS News.“The American people are, at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country,” Harris also said.Jackson also asked about voters’ concerns about the economy, noting that many blame the US president for rising prices.Harris said her policies “will not be a continuation of the Biden administration” and with inflation, “I bring my own experiences, my own ideas to it.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJackson noted that if Harris won, her victory might coincide with Republican control of Congress, which would thwart protecting abortion at the national level.“What concessions would be on the table?” Jackson asked.“I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” Harris said.Harris said she would not “get into those hypotheticals” when asked if a pardon might be on the table for Trump.“I’m focused on the next 14 days.”Harris was pressed on the pardon topic, asked if she thought it could help the country move forward together and be less divisive.“Let me tell you what’s going to help us move on: I get elected to president of the United States.” More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘People don’t like to see poverty:’ inside San Francisco’s vicious race for mayor

      by

      When the supreme court’s conservative majority ruled this summer that cities could fine and jail unhoused people for sleeping on the streets, London Breed, the Democratic mayor of famously liberal San Francisco, greeted the decision as a victory.With more than 8,000 people in the city unhoused, Breed has increasingly embraced law-and-order policies. The supreme court’s ruling would “help cities like San Francisco manage our public spaces more effectively and efficiently”, she argued.Homelessness has been an enduring challenge for San Francisco’s leaders, including for Breed. The relentless emergency is one of the top issues in this year’s elections in the city, and Breed’s re-election is uncertain. She’s facing a host of Democratic challengers – the most prominent of whom are echoing her law-and-order rhetoric.Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist, former interim mayor and former member of the board of supervisors, has said he wants to call in armed national guard troops to deal with the city’s fentanyl crisis and would embrace “zero tolerance” and abstinence-focused responses to addiction as mayor. Daniel Lurie, a former non-profit executive and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, whose billionaire mother is backing his campaign, has proposed using ankle monitors and geolocation technology to ban people arrested for drug dealing from returning to certain city neighborhoods. “It’s basically Find My iPhone for drug dealers,” he explained. “It is time to end the perception that lawlessness is an acceptable part of life in San Francisco,” Lurie pledged on his campaign website.The only progressive in the mayor’s race, the longtime city supervisor Aaron Peskin, was polling so far behind over the summer that the Los Angeles Times ran a story on it. His ratings have increased slightly since then, but he is still expected to lose the race.The tough-on-crime mayoral rhetoric has fueled national headlines about San Francisco voters moving to the right. But local political experts point out that the city’s leadership has long been more centrist than its international reputation might suggest. Local residents and business owners have described a tension between wanting to fix the humanitarian crisis they see playing out around them, and worrying about the optics of the crisis for themselves and for the city, which has long been dependent on tourist dollars.“People in San Francisco don’t like to see poverty. They can be very liberal at a distance,” said Tony Sparks, an urban policy expert at San Francisco State University. The city is built on “a very boom and bust economy, and during the boom times, people don’t want to see the leftovers of the bust times”.What is new is the growing political engagement of a generation of tech executives and investors in the region, many of whom have come to believe that progressive policies that guided the city during the pandemic and in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprising have set the city on the wrong track. They’re using their wealth and their public social media platforms – both sizable – in an effort to reshape the city’s politics, spending millions on local races.Money has always played a role in the city’s politics, but the mayor’s race is expected to be the most expensive in San Francisco history.Slow pandemic recovery and flexing of moneyBreed was elected in 2018 as the first Black woman to become mayor of San Francisco. She brought personal experience to many of the city’s struggles: she grew up in public housing, lost a younger sister to a drug overdose, and has a brother who is incarcerated.A longtime community activist, she was known as a centrist, one with significant support from the city’s business and tech elite. She has long argued that her approach to the homelessness and addiction crises is shaped not by rich donors, but by the views of San Francisco’s middle-class and working-class residents.View image in fullscreenSince the pandemic, those dual crises seem to only have grown, while yet others have appeared on the horizon. Most US cities bounced back quickly after the early pandemic: San Francisco did not.The transition to remote work turned its downtown business district into a shadow of itself. The much emptier streets made homelessness and public drug use – including more than 3,000 people living unsheltered on the streets or in tents – more visible and more unsettling, giving way to a national debate over whether the city was caught in a “doom loop”, in which the struggling downtown area would never be able to attract back the office workers, shoppers, and tourists it desperately needed to survive. The city’s public schools’ pandemic closures lasted much longer than in other parts of the country, sparking frustration among some parents. Accidental drug overdose deaths have claimed between 600 and 810 lives a year since 2020.Concerns about safety in the city were never supported by violent crime statistics, which have continued to show that San Francisco is relatively safe among large American cities. But they were confirmed by people’s visual experiences downtown, said Eric Jaye, a Democratic political consultant who has worked in San Francisco politics for decades. People are unlikely to feel safe when they see people injecting drugs on the street or living in tents in public spaces.San Francisco’s pandemic-related crisis were a regular laughingstock on Fox News, where Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson railed that California’s ultra-left politicians were reaping what they sowed.And while a caricature, the argument that progressive government was at least partly to blame for some of the problems resonated with many tech leaders and venture capitalists in the region, said Keally McBride, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.Funneling money through a network of locally-focused “grey money” groups, tech, real estate and venture capitalist leaders bankrolled the successful recall of Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s young, progressive district attorney. They backed the recall of several discredited members of the San Francisco school board. They threw their weight behind centrist candidates for board of supervisors seats. They weren’t always united in all their causes, but together, “they are spending insane amounts of money on local elections,” and they are “out to bring the hyper-progressive elements in San Francisco government down”, said McBride.View image in fullscreenSeveral challengers, similar policiesBreed, too, has embraced law-and-order policies as a way out of the emergency. She supported the recall of Boudin – replacing him with a political ally – as well as the recall of the school board members.This spring, she boosted ballot measures that gave the police department more power to use surveillance tools and that instituted drug tests for local welfare recipients. On her campaign website, she touts among her successes doubling drug arrests in 2023, and said she hopes to expand a program in which city officials buy homeless people bus tickets out of town, with a target of “1,000 people per year”.Many observers say that Breed’s leading mayoral challengers are not suggesting substantially different policies – with all of them promising to clear away the unhoused people sleeping in tents on streets and in public parks, expand the number of city police officers and put an end to public drug use.“The current mayor, and all of the prospective mayors, their aim right now is not to solve homelessness or fix homelessness or even shelter homeless people, it’s just to get them out of sight,” Sparks said. “We’re back in the 90s. Wide leg pants are in, Birkenstocks are in and so is law and order and mass incarceration.”View image in fullscreenThe number of people who are being evicted or losing access to shelter in San Francisco is constantly overwhelming the city’s ability to house them, Sparks said. An honest reckoning with California’s housing shortage, a massive problem that was decades in the making, would probably require both statewide and federal action, he argued.But it’s not just tech billionaires who want a quicker fix, he said. “At the end of the day, it’s the average San Francisco voter that is really demanding that they don’t want to see people living on the streets.”Asked about critics who said Breed’s law-and-order approach marked a return to 1990s policies, Joe Arellano, a Breed campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that “San Francisco is a city that believes in and offers second chances, but it is also a city of accountability”. He also noted that Breed had been endorsed by the San Francisco police union.The conservative media’s depiction of San Francisco as a bastion of far-left policies has always been a fiction, said Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University. Just look at the national politicians who have emerged from San Francisco: Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris, people “pretty close to the center of the Democratic party”, he said.The city’s current debate is still “firmly liberal”, he argued. “San Francisco voters are still compassionate. They’re willing to spend a lot of money on government services,” McDaniel said. “It’s not a conservative approach, which is, ‘Let’s not “waste” money on people who don’t deserve it.’”But having invested public money in city services for addiction, mental health treatment and other issues, many liberal voters are upset to still see so much public disorder in the streets, McDaniel said. “Politicians are saying part of the problem is people are rejecting those services – not going to homeless shelters,” for instance. Critics point at a crippling bureaucracy, inefficient local government and several corruption scandals. Measured success and divided donorsBreed’s chances of re-election may have slightly improved over the past year, as she has appeared to make progress in some of her goals.A recent analysis from the Associated Press found that many streets in San Francisco were now empty of tents and other makeshift encampments. The number of people sleeping outdoors dropped to under 3,000 in January, the lowest the city has recorded in a decade, according to a federal count. The number has likely dropped even lower as a result of ramped up enforcement of anti-camping laws following the supreme court decision in August, the AP said.But even as tents have disappeared, the total number of unhoused people in San Francisco has grown by 7%, according to the same federal count.Steven Burcell, who is living in a tiny cabin provided by the city, told the AP that unhoused friends of his had all of their possessions taken by the city in one of the encampment “sweeps”.“Now they have nothing. They don’t have any shelter at all,” he said. “They just kind of wander around and take buses, like a lot of people do.”The increased enforcement and intense political rhetoric about homelessness are taking a toll on the people at the heart of the debate, Sparks said.“People living on the street are feeling embattled. They’re stressed. They’re having to constantly be on the move and on the lookout,” he said. “When sweeps go up, people hide.”The tech donors are divided over who they want to see as mayor. The Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen has donated hundreds of thousands to Breed’s re-election campaign. The billionaire William Oberndorf gave $500,000 to Farrell’s campaign, and the former supervisor has won the backing of several other figures from the real estate and finance sectors. Lurie, the Levi Strauss heir, has poured more than $8m of his own money into his mayoral campaign. His mother also spent $1m to back his campaign.View image in fullscreenAs the race for that role enters its final weeks, allegations of improper financial behavior are shadowing both Breed and Farrell. A city official who led Breed’s “Dream Keepers Initiative” initiative went on leave in September, after investigations by the San Francisco Chronicle and the SF Standard raised questions about the official’s spending, including $1.5m in contracts she approved for a non-profit run by a man with whom she shared an address. It wasn’t the first time that close associates of the mayor have run into ethics problems: Breed was for a time in a relationship with the city’s former director of public works, who later pleaded guilty to fraud and public corruption charges.Meanwhile, Farrell is facing accusations that his campaign is using a fund ostensibly dedicated to supporting a local ballot initiative to improperly funnel money to his mayoral campaign and dodge campaign finance limits.None of the three leading campaigns made their candidates available for a phone interview with the Guardian, and Farrell’s campaign did not respond to questions.Arellano, Breed’s campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that the mayor had led “the biggest anti-corruption clean-up in our city’s history” and that “nearly all the recent examples in the news were identified because of the process she initiated to root out waste, fraud and abuse”.Breed had acted swiftly in response to the news about the “unfortunate events” at the Dream Keepers Initiative, including asking the director to resign, and “remains committed to the program”, he said.In the wake of the investigation into Farrell and the Dream Keepers Initiative, the Chronicle’s editorial board announced that though Breed was a “safe choice” for mayor, it was endorsing Lurie as someone who could bring much-needed change to the city government.The Chronicle’s endorsement was blunt: “Is Lurie’s inexperience concerning? Absolutely … We won’t sugarcoat the reality that supporting Lurie is a risk.”Though Lurie’s plans offered “a welcome balance of compassion and toughness”, some of his promises for addressing the homelessness crisis were “hyperbolic” or even, frankly, “a fantasy”, the paper noted.But the Chronicle argued that Lurie’s measured demeanour and extensive, if “unearned”, family connections, would likely enable him to hire and manage an impressive staff of city employees, who might be able to do a better job on day-to-day governance issues than Breed had done.Lurie has been running a “very outsider, populist campaign”, arguing that his lack of experience in city hall “is a good thing, from his point of view”, McDaniel, the political scientist, said. That kind of message, from a “very rich person” who has spent more on his own campaign than all the other candidates combined, is not one that McDaniel expected would resonate with San Francisco voters. But, he said, Lurie “has done better than I thought, and he could still win”.San Franciscans will use a ranked-choice voting process to select a mayor in November, meaning that candidates can pick up second and third-choice votes in the race from supporters of other candidates. Voters who support Peskin, the underdog progressive candidate, will probably be one of the key second choice vote swing groups. So far, influential local progressives have divided on who to endorse as their second choice, with some choosing Lurie, and others, Breed, McBride, the politics professor, said.“It’s all just messy,” she said. The Chronicle’s latest poll, from mid-October, showed Lurie surging to first place.Breed’s spokesperson accused Lurie and his family of trying to “buy the election”, and said: “Lurie would be at 1% if he wasn’t spending an unprecedented amount of money to cover up the fact that he has no experience to be mayor.”A spokesperson for Lurie’s campaign responded that Breed and Farrell also had billionaire backers: “Their attempts to cry foul about a resource disadvantage are the result of bad strategy and tactical blunders – not an actual lack of resources.”Jaye, the longtime Democratic consultant, said that he believed that some of the city’s ascendant tech donors are “well-meaning, but arrogant and naive”.“They are telling themselves because they are successful in technology that they know a lot about government or crime or housing or homelessness.”Their involvement has sometimes turned up the temperature of the campaign, with inflammatory late night tweets upping the ante. Elon Musk, whose political donations are playing an outsized role in the presidential race, has repeatedly tweeted that progressive city officials in San Francisco should be put in prison. Garry Tan, the CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator and a prominent political donor, sparked a police investigation after he tweeted the names of seven city supervisors, including Peskin, saying they should “die slow motherfuckers”.Local tech leaders have also been working for years to “remake” the city “so it’s their San Francisco, not the San Francisco of the people who live here now”, Jaye argued.While Musk announced this summer that he would be moving the headquarters of X, his struggling social media platform, out of San Francisco, new, more ascendant tech startups are moving in. OpenAI, a major player in artificial intelligence, reportedly leased a second office space in San Francisco in September, part of a reported boom in AI businesses renting office space in the city.You have to “follow the money”, Jaye said. “It’s probably five times more than has ever been spent in an election cycle in San Francisco, and we’re not done.” More

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      To win, Harris should talk more about working-class needs and less about Trump | Dustin Guastella

      by

      The 2024 campaign has entered the final stretch and, as polls tighten, it seems Kamala Harris plans to lean into attacking Donald Trump as a threat to democracy.Over the past week the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times and even the conservative National Review have all reported or commented on the messaging pivot. In a newly unveiled official campaign ad, a disembodied voice warns gravely that a second Trump term “would be worse. There would be no one to stop his worst instincts. No guard rails.” At a recent rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris reminded her supporters of Project 2025, the “detailed and dangerous plan” that she believes an “increasingly unstable and unhinged” Trump will follow to cement “unchecked power”. She sounded the alarm about the dire threat Trump poses to “your fundamental freedoms” and how in his second term he would be “essentially immune” from oversight.This is hair-raising stuff. And the campaign thinks that menacing warnings like these will motivate some urgency to march to the polls for Harris. The only problem is that voters, especially working-class voters, seem uniquely uninspired by the appeal.The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) recently tested a variety of political messages on voters in Pennsylvania, a key battleground for both campaigns, to determine what kind of rhetoric is working to nudge blue-collar voters toward Harris. In collaboration with the polling firm YouGov, we polled a representative sample of 1,000 eligible voters in Pennsylvania between 24 September and 2 October 2024. We asked respondents to evaluate different political messages that they might hear from Harris and Trump, and to score them on a scale of favorability.In line with our past research, we found that economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative fared best relative to Trump-style messages about Biden’s competence, immigration, corrupt elites, critical race theory, inflation, election integrity and tariffs. No surprise there. Meanwhile, Harris’s messages on abortion and immigration fared worse than any of the economic or populist messages we tested.Yet no message was as unpopular as the one we call the “democratic threat” message.Much like Harris’s recent rhetoric, this message called on voters to “defend our freedom and our democracy” against a would-be dictator in the form of Trump. It named Trump as “a criminal” and “a convicted felon” and warned of his plans to punish his political enemies. Of the seven messages we tested, each relating to a major theme of the Harris campaign, the “democratic threat” message polled dead last.It was the least popular message relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And it was the least popular message among the working-class constituencies Harris and the Democrats need most.Among blue-collar voters, a group that leans Republican, the democratic threat message was a whopping 14.4 points underwater relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And among more liberal-leaning service and clerical workers, it was also the least popular message, finishing only 1.6 percentage points ahead of the Trump average. Even among professionals, the most liberal of the bunch and the group that liked the message the best, the message barely outperformed Trump’s messages.The exact opposite is true for the “strong populist” message we tested. This message, which combined progressive economic policy suggestions with a strong condemnation of “billionaires”, “big corporations” and the “politicians in Washington who serve them”, tested best with blue-collar workers, service and clerical workers and professionals.If we break down the results by party we find much the same story. Republicans – who didn’t prefer any of Harris’s messages over Trump’s messages – preferred the strong populist message the most. And they overwhelmingly rejected the democratic threat message, on average preferring Trump’s messages over this by over 75 points. Among independents – an imperfect proxy for nonpartisan voters – the strong populist message was best received, while the democratic threat message was least favored. Only Democrats strongly preferred the democratic threat message, and even then it was among their least favorite.All of this suggests that the messaging pivot is a big mistake.Why voters aren’t responding to messages like these is anyone’s guess, though the fable of the boy who cried wolf comes to mind. Trump was already president. And while Democrats warned about the danger he posed to democracy, we did actually have an election to get rid of him. Remember, the moral of the fable isn’t that, in the end, there wasn’t a wolf. It’s that no one believed the boy.Moreover, the distaste for the democratic threat message among working people, and the total obliviousness to that distaste among campaign officials, is evidence itself of the huge disconnect between Harris and the working-class voters she desperately needs to win. Worse, every ad or speech spent hectoring about the Trumpian threat is one less opportunity for Harris to focus on her popular economic policies; one less opportunity to lean into a populist “people v plutocrats” narrative that actually does resonate with the working class.If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people – a party that has given up on mobilizing working people around shared class frustrations and aspirations. A party incapable of communicating a simple, direct, progressive economic policy agenda. A party so beholden to a contradictory mix of interests that, in the effort to appease everyone and offend no one, top strategists have rolled out a vague, unpopular and uninspiring pitch seemingly designed to help them replay the results of the 2016 election.Ironically, if Democrats are keen to defend democracy they would do well to stop talking about it. Instead, they should try to persuade voters on an economic vision that seeks to end offshoring and mass layoffs, revitalize manufacturing, cap prescription drug prices and put working families first.In other words, they should sound less like Democrats and more like populists.

      Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 More

    • 200 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris needs to win non-college educated white voters fast. Here’s how | Joan C Williams

      by

      Kamala Harris is doing a lot of things right that recent Democratic campaigns got wrong. She took a chance on Tim Waltz – coach, solider, snow-shoveling-helper – because she hoped to build bridges to the non-college grads who have abandoned Democrats in large numbers.Nearly 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters were white people without degrees; only 27% of Joe Biden’s were. Non-college white people are the largest voting bloc in the country, so if Democrats lose them overwhelmingly, they need the immense support and turnout among people of color to win. Instead, Democrats have lost ground among non-white voters. Their advantage among Latinos has fallen from 39 points in 2016 to 19 points today; that same New York Times/Sienapoll found the vice-president down 12 points among African Americans compared with Biden in 2020.Much of the erosion is among non-college grads of color. Democrats’ support has fallen particularly sharply among Black voters without college degrees and is eight points lower among non-college-educated Latinos than among college grads. Some Black and Latino working-class voters, particularly men, increasingly are voting like the white working class.To win back (enough) of these voters, the Harris campaign is using anti-elitist rhetoric that has been shown to appeal to working-class voters. This is a big change. Republicans have owned anti-elitist rhetoric in recent decades, using it to redirect anti-elitist anger away from economic elites towards cultural elites – the “Brahmin Left”, as Thomas Piketty calls us (I’m one of them).In 2020, only 20% of congressional TV ads by Democratic candidates running in competitive districts used anti-elitist rhetoric, but Walz does so all the time: “Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD [Vance] studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community.” Harris reminds voters that she won $20m for California homeowners ripped off by banks during the Great Recession.This isn’t just rhetoric. For 30 years, Democrats combined vague praise of the “middle class” with neoliberal policies that embraced free trade, with little attention to its consequences for blue-collar jobs in the US. Biden ended that: Democrats finally recognized that middle-status Americans don’t care about the increases in GDP if they don’t benefit from the resulting economic growth. Gone is the unquestioned faith in unfettered markets we saw from Clinton through Barack Obama; hence Harris’s proposal to lower grocery prices by prohibiting “price gouging” – policy (such as restraints on trade) free-marketers love to hate.The Harris campaign understands that class conflicts aren’t only about economics. Culture wars work for Republicans because class is expressed through cultural differences, and Democrats un-self-consciously send out signals that non-college grads hear as elitist. Patriotism is a good example. Being American is an important part of the identity of 79% of Americans with high school degrees or less, but only 43% of college-educated progressive activists. Non-elites are proud of being Americans for the same reason elites aren’t: everyone stresses the highest-status categories they belong to. That’s why elites stress class: as members of a globalized elite, they rise above nationhood. That’s also why non-elites cherish being American: it’s one of the few high-status categories they inhabit.So it’s an olive branch across class divides when Harris talks about “the awesome responsibility that comes with greatest privilege on earth; the privilege and pride of being American” to crowds chanting “USA, USA”. Like Harris’s Waltz pick, her aim is to forge a cultural connection with the white and Black non-college grads in Georgia and the midwest and the white and Latino non-college grads in purple Sunbelt states such as Arizona and Nevada. Only 46% of progressive activists would choose to live in the US if they could live anywhere in the world. But 79% of Latinos would. Latinos don’t inevitably endorse the cultural dispositions of the Brahmin Left, in part because 79% of Latinos aren’t college grads.The Harris campaign has been careful, too, about issues of style. Many commentators have complained that Harris is light on detailed policies, not recognizing that this, too, is a class outreach strategy. “Too often,” Stacey Abrams warned in 2021, “Democrats [turn] a legitimate message into an unclear or overstuffed manifesto.” Non-college grads hear messages such as Elizabeth Warren’s “I have a plan for that” as aimed at college grads, not at them.Harris is doing so many things right … and yet the election’s stubbornly tied. Does that mean it’s a fool’s errand for Democrats to attempt to build bridges to non-college voters? It is not a fool’s errand, but it is an uphill battle due to a cultural dynamic that threatens to swamp what a single campaign can do alone.Trump’s superpower is his ability to channel the hurt and fury of Americans (especially men) mourning the loss of the American dream: Americans are now 40 points less likely to earn more than their parents than they were a generation ago, with declines especially marked in the midwest. Trump doesn’t offer real solutions to their economic woes. What he offers instead is honor.He does this by drawing the Brahmin Left into openly insulting the intelligence and morals of his voters, whom Trump then defends, telling them: “I am your voice.” Bill Clinton warned against this at the Democratic national convention: “I urge you not to demean [Trump voters], but not to pretend you don’t disagree with them if you do. Treat them with respect – just the way you’d like them to treat you.”Clinton knows a thing or two about how Democrats can reach non-college grads and his approach is also backed by science. An experiment by Robb Willer found that political arguments framed to appeal to the moral values of those targeted for persuasion were more effective than those that weren’t – and that liberals were 2.4 times more likely than conservatives to fail to use such arguments. Too many are caught in an upper-middle-class bubble.Within this bubble, “disdain for the less educated is the last acceptable prejudice,” to quote philosopher Michael Sandel. A study out of Europe found that college grads showed more bias against the less educated than against any other group. Blue-state cultural elites supposedly attuned to social inequality openly traffic in stereotypes of less educated people as ignorant, irrational and worthy of contempt. “Trump’s cultists … are beneath contempt and deserve to be demeaned,” Richard Kavesh wrote of New York in the New York Times.“Yes, there are those supporters who have suffered addiction and hardship, but that this might logically lead them to support a criminal and potential dictator who gives no reason for a rational person to believe he would serve their interests is simply a bridge too far … [They are] just plain ignorant,” wrote Robert Millsap of California. “I assert that we must clearly call these people out for what they are; selfish, racist bigots like the man they support,” wrote David S Schwartz, also of New York. And it’s not just in the media; I hear these sentiments all the time in my social justice warrior circles in San Francisco. Trump’s team knows how to use this stuff against us, folks.Democrats’ fate depends on their ability to win (enough) non-college-educated voters in swing states. This isn’t how to do it. Trump bonds with non-college grads through rage; Democrats need to win them with respect – but to do that, they need to actually respect them.Harris can’t do this alone. Her supporters need to stop handing Trump a loaded gun.

      Joan C Williams is Sullivan Professor and the current director of the Equality Action Center at UC Law San Francisco and the author of the 2017 book White Working Class. Her next book, OUTCLASSED: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, will be released in May 2025 More

    • 213 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Harris and Cheney talk economy, women’s health and Trump in Michigan campaign event – US elections live

      by

      Maria Shriver asks Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney if they ever imagined they would be campaigning together. Harris says she has long worked with Republicans, and given the threat Donald Trump poses, she is not surprised to be standing with the former Republican congresswoman:
      What is at stake in this election is so fundamental for us as Americans … Do we take seriously the importance of a president who obeys the oath to be loyal to the constitution of the United States? Do we prioritize a president … who cares about the rule of law?
      Cheney says: “Everyone who watched January 6th knows what Donald Trump is willing to do.” She adds:
      I could have just said I’m going to do everything I can to work against Donald Trump, and there are a lot of Republicans who have said that … I have decided, and I am very proud, and I’m honored to have made the decision to endorse Vice-President Harris … As a mother, I want my children to know that there is someone sitting in the Oval Office that they can look up to, someone who can be a role model.
      Shriver asks Cheney if she was afraid to endorse Harris, knowing the backlash she’d face. Cheney shares a message to Republicans who want to support the Democratic ticket, but are afraid: “You can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody … Vote him out.”Donald Trump repeated a litany of falsehoods and conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene and the federal government’s response while campaigning in North Carolina today.The former president falsely suggested, once again, that federal money meant for hurricane relief was “spent … on illegal migrants”. There is no basis for the claim that disaster funding was reallocated to services related to immigration. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which also oversees the major US immigration agencies. But money allocated for a program to help migrants is separate and unrelated to disaster response funds.Trump also falsely implied that the Democrats were spending money on undocumented people so that they could “vote in the election”, reiterating his frequently cited baseless claim about election fraud.He also claimed Fema’s money is “all gone”. But this is false, CNN noted, as the federal agency told the network last week that its disaster relief fund had roughly $8.5bn remaining.More here:As Kamala Harris’s Michigan rally with Liz Cheney comes to a close, moderator Maria Shriver asks the vice president how she copes with the stress of the race and what her message is to voters who are struggling with anxiety over the election.Harris says, “I wake up in the middle of the night usually these days … but I work out every morning. I think that’s really important [for] mind, body and spirit … I try to eat well. I love my family, and I make sure that I talk to the kids and my husband everyday … My family grounds me in every way.”The vice president adds:
      We cannot despair … Every individual has the power to make a decision about what this will be… so let’s not feel powerless. I get the overwhelming nature of this all makes us feel powerless … That’s not our character as American people. We are not one to be defeated. We rise to a moment.”
      Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman now campaigning with Kamala Harris in Michigan, outlines Trump’s threats on foreign policy:
      He heaps praise on the world’s most evil people, while he attacks with venom his political opponents here at home … If you look at where the Republican party is today, there’s been a really dangerous embrace of isolationism, a dangerous embrace of tyrants …
      Don’t think that Congress can stop him … all he has to do is what he’s doing and say, I won’t fulfill our Nato treaty obligations, and Nato begins to unravel.
      Liz Cheney, campaigning with Kamala Harris in Michigan, criticizes commentators who assert that the vice-president isn’t ready to be president:
      She is supremely qualified to be president of the United States. There sometimes are some men who suggest that she’s not, but if you look at her qualifications, there’s no question that she’s somebody that I know I can count on, who will put the good of this country first.
      Cheney also emphasizes her conservative credentials while explaining her support for Harris: “The very first campaign I ever volunteered in was for President Gerald Ford … and ever since then, I have been voting for Republicans. I’ve never voted for a Democrat.”Maria Shriver asks Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney if they ever imagined they would be campaigning together. Harris says she has long worked with Republicans, and given the threat Donald Trump poses, she is not surprised to be standing with the former Republican congresswoman:
      What is at stake in this election is so fundamental for us as Americans … Do we take seriously the importance of a president who obeys the oath to be loyal to the constitution of the United States? Do we prioritize a president … who cares about the rule of law?
      Cheney says: “Everyone who watched January 6th knows what Donald Trump is willing to do.” She adds:
      I could have just said I’m going to do everything I can to work against Donald Trump, and there are a lot of Republicans who have said that … I have decided, and I am very proud, and I’m honored to have made the decision to endorse Vice-President Harris … As a mother, I want my children to know that there is someone sitting in the Oval Office that they can look up to, someone who can be a role model.
      Shriver asks Cheney if she was afraid to endorse Harris, knowing the backlash she’d face. Cheney shares a message to Republicans who want to support the Democratic ticket, but are afraid: “You can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody … Vote him out.”Maria Shriver, former first lady of California, has taken the stage at Kamala Harris’s campaign event in Royal Oak, Michigan, with Liz Cheney.Shriver starts off by making a pitch for bipartisanship, saying: “I served as a Democratic first lady in a Republican administration in California. So I get this bipartisan thing. I’ve seen it up close. And now I’m a proud independent … People of both parties used to get along really well.”Kamala Harris will soon make another appearance with Liz Cheney at a campaign event in Royal Oak, Michigan.Earlier in the day, the vice-president and former conservative congresswoman made their pitch in Pennsylvania, geared toward Republican voters. Cheney said:
      I’m a conservative, and I know that the most conservative of all conservative principles is being faithful to the constitution. And you have to choose in this race between someone who has been faithful to the constitution, who will be faithful, and Donald Trump, who is not just us predicting how he will act. We watched what he did after the last election.
      Trump then went on to insinuate that he had been told he was a better president than George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.He was harping on the border and the alleged ills of undocumented people, before going on to say that the border patrol had endorsed him. That’s not quite true – the government agency has not endorsed him, but its union, the Border Patrol Council has. Undeterred, Trump went on:
      They’re great. They endorsed your favorite president. They didn’t only endorse me, saying I’m the greatest president there’s ever been … What about George Washington? No, you’re better. What about Lincoln? What about Abraham Lincoln? No, you’re better, they said, I’m tougher on the border than Abraham Lincoln.
      The former president appeared to try to hit back at claims that, at the age of 78, he is “cognitively impaired”.But Trump raised more questions than he answered by jumbling his words.The moment came as he told the crowd in North Carolina, in a somewhat confusing anecdote, that he was talking to someone from the state on the phone, but was then distracted by watching one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets land.He told the person on the phone to wait while he watched the rocket, then forgot he was on the phone. “I forgot he was on the phone because, and now they, all these idiots back there, will say he’s cognitively impaired because he put he’s cognitively impaired,” Trump said, apparently referring to reporters in attendance.“You know, I do this stuff, five, six, seven times a day for 52 days without a break,” he said, by way of explanation for his misstatements. He appeared to then lose his train of thought:
      I’ll tell you what they are, really not all of them, not all of them. I’d say about 92% couple of good ones. That’s a lot of cameras going on. There are a couple of good ones back there. Now it is crazy in the crazy what they do, and the level of meanness.
      Trump is now onstage in Greenville, North Carolina, where he’s been whipping up the crowd with his usual attacks on Kamala Harris.Earlier in the day, he took note of Harris’s campaigning alongside Liz Cheney. On Truth Social, Trump implied that Arab voters – significant communities of which live in Michigan, a battleground state – are unlikely to look kindly on the vice-president associating with the daughter of Dick Cheney, who, as vice-president under George W Bush, was an architect of the US invasion of Iraq:Arab voters are indeed a source of concern for Democrats, though mostly over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Here’s more on that, from the Guardian’s Stephen Starr:Donald Trump is scheduled to soon take the stage in North Carolina, which hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 2008 but where polls have indicated Kamala Harris may have a fighting chance this year.Trump earlier in the day visited western parts of the state damaged by Hurricane Helene, and is now rallying in Greenville, on North Carolina’s eastern side. He was introduced by adviser Stephen Miller, who was the architect of the hardline immigration policies Trump allowed during his presidency.“For eight long years, Donald Trump has been fighting for us in the arena. What he has endured, what he has been through on this journey,” Miller said. “They came after him, they came after his family, they came after his children, they came after his businesses, they came after his freedom, and they came after his life, and he’s still standing strong. He is still standing tall. And with your help, North Carolina, Donald J Trump is going to save the United States of America.”The former president then invited Adam Smith, a former Green Beret who has helped relief efforts in the Asheville area since Hurricane Helene devastated the area just over three weeks ago, to speak.At the podium, Smith thanked Trump for coming to the area.“The biggest fear that western North Carolina is sitting on right now, at least in the communities we’ve talked to, is being forgotten,” Smith said.“To have you here and have an opportunity to have this conversation at a national level, will keep western North Carolina on the map, and not leave the communities holding the bag on the back end of this, so we’re very grateful that you’ve shown up,” Smith said to the former president.Trump continued his remarks by accusing the federal government of leaving North Carolinians “helpless and abandoned” after Hurricane Helene. “In the wake of this horrible storm, many Americans in this region felt helpless and abandoned and left behind by their government, and yet, in North Carolina’s hour of desperation, the American people answered the call much more so than your federal government, unfortunately,” Trump said.“Citizens poured into western North Carolina from all over the country, bringing food, water, fuel, medical aid, even helicopters.”“Nothing is more inspiring than to see the American spirit triumph over adversity with the most selfless acts of generosity and love” he added.Donald Trump held a press conference in western North Carolina, where he surveyed the damage wrought by Hurricane Helene and attacked the federal government’s recovery efforts.“Driving up here you see the kind of destruction, actually incredible” he said. “The power of nature, nothing you can do about it but you got to get a little bit better crew in to do a better job than has been done by the White House, because it’s not good, not good.”“I’m here today in western North Carolina to express a simple message to the incredible people of the state, I’m with you and the American people are with you all the way” Trump said. “We are going to continue to be with you, we will see what happens with the election and on January 20th I think you are going to have a new crew coming in to do it properly and help you in a proper manner.”Trump also addressed those who had lost family members and loved ones to the storm. “To everyone who has lost a loved one … we ask God to give you comfort and peace,” he said.“It’s been a terrible ordeal and this area was hit about as hard as anyone has ever seen….the communities were ravaged and destroyed, we are praying for you and we will not forget about you.”Trump’s repeated criticisms of the federal response to Hurricane Helene comes as the director of Fema condemned the former president and his supporters for spreading misinformation about the hurricane and the response by the federal disaster agency, which, the director said, has hampered the government’s ability to get people the help they need.Donald Trump has long drawn criticism before over his statements about the Central Park Five, a group of men who were exonerated after being wrongly convicted for a crime and who earlier today sued him.After the jogger’s assault, he spoke out about the case and took out a full-page ad in several New York newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty, Reuters reports.Trump in 2019 stood by his prior comments about the Central Park Five, and declined to apologize.The Guardian adds that at the debate with Kamala Harris last month, Trump said of the men: “They pled guilty…They killed a person, ultimately.”The five then-boys, who were tried as adults, actually pleaded not guilty. And the victim, Trisha Meili, although almost killed, was found unconscious in the park, survived and testified in court.Yusef Salaam watched the debate in Philadelphia, afterwards telling the Washington Post in an interview: “Here we are right now, full-circle moment, being able to be participants in this great democracy on the cusp of everything really powerfully supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I’m ready for it.”The five Black and Hispanic teenagers who were wrongfully convicted for the 1989 rape of a white jogger in New York’s Central Park have sued Donald Trump for defamation over statements he made at last month’s US presidential debate, Reuters reported.Known widely as the Central Park Five, the defendants spent between five and 13 years in prison before they were cleared in 2002 based on new DNA evidence and the confession of another person.Trump falsely said at the September 10 debate with presidential rival Kamala Harris that the Central Park Five had killed a person and pleaded guilty.The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Philadelphia by Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown and Korey Wise, called Trump’s statements “demonstrably false.”A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign called the case “just another frivolous, election interference lawsuit, filed by desperate left-wing activists.”A lawyer for the plaintiffs, Shanin Specter, said in a statement that Trump’s remarks “cast them in a harmful false light and intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them.” The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified monetary damages for reputational and emotional harms as well as punitive damages.Kamala Harris is on tour of the three Great Lakes swing states with Liz Cheney, a Republican former congresswoman who broke with her party over their support for Donald Trump. In their first event together in a Philadelphia suburb, Harris warned voters to take Trump seriously, while Cheney said she came around to backing the Democrats because she does not think the former president will stand up for American allies. They will appear together in metro Detroit and then Milwaukee before the day is through. Meanwhile, Tim Walz was on daytime talk staple “The View”, where he said that Trump’s comments about deploying the national guard against his political enemies was a sign that he planned to bend the country’s “constitutional guardrails”.Here’s what else has happened today so far:

      The White House proposed an expansion of contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) that will allow women to access birth control without a prescription.

      Harris has scheduled an interview with NBC News from her home at the Naval Observatory in Washington DC on Tuesday.

      A new poll found Trump may have lost his edge among voters when it comes to handling the economy, while Harris is viewed more favorably overall.
      Kamala Harris’s push for the support of Republican voters won her the support of the daughter of Gerald Ford, the late Republican former president who served from 1974 to 1977.Susan Ford Bales’s endorsement is perhaps most consequential in Michigan, the ex-president’s home and also a swing state coveted by both candidates. The Detroit News has Bales’s statement:As they wrapped up their joint event in Pennsylvania, Liz Cheney was asked to give something of a closing argument to her fellow Republicans for why they should support Kamala Harris.The former congresswoman said:
      I think that in this election, and especially here in Pennsylvania, we have the opportunity to tell the whole world who we are, and we have the chance to say, you know, we’re going to reject cruelty. We’re going to reject the kind of vile vitriol that we’ve seen from Donald Trump. We’re going to reject the misogyny from Donald Trump and JD Vance. And we have the chance in this race to elect somebody who, you know is going to defend the rule of law.
      You know, vice-president Harris is going to defend our constitution. We have the chance to remind people that we are a good country. We are a good and honorable people. We are a great nation and in this race, we have the opportunity to vote for and support somebody you can count on. We’re not always going to agree, but I know vice-president Harris will always do what she believes is right for this country. She has a sincere heart, and that’s why I’m honored to be here.
      Thus concluded the first of three joint events the pair will do today. They now fly to Michigan for an event in the Detroit suburbs, followed by another in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.All three states are part of the Democrats’ “Blue Wall” of swing states along the Great Lakes where voters traditionally back the party, but where polls show Harris is locked in a tight race against Donald Trump. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Liz Cheney urges conservatives to back Kamala Harris over abortion

      by

      Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, condemned Republican-imposed bans on the procedure and urged conservatives on Monday to support Kamala Harris for president.Cheney was speaking at the first of three joint events with Harris in the suburbs of three swing states aimed at prising moderate Republican voters away from party nominee Donald Trump. She has become the Democrat’s most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumoured to be under consideration for a seat in a potential Harris cabinet.At the first event in Malvern, a Philadelphia suburb, against a blue backdrop that said “a new way forward” and red one that said “country over party”, Cheney suggested that Republican-led states have overreached in restricting abortion since the supreme court’s 2022 Dobbs decision ended it as a constitutional right.“I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life, but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need,” said Cheney, a former Wyoming congresswoman and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney.“I think this is not an issue that we’re seeing break down across party lines, but I think we’re seeing people come together to say: what has happened to women, when women are facing situations where they can’t get the care they need, where in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing, is suing, to get access to women’s medical records … that’s not sustainable for us as a country and it has to change.”Harris nodded repeatedly and applauded in response. The audience also clapped warmly.It was a striking attempt to build a permission structure for conservatives to back Harris, who has made reproductive freedom a centrepiece of her campaign and vowed to restore the protections of Roe v Wade if authorised by Congress. Cheney, by contrast, has an A rating from Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a group that grades members of Congress based on their anti-abortion credentials.Monday’s three events in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were being held in counties won by Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, had sought to neutralise abortion as an election issue by supporting states’ autonomy and rejecting calls for a national ban.Cheney has vocally opposed Trump since the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and was vice-chair of a congressional committee investigating the attack. Her recent endorsement of Harris fuelled speculation that she could play a part in a future Harris administration.

      Don’t miss important US election coverage. Get our free app and sign up for election alerts
      Earlier this month, appearing on the popular daytime talkshow The View, Harris said she would differ from Joe Biden by including a Republican in her cabinet. She was asked by radio host Howard Stern if that might be Cheney but avoided a direct answer. Appointing Cheney would carry considerable political risks given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war.Trump has frequently tried to paint Harris, who is from deep blue California, as a radical liberal but she struck a moderate tone during her appearance with Cheney, who lost her House seat after she co-chaired a congressional committee that investigated the January 6 attack.She promised to “invite good ideas from wherever they come” and “cut red tape,” and she said “there should be a healthy two party system” in the country. “We need to be able to have these good intense debates about issues that are grounded in fact,” she said.“Imagine!” Cheney responded.“Let’s start there!” Harris said as the audience clapped. “Can you believe that’s an applause line?”View image in fullscreenVoters in Chester county, which includes Malvern, narrowly voted for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 but the county was won by Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points in 2016 and Biden by 17 points in 2020.The discussion was chaired by Sarah Longwell, who runs the group Republican Voters Against Trump, and lasted 40 minutes including two questions from the audience.Harris said Trump “has been using the power of the presidency to demean and to divide us” and “people are exhausted with that”. The vice-president added: “People around the world are watching. And sometimes I do fret a bit about whether we as Americans truly understand how important we are to the world.”Cheney praised Harris, saying: “I’m a conservative. I know that the most conservative of all conservative principles is being faithful to the constitution. You have to choose in this race between someone who has been faithful to the constitution, who will be faithful, and Donald Trump.”Cheney said she was concerned about allowing a “totally erratic, completely unstable” Trump to run foreign policy. “Our adversaries know that they can play Donald Trump,” she said. “And we cannot afford to take that risk.”But some observers questioned the wisdom of campaigning with Cheney in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war. Many such voters are now wavering or abstaining because of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the crisis in Gaza.Trump weighed in on Monday, writing on his Truth Social platform: “Arab Voters are very upset that Comrade Kamala Harris, the Worst Vice President in the History of the United States and a Low IQ individual, is campaigning with ‘dumb as a rock’ War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man that pushed Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to War with every Muslim Country known to mankind.”More than a hundred former Republican officeholders and officials joined Harris last week in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, not far from where general George Washington led hundreds of troops across the Delaware River to a major victory in the revolutionary war. At a rally there, Cheney told Republican voters that the patriotic choice was to vote for Democrats. More

    • 213 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Progressives must walk a fine line: end the war in Gaza and elect Harris | Judith Levine

      by

      The war in Gaza is not high among most voters’ concerns. But for many Arab Americans and protesters of the war, it is. As election day nears and the margins tighten – and with the critical swing state of Michigan, home to the largest Arab American community in the nation, up for grabs – these people are among the small, scattered constituencies that could determine the results. This makes their political strategies crucial to the US’s – and, by extension, Palestine’s – future.Some activists working to end the genocide are putting that urgent cause ahead of the other urgent cause: electing a Democrat, if only to prevent a Trump presidency. “If I’m going to be a one-issue voter and that issue is genocide, I’m okay with that,” a Dearborn, Michigan, woman told NPR’s Code Switch.For these people, Harris’s repeated assertions that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” – spoken in the passive voice and always accompanied by even louder assertions of commitment to Israel’s “self-defense” – no longer cut it. A progressive activist who is stumping for Trump in Michigan said there’s nothing the Democrat can do to change her mind. The administration’s collaboration in genocide is unforgivable; she wants the party punished. Her eyes are on the 2028 election, she said – apparently sanguine that there will be an election after the ascension of King Donald the First.In Mondoweiss this month, journalist and activist Saleema Gul interviewed a dozen members of the Uncommitted movement in a post-mortem of its campaign and failure to secure a speaking slot at the DNC this summer. The movement persuaded three-quarters of a million Democratic primary voters to write in “uncommitted” or leave their ballots blank to signal that their support for Biden, now Harris, depends on a pledge to end unconditional military support to Israel.Some of the people interviewed in the piece felt that the movement should have tried to influence the party platform in the primary process and quit there. Others believed that pushing for a speaker at the DNC distracted from organizing anti-war delegates inside the convention. After much debate, the leadership decided to endorse no one. Instead, it is urging supporters to “register anti-Trump votes” and not vote for a third-party presidential candidate. That move, wrote Gul, “has led many to believe the Uncommitted movement has prioritized shielding the Democratic Party over forcefully pushing for an end to the Gaza genocide”.The debate within the uncommitted movement encapsulates the perennial tensions in all political organizing: radical change v incremental reform; grassroots activism v establishment engagement; insider work v outsider disruption; movement-building v election-cycle campaigns. But to put “versus” between any of the above is to misunderstand political strategy: that is, to presume that organizing is either/or.In fact, you can do more than one thing at a time: organize for an arms embargo; get Harris elected; move the Democrats leftward; and build a radical pro-liberation movement.That these tactics don’t always overlap does not mean they contradict each other. Grassroots movements move politicians, not the other way around. But grassroots movements labor for decades far from the centers of influence before policy makers code their ideas and demands – watered down, of course – into bills and statutes. The more local the politician, the more open their ears are to those demands.For instance, in New York City’s safely Democratic congressional districts nine and 10, antiwar groups are asking voters to write in the name of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by an Israeli tank, instead of voting for the pro-Israel Democrats or any of the other parties’ candidates. The activists want to remind the Dems that their antiwar constituents are watching, without jeopardizing the party’s chances of winning back the House of Representatives. But presidential candidates are as far from the ground as candidates get – and this year a no vote for the Democrat holds potentially catastrophic consequences.You could argue that electing a woman of color as president would be a radical step forward for the US. But Harris is no radical. In fact, presidential elections rarely lead to radical change. The big difference this time is that Trump’s election would.The anti-war movement should not cease to pressure the Harris campaign to win their votes. Her supporters should not cease persuading anti-war voters to vote for her. Right now, a door is opening for both to happen.Harris herself pushed the door ajar. In her interview with Fox News last week, she suggested for the first time that she might break with the Biden administration. “Let me be very clear,” she said. “My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency.” She pledged to bring “fresh new ideas” to the Oval Office.One idea – not so fresh, but good anyway – would be to call for the US simply to abide by its own law: the Leahy Law, enacted in 1997, requires the state department to vet military forces receiving US aid for violations of international human rights law. If there’s credible evidence of such violations, the aid must be withheld.Since 2000, former US senator Patrick Leahy has been pressing the state department to apply such scrutiny to Israel, which has remained practically exempt. In May, in the Washington Post, he reasserted the necessity of doing so now, citing violations in Gaza and the West Bank. A former associate general counsel at the Department of Defense told Al Jazeera that the president has no discretion in the matter. “It’s not up for negotiation. It is a binding domestic law on the executive branch,” she said.The confirmed killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Rafah this week opens the door even wider. The US can declare that Israel has decapitated its enemy. Although the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never specified what would constitute victory, candidate Harris can credibly assert that Israel has achieved it. The US has fulfilled its responsibility to its ally. If Bibi wants to keep bombing Gaza, he’s on his own.Abbas Alawieh, a leader of the Uncommitted movement, has stressed many times that its goal is to end the genocide. He has also stressed the significance of this election, not just for the US but also for Palestine. Trump’s stated intention is to let Netanyahu obliterate Gaza, Alawieh has said. The candidate is already musing about potential luxury seaside resorts in Gaza – “better than Monaco”, he said – if, as his son-in-law has put it, Israel would “move the people out and then clean it up”.The movement to end the war must continue. It must succeed. And Trump must be defeated. Both can happen – must happen – at once.

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

    • 188 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump campaigns in battleground Pennsylvania as Harris visits church on birthday – US politics live

      by

      During the town hall in Pennsylvania, a woman with a tattoo of Donald Trump on her leg asked the former president about his plan to lower taxes for working Americans.Trump accused migrants arriving from Central America of hampering the economy.“We’re not going to let foreign countries come in and steal our businesses, our jobs and everything else,” he said, continuing to make anti-immigrant remarks during his answer.“We want to have people come in, but they have to come in legally. We have to know they love our country,” he added.During an interview on MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation”, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with Reverand Al Sharpton in a one-on-one interview in Atlanta.Harris discussed the death of Yahya Sinwar and the conflict between Israel and Hamas.“We have got to get this war over with. We got to get the hostages out. We need the war to end”, Harris said. “The death of Sinwar I believe has removed an obstacle to that end. And so, we’ve got to work at it and we’ve got to work at it through diplomatic means and that’s what we intend to do.”The Democratic presidential nominee also spoke about the latest polling on support from Black men.“This narrative about what kind of support we are receiving from Black men that is just not panning out in reality,” she said. “I must earn the vote of everyone regardless of their race or gender.”Donald Trump said he’s completed two cognitive tests as opponents have increasingly questioned the 78-year-old Republican presidential nominee’s mental and physical fitness.“I aced the both of them”, Trump said during a town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “And the doctor in one case said, ‘I’ve never seen anybody ace them’”.“I’d like to see cognitive tests for anybody running for president or vice president”, Trump added. He later expressed age is but a number, using media mogul Rupert Murdoch as an example.During the town hall in Pennsylvania, a woman with a tattoo of Donald Trump on her leg asked the former president about his plan to lower taxes for working Americans.Trump accused migrants arriving from Central America of hampering the economy.“We’re not going to let foreign countries come in and steal our businesses, our jobs and everything else,” he said, continuing to make anti-immigrant remarks during his answer.“We want to have people come in, but they have to come in legally. We have to know they love our country,” he added.Musk entered the stage at the Roxian Theater in Pittsburgh as the sound system blared “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys.He carried a yellow “terrible towel” of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the city’s beloved NFL team, and jumped up and down as the crowd chanted his name.In a short speech, Musk told attendees, many wearing red Maga hats, that “the constitution is literally under attack” and urged a “clean sweep of those who believe in the constitution” in November.He then issued his second check for a million dollars to a signatory to his petition backing the first and second amendment. Kristine Fishell, who had sat on the balcony level, received the giant novelty check and smiled for the cameras before being whisked away.The event then pivoted to a lengthy town hall, where attendees asked a variety of conspiracy tinged questions and whether Musk would run for president in 2028.He could not, he explained, due to the natural born citizen clause of the US constitution, and did not want the job either. “I hate politics,” Musk said, explaining his purported reason for injecting himself into the 2024 race. “But the stakes are so high.”As the town hall began to wrap up, no attendee had asked whether Donald Trump’s promise to bring Musk, who is worth an estimated $247bn, into government as a “secretary of cost cutting” might be a conflict of interest. He told the crowd he was ready for the position, adding “I’d like to say it’s a hard job, but it’s not”.A few seconds earlier a member of the crowd had shouted “taxation is theft!”.Former ESPN anchor Sage Steele is moderating the town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump is taking questions from the audience.His first question was on whether he would protect social security and Medicare benefits.“Number one, no tax on social security for our seniors, that’s a big deal,” Trump said. “No tax on tips,” he said, and “no tax on overtime.”Former president Donald Trump has started delivering his remarks at an event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.His speech in the Lancaster County Convention Center follows a visit to a local McDonald’s, where he wore an apron and worked the french fries station.We’ll be following his comments as he rallies in the battleground state.The legendary singer Stevie Wonder rallied congregants at a church in Atlanta with a rendition of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song in support of Vice-President Kamala Harris.Wonder performed during a church service and early vote event at Divine Faith Ministries International. He also sang “Happy Birthday” as Harris celebrates her 60th birthday today.The Harris campaign responded to comments made by former president Donald Trump calling Democratic representatives “the enemy from within” during an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday.“Even in his Fox News safe space, Donald Trump cannot help but show himself as the unhinged, angry, unstable man that he is – focused on his own petty grievances and tired playbook of division,” Ammar Moussa, a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson, wrote in an email.“This is precisely why his handlers are hiding him from major mainstream interviews and refusing to let him debate again. They don’t want the country to see this candidate in decline,” he added.The legality of the America Pac $1m prize draw is unclear, and a justice department spokesperson did not immediately respond to an inquiry.But several legal experts said on Saturday the petition appeared to violate federal election laws that prohibits paying or offering to pay for someone to register to vote or actually vote under title 52 of the US code.According to the justice department’s election crimes manual, for an offer of payment to violate federal election law, it must have been intended to induce or reward the prospective voter for engaging in one or more acts necessary to cast a ballot.The election crimes manual distinguishes between making it easier for people to vote, such as offering free rides to a polling station, and inducing people to vote, which is unlawful.UCLA law professor Rick Hasen said in his blog that the America Pac $1m prize draw appears to be an illegal scheme because it offered the payments to registered voters.“Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal,” he wrote.At a town hall in Pennsylvania, billionaire Elon Musk has commented on his aims to expedite government agency procedures and his role under Trump’s presidency if he were to be elected.“I will do my best to ensure that that actions are taken that maximize the benefit to the American people,” Musk said. “I don’t know at the end of the day how much influence I’ll have. But I’ll do my best to be as helpful as possible.”“There are actually a huge number of of drugs that are stuck in approval at the FDA that can help people and they’re just stuck in bureaucratic molasses,” Musk said. “Simply expediting drug approval and the FDA, I think, will save millions of lives.”The CEO of Tesla and owner of X, Elon Musk, is speaking at a town hall in Pittsburgh today in support of former President Donald Trump.Musk is in McKees Rocks to promote voter registration and mail-in balloting ahead of the November election and a promise of cash for those who attend.He’s currently taking questions from the audience.Fromer president Donald Trump doubled down on his comments labeling Democrats as “the enemy from within,” this time specifically attacking Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.During an interview that aired Sunday on Fox News with Howard Kurtz, Trump said that “radical left lunatics… the enemy from within… should be very easily handled, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”“These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people. But when you look at ‘Shifty Schiff’ and some of the others, yeah, they are, to me, the enemy from within,” Trump said on Fox News’ “Mediabuzz.”“I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within,” he added. “She was supposed to protect the Capitol.”The former president sparked outrage last week after calling for the US armed forces to be turned against his political adversaries when voters go to the polls at next month’s presidential election.Former president Donald Trump, while working at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, sarcastically congratulated Kamala Harris on her 60th birthday.“Maybe I’ll get her some fries,” Trump said.He also took a moment to boast about his time in office while he was working the fryer at the fast food chain.“We had the best economy ever. We had the strongest borders ever, a military that knocked out ISIS in a few weeks,” he said.Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson accused SpaceX founder Elon Musk of “spreading dangerous disinformation.” The comments come after Musk alleged that “Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens.”“Here are the facts,” Benson wrote in a post on X. “There aren’t more voters than citizens in Michigan. There are 7.2 million active registered voters and 7.9 citizens of voting age in our state.”“Don’t feed the trolls,” she added. More