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      Wisconsin Senate race tightens as rival attacks Baldwin over LGBTQ+ support

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      As the race between the Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin and her Republican challenger, Eric Hovde, tightens, the Hovde campaign and outside groups supporting the candidate have ramped up efforts to tie Baldwin to funding for LGBTQ+ care for youth – echoing the anxieties and biases of the rightwing “parental rights” movement.According to the non-partisan campaign analysis group Cook Political Report, the race between Hovde and Baldwin – in which Baldwin previously enjoyed an ample lead – is now a toss-up. Internal polling reportedly reflects that trend. The race in Wisconsin is one of a handful that could determine control of the Senate next year.A recent ad by the Senate Leadership Fund, a Super Pac that seeks to elect Republicans to the Senate, claims that “Baldwin supported providing puberty blockers and sex change surgeries to minor children”. Another ad, by the Hovde campaign, alleges Baldwin “ensured hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars went to a Madison nonprofit that pushes an aggressive LGBTQ agenda on kids”.The first advertisement, which claims Baldwin vowed support for “sex change surgeries” for minors on 4 October, 2023, appears to be referring to a post that Baldwin made on that date in support of Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ decision to veto a GOP-backed bill that would have banned gender-affirming care for minors in Wisconsin.Baldwin’s full post reads: “Trans kids deserve to feel safe and welcome in Wisconsin, not discriminated against. They deserve the freedom to just be kids, play sports, and get the health care they need, all without politicians butting in. Thanks for standing up for LGBTQ+ kids, @GovEvers.”Research consistently indicates that gender-affirming healthcare, including puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy, can be lifesaving for youth experiencing gender dysphoria – a condition that many trans people experience and that is associated with depression and even suicide. In Wisconsin, healthcare providers who offer gender-affirming care to minors do so only with parental consent and do not perform genital surgeries on minors.The second advertisement, alleging she helped fund a non-profit promoting an “aggressive LGBTQ agenda”, refers to federal dollars Baldwin earmarked for Briarpatch Youth Services, an organization that supports at-risk and homeless youth – and provides some programming for LGBTQ+ youth.In a September episode of the Vicki McKenna Show, a rightwing talk radio program in Wisconsin, Hovde falsely claimed that Baldwin had given taxpayer money “to a transgender clinic”, apparently in reference to her Briarpatch donation.“Briarpatch Youth Services deals with some of the most difficult situations facing youth, including youth homelessness,” wrote Jill Pfeiffer, executive director of Briarpatch, in an email. “Regardless of political talking points, we continue to focus on strengthening our community by making sure youth facing hardships have access to voluntary resources and services they need to flourish and succeed.”Although the number of transgender people in the United States has not changed significantly over time, with roughly 1% of youth aged 13-17 identifying as trans, the minority group has nonetheless faced increasing scrutiny and attacks in recent years. Anti-trans sentiment has dovetailed with the rise of the so-called “parental rights” movement, which seeks to limit discussions of issues like race, gender and sexuality in the classroom.In a statement, a Hovde campaign spokesperson, Zach Bannon, wrote that Hovde “believes any effort to push conversations about sexuality and gender identity on kids without parental knowledge is just plain wrong and taxpayer dollars should not be supporting those programs”, in reference to Briarpatch’s confidential support group for LGBTQ+ youth.This year Democrats, who narrowly control the Senate, face an unfavorable map – with sitting senators in places including West Virginia, Ohio and Montana defending seats in deep red jurisdictions. The Wisconsin race, which has narrowed in recent weeks, forms a critical piece of the puzzle.Arik Wolk, the Democratic party of Wisconsin’s Rapid Response Director, called the ads “a pretty desperate and disgusting attack that is mainly designed to detract from Eric Hovde’s record and unpopularity with the people of Wisconsin”. Wolk also pointed to a Hovde ad that draws attention to Baldwin’s partner Maria Brisbane’s work as a financial adviser and alleges Baldwin is “in bed with Wall Street” as an example of the Hovde campaign highlighting Baldwin’s identity as a gay woman. “Wisconsinites have made it clear that they support Tammy Baldwin, regardless of her sexual identity,” said Wolk.Bannon, the Hovde campaign spokesman, disputed this characterization in a statement – calling it an “effort to distract from the facts of this conflict of interest” and “a disservice to the people of Wisconsin who deserve transparency”. More

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      Endorsements from Republicans and CEOs won’t help Kamala Harris win | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney’s campaign event last week in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican party, was a dramatic component of Harris’s ongoing outreach to Republicans. That outreach, begun under President Joe Biden and continuing even more aggressively under Harris, was made clear in an open letter on Thursday in which two dozen Republican former officials and lawmakers in Wisconsin endorsed Harris and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz.“We have plenty of policy disagreements with Vice President Harris,” the Republicans wrote. “But what we do agree upon is more important. We agree that we cannot afford another four years of the broken promises, election denialism, and chaos of Donald Trump’s leadership.”This statement comes after the Harris campaign touted the endorsements of more than 100 former staffers and national security leaders from past Republican administrations, 10 retired military generals and admirals, and more than 90 business leaders including former chairs or CEOs of companies such as UBS, Aetna, Visa, Merck and American Airlines, as well as former high officials like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.The Harris campaign seems intent on convincing voters that she is the favored candidate of the bipartisan establishment. One problem with this strategy: voters probably already assume that about Harris. And if they didn’t, Trump reminds them regularly, painting her both as the “other” and as part of the establishment that has failed them. The danger: Harris is helping to make his case for him.Trump’s mendacity, duplicity, fraudulence and corruption are well known. So why is the race so close, and why does Trump enjoy such support from working-class voters, not simply white men, but growing numbers of Black people, Hispanics and single women? His poisonous racism and xenophobia surely play a part. But the central theme of his political campaigns since he came down the golden elevator in 2016 has been how working people have been fleeced by an establishment that enriched itself and failed them.In 2016, Trump’s focus was on trade, Nafta, China in the WTO. This year, his focus is on inflation and the cost of living. Even his slanders of immigrants focus on how they are taking jobs from working people, raising the cost of housing, the source of increasing crime, drugs and violence.And repeatedly, Trump indicts the establishment that has failed them. As he said in the 2016 campaign:“The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs … Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan – and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and across our country. They have stripped these towns bare and raided the wealth for themselves and taken away their jobs.”As Jared Abbott, of the Center for Working Class Politics, concluded after a study of Trump’s rhetoric in 2016, “Unlike virtually any politician they had ever heard before, Trump not only spoke over and over again to the economic pain felt by so many working-class Americans but also called out the elite culprits by name, something that traditional politicians typically shy away from.”On foreign policy, Trump is similarly openly scornful of the generals and foreign policy “blob” who led us into losing wars, squandering the lives not of their own children, but those of working people. When the generals and national security managers announced their endorsements of Harris, Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, responded: “These are the same people who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited off of them while the American people suffered,” followed by the lie that “President Trump is the only president in the modern era not to get our country into any new wars.”Trump’s lies, libels and shambling vaudeville rallies simply reinforce his message that he not only isn’t part of the establishment, but he’s hated by them.In this election, voters are looking for dramatic change. Polls show that, as Stan Greenberg has reported, only a quarter of battleground voters think the country is headed in the right direction. The overwhelming concern is inflation and the cost of living. The average household grocery bill is 20% higher than in 2020. The costs of necessities – housing, healthcare, childcare, college – seem increasingly out of reach.More and more voters are clear that a big cause of this is entrenched and corrupt interests – big oil, the drug companies, monopolies, multinationals. Greenberg reports that the percentage of voters with little or no confidence in “big business” is the lowest since the financial crisis of 2008.Harris has an agenda and a message that can speak to these concerns: cracking down on monopolies, starting with price gouging on groceries. Taking on pharma. A child tax credit, help for new families, help for new homeowners and small businesses paid for by taxes on millionaires and billionaires. Moving forward on rebuilding America and generating good jobs by investing in the growth industries of the coming years.The contrast with Trump’s agenda – of tax cuts for the corporations and the rich, of trade wars and higher costs of goods from across-the-board tariffs, of promising big oil a blank check if they support his campaign – is telling.But Harris has to prove that she is prepared to take on the powerful interests, dislodge the failed establishment, and force the changes she’s begun to talk about. When she arrays her support from the establishment, she doesn’t build her credibility, she weakens it. If 90 CEOS stand with her, why believe she’s prepared to take them on or tax them? If the generals who led us into one failed war after another are with her, why believe she’ll focus on rebuilding America and not on global misadventures?Rather than gaining media acclaim for joining Liz Cheney in Ripon, she might have been better off walking the (blessedly, short-lived) picket line with striking dockworkers, reinforcing Biden’s statement that the companies and executives have enjoyed staggering and record returns, and it’s time for the workers to get their fair share.The mainstream media will broadcast the bipartisan support behind Harris. Those who worked with Trump and now oppose him will find a ready platform. In the little time left before the election, Harris and Walz need to focus on providing a compelling answer to the famous union question: which side are you on? Liz Cheney, Robert Rubin and Mike Pence don’t help with that answer.

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has contributed to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times More

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      The high life: Kamala Harris cracks open a beer with Stephen Colbert

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      When they go low, she goes high. Miller High Life to be precise.Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, took her election campaign to late night television on Tuesday by cracking open a can of the lager with host Stephen Colbert. The moment set her apart from Joe Biden and Donald Trump – both, famously, teetotallers.The vice-president also used the interview in New York’s Ed Sullivan Theater to lambast Trump over a report that he sent Covid testing kits to Russia’s Vladimir Putin even as US citizens went without. “He thinks, well, that’s his friend,” she said. “What about the American people? They should be your first friend.”The appearance before a live audience capped a media blitz for Harris who, having previously been criticised for dodging interviews, spoke in recent days to CBS’s 60 Minutes, the podcast Call Her Daddy, the daytime show The View and radio host Howard Stern.The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has featured Harris, Biden and numerous other politicians over the years, blending serious political issues with light relief. During Tuesday’s interview in New York, he noted that people are calling this “the vibe election” and that voters typically want a candidate they can have a beer with.He duly invited Harris to share a drink and said she had requested Miller High Life in advance. The vice-president remarked: “OK, the last time I had beer was at a baseball game with Doug. Cheers.”Harris repeated the popular slogan “The champagne of beers”, while Colbert noted that it comes from Milwaukee, in the swing state of Wisconsin. He said: “So that covers Wisconsin. Let’s talk Michigan. Let’s appeal to the Michigan voters, OK? What are your favourite Bob Seger songs?”The host proceeded to reel off a list of Seger songs but Harris did not appear enthusiastic. Finally, she said: “I’ll go Aretha or Eminem. You got any?”The 40-minute interview, due to be broadcast on CBS on Tuesday night, also tackled serious topics. Colbert asked about the 7 October attack by Hamas and Israel’s response. Harris said: “We must have a ceasefire and hostage deal as immediately as possible. This war has got to end. It has to end.”Progress on a deal for a ceasefire and the release of hostages is “meaningless”, she acknowledged, until it is reached. Harris said she has met with the families of hostages and the families of Palestinians killed in Gaza. “We’ve got to get a deal done and we’re not going to give up.”The interview took place after it emerged that journalist Bob Woodward writes in his new book, War, that Trump has had as many as seven private phone calls with Putin since leaving office and secretly sent the Russian president Covid test machines in 2020. Trump has denied the claims.Harris commented: “He openly admires dictators and authoritarians. He has said he wants to be a dictator on day one if he were elected again as president. He gets played by these guys. He admires so-called strongmen and he gets played because they flatter him or offer him favour.”Referring to the Covid test kits, she went on: “I ask everyone here and everyone who is watching: do you remember what those days were like? You remember how many people did not have tests and were trying to scramble to get them?”Harris became visibly irate as she recalled that hundreds of people were dying every day, some comforted only by nurses because their families could not reach them.
      “And this man is giving Covid test kits to Vladimir Putin? Think about what this means on top of him sending love letters to Kim Jong-un. He thinks, well, that’s his friend. What about the American people? They should be your first friend.”Earlier Colbert asked Harris about a now celebrated image of her in the presidential debate against Trump in which she frowned and rested her chin on a hand. Asked what she was thinking at that moment, she replied: “It’s family TV, right? It starts with a W, there’s a letter between it, then the last letter’s F.” She burst into laughter.The comedian asked if Trump lost the 2020 election, something he has always denied. Harris said: “You know, when you lost millions of jobs, you lost manufacturing, you lost automotive plants, you lost the election. What does that make you? A loser. This is what somebody at my rallies said. I thought it was funny.”She laughed and Colbert remarked: “It’s accurate. It’s accurate.”Then Harris pointed out: “This is what happens when I drink beer!” More

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      Kamala Harris tells Howard Stern Trump is a ‘sore loser’ in interview blitz

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      Kamala Harris appeared on the Howard Stern show on Tuesday, calling Donald Trump a “sore loser” and receiving an endorsement from the host, Howard Stern.Her appearance on the radio show, whose listenership skews white and male, comes as Harris embarks on a series of sit-down interviews on popular talkshows and podcasts, including Stern, The View, the podcast Call Her Daddy and the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.During the show, Harris blasted Trump for his comment that he would be a “dictator on day one” and called him a “sore loser” for his role in promoting false claims of widespread voter fraud after the 2020 election. “Understand what dictators do,” said Harris. “They jail journalists, they put people who are protesting in the street in jail.”The interview comes just weeks after Trump, who appeared on Stern’s show in years past, claimed on Fox News that the host “went woke”. Stern shrugged off the charge last year, telling listeners that he takes “woke” as a compliment and that “the opposite of being woke is being asleep.”The interview also hit on personal subject matter – from therapy (she’s not seeing a therapist currently), to her preferred choice of breakfast cereal (Special K), to her family.During the interview Stern asked if she thought there were Americans who would refuse to vote for a woman.“Listen, I’ve been the first woman in almost every position I’ve had,” said Harris. “I believe that men and women support women in leadership. And that’s been my life experience and that’s why I’m running for president.”Stern revealed that he plans to vote for Harris. According to the show, Stern’s listenership leans white and male, a demographic that the Harris campaign and Democratic party have sought to win over through campaigns like “White Dudes for Harris” – which started as a Zoom call that drew roughly 200,000 attenders on 29 July.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris also appeared on Tuesday on ABC’s The View, where she announced a plan to expand Medicare to cover in-home healthcare for seniors. When asked whether she would have done anything differently than Biden in the last four years, Harris defended Biden’s legacy and said “there is not a thing that comes to mind”, adding that she had a role in most major decisions by the administration.Harris’s series of sit-down interviews is probably intended to reach key audiences – and dispel criticism about her infrequent interviews with journalists. Her media spree will continue when a taped interview airs on Tuesday night on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. More

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      Giggling Elon Musk revisits ‘joke’ about Kamala Harris assassination

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      Elon Musk has said it would be “pointless” to try to kill Kamala Harris weeks after a pressure campaign led to him to delete a social media post expressing surprise that no one had tried to assassinate the vice-president or Joe Biden.The Tesla and Space X entrepreneur re-entered the murky waters of political assassinations in a web video interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson which Musk then posted on the X platform that he owns.Referencing the original comment at the beginning of the one hour and 48 minute exchange, Musk tells Carlson: “I made a joke, which I realised – I deleted – which is like: nobody’s even bothering to try to kill Kamala because it’s pointless. What do you achieve?”Both men dissolved into laughter, with Carlson responding: “It’s deep and true though.”“Just buy another puppet,” Musk continues, before adding: “Nobody’s tried to kill Joe Biden. It’d be pointless.”“Totally,” agrees Carlson.Invited to elaborate on the post, Musk goes on: “Some people interpreted it as though I was calling for people to assassinate her, but I was like … Does it seem strange that no one’s even bothered? Nobody tries to assassinate a puppet … She’s safe.”“That’s hilarious,” Carlson deadpans, as his guest laughs at his own joke.Authorities have notably made multiple arrests of individuals who have made death threats against Harris and Biden. A Virginia man was arrested in August and charged with making threats against the vice-president.Musk’s original comment on X was posted in the immediate aftermath of a suspected second assassination attempt on Donald Trump last month. On 15 September, a man was arrested after a Secret Service agent spotted the barrel of a gun sticking out of bushes at the former president’s golf club in Palm Beach, Florida. A suspect, Ryan Routh, has since been charged with trying to kill Trump. He denies the charges.“And no one’s even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote after the incident, with a emoji symbolising puzzlement attached.Musk, a vocal and committed supporter of Trump’s campaign to re-enter the White House, later deleted the post amid an angry backlash and comments from the Secret Service that it was “aware” of it.“Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on 𝕏,” he later wrote in explanation.“Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”The interviewer then laughed uproariously after suggesting to his guest: “If he [Trump] loses man … you’re fucked, dude.”Musk bantered back: “I’m fucked. If he loses, I’m fucked.”To the sound of general background laughter and Carlson’s obvious delight, the tech billionaire continued: “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be. Will I see my children, I don’t know.”Musk’s latest assassination comments came just days after he appeared on stage with Trump last weekend at the same site in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a would-be assassin tried to kill the ex-president on 13 July. In that instance, Trump’s ear was grazed with a bullet and a rally-goer was shot dead before the perpetrator himself was killed by a Secret Service agent.Trump was endorsed by Musk moments after that attempt. He later said he would appoint Musk to lead a government efficiency commission if he became president again.The Secret Service – which stepped up its security protection for Trump following criticism of its failure to prevent the first assassination attempt – has said it is familiar with Musk’s latest comments, according to the Washington Post. More

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      Will white women abandon Republicans and vote for Kamala Harris?

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

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

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

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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

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