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      Election outcome may depend on whether Harris or Trump can rebrand themselves as ‘new’

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      When Kamala Harris sat down for her first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee, she praised Joe Biden for his intelligence, commitment, judgment and disposition. But twice she used the phrase “turn the page”. And twice she used the phrase “a new way forward”.This was no accident. US voters are yearning for a shift in direction, with two in three saying the next president should represent a major change from Joe Biden, according to a national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College. Yet in November they face a choice between two known quantities: Harris, the sitting vice-president, and Donald Trump, a former president with an inescapable four-year record.Just 25% of voters think Harris signifies a major change, the poll found, while 56% believe she represents “more of the same”. When it comes to Trump, 51% think he would offer major change, whereas 35% consider him more of the same. Victory in the race for the White House might be decided by which of these quasi-incumbents can rebrand themselves as a breath of fresh air for a weary, divided nation.Despite the polling, Democrats are convinced that Harris has the momentum. “The American people are looking for not just new faces but a new message,” said Donna Brazile, a former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee. “They’re looking for somebody who can heal our divisions and close our partisan divides. To the extent she’s running on a message of bringing the American people together, it helps her become a change agent.”Since 1836, just one sitting vice-president, George HW Bush in 1988, has been elected to the White House. Those who tried and failed include Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000. Gore’s decision to distance himself from his popular but scandal-plagued boss, Bill Clinton, may have proved costly in his narrow defeat by George W Bush.Harris, a former senator, California attorney general and local prosecutor, became the first woman and person of colour to serve as vice-president after Biden selected her as his running mate in the 2020 election. Like most vice-presidents, she gained relatively little public attention for three and a half years.And when she did, some of the headlines were negative, for example those regarding her role in tackling the root causes of immigration and apparent discontent in her office. Axios reports that of the 47 Harris staff publicly disclosed to the Senate in 2021, only five still worked for her as of this spring.But after the president’s feeble debate performance against Trump on 27 June, everything changed. Biden bowed to pressure, dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris. The Democratic party quickly rallied around her with a combination of relief and energy bordering on ecstasy.Speakers at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago dutifully paid tribute to Biden’s service but then pivoted to looking forward to a new era under Harris. Her acceptance speech, and a biographical video, did not dwell on her vice-presidency but rather introduced her life story as if for the first time.Brazile, a Democratic strategist, said: “People see don’t see her as vice-president in large part because they rarely see the vice-president as leading the country. But she’s campaigning on a platform that includes bringing people together, ensuring that most Americans can make ends meet.“Donald Trump is a prisoner of the past. She’s a pioneer of a future. That’s the message that brings people in line with her values versus what he campaigns on every day, which is all about attacks, insults and derogatory statements.”On the campaign trail, Harris has been walking a political tightrope, embracing her boss’s achievements while keeping his unpopular baggage at arm’s length. Whereas Biden touted jobs and growth numbers, Harris has acknowledged the rising cost of living and proposed a federal ban on grocery price-gouging.Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “She wants it both ways. She wants to take credit for the improvement in the economy, the number of jobs, the successes of bringing inflation down. But she doesn’t want to be blamed for voters’ continuing frustration that they’ve been hurt because of inflation.He added: “She’s been trying to run as the change candidate, which is very strange because the change motif is for the challenger, not the incumbent party.”The switch from Biden, 81, to 59-year-old Harris instantly removed the Democrats’ biggest vulnerability – age – and weaponised it against Trump who, at 78, is the oldest major party nominee in US history.At the first debate in June, he came over as more engaged and vital than Biden, who stumbled over answers and stared into the distance with mouth agape. At the next debate on Tuesday, it is Trump whose age will be thrown into sharp relief by a rival nearly two decades younger – who would become the first female president in the country’s 248-year history if she wins.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “We went from a generic where we had two candidates who were pushing 80, so anytime that you add in a new element and someone who is generationally younger, that’s a change without even having to say a word. The fact that we are going from two old white men to a woman of colour – that screams change. It creates the tangible illustration of past versus future.”Trump has been wrongfooted by the Democrats’ abrupt change of nominee and still complains bitterly about it. Nicknames such as “Crooked Joe” and “Sleepy Joe”, as well as criticism of alleged Biden family corruption, now ring hollow. He has continued to repeat his false claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election as he makes his third bid for the White House. Still promising to “Make America great again”, he has lost the mantle of a disrupter taking on the status quo.Bardella, a former spokesperson and senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee, added: “Any time that you’re the candidate whose slogan uses the word ‘again’, that doesn’t scream change. That screams going backwards. Clearly voters want something that’s more forward-facing and, frankly, more optimistic as well. I don’t think we can overestimate the tone difference.“One campaign is saying, it’s a disaster, everything is terrible, America will be destroyed if Kamala Harris is president. The other campaign is saying we can do better, we can be better, our best days lie ahead. It’s much more optimistic and for voters coming out of Covid, January 6, the sense of weariness they have with both Biden and with Trump, that idea of turning the page and having a fresh start is a very appealing sentiment.”The Trump campaign has unleashed countless attacks tying Harris to Biden’s record on immigration, inflation and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan but with little tangible effect, at least so far. Instead, Harris continues to wear her vice-presidency lightly and cast herself as the candidate of the future.Whit Ayres, a political consultant and pollster, said: “She’s not pulling it off because of particular policy positions, but her race and gender create an image of change without ever stressing it or mentioning it.“The idea that a Black, Asian American woman could be president of the United States says change all by itself. That’s how she has created this impression that she is the change candidate in a change election, even though she’s the incumbent vice-president.”Trump would be wise to contrast his White House record with that of the Biden-Harris administration, Ayres argues. “Emphasising the economy and immigration is an obvious place for him to go. And then painting Harris as a San Francisco liberal – and there are plenty of issue positions that she has taken, in the past at any rate, that allow him to do that. If he could actually focus on that rather than using schoolyard bullying name-calling, he could win the thing.”Trump represented the shock of the new in 2016, running as an anti-establishment outsider, rattling the foundations of the Republican party and defeating the Democratic stalwart Hillary Clinton. But eight years, four criminal cases and two impeachments later, many Americans say the act has gone stale and the novelty has worn off.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “He feels diminished to me. He feels smaller, less relevant, he’s not breaking through. In part it’s because she’s rising above and talking about where she wants to take the country; she’s not engaging him. He’s using this old formula of creating chaos and fighting with his opponents and she’s not playing, and it’s hurting him.”He added: “There’s only one Trump. This Trump isn’t working the way it used to and they don’t have a plan B, and the Trump campaign’s in trouble. He’s singing the same songs and they’re not connecting the way they used to. It’s a real problem for him.”But the latest New York Times and Siena College poll – in which Trump is up by one percentage point at 48% to Harris’s 47% – makes Republicans sceptical of the notion that she has become synonymous with change in the minds of the electorate.Lanhee Chen, who was the policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, said: “There’s no question that if you look at the media narrative, that’s how she’s been framed. But with voters it could be a very different picture. As we get a little bit more data, we’ll be able to get a firmer sense of whether this framing is one that’s taken hold or if it’s just an inside-the-Beltway creation. Hard to say at this point.” More

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      Democrats unite to center reproductive rights as Republicans flail on abortion

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      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump prepare to meet on the debate stage in Philadelphia, the battle over abortion rights has vaulted to the center of the 2024 presidential election campaign, the first since the supreme court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade.At the party’s convention last month, Democrats spotlighted the harrowing stories of women placed in medical peril as a result of post-Roe abortion bans in their states. Last week, the Harris campaign launched a 50-stop “reproductive freedom” bus tour across several battleground states, kicking off in Trump’s “back yard”, miles from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence in south Florida.And this weekend, days before the first – and perhaps only – primetime presidential debate, where the issue is likely to be raised, the Harris campaign debuted three new TV ads reminding voters that Trump has repeatedly taking credit for his role in ending the 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion. The message is blunt: because of Trump, one in three women of reproductive age now live in states where abortion is banned or significantly restricted. And it could get worse, they warn, if Trump is given a second term.“Donald Trump is a fundamental threat to reproductive freedom – and you don’t have to take our word for it – Trump said it himself,” Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement. “Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting to restore reproductive freedom in all 50 states because they trust women to make the right decisions for their families.”In the bitterly contested race for the White House, abortion remains a glaring vulnerability for the Republican nominee.“You know it’s an important issue because Trump is trying to change his position,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster.As a candidate, Trump has held conflicting positions on abortion, alternately boasting that he appointed three of the nine supreme court justices whose votes were decisive in overturning Roe, while complaining that Republican extremism on the issue has cost his party at the ballot box.​He recently appeared to endorse a ballot measure to expand abortion rights in his adopted home state of Florida, only to announce one day later – after sparking backlash among prominent conservative groups – that he would vote against it. He has also previously hinted at support for a 15-week federal ban only to insist that the issue should be left to the states. His campaign has said Trump would not sign a national abortion ban as president.While the economy remains the top election issue for voters this November, a New York Times/Siena College poll released in August showed that a growing share of battleground state voters, particularly women, say abortion will be central to their decision. Among women younger than 45, abortion has eclipsed the economy as their single most important issue.In the final months of the campaign, Democrats are aiming to harness the unabated anger over the loss of federal abortion protections, especially among women and young people, and unifying around a platform that seeks to protect what remains of abortion access and the availability of reproductive healthcare, including contraception and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).In polling and focus groups, Lake said abortion rights remains an especially salient issue for women and the issue was helping to fuel a widening gender gap between Harris and Trump. Harris’s vocal support for abortion rights has not only energized young voters, a core Democratic constituency, but is also helping to persuade independent women and, as Lake put it, “older women who remember when abortion was illegal, and don’t think the idea of jailing doctors, investigating miscarriages, [and] eliminating birth control and IVF is a good idea”.View image in fullscreenIn recent weeks, Trump, who has long worried that Republican-led efforts to outlaw abortion and restrict access to reproductive care could imperil his White House bid, has sought recast his approach to the issue. During a town hall even in battleground Wisconsin, he endorsed a plan to make the government or insurance companies cover the cost of IVF – a type of fertility assistance that can cost tens of thousands of dollars and that some in the anti-abortion movement want to see limited.“We wanna produce babies in this country, right?” Trump said.Democrats assailed the proposal as insincere, pointing to the Republican’s record and the positions of his running mate, JD Vance.Trump has had “more positions on reproductive rights than he has had wives”, Ana Navarro, a TV personality and anti-Trump Republican, said last week, at the Florida launch of the Harris campaign’s bus tour.Democrats have leveraged the abortion issue to secure key victories in the 2022 midterms, when mobilization efforts around abortion rights drove strong turnout and enthusiasm, helping the party keep control of the Senate and limiting Republican gains in the House. In Michigan, Democrats secured a governing trifecta as voters in the state overwhelmingly turned out to back a ballot initiative enshrining abortion rights in the state’s constitution.“Bringing the message to the people, talking with women and healthcare providers and our families, that’s how we had such a historic outcome in our ’22 election here in Michigan,” the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a co-chair of Harris’s campaign, said in an MSNBC interview this week. “But it’s important, even for Michiganders and New Yorkers and Floridians, to know what’s at stake if we have a second Trump presidency.”Some Republicans have argued that the potency of abortion rights would wane in a noisy presidential election. But Lake believes the opposite could be true.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbortion rights are a priority for young voters who are more likely to turn out in a presidential election year. Constitutional amendments seeking to guarantee abortion rights are on the ballot in 10 states this fall, including battleground states like Arizona and Nevada as well as Florida, once a presidential bellwether that has trended Republican in recent cycles.“We are the belly of the beast here in the state of Florida,” said Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party. “We are the state that has drastically moved on abortion from two years ago having full access to now being one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country.”Florida Democrats are hopeful the ballot initiative will help boost the former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell’s underdog campaign against the Republican incumbent senator Rick Scott. Elsewhere in the battle for control of the Senate, vulnerable Democratic incumbents Jon Tester of Montana and Jacky Rosen of Nevada will appear on the ballot alongside measures to protect abortion rights.Fried, who joined the Harris campaign kick-off in Palm Beach county last week, said the referendum had helped draw attention to the state – and was mobilizing voters of all political stripes.“If they can take away access to reproductive healthcare, what else is next?” she said. “What other types of rights have we moved the needle on that would be going backwards if Trump is re-elected?”The state’s referendum would overturn the state’s unpopular six-week ban, guaranteeing the right to abortion “before viability”, usually around 24 weeks of pregnancy. A poll released in mid-August found that 56% of Sunshine state voters support the proposed amendment, just shy of the 60% threshold needed to become law. Yet it drew more support than Trump, who led Harris 51% to 47% in the state, according to the survey.Abortion remains Harris’s strongest issue. She holds a 15-percentage-point advantage over Trump in a national poll of likely voters by The New York Times and Siena College. Yet there were also signs that Trump’s mixed signals have muddied the waters on the issue. According to the survey, released Sunday, nearly half of independent voters say they did not think the former president would sign into law a national abortion ban.Still, the Republican nominee must contend with his base, particularly evangelicals and other conservative Christians, who expect Trump to further restrict access to abortion as president.Kristan Hawkins, president of the prominent anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, recently told the Guardian that young conservatives were “shocked and saddened to see someone who they thought was pro-life, or who had always reaffirmed pro-life values, walking back on that”.Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia offers one of the highest-profile opportunities for Harris to draw a sharp contrast with Trump on abortion. Reproductive rights supporters anticipate Harris will challenge the former president over his attempts to shift positions on the issue.“I hope that Vice-President Harris makes it crystal clear for the tens of millions of people who are watching that leaving it to the states is not a moderate position – that it is extreme,” said Rob Davidson, a Michigan-based emergency physician and executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care, a left-leaning coalition of physicians and medical professionals that recently endorsed Harris.Davidson said voters will also want to hear Harris articulate her vision for expanding access to reproductive healthcare.“We know what Trump did,” he said. “What are we going to do going forward?” More

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      Ro Khanna says he’s not a fan of fellow Democrats calling Republicans ‘weird’

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      Congressman and Kamala Harris campaign surrogate Ro Khanna said he doesn’t support the trend among his fellow Democrats of calling Republicans “weird” on the election trail.“I’m not, in candor, a fan of calling each other ‘weird’ or names, I don’t think that advanced American democracy,” the California US House representative said during a live event with the Guardian at the Texas Tribune festival Saturday in Austin. “I think we have to – in this country, and as a party – not just win, but deserve victory. And to deserve victory means to offer a vision that is going to bring this country together with a common purpose.”That common purpose, he said, was economic growth, expanding voting rights, women’s dignity, and a “civic religion”.The term “weird” has been part of a campaign strategy by Harris’s vice-presidential pick Tim Walz and several others as a way of painting opponent Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance as destructive and out of line with US voters.“These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said in an interview in July. “They wanna take books away, they wanna be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to and don’t, you know, get sugar-coating this: these are weird ideas.”But in a sweeping conversation about democracy, the economy, and the role of tech platforms in the election, Khanna emphasized a focus on unity and reaching out to skeptical voters, including in his view of Harris’s strategy for her debate on Tuesday with Trump.Khanna said he realized “it’s not fashionable anymore” to do as his fellow Democrat and former first lady Michelle Obama once said: “When they go low, we go high.” But he said former Democratic presidents like Barack Obama and John F Kennedy Jr “were inspirational figures and inspiration”, and he added: “I still think that wins for a nation that’s hungry for some kind of new common purpose.”Khanna also weighed in on the role of tech platforms and social media in polarizing voters and spreading misinformation. Already this year voters have been faced with deepfake robocalls in a false Joe Biden voice, a fake Taylor Swift image posted by Trump himself, and various fake ads painting Harris as a communist leader.While Khanna said there was no way to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) systems in time for the 5 November election, the congressman – whose district includes a significant part of Silicon Valley – said he is hopeful that there is bipartisan support for policy in this sector.“We’re in much better shape than when we had the printing press. And you look at some of the pamphlets on the printing press … they actually went to war over those pamphlets in Europe,” he said. “ The internet in the early days was filled with, pornography, with things that were not salutary for society. But it took a governing structure so that today I don’t think anyone would say a life in the world or in America would be better without the internet.”He also sought to promote the careful balance of regulating social media and content moderation without compromising free speech.Khanna furthermore reiterated his support for unfettered free speech when asked about Biden and the president’s record of avoiding press and media during most of his term when compared to his predecessors, a criticism that’s also been lodged at Harris early in the vice-president’s campaign for the White House.“I think politicians benefit from being out there in the media,” Khanna said. “And, as much as possible, you’re taking hard questions and making gaffes and letting people see who you are. But if you do a lot of that, by the way, your gaffes are likely to be diminished because you’ve done so many.“I’m a classical liberal. I believe in free speech. I believe in persuasion. I believe that in this country you can still persuade people.”Asked outright if Biden should have given more interviews, Khanna said: “Of course.” More

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      Joy derision: Democrats turn Trump’s deadliest weapon against him

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      In Trump in Exile, her recent book on the former president’s life after losing power, the reporter Meridith McGraw describes how aides to Donald Trump set about destroying Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who threatened to lure Republican voters away.“One Trump adviser referred to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals,” McGraw writes. “Rule number five: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”Alinsky was a Chicago community organizer who died in 1972 but is still influential on the left and demonized on the right. Trumpworld put his fifth rule – which also says: “It infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage” – into concerted action.DeSantis was ridiculed for his lack of height and his heightened sanctimoniousness but most effectively for his simple weirdness: a discomfiting public manner the Trump camp indelibly linked to an alleged incident on a donor’s jet in which, lacking a spoon, the governor chose to eat a cup of chocolate pudding using his fingers.DeSantis disintegrated. Trump swept to the nomination.With Joe Biden as his opponent, it seemed Trump would once again dominate with nicknames and ridicule, based on “Sleepy Joe’s” (even more) advanced age. But then Biden dropped out, and something unexpected happened. Kamala Harris and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, turned fierce ridicule back on Trump and his VP pick, the Ohio senator JD Vance, deriding both for their simple weirdness: personal, social and of course political.If polling is any guide, the tactic has worked like a dream.To Molly Jong-Fast, a podcaster and MSNBC commentator now touring Politics as Unusual, a live show with the Republican operative turned anti-Trump organizer and ridicule merchant Rick Wilson, Trump, Vance and the rest of the GOP are simply easy targets.“They’ve just gone so far afield, this Republican party, that you can mock it all because it’s just so weird,” Jong-Fast said. “All this stuff about women’s reproductive cycles” – support for abortion bans, Vance attacking women who do not have children, endless tangles over IVF – “that stuff is quite weird from an adult man, and so it does lend itself to mockery.“I also think they got so high on their own supply that they didn’t pause and think, ‘Well, perhaps people won’t like this,’ you know?”Ridicule certainly worked for Trump in the past. In 2016, the Texas senator Ted Cruz was “Lyin’ Ted”, the Florida senator Marco Rubio was “Liddle Marco”, and, most infamously, Hillary Clinton was “Crooked Hillary”. Fair or not, the labels stuck.Eight years later, though, Trump “just can’t do it”, Jong-Fast said. “Maybe because he’s almost 80. Maybe because he just doesn’t have it any more.”Trump has road-tested nicknames for Harris but nothing has stuck. He tried “Kamabla”, arguably racist, and “Comrade Kamala”, alleging communist leanings. He tried more.Jong-Fast said: “‘Laffin’ Kamala?’ It just doesn’t do it because their whole plan of attack was that she laughs and somehow that makes her unserious, and being unserious is somehow bad for being president. But the problem with Trump is that his whole thing was that he was unserious, right? Like, you were supposed to vote for him because he was a reality television host, not because he was some genius.“I think Trump is just tired. He’s been running for president for a decade, and he’s just scared [of defeat and potentially jail in four criminal cases] and sick of it. One of the things that Trump was able to do really well was ridicule. He would pick these nicknames and you would always be a little bit horrified by them but a lot of times they actually were right … he was very good at summing people up.”Now, not so much.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCompounding Republican problems, under Harris and Walz – whose decision to call Trump and Vance weird on TV did much to put him on the ticket – Democrats have abandoned the political squeamishness, or just good manners, that long deterred them from firing back in kind.“I think Biden was in a different generation of politics and he just couldn’t meet the moment in the same way,” Jong-Fast said. “He wouldn’t let his people do that aggressive stuff. I think of Democrats now as trying to push back aggressively, which they have to, right? I mean, it’s completely asymmetrical otherwise.”As Walz led in ridiculing Trump and Vance, so party grandees followed. At the Democratic convention in Chicago last month, Barack and Michelle Obama mocked Trump from the podium. The former president even appeared to question the size of Trump’s penis. It was all a long way from “When they go low, we go high”, Michelle Obama’s 2016 appeal to purity of political action and thought.“They know it gets him mad,” Jong-Fast said. “Part of what’s happening here is this ‘audience of one’ idea, which is they know it gets Trump kind of upset when you make fun of him, so they’re doubling down. They know the way to beat him is to get him so agitated that he acts out and alienates voters.”Trump has certainly been acting out – and Jong-Fast’s colleague Wilson, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, is well-practiced in making him do so, attracting threats to sue. Asked about Wilson’s insult-comic style, ridiculing Trump onstage and on the Fast Politics podcast and his own platforms, Jong-Fast laughed and said: “It makes for good podcasting. I think it would make for scary live television.”Probably true. Nonetheless, live television will host the next huge campaign set piece, the debate between Trump and Harris on ABC on Tuesday. Ridicule seems sure to be on the menu. Saul Alinsky’s ghost will watch with interest.Recently, David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, a progressive magazine, pondered Harris’s likely tactics.“I would offer the same advice to Harris as I did to Biden,” Corn wrote. “Deride, deride, deride. But it looks as if she got the memo.” More

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      Prosecutor v felon: US prepares for presidential debate between Harris and Trump

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      It will be a study in contrasts around age, gender, race, temperament and policy. It will also be the first time in US presidential history that a former courtroom prosecutor will take the debate stage alongside a convicted criminal with the White House at stake.Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has served as a trial lawyer, district attorney and state attorney general in California. Former US president Donald Trump, her Republican rival, has been convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal.The pair will go head to head in Philadelphia on Tuesday night in their first – and perhaps only – debate, just 75 days after Joe Biden’s dire performance against Trump triggered a political earthquake that ultimately forced him from the race for the White House.Few expect such a transformative result this time. But Trump has his last best chance to end Harris’s extended “honeymoon” while the Democrat is aiming to prosecute her opponent’s glaring liabilities before tens of millions of voters watching on live television.“It’s the first time Donald Trump is actually going to be cross-examined in front of the American people,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “Kamala Harris’s career and experience as a prosecutor, attorney general and a senator is something that Trump should not underestimate in this debate.”This will be Trump’s seventh appearance in a national general election debate, making him the most experienced debater in US presidential history. Against Biden in June he repeated familiar falsehoods that mostly went unchallenged. Harris is expected to be a more formidable opponent and could put Trump on the defensive over facts, policy and his conduct following the 2020 election.View image in fullscreenThe 59-year-old has not been shy about embracing her career in law enforcement so far in the campaign. A video at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago declared: “That’s our choice. A prosecutor or a felon.” In a speech accepting the party’s nomination, Harris told cheering delegates: “Every day, in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge and I said five words: Kamala Harris, for the people.”She has also been touting her record taking on predators and fraudsters, telling crowds across the country: “I know Donald Trump’s type!” Harris brought that experience to bear in her memorable 2018 cross-examination of Brett Kavanaugh during Senate confirmation hearings after Trump, then president, nominated him as a justice on the supreme court.But she is unlikely to go after Trump directly over his convictions – or three other criminal cases still looming over him. When, at a rally in New Hampshire this week, an audience member shouted, “Lock him up!” Harris replied: “Well, you know what? The courts are going to handle that, and we will handle November. How about that?”In May Trump became the first former US president to be convicted of felony crimes when a New York jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush-money payment to an adult film performer. On Friday the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, delayed Trump’s sentencing until 26 November – after the election date of 5 November.For any other candidate on a debate stage, the convictions would be a huge liability. But Trump has repeatedly rallied his base by falsely claiming that the case, and others relating to election interference and mishandling classified information, are bogus and politically motivated. Should the topic arise on Tuesday, he is likely to cast himself as a martyr and also remind viewers that he was nearly assassinated in July.The 90-minute duel, held at Philadelphia’s National Constitutional Center, will be moderated by the ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis. In accordance with rules negotiated by both campaigns, there will be no live audience and candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak.The same rules seemed to work in Trump’s favour when he took on Biden in Atlanta in June. Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan, said: “Trump adjusted well to no audience and the cutting of the microphones in Atlanta. Biden clearly didn’t.“He had never debated when there’s no audience; same thing with Harris. Not getting any feedback and not knowing how things are going, you have to trust your judgment and who’s got better media instincts than a reality television host?”The muting of the microphones may not only save Trump from himself – he interrupted Biden 71 times during their first presidential debate in 2020 – but prevent Harris offering sharp rejoinders such as “I’m speaking”, a line she delivered against Mike Pence in the vice-presidential debate four years ago.Harris and Trump have never met before in person and, in the city of Rocky Balboa, are likely to take on the roles of boxer and fighter respectively. Trump, 78, is not known for his discipline, preparation or fidelity to the truth. His debate performances, like his governing style, are typically based on gut instinct rather than considered analysis.Kall, who has attended many presidential debates, added: “You can never count him out because he’s just all over the place in kind of a scattershot format and, when you think you’ve got him on something, he quickly moves to something else. It’s hard to keep up with him so she’s got to pick her spots.View image in fullscreen“He’s always been known as the more effective counterpuncher. He sometimes doesn’t lob the first volley or attack or argument but then, if she decides to go on the offensive as a prosecutor and treat him in that way, he can be even more deadly in response.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has struggled to find a coherent and effective line of attack on Harris since she entered the race. He has accused her of being a radical leftist while also suggesting she bears responsibility for Biden’s more centrist policy agenda. He has questioned her intelligence and racial identity. He has also floundered in trying to achieve consistency on the incendiary topic of abortion rights.Republicans will be hoping that his debate showing is more focused and avoids any blatantly sexist or racist behaviour. The last time he faced a female candidate, Hillary Clinton in 2016, he physically hovered behind her in one debate and referred to her as “the devil” and a “nasty woman”.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The Harris campaign was eager for his mic to be live because they think he’s his worst enemy and that’s true. He has a very limited attention span.“He’s a remarkably undisciplined candidate, particularly at this level, and he’s profoundly uncomfortable with women and people of colour. I don’t see any change in that orientation. Already in this campaign he’s come out with some pretty offensive comments about Kamala Harris. I’d expect more of that and it’s possible that Kamala Harris is going to push him in ways that might provoke that reaction.”Harris enters the debate with momentum. After she closed out the convention on 22 August, her campaign announced she had raised more than $500m since entering the race. The polling aggregator website 538 shows Harris up by three percentage points in national polls but much tighter races in some battleground states.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “Kamala Harris is a capable politician operating at the height of her powers. She’s going to come and have a good debate and he is, in all likelihood based on his current run of public performances, going to say things that are ugly and shocking and he’ll do further damage to an already damaged campaign.”But the vice-president may come under pressure to explain reversals in her positions on issues such as universal healthcare, fracking, plastic straws and decriminalising illegal border crossings. She could face questions over the Biden-Harris administration’s economic record, especially inflation, forcing her both to defend her boss and promise to turn a new page.Lanhee Chen, a fellow in American public policy studies at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Stanford, California, said: “The substance of what she’s rolled out so far either completely contradicts her past history or they’re just not really good ideas for the most part. If she’s able to actually propose some new ideas in this debate and give people some grist for the mill, that’s a much better approach.”History suggests, however, that debates are less about policy than memorable moments. Examples include Ronald Reagan’s “There you go again,” tease of Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush’s glance at his watch, Al Gore’s sighs and Trump’s apparent threat to jail Clinton. Political scientists also still question whether the impact on public opinion is fleeting or lasting enough to make a difference on election day.Chen, who was policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, cited the example of Romney’s forceful first debate performance against a lacklustre President Barack Obama in 2012. “We saw a significant bump for Romney in public polling as well as our private polling after that tremendous debate performance against Obama in 2012,” he recalled.“In that first debate, he picked up a number of points that was well outside the margin of error in many places. It was a couple of weeks of positive momentum and then the race kind of came back to stasis after that.”Chen added: “The debate doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. You have the debate but you also have world events and you have what the campaigns do after the debate as well. The debate will have impact but the impact is probably short term and will eventually wash out with other campaign events as they happen.” More

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      US ‘hero voters’ key to Harris win, say top ex-aides who plotted Labour UK victory

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      Keir Starmer’s former pollster, Deborah Mattinson, is to meet Kamala Harris’s campaign team in Washington this week to share details of how Labour pulled off its stunning election win by targeting key groups of “squeezed working-class voters who wanted change”.The visit comes ahead of a separate trip by Starmer to Washington on Friday to meet US president Joe Biden, his second since becoming prime minister. It will also be his first since Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee.With the race for the White House on a knife-edge, Mattinson, who stepped down from Starmer’s office after the election, and the prime minister’s former director of policy, Claire Ainsley, who will also attend the briefings, believe the same strategy that delivered for Labour could play an important role in Harris defeating Donald Trump on 5 November.Writing in the Observer, Mattinson and Ainsley say many of the concerns of crucial undecided voters will be similar on both of sides of the Atlantic.“These voters – often past Labour voters – had rejected the party because they believed that it had rejected them. Often Tory voters in 2019, they made up nearly 20% of the electorate. Labour’s focus on economic concerns, from affordable housing to job security, won them back.“For Harris, addressing core issues such as housing, prices and job creation could also win over undecided US middle-class voters, many of whom face similar economic pressures. Labour set about finding out as much as possible about these voters and applying that knowledge to all aspects of campaigning.“They were patriotic, they were family oriented, they were struggling with the cost of living: squeezed working-class voters who wanted change.”Mattinson coined the phrase “hero voters” to describe a group who were more often than not pro-Brexit and persuadable by political leaders if they felt they would address their fundamental core concerns.The collaboration, they believe, could help tilt the balance by delivering voters in key US battlegrounds.“Before November’s presidential election, Harris has turned on its head a contest that looked like a foregone conclusion in Trump’s favour. However, as the data shows clearly, it is still too close to call. We believe that adopting a similar hero-voter approach could make a vital difference, just as it did here in the UK.“The start point is to identify and understand Harris’s hero voters – undecided voters who have considered Trump and live in the handful of the most crucial battleground states.”Mattinson and Ainsley were invited by the Democratic thinktank the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), with which Ainsley has been working since leaving Starmer’s team in late 2022.Recently, they have been polling among US voters and conducting focus groups to try to understand what will win them over and which groups matter most.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The context is very different but the parallels are almost uncanny,” they write. “This group – who in the US self-define as middle class rather than working class, as the same group might in the UK – is struggling.“Its members believe that the middle class is in jeopardy, out of reach for people like them, denied the dream of homeownership that previous generations took for granted, unable to cover the essentials, and hyper-aware of the cost of groceries, utilities and other bills. Many work multiple jobs just to keep afloat.”Among those that the two former Starmer aides are likely to meet are Megan Jones, the senior political adviser to vice-president Harris, and Will Marshall, founder of the PPI, who had dealings with top New Labour figures, including Tony Blair, when the party was trying to learn from the electoral success of Bill Clinton’s Democrats in the early to mid-1990s, before the 1997 general election.View image in fullscreenMattinson and Ainsley say they had far more time to plan their strategy in detail than have members of the Harris campaign. But they suggest that fine-tuning the Democratic strategy could help sustain recent momentum and give the party a better chance of crossing the finishing line victorious.“From the point where we defined our hero-voter focus, we had three years to mainline the thinking through party activity. Team Harris has less than three months. But looking at what they have achieved in the past few weeks, success now looks within reach. Hero voters may just help to close that gap.” More

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      How the lessons of the UK election could help Kamala Harris defeat Donald Trump

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      On 4 July, against all odds, Labour overturned the most shattering defeat in decades to win a stunning landslide. A talented and energetic party team deserves huge credit for this victory: effective communications, innovative digital output, creative policy culminating in the five missions, organisationally brilliant events and a super-efficient ground force – all under the leadership of campaign director Morgan McSweeney and political leads Pat McFadden and Ellie Reeves.It was a cohesive campaign united by its sharp, disciplined focus on our very tightly defined “hero voters”. Could a similar single-mindedness help Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump on 5 November?Just three years before, Labour had suffered the devastating setback of the Hartlepool byelection. While Keir Starmer had made significant strides towards returning Labour to the service of working people in his first year as leader, the party still struggled to embrace a disparate coalition of voters stretching from its base to a wider group of progressive voters and including the “red wall” that had so dramatically abandoned Labour in 2019.It was an impossible task. As the party picked itself up, Starmer’s brief was to really understand the voters who were crucial to that Tory win. He redoubled his resolve to take the party to them. These voters – often past Labour voters – had rejected the party because they believed that it had rejected them. Often Tory voters in 2019, they made up nearly 20% of the electorate. Labour’s focus on economic concerns, from affordable housing to job security, won them back.For Harris, addressing core issues such as housing, prices and job creation could also win over undecided US middle-class voters, many of whom face similar economic pressures. Labour set about finding out as much as possible about these voters and applying that knowledge to all aspects of campaigning. They were patriotic, they were family oriented, they were struggling with the cost of living: squeezed working-class voters who wanted change.Starmer was the personification of this segment of the UK electorate. As someone who had grown up in a pebbledash semi, with hard-working parents who were so strapped for cash that at one point the family’s phone was cut off, he identified with these voters and understood them. This became our focus over the next three years. The discipline paid off, enabling the electoral efficiency that won 411 seats, even on a vote share of less than 35%.Before November’s US presidential election, Harris has turned on its head a contest that looked like a foregone conclusion in Trump’s favour. However, as the data shows, it is still too close to call. We believe that adopting a similar hero-voter approach could make a vital difference, just as it did here in the UK.The start point is to identify and understand Harris’s hero voters – undecided voters who have considered Trump and live in the handful of most crucial battleground states.Working with Democratic thinktank the Progressive Policy Institute, we have attempted to do just that, applying lessons from the UK election, conducting polling and focus groups to really understand the voters that matter most.The context is very different but the parallels are almost uncanny. This group – who in the US self-define as middle class rather than working class as the same group might in the UK – is struggling. Its members believe that the middle class is in jeopardy, denied the dream of homeownership that previous generations took for granted, unable to cover the essentials, and hyper-aware of the cost of groceries, utilities and other bills. Many work multiple jobs just to keep afloat.As one Michigan swing voter told us last week: “There’s less of a ‘legit’ middle class these days. People are just working, working, working – and I think that’s really unfair.” Another voter in Pennsylvania said: “The middle class is being eroded. You used to be able to work one job and buy a house, but those things are out of reach for people like us nowadays.”Unsurprisingly, these voters want change – change that redresses the balance. But they are also deeply insecure and want that change within a framework of stability.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris can use this balancing act to her advantage, offering a combination of stability and the change voters crave. By addressing concerns such as inflation and homeownership while promising steady progress, she can present a vision that contrasts with Trump’s record, appealing directly to the middle class’s desire for practical, lasting change.Like Starmer, Harris has an edge: she comes from the same background as these voters. Her middle-class upbringing and understanding of economic struggle give her a unique connection to working-class Americans. She can own this narrative – something that Trump’s rhetoric, despite his populist appeal, can’t match.There are takeaways for the new Labour government from our research too. US voters want tangible evidence of policies from the Democrats that have helped them and their country. In these early days of the new Labour government, the party will want to plan now what those markers of success will be to their hero voters, well before the next general election.In our project, we have explored how the lessons from Labour’s successful campaign may translate across, reflecting the mood of hero voters, creating clear dividing lines on party brand, and leader reputation and, ultimately, developing a compelling offer.From the point where we defined our hero voter focus, we had three years to mainline the thinking through party activity. Team Harris has less than three months. But, looking at what they have achieved in the past few weeks, success now looks within reach. Hero voters may just help to close that gap.Deborah Mattinson and Claire Ainsley will spend this week in Washington DC with the Progressive Policy Institute, briefing leading Democrats on their project More

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      US presidential polls: Harris leads Trump nationally, but key swing state races tighter

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      As next week’s crucial presidential debate looms into view, Kamala Harris has maintained her narrow lead over Donald Trump in head-to-head polls but is locked in a tighter race in the crucial swing states needed to win the US election.Ever since Harris entered the contest – after Joe Biden dropped out following a disastrous debate performance that highlighted fears over his age and mental acuity – the vice-president has ridden a wave of support and enthusiasm, turning the race on its head. A solid but slight Trump advantage morphed into a Harris lead.But as Harris faces her first ever debate as a presidential nominee, there are signs that her upwards swing has hit a ceiling. Meanwhile, Trump will be hoping the debate offers his campaign a chance to recapture some momentum.Yet the race remains so tight in the swing states – and with a Republican advantage in the electoral college – that one commentator on Politico this week called it the “equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth”.At the same time, the narrow geographical focus of the election is sharply coming into view, with the first ballots to determine the next occupant of the White House due to be mailed out to voters.North Carolina had aimed to start mailing out its presidential ballots on Friday. But in what might be seen as a metaphor for the cliffhanging nature of the contest between Harris and Trump, what should have been standard protocol was delayed by a dispute over whether Robert F Kennedy Jr, hitherto running as an independent candidate, should have a place on the ballot.Kennedy, who suspended his campaign on 23 August and endorsed Trump, is suing the North Carolina board of elections over its refusal to remove his name from the ballot in a state where surveys show the result on a knife edge.A judge on the state’s supreme court ruled against him on Thursday but gave him 24 hours to appeal – resulting in a temporary delay to ballots being dispatched. And on Friday, the state’s appeals court issued an interim stop on the dissemination of mail-in ballots to allow Kennedy’s appeal to be heard.The postponement added another layer of suspense to a contest that could not be tighter, according to fresh Guardian analysis of recent polls.In a state with 16 electoral college votes up for grabs but where a Democratic presidential candidate has won only once since 1980, Trump and Harris are deadlocked at 48.07%.The figures illustrate why Kennedy – who is trying to help Trump after concluding that his presence in the race was draining his support – is so keen to remove his name from the ballot.A tiny number of voters putting their cross next to Kennedy’s name on ballot papers could be enough to deprive Trump of the only one of seven swing states he won in his 2020 defeat at the hands of Joe Biden.The North Carolina imbroglio shows in a microcosm what has become a reality of this – and, increasingly, all – US presidential elections: that while voters will flock to the polls across all 50 states, some states matter more than others under America’s unique electoral college.The system designates a set number of electors for each state based on population – with 539 for the entire country, meaning that 270 electoral college votes are needed to win.While the outcome in numerous states is a foregone conclusion – with many southern and midwestern states reliably Republican and others like New York and California solidly Democratic – the roughly equal partisan division of such states in electoral vote terms means much rests on the small number where party loyalties are evenly split.It also means that the national polling figures – while indicative of overall trends – are not what necessarily decides the election. The Guardian’s latest national poll tracker, taken over a 10-day average, showed Harris at 47.5% compared with 43.9% for Trump, which is encouraging for her but probably not a big enough cushion to guarantee an electoral college win if replicated on polling day.In this context, arguably even more important than North Carolina is Pennsylvania, one of the Democrats’ designated “blue wall” states – along with fellow battlegrounds Michigan and Wisconsin – and sometimes given a “Rust belt” label because of its status as the heartland of the US steel industry.Biden won it by slightly more than 80,000 votes in 2020, capturing its 19 electoral votes.This time, various permutations suggest that it might be key to the paths being charted by both Harris and Trump to reach the magic 270 total.That explains why the state has become such a focal point of both campaigns’ activity in recent days; On Monday, Harris appeared with Biden at a Labor Day parade in Pittsburgh in their first joint campaign appearance since she replaced him atop the Democratic ticket, while Trump attended a televised town hall event hosted by Fox News and fronted by Sean Hannity on Wednesday.This Tuesday, the candidates will meet in their only scheduled presidential debate in Philadelphia, the biggest city in Pennsylvania.The data shows Harris with a wafer-thin lead in the state of 1.7% – 48.9% to 47.2% – within the margin of error. Other polls show the race even tighter; a CNN survey this week had candidates tied at 47% each.The tight scenario underpins why states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina – and others like Georgia and two “Sun belt” states, Nevada and Arizona – are now the targets of the lion’s share of campaign resources. Maga Inc, a Trump-backing Super Pac, recently spent a reported $16m in adverts for North Carolina while the Trump campaign has diverted its efforts away from other less winnable locations to focus on the seven battleground states.In the war of resources and ad spending, Harris may have the advantage. Figures published on Friday showed her campaign had outraised Trump’s by $361m to $130m in August, and had raised a total of $615m since she became her party’s nominee in July.It seems an eye-watering sum and surely enough to sustain a message across this vast country. But the clarion call will be heard loudest in those states where the result is likely to remain too close to call even after polls close. More