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      Uncommitted achieved its goal in making Gaza a mainstream issue | Camonghne Felix

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      In the days following the 2024 election, a cadre of pundits have been eager to call the uncommitted voters’ impact on the presidential race both a failure and a significant factor in Vice-President Kamala Harris’s loss. Despite those contradicting analyses, the movement’s success lies not in its voter count, but rather in the clarity it offered voters, even those who changed their minds and chose to vote for Harris in the end.As with the anti-war campaigns of the 1960s, the Uncommitted National Movement, the more than 500,000-person effort which called on Americans against the genocide in Gaza to withhold their votes, was a representation of the nation’s shifting consciousness around US responsibility in Israel’s war. By asking the public to confront imperialism, the movement opened the door to a confrontation between the people and the Democratic party, awakening its voters to an issue once seen as someone else’s concern.When the uncommitted movement offered to endorse Harris in exchange for having a speaker at the Democratic national convention and were denied, it allowed the movement to more extensively highlight the contradictions that mark the party. If the Democrats weren’t giving marginalized people an opportunity to speak, what does that say to Muslims, Arabs and voters of color who know intimately this kind of erasure and disregard at the hands of the party that purports to represent them?While some in the Democratic party billed Israel’s carnage as an issue that concerned only the left, many liberals across the spectrum, from the far left to centrists, actually consider it a mainstream issue, one that dominates their political perspectives and positions.More and more people, through the activism of uncommitted voters, learned that American democracy is a feature of western imperialism – Republicans and Democrats alike would supply arms to Israel and allow its government impunity on the world stage. Even though more than 60% of US voters supported an arms embargo, including 77% of Democratic voters and 40% of Republican voters, and even though stopping arms transfers polled highly in swing states, the Democratic party ignored demands for an embargo and ceasefire. (The Biden administration has repeatedly said it is pushing for a ceasefire.) That ceasefire has yet to come, and more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, with many more unaccounted for.The anti-war college campus protests also furthered the cause of uncommitted: students across the country were unduly labeled as antisemitic antagonists because they pressed their universities to divest from weapons manufacturers. Democratic voters across the country became more and more sympathetic to the students’ actions, marking an even more pronounced break from the party position. That consciousness only grew once the expansion of the war into Lebanon and Syria underscored the extent of US involvement in the creation and exacerbation of regional warfare.Uncommitted voters in Michigan, which has the largest population of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslim people in the country, helped deliver a loss to the Harris campaign on election night. To be clear: there is no basis to the accusation that Harris losing Michigan was the lone cause of Trump’s win. But it matters that Arab and Muslim voters in cities such as Dearborn rejected the Democrats’ agenda, while Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian representative from Michigan and Ilhan Omar, a representative from Minnesota, held on to their seats. Biden and Harris had room to choose a different approach on Israel, even if it meant appealing to a smaller group of Democrats who would have been happy to campaign and organize for Harris had the party shown any significant steps to end the war.Even those uncommitted voters who decided to vote for Harris were participating in a consciousness-raising effort that revealed existing contradictions within the party and democracy as a whole. Their demands dominated headlines, especially before the Democratic national convention.Uncommitted voters, in the end, are the ones coming away from this election with a win. In raising awareness, the movement has provided an example for future anti-war actions, by redefining the function of the vote as less of a compulsion and more of an opportunity to center morality instead of myopic harm-reductionist tactics meant to maintain the status quo.The movement also offers a useful retrospective on the race: when the party of the people chooses to remain hostile to Palestinian protests and refuses to show any proportional empathy to Palestinian people, the voters they need will reject them. Anger and disappointment took up the space that hope might have, and was the dominant emotion felt by many in the electorate, due in part to the persistence of uncommitted voters in elevating their voices and pushing others to consider the value of their vote.That this was possible was news to many Americans until uncommitted voters began to organize. Because of their activism, the Democrats are learning that the genocide in Gaza is a hard line for more people than they thought, and that chances of winning back the House and Senate in 2026 will remain slim unless some shift is made in the strategy, a shift that requires the party to aggressively pursue an end to the hecatomb of Gaza.America is slowly opening its eyes to the violent truths of American hegemony. Because of uncommitted, more people now have a working criticism of America’s position on the world stage. This is what the seams of Harris’s loss reveal: the Democrats are in trouble, and democracy is in trouble, too. More

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      Republican senator calls for release of Matt Gaetz ethics report to chamber

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      Discussion on Donald Trump’s selection of Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman who had been accused of sexual misconduct, for US attorney general continued on Sunday, with Republican senator Markwayne Mullin calling for an unreleased ethics report to be released to the Senate.Mullin told NBC’s Meet the Press that the Senate, which will oversee Gaetz’s confirmation hearings to become attorney general, “should have access to that” but declined to say if it should be released publicly.Gaetz resigned from his seat in Congress on Wednesday soon after the president-elect made his controversial pick, frustrating plans by a congressional ethics panel to release a review of claims against Gaetz, including sexual misconduct and illegal drug use. Gaetz denies any wrongdoing.Republican House speaker Mike Johnson repeated his position on Sunday that the survey should remain out of the public realm. Gaetz had faced a three-year justice department investigation into the same allegations that concluded without criminal charges being brought.Johnson said the principle was that the ethics committee’s jurisdiction did not extend to non-members of the House. “There have been, I understand, I think, two exceptions to the rule over the whole history of Congress and the history of the ethics committee,” Johnson told CNN, adding that while he did not have the authority to stop it “we don’t want to go down that road.”Trump’s selection of Gaetz, while successfully provoking Democrats’ outrage, is also seen as a test for Republicans to bend Trump’s force of will. Mullin has previously noted situations in which Gaetz had allegedly shown colleagues nude photographs of his sexual conquests and described him as “unprincipled”.But the senator said he had not made a decision on whether to support Gaetz in a confirmation vote. “I’m going to give him a fair shot just like any individual,” Mullin said.The pending report seems likely to emerge in some form after other senior Republicans, including senators Susan Collins, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis have all said they believe it should be shown to them.Separately, Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman repeated his advice to members of his own party to not “freak out” over everything Trump does, pointing out that for at least the next two years, Republicans can “run the table”.Fetterman, who won decisive re-election in the state this month, said he looked forward to reviewing some of Trump’s nominations but others “are just absolute trolls”, including Gaetz.For Democrats, who are still trying to figure out reasons for their devastating loss at the ballot box this month, their outrage at Trump’s nominations “gets the kind of thing that he wanted, like the freak out”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s still not even Thanksgiving yet and if we’re having meltdowns at every tweet or every appointment.”Democrats, Fetterman added, should be “more concerned” about Republicans being able “to run the table for the next two years. Those are the things you really want to be concerned about, not small tweets or, you know, random kinds of appointments.”But Democratic senator-elect Adam Schiff told CNN that Gaetz was “not only unqualified, he is really disqualified” to become the country’s top lawyer.“Are we really going to have an attorney general [with] … credible allegations he was involved in child sex-trafficking, potential illicit drug use, obstruction of an investigation? Who has no experience serving in the justice department, only being investigated by it,” Schiff said. More

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      ‘A change from the status quo’: the voters who backed Trump and AOC

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      Politics makes for strange bedfellows. US political minds will be reminding themselves of this fact as the dust settles on America’s election, with some results showing that a few voters were able to simultaneously support Donald Trump and progressive-leaning Democratic candidates.In the Bronx in New York, a strongly Black, Asian and Latino community, Trump’s support jumped 11 points to 33% over 2020, one of the largest margins citywide. At the same time, the leftwing firebrand Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez secured 68.9% of the vote, returning her to Congress for a fourth consecutive term.Welcome to the vote-splitting phenomenon of 2024, another sign of a restive American electorate committed to rejecting business as usual in Washington and voting to shake up a self-serving two-party system they often believe pays only lip service to their concerns.Trump and Ocasio-Cortez, whose politics are poles apart on almost every issue, were seen by at least some voters as sharing one very important thing: an anti-establishment authenticity.“They’re a good counter-balance for each other,” said Mamé, 66, a West African man on his way to a doctor’s appointment in the Bronx. “He’s a bully she doesn’t accept. She’s a fighter, progressive, and she loves democracy.”A Dominican Uber driver called Robin said Trump was better on the economy and security, but Ocasio-Cortez was better on democracy. “The last three years were no good economically: half a million migrants coming to New York, being given a hotel and money, and me working 60 hours a week with three kids.”Last week, Ocasio-Cortez herself prodded her own followers on X – the social media platform formerly known as Twitter – about vote-splitting between her and Trump. “I actually want to learn from you, I want to hear what you were thinking,” she said.Many in response to her appeal said there was no contradiction between supporting Trump and the avowed Democratic socialist.“I feel you are both outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less ‘establishment’,” said one. Another, “both of you push boundaries and force growth”. And: “It’s real simple … Trump and you care for the working class.”“You are focused on the real issues people care about. Similar to Trump populism in some ways,” said a fourth. Lastly, a respondent said: “You signaled change. Trump signified change. I’ve said lately, Trump sounds more like you.”Ocasio-Cortez told The View on Thursday: “One, there is universal frustration in this country, much of it I actually think justified, that is raging at a political establishment that centers corporate interests [and] billionaires. and puts their needs ahead of the needs of working Americans.”The exchanges on X prompted whoops of joy from Salon, a liberal-leaning outlet, which said there might now be an openness among bruised Democrats to “someone who simply has the sauce … And Ocasio-Cortez has the sauce.”View image in fullscreenTo some extent, the Bronx split-ticket vote phenomenon was repeated across the US. Republicans won the White House and Senate convincingly. But in the House of Representatives, Democrats more or less held their own. (Split-ticket voting had an impact but it still left the House narrowly under Republican control.)“People are looking for people to shake up the system and fight for a bold agenda so they’re voting for candidates who are different and have a clear agenda outside the norms of our political system,” said Jasmine Gripper, co-director of the New York Working Families party.“Trump is not a career politician and challenges the system, and AOC is doing that in a different way. Their approaches and philosophies and values are deeply different, but they both represent a change from the status quo that voters are rejecting.”In 2018, Trump was one of the first to recognize AOC’s rise, warning Joe Crowley, the 10-term Democrat she defeated for the nomination, of her natural political abilities. Crowley later reflected that Trump’s win two years earlier had helped to get Ocasio-Cortez elected.“It lit the fire on to the base of our party, and I think that’s a good thing in many respects,” he said.Trump and Ocasio-Cortez, native New Yorkers and Democrats in their origin stories, have often appeared to be perfect sparring partners, with an innate understanding of how to get under the other’s skin, and clapping back at each other on social media (AOC has 8.1 million Instagram followers).She has called Trump a “racist visionary” and said he is “afraid” of strong Latino women. He has insulted her right back, though mixed with compliments. “Look, she’s a fake, and in all fairness to her, she knows it. But she’s got a good thing going – a good thing for her,” Trump said in August. “She’s got a spark – I will say that. A good spark that’s pretty amazing, actually.”Both know the value of a political stunt. AOC wore a white gown with the message “tax the rich” emblazoned in red to the Met Gala, where tables cost $450,000. “The medium is the message,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram, quoting the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan.But the Democrat’s ultra-progressive group in Congress, known as “the Squad”, did not fare so well under the softer liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration. Two of the group no longer sit in the House. Despite that, Ocasio-Cortez was a good soldier for Harris and before her, Joe Biden, supporting and enthusiastically campaigning for both.But its too soon to say how much progressives are encouraged by the phenomenon of split-ticket voting and whether it will presage a tack away from traditional party elites, as the Democrats try to regroup in the political wilderness of the next four years. Certainly there are those who think the party needs a dose of economic populism and charismatic outsiders to lead it.“What’s clear is we have to compete in a new information environment that Trump understands, the Democrats struggle with, and AOC is a genius at,” said Billy Wimsatt of the Movement Voter Project. “We need candidates and leaders that people believe in and see as authentic and not as a manufactured politicians.”But what might be more worrying for Democrats are people like 30-year-old Bronx resident Carlos Thomas. “I was rooting for Donald because he’s for business, but I liked the girl he was running against [also],” he said.But he – like tens of millions of other Americans in an election that saw turnout drop – simply failed to vote. More

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      In this age of rage, it’s easy for Trump to keep stoking people’s anger | Henry Porter

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      Donald Trump and the Republican party may have won a decisive victory, but do not expect the anger that has blighted America since Trump announced he was running for office nine years ago to subside. Anger and grievance are the fuel rods of Maga populism, and they must be kept at dangerously high temperatures for the movement and a second Trump term to operate.Watching the last four weeks of the campaign, the uninhibited rage of Trump and his supporting acts at rallies was very striking. There was no attempt at decent norms. As the election neared, speeches became louder and more laced with vitriol, to the degree that commentators believed they had gone too far for the American public.First lesson of the Democrat defeat is that most US voters lapped it up. This is what they want. America is a very angry place, much more so that than its neighbour to the north, Canada. In the US, dissatisfaction with opportunities, the state of the country and the government have risen sharply since the Reagan era, whereas in Canada dissatisfaction has only increased over the government’s failure to protect the most vulnerable in society. That says a lot about the wildly differing tone of the two societies as well as levels of available empathy.Road rage in the US doubled between 2019 and 2022, with 44 people killed or wounded by gunfire on the roads every month, a ­figure that bucks the trends of violent crime and murder that have been generally declining in the US since 1990.There are a lot of people walking around with the bewildering, hair-trigger rage of John Goodman’s character Walter Sobchak in the Coen brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski. Trump echoes the craziness, amplifies it, then uses the energy tha t it returns to him.This is a feedback loop, but the anger doesn’t just circle with the same intensity between Trump and his people; it steadily increases.At a Trump rally you became aware of the exuberant high of the outrage, that this is a fix enjoyed across America both by those who tend towards unreflective negativity, racism and misogyny and by people who have a genuine complaint about their lives. In both cases they have acquired the habit of rage, and it has become a meaningful and gratifying part of their identity.The anger is not simply going to evaporate when Trump takes over in January, not only because it’s too important to people’s sense of political self but also because the communication channel between the president and his supporters works only at this level. There is no exchange of ideas, of course, no sense that he leads with a vision other than the one that meets their anger with a promise of destruction.The early evidence of this political wrecking machine comes with the appointments of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, all of whom cannot fail to vandalise and degrade the institutions they take over. Indeed, that appears to be their brief.When he moves back into the White House with the Senate, Congress and supreme court in the control of the Republican party, he will be one of the most powerful presidents ever to have governed and he will be 100% responsible for the fortunes of Americans.How will his supporters, so used to reflexively blaming Washington and the government, confront his responsibility when he fails to improve their lives, as he certainly will because of a suicidal tariff regime, tax cuts to the rich and corporations that will increase national debt, cuts to Medicaid and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants that will severely damage growth as well as cause unbelievable pain to separated families across America?His failure will be a problem for his supporters, who can’t lose faith in their idol, and also for Trump, who must not let their support fall away. The solution for both parties will be to maintain the anger but divert it away from Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd this is where we should fear for America. Trump has been lining up scapegoats. He has promised to persecute “the enemies within” and “radical left communists” like Adam Schiff, the new senator for California, and the former speaker Nancy Pelosi. He has made threats to Michelle Obama and Liz Cheney, who endorsed Democrat candidate Kamala Harris, and has demanded that CBS’s broadcast licence be revoked. He has suggested “one really violent day” and “one rough hour” against petty criminals.He will resort to this list whenever he needs to, but it will be America’s undocumented immigrants who will initially suffer, for next to the economy they topped the concerns of Republican voters. Trump will always be able to satisfy Maga anger by promising new and more cruel actions against immigrants, among which measures are likely to be privately run detention camps.There is no telling where this will end, no sense where national resistance will come in a society that is unused to dealing with an authoritarian who exploits dark and violent emotions as expertly as Trump does.The Democrats are plunged in a round of recriminations about the defeat, but they need to find new leadership and a strategy to deal with the anger that now threatens America and its institutions of government. When fuel rods overheat in a nuclear reactor, the result is usually meltdown. More

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      ‘A Russian asset’: Democrats slam Trump’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence

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      Democratic lawmakers are slamming Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, saying their former House colleague is a vocal supporter of Russia who poses a threat to US national intelligence.Jason Crow, a House Democrat from Colorado and a member of the House intelligence committee, told NBC News that he has “deep questions about where her loyalties lie”.“We get a lot of intelligence from our allies, and there I would be worried about a chilling effect,” he said.Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a House Democrat from Florida, told MSNBC on Friday: “There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”Abigail Spanberger, another House Democrat on the intelligence committee and a former CIA case officer, said on X that she is “appalled” by Gabbard’s nomination.“Someone who has aligned herself with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad and trafficked in Russian-backed conspiracy theories is an unsuitable and potentially dangerous selection,” Spanberger wrote. “The objections to her nomination transcend partisan politics. This is a matter of national security.”Gabbard is just the latest of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks to garner alarm over her nomination. Questions and criticism have been raised by members of both parties over the qualification of other Trump nominees, including representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Robert F Kennedy Jr as secretary of health and human services and Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.It’s unclear whether all of Trump’s nominees will be able to get through a Senate confirmation, even with the chamber’s Republican majority.Moderate Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have voiced reservations about nominees like Gaetz, who Murkowski said is not “a serious nomination”. Former Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy similarly said that “Gaetz won’t get confirmed”.“Everybody knows that,” he told Bloomberg.Gabbard was a Democratic representative from Hawaii from 2013 to 2021 and was the first Samoan and Hindu elected to Congress. She served in the military in Iraq and was once a surrogate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 primary campaign.She has since become a contributor on Fox News and said that she quit the Democratic party, which she said is run by an “elitist cabal of warmongers”. Gabbard has been a staunch critic of US foreign policy. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard accused the US of running biological weapon laboratories in Ukraine – a falsehood often touted by Russia.Michael Waldman, president of the Brenna Center for Justice, told the New York Times on Wednesday that Trump’s cabinet nominations “seem designed to poke the Senate in the eyes”.“They’re so appalling they’re a form of performance art,” he said. More

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      The ‘foolproof’ election forecaster who predicted Trump would lose – what went wrong?

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      Surely not even Nostradamus could get it right all of the time.Allan Lichtman had correctly forecast the result of nine of the past 10 US presidential elections (and even the one he didn’t, in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore). His predictive model of “13 keys” to the White House was emulated around the world and seemed all but indestructible.Until, that is, Donald Trump, the notorious human wrecking ball, came along and broke his crystal ball. Lichtman had prophesied that Democrat Kamala Harris would win eight of his keys, claiming the presidency, forcing him to face the harsh truth that his winning streak was over. Was it a big personal blow?“Of course,” the 77-year-old admits by phone. “But I care far less about the personal blow than I care about the blow to our democracy. Even before the election I said, ‘Look, if I’m wrong, the implications are vastly greater for our society than they are for the keys.’ It’s much more important to look at the broader implications.”Lichtman, a history professor who has been teaching at American University in Washington for more than a half a century, developed his keys to the White House in the early 1980s. With Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Soviet expert on earthquake prediction, he analysed elections in terms of stability (the party holding the White House holds it) versus earthquake (the party holding the White House is ejected).The pair devised 13 true/false questions: if six or more keys went against the White House party, it would lose. Lichtman used the model to successfully predict Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1984 and (nearly) every election that followed. After the 2016 election, he received a copy of his Washington Post interview with a message written in a Sharpie pen: “Congrats, professor. Good call. Donald J Trump.”The 2024 election was always going to be a tough test for Lichtman. Joe Biden dropped out in favour of Harris while Trump, who survived two assassination attempts, is a norm-busting figure who was bidding to become the first former president to win back the White House since Grover Cleveland in the 19th century.Why did he think Harris would win, and what went wrong? “The keys are premised on the proposition that a rational, pragmatic electorate decides whether the White House party has governed well enough to get another four years,” he explains. “Just as this kind of hate and violence is new, there are precedent-shattering elements now to our political system, most notably disinformation.“There’s always been disinformation but it has exploded to a degree we’ve never seen before. It’s not just Fox News and the rightwing media. It’s also rightwing podcasters and we have a brand new player, the $300bn guy, Elon Musk, whose wealth exceeds that of most countries in the world and has heavily put his thumb on disinformation.”Musk’s Super Pac reportedly spent about $200m to help elect Trump while his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, amplified rightwing propaganda. Musk was a leading Trump surrogate and has since become a near-permanent fixture at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Along with the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, he will now head an effort to reduce wasteful government spending.Lichtman continues: “It’s been reported that the disinformation that he disseminates has been viewed billion of times. The disinformation extends to every aspect of our society and our economy. Many people are living in an alternative universe and that calls into question the fundamental basis of political decision-making in this country.”That includes disinformation about inflation, jobs, employment, the stock market, growth, hurricane aid, the Ukraine war and undocumented immigrants, falsely portrayed as dangerous killers when in fact they commit crimes at far lower rate than native-born Americans.Another problem for Lichtman’s model was a presidential candidate who has constantly torn up the rulebook and defied categorisation. “We’ve seen Trump far more than we’ve ever seen in the history of this country channel the darkest impulses in American life – things that have always been with us but were increased exponentially this time: racism, misogyny, xenophobia, antisemitism.“We’re seeing something new in our politics, which affected the prediction and could affect future predictions but has a much bigger message for the future of our democracy. George Orwell was 40 years too soon. He made it clear that dictatorships don’t just arise from brutality and suppression. They arise from control of information: doublethink. Famine is plenty, war is peace. We’re in the doublethink era and maybe we can get out of it, maybe not.”After Lichtman made his 2024 prediction, he and his wife received a backlash in the form of death threats, vulgar abuse and even people trying to breach their home. They were also the victims of swatting (false reports of a threat intended to draw a heavy police response at the target’s home) and doxing, in which their private information was published online.“I’ve been doing this for 42 years and I have never experienced anything remotely like this,” he says. “I haven’t had to call the police before ever; now they’ve been here several times. They’re on alert. They notified the FBI.”Once an idealistic 13-year-old who watched John F Kennedy speak in New York, Lichtman is dismayed that politics has come to this. “It tells me that America has fallen to an absolute new low,” he reflects.“All I have done is exercise my free speech and yet here I am, subject to all of this hate, attempts to breach the security of my family, and it’s consistent with what we heard from Donald Trump, who’s constantly invoking violence as legitimate, plus for dehumanising those he doesn’t agree with as vermin, scum, something less than human to be dealt with. We’ve never seen anything like this before in America.”Looking back at his 2024 miscalculation, Lichtman is not about to let Democrats off the hook. He had been a staunch defender of Biden until the end and condemned the party for forcing him to step aside in favour of Harris. He is now unimpressed by its epic blame game and self-flagellation over the election result.“They’re pointing the finger at everyone else but not taking any responsibility. This election proves what I’ve been saying for years. I can summarise American politics in one sentence. Republicans have no principles, Democrats have no spine.”As if to prove the point, Trump has nominated Matt Gaetz, a Maga bomb thrower once subject to a sex-trafficking investigation, as his attorney general. The post is currently held by Merrick Garland, whom Lichtman has known for 60 years.“I love the guy,” he says. “I thought he was maybe the greatest federal judge in America and he is now the poster child of the spineless Democrats who have let all this happen. He diddled for almost two years before appointing a special counsel [to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 2021 insurrection].“We all knew on January 7 what Trump had done. Certainly we knew it by the time Merrick Garland was appointed in early 2021. If he had acted as he should have right away, everything would have been different. I believe Trump would have been convicted of serious federal crimes and either be in jail or be on probation and the whole political system would have been different.”Lichtman adds: “He epitomises the spineless Democrats. ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this because I might seem political and Republicans might criticise me.’ Didn’t he learn anything from his supreme court nomination? Republicans are going to do what they’re going to do.“It doesn’t depend on what you do. I always go by the mantra of: it’s not just the evil people who wreak havoc on this world, it’s the good people who don’t do enough to stop them. And Merrick Garland is right front and centre of that.”The Trump-Musk axis “broke my predictive model this year”, Lichtman admits, but he intends to pick himself up, dust himself down and try again in 2028. “I fully expect to adjust the keys according to what I see unfolding over the next several years,” he promises. “The beauty of being a presidential predictor is you have four years to correct your course.“Presuming I’m still around at 81 and fully engaged in my faculties, I will be very carefully monitoring developments over the next few years apropos of the keys and also speaking out in defence of our democracy. The keys are one thing – they’re totally non-partisan – but I have my own political views as well and I fully intend to express them. And when I think the Democrats are worthy of criticism, I don’t hold back.” More

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      Democratic leaders across US work to lead resistance against Trump’s agenda

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      After the November elections ushered in a new era of unified Republican governance in Washington, Democratic leaders across the country are once again preparing to lead the resistance to Donald Trump’s second-term agenda.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said he would convene a special legislative session next month to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights”.Washington state’s governor-elect, Bob Ferguson, who is currently the state’s attorney general, said his legal team has been preparing for months for the possibility of a second Trump term – an endeavor that included a “line-by-line” review of Project 2025, the 900+ page policy blueprint drafted by the president-elect’s conservative allies.And the governors of Illinois and Colorado this week unveiled a new coalition designed to protect state-level institutions against the threat of authoritarianism, as the nation prepares for a president who has vowed to seek retribution against his political enemies and to only govern as a dictator on “day one”.“We know that simple hope alone won’t save our democracy,” the Colorado governor, Jared Polis, said on a conference call announcing the group, called Governors Safeguarding Democracy. “We need to work together, especially at the state level, to protect and strengthen it.”With Democrats locked out of control in Washington, many in the party will turn to blue state leaders – governors, attorneys general and mayors – as a bulwark against a second Trump administration. For these ambitious Democrats, it is also an opportunity to step into the leadership void left by Kamala Harris’s defeat.Progressives such as Newsom and the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, are viewed as potential presidential contenders in 2028, while Democratic governors in states that voted for Trump such as Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are seen as models for how the party can begin to rebuild their coalition. And Tim Walz, Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, returned home to Minnesota with a national profile and two years left of his gubernatorial term.Leaders of the nascent blue state resistance are pre-emptively “Trump-proofing” against a conservative governing agenda, which they have cast as a threat to the values and safety of their constituents. As a candidate, Trump promised to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history”. In statements and public remarks, several Democrats say they fear the Trump administration will seek to limit access to medication abortion or seek to undermine efforts to provide reproductive care to women from states with abortion bans. They also anticipate actions by the Trump administration to roll back environmental regulations and expand gun rights.“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people – you come through me,” Pritzker said last week.Unlike in 2016, when Trump’s victory shocked the nation, blue state leaders say they have a tested – and updated – playbook to draw upon. But they also acknowledge that Trump 2.0 may present new and more difficult challenges.Ferguson said Trump’s first-term executive actions were “often sloppy”, which created an opening for states to successfully challenge them in court. Eight years later, and after studying Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47, he anticipates the next Trump White House will be “better prepared” this time around.Pritzker said Trump was surrounding himself with “absolute loyalists to his cult of personality and not necessarily to the law”. “Last time, he didn’t really know where the levers of government were,” the governor said on a call with reporters this week. “I think he probably does now.”The courts have also become more conservative than they were when Trump took office eight years ago, a direct result of his first-term appointments to the federal bench, which included many powerful federal appeals court judges and three supreme court justices.The political landscape has also changed. In 2016, Trump won the electoral college but lost the popular vote. Despite Republican control of Congress, there were a number of Trump skeptics willing – at least initially – to buck the president during his first two years in office.This time around, Trump is all but certain to win the popular vote, and he made surprising gains in some of the bluest corners of the country.Though the former president came nowhere close to winning his home state of New York, he made significant inroads, especially on Long Island. At a post-election conference last week, New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, struck a more neutral tone. Hochul, who faces a potentially tough re-election in 2026, vowed to protect constituents against federal overreach, while declaring that she was prepared to work with “him or anybody regardless of party”.In New Jersey, where Trump narrowed his loss from 16 percentage points in 2020 to five percentage points in 2024, the Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, acknowledged the result was a “sobering moment” for the party and country. Outlining his approach to the incoming administration, Murphy said: “If it’s contrary to our values, we will fight to the death. If there’s an opportunity for common ground, we will seize that as fast as anybody.”Progressives and activists say they are looking to Democratic leaders to lead the charge against Trump’s most extreme proposals, particularly on immigration.“Trump may be re-elected but he does not have a mandate to come into and rip apart our communities,” said Greisa Martínez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream Action, a network of groups that advocate for young people brought to the US as children, known as Dreamers.She called on state and local officials, as well as university heads and business leaders, to “use every tool at their disposal” to resist Trump’s mass deportation campaign, stressing: “There is a lot we can do to ensure Trump and his cabinet are not successful in their plans.”State attorneys general are again poised to play a pivotal role in curbing the next administration’s policy ambitions.“The quantity of litigation since the first Trump administration has been really off the charts – it’s at a new level,” said Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University in Wisconsin. “I fully expect that to continue in Trump 2.0.”There were 160 multi-state filings against the Trump administration during his four years in office, twice as many as were filed against Barack Obama during his entire eight-year presidency, according to a database maintained by Nolette.Many of the Democratic lawsuits succeeded – at least initially – in delaying or striking down Trump administration policies or regulations, Nolette said. Attorneys general can also leverage their state’s influence and economic power by entering legal settlements with companies. States have used this approach in the past to “advance their own regulatory goals”, Nolette said, for example, forcing the auto industry to adopt stricter environmental regulations.In a proclamation calling for a special session next month, Newsom asked the legislature to bolster the state’s legal funding to challenge – and defend California against – the Trump administration. Among his concerns, the California Democrat identified civil rights, climate action, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, as well as Trump’s threats to withhold disaster funding from the state and the potential for his administration to repeal protections shielding undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation.Trump responded on Truth Social, using a derisive nickname for the Democratic governor: “Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California. He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again,’ but I just overwhelmingly won the Election.”Democratic leaders in battleground states that Trump won are also calibrating their responses – and not all are eager to join the resistance.“I don’t think that’s the most productive way to govern Arizona,” the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, told reporters this week, according to the Arizona Capitol Times. Hobbs, who faces a potentially difficult re-election fight in 2026, said she would “stand up against actions that hurt our communities” but declined to say how she would respond if Trump sought to deport Dreamers or to nationalize the Arizona national guard as part of his mass deportation campaign.The state’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, who also faces re-election in two years, drew a harder line against Trump, vowing to fight “unconstitutional behavior” and protect abortion access, according to Axios. In an interview on MSNBC, Mayes said she had “no intention” of dropping the criminal case against allies of the former president who attempted to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory in the state.Yet she insisted there would be areas of common ground. She urged Trump to revive a bipartisan border deal that he had previously tanked and called on the next administration to send more federal resources and agents to help combat the flow of fentanyl into the US.With Democrats locked out of power in Washington, the new Indivisible Guide, a manual developed by former Democratic congressional staffers after Trump’s election in 2016 and recently updated to confront a new era of Maga politics, envisions a major role for blue states.“Over the next two years, your Democratic elected officials will make choices every single day about whether to stand up to Maga or whether to go along with it,” the Indivisible guide states. “Your spirited, determined advocacy will ensure that the good ones know they’ve got a movement behind them as they fight back – and the bad ones know they’re on notice.”Among the examples of actions blue state activists can demand their leaders consider, it suggests establishing protections for out-of-state residents seeking abortion access or gender-affirming care; refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and forging regional compacts to safeguard environmental initiatives, data privacy and healthcare.Democratic leaders at every level and across the country – even those in purple or red states – can serve as “backstops for protecting the democratic space”, said Mary Small, chief strategy officer at Indivisible.“The important things are to be proactive and bold, to be innovative and to work with each other,” she said. “I don’t think everybody has to have all of the answers right now, but to have that intention and that commitment and to not shrink down in anticipation of a more oppressive federal government.” More

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      The Republican and Democratic parties are killing electoral reform across the US | David Daley

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      Ohio’s extreme gerrymanders have enabled more than a decade of corruption, lawless behavior and unpopular legislation passed by lawmakers safely insulated from the ballot box.Voters tried to fix it by bringing a citizen-led independent redistricting commission to the ballot. Due to Republican subterfuge, they ended up voting against themselves. With breathtakingly Orwellian tactics, Ohio Republicans twisted the ballot language and presented it to voters as an initiative that would require gerrymandering rather than end it.When Ohioians arrived at Issue One on their ballots, they were told that a yes vote would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering”. Voters were understandably confused. So while redistricting reform won huge wins in the Buckeye state in 2015 and 2018, with more than 70% of the vote, this year 54% of Ohio voters rejected it.Most analyses of the 2024 elections have focused on the swing toward Republicans at the top of the ballot. But another trend could be more consequential: when citizens stood up across red, blue and purple states this year with reforms designed to strengthen democracy and make all elections more meaningful and competitive, the parties undermined them with brutal, deceptive tactics and submerged them in a swamp of dark money.It worked nearly every time. Unlike 2018, when pro-democracy reforms won big nationwide, this time, reformers were routed.This is frightening news. The vast majority of states – even the purple ones – are either safely Republican or Democratic, or have been gerrymandered that way. Ballot initiatives and citizen-driven reforms uniting voters across party lines have been a rare bright spot and showed a possible path to defeat extremism and entrenched one-party control. But not this year.This year brought defeats – and Ohio-style trickery – across the map, and on a wide variety of pro-voter reforms, including redistricting reform, ranked-choice voting and open primaries. One state, Missouri, even jumped ahead of reformers and banned them in advance with a new prohibition on ranked-choice voting and open primaries – cleverly rolled into an amendment headlined by a ban on “noncitizen voting”, which, of course, isn’t actually happening there or anywhere.Voters in Colorado, Nevada and Idaho advanced initiatives that would have created open primaries and advanced either four or five candidates to a ranked-choice general election. Reformers hoped to give growing numbers of independent voters a say in which candidates are on the ballot in November, and ensure that candidates need a majority to win – instead of a fraction of a fraction of voters in low-turnout, closed primaries.The parties and their dark-money allies pushed back, hard. In Idaho, rightwingers determined to maintain their grip on power ran ads filled with both lies and red meat to outrage the base. “They have open borders. They want open bathrooms. They need open primaries,” claimed one of the most ridiculous and misleading, but effective, mailers.Leonard Leo’s billion-dollar dark-money network – which, after capturing the US supreme court and multiple levels of the judiciary, has now cast its eye on locking in far-right minority rule in the states – dispatched its operatives to mislead voters with one dishonest claim after another about ranked-choice voting. In one especially rich claim, opponents funded by billionaires and the wealthiest rightwing foundations have created front groups to argue that ranked-choice voting would make it easier for the wealthy to buy elections.The true agenda is clear: to protect and defend extreme lawmakers who perform best in base-driven primaries with multiple candidates and a small, divided electorate. That’s why a constellation of groups with ever-shifting names – but with the same far-right foundations and even election deniers behind them – have engaged in this multimillion-dollar scare operation.In Nevada, both Democrats and Republicans (and their aligned groups) spent millions in a successful effort to defeat open primaries and ranked choice. The state’s political elites – the still powerful machine built by the late senator Harry Reid and the Maga state Republican apparatus – built an odd coalition to brand a heretofore popular political reform, incorrectly, as “unproven” and “complicated”.Some Colorado Democrats, and even advocates of ranked-choice voting elsewhere such as Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, sadly swallowed Leo’s talking points whole to ensure the party retained power in this growing Democratic bastion where a record half of registered voters are unaffiliated.Perhaps what’s happening here is no surprise. Citizens want to reclaim state legislatures that have been distorted by gerrymandering and captured by unrepresentative winners of party primaries. The powerful want to close off one of the last avenues for reform.After all, Ohio’s unbreakable gerrymander, now in its 14th year, is so extreme that only four of 99 state house races were within five points this year, and just one of 17 state senate races. Uncompetitive elections push all the action to low-turnout primaries, where the tiniest percentage of the base can select unrepresentative candidates to coast into the general – and then advance unpopular legislation such a six-week abortion ban once in office.Ohio’s supreme court rejected the state house and congressional maps as unconstitutional not once, not twice, but seven times. A cowed governor, Mike DeWine, conceded that the maps could have been “more clearly constitutional”, but went along with the party line anyway. Lawmakers lawlessly disobeyed, ran out the clock, then found Trump-appointed federal judges with longstanding ties to Leo and the Federalist Society to impose the gerrymandered maps.“It is hard to recognize Ohio,” the former governor Bob Taft, a Republican, told me. “The consequences of extreme gerrymandering have been obvious here.”Idaho’s far right, meanwhile, has captured much of a once-traditional Republican machinery and moved to relentlessly consolidate power. In 2018, voters found an end run around the legislature and used the initiative process to expand Medicaid. More than 60% of voters supported the measure, after lawmakers refused to accept Affordable Care Act dollars during multiple sessions.Lawmakers, recognizing that the initiative represented a last opportunity for the public to check a hijacked legislature, endeavored time and again to make one of the nation’s most difficult initiative processes even more onerous and to oppose efforts to open Idaho’s system to voices beyond their own. Then, when courts and determined citizens pushed forward anyway, the legislature drowned them out with the support of organizations funded not only by Leonard Leo but also the Koch brothers, the Bradley Foundation and DonorsTrust (“the dark-money ATM of the right”).There was one significant bright spot last Tuesday: Washington DC, which overwhelmingly adopted ranked-choice voting despite some misleading efforts by officials from the district’s dominant Democratic party.But the simple truth is that the structural reform we so desperately need has become harder, as those from both the left and the right who prefer to govern without majorities, and without persuading everyone to their side, recognize it as a threat. They won’t stop here, and they have said so.Leo and his henchmen, armed with dark money, having grabbed control of election machinery, will stop at nothing to expand their ill-won and ill-held power. These fights will arrive in more state capitols and in Congress. They are trying to steal control while hiding behind phoney names and untold billions.The good news is that their scam is easy to see through. The test for our democracy – and for reformers – will be how to rise to this new challenge in a polarized, partisan moment. No task will be harder. None is more important.

      David Daley is the author of the new book Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count More