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AOC’s power comes from her outsider status. Can that endure? | Moira Donegan
She spoke loudly and with confidence, gesticulated broadly, and returned, several times over the course of her seven-minute remarks, to the struggles of working families. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New York and standard-bearer for the post-Bernie Sanders US left, may have been an unlikely choice for a lengthy primetime speech at the Democratic national convention’s opening night. The last time she spoke at the Democratic convention, in 2020, she was given just a minute and a half, in which she indicted the party establishment from the left and endorsed Sanders’ campaign for the nomination, which by then had failed.But this time, the party showcased Ocasio-Cortez as one of its prime talents, and her rhetoric was starkly different. Though she focused her remarks on her trademark politics of class, emphasizing the struggles of whose who worry about “rent checks and groceries”, she spoke, this time, in the Democrats’ most comfortable terms. Ocasio-Cortez used to speak of the “working class”. On Monday night, she praised Kamala Harris as “for the middle class because she is from the middle class”.The remarks, and Ocasio-Cortez’s starring role at the convention, underscore both her own transformation in Washington DC and the uneasy integration of the US left into the Democratic coalition. Her presence signals not only that Washington has changed the leftist members of “the Squad” – including AOC as well as the likes of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley – but also that the left’s arrival in Washington has changed the Democrats.For one thing, it would have been easy for the Harris-Walz campaign to freeze her out. After all, AOC has not always been willing to play ball with the House Democratic leadership’s agenda. She has withheld her vote on key legislative priorities, such as Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, frustrating the likes of Nancy Pelosi. And over the course of her time in Washington, she has frequently used Instagram Live, her preferred method of public communication, to sidestep the establishment media and address her constituents and supporters directly, often in ways that counteract the party’s preferred messaging.Most recently, she took to a livestream on 19 July to push back against the then growing number of high-profile Democrats who were calling on the president to drop out of the race, saying that she thought the ageing and embattled incumbent should continue his campaign. Biden dropped out just two days later. As the party rapidly coalesced around the vice-president, it seemed that AOC had made a dramatic miscalculation.Another version of the Democratic party probably would have repaid these affronts with icy exclusion. But for the Democrats of 2024, AOC is an asset that they cannot afford to lose.This is not only because of her youth, or the extreme force of her charisma – whatever the contradictions of her position, AOC remains an uncommonly powerful speaker, signaling the Democrats’ shift to the future after their party had long been criticized for failing to develop younger talent and reflecting a stark contrast with the Republicans, whose millennial talent pool is overrepresented with charmless male grievance grifters and sex-obsessed creeps. But it is also because AOC has unique credibility with two pools of voters that Democrats have alienated over the past year, voters they cannot win without: the left block that was animated by Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 and 2020, and the young.Biden’s successful 2020 coalition relied heavily on these voters – from the far-left Bernie supporters, who largely put aside their complaints about their hero’s treatment by the party to support Biden against a second Trump term, and young voters, who had similarly bucked historical trends to deliver an uncommonly high turnout for their age cohort.These voters, however, have drifted from the Democrats more recently. Some were turned off by Biden’s distaste for abortion; many felt that his age disqualified him, and found the ageing president an untenable vehicle for their future aspirations. But many from both of these camps began drifting away from the Democratic ticket not only because of the particular weaknesses of Biden as a candidate – they were driven away by moral outrage at his administration’s support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. These are voters who will not be so easily won back by a change of candidate; many of them are still waiting to see a change of policy.AOC is perhaps uniquely positioned, among the major Democrats who have quickly lined up to serve as Harris surrogates, to reach these voters. But her cooperation with the Democratic establishment could also threaten her credibility with parts of the left that define themselves by their opposition. At her speech on Monday, Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken critic of the war, said that Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire”. The Harris-Walz camp will likely use the clip in campaign promotions targeted at young voters. It is a valuable image for them. It is not yet clear what concessions AOC extracted in exchange for it.How long can Ocasio-Cortez walk this tightrope? Her career has been defined by her status as an insurgent critic of the party. But this position, which has long been AOC’s source of moral authority, may become a victim of her own success. She can’t keep claiming to be an outsider in a party that has rapidly reshaped itself in her image. But then again, it is her credibility with the left – her ability to claim status as an outsider – that is the very source of her influence.AOC’s mentor, Bernie Sanders – who campaigns as an independent, even though he has long caucused with the Democrats – has been able to maintain his distance from party leadership, showing uncommon integrity and consistency. But this stance, though it has won Sanders many moral and rhetorical victories, has largely excluded him from winning legislative ones. AOC seems to be taking a different track.She is embarking, instead, on what for American leftists is something of a novel path: an effort to join a governing coalition – and to take on the ambivalent responsibilities of real power.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More
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What to know about Bill Clinton and Tim Walz’s speeches tonight at Democratic convention
Bill Clinton and Tim Walz will headline the Democratic national convention Wednesday night.The former president will give an address before the vice-presidential hopeful – Clinton’s 11th Democratic convention speech.In 2020, he tore into Donald Trump, remarking: “If you want a president who defines the job as spending hours a day watching TV and zapping people on social media, he’s your man.” In 2016, he made the case for his wife, Hillary Clinton, to be elected, and in 2012, he made a passionate and clear case for why Barack Obama deserved a second term.Walz, the Minnesota governor, will close out the night by officially accepting his party’s nomination for vice-president.Walz’s speech is an opportunity for him to introduce himself to a much wider audience of voters as he seeks to build on the intense enthusiasm surrounding his campaign with Kamala Harris.Here’s what we know about tonight’s speeches from Bill Clinton and Tim Walz.When is Bill Clinton’s convention speech?Bill Clinton is expected to deliver remarks on Wednesday during the 6pm-10pm main programming block.When is Tim Walz’s convention speech?Tim Walz will close out the third night of the convention with a primetime address in the same main programming block.After delays on Monday saw Joe Biden’s address knocked out of prime time, Tuesday’s keynote speech from Barack Obama started earlier, around 10pm ET.How can I watch the speech?The party will livestream the convention on its Democratic national convention website and on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.The Guardian has a team of reporters in Chicago and will be covering the speech in depth, including on a live blog.Major news networks are likely to carry primetime programming. PBS will have live coverage beginning at 8pm each night.What will Walz talk about?Wednesday’s theme is “A Fight for Our Freedoms”, mirroring a message that Harris has embraced in her campaigning. The Democratic nominee has invigorated crowds with her argument that fundamental freedoms are on the line this year, telling voters: “We won’t go back.”Walz may use his speech to highlight how he has similarly embraced that message during his gubernatorial tenure. Since Minnesota Democrats won a legislative trifecta in 2022, Walz has signed a series of bills to enshrine abortion rights into state law, protect access to gender-affirming care and make it easier for people with a felony conviction to vote.“The story here is simple and it’s one that will resonate with Americans across the country,” Minyon Moore, the convention chair, said on Sunday. “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are fighting for the American people and America’s future – Donald Trump is only fighting for himself.”Who else is speaking Wednesday?In addition to Walz and Clinton, Wednesday’s programming will include some of the best-known names in the Democratic party, including Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker. Top congressional Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader; Cory Booker, senator of New Jersey; and Amy Klobuchar, senator of Minnesota, are slated to speak as well. Some of the party’s biggest rising stars – including Pete Buttigieg, the US transportation secretary; Wes Moore, the Maryland governor; and Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor – will address the convention.Who else is speaking at the convention?The full lineup of speakers has not yet been released, but several big names – plus many new lawmakers and rising stars – are expected to appear.
Thursday, 22 August: Vice-president Kamala Harris will close out the fourth night of the convention.
What else has happened so far at the convention?The first night of the convention included speeches from Biden, Hillary Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside the convention.Joe Biden closed out the first night, delivering a reflective and optimistic 50-minute address, urging the nation to elect Kamala Harris to protect American democracy.Both Barack and Michelle Obama gave full-throated endorsements of Kamala Harris Wednesday night, with Michelle arguing: “Kamala Harris is more than ready for this moment.”“America is ready for a new chapter. America is ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris,” Barack Obama said in his keynote address. More - in US Politics
Obamas cast Kamala Harris as their heir and ‘flip script on Trump’, says ex-aide
Barack and Michelle Obama have cast Kamala Harris as the heir to their political movement and flipped the script on Donald Trump, former Obama adviser David Axelrod told the Guardian on Wednesday.The Obamas delivered electrifying speeches at the Democratic national convention in Chicago on Tuesday night. The former US president compared Harris’s ascent to his own by observing: “I’m feeling hopeful because this convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible.”Michelle, the former first lady, invoked her husband’s hope-and-change campaign by remarking: “Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?… A familiar feeling that’s been buried too deep for too long. You know what I’m talking about? It’s the contagious power of hope.”Both addresses were lauded by Axelrod, chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns, in an interview after an event organised by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report on the sidelines of the convention.He said: “When Barack Obama got the call in 2004 that he was going to give the keynote speech at the Democratic convention, he said immediately, I know what I want to say, I want to talk about my story as part of the larger American story, and he’s always done that. He and Michelle are great American stories and they take pride in that and the values associated with that.“You heard it last night and Kamala Harris is very much rolling down those same tracks. They flipped the script on Trump. Trump’s play is to try and make people alien and what they did was make Trump alien to the values that most Americans share, so I thought those speeches were incredibly effective.”Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama in the White House, said there was “no doubt” that the Obamas regard Harris as their natural heir.“I think they feel very much a kinship with Harris and they see her as carrying that torch forward of what America really is about: the time-honored values of community and selflessness and hard work and all the things that we like to associate with what it means to be an American. She is out there talking about that and it’s one of the reasons why she is right in the middle of this race.”The mood in Chicago has been buoyant, with fears of a repeat of the party’s chaotic 1968 convention in the same city evaporating: instead of division and acrimony there is unity and joy. The gloom around Joe Biden’s candidacy has lifted as opinion polls show Harris pulling narrowly ahead of the Republican nominee Trump in swing states. Can it last?Axelrod, who was a student in Chicago and has spent much of his career in the city, commented: “I don’t know how you measure when honeymoons end but here’s the reality of the situation. This turnover happened very late in the race. She has had a very good month not just because of a honeymoon, but because of the way she’s presented herself, the way her campaign has positioned her. She now has a convention, which is a four-day commercial.“You get to Labor Day because next week is sort of a dead week and then the following week you have the debate. If she does reasonably well in the debate that takes you into late September and people are already voting. I think she has the ability to extend this and it may just turn out that it’s not a honeymoon but the consolidation of the base and then it becomes a scrum for the remaining voters.”As the Obamas define Harris as a personification of American values, Trump has been struggling to land a counter-punch. He has sampled attacks on her racial identity and intelligence as well as peculiar nicknames such as “Laffin’ Kamala”, “Lyin’ Kamala” and “Kamabla”. Axelrod believes that the former president is flailing.“He’s a jazz man when it comes to all of this and he gets in front of a crowd and he tries to find the groove and he throws everything against the wall. It’s generally bile, it’s personal and it’s negative. But he’s just trying out themes. The campaign seems more rational than the candidate and that’s been true from the beginning. The question is whether they can get him under control and on the message.“The best chance is for them to try and make her sort of Biden-lite and make her wear the jacket for whatever it is that people are unhappy with about Biden’s policies. But it’s hard to get people to buy the idea that the vice-president was actually pulling all the strings. That’s the flip side of nobody really knowing much about her. I don’t think they believe that and so there aren’t that many good options for that.”But he warned: “That’s not to say this isn’t a really close race and I’m not sure, if the race were today, that Trump wouldn’t win. But the motion is certainly in her direction.”Asked by the Guardian for a final prediction, Axelrod shot back: “Are you nuts? My prediction is it’s going to be a very close race. And I would not have made that prediction a month ago.” More
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Robert F Kennedy Jr to drop out of presidential race by end of week – report
Robert F Kennedy Jr is set to drop his maverick campaign for president, it has been reported, amid speculation that the independent and environmental lawyer will throw his support behind Donald Trump.The ABC network, citing “sources familiar with the decision”, reported that Kennedy would formally leave the race on Friday. The report followed an announcement on his campaign website that he would make a statement that day “about the present historical moment and his path forward” in Phoenix that would be live-streamed on X and other social media.Speculation that Kennedy could abandon his presidential bid intensified after his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, revealed on a podcast on Tuesday he was considering that option – and considering endorsing Trump, the Republican nominee. Shanahan suggested Kennedy’s continued candidacy risked diverting support away from Trump, thereby helping to elect Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.Her comments were immediately welcomed by Trump, who told CNN that Kennedy – who he denounced as recently as April as a “Democrat plant” and a “radical left liberal” – was “a brilliant guy”.“I didn’t know he was thinking about getting out, but if he is thinking about getting out, certainly I’d be open to it,” said Trump, who, perhaps not coincidentally, is also due to speak in the Phoenix area on Friday, at a campaign rally.In truth, the pair seem to have been in contact for weeks amid an apparent rapprochement.A leaked recording of a telephone call between them emerged last month during the Republican national convention – just days after Trump survived an assassination attempt – when the former president solicited Kennedy’s support and the two discussed the possibility of Kennedy joining a future administration.Trump also appeared to endorse some of the anti-vaccine theories, for which Kennedy has become noted, during the call.In an interview with NBC News, JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, acknowledged there had been a stream of “communication” between the two campaigns.“I haven’t spoken to RFK personally, but I know there’s been a lot of communication back and forth between RFK … [and] this campaign,” he said. “Our argument to RFK, and I’ll make it right now, because, of course, he hasn’t dropped out yet, is, look: if you want a Democratic party that protected American workers and stood for strong borders, maybe disagreed with Republicans on things like tax policy, that party doesn’t exist any more.”Kennedy initially sought the Democratic nomination before abandoning that attempt to launch an independent campaign.His presidential bid has been hit by a spate of damaging stories that have undermined his efforts to present himself as a serious figure.An allegation surfaced in a Vanity Fair article that he had groped a family babysitter, to which Kennedy responded not with a denial, but by saying: “I am not a church boy.”He added: “I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”A further embarrassing disclosure was unearthed by the New Yorker, which described how Kennedy once left the carcass of a dead bear cub in Central Park and placed a bicycle next to it to make it look like an accident.Kennedy pre-empted the article by posting a video on X of him admitting the episode in a conversation with Roseanne Barr, as the pair sat in a spacious kitchen.The campaign has also run into money troubles in recent weeks, as Kennedy’s poll standing has dropped. It reportedly ended July $3.5m in debt, while Shanahan – who has contributed her own funds to it – was recently given a $1m refund. More
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Joe cried, Kamala cried and so did I. Can this be the Democrats putting on a better show than Trump ever did? | Emma Brockes
“He looks perkier,” said my nine-year-old, passing the screen as I watched footage of Joe Biden speaking on the first day of the Democratic national convention in Chicago. The president did, indeed, look perkier, borne aloft by the gratitude of 23,000 people in the hall and the millions beyond it for the fact he is no longer seeking re-election. By itself, this moment would have lifted the occasion above the norm. But the Democratic convention this year is so uniquely dramatic, so unprecedented in US history, that it rivals and possibly outstrips even President Obama’s nomination in 2008. And Biden’s heart-wrenching appearance was just the beginning.“When we fight, we win,” said Kamala Harris in her opening speech on Monday and there it was, that strange moment of realisation that what she was saying might actually be true. Strange because it’s the kind of thing Democrats always say and that, in recent years, has been accompanied by a terrible wah-wah downward arpeggio on the trombone. Limp, disorganised, outshone by Donald Trump; that had been the campaign to date. The speed of the turnaround and the sheer force of the narrative that now propels Harris forwards, has unleashed a psychic energy so strong that on stage in Chicago it practically gave off sparks. Democrats have the scent of blood in their nostrils and thank God, they’re finally chasing it.Watching footage from the first two days, I kept thinking of Joan Didion’s biting piece about the 1988 presidential race, in which she remarked on the emptiness of staged political events. Reporters, she observed, like to cover a presidential campaign because “it has balloons”. You know what she means, which only makes the genuine emotion witnessed in Chicago this week all the more thrilling. So rare is it for balloon-based political events to do anything other than bore or depress, that when one does, it lets loose not only a primary giddiness, but a second-tier hysteria triggered by incredulity at the presence of the first.And so it was here, in the form of wave after wave of what felt like history. President Biden, smiling, rueful, apparently much more cogent now that the need to perform has been removed, and deeply touching in his ability to do that rarest of things, act for the collective good at his own expense. The alleviation of anxiety in the audience even allowed for the return of some of that old Biden charisma. It was emotional! Friends on the east coast stayed up late watching, and cried. I cried! Harris, in the audience, had tears in her eyes, and Biden himself was emotional as he was led off stage by his daughter. The political obituaries in the US press the next day were elegiac, sentimental, all the things that would’ve been undone had he stayed in the race. Evan Osnos in the New Yorker called Biden “a man whose career describes a half century of American history”, and that was the feeling – a real “thank you for your service” moment.Biden left it to younger Democrats really to go after Trump, and boy, did they. On the first day, congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Texas called Trump “a 78-year-old lifelong predator, fraudster and cheat” who “cosies up to his role model, Vladimir Putin”. On the second night, Michelle Obama, after the years-long failure of her mantra “when they go low, we go high”, came up with an absolute corker, referring to Trump as the beneficiary of “the affirmative action of generational wealth”.She gave high praise to working mothers – the kind of “unglamorous” labour that holds the country together – while her husband got a huge laugh off Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes”. It was a throwback to the good old days of humour and levity in a party long mired in depression and panic. “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” said Michelle and the crowd erupted.What struck you about all this was the way in which it seized for Democrats a dynamic that has lately been the reserve of Republicans. Trump’s success is a side-effect of his pure entertainment value and the fact he is “disruptive” in a way that, for large numbers of his followers, is simply a fun thing to be part of. Now that same sense of drama and disruption animates the other side. People at the convention chanted “USA!” while Hillary Clinton – for whom this moment must be bittersweet – graciously talked up Harris and generational unity came in via the rallying cries of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Bernie Bros.No successful production can do without at least a little hokiness, and here it was in the form of Doug Emhoff, in line to be the first “second gentleman”, should his wife win the White House, on stage doing his lovable dork act. Emhoff, with much aw shucks self-mockery, even described the first time he rang Harris to set up a blind date. It felt like a flex: look at this married couple who actually love one another compared with those estranged freaks on the other side.There were notes of caution and warnings against complacency. The stakes are so much higher now that we know who Trump is, and that, like a squirrel cornered in an attic, his desperation if elected is liable to lead to attack. But there was, this week, also a sense of let us enjoy the sense of glamour, and excitement, and youth, and – yes, hope – of this moment before we get to the terror of the next few months and the actual election.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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Democrats use AI in effort to stay ahead with Latino and Black voters
Latino and Black-led Democratic and progressive organizations are mobilizing to come up with novel uses of AI to reach voters of color.On Discord, a social messaging app that connects gamers, it’s taking the form of a smiling chatbot powered by artificial intelligence that evokes Pixar’s animated robot Wall-E. When you click, a conversation opens up that says: “This is the very beginning of your legendary conversation with Vote-E.”You can ask election related questions such as “How do I register to vote?” or when North Carolina’s voter registration deadline is – and the answers are almost instantaneous.Vote-E is an experiment in how to crack one of the toughest problems for Democrats – reaching voters of color, especially younger ones, using platforms where they actually spend time, and persuading them to vote for Democrats. And it comes at a transformative, but uncertain time for the party, with Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, who must use existing infrastructure to beat Donald Trump.NextGen America, which built Vote-E and is one of the nation’s largest youth voter organizations, says it allows young men to access the bot from Discord chats and Twitch streams of Latino and Black gaming influencers.“We’re seeing voter turnout gaps between Black men and women and Latino men and women,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, NextGen America’s president, noting that while there’s a focus on connecting with young people on college campuses, not everyone is there. The chatbot is active in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina.It’s just one example of progressive groups of color experimenting with artificial intelligence which wasn’t on their radar four years ago: AI chatbots are now also recruiting Latino voters from WhatsApp and Black voters from Facebook Messenger; they’re using natural language processing to record voter interactions with canvassers and identify shared concerns; and even using it to index and identify friendly Spanish-language sites to place an ad touting Democrats’ clean energy plan.With the election mere months away, the challenge facing Democrats remains how to galvanize younger voters and voters of color.While more Latinos turned out in 2020 than ever before, Hispanics still lag behind white, Black, and Asian and Pacific Islander voters as a proportion of their population of eligible voters, according to Catalist, a progressive data hub, which noted this is true across communities of color, “where non-voting rates are substantially higher”.Héctor Sánchez Barba, the president and chief executive of Mi Familia Vota, told companies he was less interested in their diversity dollars than in their budgets and expertise in the realm of data, research, and innovation. It’s why he recruited Denise Cook, a Cuban American former enterprise software architect who spent 16 years at IBM to join MFV as its chief data and innovation officer. She leads an all-Latina team, which created its own chatbot and uses AI to have human-sounding, bilingual conversations with Latino voters on platforms like WhatsApp.Canvassers with the group ask for permission to record conversations with voters on their mobile phones or tablets. Those interactions are then turned into data using natural language processing, a type of AI. This way, MFV is able to quickly summarize voter priorities and figure out if it is speaking about the economy, reproductive rights or climate optimally to voters.“We need this kind of brainpower when we’re fighting the biggest enemy our community has ever had,” Sánchez Barba said of Trump. “This is about using the most important technological advancements, including artificial intelligence, for good and to save our democracy.”Many leaders of color said they are mindful of pitfalls around AI but open to harnessing its power and testing possible strategies. Larry Huynh, the president of the American Association of Political Consultants and the founder of Trilogy Interactive, is so interested in incorporating AI into political campaigns that he followed leaders in other industries by creating an internal taskforce at his company.He believes campaigns should follow the lead of brands, which use AI voiceovers of celebrities and public figures, to have their natural mouth movements seamlessly disseminate campaign messages. Huynh’s research has found AI voices tailored to their target audience – young male speaker, young male voter, say – appear to be more persuasive.One example he gave is of an allied group creating a video of the candidate – now Harris – speaking perfect Spanish in her own voice aimed at Arizona or Nevada voters.“If it’s well-delivered and it doesn’t seem odd or off, some voters could appreciate that communication in their predominant language,” he said.Putting out a wholly AI-made Harris, however, would be highly scrutinized both from within the party and by Republicans. Harris is already a target of deepfakes that put words in her mouth as well as ones meant to sexualize and demean her. Yet another deepfake of her, even a positive one, could strike the wrong chord. A Trump has said she used AI to fake a huge rally crowd. The photo of her campaign stop was real, though. Concerns over disinformation have only been heightened by the spread of AI-generated images of Trump getting arrested in New York and an AI robocall that mimicked Biden’s voice telling New Hampshire voters not to cast a ballot.Still, progressive groups are charging forward. Poder Latinx, an advocacy group committed to building Latino political power, created an ad touting the clean energy plan from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. It was timed to coincide with the popular Copa América soccer tournament last month. Partnering with Mundial Media, the group was able to serve the ad to US Latinos reading Spanish-language news sites in places like Arizona. Mundial Media’s Cadmus AI engine crawled the sites and indexed their keywords to make sure the soccer-themed clean energy ad would fit in with the content on the pages.Yadira Sanchez, the co-founder of Poder Latinx, was happy with how the campaign reached voters, over-delivering impressions and click-thru rates from Latinos, including finding a 64% Hispanic male audience.“We know that the best connection is voter to voter contact. This technology is complementing the on-the-ground canvassing we are already using,” she said. “Technology, AI in particular, is great to reach younger, more online voters.“But AI may not be viewed as safe enough for initiatives that require serious resources to scale up in time for November. And there are concerns it could freak out voters in the wrong context.In focus groups in Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia this year, Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPac, found “hesitation” from Black voters around AI.“There’s a concern people have with what they’re seeing and where it’s coming from exactly,” she said, noting voters “don’t know what to trust and are suspicious and skeptical of everything.”Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a group that advocates for Black Americans and has a $25m program for 2024, has met with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, alongside senior staff at Meta, Google and OpenAI, to call for commitments on how AI will be used around election tools, which he says aren’t ready for primetime.“Imagine if there were no regulations for cars and it was all about who could get their new vehicle to market fastest?” he said, citing Musk’s Tesla, which has recalled its latest model four times. “It’s Tesla on steroids. At least cars get recalled, but there is no infrastructure or body that recalls tech.”Quentin James, founder and president of The Collective Pac, a group that works to elect Black Democrats and is using the Facebook Messenger chatbot to get registration information from voters, stressed that deepfakes or ads where one campaign is using the likeness of their opponent to mislead voters should be shut down immediately.Still, he said, Democrats must be willing to use the tools at their disposal to beat Trump, because the other side will be looking at them as well.“I don’t know if FEC law can catch up to this in a few months, so we should use it to our advantage,” he said. “There’s no way we can control what happens with technology in this short time period.” More
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Midwestern guys: Vance and Walz’s opposing views of being from the US heartland
For 30 years, Michael Bailey worked at the former Armco steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, eventually becoming president of a union that represented thousands of workers. Among them was James Vance, grandfather and sometimes stand-in father of the Republican party’s current vice-presidential candidate, JD, who worked as a skilled tradesperson at the plant.So Bailey, today a 71-year-old pastor at the Faith United church in downtown Middletown, says he’s confused by claims from Donald Trump’s running mate that he “grew up as a poor kid” in Middletown.“As a rigger, [James Vance] made good money. Where he lived, on McKinley Street, he didn’t live in poverty,” he says. “JD came up in a middle-income family. He didn’t come up on the rough side of town.”Politicians assuming working-class identities to attract votes is nothing new. But this year’s election pits vice-presidential candidates against each other – ostensibly picked for their “real American” chops – who hold contrasting views of what it means to be a boots-on-the-ground midwesterner.Endless corn fields, small towns and wide-open highways are characteristics of life in the midwest that most can agree on. Beyond that, experts say the region is far more complex.Cities such as Chicago, Detroit and Cincinnati are home to millions of people that, for a time during the 20th century, were among the most innovative in the world.“Midwesterners have historically been on the frontlines of progressive politics and education. Midwesterners also have been innovators in both an economic and cultural sense,” says Diane Mutti Burke, the director of the Center for Midwestern Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.But many agree there are a few features that typically set midwesterners apart.“Midwesterners also are said to be ‘nice’,” says Mutti Burke. “The idea is that midwesterners are often friendly and gracious to a fault.”Perhaps that’s why Democratic party vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz’s characterization of Vance and Trump as “weird” last month has struck such a chord with voters in the midwest, propelling the Harris-Walz ticket to a four-point lead in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in a recent poll.As governor of Minnesota, Walz’s brand of “nice” saw him introduce universal free breakfast and lunch for K-12 students in the state last year. The move was informed by his previous firsthand experience as a high school teacher who saw that lower-income kids using different colored food tickets to others could end up being stigmatized.What’s more, Walz has asked to appear on Millennial Farmer, a popular YouTube channel run by a Minnesota crop farmer that depicts everyday, midwestern farm life, despite its host’s anti-Democrat leanings. That request has yet to be fulfilled.At his first rally with Kamala Harris in Philadelphia on 6 August, Walz went straight after Vance’s midwestern chops, saying sarcastically: “Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires.”Vance has defended his upward mobility as illustrative of having succeeded in achieving the American dream.For his part, Vance has said he’d like to increase the child tax credit, currently at $2,000 per child, to $5,000, and eliminate the upper income threshold, which currently stands at $200,000 for single tax filers and $400,000 for couples.However, this month Vance failed to vote on a bill to increase the child tax credit program, claiming it would have failed regardless of whether he had taken part or not. The day of the vote, Vance was at the border in Arizona falsely claiming that the vice-president was the current administration’s “border czar”. (Harris aides have said that she was never given the responsibility of policing the border.)While Vance visited with picketing auto workers in Ohio last October, those who have closely watched his 18 months in office as a US senator say that, compared to Walz, he hasn’t achieved anything substantial for midwesterners.“Walz has been a teacher, a coach, a governor [and] a congressman,” said Charles “Rocky” Saxbe, a former senior member of Ohio’s Republican party who opposes the Maga movement. “I think when you look at vice-presidential contests – to the extent that they matter – you want someone who can step into the role of presidency, if it’s necessary and you want someone who has leadership experience, which JD Vance has never had.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnsurprisingly, Vance’s camp disagree, citing his working with Democrats to introduce rail safety and banking regulation bills as evidence of his political achievements.Politics aside, there’s an obvious financial gap dividing the two candidates. While in 2022 Walz earned $127,629 as governor of Minnesota, Vance raked in more than $1m the same year through a salary and company profits at a venture capital firm, a property rental, book royalties and from a host of investments. The Wall Street Journal suggests Vance’s net worth could be more than $10m.For some midwesterners, however, it’s the rhetoric that most keenly separates the two.Last year, Vance lobbied against, and failed to defeat, an amendment to the Ohio constitution to enshrine access to abortion. His “childless cat ladies” comments resurfaced last month were almost universally panned.But Bailey says his first opinions of Vance were formed several years ago, when the senator was in town publicizing his 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy.As a pastor and former president of a major workers’ union at Armco Steel, Bailey figured that someone of Vance’s emerging public persona meant that the senator might want to speak with him and other Middletown community leaders, so he gave Vance his business card.“I said: ‘I’d like to talk to you and if you’re thinking about running for office, we’d like to have your ear,’” says Bailey.“We’ve never had a response.”Despite Vance being elected nearly two years ago, his Middletown constituency office has no external signs or obvious indications highlighting the location for locals seeking to meet with him. A recent visit by the Guardian found the office door locked and the only communication made available by a staffer was through an intercom.Bailey says he thinks that rather than running for the benefit of Middletown and midwesterners at large, Vance is being used as a political stooge by the Silicon Valley billionaires who bankrolled his successful 2020 senate campaign.“I think they looked at someone with JD’s background,” he says, “and said: ‘We can use him to take away our democracy.’” More
