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      Trump and Vance are unmatched in ‘the Olympics of lying’, says Pete Buttigieg

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      The Republican presidential ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance might be slipping in the polls, but remains unmatched in “the Olympics of lying”, according to transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.The senior Democrat was responding Sunday, the final day of the Paris Olympics, to remarks by the Ohio senator criticizing Tim Walz for misstating his military service in an interview six years ago.The Minnesota governor, announced this week as running mate to Democratic candidate and vice-president Kamala Harris, served 24 years in the army national guard, but never in a combat zone, which he seemed to suggest in the 2018 interview.In an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Buttigieg assailed Vance, himself a former marine corps journalist, for disparaging Walz’s military record at a rally this week and moments earlier on the same show.“I watched that interview and watched JD Vance present himself as suddenly very particular about precision in speech and very concerned about honesty,” Buttigieg said.“He’s running with Donald Trump, somebody who has set records for lying in public life. He just gave a press conference where fact-checkers estimate that he told 162 distortions or lies. That, frankly, is just impressive in terms of being able to physically do that. It’s like the Olympics of lying.”It was quite the zinger from Buttigieg, a former intelligence officer in the US navy reserve who has established a reputation for eloquent takedowns of Republican political positions.“The fact a veteran wants to go out and disparage another veteran just goes against certainly everything I learned during my time in service,” he said.“The fact they have to go back to find a clip from 2018 to find the one time that he slipped up when he talks about the weapons of war that he carried and said something instead about carrying a weapon in war, it’s kind of an exception that proves the rule in terms of how hard you have to look to find Tim Walz saying anything that isn’t precise and accurate.”On State of the Union, Vance insisted he was not impugning Walz’s military service, but “the fact that he lied about his service for political gain”.“I think that’s what Tim Walz did. That’s what I was criticizing. And, yes, I do think it’s scandalous behavior,” he said.A statement from the Harris-Walz campaign on Saturday turned Vance’s earlier criticism around. “Governor Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country. In fact, he thanks Senator Vance for putting his life on the line for our country. It’s the American way,” it said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He did handle weapons of war and believes strongly that only military members trained to carry those deadly weapons should have access to them, unlike Donald Trump and JD Vance who prioritize the gun lobby over our children.”Buttigieg, on CNN, also condemned Vance’s much-maligned commentary that senior Democrats were “a bunch of childless cat ladies”. As part of his clean-up effort for those remarks, Vance claimed Sunday he was not criticizing people for not having children, but for “being anti-child”.“I don’t know which part of that is worse, the lie that he just told when he says he never criticized people for not having kids, because of course he very much did, including Kamala Harris and me and a lot of other people, millions of Americans, in fact, who he disparaged as childless cat ladies,” said Buttigieg, who has two adopted sons with his husband.“The other part, just as troubling, is saying that anybody who disagrees with him is anti-child. It’s part of just who he is, right? He seems incapable of talking about a vision for this country in terms of lifting people up, or building people up, or helping people out.” More

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      The Guardian view on the politics of joy: Democrats are embracing the sunny side | Editorial

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      “Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Tim Walz told Kamala Harris in his first speech after agreeing to become her running mate. He has continued to invoke the emotion, describing himself and Ms Harris as “joyful warriors” against opponents who “try and steal the joy”. Donald Trump has attacked Ms Harris’s ready laughter, but the Democrats are embracing an upbeat coconut-and-brat-meme atmosphere while Republicans invoke American carnage.Rarely have two presidential campaigns had such contrasting moods. Asked by a reporter what made him happy, Mr Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, retorted that “I smile at a lot of things including bogus questions from the media”, and that he was “angry about what Kamala Harris has done to this country”. Mr Trump – along with other rightwing populists globally – has channelled fear and rage to extraordinary effect.“Visceral states and feelings appear at the forefront of the political conversation” in this era, writes Manos Tsakiris, director of the University of London’s Centre for the Politics of Feelings. Voters are less rational and more emotional than we like to believe. Feelings may also have different effects upon different parts of society. US research suggests that dissatisfaction with politicians is more likely to send white voters to the polls and minority voters to other forms of activism.In the past, Democrats have tried to counter lies and loathing with facts. Though fear of Mr Trump motivated voters in 2020, warnings about his return have not proved as effective. People can be indifferent or passive in the face of threats such as the climate crisis. (In contrast, deliberative democracy – such as citizens’ assemblies or community activism – can generate a sense of political agency and re-engage them.) Giving people something to fight for, not just against, may be potent. But there is more research on how emotions such as anger affect politics than there is on emotions such as hope.Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva beat Jair Bolsonaro’s dark vision of Brazil in 2022 with hope, and Rahul Gandhi walked the length of India with a message of love and solidarity, an appeal that cost India’s divisive prime minister, Narendra Modi, his parliamentary majority this year. In Britain, the joy of the Liberal Democrats’ successful election campaign bubbled over. But critiques of “cruel optimism” and “hopium” note that invoking positive emotions can sometimes encourage people to feel good about bad political choices. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos won the Filipino presidency in 2022 with a feelgood social media campaign glamourising his family and his father’s dictatorship.In the US, Ronald Reagan’s sunny “morning in America” advert won plaudits, but Hubert Humphrey’s “politics of joy” didn’t win the Democrat the presidency. For Ms Harris – like Humphrey, a vice-president aspiring to the top job – urging voters to get happy when they’re worrying about bills could be counterproductive. The wrongfooted Trump campaign appears to be pivoting towards attacking her record.Ms Harris seems to recognise the problem, tempering the buoyant mood by acknowledging that grocery prices are too high, for instance. But if a recession hits, striking the right note will be even tougher, and policy will be still more pressing. The Democrats are hoping for the best – but even in a short campaign, vibes will only carry them so far. More

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      Nancy Pelosi continues to exercise ultimate power over Democrats

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      When you’ve lost Nancy Pelosi, you might as well clear out your desk.Amid all the chaos and whiplash in US politics over the past few weeks, one law remained constant: Pelosi is uniquely influential and has the power to make or break careers – even those of American presidents.The former House speaker did more than anyone else to re-engineer the race for the White House, breathing new life into her Democratic party and sending Donald Trump’s Republicans into a tailspin.Pelosi, 84, publicly encouraged 81-year-old Joe Biden to make a decision about his re-election campaign when he had already insisted he had no plans to step aside. Once he did drop out and endorse Kamala Harris, Pelosi scored another victory when former congressman Tim Walz was named as running mate.If Biden, a friend of Pelosi for 40 years, nurses a grudge about being shoved aside after his jarring debate performance, she might quote The Godfather: “It’s not personal … it’s strictly business.” The California congresswoman insists that her number one priority is ensuring her old nemesis Trump never returns to the White House.“I don’t think that President Biden would have stepped back without Nancy Pelosi’s influence,” said Susan Page, author of Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power. “He had made it clear that he didn’t want to. He had, in fact, announced that he was going to stay in the race.”Despite that, when Pelosi appeared on the MSNBC network’s Morning Joe programme – of which Biden is known to be regular viewer – she implied the matter was far from closed. “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” she said. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”Pelosi denies that her intervention on Morning Joe was part of a grand plan to force Biden’s hand. But in an interview with the New Yorker this week, she did state with unusual candour: “I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation. They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen.”Pelosi also rejected reports that she had been working the phones to mastermind a pressure campaign against the president. “I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next.”Still, Pelosi’s private conversations with Biden himself appear to have been crucial in assessing the risk of losing not only the White House but also Congress, which she cares about deeply.Page, who is Washington bureau chief of USA Today, continued: “Nancy Pelosi is more comfortable with the exercise of power than anyone I’ve ever covered and that was exhibited when she called Biden himself and had that tough conversation about whether he had a real prospect to win.”Finally Biden gave in and announced that he would not seek reelection, much to the relief of his party. He and Pelosi have not spoken since. When Page, interviewing Pelosi this week for USA Today, asked if the episode has affected her relationship with Biden, the former speaker replied: “You’d have to ask him.”Pelosi reportedly spoke to Harris, a fellow San Francisco Democrat, by phone within hours of Biden exiting the race and endorsed her the following day with “immense pride and limitless optimism for our country’s future”. The rest of the Democratic party quickly fell into line, avoiding a messy internal contest for the nomination.Some, however, caution against overestimating Pelosi’s influence.Elaine Kamarck, a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee and former White House official, said: “She’s pretty powerful, but I don’t think this is all about Nancy Pelosi. This is about the state party chairman in 50 states in the United States. It’s about 4,000 delegates who all came to the same conclusion. It’s about the House members. It’s a lot about congressman [James] Clyburn.“Put it this way: there’s way too much being made of one person. The entire party came to this conclusion on their own. We simply ran out of time. It was ridiculous to assume that there was going to be a national campaign for delegates mounted with two months to go. That was never going to happen. Nobody got into the race; nobody even whispering about getting into the race. This was the logical conclusion and as many people said, ‘Well, this is after all what we have vice-presidents for.’”When it came to choosing Harris’s own potential vice-president, Pelosi has said she thought any of the contenders would have been strong choices. But she made no secret of her enthusiasm for former House members to counter the way that, in her view, presidents tend to be more deferential to the Senate. Walz was a member of the House from 2007 to 2019 before becoming governor of Minnesota.Page commented: “She is famously loyal to people who have served in the House of Representatives because that has always been her place. She has huge regard for the House and disregard for the Senate, among other places with which she is often battling. When Walz was in the House, he was one of her majority makers. He served in a district that Democrats wouldn’t necessarily be expected to win and so that made him especially important to her.”Pelosi, whose husband Paul was attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant in their San Francisco home in 2022, is now House speaker emerita but will seek another term – her 20th – in November’s elections. The events of this tumultuous summer have underlined her status as the most powerful woman in American history, an accolade that might soon pass to Harris. What makes her so effective?Page said: “She listens more than she talks and that was true in this case as well. She listened to Democratic members of Congress who had concerns about Biden. She didn’t, I don’t think, try to marshal them; she was a hub that they knew they could call and talk to about that.“She’s also completely fearless. She’s a tough interview because she doesn’t care if you like her and she doesn’t care what you want to know. She knows what she cares about, what she wants to say, and that’s what she’s going to say. Some of the vulnerabilities that many politicians have, she doesn’t have.“That’s one reason she didn’t really aspire to the presidency and probably would have had trouble getting there. She was made for being a legislative leader, working behind the scenes, and that’s what she’s done in a way that’s been pretty historic.”This week, Pelosi spoke with reporters and columnists about her new book The Art of Power, My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House. According to an Associated Press account, she repeatedly declined to detail her conversations with Biden during the difficult transition.“At some point, I will come to terms with my, to peace, with my own role in this,” she said. “I think that part of all of our goals in this was to preserve his legacy, a fabulous legacy, that would go right down the drain if Bozo got elected to the White House.”Asked if her book title was an intended dig at Trump’s The Art of the Deal, Pelosi replied: “Nothing that I do has anything to do with him, except his downfall.” More

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      The evolution of Tim Walz: from high school teacher to VP nominee

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      Tim Walz must be having the wildest month of his life.After the Minnesota governor was announced as Kamala Harris’s pick for running mate, the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and independent senator Joe Manchin both put out statements praising him, an indication of his appeal across Democratic constituencies.“Dems in disconcerting levels of array,” Ocasio-Cortez joked on X.In the week since his name catapulted from relative obscurity – Walz flew up the shortlist of second-in-command possibles in a matter of two weeks, buoyed by clips of his TV appearances and memes about his dadliness – camo caps with orange writing have flown off the campaign merch shelves, a nod to Walz’s dressed-down midwestern attire.But beyond the appearances, his record in politics shows an evolution – a shift from a moderate Democrat winning over a Republican-leaning district to a governor who delivered a laundry list of progressive policy wins that has his critics fuming.Is he a progressive darling? Is he a moderate in progressive clothing? A centrist? Is this a bait-and-switch?Well, he’s Tim Walz.When you talk to people who know Walz, they all call him real, genuine, authentic, an everyman. There’s no reason to believe he’s putting on an act.But his way of selling policies is also calculated – a sign of a man who’s spent his life working to persuade people, from high school students tuned out in class to voters in a high-stakes presidential election. Beneath his “aw, shucks” demeanor is a skilled political operator.He’s knowingly tapped into a sort of universalism, selling Democrats’ ideas with broad popular appeal, said Larry Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota.“His thinking is very much around: how is it that we can present our policies and our political agenda as benefiting everyone?” Jacobs said.The pre-politics lifeWalz was born in the small town of West Point, Nebraska, in 1964, then lived in a couple of other small Nebraska towns, ultimately graduating in a class of 25 students from a high school in Butte. He enlisted in the army national guard at age 17, serving 24 years before retiring.His father died when he was 19. He has said his family relied on social security survivor benefits to stay afloat. Walz subsequently moved around, taking some classes in Houston, Texas, then building tanning beds in Arkansas.He ended up back in Nebraska at Chadron State College, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1989. He first taught abroad, in China, for a year after college, then returned to Nebraska to teach locally.Walz met his wife, Gwen, also a teacher, and they moved to Mankato, Minnesota, a mid-size town south-west of Minneapolis. They now have two children, Hope and Gus, and have shared how they used in-vitro fertilization to bring them into the world.He was a part of the football coaching staff that led the school to a state championship in 1999. His status as a coach played heavily in Harris’s introduction of him in Philadelphia on Tuesday.And he was the faculty adviser for a new chapter of the school’s gay-straight alliance, at a time when LGBTQ+ issues were not embraced by his own political party, a nod to his progressive bona fides.His start in politicsWalz has said an experience taking students to see a George W Bush rally, where his students were turned away because organizers believed they were Democrats, led him to seek public office.He first ran for Congress in Minnesota’s Republican-leaning first congressional district in 2006, beating the Republican incumbent in an upset. One of his first radio ads highlights the hearing loss he experienced from using heavy artillery in the national guard and how the medical services he accessed helped him to hear his young daughter singing in the morning.“I am running for Congress because I believe we as a country have a moral obligation to ensure that every father can hear his daughter sing – that every citizen receives the best care our medical community has to offer,” he says in the ad.View image in fullscreenHis record in Congress proved moderate. He often co-sponsored bills with Republicans and was one of the few Democrats to vote to hold the then attorney general Eric Holder in contempt of Congress in 2012.A gun owner and hunter, Walz previously received endorsements and donations from the National Rifle Association and had an A rating from the group, which plummeted to an F rating after he gave the group’s donations to charity and signed gun control measures as governor. He has said mass shootings, like those in Las Vegas and at a high school in Parkland, Florida, showed him the need for greater restrictions.Walz supported the Affordable Care Act and the Dream Act, and he voted in favor of repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” anti-gay policy.“He’s got deep core convictions, but he’s driven by the facts and he’s driven by what he hears from the people that he’s representing,” said Josh Syrjamaki, who was Walz’s chief of staff in the district from 2007 until he became governor in 2019.Syrjamaki recalled tense town hall meetings during the Tea Party days where Walz would get hammered by conservatives upset with his votes. He would listen to their appeals and try to find common ground.He remembers Walz having to defend his votes on issues such as the Affordable Care Act, which was“pretty unpopular in very conservative parts of the country”.In a 2014 debate with his Republican challenger, Walz used a line he’s brought up now – that neighborliness is not socialism – and said party affiliation didn’t prevent him from working with someone or from calling someone out.“When I disagree with them, I don’t disagree because they’re Republican or Democrat, I disagree when they’re wrong,” Walz said at the time.He ran for governor in 2018. Walz won the Democratic primary and then the general election that year – he has never lost a race.He did not receive the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party’s endorsement – that went to Erin Murphy, now the majority leader in the state senate, who ran on a “politics of joy” message that looks a lot like the joy Walz is harnessing on the campaign trail now. The idea is borrowed from another Minnesotan, former vice-president Hubert Humphrey.Murphy said she started getting texts from people after Harris took over the ticket, saying the vice-president has the politics of joy, too. Walz, whom she has worked closely with, has the same “happy warrior” energy.“He really does care about people. I don’t know how we do politics if we don’t care about people, but, you know, it shines through in him,” Murphy said.A progressive wishlistWalz’s first term as governor required working with a divided legislature, limiting what Democrats could do. But then, in 2022, Democrats won both chambers of the legislature and Walz won re-election, giving the party a trifecta.Democrats took the ball and ran with it.The 2023 legislative session made national headlines. Democrats in Minnesota put up posters listing their top priorities – protecting reproductive rights, paid family and medical leave, driver’s licenses for undocumented people, universal school meals, clean energy, childcare assistance, gun control measures, felony voting rights restoration, a ban on conversion therapy. They checked them all off, with Walz’s signature on each one.The session was branded the “Minnesota miracle”.“He has really got a record now as a governor that is kind of a progressive dream list,” said Amy Koch, a former Republican majority leader.In the years before the 2023 session, progressive organizers worked to build support among voters for these kinds of policies, said JaNaé Bates, the co-director of Faith in Minnesota, an advocacy group. The group endorsed Murphy in the 2018 Democratic primary, but its work in that race “moved the Overton window for all of the candidates”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It took us 10 years to build the kind of mandate that was then shovel-ready once we got the trifecta in 2022,” Bates said.Melissa Hortman, the speaker of the Minnesota house, said she, the senate majority leader and Walz had gotten together the Friday after the 2022 election and went through their to-do lists, which were “very aligned”.“We were a team right from the get-go,” she said. “There was none of that kind of difficult stuff behind the scenes of like, who’s going to get credit? We just were a team. We went out there and did it together.”Walz championed some items heavily from the start, like paid family leave. He also pushed for the child tax credit and clean energy mandate.Universal school meals, in particular, have emerged as a battle line in this election. Walz has defended them in simple terms: kids need to eat so they can learn. Some Republicans, including those who wrote Project 2025, the rightwing manifesto for a potential second Trump term, refer to school meals as an entitlement program that should be curtailed.View image in fullscreenSydney Jordan, a state representative who sponsored the universal school meals bill in the house, said Walz initially got on board with a previous measure against school lunch debt shaming, which evolved into universal school meals. She wears a button that says “feed the kids”.Democrats in the legislature say Walz’s guiding principle is to use policy to help as many people as possible. And if that falls into the progressive camp, so be it. Some of the policies, like paid family leave, are broadly popular, noted Jamie Long, a Democratic state representative.“Governor Walz has a record that I think progressives can be proud of, but I think one of the reasons why he is such a good fit for the ticket is that he’s able to communicate the policies that we were able to achieve in Minnesota in a way that everyday people can understand, and in a way that I think speaks across political difference and doesn’t alienate folks,” Long said.Walz might not call himself a progressive directly, but he wouldn’t bristle if you called him one, his colleagues say. And he staunchly defends every policy he has signed.“You cannot call him anything else after what he just did,” Jacobs, the professor, said of the progressive label. The leading edge of his party is progressive, so he works with them and finds policies that can win enough votes to pass and then help sell the party to voters again at election time.But Republican lawmakers have felt shut out of the process. Lisa Demuth, the minority leader in the state house, said she liked Walz’s idea of “One Minnesota”, of unity, that he ran on in 2018. The slogan appears on a specialty license plate on his classic International Scout vehicle.“There was really no appetite of the Democrats to have to work with Republicans at all,” she said. There are only a handful of bipartisan bills from recent sessions, including one for nursing home support.“They had the votes. They had partisan priorities, they had full control of the entire state. And they were very clear in saying, ‘We’re going to push through what our priorities have been, and we’re going to get them done.’”Battle lines drawnRepublicans have quickly tried to paint Walz as radical after Harris’s announcement.“She picked a radical left man that is, he has positions that are not even possible to believe that they exist,” the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, said in a press conference this week. “He is going for things that nobody has even heard of. Heavy into the transgender world. Heavy into lots of different worlds.”Memes have spread calling Walz “Tampon Tim”, a reference to a law he signed that requires schools to carry menstrual products in their restrooms, which some have criticized because boys’ bathrooms may have period products in them as well. He also signed a trans haven law that protects access to gender-affirming care in the state.Others have attacked his military record, saying he retired from the service rather than go to Iraq with his national guard unit and that he was inflating his rank, given he did not complete training to be called a command sergeant major at retirement. These claims came up during his gubernatorial runs but are getting increased scrutiny on the national stage. Walz retired before his unit received orders to go to Iraq, though after an indication that the unit might be called up.And photos of Minneapolis burning after riots followed the murder of George Floyd by police have resurfaced. A report from state senate Republicans criticized Walz and Minneapolis’s mayor for being too slow to respond.Republicans have also scoffed at the idea that Walz could appeal to rural voters with his lengthy list of progressive policies. He didn’t win his old district in his run for governor.“I think he doubles down on the criticisms of Harris by the Trump campaign,” Jacobs said. “If you’re arguing that Harris is super liberal, you’ve just got an enormous example of that in Walz.”Demuth pointed to a comment Walz made in 2017 about electoral maps that show broad swathes of red, which Walz said were made up “mostly of cows and rocks”.“We are not rocks and cows,” the Republican lawmaker said. “He has not paid attention to greater Minnesota or the rural areas of Minnesota unless it’s been a good campaign strategy for him.”Vice-presidential picks themselves don’t typically sway many voters, though they can signal how a president would govern and can win some people at the margins. In a very close election, that can matter.But the pick is a sign that Democrats might try to win voters in places they haven’t in recent years. Some mentioned Walz’s appeal in places like the iron range, the iron-ore mining area in northern Minnesota that was once solid blue and is now trending more red, and hope that can translate to other parts of the Rust belt that Democrats need to win the presidency.View image in fullscreenThey also think he’ll appeal in the suburbs, where his plainspoken nature will sound familiar to voters in key states like Wisconsin and Michigan.He looks the part of a suburban or rural midwestern dad, the kind of guy the word “avuncular” was made for. And it’s not a costume – the camo hat, jeans, T-shirt and comfortable shoes are his actual clothes.“He only wears a suit if he absolutely has to,” Long said. “That’s not an act, that’s just him being Tim and not being willing to craft his image around what people think a governor ought to look like. He’s just who he’s always been.”But curbing the Democratic losses in some of these areas won’t be easy.Terry Gjersvik, a farmer who lives in Walz’s old congressional district and ran for office as a Democrat in the rural area in 2018, found Walz “indefatigable” on the campaign trail, bouncing from conversation to conversation with voters. Gjersvik lost his race, as many Democrats in rural areas now do.“In the rural areas, when you’re a Democrat, you stop the bleeding, especially on the statewide races,” he said.One Minnesota farmer told the Star Tribune that an electric vehicle law “burns my butt”. Another voter in a St Paul suburb has a sign in his yard that says “MY GOVERNOR IS AN IDIOT”, the New York Times reported. The 2024 election will also test how voters feel about the Minnesota trifecta’s work, with control of the legislature up for grabs.Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic party, said Walz’s “mind your own damn business” retort and his populist policies will endear him throughout the midwest.“We have a saying out here, and Tim Walz uses this, and he also embodies it, that if it doesn’t bother the cattle, it doesn’t bother me,” she said. More

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      Democrats’ joy is unconfined as Harris and Walz take upbeat message on tour

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      When Kamala Harris and the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, stepped onstage together for the first time on Tuesday, Philadelphia’s Liacouras Center glittered red, white and blue as Beyoncé’s Freedom blared and the crowd pulsed.Walz, who was plucked from relative obscurity just hours when he accepted the vice-president’s offer to join the Democratic presidential ticket, placed his hand over his heart, almost bewildered by the reception. He waved. He bowed. He pointed to the crowd, and back to Harris. He grinned and laughed and bowed again.When it was his turn to speak, Walz turned to Harris: “Thank you, Madam Vice-President, for the trust you put in me but, maybe more so, thank you for bringing back the joy.”It was a remarkable moment in a remarkable election cycle that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago, when the Democratic party appeared all but resigned to the prospect of a second, and even more devastating defeat to Donald Trump in November.But then Joe Biden abandoned his bid for re-election, and Democrats, with unusual speed and certainty, embraced his vice-president as their standard-bearer. Harris’s ascendance – and her choice of Walz as a partner, which drew plaudits from Democrats across the ideological spectrum – have transformed the party.“All of a sudden, an election that felt like it was slipping away from us, we are now in command,” said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and the relentlessly optimistic author of the substack, Hopium Chronicles. “In every way imaginable I would much rather be us than them.”​The Philadelphia debut was the first stop of a multi-day, battleground state tour through the Rust belt – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – and the Sun belt – Arizona and Nevada – designed to introduce “Coach Walz” and energize Americans for the three-month sprint to election day. (Stops in North Carolina and Georgia were postponed as tropical storm Debby churned through the mid-Atlantic last week.)Along the way, Harris and Walz cast themselves as “joyful warriors”. Unlike Biden’s campaign, which had framed the contest as an existential choice between a president who would defend US democracy and a former president who would destroy it, Harris has sought to present the race as a choice between her vision for a “brighter future” and Trump’s “backward agenda”. At events, crowds chant the campaign’s rallying cry: “We’re not going back!”“Do we want to live in a country of freedom, of compassion, of rule of law?” Harris said in the rural Wisconsin city of Eau Claire on Wednesday. “Or a country of chaos, fear and hate?”View image in fullscreenLater that day, the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, introduced Harris to a crowd of thousands at an airport hangar outside Detroit, declaring: “We need a strong woman in the White House. It’s about damn time.” If elected, Harris would be the first female president.At a union hall the next day, Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers, said Americans faced a “‘which side are you on’ moment” – and he was siding with the “badass woman who stood with us on the picket line”.At a rally near Phoenix, Harris drew her largest crowd yet, more than 15,000, according to an estimate by the campaign. Speaking ahead of Harris, John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona, asked his fellow Republicans and independents to “please join me in putting country over party and stopping Donald Trump”.The introductory tour concluded on Saturday evening at an arena in Las Vegas, where thousands braved triple-degree heat to see the Democratic ticket. There Harris marveled at the rise of their new Democratic ticket: a daughter of immigrants raised by a single mother in Oakland and a “son of the Nebraska plains” who grew up working on a farm.“Only in America is it possible that the two of them would be running together all the way to the White House,” she said.Recent polls reflect a stunning turnaround for the Democratic ticket, now locked in a highly competitive battle for the White House. Harris’s weeks-old campaign has regained lost ground with younger and more diverse voters who were turned off by the 81-year-old president. She has also significantly narrowed – and in several new surveys overtaken – Trump’s lead in the battleground states Democrats need to win.Last week, the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election, adjusted its outlook in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada – three states that seemed to be slipping out of reach forDemocrats – from “leans Republican” to “toss-up”.Harris maintains that they are the “underdogs”. And in an email to supporters on Friday, the representative Pramila Jayapal, acknowledged the excitement but cautioned against taking anything for granted.“That’s the most dangerous thing we could possibly do right now,” the Washington Democrat wrote.Harris raised $36m in the first 24 hours after naming Walz as her running mate, adding to her record-shattering haul in the past three weeks, since Biden stepped aside. On Wednesday the Harris campaign said supporters had purchased $1m-worth of camouflage hats with Harris/Walz in orange print, an apparent nod to the Midwest Princess hat sold by the pop star Chappell Roan.The boom in fundraising has been matched by a surge in volunteer sign-ups, while down-ballot Democrats, organizers and activists report similarly dramatic increases in donations and support.On social media, young people shared their excitement for the new Democratic ticket with coconut tree memes and big dad energy jokes.“We’re obsessed with coconut,” a young volunteer told Harris, during a visit to a campaign office in north Phoenix on Friday.View image in fullscreen“Some people say it’s just vibes, but you know what vibes are important because vibes open up the door for the wider conversation,” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter Fund, which has noticed a groundswell of support for the Democratic ticket since Harris became the nominee.“While we need to warn about the challenges and the dangers that Trump poses,” he said, “we also agree that it’s OK to laugh, right? It’s OK to bring some joy and some culture into into this voter mobilization.”As Harris and Walz crisscross the country, they are also racing against Republicans’ efforts to brand her running mate as a “far-left radical”. In their telling, Walz’s folksy persona conceals a liberal governing record that Democrats view as a blueprint for the country.Yet in Walz, the Nebraska-born former social studies teacher and high school football coach, many Democrats believe they finally have a credible ambassador to rural America, where white voters who once helped elect Barack Obama have since abandoned the party in favor of Trump.“Rural voters have entered the chat,” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic party, who supported Walz’s selection. “This new ticket really does expand the map for Democrats beyond the swing states and the east and west coast.”Nebraska is not usually considered a swing state in the traditional sense and it is not a part of the Democrats’ battleground state tour. But in a quirk of the electoral process, a single electoral college vote from the state’s second congressional district could be decisive in a close race. Kleeb expects a visit after the Democrats’ convention later this month.But Kleeb said Walz does not fit neatly in a political box, rather he embodies the midwestern ethos of neighborliness and, to borrow the governor’s phrase, minding your damn business.“In Minnesota, we respect our neighbor’s personal choices,” Walz said in Wisconsin. “Don’t like a book? Don’t read it!”View image in fullscreenRepublicans are deeply skeptical that Walz’s folksy demeanor will translate into support from rural voters who have shown fierce loyalty to the former president.“There’s no way in the world, despite [Walz’s] supposed affinity with blue-collar white voters, that he’s going to get any of those people,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant and pollster. “They’re Trumpies.”While Democrats have enthusiastically embraced Walz, Republicans too have celebrated, convinced Harris made a grave tactical mistake in passing over Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of swing state Pennsylvania.“She had a blindingly obvious right choice if she wanted to beat Donald Trump and she went the opposite direction,” Ayres said. “She could have thrown a bone to the Trump-skeptical Nikki Haley Republican voters, and she refused to do that.”Amanda Stewart Sprowls, a lifelong Republican from Tempe, Arizona, who backed Nikki Haley in the primary and will not vote for Trump in November, had hoped Harris would choose Shapiro. With Walz on the ticket, she’s not sure what she will do in November. “Your more informed voters in suburbia are just a little shocked and disappointed,” she said.Stewart Sprowls is not sure she can support someone who has championed the very progressive policies she believes are driving people toward Trump’s movement. But she intends to continue engaging with the Harris campaign, pushing for something “tangible” – like a commitment to name a Republican or independent to her cabinet – that might persuade her to vote for a Democrat for the first time in her life.“I think both camps need us,” she said. “And I think they both need to move to the center, for sure. But I think she has the greater potential to do it.”There were other criticisms. Walz ​was forced to address scrutiny over how he presented his military service, while Harris is under pressure to ​a​llow for more extensive questioning of her record and agenda.Two events were interrupted by activists protesting Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict. In Detroit, Harris affirmed their right to protest, but when the shouting didn’t stop, she replied curtly: “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”In Phoenix, she tried a different tack, telling them: “I have been clear: Now is the time to get a ceasefire deal, and get the hostages home.”View image in fullscreenIn Michigan on Wednesday, Harris met briefly with the leaders of the “uncommitted” campaign – an anti-war movement that could prove influential in the state – who said in a statement afterward that they “found hope” in the vice president’s willingness to open a dialogue with them.From his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump on Thursday attempted to seize the national attention that has eluded him since the vice-president’s elevation, a phenomenon the former president’s top pollster called the “Harris Honeymoon” and predicted would be short-lived.In a rambling, hour-long press conference, Trump lashed out at his new rival, calling Harris “barely competent” amid a litany of outlandish claims and outright falsehoods. The former president also brushed off questions about his relatively light footprint on the campaign trail as “stupid”.There was one potentially significant development, however: Trump committed to participating in a presidential debate with Harris on 10 September.In a brief exchange with reporters later that day, Harris reaffirmed her participation in the ABC debate and said she would be “happy” to discuss additional ones raised by Trump.On Friday night, Trump held a rally in Montana, a state he won handily four years ago that is home to a critical Senate contest. Still testing nicknames for Harris, Trump vowed: “We’re going to evict crazy Kamala.”Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, was dispatched to follow the Harris-Walz tour, hosting a series of rival events near their stops. On Wednesday, the candidates nearly crossed paths when the senator’s plane landed on the same tarmac in Wisconsin as Air Force Two. Vance, flanked by an entourage of staffers and aides, approached Harris’s plane, moments after she climbed into her motorcade.“I just wanted to check out my future plane,” he told a group of assembled reporters. He also taunted Harris for not yet holding a news conference or sitting for an unscripted interview, as questions swirl about her vision for the economy, the US-Mexico border and her foreign policy.In brief exchanges with the press, Harris told reporters she would release a policy platform later this week, and would schedule a sit down interview by the end of the month.View image in fullscreenAt an event in Detroit, Vance waved off the notion that the excitement surrounding Harris’s campaign would translate electorally.“I think most people in our country, they can be happy-go-lucky sometimes, they can enjoy things sometimes,” he said, “and they can turn on the news and recognize that what’s going on in this country is a disgrace.”In the final stretch before election day, Democrats hope their message of uplift will serve as an antidote to the darker themes animating Trump’s campaign. The former president, who opened his first term in office with a sinister depiction of the country as “American carnage”, has threatened to use a second term to seek “retribution” on his political enemies.“All the things that make me mad about those other guys and all the things they do wrong, the one thing I will not forgive them for is they tried to steal the joy from this country,” Walz said in Detroit. “But you know what? You know what? Our next president brings the joy. She emanates the joy!” More

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      New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states

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      A major new poll puts Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in three key swing states, signaling a dramatic reversal in momentum for the Democratic party with three months to go until the election.The vice-president leads the ex-president by four percentage points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, 50% to 46%, among almost 2,000 likely voters across the three states, according to new surveys by the New York Times and Siena College.The polls were conducted between 5 and 9 August, in the week Harris named midwesterner Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and a former high-school teacher, as her running mate on November’s Democratic ticket.It provides the clearest indication from crucial battleground states since Joe Biden pulled out of the race and endorsed Harris amid mounting concerns about the 81-year-old’s cognitive wellbeing and fitness to govern for a second term. The results come after months of polling that showed Biden either tied with or slightly behind Trump.Harris is viewed as more intelligent, more honest and more temperamentally fit to run the country than Trump, according to the registered voters polled.The findings, published on Saturday by the New York Times, will boost the Democrats, as Harris and Walz continue crisscrossing the country on their first week on the campaign trail together, holding a slew of events in swing states that are likely to decide the outcome of the election.On Saturday, the candidates held a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, a state the Biden-Harris ticket won by more than two points in 2020.While only a snapshot, Democrats will probably be heartened to see that 60% of the surveyed independent voters, who always play a major role in deciding the outcome of the race, said they are satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates, compared with 45% in May.The swing appears to be largely driven by evolving voter perceptions of Harris, who has been praised for her positivity and future-focused stump speeches on the campaign trail. In Pennsylvania, where Biden beat Trump by just more than 80,000 votes four years ago, her favorability rating has surged by 10 points since last month among registered voters, according to Times/Siena polling.Harris will need to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – crucial battleground states that Biden clinched in 2020 – if the Democrats are to retain the White House.The latest polls will probably further anger Trump, whose few recent campaign events have largely been dominated by ire – and apparent disbelief – at the rapid shift in momentum since naming JD Vance, the Ohio senator and former venture capitalist, as his running mate amid a celebratory atmosphere at the Republican national convention less than a month ago.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance, who has been derided as “weird” by the Democrats as he doubles down on 2021 comments about the US being run by “childless cat ladies”, is broadly viewed unfavorably or unenthusiastically by the majority of independents, Democrats and registered Republicans, the new poll found.But Democrats still have work to do to communicate Harris’s vision for the country. The poll found that 60% of registered voters think Trump has a clear vision of the country, compared with only 53% when asked about Harris.Crucially, Trump is also still leading when it comes to confidence over handling the economy and immigration – two of the three key issues for voters, according to polls.Still, Harris has a 24-point advantage over Trump when it comes to abortion, an issue which Democrats hope will help get out the vote in key swing states such as Arizona and Wisconsin. Harris is also viewed significantly more favorably when it comes to democracy than Trump, who continues to face charges related to his alleged role in subverting the 2020 election results and the 6 January insurrection in Washington.In a statement to the Times, Tony Fabrizio, the Trump campaign’s chief pollster, said the new polls “dramatically understated President Trump’s support”, citing surveys conducted in the days before the 2020 election that overestimated the margin of Biden’s victory. More

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      Latinos in once true-blue Texas border zone are getting on the Trump train

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      Anna Holcomb is preparing her Ram pickup truck for the big event on Saturday, festooning it in Make America Great Again (Maga) flags that flap restlessly in the searing hot Texas wind.Holcomb is gearing up for a show of strength by Donald Trump supporters in the Rio Grande valley, the region of south Texas that flanks the Mexican border. From 8am on Saturday morning, thousands of similarly decked-out vehicles will form convoys along a 300-mile stretch, from Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico all the way north to Eagle Pass.They will converge on the fair grounds in Holcomb’s small town of Zapata, where the number of cars is expected to exceed the local 5,000-strong population. There will be a carne asada cook-off, prizes for the most lavishly decorated Maga vehicle, and a joining of hands in prayers for Trump.The convoys are known as “Trump Trains”, and though they have appeared in other states they have taken off in the Rio Grande valley. They symbolize the political drama that is unfolding in this overwhelmingly Hispanic community that has for generations been umbilically tied to the Democratic party: the seemingly unassailable rise of Trump.Presidential election results in Zapata county starkly tell the story. In 2012, the Republican candidate Mitt Romney was trounced by Barack Obama 28% to 71%.When Trump made his first bid for the White House in 2016 he barely improved on Romney’s record, attracting 33% of Zapata’s votes to Hilary Clinton’s 66%. But then in 2020 he sent shockwaves through the valley, winning the county by 53% to Joe Biden’s 47%.It was the first time in 100 years that a Republican presidential candidate had won Zapata. This rugged community of cattle ranches dotted with prickly pear cactus plants, which is 95% Hispanic and has been unswervingly Democratic since 1920, had fallen for the Apprentice star turned US president.View image in fullscreenHolcomb, 58, is part of the wind of change blowing through the valley. She is an American-born Hispanic woman whose mother immigrated from Old Guerrero on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande river.Holcomb, who worked in the local oil business, has been politically active since she turned 18. The politicians she canvassed for were invariably Democratic – it was the only party that ever fielded candidates.“We believed the Democratic party was the party for the working class. That’s what I understood it to be,” she said.Then Trump came along. She vividly recalls his 2015 speech after descending the escalator of Trump Tower announcing his presidential bid, in which he talked about some Mexican immigrants being “rapists” and others bringing in drugs and crime. Within minutes of the speech ending her phone began ringing as several of her first cousins – she estimates she has more than 40 in the Zapata area, all of Mexican descent – shared with her their alarm.She had a different response. “I liked his speech. I liked that he said he was going to be stricter with the influx of immigrants. He got me thinking, my country first. I am American. Sure I have Hispanic blood, but I am red, white and blue American.”Her cousins told her that anyone in Zapata who voted for Trump was crazy given his disdain for Mexicans. She replied: “Call me crazy, I’m voting for him.”She did vote for Trump in 2016, though she did so surreptitiously, telling no one. “Back then it felt like a sin to be a Republican,” she said. By 2020, she felt confident enough to join a Trump Train that did a victory loop around town after the county results came in.Now Holcomb is preparing to fight for Trump again and she expects him to win even more handsomely in Zapata this time. She guesses that her 40-plus first cousins are evenly divided this year between those who are pro-Trump and those who still virulently oppose him.Holcomb’s story is repeating itself throughout the Rio Grande valley. Trump has marched through the area, winning 14 out of 28 counties in 2020 that previously had been presumed Democratic.An opinion poll from April conducted by the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation (TxHPF) found that Trump was leading his then presumptive rival Biden in South Texas by 44% to 36%. That was an astounding statistic given the region’s previously lock-tight Democratic record, its Hispanic roots and Trump’s often unrestrained hostility towards immigrants from Mexico and Central America.View image in fullscreen“Trump is doing better in south Texas and the Rio Grande valley than he is in the big urban counties, and that’s of note because historically Texas Democrats relied on the RGV as their reservoir of votes,” said Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University.Analysts caution against drawing national conclusions from the valley, given its unique fusion of Texan and Mexican history and culture. Local people tend not to call themselves Hispanic, Latino, or Mexican American – they identify as “Tejanos”.It would be equally foolhardy, however, to ignore Trump’s surge. Hispanic Americans are among the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country, the Pew Research Center has found, accounting for 36 million eligible voters – 15% of the total – in November.Nationally, although most Latino voters continue to vote Democratic, the margins are falling – from 71% Democratic support in 2016 to 63% in 2020. The rate at which Trump is making inroads varies greatly by state, turning the country into a patchwork of contrasting loyalties.Biden did well in 2020 among Latino voters in Arizona, who were critical to his victory. His success came on the back of years of intensive grassroots organising by Democratic groups. They harnessed the backlash to the harsh anti-immigrant bill SB 1070 passed by state Republicans a decade earlier.By contrast, Trump did well in Florida, building on the longstanding Republican affinities of Cuban Americans around Miami. Trump also capitalised on voters’ feelings towards immigration, but in this case he did so in a diametrically opposed direction – he emphasised his own harsh attitude towards undocumented immigrants, an argument which played well with Cuban émigrés. .That the same issue – immigration – could polarise Latino voters in two key states cautions against making firm political assumptions. It is becoming ever clearer that America’s Hispanic population is not the left-leaning monolith that some Democratic strategists wish it to be.It is a demographic with rich and varied traditions, convictions and aspirations that are increasingly becoming reflected in diverse electoral choices. As Jones put it: “What’s happening in south Texas tells us that some Hispanic areas that the Democratic party has depended on, that were dark blue, may no longer be reliable.”The Rio Grande valley is a frontier community that feels cut off from the world around it. It belonged to Mexico until Texas gained independence in 1836, and only joined the US with annexation in 1848.Spanish remains the first language of many of the valley’s US citizens. A drive through the region passes the usual relentless repetition of corporate behemoths like Walmart and McDonald’s, but also local outlets like El Tigre Food Store and El Pueblo Express Mart.View image in fullscreenBy the side of the road, crumbling Spanish-style haciendas are painted blue and ochre, bleached under a brutal sun. Military Highway, which tracks the river, runs alongside miles of border wall, some of it constructed noisily by Trump (“Build the wall! Build the wall!”), other portions erected more quietly under Obama.In the sky above Zapata, a large white blob hangs over the blackbrush. It is a blimp – an aerial radar system on the lookout for drug and human trafficking.A joke told about the valley is that its people have only two political affiliations: Democratic and conservative Democratic. The region has strong religious and socially conservative traditions: residents tend to be pro-gun, anti-abortion, strongly on the side of law enforcement given the number of jobs locally in border security and policing, and pro-fossil fuel industries.In the Walmart in Rio Grande City, many of the customers don’t have a vote – some are Mexican citizens who have hopped over the river to shop, others undocumented immigrants. Of those who can vote, many expressed enthusiasm for Trump, others were full of disappointment about the Biden-Harris administration.View image in fullscreen“I’m for Trump, sure,” said Gilberto Maldonado, a 21-year-old electrician who described himself as a Democrat. “Economically, Trump’s better for the country, better for everybody.”Stella Solis, 65, whose family has lived for at least five generations in the valley, said she was with Trump too. “I don’t like what Biden has been doing, all these people coming over the border from Mexico. Trump would give more help to people, when Biden has done nothing for us.”Carmen Castillo, 44, a registered Democrat, is not going to vote. Speaking with the Guardian in Spanish, she explained she would never vote for Trump because of his lack of morals, but she had the same criticism as Solis about the past four years, saying that the current administration “hasn’t done anything for us”.Abel Prado, a Democratic operative in the valley, told the Guardian that since Biden stepped aside last month to make way for Kamala Harris there had been a leap in confidence. Within days of Biden’s announcement the inbox of the Hispanic civic engagement group he co-founded, Cambio Texas, had filled up with offers to volunteer in registering people to vote.View image in fullscreen“There’s renewed enthusiasm, a new general swagger of the people I work with in this space,” he said.Opinion polls conducted in key battleground states since the switch to Harris suggest that what Prado is detecting in the valley may be part of a wider shift. A survey of 800 Latino voters released this week by Somos Pac based on seven swing states has Harris leading Trump commandingly by 55% to 37%.Prado himself is one of the rarer breed of progressive Democrats in south Texas. He said his personal politics were “extremely radical” but he keeps many of his views private because it could harm his ambitions to build a broad coalition.“People think that because this place is a Democratic stronghold they can walk into any meeting with piercings all over their nose and rainbow hair and fit in just fine. The exact opposite is true.”He said that Trump’s projected image as a strongman resonates in the valley among the children of immigrants who have had to make their own way in life and for whom family is supremely important. But Prado also thinks the most regrettable aspect of Trump’s impact in the valley is that it has got people to think that “just because somebody else enjoys something, they took it from you”.View image in fullscreenIt’s also divided the community, setting residents against each other despite their common heritage. “You would think that having such strong Mexican roots would give people empathy towards those who come after them. But there’s one thing that people in the Rio Grande valley love doing, and that’s pulling up the ladder after they’ve reached the top.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPrado has heard such sentiments from his oldest brother, a hardcore Trump supporter. He recalls a conversation with him at a barbecue early on in Trump’s presidency in which his brother began ranting about “illegal immigrants” and the need to “send them all back”.Prado’s parents were born in Mexico and entered the US illegally. They gained citizenship under Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty.Prado said to his brother: “Bro, who do you think you are? We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for people like that. Have you forgotten your parents, your aunts and uncles, all these countless people who came here illegally?”He hasn’t spoken to his brother since 2019.The change that Trump has brought to the valley is etched into the individuals who now follow him. Literally so, in the case of Marcus Canales, who about a year into Trump’s presidency tattooed his arms with patriotic designs. “We the people” now dominates one arm, “In God we trust” the other.Canales, 56, was a committed Democrat until his late 40s, just like his parents before him. His grandparents crossed the river into the US as undocumented immigrants and his parents, born in Texas, were passionate Democrats after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal gave them hope during the Great Depression.Yet Canales is now solidly in Trump’s camp, to an extent, he said, that would make his late parents “turn in their graves”. The change came with Trump’s 2016 campaign when Canales was drawn to the real estate developer because “we saw him talking as a businessman, not a politician”.View image in fullscreenCanales started asking questions, he said, about how it was that Democrats have run the valley for generations and yet it remains among the poorest parts of the country. A 2017 report found that 68% of children in the valley live in high-poverty neighbourhoods, compared with 18% statewide.Like many valley residents the Guardian spoke to, Canales has bought the line peddled repeatedly by Trump that as president he presided over the “greatest economy the world has ever seen” (a claim rated “false” by factcheckers). “Look at what Trump did for our economy,” Canales said.“He concentrated on the energy sector, and they started drilling, and jobs started popping up all over the place. And all of a sudden a lot of people are getting very good-paying jobs.”Canales complained by contrast about the economy under Biden and the high cost of food and goods. The inflation rate has in fact declined dramatically since its 2022 peak of 9.1% and now stands at 3%, yet opinion polls conducted for the Guardian show most voters wrongly believe it is still rising.Canales said that the Biden-Harris administration was “printing money, devaluing our dollar, you have inflation in the valley and we’re earning less, we’re getting poorer”.Religion is another critical factor. Opinion polls suggest that Trump’s popularity in Texas is especially high among born-again Christians.According to the TxHPF poll, Trump held a clear lead within this religious community over Biden of 61% to 18%. Evangelical preachers have led the charge, urging their worshippers to back Trump.Jorge Tovar, pastor of Jordan River church in Laredo, is busy organising next month’s Trump Train. He was a Democrat until 2018, when he said he converted to Trump’s side after a policy clash at Laredo city council over LGBTQ+ rights.The council had proposed a new ordinance that would have banned discrimination at work and in housing based on sexual orientation and gender identity; Tovar and other religious leaders successfully blocked the measure.“Ever since then, the Lord woke me up to get involved,” Tovar told the Guardian. “He said I had been neglectful in my civic duty, voting without even researching the candidate. He showed me that they are pushing God out with their laws, but we can keep God in Texas if we go back to the America that we had when Trump was president.”View image in fullscreenThe rise of Trump across the Rio Grande valley presents Democratic leaders and activists with a conundrum. In recent years hopes have risen that Texas – in which no Democrat has won a statewide race since 1994 – might be turned purple, based on its changing demographics.But if Trump continues to grow in the Rio Grande valley all hope of that dies. The Democrats would lose a vital repository of votes upon which statewide success depends.Beto O’Rourke has articulated the dream of a purple Texas perhaps more forcefully than anybody, having come close to defeating the Republican US senator Ted Cruz in 2018. (He then ran for governor in 2022 and was handily beaten by the incumbent Greg Abbott.)“I think Democrats have historically taken the Rio Grande valley for granted,” O’Rourke told the Guardian. “Republicans saw an opportunity, they’re hungry, and they’ve gone after it, investing money and running strong candidates with resources behind them.”He added: “For the first time in my lifetime you are seeing real contested elections between Republicans and Democrats in the valley, and it’s painful for my party.”O’Rourke hopes that events here will act as a wake-up call for the national Democratic party to listen more carefully to the hopes and concerns of local people. “National Democrats have tended to talk to Hispanic communities about being pro-immigration, when here in the valley there’ll be families who have been on this side of the Rio Grande river for seven generations, and they’re like, ‘What the hell are you talking to me about immigration for, what I care about is the economy and world-class public schools’.”View image in fullscreenPrado of Cambio Texas agrees. He criticises Democratic party strategists from Austin or Washington DC of coming to the valley with their own sets of priorities without listening to the actual wants and needs of local people.“They parachute people in from outside, draw their salaries, lose the races, and then they go back to wherever they came from – leaving us here to pick up the pieces.”Such disconnect poses an existential threat for Jonathan Gracia, who is running as the Democratic party’s candidate in a high-priority contested race for a Texas House seat in district 37. The makeup of the constituency means Gracia should have the edge over his Republican rival, but that lead is threatened by Trump’s soaring popularity.Gracia reckons that he’s knocked on about 4,000 doors in the district in the past month in hardcore Democratic-Hispanic neighborhoods. By his estimation, about 7% of those households, all of them longtime Democrats, told him they were voting for Trump – a proportion that if it spilled over into his race would wipe out his advantage.His challenge is to bring those 7% back into the Democratic fold. “I need to win their hearts and minds,” he said.To do that, he begins by listening to people’s concerns. He hears complaints about rising prices and the economy, which he responds to by stressing that new jobs are being created in the valley with the building in Brownsville of launch facilities for Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a new liquid natural gas (LNG) export plant which Gracia promotes against the protests of environmentalists.In terms of his messaging, he avoids any discussion of social issues such as abortion or LGBTQ+ rights. “That’s a loser,” he said. Instead, he stresses that he is pro-business, pro the creation of good-paying jobs, pro-law enforcement.View image in fullscreenIt’s a formula that few in the Democratic party in New York or Chicago or San Francisco would recognise. But it’s worked in the valley for decades.The question is: how long can it hold?Back in Zapata, Anna Holcomb is not only dusting off her truck before next month’s Trump Train, she’s also preparing to campaign for a couple of Republican candidates standing for county seats. It’s the first time in her lifetime that Republicans have run for local office.It’s characteristic of the valley’s complex politics that Holcomb remains a registered Democrat. She said she doesn’t even like Trump: “I couldn’t stand him as a TV personality, every time he came on I would switch the channel. I still don’t like his personality, his arrogance, his mouth.”But she’ll be voting for him in November. “I vote for him because I believe he’s the guy that can get the job done.” More

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      Not done yet: still-smarting Joe Biden to focus on his legacy in final months

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      When a reporter asked if the White House had already started the transition process, Karine Jean-Pierre seemed bemused. “Why?” the press secretary retorted. “Are you trying to kick us out already? We’ve got five months.”Whatever excitement there is in American politics at the moment, the White House is not the centre of the action. What was expected to be a hectic final sprint towards the presidential election, with Joe Biden pinballing between swing-state rallies, has been replaced by long, languorous afternoons in humid Washington.Since 81-year-old Biden ended his re-election campaign after losing the confidence of fellow Democrats, his schedule has been appreciably quieter and his public appearances more scarce. As the party’s new nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris, 59, barnstorms the country and electrifies crowds, there are some days when Biden lies low and is not seen at all.Jean-Pierre recently acknowledged that the president and White House were still “recalibrating” after his decision. “We are trying to figure out what the next six months are going to look like,” she told journalists. “Just give us a beat.”Such absences can create an impression that Biden is less running through the tape than staggering across the finish line. The vacuum can be filled by baseless rightwing conspiracy theories suggesting that Biden is no longer fit for office and that Harris, former president Barack Obama or some other deep state operative is actually running the government.However, analysts say, Biden is making a deliberate choice to work on cementing his legacy – and ensuring the election of Harris to protect it from Republican rival Donald Trump. Though his relevance is diminished, the fact he no longer needs to worry about getting re-elected could prove liberating.Domestically he hopes to keep money flowing from a series of major legislative wins early in his term that could be undone should Trump return to the White House. He will press to quickly fill federal judiciary vacancies and last month he proposed reforms for the supreme court, calling on Congress to establish term limits and an enforceable ethics code for the nine justices.View image in fullscreenForeign policy represents Biden’s best hope for a final defining moment. Last week he helped secure the release of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former US marine Paul Whelan and others in the biggest prisoner swap between Moscow and the US since the cold war.Now he is racing against the clock to persuade Israel and Hamas to agree to his proposed three-phase ceasefire deal to bring home remaining Israeli hostages and potentially pave the way for an end to the 10-month-old war in Gaza. At the same time, he is desperate to avoid tensions with Iran escalating into an all-out regional conflagration.Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “I would imagine that he is going to devote a lot of time and energy to the situation in the Middle East. He surely doesn’t want history to record that the final months of his tenure witnessed the outbreak of the first comprehensive Middle East war in decades, a war that he, like others, has been struggling to avoid.“I would think that it’s going to be all hands on deck to try to contain the ripples of the Iranian attack when it comes, to try to prevent Israel and Hezbollah from moving from tit-for-tat to something much worse, and finally figure out a way of getting the Gaza ceasefire done.”Governing well might also be a more effective way of helping Harris than making speeches. Enthusiasm for the vice-president at rallies and online has already far exceeded anything that he could muster. Biden is not expected to feature prominently as a campaign surrogate for reasons of both style and substance.His low approval rating, especially on issues such as immigration, inflation and Gaza, would saddle his deputy with unwanted baggage. Moreover, the gaffe-prone oldest president in American history would not be a natural fit for Harris’s optimistic, future-focused campaign. Her running mate, Tim Walz, told her this week: “Thank you for bringing back the joy.”Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, added: “She needs a chance to separate herself from him without breaking ranks with him and that will be easier if she draws a bright line between her candidacy and his presidency. I’m not saying that he should become invisible but I don’t think he should be highly visible either, except in his presidential capacity.”Past lame-duck presidents have used their waning days to seek one more big policy win. In 2000 Clinton launched negotiations between the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, and the Palestinian Authority leader, Yasser Arafat, at Camp David in one last – and ultimately doomed – effort at securing Middle East peace. In 2008 George W Bush signed into law a $700bn bailout of the financial services industry as the global crisis deepened.View image in fullscreenBut Biden may still be brooding over how a dismal debate performance in June destroyed his hopes of a second term. He is reportedly smarting over those who orchestrated the end of his 51-year political career and the even swifter embrace of Harris as his replacement. His first in-depth interview since the announcement will be broadcast on CBS News on Sunday.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “I can imagine that there’s a lot of frustration in Biden world because Biden would most definitely like to be rounding out his administration and pursuing his policies but the energy and the resources of the Democratic party are about winning the next election.”Jacobs added: “If he is campaigning he becomes the subject of the Trump campaign for being frail and clueless. There’s nothing good that Joe Biden can do. Also, Kamala Harris needs to clearly identify herself as a distinct and separate brand and she can’t do that if Joe Biden is on the campaign trail.”However, Biden is still sure to receive a rapturous welcome later this month in Chicago, where he is expected to give a prime-time address on the first night of the Democratic national convention before leaving the stage clear for Harris and Walz. The party will be eager to project unity and gratitude for his selfless act in passing the torch.Donna Brazile, a political strategist and former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “He has done more to get this country on the right track than any other president at least in modern history and it’s up to him to decide when and where he will enter in the 2024 race.“Look, he left the vice-president with millions in the bank, with hundreds of thousands of volunteers, over 400 campaign offices. I don’t know how much more we want from Joe Biden but he has given the vice-president a head start and a very healthy start in this 90-day marathon.” More