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      Kamala Harris ‘listening’ to young people on Gaza, says fellow Democrat

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      Progressive US representative Pramila Jayapal has said Kamala Harris is “listening” to young people’s concerns about Israel’s war in Gaza as the newly elevated presumptive Democratic nominee rides an “undeniable” wave of momentum.In the days since Joe Biden ended his presidential re-election campaign and endorsed the vice-president for November’s race against Republican nominee Donald Trump, gen Z supporters have flooded social media with coconut tree video cuts and “brat summer” memes – a reflection of the way her campaign has jolted a presidential race many Democrats were afraid was slipping away.Jayapal, chair of the Progressive caucus, which was divided over the question of whether Biden should step aside, said the level of enthusiasm she has seen for Harris in the last six days – especially among young people – was unparalleled.“I have not seen anything like this,” Jayapal, who represents Seattle in the US House, said on the sidelines of a two-day youth voter summit in Atlanta on Friday night. “The closest was probably Barack Obama.”However, citing the Harris campaign’s record fundraising and a surge of early support, the representative said: “This is even more than that – just the amount of money that’s been raised. The fact that it’s come from grassroots donors, the fact that it’s first-time donors, the volunteers, the voter registration, it has really been palpable.”Jayapal said Harris, who is poised to become the first woman of color to lead a major-party presidential ticket, had a unique opportunity to excite young people as well as Black and brown voters. Harris was also a strong messenger on issues that matter to young people, especially abortion rights, she said.“On every level, including the fact that she is a prosecutor and she will prosecute the case against a convicted felon, I think this is going to be a candidate that can take us to victory,” Jayapal said.Doug Jones, a former Alabama senator and a close ally of Biden, said Democrats were desperate to unite after a painful few weeks.“It has moved not just with lightning speed, but with an enthusiasm that I’ve never seen,” he said in an interview at the conference. “It is extraordinary.”Many young people have expressed hope that Harris will distance herself from Biden’s approach to Israel’s war in Gaza.During a meeting on Thursday, the vice-president said she implored Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal that would pause the fighting in Gaza and release hostages. In comments afterward, Harris emphasized Palestinian suffering while also recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself.“We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies,” Harris said this week. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”Jayapal, who was among the roughly 100 House Democrats who boycotted the Israeli prime minister’s address to Congress this week, said it would be “complicated” for Harris to chart her own course while still serving as vice-president.“I know that she feels a deep empathy for Palestinians,” said Jayapal, who said she had spoken recently to Harris about the issue. Pointing to Harris’s remarks after meeting with Netanyahu this week, the Seattle Democrat said: “I think she was trying to signal that she wants to take a different course – that she wants to perhaps consider things that President Biden hadn’t considered or had decided not to do.”Jayapal noted that it wasn’t just young people and Arab and Muslim Americans who were pushing the administration to change its approach. Black faith leaders and labor groups have also joined calls for the US to stop sending offensive military aid to Israel.“I believe she is listening to all of that,” Jayapal said. “How she actually moves, we’re going to have to see.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJayapal also weighed in on Harris’s search for a running mate. Her preference is Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, a strong supporter of labor who Jayapal believes would help Democrats hold the midwest. Walz is one of more than a half-dozen candidates viewed as potential running mates.Young voters are crucial to Democrats’ prospects in November. Recent polling has shown Republicans making gains with voters under 35 amid widespread disillusionment with the state of American politics, its institutions and its leaders.Youth-led groups that have been calling on Democrats to do more to invest in young people are hopeful Harris can harness this new energy around her campaign. Already, her campaign has leaned in, embracing an excitement they have branded the “Kamalove”.“The thing that’s creating the energy here is Vice-President Harris and the hope that she’s been giving young people and the vision that she wants to accomplish for us,” said Marianna Pecora, the communications director for Voters of Tomorrow, which is hosting the Atlanta Year of Youth summit. “Young people are excited and they’re energized and they’re finding politics to be a joyful thing, something that they want to pay attention to for the first time in a long time, and I don’t think that’s momentum that can die with a meme.”Harris was due to virtually address the conference in Atlanta on Saturday.A handful of new polls this week showed Democrats, with Harris at the top of the ticket, gaining a few points against Trump, with the national race against the former president now neck-and-neck.Voters of Tomorrow, a liberal gen Z-led organization, recently joined with a coalition of 17 youth groups to unite behind Harris. The newly formed alliance aims to boost Harris in the final 100-day stretch before election day.On 21 July, after Biden endorsed Harris, Voters of Tomorrow recorded its best fundraising day, raising nearly $125,000. It has also been flooded with new applications and requests to start new chapters.In remarks at the summit, Jayapal cast Harris as a champion of the middle class who, as a prosecutor, took on the “big banks, big oil, big pharma”.“She will lift up and inspire our next-generation leaders across the country, and give us all a place to see ourselves in her,” Jayapal said. More

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      ‘I’m rocking with Kamala’: Black men defy faulty polling by showing up for Harris campaign

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      On Monday night, more than 53,000 Black men joined a virtual conference, Win With Black Men, to rally behind the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. During the four-hour call, organizers said the group raised more than $1.3m for the Harris campaign and grassroots voter organizations focused on Black men.The success of the call, which was inspired by the Win With Black Women call the night before, runs counter to the narrative shaped by recent election polling indicating that 30% of Black men are planning on voting for Donald Trump. “Don’t let anybody slow us down asking the question: ‘Can a Black woman be elected president of the United States?’” Raphael Warnock, who represents Georgia in the US Senate, said on the call. “Kamala Harris can win. We just have to show up. History is watching us, and the future is waiting on us.”Black voters have consistently been a key voting bloc for Democrats, but experts say inaccurate polling about Black men in particular could be creating false narratives about their leanings this election cycle, mainly the idea that there is a mass shift of Black voters to the Republican party. Win With Black Men, which was hosted by the journalist Roland Martin, said it’s working to dispel stereotypical notions about changes in Black male voting habits, their refusal to support a woman candidate and their unwillingness to mobilize politically.“People are making a lot of conjectures without actually talking to a large enough sample of Black people to be able to say things with the precision that they’re making it,” Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University, said. “You’re not going to be able to detect what is likely to be no more [than] a one- to three-point swing in favor of Donald Trump based on changes in surveys where you’re talking to 200 Black people at a time. I can’t say with any statistical certainty that that three-point shift is real or not.”Unrepresentative polls can also have an adverse effect on voter habits. People tend to vote if they perceive that an election is close, Gillespie said. So polls that suggest that Trump is going to win easily and that even Black people will vote in droves for him may distort people’s understanding of reality. Ensuring that the public is aware of potential polling inaccuracies is key.“These narratives are also used to kind of confuse Black voters themselves, which can in turn depress Black vote and drive down turnout,” said Christopher Towler, founder of the Black Voter Project (BVP), a national polling initiative. “It can be used as a mechanism of voter deterrence, knowing that Black voters will play a key role in this election.”View image in fullscreenThough Gillespie said it will take a few days for new polling that specifically examines how Harris is performing with Black voters, recent mobilization around Harris suggests that narratives about a would-be exodus of this bloc from the Democratic party might have been premature.The problem comes down to sample size. In surveys of 1,000 to 1,500 voters, sub-sample sizes of Black voters may be anywhere from 150 to 300. In some cases, all people of color are amalgamated into one demographic group. Surveys with such a small sample size create large margins of error.“The issue is the level of precision with which we can make certain types of pronouncements when you’re talking to that few people,” Gillespie said. “The number that comes out in the survey is the midpoint of a range of possible numbers that we think is in the real population because of statistical analysis.”If the sub-sample size is less than 100, she said, the margin of error is plus or minus 10. So if a survey says that 20% of Black voters are going for Trump, the real number based on the sub-sample is between 10% and 30%.Towler, of the Black Voter Project, said that he began noticing the issue of unrepresentative polling years ago. He started BVP to “counteract the industry standard of taping on a couple hundred Black responses to a general survey” and using that small sample size as a full picture.“It’s really unscientific,” Towler said. “So I’ve worked for years now to try and create data that is reliable, accurate and actually representative of the Black community.”This year, BVP released a large, multiwave, national public opinion survey focused on collecting representative data of Black Americans. Fielded from 29 March to 18 April, with 2,004 Black Americans interviewed, the survey collected a nationally representative sample of respondents from all 50 states. The BVP study found that 15% of respondents would vote for Trump if the election had been held at the time of the survey, a figure much lower than reported by other polls with smaller sample sizes. A survey on the BVP scale is important to garner an idea of what the Black population and Black voting population of the US actually looks like, Gillespie said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut mainstream beltway polling companies typically lack Black leadership, so accurate polling of Black communities is not a priority, said Towler. What’s more, some pollsters do not see the value in spending more money to survey a population that they estimate will already vote staunchly Democratic.Black and brown communities exist on the margins in American politics, said Emmitt Riley, president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Mainstream political scientists’ biases result in pollsters who are not adequately capturing the political behaviors and views of excluded groups.“Many people who study race aren’t considered to be mainstream political scholars,” he said. “This has profound consequences for the kind of reporting that’s happening, the kind of news stories that are coming out, how you describe what’s happening in these communities.”Towler said that pollsters should create surveys that are culturally competent and that ask questions in ways that don’t manufacture misleading opinions. “It’s important when looking at polling of Black people to, one, not only make sure you have polls designed to accurately measure Black opinion, but to also have pollsters who study and understand the Black community,” he said.While polls continue to try to parse out where Black men will place their political support, groups like Win With Black Men and Black Men for Harris are making their loyalties clear.“Let’s protect Kamala. Let’s be with her like she was there for us,” Bakari Sellers, the former South Carolina representative, said on the call. “We are going to disagree a lot. But let’s put the petty bickering aside. Let’s stand up and be the Black men who change this country. We built this country. I’m rocking with Kamala.” More

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      Kamala Harris makes history as whirlwind week upends US election

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      The telephone line was a little fuzzy, and the voice on the end gravelly from several days of Covid isolation. Yet the poignancy of the message, and the moment itself, could not have been clearer: “I’m watching you, kid. I love you,” the speaker said.Joe Biden’s warmhearted call to his vice-president, Kamala Harris, at the Democratic party’s campaign headquarters in Delaware on Monday marked a generational shift in US politics, a symbolic passing of the torch from parent to progeny.In terms of the 2024 presidential election race it was also a defining moment. Harris, a former prosecutor, state attorney general, California senator, and for three and a half years the 81-year-old Biden’s White House understudy, was appearing for the first time as her party’s preferred new candidate, less than 24 hours after her boss’s stunning announcement that he would not seek a second term of office sent a seismic shock across the country.There followed what by any metric could be called a whirlwind week on the campaign trail in an extraordinary month in American history already notable for the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, the Republican party’s candidate for the 5 November election.By Wednesday, Harris was addressing an historically Black sorority in Indianapolis as the Democratic presumptive nominee, having secured the support of enough delegates at the party’s national convention in Chicago next month to clinch the nomination.It was the same day as Biden gave an emotional, nationally televised address from the White House explaining his decision to step aside “in defense of democracy”.“I revere this office, but I love my country more,” he said, urging the country to stand behind Harris.One by one, other heavyweight Democratic figures had stepped up to endorse her, culminating on Friday with the outsized backing of Barack Obama. The former speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, all 23 of the party’s state governors, and elected officials from the most junior Congress members to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, respectively the House minority leader and Senate majority leader, also gave their approval.“We are not playing around,” Harris told supporters at the sorority gathering in Indiana on Wednesday.View image in fullscreen“There is so much at stake in this moment. Our nation, as it always has, is counting on you to energize, to organize, and to mobilize; to register folks to vote, to get them to the polls; and to continue to fight for the future our nation and her people deserve.“We know when we organize, mountains move. When we mobilize, nations change. And when we vote, we make history.”It was a rousing speech from a politician who only three days previously was still in a supporting role, despite weeks of swirling speculation about Biden’s future following his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June.But things moved swiftly once the president’s decision to step aside was announced on Sunday afternoon. The Biden campaign apparatus, and election war chest of almost $100m (£77.6m), became the property of a new entity called Harris for President (Republicans have vowed to challenge the funds transfer in court).And staff hastily drew up a new travel schedule for the vice-president, which saw her crisscrossing the country, including the Wilmington, Delaware, appearance on Monday, at which she acknowledged the “rollercoaster” of the previous 24 hours.On Tuesday, she was rallying in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with the campaign message: “We’re not going back” to the “chaos” of the Trump years.View image in fullscreenOn Wednesday, to Black women in Indianapolis, Indiana, she said: “We face a choice between two different visions for our nation: one focused on the future, the other focused on the past.”On Thursday, she told teachers in Houston, Texas: “In our vision, we see a place where every person has the opportunity not just to get by, but to get ahead.”Also on Thursday came her first meeting with a foreign leader – Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – in her own right as a presidential candidate, not in a joint summit as vice-president. In a White House statement issued in her name, not Biden’s, Harris condemned violence at Wednesday’s anti-Netanyahu protest in Washington DC and the burning of the US flag.In forceful public remarks following the meeting , she also went further than Biden ever had to criticize civilian suffering in Gaza. “I will not be silent,” she said.“Israel has a right to defend itself … [but] we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering.”Activities behind the scenes, meanwhile, progressed every bit as quickly as Harris’s front-of-house appearances.Fundraising operations cranked up, pulling in an all-time record $81m for any 24-hour period in presidential campaign history, a windfall for the newly branded Harris Victory Fund that surpassed $130m, mostly from small or first-time donors, by Thursday night.Seizing on enthusiasm from younger voters that polling found was conspicuously absent for Biden, or the 78-year-old Trump, Harris’s team also released to social media its first campaign video. Beyoncé’s 2016 hit Freedom, the unofficial anthem of Harris for President, provided the soundtrack for a message countering what it says was Trump’s “chaos, fear and hate” vision for the country.View image in fullscreenHarris has enormous appeal with generation Z, noted by backing from numerous youth organizations, including March for Our Lives, the student activist group formed in the aftermath of the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.There could have been no better illustration than the declaration on X/Twitter by the British singer Charli xcx that “kamala IS brat”. Viewed by more than 53 million people, the simple message encapsulating a pop culture lifestyle delighted the younger generation and confounded their elders in equal measure. “You just got to go listen to that Charli xcx album and then you’ll understand it,” Florida’s Maxwell Frost, the first gen Z member of Congress, told CNN.“Whether it’s coconut trees or talking about brat or whatever, the message is getting across to tens of millions of young people across the entire country, and across the entire world, and that’s really inspiring.”Wrongfooted by Biden’s abrupt exit, and alarmed by polls showing Harris gaining ground or even surpassing Trump in popularity, the former president’s campaign scrambled to find attack lines for their new opponent.At a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday, Trump tested insults including calling Harris a “radical left lunatic” and “the most incompetent and far-left vice-president in American history”. Republican party acolytes have also been busy with racist attacks, accusing Harris, who has Black and Asian heritage, of being “a DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] hire” or “unqualified” for the presidency.View image in fullscreenExperts warn to expect an all-out attack of misogyny and racism on Harris as the election approaches.This week, however, while Harris’s fledgling campaign took its first steps, it was sharpening its own knives. Framing the upcoming campaign as “the prosecutor versus the felon”, it took swipes at Trump’s 34 felony convictions on fraud charges, and in a searing missive on Thursday mocked the former president’s rambling anti-Harris diatribe on a rightwing news channel by issuing a “statement on a 78-year-old criminal’s Fox News appearance”. The gloves are off.Now, with the first full, buoyant week of Harris’s presidential challenge about to be in the history books, the question is whether the initial enthusiasm and momentum can be maintained through the gruelling 101 days left until the election.Harris and her team are confident it can. Contradicting the statement by the liberal British politician Joseph Chamberlain more than a century ago that “in politics, there is no use looking beyond the next fortnight”, they have their sights set not only on November’s election, but the eight years beyond it. More

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      Trump calls Harris remarks on Gaza war ‘disrespectful’ as he meets Netanyahu

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      Donald Trump has called Kamala Harris’s statement on the Gaza war “disrespectful” before a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Florida to discuss the conflict.Harris, the US vice-president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, had seemed to mark a change of tone on the Israel-Gaza war on Thursday after her own meeting with Netanyahu, when she declared she would “not be silent” about the suffering of Palestinians.Trump criticised Harris on Friday before his meeting at his Mar-a-Lago home, calling her remarks “disrespectful” as he targeted her over an issue that has split the Democratic party.“They weren’t very nice pertaining to Israel,” Trump said. “I actually don’t know how a person who is Jewish could vote for her, but that’s up to them.”Right-wing Israeli politicians attacked Harris and anonymous officials have suggested the remarks could make it more difficult to conclude a ceasefire deal.“I think to the extent that Hamas understands there’s no daylight between Israel and the United States, that expedites the deal,” said Netanyahu to reporters at his meeting with Trump. “And I would hope that those comments don’t change that.”A Harris aide rejected a report in the Times of Israel that a senior official had said that Harris’ criticism would hinder the conclusion of a deal.“I don’t know what they’re talking about,” a Harris aide told CNN.Photographs showed Trump warmly greeting Netanyahu, who is concluding a one-week visit to the US that has been marked by large protests against the war. People stood along the route used by Netanyahu’s motorcade to visit Trump, holding up signs that read: “Ceasefire now” and “Convicted fellon [sic] invites a war criminal”.View image in fullscreenBefore the meeting, Netanyahu said he believed military pressure on Hamas had created “movement” in ceasefire talks, and that he would send a team to an upcoming round of negotiations in Rome. “Time will tell if we’re closer to a ceasefire deal,” he said.The meeting is their first since Trump left the White House in 2020. The men have had a strained relationship in the past after Netanyahu congratulated Joe Biden on his victory in the 2020 election, a vote that Trump has claimed, without evidence, was manipulated. “Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake,” Trump said at the time. “Fuck him.”On Friday, the two appeared to have reconciled. “We’ve always had a good relationship,” Trump told reporters before the meeting.The two were political allies in the past. Trump largely gave Netanyahu carte blanche during his first term in office, ADD moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. . He told Fox News this week that Israel should finish the war and bring back the hostages “fast”. “They are getting decimated with this publicity, and you know Israel is not very good at public relations,” Trump told the broadcaster.Harris has tried to thread the needle of continuing the Biden administration’s policy of support for Israel while assuaging growing anger among Democrats about the humanitarian toll of the conflict that has killed 39,000 Palestinians. Nearly half the Democrats in Congress skipped Netanyahu’s speech in the House of Representatives, and dozens openly said they were boycotting it because of the war.Harris met Netanyahu on Thursday at the White House shortly after the prime minister had sat down with Joe Biden. The separate meetings highlighted how the presumptive Democratic nominee has become increasingly independent since launching her presidential campaign.At the same time, aides tried to play down the potential for change between Biden and Harris on Israel. “[Biden’s] and [Harris’s] message to PM Netanyahu was the same: it’s time to get the hostage and ceasefire deal done,” wrote Phil Gordon, Harris’s national security adviser.Harris called the meeting “frank and constructive”, and said “Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters”. She indicated that she would not halt military aid to Israel because she would “always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself”.But she went further than other administration officials in criticising how Israel has prosecuted the war in Gaza, bolstering hopes she may, at least rhetorically, give more voice to the humanitarian concerns of Palestinians.She said she had expressed her “serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians, and I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there”.“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating – the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”Harris did not say how Netanyahu responded to the Biden administration’s offer of a three-part ceasefire that would begin with a withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces from population centres and some hostages being released. She did not take questions from reporters following the remarks.“There has been hopeful movement in the talks to secure an agreement on this deal,” Harris said. “And as I just told prime minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done. So, to everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you.”The Democratic mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud, said in an interview with Michigan public radio: “Many of us are waiting to see what policy platform Harris puts forward.” Hammoud has been outspoken on Gaza in a state where 13.2% voted “uncommitted” in this year’s Democratic primary in a protest against Biden’s policy towards Israel.“In the conversations that we have had I have found her to be sympathetic and empathetic,” he said. “I’ve found her to be someone that wants to listen … obviously there’s much that remains to be seen.”A senior administration official said before the meetings with Biden and Harris that the “framework of the deal is basically there” but that there are “some very serious implementation issues that still have to be resolved”.“There are some things we need from Hamas, and there are some things we need from the Israeli side, and I think you’ll see that play out here over the course of the coming week,” the official said. 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      Record-breaking Zoom supporting Harris mobilizes white female voters

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      Following the success of a virtual call to mobilize Black women voters for Kamala Harris, a similar event with more than 160,000 attendees was held on Thursday aimed at white women, and appeared to break records.White women will be a key demographic for the Democrats to win over this election.The presidential campaign of Harris, who would become America’s first female president if she wins for the Democrats in November, and will become the first Black woman and south Asian woman to be a major party’s presidential candidate if she is confirmed at the Democratic national convention next month, has taken off quickly since Joe Biden announced last Sunday he would step aside from his re-election campaign.“It’s our turn to show up. So that’s what we’re doing. Hold this date and time,” read the virtual flyer for an event calling for white women – the majority of whom tend to vote Republican – to mobilize for Harris shared widely on social media.“White Women: Answer the Call,” a Zoom call inspired by the one for Black women held earlier this week, saw 164,000 white women joining the call, reportedly setting a world record as the largest Zoom meeting in history. Nearly $2m was raised for Harris in less than two hours on Thursday night.The Zoom call that started it all was hosted on Sunday by Win With Black Women, a group of Black women leaders and organizers, within hours of Biden’s decision, and saw an astonishing 44,000 participants, raising more than $1.5m for Harris’s budding campaign.The tens of thousands of those who couldn’t access that call because it was at capacity streamed it through other platforms such as Twitch, Clubhouse and YouTube.It was just one of several calls hosted by the group since 2020, when it was founded by strategist Jotaka Eaddy.A Win With Black Men call also inspired by the one with Black women raised more than $1.3m to support Harris from over 17,000 donors on Monday.Shannon Watts, a prominent gun control activist, organized Thursday’s event, which featured speakers, including actor Connie Britton, former US soccer star Megan Rapinoe, US house representative Lizzie Fletcher and musician Pink.Exit polls found 52% of white women eligible to vote in 2016 cast a ballot for Donald Trump, a figure which likely helped tilt the election in Trump’s favor. At the time, he was running against Hillary Clinton, who hoped to be the first female president. In 2020, the majority of white women voted for Trump again.“A majority of white women have voted for the Republican candidate since the 2000 presidential election when white women were almost equally split between Democrat Al Gore and Republican victor, George W Bush,” according to the center for American women and politics at Rutgers University. “In contrast, a large majority of Black, Latinx and Asian women have supported the Democratic candidate for the entirety of the time period in which data disaggregated by gender and race has been available.”Watts hopes history won’t repeat itself.“Fellow white women: we can and have to fix this, and that starts with mobilizing like Black women,” Watts wrote on Instagram ahead of the call. She linked to a Substack post she wrote, which read in part: “White women voting for Republicans, even when it appears to be against their best interests, is a complex phenomenon influenced by privilege, systemic racism and sexism, religious affiliations and, of course, the patriarchy.“But we’re not a monolithic group; our voting patterns are typically divided along lines of religion, education and marital status, and that division makes us not only a crucial voting bloc, but an unpredictable one – even small shifts in our voting behavior can have significant impacts on election outcomes.”Watts added: “In other words, if we start doing the work right now, we can create a shift in voting momentum that will help Black women elect Vice President Harris as President in just 100 days.” More

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      Kamala Harris still needs to define herself – but she is the ultimate anti-Trump candidate | Arwa Mahdawi

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      A week has always been a long time in politics, but this might have been the longest week in Kamala Harris’s life. While Joe Biden is still technically the US president, he already feels irrelevant. All eyes are on Harris now. The speed with which she has gone from being one of the most unpopular vice-presidents in modern history to sitting at the top of the Democratic ticket, with an army of enthusiastic fans behind her, is astounding. Biden’s trajectory has been widely compared to a Shakespearean tragedy; Harris’s sudden reversal of fortune, meanwhile, is like something out of a fairytale.A quick recap: Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris on Sunday. The Democratic establishment then threw its weight behind her on Monday. So did hundreds of thousands of donors; Harris’s campaign raked in a record-breaking $81m in just 24 hours. By Tuesday, she had earned enough support from delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president next month. On Wednesday, Democrats approved rules meaning that any Democrat who wants to compete against Harris for the nomination only has days to do so. Then, on Friday, Barack Obama endorsed the vice-president. Her coronation is almost complete.Importantly, Harris doesn’t just have the consolidated support of party elites. She’s also got large swathes of social media cheering her on. The woman has undeniably mementum. “kamala IS brat,” the British pop star Charli xcx posted on X on Sunday. It may not be on the level of an Obama endorsement but Charli’s approval thrust Harris into the middle of the pop-cultural zeitgeist. Charli xcx’s new album, Brat, has undoubtedly been the meme of the summer – the album’s lime-green aesthetic plastered everywhere.In fact, soon after Charli’s approving tweet, @kamalahq changed its backdrop to brat green. Cue a lot of campaign staff trying to explain to high-ranking Democrats like Nancy Pelosi what on earth is going on. (“Well ma’am, Ms xcx, has defined a ‘brat’ as ‘just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it’. Yeah, I know that sounds confusing. But trust me when I say it’ll help us get out the youth vote.”)Harris’s campaign hasn’t just embraced the brats, it’s leaning hard into all the Kamala memes that have been flooding the internet over the past few weeks, including a lot of coconut-related content. That is not a racial slur, I should make clear to British readers, but rather a reference to a speech the vice-president gave in 2023.“My mother … would give us a hard time sometimes,” Harris said at a White House event about educational opportunity. “… and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” She then paused for profundity before continuing with the philosophical bit. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”The coconut quote – which circulated online long before last week – is quintessential Harris: a bewildering series of words that sound like someone typed “come up with a profound sentence” into an early version of ChatGPT. Lines like this have been a liability in the past, used by her detractors to suggest she’s unserious. The internet, however, is now turning Harris’s unique rhetorical style into an asset. The TikTok mashups and coconut memes have helped inject some much-needed joy and levity into what until now has been an extremely depressing election cycle.At the moment, Harris seems unstoppable. A new Axios/Generation Lab poll shows she’s got a big edge with young voters and another poll has found she’s narrowed Donald Trump’s lead significantly. Nevertheless, it can’t be emphasised enough that we are still very much in the Harris honeymoon phase. People were desperate not to have another Trump-Biden matchup and eager to embrace change of any kind. The question is: can the momentum around Harris be sustained?There is certainly precedent in US elections when it comes to a woman being rapidly built up, only to be swiftly knocked down. And Republicans are already doing their best to knock Harris down with racist and misogynistic attacks. They’ve also attacked her record as vice-president, calling her the “border tsar” and blaming her for the migration crisis.Then there’s the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The internet may have positioned Harris as a lovable goofball now but that image will be hard to sustain among young people if she becomes the face of Biden’s horrific Gaza policy – which has been deeply unpopular with young people and lost the Democrats a lot of support in the important swing state of Michigan, where there is a large Arab American population.So far, Harris has been walking a careful tightrope when it comes to Gaza; trying not to alienate progressives while also making sure she isn’t branded “anti-Israel”. On Wednesday, the vice-president skipped Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress and met him privately instead. On Thursday, she said it was time for a ceasefire deal to be done, but also pledged “unwavering” support for Israel. There’s only so long she can play both sides, however. She will either continue Biden’s policy of letting Israel kill as many Palestinians as it wants, with only meek protestations, or she won’t.Harris will also have to define herself as a candidate more broadly. This has never been one of her strengths and a lack of substance was the undoing of her 2019 attempt to be the Democratic nominee. “She has proved to be an uneven campaigner who changes her message and tactics to little effect and has a staff torn into factions,” the New York Times decreed in a November 2019 piece about how her campaign unravelled.That said, running against her fellow Democrats is very different from running against Trump. While Harris didn’t fully shine as the primary candidate or the vice-president, she has the potential to come into her own now. She is the ultimate anti-Trump. She’s the prosecutor, he’s the felon. He’s the old guy, she’s the relatively young woman. He represents the US’s past, she represents its future. Just a few weeks ago, I was resigned to a Trump win. Now I think the US has a fighting chance of seeing a Madam President.Then again, a week is a long time in politics. And there are still 14 to go before the election.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      Uncommitted voters who protested Biden over Gaza ‘need to see action’ from Harris

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      The protest movement that sought to use the Democratic primaries to pressure Joe Biden to shift his policy on Israel and Gaza breathed a sigh of relief when he ended his bid for re-election. But they’re not ready to promise they’ll support Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee.More than 700,000 Americans voted “uncommitted”, or its equivalent, in state primaries as a message to Biden that he risked losing significant support in November if he did not shift away from his support for Israel. As next month’s Democratic national convention inches closer, the movement has turned its sights to pressuring Harris to shape a new course on Gaza policy. Its demands of Harris include an arms embargo on Israel and support for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, where more than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed since the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, according to health officials.Uncommitted voters say that their message to the White House is clear: stop funding Israel’s war, or lose our votes.“[Harris] could get my vote, but it’s going to be a difficult journey. We actually need to see action,” said Fadel Nabilsi, a Palestinian American attorney who voted uncommitted in Michigan’s Democratic primary. Biden won the swing state, where 278,000 Arab Americans live, by just 154,000 votes in 2020. “You need to get on the same page with all of us,” Nabilsi said, “if you’d like to get our support and our backing.”Harris has spoken more forcefully about Palestinian suffering than her boss, and in remarks on Thursday after meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, she used sharp terms to call for a ceasefire and the protection of Palestinian civilians.“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time.”She acknowledged that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and denounced Hamas, but also added: “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies [in Gaza]. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”But despite a difference in tone, she has not signaled how or whether her politics on the region would break from Biden’s – the departure that uncommitted activists are looking for.“The White House’s policy to continue to supply American bombs to Netanyahu is like a bartender serving drinks to an alcoholic while repeatedly urging them to stay sober,” Waleed Shahid, a progressive Democratic strategist and an adviser to the Uncommitted National Movement, said after Harris spoke on Thursday. “Empathy for Palestinians from the vice-president is a step in the right direction but people just want a policy change to stop the supply of American bombs to Israel’s war.”The uncommitted movement gained ground in March following a campaign called Listen to Michigan, which succeeded in persuading more than 100,000 voters to mark their ballots “uncommitted” during the state’s Democratic primary in February. The grassroots effort spread to more than two dozen states, ultimately earning the movement 30 delegates who will travel to the Democratic national convention next month.The movement is urging delegates outside of the uncommitted camp to support their policy demands during the convention. Harris delegates “can help push for an arms embargo”, said Shahid. “They don’t need to become uncommitted delegates.”Abbas Alawieh, an uncommitted delegate from Michigan, said that people close to the Harris campaign have reached out to uncommitted activists in recent days, but declined to share specifics.“We need her to meet with members of our community. We need her to meet with uncommitted delegates,” Alawieh said. “We need to hear from her and her team how she will embrace an approach that prioritizes and values Palestinian lives and the lives of every civilian.”More than 600 people joined an uncommitted national organizing call on Monday night for the movement’s recently launched Not Another Bomb campaign, which urges US leaders to end financial and military support for Israel’s war.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenChloe Lundine, a Detroit, Michigan, resident and uncommitted voter, joined a protest near the Capitol building in Washington DC during Netanyahu’s visit. Earlier this week, she said, she was pressured to resign from her position as an analyst at Wayne State University after posting pro-Palestinian art outside her office. While she was “cautiously optimistic” that Harris would change course on Gaza policy, she added that she’d “love to see her speak with Netanyahu and plainly say that she supports a permanent ceasefire at the very minimum”.Uncommitted voters are torn on whether they’ll vote for the Democratic candidate if their demands aren’t met – they recognize that Donald Trump is not likely to bring peace to Gaza but are resistant to pressure from Democrats to vote against their conscience. Some said they would be dissatisfied if Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, were picked as Harris’s running mate, citing his efforts to quash pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.For Ghada Elnajjar, a Palestinian American organizer based in Georgia, the decision of whether to vote for Harris or a candidate like the Green party’s Jill Stein keeps her up at night.“On the one hand, I do consider that it is time for this country to break shackles from a two-party system and introduce a third party,” said Elnajjar. “On the other hand, I understand there’s so many other policies that we need to support: the economy, education, the environment.”‘This could look two ways’A separate anti-war movement has also started mobilizing. On Thursday, Pennsylvania activists launched a campaign to collect pledges from voters refusing to vote for Harris unless she breaks more sharply from Biden policies.“President Biden lost the support of hundreds of thousands of voters because he refused to stop funding genocide in Gaza,” said Reem Abuelhaj, an organizer with the No Ceasefire No Vote campaign. “Vice-president Harris now has a unique opportunity to win back those votes. But that will only happen if she does everything in her power to bring about a ceasefire.”Other activists may not be pressuring people to withhold their votes, but they warn that Harris shouldn’t take their support for granted.“Instead of trying to stop support for Harris, our strategy is going to focus on holding her accountable to values and demands of the majority of the Democratic party base and electorate, which includes a lasting and permanent ceasefire via an arms embargo on Israel,” said Lexis Zeidan, a Palestinian American activist with the uncommitted movement from Dearborn, Michigan.A recent Gallup poll found that more Americans oppose Israel’s war on Gaza than support it: 48% compared with 42%. Just 23% of Democrats said they approve of Israel’s military campaign.“This could look two ways,” said Shahid, the Democratic strategist. “Either the 700,000 uncommitted voters could actively mobilize for vice-president Harris, if they felt like she had shifted significantly on Gaza from Biden.“If she doesn’t shift on Gaza, I think people will be much more reserved about their enthusiasm, in terms of knocking on doors, donating, telling their friends and family and their community to vote for Harris, even if they don’t like Trump.” More

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      Conservatives’ racist and sexist attacks on Kamala Harris show exactly who they are | Judith Levine

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      Like a warm compress drawing pus from a wound, the Democratic presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris immediately brought out the misogyny and racism of the Maga Republican party.Tim Burchett, the Tennessee Republican representative, called Harris, the child of a Black Jamaican father and an Indian mother, a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) hire – picked, that is, because she is Black, not because she’s qualified. Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, insinuated that Harris is a welfare queen. “What the hell have you done other than collect a check?” he asked at a Michigan rally of Harris, a former state attorney general, US senator and now the vice-president. At the same time, social media posts showing Harris with her parents falsely claim she’s not really Black, because her father is light-skinned.Popping up again are rumors circulated in 2020 by Trump lawyer John Eastman that Harris is ineligible to run for office because she might not be a citizen. Like Barack Obama, about whom Trump stirred the same “birther” calumny, Harris was born in the US.Far-right blogger Matt Walsh and former Fox host Megyn Kelly suggested Harris slept her way to the top. Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer went further, alleging that the veep was “once an escort” who started out by “giving blow jobs to successful, rich, Black men”. The founder of Pastors for Trump tweeted: “Both Joe + the Ho gotta go!”While allegedly copulating with all comers, Harris is slammed for failing in her womanly duty to reproduce. In a video that recently turned up, Vance, the father of three, told Tucker Carlson in 2021 that the US was being run by “childless cat ladies” – Harris among them – who don’t “have a direct stake” in the country’s future. Will Chamberlain, a lawyer who worked on Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, proclaimed that “people without kids … are highly susceptible to corruption and perversion. They have no care for the future and live in the present.”Being a step-parent – as Harris is to her husband’s biological children – doesn’t count, Chamberlain added. This criticism has never been leveled against the childless George Washington – although, to be fair, he was the Father of Our Country.And if misogyny and racism are not sufficient, the right keeps searching for plain weirdness to use against the Democratic candidate. All they’ve come up with, though, is one of her more charming characteristics, her laugh, from which Trump derives his lamest-yet political nickname: “Laughing Kamala”.This stuff is vile to watch. But as with drained pus, it’s got to be exposed to the air. Because it’s not just talk. It reveals what a Trump presidency would mean. By exposing what’s festering barely under the skin of Trumpism, the Republican party is telling us to vote against him.While in office, Trump’s ignorance and incompetence prevented him from accomplishing – or, often, knowing – what he wanted to do. In his madder moments, some of his advisers pulled him back from the edge. But this time, he’s got a team of smart, loyal experts and a detailed plan, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to get it done.In 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s murder spread across the country, Trump gunned to gun down the protesters – literally. “Can’t you just shoot them?” he asked Mark Esper, according to the then defense secretary’s memoir. In another memoir, then Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender quotes the apoplectic president calling on police and the military to “crack [protesters’] skulls” and “beat the fuck” out of them. For the most part, this didn’t happen.Should Project 2025 become reality, however, the commander-in-chief would be freer to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which authorizes him to direct the military to put down domestic unrest. The blueprint also advises the administration to revoke all consent decrees imposing federal oversight on police departments with records of brutality and murder of civilians, particularly civilians of color.The 2024 Republican national convention, featuring Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock and another straight white man on the ticket, was practically a parody of the white hypermasculinity animating the party. But the Republican party promises to force its gender ideology on the rest of us. “Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” reads the platform. Project 2025 proposes that “the redefinition of sex to cover gender identity and sexual orientation … be reversed” and the phrase “sexual orientation and gender identity” be eliminated from anti-discrimination policies across federal agencies. In fact, its aim is to eliminate anti-discrimination policies altogether.And, of course, there’s abortion. In 2016, Trump opined that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Then he walked the statement back. This April, he told a reporter that states should be allowed to punish doctors. “Everything we’re doing now is states and states’ rights,” he elaborated, using the historical code words for legislated racial segregation – now updated to gender oppression. And while he’s distanced himself from a federal abortion ban, Project 2025 is riddled with pledges to protect the safety, dignity and humanity of the unborn.Clueless as he was, Trump attained the right’s holy grail: a supreme court majority that will decimate the civil and human rights of people of color, pregnant people, the poor, immigrants and the marginalized long into the future. The Trump court is already punishing people who seek abortions. Even if Congress founders, this court will realize every racist and misogynist dream.It’s hard to say whether this bigotry will sway voters. A month before the 2016 election, after a campaign of one racist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic outburst after another, Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” tape was leaked and a dozen women accused the candidate of sexual misconduct. Hillary Clinton surged to a lead of as much as 11 points. Then, FBI director James Comey released a letter equivocating on the extent or importance of those official emails on her private server, and Trump won. It’s still unclear whether the Comey report turned the election. But the pussy-grabbing tape did not.Still, in 2016, Trump was a pig but an untested pig. A lot has happened since then. His presidency was bookended by the Women’s March and the Black Lives Matter protests. In 2017, Tarana Burke’s #MeToo hashtag went viral and rage over sexual harassment exploded. Five years later, Pew Research found that the majority of Americans, including Republicans, felt the #MeToo movement had a positive impact. BLM engaged protesters of every age and race, and antiracist movements continue to. Trump has been convicted of sexual abuse. Now, if anything, Maga is focusing the anger of women and people of color.Republican leaders sense these changes, and they’re worried – worried enough that Richard Hudson, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, called a closed-door meeting to tell the caucus to cut the slime and focus on the issues.Maybe they will. But Trump and his nastier champions will not: hatred will continue to ooze from their mouths. Disgusting as it, pay attention. Because sexism and racism are not just talk. They’re policies – the calamitous policies a Trump presidency augurs.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More