Democrats

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans are lining up to oppose Trump. Will it make a difference?

      by

      Donald Trump has a knack for rallying a remarkable range of political opinion around a common goal: preventing his return to the White House.That now includes prominent names from his own Republican party and top aides who worked under him as president. From former White House officials and national security staff to a once-worshipful press secretary, a host of one-time Trump fans are now lining up to join Democrats in declaring him unfit for another term in office.White House lawyers who served Republican presidents going back to Ronald Reagan and retired senior military officers have also denounced Trump as a danger to democracy.Adding to Trump’s humiliation, even members of his own cabinet – who once pledged their fealty with a subservience that would not displease Vladimir Putin – are declining to endorse him for re-election in November.It’s not entirely a one-way street. For his part, Trump has managed to win over Robert F Kennedy Jr, scion of the US’s most renowned Democratic family and erstwhile presidential candidate, and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress.Trump has added the pair to his transition team but the impact of their endorsement was tempered by Democrats swiftly reminding voters that Kennedy once described Trump as “a terrible president” and his policies as “absurd and terrifying”. Neither will more reasoned Republicans be reassured by Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer views, which have drawn the scorn of at least one major party donor.The anti-Trump messages are principally aimed at persuading Republicans who may formerly have voted for him that they should put country before party to keep a dangerous populist from a second term in the White House. Opinion polls say that 9% of likely voters who support Trump are prepared to at least consider switching to the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.In early August, her campaign launched “Republicans for Harris” to target voters thought most likely to switch, particularly those who backed Trump’s rival in the primaries, Nikki Haley.On Monday, 200 Republicans who worked for President George W Bush and the former presidential candidates Senators Mitt Romney and John McCain, released an open letter in support of Harris and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz.The letter warned that there was more to fear from Trump than a repeat of his first term because he is now bound up with the authoritarian plan to impose rightwing control across the entire US government, including non-partisan federal agencies, known as Project 2025.“Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable,” the letter said.“At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions. Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies. We can’t let that happen.”The signatories included Jean Becker, President George HW Bush’s chief of staff; David Nierenberg, the campaign finance chair for Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign; and two former chiefs of staff for McCain.View image in fullscreenThe Trump campaign communications director, Steven Cheung, scorned the letter as written by nonentities.“It’s hilarious because nobody knows who these people are. They would rather see the country burn down than to see President Trump successfully return to the White House to Make America Great Again,” he told Fox News.But many Trump supporters will have heard of Stephanie Grisham who served as White House press secretary and routinely appeared on conservative media outlets promoting the then president. Grisham spoke at the Democratic national convention in August where she described how she was once “a true believer” but by the end of Trump’s presidency had concluded that “he has no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth.“Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers,” she told the DNC and millions of Americans voters watching on television.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGrisham, who was the first senior White House official to resign after Trump stoked the January 6 insurrection, called on Americans to vote for Harris.“I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris tells the truth. She respects the American people and she has my vote,” she said.A former member of Congress, Adam Kinzinger, who was one of just 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Trump after the attack on the Capitol, also denounced him from the Democratic convention podium for having “suffocated the soul of the Republican party”.Other Republicans have joined the criticisms of Trump by saying that it is not enough to stand by and not vote in November.A dozen former White House lawyers who served Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W Bush backed Harris in a letter warning that returning Trump to office “would threaten American democracy and undermine the rule of law in our country”. The letter appeals to “all patriotic Republicans, former Republicans, conservative and center-right citizens, and independent voters to place love of country above party and ideology” and vote for Harris.“We cannot go along with other former Republican officials who have condemned Trump with these devastating judgments but are still not willing to vote for Harris. We believe this election presents a binary choice, and Trump is utterly disqualified,” it said.That appears aimed at former officials such as John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, and former defense secretary Mark Esper who have both denounced Trump as unfit for office but declined to endorse Harris.The letter signed by the 200 former officials said the last presidential election was decided by “moderate Republicans and conservative independents” in swing states who “put country far before party” to defeat Trump four years ago.“We’re heartfully calling on these friends, colleagues, neighbors, and family members to take a brave stand once more, to vote for leaders that will strive for consensus, not chaos; that will work to unite, not divide; that will make our country and our children proud. Those leaders are Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov Tim Walz,” it said.Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s center for politics, said the appeals by the anti-Trump Republicans are aimed at a narrow slice of the electorate given that he doubts many voters are truly undecided.“A lot of those undecided are just people who are not going to tell the pollster who they’re voting for. There just aren’t that many undecideds. It’s people’s way of avoiding an argument. Also, I don’t think it changes one Republican’s mind who wasn’t open to the idea of not voting for Trump and there aren’t that many of them,” he said.“But it can make a difference for people who pay attention and who are movable. It also makes a difference for Democratic-leaning independents. It justifies the decision to support Harris they’ve already made. For that reason it matters because these are people, many of them, who’ve worked closely with Trump in the White House and they’ve seen up close how incompetent he is and how unsuited he is for the presidency. It’s critical to get these people on the record.” More

    • 238 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      The right’s obsession with childless women isn’t just about ideology: it’s essential to the capitalist machine | Nesrine Malik

      by

      A woman without biological children is running for high political office, and so naturally that quality will at some point be used against her. Kamala Harris has, in the short period since she emerged as the Democratic candidate for US president, been scrutinised over her lack of children. The conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain posted on X that Harris “shouldn’t be president” – apparently, she doesn’t have “skin in the game”. The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, called Harris and other Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives”.It’s a particularly virulent tendency in the US, with a rightwing movement that is fixated on women’s reproduction. But who can forget (and if you have, I am happy to remind you of a low point that still sticks in my craw) Andrea Leadsom, during the 2016 Conservative party leadership election, saying that Theresa May might have nieces and nephews, but “I have children who are going to have children … who will be a part of what happens next”. “Genuinely,” she added, as if the message were not clear enough, “I feel that being a mum means you have a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake.”It’s an argument about political capability that dresses up a visceral revulsion at the idea that a woman who does not have a child should be vested with any sort of credibility or status. In other comments, Vance said that “so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me”. He appears so fixated on this that it is almost comical: a man whose obsession with childless women verges on a complex.But his “disorientation and disturbance” is a political tendency that persists and endures. It constantly asks the question of women who don’t have children, in subtle and explicit ways, especially the higher they rise in the professional sphere: “What’s up with that? What’s the deal?” The public sphere becomes a space for answering that question. Women perform a sort of group plea to be left the hell alone, in their painstaking examinations of how they arrived at the decision not to have kids, or why they in fact celebrate not having kids, or deliberations on ambivalence about having kids.Behind all this lies some classic old-school inability to conceive of women outside mothering. But one reason this traditionalism persists in ostensibly modern and progressive places is that women withdrawing from mothering in capitalist societies – with their poorly resourced public amenities and parental support – forces questions about our inequitable, unacknowledged economic arrangements. A woman who does not bear children is a woman who will never stay home and provide unremunerated care. She is less likely to be held in the domestic zone and extend her caregiving to elderly relatives or the children of others. She cannot be a resource that undergirds a male partner’s career, frailties, time limitations and social demands.A mother is an option, a floating worker, the joker in the pack. Not mothering creates a hole for that “free” service, which societies increasingly arranged around nuclear families and poorly subsidised rights depend on. The lack of parental leave, childcare and elderly care would become profoundly visible – “disorienting and disturbing” – if that service were removed.“Motherhood,” writes the author Helen Charman in her new book Mother State, “is a political state. Nurture, care, the creation of human life – all immediate associations with mothering – have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources … than we like to admit. For raising children is the foundational work of society, and, from gestation onward, it is unequally shared.”Motherhood, in other words, becomes an economic input, a public good, something that is talked about as if the women themselves were not in the room. Data on declining birthrates draws comment from Elon Musk (“extremely concerning!!”) . Not having children is reduced to entirely personal motivations – selfishness, beguilement with the false promise of freedom, lack of values and foresight, irresponsibility – rather than external conditions: of the need for affordable childcare, support networks, flexible working arrangements and the risk of financial oblivion that motherhood frequently brings, therefore creating bondage to partners. To put it mildly, these are material considerations to be taken into account upon entering a state from which there is no return. Assuming motherhood happens without such context, Charman tells me, is a “useful fantasy”.It is a binary public discourse, obscuring the often thin veil between biological and social actualisation. Women who don’t have children do not exist in a state of blissful detachment from their bodies and their relationship with maternity: a number have had pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions and periods. A number have entered liminal stages of motherhood that don’t conform to the single definition from which they are excluded. A number extend mothering to various children in their lives. Some, like Harris herself, have stepchildren (who don’t count, just as May’s nieces and nephews didn’t). A number have become mothers, just not in a way that initiates them into a blissful club. They experience regret, depression and navigate unsettlement that does not conform to the image of uncomplicated validation of your purpose in life.But the privilege of those truths cannot be bestowed on creatures whose rejection of the maternal bond has become a rejection of a wider unspoken, colossally unfair contract. Women with children are handed social acceptance for their vital investment in “the future”, in exchange for unrewarded, unsupported labour that props up and stabilises the economic and social status quo. All while still suffering sneeriness about the value of their work in comparison with the serious graft of the men who win the bread.On top of that, women have to navigate all that motherhood – or not – entails, all the deeply personal, bewildering, isolating and unacknowledged realities of both, while being subject to relentless suffocating, infantilising and violating public theories and notions that trespass on their private spaces. With that comes a sense of self-doubt and shame in making the wrong decision, or not being as content with those decisions as they are expected to be. It is a constant, prodding vivisection. That, more than anything clinical observers feel, is the truly disorienting and disturbing experience.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      For decades, it’s been a man’s world on Capitol Hill – that’s finally changing

      by

      The halls of the US Congress were, for many years, a man’s world. The first woman elected to Congress, the Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana, joined the House in 1917, three years before the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote and decades before the civil rights movement enabled ballot access for women of color.Now, more than a century later, 150 women serve in Congress, marking an all-time high. And as more women have joined the House and Senate, the ranks of senior staffers on the Hill have shifted alongside them. More women, specifically young women, are leading congressional offices as chiefs of staff, giving them invaluable access to lawmakers and opportunities to influence the policies that shape Americans’ lives.Data shows that white male staffers are still more likely to hold senior roles on Capitol Hill, but the young women who lead congressional offices want to help change that. And among Democratic chiefs of staff, this year represents an inflection point: many of them were first inspired to get involved in politics after Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, and the country now has another opportunity to not only defeat Donald Trump but elect Kamala Harris as the first female president.“It’s really important for women in positions of power to be speaking out and sharing their experiences,” said Marie Baldassarre, 29, chief of staff to the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna. “The more of those examples that young women can have, then the less we doubt ourselves – because we’ve seen other people do it.”A call to action after 2016Multiple Democratic chiefs of staff said they had not envisioned a career in politics before Trump’s victory in 2016. They certainly did not expect to rise to the level of a chief of staff, who holds the most senior role in a congressional office and can directly consult with a House member on legislative and political decisions.After her family emigrated to the US from Iran when she was seven, Armita Pedramrazi, chief of staff to the Democratic representative Mary Gay Scanlon, thought she might go into pro-bono immigration law. Then a mentor suggested she apply for a job with the then congresswoman Susan Davis.“I applied completely on a whim, thinking there was absolutely no way that someone without political connections or without some sort of leverage could work for a congressional office,” said Pedramrazi, 32. “It felt like this incredibly far away, impossible thing.”She got the job and eventually moved to Washington DC in 2016, expecting to do immigration policy work with Hillary Clinton’s administration. That did not come to pass, but she stayed on in her legislative role with Davis before arriving in Scanlon’s office and working her way up to chief of staff.For Amy Kuhn, chief of staff to Democratic congresswoman Sara Jacobs, Clinton campaign’s in 2016 marked her first foray into political work. And although Clinton lost, the experience allowed Kuhn to meet her current boss and underscored the importance of the work.“I’m a gay woman who grew up in the very red state of Montana, so a lot of my life has been very political by its nature,” said Kuhn, 35. “[The Clinton campaign] was such a good experience, but the outcome was so personal and painful, and we were all reckoning with what it meant for Donald Trump to become president.”If Trump’s presidency spurred them into action, several chiefs of staff said the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022 served as a reminder of why they chose this professional path.“My mom dedicated her career to fighting for reproductive rights, and that was something I really viewed as a threat when I first got involved in politics,” Baldassarre said. “Now that Roe has been overturned, it just motivates me that the fight isn’t over.”Since launching her campaign, Harris has placed a renewed emphasis on the importance of protecting abortion access. She has embraced the rallying cry of “we’re not going back” to bolster her argument that this election represents an existential fight over Americans’ fundamental freedoms.For young women working in Democratic politics, the excitement around Harris’s candidacy demonstrates the importance of deploying effective messengers who understand the gravity of issues like abortion access.View image in fullscreen“She’s a trustworthy narrator. She can talk about the issue from personal experience, as so many women can,” said Abby May, 28, chief of staff to the Democratic congressman Wiley Nickel. “Being able to speak to the millions of women out there who are worried about having their rights ripped away, and knowing that she’s someone who understands exactly what’s at stake, is hugely impactful.”The same logic applies to the young women who lead congressional offices, Pedramrazi argued.“Being a young woman in this moment, there are ways that we can talk about the issues facing the electorate and our constituents that are much more personal,” she said.“To me, that’s the benefit of any type of diversity. You have people who are bringing a different kind of fire to the issues that affect them personally. And I think that is as true being a young woman chief of staff as it is for anyone.”More work remainsEven as more young women step into senior roles in congressional offices, they remain somewhat of an anomaly. According to 2019 data compiled by the left-leaning thinktank New America, 22% of female Hill staffers serve in senior roles compared to 33% of male Hill staffers. Women were also less likely than men to serve in roles focused on political leadership, which tend to be more senior and better paid. Among female staffers on the Hill, 11% of them worked in political leadership in 2019, compared to 17% of male staffers.People of color face their own challenges on the Hill. According to a 2022 report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, people of color account for only 18% of top House staff, even as they make up 40% of the national population. In the personal offices of white Democratic members, people of color represent 14.8% of top staff, compared to 5.2% in the personal offices of white Republican members.And although those under 35 made up a majority of Hill staffers, political leadership roles tend to be held by those more advanced in their careers. In 2019, the average tenure for all staffers was roughly three years, according to New America’s data, but the average tenure for those in political management roles was more than 14 years.The impact of remaining in the minority is felt by many of the staffers. May said that, even as her boss has expressed unwavering confidence in her capabilities, she has still had the experience of being mistaken for his daughter or intern.“I think the main challenges are with external folks who come in expecting one type of face when they’re meeting with the chief of staff and get mine,” May said. “Being taken seriously at all levels when we are doing such important work is still a reality that I think all women chiefs of staff – and women around the country – deal with.”Baldasarre echoed that sentiment, while praising Khanna and other mentors for giving her opportunities for advancement. “I think the biggest challenge that I’ve faced has actually been much more subtle, which is that women, people of color, younger people, we just aren’t given the same benefit of the doubt when we walk into a new room,” she said.Despite those challenges, there are signs of slow change. The New America data found the percentage of women in senior staffer roles increased by 5%, from 17% to 22%, between 2017 and 2019, although the percentage of men in senior staffer roles rose by 11 points in that same time period. The report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that the percentage of people of color in top House staffer positions rose from 13.7% to 18% between 2018 and 2022.“I’m grateful that the institution of Congress is sort of changing along with us,” Kuhn said. “We go into weekly meetings with all the Democratic chiefs, and it is a remarkably diverse room.”The young women chiefs of staff are bringing about change in their own offices as well, encouraging colleagues to take mental health days and providing younger employees the opportunity to voice their opinions.Pedramrazi wants to build an experience for her younger coworkers that feels distinctly different from her own early memories on the Hill, when she often felt condescended to by external groups. She got the impression that her contributions or concerns were dismissed out of hand because she wasn’t taken seriously by external advisers.“No one really was standing to attention when a brown, 24-year-old young woman was speaking,” Pedramrazi said. “And I think part of the amazing experience of being a chief of staff now is … creating a really safe environment for our staffers – regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, race – to feel really heard in the office.”May hopes that by building more equitable offices, more young women will be motivated to get involved in politics. In a year where the enthusiasm of young voters could decide the outcome of a presidential election, that mission feels more urgent than ever.“Representation of young women only encourages more young women to get involved and get their own seats at the table,” May said. More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Not a place for photo ops’: Democrats turn Trump’s Arlington incident into election issue

      by

      Democrats are trying to turn Donald Trump’s clash with staff at Arlington National Cemetery, the hallowed final resting place of America’s war dead, into a broader election issue by highlighting it as an example of his history of disrespecting military veterans.Congressional Democrats with military records and liberal-leaning veterans groups say the episode is consistent with past instances of the Republican presidential nominee flagrantly denigrating service in the armed forces.They also see it as an opportunity to turn the tables on Republican efforts to undermine the record of Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, who has come under fire for a series of supposedly misleading statements about aspects of his 24 years of military service in the national guard.The US army rebuked Trump’s campaign this week after members of the former president’s entourage “abruptly pushed aside” a female cemetery staff member who was trying to prevent them taking pictures of Trump at a wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of a soldier who was killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.The cemetery worker was acting in line with the facility’s rules, which prohibits pictures or film being shot in section 60, the burial area for personnel killed serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.Pictures later appeared of Trump posing alongside members of the soldier’s family smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign – a gesture denounced by some as inappropriate and crass.Trump’s campaign also posted video footage on TikTok with the former president claiming – falsely – that “we didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then [the Biden administration] took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.” In fact, 11 US soldiers were killed in Trump’s last year in Afghanistan.Trump was invited to Arlington by several of the families of those killed to mark the third anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal – the botched handling of which stands as one of the most damaging episodes of Joe Biden’s presidency.Now Democrats are accusing him of exploiting a revered site for narrow campaign purposes, in breach of the cemetery’s regulations. The former president did not attend the previous two anniversaries marking the withdrawal.“Arlington National Cemetery isn’t a place for campaign photo-ops. It’s a sacred resting place for American patriots,” Mikie Sherrill, a Democratic House member from New Jersey and former navy helicopter pilot, posted on X. “But for Donald Trump, disrespecting military veterans is just par for the course. It’s an absolute disgrace.”Gerry Connolly, a congressman from Virginia, demanded the release of footage and paperwork from the incident. He said it was “sad but all too expected that Donald Trump would desecrate this hallowed ground and put campaign politics ahead of honouring our heroes”.Jared Golden, a Democratic Congress member from Maine and an ex-marine, called Arlington “sacred ground and all visitors should take the time to learn the rules of decorum that ensure the proper respect is given to the fallen and their families”.Although surveys have shown that roughly six in 10 retired service members voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election, some left-leaning veterans groups have added their voice to the criticism.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJon Stoltz, a former army veteran and co-founder of VoteVets, a veterans group that is supporting Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, accused Trump of using the cemetery “for a political ceremony” and predicted that it could turn previously sympathetic ex-servicemen against him.“They don’t have a right to do that with other veterans who are there,” Stoltz told the Associated Press. “I know there’s veterans who support Trump. He’s just motivated people against him.”In a statement, Allison Jaslow, chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, added to the condemnation, saying: “There are plenty of places appropriate for politics – Arlington is not one of them. Any aspiring elected official, especially one who hopes to be Commander in Chief, should not be confused about that fact.”The cemetery’s rules state: “Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honoured dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”Trump’s attitude to military service has come under scrutiny because of a track record of dismissive statements, both public and private. This month, he appeared to disparage the Congressional Medal of Honor – saying it was inferior to the medal of freedom, which he bestowed as president – because most of its recipients had “been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead”.According to his former White House chief of staff John Kelly, he refused to visit a first world war cemetery during a 2018 visit to France, calling the American servicemen buried there “suckers” and “losers” for getting killed.He also ridiculed the late Republican senator John McCain, saying he was only considered a war hero because he had been captured. According to separate reports, Trump voiced objections to having disabled veterans at a military ceremony which ultimately never occurred, saying “it doesn’t look good for me”. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Anti-abortion groups warn Trump’s row back on position risks losing votes

      by

      Over the last two weeks, Donald Trump has publicly backed away from multiple anti-abortion positions – a move that Democrats see as hypocritical and that, anti-abortion activists warn, risks alienating voters who have long stood by him.On Thursday, Trump said that, if elected, he would make the government or insurance companies cover in vitro fertilization – a type of fertility assistancethat some in the anti-abortion movement want to see curtailed. Trump also seemed to indicate that he planned to vote in favor of a ballot measure to restore abortion access in Florida, which currently bans abortion past six weeks of pregnancy. “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” Trump told NBC News in an interview.Trump’s campaign quickly rushed to walk back his remarks on the ballot measure, telling NPR that Trump simply meant that six weeks is too early in pregnancy to ban abortion. “President Trump has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida,” his press secretary said.Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, in a decision backed by three justices that Trump appointed, Trump has alternately bragged about toppling Roe and complained that outrage over its fall will cost Republicans elections. But Trump’s comments on Thursday mark his latest attempt to apparently clarify and soften his stance on the controversial procedure. Last week, Trump also suggested that he would not use a 19th-century anti-vice law to ban abortion nationwide, while his running mate, JD Vance, said Trump would not sign a national ban.“I don’t think it tells us necessarily what Trump is or isn’t going to do, because he’s still been leaving himself wiggle room on a lot of critical questions,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Law who studies the legal history of reproduction. But, she continued: “What had been a strategy of ‘be ambiguous and then hopefully be everything to everyone’ has tilted more in the direction of Trump trying to assure voters that he doesn’t agree with the anti-abortion movement.”Trump’s new strategy comes as Kamala Harris, a far more effective champion of abortion rights than Joe Biden, has taken over as the Democratic nominee for president, and as polls show the two candidates are neck and neck. But this strategy may leave anti-abortion voters feeling less energized to vote for him, warned Kristan Hawkins, president of the prominent anti-abortion group Students for Life of America.“The pro-life movement didn’t always have a firm place in the Republican party. For many years, we were at the little kids’ table,” Hawkins said. “The young people that we work with, they don’t remember that. And so they’re absolutely shocked and saddened to see someone who they thought was pro-life, or who had always reaffirmed pro-life values, walking back on that.”Although the anti-abortion movement was a critical component of Trump’s success in the 2016 presidential election, Republicans have tried to back away from it in the years since Roe’s demise as abortion rights supporters have repeatedly won ballot measures even in red states. Sixty per cent of American adults believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 70% say access to IVF is a “good thing”.Tresa Undem, who has polled people on abortion for more than 20 years, does not think that Trump’s comments will necessarily win him the support of uncertain or independent voters who support abortion rights. Instead, he may be trying to reassure the segment of his base that also supports access to the procedure.“A third of his voters are pro-choice,” Undem said. “In a recent survey we did, 16% of 2020 Trump voters say abortion rights are a top five issue. So when you have an election that is probably going to be determined based on 1% of people, 16% of Trump voters saying their abortion rights is top in their mind – that’s a problem for him.”Democrats have cast Trump’s new strategy, particularly his comments on IVF, as a sham. In a Friday press call organized by the Harris campaign, the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, repeatedly pointed out that Vance had voted against a Senate bill to create federal protections for IVF.“Trump that thinks women are stupid and that we can be gaslighted,” Warren said. “He seems to believe he can do one thing when he talks to his extremist base and then turn around and smile at the overwhelming majority of Americans who want to see access to abortion and IVF protected.”On Friday, the DNC is rolling out billboards in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state, that slam Trump over IVF, according to a strategy shared exclusively with the Guardian. “Trump overturned Roe, threatening the future of IVF,” one billboard reads. Another says: “Donald Trump’s Project 2025 Undermines Reproductive Care and Threatens IVF.”Project 2025, a playbook of conservative policies drawn up by the influential Heritage Foundation, contains a long list of anti-abortion proposals. Trump has tried to distance himself from it over the last several weeks.At least one prominent anti-abortion activist, Lila Rose, has publicly declared she currently does not plan to vote for Trump, given his recent turn away from anti-abortion positions. But Hawkins is still committed to getting people to vote for Trump – not because of Trump himself, but because she fears how a Harris presidency would strengthen abortion access.“I don’t like it. It’s not where I think we should be as a nation, but I think that we’ve had to do this at times within the pro-life movement,” she said. “Folks are asked: if you can’t vote for a candidate, vote against the worst one.”What Hawkins is less sure of is whether Trump’s comments will affect Students for Life’s get-out-the-vote program for the 2024 election. “I think it remains to be seen whether or not we’re also talking about Donald Trump at the doors,” she said. More

    • 88 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Harris’s interview: Democrats swoon while Republicans grimace

      by

      Democrats lauded it as the perfect pitch; Donald Trump dismissed it as “boring”, while fellow Republicans invoked derogatory terms like “gobbledygook”.Between the two extremes, Kamala Harris appeared to have achieved what she wanted from Thursday’s groundbreaking CNN interview, given along with her running mate, Tim Walz – her first since become the Democratic presidential nominee.Under fierce scrutiny after nearly six weeks of interview radio silence, the vice-president earned lavish praise from the Democratic base while denying Republicans a clear line of attack simply by avoiding major missteps of the type that undid Joe Biden’s candidacy in June’s climactic debate.The performance is also unlikely to shake up a race that has reversed itself since Harris entered it and replaced Biden, flipping a narrow but solid Trump lead into a contest in which she is now firmly ahead.A commentator with AZCentral.com – a news site in the key swing state of Arizona – called the performance “too sane to be great TV”, an implicit comparison with Trump’s frequently ostentatious media appearances.Commenting on her championing of Biden’s record in office, the New York Times noted that “it turns out, Ms Harris is a better salesperson for Mr Biden’s accomplishments and defender of his record than he ever was”.But the highest praise came from Harris’s party supporters.“This interview with Dana Bash is a moment to recognize that it is absolutely under-appreciated that Vice President Harris is running a perfect campaign,” Bill Burton, a former deputy press secretary in Barack Obama’s presidency, posted on X.“She took over a campaign that she did not hire. She added pieces to the team who have made it stronger. She ran a convention that was absolutely electric in its energy. And she stepped up to the biggest speech of her life and achieved at the highest level … She is a true inspiration.”Ed Krassenstein, a pro-Democrat X user with 1m followers, wrote: “Kamala Harris is killing it. She’s showing she is a unifying, non-divisive force … Her poll numbers will go up after this interview.”Another vocal Democratic supporter, Alex Cole, praised Harris for sidestepping a question from the interviewer, Dana Bash, on Trump’s recent comments denigrating her mixed racial identity, which the vice-president dismissed as “the same tired old playbook”.“Kamala isn’t playing by Trump’s or the media’s rules. They can’t lay a hand on her,” Cole wrote. “Trump craves the attention.”Harris’s low-key approach even won the grudging praise of the Republican pollster Frank Luntz when she vowed to enact a bipartisan immigration bill that Trump had pressured his GOP congressional allies into torpedoing.“Harris reminding voters that Trump sunk a bipartisan immigration solution makes him look pretty bad. Smart approach,” Luntz wrote.Predictably, the most forceful attacks came from Trump himself, who began went on the offensive even before the interview was broadcast.On Harris’s response to being pressed on her abandonment of previous leftwing policy positions, Trump wrote: “Her answer rambled incoherently, and declared her ‘values haven’t changed.’ On that I agree, her values haven’t changed.”A related post conjured up Trump’s frequent and bizarre depiction of Harris as a communist, reading simply: “Comrade Kamala: ‘My values have not changed.’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnder a Harris presidency, “America will become a WASTELAND,” Trump wrote, reverting to his habit of using block capitals.He even took issue with the interview’s setting, a Black-owned restaurant in the historic Georgian city of Savannah, suggesting it made Harris look unpresidential.“She was sitting behind that desk – this massive desk – and she didn’t look like a leader to me,” Trump said at a campaign event in Wisconsin. “I’ll be honest, I don’t see her negotiating with President Xi of China. I don’t see her with Kim Jong-un like we did with Kim Jong-un.”Jason Miller, a Trump spokesperson and former presidential assistant, asked why the interview lasted only 27 minutes, well short of the hour CNN had slotted for it in its schedule.“How many minutes of fluff filler did CNN have to run to make up for the ridiculously short interview?” he wrote, asking if the network was forced to “cut some of Kamala’s answers, and that’s why they couldn’t fill the hour?”The rightwing Fox News channel highlighted the mocking responses of conservative commentators to Harris’s comments on the climate crisis, when she extolled her work on the Green New Deal and said the administration was “holding ourselves to deadlines around time”.“Gobbledygook,” posted a conservative commentator, Steve Guest, on X. “The definition of a deadline is ‘the latest time or date by which something should be completed’.”But having promised a presidency that would seek “consensus” and vowed to appoint a Republican to her cabinet, Harris may have noted with quiet satisfaction Trump’s ultimate verdict on her interview: “Boring!”The judgment could have been a tacit admission that Harris’s performance had denied him a clear target as he prepares for a keynote debate with her in two weeks.“On issue after issue, Harris signaled moderation and a gauzy centrism that has been the hallmark of every winning Democratic presidential campaign for decades,” Politico said on its Playbook column. “The interview suggested to us how tough Donald Trump’s job is now – and especially at the Sept. 10 debate.” More

    • 288 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      The future of the world may depend on what a few thousand Pennsylvania voters think about their grocery bills | Timothy Garton Ash

      by

      On 5 November, people around the globe will tune in to watch the world election. It’s not a “world” election in the sense of the World Cup – a football championship in which many nations actively participate – but it’s much more than a World Series, the curiously named baseball championship that involves only teams from North America. This year has been called the biggest election year in history. By the end of it, something approaching half the world’s adult population will have had the possibility to put a cross against a name on a ballot paper. But the US presidential election is the year’s big match.Why? Because this is a genuine democratic election that will result in a single person holding exceptionally concentrated executive power in what is still the world’s most powerful country. It’s a highly watchable soap opera, with a classic plot familiar to all. And one of this year’s two contenders, Donald Trump, is a danger to his own country and the world. If the “election” of the president of China, the world’s other superpower, were a genuine democratic choice, that event would perhaps be as consequential. But it isn’t, so it isn’t. Russia had a presidential “election” earlier this year, but at issue was only the size of Vladimir Putin’s declared majority.Equally, if the US were a parliamentary democracy, and especially if it had an electoral system of proportional representation, the stakes would not be so high. The resulting government would depend on the party-political composition of parliament and in many such countries you routinely end up with coalition governments. Even in Britain’s “elective dictatorship”, as the Conservative politician Lord Hailsham (Quintin Hogg) once characterised the British political system, the prime minister has significantly less power than a US president. President Emmanuel Macron of France is now behaving as if he thinks he is the US president, with an unrestricted right to form the nation’s government, but that’s not what his country’s constitution says.As the American political scientist Corey Brettschneider reminds us in his new book, The Presidents and the People, the danger inherent in this concentration of power was already highlighted by Patrick Henry, a hero of the American war of independence, when the US constitution was debated at the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788. What if a criminal were elected president, Henry asked. What if he could abuse his position as singular head of the executive branch and commander in chief of the military to realise his criminal ambitions? Well, here we are 236 years later, and a convicted felon and notorious fan of autocrats is neck-and-neck with the newly crowned Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.If her opponent were Nikki Haley, the runner-up in the Republican primary contest, the drama would be nothing like as intense. This would be something like a normal election. But it’s Trump, so it isn’t.I arrived in the US the day before Joe Biden finally conceded that he would not stand again. Since then we have witnessed a tidal wave of hope flow into the candidacy of Harris and her folksy running mate, Tim Walz. This culminated in the Democratic national convention in Chicago, where the usual orgy of razzmatazz was accompanied by genuine joy and unabashed flag-waving patriotism.View image in fullscreenTo their own and everyone else’s surprise, the Democrats give every impression of being united. Harris raised about $500m for her campaign in just a month. She is not a great orator, like Bill Clinton and both Obamas, but she gave an excellent acceptance speech. She introduced herself to the American public as the child of an indomitable Indian immigrant mother. She elaborated on her campaign’s brilliantly chosen theme of freedom – therefore taking what has been for years a Republican leitmotif and reconnecting liberty with liberalism. She listed some of those freedoms from that are also freedoms to: women’s freedom to decide about their own bodies, the freedom to live safe from gun violence, the freedom to love whom you choose, the freedom to breathe clean air, the freedom to vote.Importantly for a female candidate with a left-liberal background, Harris successfully conveyed the image of a strong leader who would give the US “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” and enable it to out-do China in the competition for the 21st century and “stand strong with Ukraine and our Nato allies”. In substance, 90% of this could equally have been said by Biden, but the way she said it – not least in seeming credibly to care about the heartbreaking scale of Palestinian suffering – made it feel new and promising.As a result, enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate has soared – but only to the point where this election has become too close to call. Recalling his own electrifying slogan from the 2008 election, “Yes we can”, Barack Obama told the convention, “Yes she can!”Yes, she can; but that doesn’t mean she will. She may be marginally ahead in nationwide polling, but with the antiquated electoral system that the US uses for its presidential election, she could win the popular vote, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and still lose because of a few tens of thousands of swing voters in battleground states in the midwest and the sun belt.One leading pollster tells me that the top three issues for the electorate are the economy, crime and immigration, and on all three, Republicans typically have the edge. Trump himself looks all over the place, giving long rambling speeches, but he’s a formidable political counter-puncher.The social aquifers of white working-class anger are still very full, especially among men. (The gender gap is very marked in the Harris v Trump contest.) Moreover, if it’s a narrow victory for Harris, Trump will immediately declare the election “stolen”, and we will be set for a long bout of bitter litigation, as happened in 2000, but with the supreme court now seen by many as biased towards the Republican side.All of which is a long way of saying: nobody knows. And that, after all, is the hallmark of a genuine democratic election. But here’s the uniquely curious thing about this one. Millions of people all over the world, from Austria to Zimbabwe, not only follow it closely but also know many of the sometimes arcane psephological details that may decide the result in the electoral college. This is not just because Washington is the world’s political theatre, as much as Netflix is now the world’s movie theatre, but because the result will have important consequences for them. If you are Ukrainian or Palestinian, it may literally be a matter of life and death.Ultimately, what is most peculiar about this world election is the sheer incongruity of cause and potential effect. Whether women and children in Kharkiv or Rafah live or die may depend on what Mike the mechanic in Michigan and Penny the teacher in Pennsylvania think about their grocery bills.

      Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Was Kamala Harris’s big interview a success? Sort of | Moira Donegan

      by

      How much of an incentive does Kamala Harris really have to lay out a thorough policy agenda? With fewer than 70 days until the general election, the newly official Democratic presidential nominee has exited her party’s Chicago convention riding a a wave of tight but improving poll numbers and tremendous party goodwill.Her move to the top of the ticket has prompted waves of enthusiasm and barely concealed relief, as young voters and weary Democrats greeted the happy prospect of an election campaign that was, at last, not between Biden and Trump. The shift of candidates initiated a new shift in the campaign’s voice, with a more playful, irreverent and optimistic turn coming to characterize the Democrats’ public messaging. When the vibes are this good, few people ask about specifics.There are pitfalls, too, for a politician who is too precise about what they aim to do in office. After all, much of the Democrats’ 2024 campaigning has featured deep dives into Project 2025, the 900-plus-page policy prescription for a second Trump term that was compiled by conservative thinktanks under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation. Democrats, including Harris herself, have used the document as a near-depthless well of possible attacks, making each one of the plan’s copious number of proposals into an attack that they can make Republicans answer for. As Harris heads into the final weeks of the campaign, one can see a certain cynical logic to her imprecise policy positions: why would she bother painting a target on her own back?So maybe it’s not surprising that on Thursday night, in her first major interview since ascending to the presidential nomination, the vice-president did not seem interested in making any news. She was competent, personable and a forceful defender of the Biden administration; she was attentive to issues where her campaign believes her to be vulnerable, such as on immigration and energy policy; and she was deliberate in depicting herself as a hawkish advocate for stricter border controls.She did not talk much about her opponent, Donald Trump, brushing off a question from CNN’s Dana Bash about his recent slanderous claim that Harris had only recently “turned Black”. She did not endorse an arms embargo to Israel, whose genocidal war in Gaza has killed upwards of 40,000 Palestinians with the aid of American weapons. And with the exception of a few economic proposals – like for an expansion of the child tax credit, a $25,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers and a repeat of her promise to punish price gauging – she was light on specifics.The interview seemed to be less about presenting a policy vision for the American people than about presenting them with a character. The character that emerged in the form of Vice-President Harris was one who is confident, intelligent and at ease with her authority; one who was unfazed by Bash’s sometimes pointed questioning, in part because she has mastered the art of the dodge.Among the interview’s surprising omissions was abortion, the issue that has redefined the status, health and civil rights of half of Americans as a result of the presidency of her opponent. The word was only mentioned once over the course of the interview, when the vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, mentioned the issue as something that voters were more interested in than his own previous verbal gaffes. He’s probably right that voters care more about it, but both he and Harris declined to address the issue further.Harris, historically a forceful advocate for abortion rights who was largely tasked with campaigning on the issue while Biden was still in the race, seemed to demur from the historical nature of her candidacy more broadly. When Bash asked her about a viral photo from the Democratic national convention – which pictured Harris at the podium, being gazed up at by her great-niece, a pigtailed young girl – she avoided the question’s implicit inquiry into how she feels about the prospect of becoming the nation’s first female president. Harris said only that she was running because she believed herself to be the best person for the job, and that she aimed to be a president for Americans of all races and genders.It was a nice sentiment, and probably even true. But her words avoided the gender issue that has come to shape the campaign, and left aside an opportunity to rally voters in the 10 states that will have abortion rights measures on the ballot in November. If anyone in the Harris campaign feels that electing a woman president now, in this post-Dobbs era, could be a righteous rebuke to the backward and bigoted misogyny that has come to define the Trump-Vance ticket, then that is not an argument they are interested in having their candidate make.Harris will be criticized on the left for her refusal to endorse an arms embargo to Israel, whose war has become a generational moral catastrophe that threatens to destabilize the region. When asked about the conflict, Harris spoke of the atrocities of 7 October in lurid terms; of the unfathomable human cost that has been imposed on Palestinians, she said only that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed”. (An unfortunate phrase that implies that there is an acceptable number of innocents that Israel can murder.) Her unwillingness to speak with more empathy and commitment about this issue threatens to alienate young voters, a disorganized but growing left, and the large cohorts of Muslim and Arab voters she needs to win over in places like Minnesota and Michigan.That unwillingness also threatens to give more credence to other leftwing suspicions of Harris, such as the marginal but noticeable suspicion among activists over whether she will maintain Biden’s enthusiasm for antitrust enforcement.Maybe Harris is calculating that these voters have nowhere else to go; maybe she just doesn’t really share their values on these issues. But the central argument for her candidacy is about values: that she is a more moral, more principled, more trustworthy candidate than Donald Trump; that she will bring less bigotry, less selfishness, less recklessness and less tedious narcissism to the White House. It’s a low bar, but she still has to clear it. If Harris’s campaign is about values, but she is unwilling to more forcefully champion women’s rights and the value of Palestinian lives, she risks making some wonder just what those values are.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More