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      What is a government shutdown and why is this year’s threat more serious?

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      The federal government is once again on the brink of a shutdown, unless Congress can reach a funding agreement before the start of the new fiscal year, on 1 October.With the clock ticking and both Democrats and Republicans seemingly dug in, there is little time left to avoid a lapse in government funding. And in a sharp escalation, the White House has threatened permanent mass layoffs of government workers in the event of a shutdown, adding to the roughly 300,000 it forced out earlier this year.What is a government shutdown?If a compromise isn’t reached by midnight on 30 September, parts of the government will begin shutting down. Until Congress acts, a wide range of federal services could be temporarily halted or disrupted as certain agencies cease all non-essential functions.In a polarized Washington, with the chambers narrowly divided, shutdown threats have become a feature of recent congressional budget battles. A standoff in 2018, during Trump’s first term, resulted in a 34-day shutdown, the longest in the modern era. At the time, roughly 800,000 of the federal government’s 2.1 million employees were sidelined without pay.What’s causing the fight this time?The federal government’s new fiscal year begins on Wednesday, and Congress has yet to strike an agreement on a short-term funding bill.Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, are refusing to compromise and in effect daring Democrats to reject a stopgap measure that would extend funding levels, mostly at current levels, through 21 November. That bill narrowly passed the House but fell short in the Senate earlier this month.Donald Trump has said he expects the government to shut down this week. “If it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down,” he said on Friday, blaming the Democrats.Republican and Democratic congressional leaders remained at an impasse after a Monday-afternoon meeting with Trump at the White House. “I think we’re headed into a shutdown because the Democrats won’t do the right thing,” JD Vance told reporters after the summit.View image in fullscreenDemocrats, locked out of power in Washington, have little leverage, but their votes are needed to overcome the filibuster in the Senate. Democrats are demanding an extension of subsidies that limit the cost of health insurance under the Affordable Care Act and are set to expire, a rollback of Medicaid cuts made in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the restoration of funding to public media that was cut in the rescissions package.Leaving the White House on Monday, the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said: “There are still large differences between us.”Congressional Democrats are under pressure to use their leverage to stand up to Trump and his administration. In March, Schumer lent the necessary Democratic votes to approve a Republican-written short-term funding measure without securing any concessions – a move that infuriated the party’s base.Why is this year’s threat more serious?This time, the impact on federal workers could be even more severe. In a memo released last week, the White House’s office of management and budget (OMB) told agencies not just to prepare for temporary furloughs but for permanent layoffs in the event of a shutdown.The memo directed agencies to ready reduction-in-force notices for federal programs whose funding sources would lapse in the event of a shutdown and are “not consistent with the president’s priorities”.The OMB led the administration’s earlier efforts to shrink the federal workforce as part of a broader government efficiency campaign led by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”.In a statement on Thursday, AFL-CIO’s president, Liz Shuler, said government employees had “already suffered immensely” this year under the Trump administration’s vast cuts to the federal workforce. “They are not pawns for the president’s political games,” she said.Asked about the memo on Thursday, Trump blamed Democrats, saying a shutdown was what the party wanted. “They never change,” he said.At a news conference, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said on Thursday that Democrats “will not be intimidated” by the Trump administration’s threats to fire more federal employees if the federal government shuts down. He added that his message to Russell Vought, the head of OMB, was simple: “Get lost.”What happens if the government shuts down?In the event of a full or partial government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal workers may be furloughed or required to work without pay. Approximately 750,000 federal employees will be furloughed each day of a government shutdown, according to an estimate by the congressional budget office released on Tuesday.Operations deemed essential – such as social security, Medicare, military duties, immigration enforcement and air traffic control – would continue, but other services may be disrupted or delayed. Mail delivery and post office operations would continue without interruption.Agencies have been releasing updated contingency plans in the event of a shutdown. The Department of Education said nearly all its federal employees would be furloughed, while most of the Department of Homeland Security workforce would remain on the job.The effect can be wide-ranging and potentially long-lasting. Previous shutdowns have closed national parks and the Smithsonian museums in Washington, slowed air travel, delayed food-safety inspections, and postponed immigration hearings.While the broader economy may not feel the effects immediately, analysts warn that a prolonged shutdown could slow growth, disrupt markets and erode public trust. More

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      Unions are handing Democrats a golden opportunity amid the shutdown battle | Judith Levine

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      The Federal Unionists Network (FUN) and 35 national, state and local unions have written a letter to the Democratic congressional leadership – Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House, urging them to hold out against Republicans in the budget negotiations, even if it means a government shutdown and halted paychecks. The signatories represent “tens of thousands of federal workers”, according to an FUN press release.The Democrats’ demands, the letter says, should include “adequate funding for critical public services” and a “guarantee” that funds appropriated by the Congress are spent.This gives the Democrats the chance not just to win this budget battle, but to begin to win back their identity and the people who should be their base.“A government shutdown is never Plan A,” the letter reads. “Federal workers and the communities we serve will face severe hardship. But federal workers will willingly forego paychecks in the hopes of preserving the programs we have devoted our lives to administering.”These workers are showing remarkable solidarity with each other. They are willing to stage the closest thing to a general strike the US has seen since 1946, when more than 100,000 Oakland, California, workers stayed home, shutting the city down.Federal workers cannot legally go on strike. But in the last few months, even the option of a wildcat walkout presented a quandary. It would have granted, if they struck, the Trump administration exactly what it wanted: a decimated civil service. They also would have given their nemeses a psychological victory unpalatable to themselves. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” Russell Vought, now US office of management and budget (OMB) director, told a conservative audience last October. “We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”But now, they’re ready to wake up in the morning and not go to work – if they haven’t already been fired. They are not the villains but the heroes. And they’re handing the trauma back to those who have been almost gleefully traumatizing them.Moreover, labor is standing together not just for its members’ bread and butter. In fact, as miners and railroad workers, teachers and auto workers have done for decades, the members are foregoing their own bread and butter for a greater good, for future workers – and in this case, for a progressive American future. They are speaking for what they should have been speaking for all along: economic justice, democracy and the wellbeing of the people.They’re speaking for what the Democratic party should be speaking for.“Federal unions and workers stand with members of Congress who oppose damaging cuts, unconstitutional executive overreach, attacks on science and data itself, and attempts to undercut organized labor,” the letter says. “We join together with you in the fight to save and strengthen the many important government programs and services that have been created throughout our country’s history to raise standards of living, provide safety, and ensure the continued growth of science, industry, and American prosperity.”Organized labor is giving the party that abandoned it another chance to show which side it is on. They’re standing with Democratic allies in Congress. Those Congress members must stand with them.As usual, the party’s leadership is focusing on one thing. This time it’s cuts to Obamacare subsidies. That’s a good start.But in this letter, the unions have told most of the narrative. The Democrats need only to furnish the moral of the story: why are the Republicans cutting everything under the sun, endangering the country’s safety, security, and prosperity? To further enrich their rich friends and corporate benefactors.Now’s your chance, Democrats. Don’t blow it.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      Palestinian American denied slot at DNC competing for Georgia governor: ‘We’re trying to rebuild the coalition’

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      Ruwa Romman, the first Palestinian-American elected to state-level office in Georgia, was fighting for a speaking slot a year ago at the Democratic national convention, hoping to draw attention to concerns among progressive voters about the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.On Monday, she announced her candidacy for governor in Georgia – looking for a different kind of attention.“I’m running to build the movement,” she told the Guardian. “Because for over the 20 years Republicans have controlled our state, hospitals have shut down, the minimum wage on our books is still $5.15 an hour, and our education continues to drop. In order to fix all of those things, the first things, the first thing we need to do is replace who the governor is.”Romman, a 32-year-old state representative, enters a crowded field of Democrats seeking the nomination. Lucy McBath, a Georgia congresswoman, who had widely been considered a frontrunner, withdrew from consideration last year, citing her husband’s health. Jason Esteves, a former state senator, Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor, Michael Thurmond, a former DeKalb county CEO, Derrick Jackson, a state representative, and Geoff Duncan, a former lieutenant governor and previously a Republican, are competing in the May primary.She laughs at comparisons with Zohran Mamdami’s progressive run in the New York City mayoral race.“I am not here to define any other candidate but myself, for the average everyday voters, as someone who cares about economic issues,” she said. “A typical voter, for me, is young and progressive, but I’m also going after the older voters that understandably are very cynical and very nihilistic right now, and think this is the way the world is, and it will always be.View image in fullscreen“We are trying to rebuild the coalition. And to do that, we are building it so that we can bring those groups back that just don’t see anybody fighting for them, which inadvertently, by the way, ends up being everybody.”Georgia has elected several Muslim men to the general assembly; Romman became the first Muslim woman in 2022, winning a seat in the Atlanta suburbs of Gwinnett county. She is religiously observant and wears a headscarf in public. Born in Jordan and raised in Georgia, Romman was an activist for years before entering politics, she said.Romman became the face of the Uncommitted voter movement that grew out of discontent with the Biden administration’s seemingly unconditional support for Israel as images of dead children washed through America’s political consciousness last year. She lobbied to no avail for a speaking slot at the convention, so that the party would at least acknowledge the internal conflict.Ultimately, Romman released a message endorsing Kamala Harris, while calling for the combatants to “reach a ceasefire, end the killing of Palestinians, free all the Israeli and Palestinian hostages and to begin the difficult work of building a path to collective peace and safety”.Romman acknowledges that most people watching politics probably recognize her from that effort. “But the reality is that I have been doing this work in Georgia for over a decade,” she said. “And while I understand how that plays into all of this … I hope that the same people who paid attention to that nationally and locally will now pay attention to our state and everything that is possible here.”Republicans have held the governor’s seat since 2003 in Georgia with a string of conservatives who have generally eschewed deep ideological partisanship in favor of business-friendly governance, as typified by governor Brian Kemp’s response to political provocations by Donald Trump.Nonetheless, Georgia remains one of 10 states opting against Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. A brain-dead Georgia woman was kept alive earlier this year to prevent the death of her fetus, a medical decision driven by Georgia’s “fetal heartbeat” anti-abortion law. And pro-growth policies have also led to changes to insurance law, housing affordability and employment law that Democrats believe provides a political opening.Romman said she hopes her candidacy will inspire others to run, particularly in districts where Democrats have struggled in the past, and for people to engage their government and pressure conservatives to consider better options.“Nothing that we are pursuing is unpopular,” she said. “The bills are going up on everything: food, your electric bill, your tax bill on your home, if you’re lucky enough to own a home. If you’re trying to buy a home, you’re getting priced out by corporations. The cultural change that I hope people see is in overcoming cynicism and restoring this civic ethos of being involved in government, and seeing government as a place for everybody, not just special interests.” More

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      Tensions expected as Trump meets with top Democrats and Republicans in effort to avoid shutdown

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      Democrats and Republicans are gearing up for a crunch White House meeting with Donald Trump in an 11th-hour bid to avert a potentially damaging federal government shutdown.Monday’s gathering is aimed at reaching an agreement over funding the government and largely hinges on Democrat demands for an extension of funding subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, beyond the end of the year, when they are due to expire.Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat leader in the House of Representatives, and Chuck Schumer, the party’s leader in the Senate, will meet Trump along with their Republican counterparts, Mike Johnson, the House speaker, and John Thune, the Senate majority leader, for talks that are expected to be tense if not confrontational.It will be Trump’s first meeting with the two Democrats since his return to the White House in January. Jeffries and Trump have never previously met in person.Expectations for the encounter are low, with failure likely to result in large swathes of the federal government shutting down from 1 October.Trump and the Republicans have signaled that they are unfazed at that prospect, calculating that the public will blame Democrat intransigence.The White House office of management and budget (OMB) has also indicated that it will exploit a shutdown to carry out more mass firings as part of its crusade to slash government bureaucracy.An OMB memorandum said government agencies have been instructed “use this opportunity to consider reduction in force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities”, The Hill reported.Republicans have also warned that Trump could make a shutdown politically costly by targeting spending programmes that are disproportionately used by Democrat-run states and cities.CBS, citing a source close to Trump, reported that he privately welcomes the prospect of a shutdown because it would “enable him to wield executive power to slash some government programs and salaries”.“I just don’t know how we are going to solve this issue,” Trump told the network in a telephone interview. “They [the Democrats] are not interested in waste, fraud and abuse.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome Democrats have acknowledged that they have “no good options” in trying to end the standoff.“It’s doubly made no good because it’s very clear that Republicans want [a shutdown]. Trump wants it. He’s fine with that, happy to have it,” The Hill quoted a Democratic Senate aide as saying.. “I don’t really know what your good option here is when they want one.”However, Schumer is under pressure to be seen taking a more actively confrontational stance after being fiercely criticized by fellow Democrats for backing a Republican funding packing in March to avert an earlier government shutdown.With Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican senator, likely to vote against the funding package, it would need the support of eight Democrats to overcome a Senate filibuster. More

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      Kamala Harris’s election memoir shows just how deluded the Democrats still are | Nesrine Malik

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      Watching the Kamala Harris presidential campaign unfold last year, I remember thinking, and writing, about how striking it was that she had been rehabilitated almost overnight into a political titan. Authoritative accounts of her before that moment portrayed a lo-fi vice-president, who, even according to people who had worked to get her there, had “not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country”. Another striking feature of her campaign was how it leaned into vibes and spectacle rather than substance, or building faith in Harris as a clean break from an unpopular and visibly deteriorating Joe Biden. Her new book, 107 Days, a memoir of the exact number of days she had to win the presidency, goes a long way in explaining why that was. In short, Harris – and those around her, including supportive media parties – got high on their own supply.This was not the intention, but 107 Days is a hilarious book. The kind of “you have to laugh or else you’ll cry” type of hilarity. As the second Trump administration unfolds in ever-more disastrous ways, Harris and the other timeline that was possible had she won take on a calamitous, mythical quality. Here she comes, alerting us to the fact that her defeat was no fateful tragedy, but a farce. There was no hidden, better version of Harris that was muzzled and limited by circumstance. There was only a woman with a formidable lack of self-awareness and a propensity to self-valorise.The book reveals a politician who is all about the machinery of politics, rather than one with conviction spurred by a sense of duty, or a coherent and specific set of values that differentiate her. The “not a thing that comes to mind” answer she gave when asked during the campaign if there was anything she would have done differently to Biden was not caution, but the truth. There is no sign here that she would have liked to meaningfully diverge on Gaza, for example, other than to introduce more parity in the rhetoric of compassion. Or any indication that she would have liked to grasp the nettle on economic policy and make more of her accusation that Donald Trump’s economic agenda “works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers”.This dearth of a unique Harris agenda explains why she often seemed so vague, skittish and rambling. How does she receive the news she will be the candidate? By reminding herself (and us) that she had the best “contact book” and “name recognition”, as well as the “strongest case”. She tries to cloak her ambition, saying “knew she could” be president, but only because she “wanted to do the work. I have always been a protector.” It’s fine to have ambition to be the president of the United States! Every cardinal dreams of becoming pope, as Cardinal Bellini of Conclave said. Even he did himself, to his shame, when he lamented upon the discovery of his ambition: “To be this age and still not know yourself.”My abiding feeling reading was: oh God, this was all just as bad as it looked. The celebrity-packed campaign roster was not, in fact, panicked desperation, but the preference of the candidate and her team. They thought that such a range of characters would show that Harris was “welcoming everyone into the campaign” – as if the power of celebrity could do the unifying work of coalition-building, rather than her own programme and politicking. The immersion in the filmic, the celluloid of US politics is so complete that there is a line about Jon Bon Jovi performing for her and it being a good omen, because he performed for a candidate who won in The West Wing. The media loved her. “And behold,” Harris quotes a Washington Post writer, praising her approach to Gaza, “she had her boat through the impossible strait.” Jon Favreau said Harris was “a sight to behold” at the Democratic convention.I lost count of the number of descriptions of crowds exploding, roaring, on fire. The audience applause to Harris’s Saturday Night Live appearance was some of the loudest ever heard. She replays her greatest hits, revealing a politician captured by the reverie of rapturous self-selecting crowds and buzzy studios, fatally unable to connect to the voters outside the bubble, who had soured on the Democrats and were checking out, or voting for Trump.View image in fullscreenBiden pops up often, a self-involved and petty figure, snapping at her heels and distracting her. But she is loyal, she tells us – often. So loyal that she couldn’t disparage him in the way that people needed her to (“People hate Joe Biden!” she is told by a senior adviser). But not so loyal that she doesn’t more artfully disguise that she wants you to know the man was a real drag who mentioned her too late in his speeches, and then called her before her big debate with Trump to unsubtly threaten her if she bad-mouthed him. But what is most telling, and alarming, is what she reveals about the Democratic establishment, and therefore what hope there is of an awakening among its ranks. One that could pose a meaningful challenge to Trump now, and Trumpism in the future. The 107 days were short, but they were a concentration of a process in which the party and its candidate had to dig deep quickly to unearth the most compelling and defining vision for the American people. The result was to take no risks, offer continuity and scold dissenters as Trump enablers, but with style. It wasn’t enough, and will never be.The answer to the question “what went wrong” isn’t “we didn’t have enough time” to establish Harris. It was that Harris, even now, with all the time to reflect and be honest with herself, is a politician who invests too much in presentation, and entirely exculpates herself of failures because she was dealt a bad political hand. What can you say besides, “to be this age and still not know yourself”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump to meet with US congressional leaders in last-ditch effort to avoid shutdown

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      Donald Trump has reversed course and is purportedly planning to host a bipartisan gathering of the top four US congressional leaders at the White House on Monday afternoon in a last-ditch effort to avoid a looming government shutdown, the House speaker and the US president’s fellow Republican Mike Johnson said on Sunday.Trump’s climbdown comes days after he scrapped a planned meeting to discuss the crisis with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the respective Democratic minority leaders in the House and Senate.The president accused the pair of making “unserious and ridiculous demands” in return for Democratic votes to support a Republican funding agreement to keep the government open beyond Tuesday night – but left the door open for a meeting “if they get serious about the future of our nation”.Johnson, appearing on CNN, said he spoke with Trump at length on Saturday, and that the two Democrats had agreed to join him and John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, for an Oval Office discussion Monday.He did not say if Trump would be negotiating directly with the Democrats – but portrayed Trump as keen to “try to convince them to follow common sense and do what’s right by the American people”.Schumer, talking to NBC’s Meet the Press, said he was “hopeful we can get something real done” – but was uncertain of the mood they would find Trump in when they sat down for the 2pm ET discourse.“If the president at this meeting is going to rant, and just yell at Democrats, and talk about all his alleged grievances, and say this, that, and the other thing, we won’t get anything done,” Schumer said.“We don’t want a shutdown. We hope that they sit down and have a serious negotiation with us.”According to CBS News on Sunday, meanwhile, Trump is not hopeful the meeting will lead to an agreement.The network’s chief national correspondent, Robert Costa, told Face the Nation he spoke with Trump by phone Sunday morning and that a government shutdown “looks likely at this point based on my conversation … He says both sides are at a stalemate.”Costa said: “Inside the White House, sources are saying president Trump actually welcomes a shutdown in the sense that he believes he can wield executive power to get rid of what he calls waste, fraud and abuse.”If no deal is reached, chunks of the federal government are set to shut down as early as Wednesday morning, with the White House telling agencies to prepare to furlough or fire scores of workers.Republican and Democratic leaders have been pointing fingers of blame at each other for days as Tuesday’s deadline for a funding agreement approaches.The narrow House Republican majority passed a short-term spending bill known as a continuing resolution earlier in September that would keep the government funded for seven weeks – but it faces opposition in the Senate, where it needs the support of at least eight Democrats to pass.Democrats have made the extension of expiring healthcare protections a condition of their support, warning that planned Republican spending cuts would affect millions of people.“If we don’t extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits, more than 20 million Americans are going to experience dramatically increased premiums, copays, deductibles, in an environment where the cost of living in America is already too high,” Jeffries told CNN on Sunday.“We’ve made clear that we’re ready, willing and able to sit down with anyone, at any time and at any place, in order to make sure that we can actually fund the government, avoid a painful Republican caused shutdown, and address the healthcare crisis that Republicans have caused that’s [affecting] everyday Americans.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Trump and Republicans have repeatedly accused their political opponents of exploiting the issue to force a shutdown while there was still plenty of time to fix healthcare before the subsidies expire on 31 December.“The Obamacare subsidies is a policy debate that has to be determined by the end of the year, not right now, while we’re simply trying to keep the government open so we can have all these debates,” Johnson said.“There is nothing partisan about this continuing resolution, nothing. We didn’t add a single partisan priority or policy rider at all. We’re operating completely in good faith to get more time.”Thune, on Meet the Press, also attempted to blame Democrats for the potential shutdown and said “the ball is in their court” as to the next development.“There is a bill sitting at the desk in the Senate right now, we could pick it up today and pass it, that has been passed by the House that will be signed into law by the president to keep the government open,” he said.“What the Democrats have done is take the federal government as a hostage, and by extension the American people, to try [to] get a whole laundry list of things that they want.”But US senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who has previously urged his party leadership to be stronger in standing up to the Trump administration, said the problem was Republicans handing “a complete blank check” to the president to spend money on his own political interests, and not those of the nation.“Until now the president has said he’d rather shut down the government than prevent those healthcare costs from spiking,” he told CNN.“Democrats are united right now on this question. I’m glad we’re finally talking. We’ll see what happens.” More

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      A Trump ally in California is fighting redistricting. Is that what his constituents want?

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      Inside a packed banquet hall in northern California in early August, tensions were flaring. As the representative Doug LaMalfa spoke to constituents in his district, he faced immediate pushback from frustrated audience members who shouted the Republican down.It was the first public town hall LaMalfa had held in Chico, the largest city in his district, in eight years. The booing and shouts grew louder still as the Republican representative, a loyal supporter of Donald Trump, talked about “waste and fraud” in government programs, and the uproar continued for more than an hour as people expressed fear and anger over immigration raids, tariffs, cuts to Medicaid and Medicare and the impacts on rural hospitals. Some called for his resignation, while one attendee yelled: “No fascism in America.” The rowdy scene made headlines across the US.It came before a crucial moment for the representative – just days later, California’s governor announced plans to move forward with a proposal to redraw the state’s voting map in an effort to create five new Democratic seats in the US House of Representatives. The redistricting plan is a direct response to gerrymandered maps in Texas. Now voters will decide on the proposal in a special election in November. If the proposition is approved, LaMalfa, a seven-term representative, could lose his seat in the war over control of the House.With less than six weeks before the election, the fight is on in the first congressional district, which covers a vast swath of northern California from the almond orchards and rice fields of the Sacramento valley to the forested and fire-prone foothills of the Sierra Nevada and Cascades. Audrey Denney, a previous Democratic challenger who came closer than any prior candidate to unseating LaMalfa, has said she will run again if Proposition 50 passes. LaMalfa, meanwhile, “is committed to running in his current district and ensuring that Proposition 50 fails”, his office said in a statement.Democratic and Republican groups alike are preparing for a contest that could dramatically reshape the area’s political representation and ultimately determine the US president’s ability to advance legislation after the midterm elections.“Overwhelmingly, the reason people care is the belief that the Democrats [winning] control of the House of Representatives next year is the only possible meaningful impediment to Donald Trump’s implementation of his authoritarian agenda,” said David Welch with the Democratic central committee of Butte county, where Chico is located.Conservatives in this area argue that Prop 50 represents an existential threat that will erode the already limited Republican representation in the state.“We already only have nine seats throughout the entire state of California on the Republican side and we could go down to four seats if 50 passes. It’s not a fair representation for the parties – it’s not fair for both sides,” said Teri DuBose, the chair of the Butte county Republican party, who also works for LaMalfa’s office. “The voters should be picking their representatives, not the representatives picking their constituents.”Residents of this part of northern California, with its remote mountain communities, frequent wildfires and vast agricultural industry, often say it’s different from the more densely populated areas of the state.“We’re very rural here,” DuBose said. “As I drive from Chico to Orland right now, all I see are almond trees and open fields and walnuts and tractors. We don’t have the big-city high-rises and freeways with traffic.”The first congressional district is among the most conservative, and whitest, in the state.Water, wildfires, housing and homelessness have been key issues for voters in recent years. The area was already struggling with a severe housing shortage when several years of large wildfires destroyed thousands of homes, worsening the crisis and pushing more people onto the streets.Over the last decade, wildfires have scorched nearly 40% of land in the county, including the 2018 Camp fire, which destroyed the community of Paradise and killed 85 people, 2020’s North Complex fire, which wiped out Berry Creek and left 16 people dead and last year’s Park fire, one of the largest blazes in state history.While there was a strong base of Democratic supporters in the region in the mid-20th century, much of what is now California’s first congressional district has largely voted Republican since the 1980s. Trump has consistently carried the area since 2016 and in 2024 received 61% of the vote.Butte county, where LaMalfa is from, is more evenly politically split due to the more liberal community of Chico, a university town, and the more conservative agricultural areas – in 2008, it supported Barack Obama, in 2020 backed Joe Biden, but in 2016 and 2024 went for Trump.LaMalfa, a rice farmer who previously served as a state lawmaker, has represented the district since 2013. In an interview this year with the Chico Enterprise-Record, he cited the work his staffers have done assisting people having issues with social security, Medicaid and Veterans Affairs as his proudest accomplishments in office.“It’s defending these folks and giving them a level of hope that somebody is actually listening to them,” he said.He’s garnered attention – and criticism – in recent years as an ally of the president who challenged the 2020 election outcome and voted against certifying the result and has expressed skepticism about the climate crisis and its cause. Efforts to unseat LaMalfa have been unsuccessful, but the 2018 and 2020 elections revealed some level of discontent.“He does not at all differ from Trump’s line-by-line mandate of what he says Republicans should say,” Denney said, adding that LaMalfa has introduced “anti-LGBTQ, anti-public health” legislation that “harms our communities”.In the 2018 race, Denney, an educator and consultant with a background in agriculture, pledged to represent working families in the district. She closed the representative’s more than 30-point lead in the primary down to 9.5%, and raised $1m, but LaMalfa ultimately prevailed, and did so again in 2020.“At the end of that election, I was feeling pretty defeated. And then when they redrew the maps in 2022, it was just clear to me that it was not a winnable district,” she said.But this year, frustrations in some corners of the district have continued to mount over the Trump budget, which is expected to have a significant impact on rural areas and hospitals with its cuts to Medicaid and new work requirements for food stamps. That anger was on full display at LaMalfa’s town hall.LaMalfa did not agree to be interviewed, but in a statement, Paige Boogaard, his communication director, said the representative had anticipated as much but stated that most constituents back Trump’s agenda.“Congressman LaMalfa purposefully chose highly contentious areas of his district so that they feel heard. Their reactions were completely expected,” she said. “Raucous townhalls in Chico do not change the fact that District 1 and Northern California remain overwhelmingly conservative and overwhelmingly supportive of both Congressman LaMalfa’s and the President’s policies.”Meanwhile, the area is already grappling with the loss of one rural hospital. Glenn medical center will close its emergency room in just a few days, leaving Glenn county without a hospital, after the federal government moved to eliminate its “critical access” designation. The representative “continues to work on issues related to Glenn Medical Center and rural healthcare”, Boogaard said.‘Not a fair representation for the parties’Ten days after the town hall, Gavin Newsom announced California would move ahead with a plan to put a redistricting proposal before voters. The governor described it as “neutralizing” Texas’s new maps that could flip up to five seats. The referendum would temporarily suspend the use of maps from California’s independent redistricting commission and instead use legislatively drawn maps until after the 2030 census. The special election could cost as much as $282m.LaMalfa has sharply criticized the effort.“No state should be doing mid-decade redistricting unless directed by a court or forced to. Voters in California have voted overwhelmingly twice to prevent partisan redistricting,” he said in a statement at the time. “I will fight to make sure Northern California is represented by someone they elect, not someone Sacramento Democrats selected in a back room.”Under the new map, Butte county and much of district 1 would be joined with counties further to the west and south, including Sonoma county. Democrats have praised the proposal, not just for what it will mean locally, but to the country.“I think Governor Newsom doing Prop 50 has got Democrats all across America saying to themselves: ‘Hey, we got a chance to retake the House to defeat Trump,” said Bob Mulholland, a veteran Democratic strategist and Butte county resident.Denney argued it was a necessary course of action for the current political era in which the Trump administration is “tearing down institutions and norms”.“In this moment of time that we’re living in, with the scope and the scale of the threat that we’re up against, I think it’s absolutely the right move,” she said.“I love the new district. I love how it combines the two college towns on each end, Santa Rosa and Chico. Both have been historically devastated by wildfires, both surrounded by agriculture,” she said, adding that it will bring together areas where natural resources and land management are of deep concern.Republican and Democratic chapters across the district are working to rally voters before the November election, spreading signs far and wide and door-knocking. In Denney’s Chico home earlier this month, she had boxes with thousands of pieces of pro Prop 50 literature.Further south, in Yuba county, the local Republican party has purchased 10,000 yard signs to spread across the state, said Johanna Lassaga, the county party chair.“I think [Prop 50] would be devastating to our area. Putting the urban areas with the rural areas, we don’t get that fair representation,” she said.West of Chico, in the farmlands of Glenn county, Lee McCorkle, the local Republican party chair, has also been posting signs far and wide. He argued LaMalfa has been a valuable representative, citing his role in securing federal money to build a reservoir and nearby levee.“Doug, he’s a conservative guy, he’s a rice farmer, he spends a lot of time to be a congressman,” McCorkle said. “It’s a heck of a job. I wouldn’t want it.”Texas shouldn’t have moved ahead with their new congressional maps, DuBose said, but she argued what’s happening in California is also wrong. People are frustrated the state is moving forward with a costly special election, she said, when the governor did not fully fund Prop 36, a measure approved by voters last year that implements harsher penalties for theft and drug offenses. (Newsom’s budget did not initially include funding for that proposition, which he said was a result of shortfalls, but he later approved $100m to support the legislation.)And the speed at which the proposition has moved ahead has forced the party to quickly jump into gear, she said.“We really kind of got blindsided. It didn’t give us much time, so we just went all out [with the campaign],” she said. “Every moment that I’m not working, I am doing this.”In a historically conservative district, the local Democratic party has relatively few resources, said Welch with the Butte county Democrats, but they too are doing “everything we can to mobilize and motivate people”.“It’s almost certain the spending [to] defeat this will be enormous,” he said. “Really our best hope of overcoming that is with motivating individuals to volunteer to work at a grassroots level.”For her part, Denney, who also chairs the Democratic Action Club of Chico, has been traveling to the far reaches of the district in north-eastern California to talk to voters about Prop 50.“Even up to a month ago, I had zero belief that anything would ever change,” she said. “It’s gonna have a different ending this time.” More

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      Democrats race to embrace swearing and angry comebacks – but will it work?

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      Democrats want your attention, and they’re done asking politely.Several months into Donald Trump’s second term, presidential aspirants, members of Congress and party officials are abandoning carefully calibrated messaging in favor of gut-level rhetoric that is angrier, rawer and unapologetically more profane.“Things are really fucked up right now,” Democratic congressman Robert Garcia said in a TikTok video with the influencer known as the Regina George liberal, who has built a following demanding Democrats get meaner.With party approval ratings at decade-lows and their base increasingly alarmed by what they fear is America’s authoritarian slide, Democrats are racing to revamp how they talk – and how they resist.Democrats’ wider embrace of swearing, trolling and scorched-earth comebacks is part of a broader mission to sound more like “normal people” and less like a party of poll-tested talking points and white papers. From campaign rallies to TikTok vent seshes, the characteristically buttoned-up Democrats are taking more risks – and punching back harder at Trump and his administration.“This is not the Democratic party of your grandfather,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), declared earlier this year. “This is a new Democratic party. We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight.”There is widespread agreement among soul-searching Democrats that they have an authenticity problem.View image in fullscreen“We are tired of being seen as weak and out of touch, and are really trying to make the point that it’s some bullshit that the Republican party and all the big corporations that support them continue to try to frame us as [such],” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic party and head of the DNC’s association of state Democratic parties.The party has hemorrhaged rural and working-class voters for years. But in 2024, Democrats also saw worrying drops in support among Black and Latino voters as well as young people – becoming a party increasingly confined to the coasts, major metros and college towns.After losing to Trump, again, fundraising has slumped and Democrats now lag far behind Republicans in voter registration. Since November, several leading Democrats, including California governor Gavin Newsom, have described the party’s brand as “toxic”.Democrats have many theories as to how it got so bad – but they keep circling back to the most basic political skill: communication.Critics say risk-averse party elders – valued more for their fundraising prowess than their digital fluency – failed to adapt to the tectonic shifts in media consumption. Democrats anodyne messaging, they argue, might have made the evening news, but it was too easily drowned out by the right’s online surround sound, turbocharged to amplify Trump and his Magaworld allies.“A message that nobody hears cannot persuade them,” Anat Shenker-Osorio, veteran Democratic strategist and communications researcher who has convened hundreds of focus groups with American voters. “If you keep producing blandly unobjectionable 100-word statements … then it truly does not matter what you are saying because literally no one’s gonna hear it.”The bigger challenge, Shenker-Osorio notes, is that Democrats aren’t just competing for eyeballs with Republicans — they’re up against an algorithm that prizes outrage and emotion, whether it’s Maga memes or Taylor and Travis engagement headlines.Months into Trump’s second term, buoyed by a string of off-cycle election wins and a revved up base, Democrats are experimenting more. More members of Congress are on TikTok and heeding advice to adopt platforms like Twitch and Snapchat. They’ve jumped on viral trends and livestreamed hot takes stepping off the chamber floor. They’re also venturing into less friendly terrain, yakking it up on “manosphere” podcasts or launching their own.Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary and a possible 2028 presidential contender, was an early evangelist of the go-everywhere style. He appeared on Fox News when many Democrats refused to sit down with Trump’s favorite network hosts. In April, he sat for a nearly three-hour interview on the podcast Flagrant, covering everything from White Lotus to “Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays”.View image in fullscreenThe push for a more free-wheeling style hasn’t slowed the circulation of polling memos and strategy briefs coaching Democrats on how to be more free-wheeling. There has been reams of guidance on what to say (Trump’s takeover of DC is a “distraction” from his market-rattling tariffs and Medicaid cuts, for example) and also what not to say (words like birthing person, BIPOC).Republicans have sneered at Democrats’ newfound brashness, deriding the effort as “desperate” and “Maga cosplay”. Comparatively, the White House’s social media strategy seems designed to shock. In a July post on X, its official account wrote: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes.”Democrats accept that some attempts will be cringe. In February, an unfortunate turn-of-phrase at a rally alongside federal workers became a cautionary tale.“I don’t swear in public very well,” first-term congresswoman Maxine Dexter of Oregon warned before throwing caution to the wind and declaring: “We have to fuck Trump!”The crowd cheered. “You said it!” an audience member shouted encouragingly. But the remark was dragged online, with Politico observing that it “landed less like a diss and more like a proposition”.View image in fullscreenBut the stakes have grown far more serious.In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination this month, Trump’s White House has led a clampdown on political speech, threatening to punish left-leaning figures and groups it accuses of spreading hateful rhetoric.At a rally in North Carolina this week, vice president JD Vance, who once feared Trump could be “America’s Hitler,” urged Americans to abandon such rhetoric: “If you want stop political violence, stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi.”Elected Democrats were near-universal in their condemnation of political violence, which has targeted officials in both parties. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and other prominent Republicans from casting blame on the left. “I hate my opponent,” Trump said, speaking at Kirk’s memorial.In a widely circulated exchange, a reporter asked progressive Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren for her response to calls on Democrats to “lower the temperature”.“Oh, please,” Warren replied. “Why don’t you start with the president of the United States?”For years, Democrats took Michelle Obama’s “go high” mantra as gospel.In 2018, when Barack Obama’s former attorney general Eric Holder reinterpreted the refrain, suggesting that “when they go low, we kick them,” he was rebuked by Michelle Obama herself and also by Trump – despite his own long record of disparaging and even threatening language. Earlier that year, Trump asked lawmakers why the US should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa rather than from places like Norway.Seven years later, Trump is still heaving expletives and insults from the bully pulpit. But this time, Democrats are far less reticent to respond.“If we’re serious that Trump is a threat to the fundamental values of our country and a threat to democracy, then we have to use these tactics and be real fighters,” Kleeb said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYet, as Democrats fight to break through Trump’s unfiltered media dominance, there is deep frustration among their base that the party’s leadership is not doing enough to stop him – no matter how tough they talk. In Washington, out-of-power Democrats are under pressure to use the little leverage they have in a looming government shutdown showdown with Republicans.Meanwhile, some of the fiercest resistance is coming from the states. In August, Texas Democrats fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum needed to vote on a brazen, Trump-sought plan to redraw its political maps in the middle of the decade. Though Republicans ultimately approved a new map carved up in their favor, the Democrats’ quorum-breaking gambit helped trigger a response from governors like Newsom in California, whose Trump 2.0-era mantra now is: “fight fire with fire.”In recent months, Newsom has matched his combative posture with a pugnacious social media persona, a mimicry of Trump’s all-caps bombast. The governor’s team now regularly trolls the president, posting with a cadence that mirrors the right-wing outrage machine they mock, blasting out lengthy rants, AI-generated taunts, even the occasional Spanish-language vulgarity.“I’m sick of being weak,” Newsom said on a podcast in August, adding: “We’re going to punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.”View image in fullscreenIn a full-circle moment, Holder, a longtime champion of clean maps, threw his support behind California’sretaliatory gerrymander.Lorena Gonzalez, the salty-tongued leader of the influential California Labor Federation, said the appetite for a no-holds-barred approach is strong.“People are frustrated. We’re frustrated,” she said. “So we’re fighting back – and the language, I think, mirrors the frustration and the urgency.”At a rally launching California’s redistricting campaign, Gonzalez rendered a blunt verdict on Trump’s presidency: “We tell our members who believed him, it’s okay. He fucking lied.” The crowd roared, and she repeated the bit. Handing the mic to the next speaker, Gonzalez grinned: “I’ve exceeded my number of fucks today.”More and more Democrats argue that the real divide in their party isn’t between the ideological left and center, but between the fighters and the so-called “folders”. And the so-called fighters tend to be the angriest.Among the most prolific Democratic swearers were Representatives Eric Swalwell of California, Maxwell Frost of Florida and Jasmine Crockett or Texas, all younger progressives, according to a Washington Post analysis of social media posts, podcasts and other public statements by politicians. Among party officials, Kleeb topped the list. Overall, it found that Democrats cursed far more frequently than Republicans in the months following Trump’s return to the White House.“I do cuss but I’m just passionate,” Crockett said in an interview last month. “I don’t imagine myself saying, ‘Trump is trying to be a dictator,’ and then sitting quietly. No. If I say it, I mean it.”A former trial attorney, Crockett said language can help build trust. “I never had the benefit of putting on a facade,” she said. “You’ve got to build a rapport quickly, and the best way to do that is to be authentically who you are.”View image in fullscreenResearch suggests that swearing can make a speaker seem more honest and sincere –though voters are quick to detect a false note.“Swearing as a tactic is dumb,” said Lis Smith, a veteran Democratic strategist known for her bluntness. Her advice: “Just be normal. Don’t use weird lefty academic jargon. Don’t dismiss people’s real concerns about things like crime by citing stats and data. And don’t think that the key to coming across as authentic is dropping four letter words that you don’t use normally.”As younger Democrats rise through the ranks, an “extremely online” vernacular has crept into the party’s messaging – snarky, irreverent and tailor-made to go viral.Earlier this year, Garcia brought a poster of Elon Musk to a Congressional hearing in a stunt he called a “dick pic”. In June, House Democrats elected Garcia to serve as ranking member on the influential House oversight committee – the first time in 100 years a second-term congressman was elevated to the role.The DNC has also sharpened its trolling game, with edgy posts, including one suggesting the Secretary of Defense was “tweeting while drunk” and another taunting White House aide Stephen Miller with a crude “cuck-chair” meme. They’ve also seized on right-wing anger over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case, breathlessly boosting calls for Republicans to “release the files”.View image in fullscreenAt the party’s summer meeting, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the former vice-presidential nominee with a “Midwest nice” reputation, took a juvenile jab at Trump’s chronic venous insufficiency, mocking his “fat ankles”.“Petty as hell,” Walz admitted, as the room erupted in cheers.Yet for those who fear authoritarian drift, trolls and clap backs can seem woefully insufficient in the face of Trump’s mass deportation campaign or his deployment of federal troops to American cities.Ridicule, Shenker-Osorio argues, can be a powerful tactic, but only as part of a broader resistance. “Taking the piss out of the strongman is a really critical part of fighting authoritarianism,” she said.Still, she cautioned: “Rhetoric without action is nothing. If anything, it just makes voters more frustrated.”David Smith contributed to this story from Washington More