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      Buttigieg: Republicans calling Kamala Harris a diversity hire is ‘a bad look’

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      White House administrator Pete Buttigieg says it is “a bad look” for Republicans to call Kamala Harris a diversity hire in their attempts to slow down the momentum that has greeted her ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket for November’s presidential race.On Saturday’s episode of the New York Times podcast The Interview, the Democratic transportation secretary said “you can tell” that is the case because of how even Republican US House speaker Mike Johnson has tried to distance himself from that line of attack against Harris.“You got somebody like Mike Johnson, who is a very, very conservative figure … telling his own caucus, like, ‘Hey, cool it,’” Buttigieg remarked to podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro. “He’s basically saying that they are embarrassing the party, and I think acknowledging that they are diminishing the party’s chances by indulging in that kind of rhetoric.”Buttigieg added: “And the fact that they can’t think of what else to do, besides go right to race and gender, isn’t just revealing about some of the ugliest undercurrents in today’s Republican party – it’s also profoundly unimaginative because it means that they can’t speak to how any of this is going to make people’s lives better.”Harris, a former California attorney general and US senator who is of Indian and Jamaican heritage, became the first woman to be elected vice-president when Joe Biden won the Oval Office in 2020. She is now poised to become the first woman of color to lead a major-party presidential ticket after Biden halted his re-election bid on 21 July and endorsed her, setting the stage for Harris to reportedly sign up 170,000 campaign volunteers and raise $200m for her political warchest in a matter of days.Supporters of the Republican nominee Donald Trump – who lost the presidency to Biden – have met those accomplishments by disparaging Harris as a hire resulting from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. While grappling with a criminal conviction for election-related fraud in a case involving an adult film actor who alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him as well as other prosecutions pending against him, Trump has insulted Harris as “crazy”, “nuts”, “dumb as a rock” and – at a rally on Friday – “a bum”.That approach prompted some Republican leaders to try to warn party members against aiming overt racism and sexism at Harris. Those included Johnson, who said at a Tuesday news briefing: “This election will be about policies and not personalities.”The Louisiana congressman added: “This is not personal with regard to Kamala Harris, and her ethnicity or her gender having nothing to do with this whatsoever.”Buttigieg went on the Republican-friendly Fox News Sunday show and said Harris has proven herself in “one of the most visible leadership roles in the country”.“The idea that somebody hasn’t been tested or vetted when they have been vice-president of the United States just doesn’t make any sense,” Buttigieg said.Opinion polls show Harris is running a tight race with Trump after Biden had fallen several points behind, with the president’s support in vital swing states plummeting.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionButtigieg – the ex-mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 – is considered to be among a field of contenders to be Harris’s running mate. And in fact, a National Public Radio/PBS News/Marist poll showed him tied as the most popular Democratic vice-presidential candidate for the fall election.He declined to tell Garcia-Navarro whether he believed he would make a good vice-president.“I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to talk like that knowing that the person who needs to make that decision is … her – not me,” Buttigieg said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to wander down that path with you right now.” More

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      ‘Good for Joe’: Scranton residents back Biden’s decision to quit race

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      The Central Scranton Expressway, the road which leads into Scranton from the I-81 highway, was renamed in 2021 as the President Joseph R Biden Jr Expressway.The road drops down into the center of Scranton, the Pennsylvania city where the president was born, where it meets up with Biden Street – renamed in the same 2021 city council vote.There is no indication yet that Scranton, a former coal and manufacturing hub home to about 80,000 people, intends to change its name to Bidenton, but the message here is clear: this is Joe Biden country.“​​Let me start off with: we’re very proud of Joe Biden. We love Joe Biden. The fact that he’s a local guy, and all that,” said James Ferguson, 81.Ferguson was sitting with his brother, John Ferguson, 77, on a bench on Biden Street on Thursday afternoon. It was a blow for both when the president, who moved to Delaware from Scranton aged seven but who speaks often of his Scranton upbringing, decided to drop out of the race in mid-July, but the fondness for Biden remains.“I think Joe Biden showed the character that he is. He is a very good man, and he put the country first. It’s not how good he is, or whether he is smart or not. It was perception. The perception was bad for Joe, and he knew it and he dropped out. Good for Joe,” the elder Ferguson said.But with Trump leading Biden in the polls and posing an existential threat to the US, there is an acceptance that Biden had to go.“We can’t afford to lose this election, I think. So yeah, we were disappointed. We voted for him, we would vote for him again. But I think this is better for the party, better for the country,” John Ferguson said.“He’s a realist. I think he finally was convinced that he couldn’t take the risk. We’ve got to stop Trump from winning. We can’t let Trump get in. That is a terrible man. He’s an insult to the human race, that man.”Biden dropped out on Sunday, bringing to an end a painful, weeks-long pressure campaign that began with a dreadful debate performance and saw an ever-increasing number of Democratic politicians call for him to resign.Behind the scenes senior party figures, including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, had also made the case to Biden that he couldn’t win, despite the president comfortably – albeit in the face of very little opposition – clinching the Democratic primary earlier this year.“His age was a concern for a lot of voters and he was slipping in the polls. And I was very worried about that. So I mean, I’m thankful of all he’s done, I think he’s done good work, and I think he did the honorable thing that really should be valued,” said Angela Miller, a civil engineer.“I never wanted him to run again. He never said he was going to, do you know what I mean? From the beginning he said he was going to be a transitional president. I felt like he kind of went back on that.”Biden narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2020, defeating Trump by 80,000 votes. He comfortably won Lackawanna county, the north-east Pennsylvania district where Scranton is based, but not everyone in the city is an admirer.View image in fullscreen“He wasn’t really on the ball I don’t think. It was kind of like having the senile grandpa in the White House office,” said Phil Fleming, 61, as he watching his friend unpack a guitar at a bandshell in downtown Scranton.Fleming had the opposite geographic journey to Biden. He grew up in Delaware, where Biden moved with his family aged 10, and then moved to the Scranton area later in life. But Fleming has no particular affection for the president.“I always said Joe would do for the country what he did for Delaware: nothing,” he said.Biden endorsed Kamala Harris for president within minutes of pulling out of the race on Sunday. Harris has since all but secured the Democratic nomination, and if she wins in November she would become the country’s first woman president.“I’m excited about it. I think it would be awesome to have a female run the country, to see what she could bring and try to unite the country a little bit more,” said Kelly, 34.Kelly, who asked not to use her last name, was walking her dog through the Green Ridge area of Scranton, where Biden’s three-storey childhood home is now marked by a small plaque.“It’s definitely a cool thing to say that the President of the United States grew up in your neighborhood, you can’t really say that too often. So it’s a little fun fact that we have here,” she said.Few cities can claim to have a president on their books – Quincy, in Massachusetts, can lay claim to two: father and son duo John Adams and John Quincy Adams. For Scranton, Biden may no longer be in the race, but he will remain a presence.“I think he really put all his heart and soul into this country, and I just feel like maybe now it’s time to step out, and let the next generation come in and serve the same way he did,” Kelly said. More

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      Voters to choose between two starkly different candidates in US ‘Armageddon election’

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      A man convicted of dozens of felonies versus a criminal prosecutor. An architect of abortion bans versus a champion of reproductive freedom. An elderly white man fixated on the past versus a mixed-race daughter of immigrants leaning into the future.One hundred days from the US presidential election, the choice for voters has never been so clear cut. Kamala Harris, 59, the de facto Democratic nominee after the dramatic withdrawal of Joe Biden, is a progressive person of colour bidding to become the first female president in America’s 248-year history.Donald Trump, at 78 the oldest nominee in history, is a populist-nationalist who has demonised immigrants, gained backing from far-right extremists and tapped into white Christian nostalgia by promising to “make America great again”.“In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation, one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” Harris told members of the historically Black sorority Zeta Phi Beta in Indianapolis on Wednesday. “And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”Biden has previously spoken of a “battle for the soul of the nation” and Trump has described this election as “the final battle”. But the nomination of Harris will be clarifying about the culmination of a tumultuous decade and a collision of two Americas: one liberal, diverse and optimistic, the other conservative, nativist and, in Trump’s telling, driven by grievance and vengeance.Halifu Osumare, professor emerita in the department of African American and African studies at the University of California, Davis, said: “The difference between the candidates couldn’t be any starker. To me it represents this country and its schizophrenia. This country is both racist to its core yet the leader of the world in the rights of the individual and democracy.“This election is going to play out that schizophrenia because you’ve got a good deal of the nation who wants to take us back to those days where white supremacy was absolutely dominant, and those who want us to evolve as a human species. We need somebody who has humanity at her core in order to do that.”The road that led here began with the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, in 2008. For millions of Americans, Obama represented hope; for millions of other Americans, he represented fear that the country they grew up in was disappearing. Whereas white Christians made up 54% of the US population in 2008, they have now slipped into the minority and make up only 44%.Racially motivated backlash against Obama was evident in the stirrings of the populist Tea Party movement. Then came Trump’s entry into politics as a “birther”, questioning whether Obama had in fact been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible for the presidency.Again, Trump offered hope to one America and fear to the other. He embodied a rage against change, political correctness and liberal elites, gaining traction in small towns and rural areas that felt left behind. He scapegoated immigrants as the source of blame, creating an us-versus-them dynamic, and promised to build a border wall to keep them out.The country faced a clear choice in 2016 and handed Trump victory over Hillary Clinton in the electoral college, though there were complicating variables such as her status as a former first lady and the FBI reopening an investigation into her handling of classified information.Four years and one global pandemic later, Trump, a white man who was the oldest president ever, was defeated by Joe Biden, a white man who was even older and a moderate who won back white working-class votes that Clinton had lost in the rust belt. In 2024, the world was braced, somewhat wearily, for a rematch.Moe Vela, a former senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, said: “When it was Biden and Trump, you had two septuagenarians that created a battle of senior citizens. Now you have not only gender, not only the past versus the future, not only a difference in heritage – you have also the stark contrast in hope versus hate.”In the past month, American politics has moved at incredible speed, upending all certainties. Biden flopped at a presidential debate in Atlanta, Trump survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and, as a chorus of Democrats questioned his age and mental acuity, Biden became the first incumbent since 1968 to announce he would not seek re-election.The party quickly rallied around Harris, a former US senator, prosecutor and California attorney general, with an avalanche of endorsements, fundraising and memes. She hit the campaign trail with electrifying speeches and Beyoncé tracks, providing a shot of adrenaline that flipped Democrats from doom and gloom to giddy optimism. Opinion polls show Harris outperforming Biden among Black, Latino and young voters, and running more or less even with Trump.Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, said: “There’s a hundred days to go to the election and, in a year where everything has pretty much happened, it’s hard to tell how this all plays out. But I don’t think there’s any question that the Democrats are very much back in this race and are looking a hell of a lot better than they did a few weeks ago.”Panetta, who served in various capacities under nine US presidents, has witnessed growing polarisation and a coarsening of political discourse. “It’s obvious that America in these last number of years has become more divided, more partisan, and our democracy in many ways has become much more dysfunctional as a result of those divisions,” he added. “Kamala Harris presents a message that we could have a better America in the future, and we need that message of hope.“The message of Trump, whether he wanted to change it or not, still gets trapped by his own sense of retribution, vengeance and going after people. That’s not what Kamala Harris is about and so the American people are going to have a real choice here in November to decide what kind of direction we want for our country. The more defined that difference is, the better the chances are that the Democrats can win.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBorn in Oakland, California, to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Harris is the anti-Trump in myriad ways. She is 19 years younger, instantly neutralising the age argument and turning it against her opponent, whose ramblings and name confusions will be under special scrutiny.She has been the face of the Biden campaign on the issue of abortion as reproductive rights became an animating issue after the supreme court in 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision. She is expected to stick largely to Biden’s foreign policy playbook on Ukraine, China and Iran but could strike a tougher tone with Israel over the war in Gaza.Her sudden ascent punctured Republican balloons after a successful party convention in Milwaukee, where Trump was almost deified after his defiant response – “Fight! Fight! Fight” – to a near-death experience. His entrance to the sound of It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, and speeches by the likes of wrestler Hulk Hogan, underlined an image of old-school machismo.The Trump campaign, which relished a contest with the ailing Biden, is now having to rapidly adapt to the new challenge of Harris. It has begun casting her as a leftwing radical from California who was the “co-pilot” of what they say are the Biden administration’s failed policies on immigration and inflation.Trump told a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, this week: “For three and a half years, Lyin’ Kamala Harris has been the ultra-liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe … As border czar, Kamala threw open our borders and allowed 20 million illegal aliens to stampede into our country from all over the world.”Republican representative and rightwing media have mispronounced her name, mocked her laugh (“Cackling Kamala”), and invoked diversity, equity and inclusion programmes to brand her potentially the “first DEI president”. Commentators predict a torrent of bigotry, racism and misogyny reminiscent of the playbooks deployed against Obama and Clinton. The tone of the two campaigns could not be more different.Tara Setmayer, co-founder and chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led Super Pac, said: “That’s the decision. It’s between democracy versus autocracy, and progression versus regression. Usually a future-forward vision wins out. But we’ll see. It’s going to be a hell of a battle. When you think we were battling for the soul of America in 2020, this is the battle for the soul of America on steroids.”The clarity of the choice raises the temperature in an already febrile atmosphere. The attempt on Trump’s life came after years of political violence that included the shooting of representative Steve Scalise, a hammer attack on former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.Both parties now head into an “Armageddon election” in which they say the American way of life is on the line. Winning will signify total vindication; losing will signify total catastrophe. How would Trump’s fervent base react to defeat by a Black woman? At a rally for Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, in Middletown, Ohio, this week, state senator George Lang warned: “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved.”Differences personified by Harris and Trump appear irreconcilable. David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University, said: “It’s about crushing the other side. There’s no bipartisanship about this election except for the ‘never Trumpers’ [traditional Republicans who oppose Trump], who have seen a light and don’t want to live in a country with that kind of authoritarianism.“We’re on the brink of something here.” More

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      Kamala Harris switch scrambles Republicans as Trump resorts to insults

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      Donald Trump capped a tough week in which his Democratic opponents turned the tables, replacing aging Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as their top choice for president, by resorting to insults and extremism on the campaign trail.A week ago, Trump was riding high on the iconic moment when he rose bloodied and with a defiantly raised fist from an assassination attempt, pulling away in the polls. Biden, meanwhile, was struggling to recover from his dire late June debate against the Republican nominee and an unconvincing performance in the days since.Now, with the former president suddenly facing a vibrant, younger rival in Harris, who hit the ground running after Biden quit his re-election campaign last Sunday and quickly endorsed her for the top of the ticket, Trump called her “a bum” and said he “couldn’t care less” if he mispronounced her name.At a rally in Florida on Friday night organized by the far-right Christian advocacy group Turning Point Action, Trump not only went personal against the US vice-president, but once again appeared to threaten American democracy.“Christians, get out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it anymore. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” he said at the event in West Palm Beach, not far from his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence.Trump has been adopted by much of the US evangelical Christian right as a flawed champion, besmirched by losing in sexual misconduct and business fraud civil cases and convicted on criminal counts for election-related fraud in a case involving an adult film actor who alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him. With other criminal cases ongoing, he is nevertheless the one-term president who tilted the US supreme court against abortion, gun control, government experts, voting rights and diversity efforts in higher education, delighting his white, ultra-conservative base.At Friday’s rally, he also lit into Harris. She won the support not only of Biden but of the Obamas, the Clintons and the Democratic leaders in Congress last week, and if she is officially anointed at the party’s convention next month, she will be the first Black female nominee, the first south Asian nominee, and, if she beats Trump in November, America’s first female president.On Friday, Trump called her “the most incompetent, unpopular and far-left vice-president in American history”. And in a seeming nod to how the campaign has been upended, he said: “She was a bum three weeks ago.”He also pronounced her name Ka-MAH-la Harris, whereas the vice-president pronounces her name KAHM-a-la.He insisted that he had been told there are numerous ways to say her name and added: “I said: ‘Don’t worry about it, doesn’t matter what I say, I couldn’t care less if I mispronounce it or not.’ Some people think I mispronounce it on purpose but actually I’ve heard it said about seven different ways.”He has variously called Harris “crazy”, “nuts” and “dumb as a rock”. Some Republicans in Congress disparage her as a “diversity hire”, even though in her career before she became the first female US vice-president she had been elected as the district attorney of San Francisco, the attorney general of California and a US senator. Rightwing activists and trolls have smeared her online with racist, sexist and sexualized barbs, Reuters reported.But opinion polls show that in just a few days, Harris, 59, has closed to within a point or two of Trump, whereas Biden had fallen around six points behind and was losing support in vital swing states.Trump, 78, is now the oldest nominee to run for president. Earlier in the week, Trump also said Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people” after she did not attend Benjamin Netanyahu’s in-person visit and address to a joint session of Congress in Washington where the Israeli prime minister defended Israel’s war in Gaza. Harris spoke out strongly against the suffering of Palestinian civilians.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis despite her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, being Jewish and being involved in an antisemitism taskforce for the White House.In the last week, Trump also experienced another wobble in his trajectory. After introducing his choice of running mate at the Republican national convention as young gun and US senator for Ohio JD Vance to great fanfare, some within Republican circles began to lament Vance as a liability rather than a boon to the Trump ticket, following awkward performances on the campaign trail.Then, Jennifer Aniston went viral criticizing Vance’s past comments disparaging the likes of Harris, who is a stepmother but has not given birth, as unhappy “childless cat ladies”..And on Saturday, the New York Times published excerpts from communications between Vance and a peer from Yale Law School who said their close friendship broke down in 2021 when Vance supported a ban by Arkansas on gender-affirming care for transgender minors. It was the first such ban in the country – later struck down in court.Former friend Sofia Nelson is transgender and told the publication that the public should know what Vance has said, including more about his pivot from being a Trump opponent to an acolyte. This included Vance writing “I hate the police” after white officers killed a Black 18-year-old, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and calling Trump a demagogue, a disaster and “morally reprehensible” while saying the greater his appeal to the white electorate, the worse it would be for Black voters. The Vance campaign called Nelson’s decision to disclose private conversations unfortunate.On Saturday night, Trump and Vance are due to appear at a rally in Minnesota, hoping to get their campaign off the back foot. More

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

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

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

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

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      Kamala Harris makes history as whirlwind week upends US election

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

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

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