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      Pelosi has ‘never been that impressed’ with Biden’s political operation

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      Nancy Pelosi has “never been that impressed” with Joe Biden’s “political operation”, the former US House speaker said, discussing a judgment that helped her conclude the president could not beat Donald Trump and should step aside.“They won the White House [in 2020]. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for [Biden’s withdrawal] to happen,” Pelosi told the New Yorker, in an interview published on Thursday.On 21 July, in a historic moment, the 81-year-old president finally heeded those who said he was too old to beat Trump and serve a full second term.Stepping aside as the Democratic nominee, Biden endorsed his 59-year-old vice-president, Kamala Harris, a move that transformed the election, placing Trump under pressure.Pelosi was widely reported to have played a key role in the switch.She told the New Yorker: “The president has to make the decision for that to happen. People were calling. I never called one person. I kept true to my word. Any conversation I had, it was just going to be with [Biden]. I never made one call. They said I was burning up the lines, I was talking to Chuck [Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader]. I didn’t talk to Chuck at all.“I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next.”Pelosi said her goal was simple: “That Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”Now 84, Pelosi is in her 19th term in the House. Having been speaker between 2007 and 2011 and 2019 and 2023, she remains vastly influential.Pelosi spoke to the New Yorker to promote her new memoir, The Art of Power. Last week, the Guardian first reported Pelosi’s descriptions of how she grew increasingly concerned about Trump’s mental fitness for office, even before his defeat by Biden and incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress.Pelosi told the New Yorker she hoped her role in ending Biden’s presidency would not destroy her relationship with a man three years younger but elected as a senator in 1972, 14 years before Pelosi won her seat in the House.“I hope so,” she said. “I pray so. I cry so.”She said she had lost sleep over the situation. Asked if she thought Biden was angry with her, she said: “I don’t know. We haven’t had a conversation. But … ”Pelosi said she thought Biden was “in a good state”, praising as “masterful” his handling of a large-scale prisoner swap with Russia which concluded last week.But Biden’s legacy “will go right down the drain if what’s-his-name ever [returns to] the White House”, Pelosi said, adding: “One of the reasons I ran again [in 2022] was to make sure that Donald Trump never stepped foot in the White House again.“He is a danger to our democracy … he’s a danger to the air our children breathe, the water they drink, their safety in terms of gun-violence prevention. Freedom of choice, the size, the timing of your family – all that.”Asked if she had met Trump since her time as speaker, Pelosi said she had not.“Oh, my God, what a horrible thought,” she said. “He knows he’s an impostor. He knows he shouldn’t be president of the United States.” More

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      Why Donald Trump won’t make major inroads with Black voters | Musa al-Gharbi

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      Throughout the 2024 cycle, polling has suggested that Republicans are poised to do extraordinarily well with African Americans.Even with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, nearly one out of five black voters say they support Donald Trump. Younger Black voters seem especially open to casting ballots for the Republican party.On its face, this seems like a sea change in Americans’ electoral affinities. The last time Republicans put up numbers anywhere near that level with Black voters was in 1976. And given that Black voters currently make up nearly one-quarter of the Democratic base, a scenario where almost 20% of these constituents defected to the other side would be absolutely devastating for the vice-president’s electoral prospects.The good news for Democrats is that, even if the polls have been genuinely capturing overall Black sentiment in the US, they are unlikely to be accurately predicting the final vote distribution in November.To clarify why polls are unlikely to reflect the eventual vote margins for this particular subset of voters, it might be helpful to look at how things typically shake out for third-party candidates.Elections are decided by voters, not poll respondentsDuring the 2016 electoral cycle, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson consistently hovered around 9% of the vote in polling. As the race tightened in the weeks before the election, voters began defecting to one of the top ticket candidates. However, in the week before ballots were cast, he was still polling at more than 6%. Ultimately, he ended up with just over 3%.In the 2020 cycle, Green party candidate Howie Hawkins polled at 2% of the national vote six weeks before the election. He ultimately secured roughly one-quarter of 1% of ballots.In the current cycle, Robert F Kennedy Jr polled above 10% for most of the race and, at his high point, was more than double that. However, as the race has tightened (we’re less than 90 days out), and after Joe Biden dropped out, Kennedy is now polling around 4%. In the end, he’d probably be lucky to get half that many votes in November.In short: despite most Americans consistently expressing support for alternatives to the Democratic and Republican nominees, third-party candidates consistently underperform at the ballot box relative to their polling – even in cycles (like 2016) where unusually high numbers of voters dislike both major party candidates.One of the primary causes of this gap between polling and outcomes is that contests are ultimately decided by who shows up to vote on election day. And Americans who are disgusted with both major-party nominees often find other things to do on a Tuesday afternoon than standing in line at a polling place to cast a ballot for someone who has little prospect of actually winning. And when these voters do show up at the ballot box, it’s often to hold their nose and vote for whomever they perceive to be the lesser of the two major party evils, in order to deny victory to the candidate they least prefer. And so, in the end, few Americans who express support for third-party candidates in polls actually show up to vote for them. The polls may accurately capture Americans’ preferences for third-party candidates, but they don’t predict well voting behavior with respect to those candidates.A similar tale holds for Black support of Republicans.Although polls this cycle have consistently found that nearly one in five Black Americans are open to voting for Trump, they also show that most Black voters could be easily swayed to vote for someone other than who they’re leaning towards at the moment, most Black voters have much weaker commitments to their current candidate of choice than other Americans, and roughly a third say they will probably not vote at all. This pattern in responses is also reflected in historical voting behavior: Black voters are more likely than most other Americans to sit elections out.Across the board, the Americans who are most likely to show up on election day – highly-educated, relatively affluent, urban and suburban voters – now tend to favor Democrats, even as lower-propensity voters (younger, working class and low-income, and/or less educated Americans, especially those who live in small towns and rural areas) have been shifting to the right.Historically, the dynamic has gone the other way. Democrats benefitted from high turnout and sought to expand access and participation while Republicans aggressively sought to suppress turnout by increasing voting restrictions, purging voter rolls, gerrymandering districts and otherwise undermining the Voting Rights Act. However, as the Democratic party was reoriented around knowledge economy professionals, many other constituencies swung in the other direction. And because there are far more “normie” voters than there are symbolic capitalists, high turnout increasingly came to favor Republicans instead.This matters because Republicans’ polling gains among African Americans are concentrated most heavily among lower-propensity voting blocs (such as younger and less affluent or educated constituents) and, as a consequence, the lower overall electoral turnout is, the more we should expect to see Republicans underperform among black voters relative to the polls.In 2020, the GOP got a bigger share of the black vote than in previous cycles, but this was in part because of record turnout among non-white voters (whereas Democrats overperformed in subsequent special elections that had much lower overall turnout). Unfortunately for Trump, there are signs that African American turnout this cycle may be significantly lower among lower-propensity voters. Consequently, the vote share Republicans ultimately receive in 2024 among black voters may end up being significantly lower than the polling suggests.The bad news for Democrats is that Trump doesn’t necessarily need to get around 20% of the black vote to freeze Kamala out of the White House. If he’s to even marginally exceed his numbers from last cycle, Democrats would be left with a highly precarious path to victory unless they can make up the losses with other constituents in swing states.Both parties have been alienating core constituenciesSince 2010, Democrats had been consistently losing vote share among African Americans in every midterm and general election.And it wasn’t just African American voters who were leaving, but also Hispanic Americans, religious minorities, and less affluent or educated voters. The very populations that Democrats often fancy themselves as representatives of and advocates for. The very constituents that were supposed to ensure Democrats an indefinite electoral majority.These defections were highly consequential: they contributed to enormous congressional wipeouts from 2010 to 2014 and cost Democrats the White House in 2016 (as Black voter attrition helped flip states including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio, even as Hispanic alienation helped tilt Arizona, Texas and Florida toward the Republicans).Many assumed that with Trump in the White House, minority voters would come flocking back to the Democratic party. Instead, the GOP held their margins with non-white voters in the 2018 midterms. Democratic gains in that election were near-exclusively due to shifts among highly-educated, relatively affluent, urban and suburban white people.In 2020, Black voters in states such as South Carolina helped save Biden’s floundering primary election campaign. In response, the president vowed to appoint a Black woman as his running mate should he win the Democratic nomination. Upon securing the vote, he ultimately settled on Harris.This choice was striking because Harris was not popular with Black voters during the primary. She typically trailed behind not just Biden, but also Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and sometimes other competitors as well – consistently polling about 5% with African Americans.That general sentiment seems to have continued through to the general election. Although Harris’s nomination was historic in virtue of her being potentially the first Black, female and/or Asian vice-president, her appearance on the ticket generated little enthusiasm among any of these voter blocs. Democrats ultimately got a smaller share of the black vote and the Asian vote in 2020 as compared with 2016 (across gender lines). Democrats were able to nonetheless carve out a narrow electoral college win primarily because white men (especially self-identified “moderates” and “independents”) shifted away from Donald Trump in 2020.These patterns continued through the 2022 midterm elections: non-white people, including non-white women, shifted much further towards the GOP than white people (especially white men). And it seems likely that Democrats will see further attrition in 2024, even if it’s less than current polling suggests.Contrary to optimistic narratives that circulated as Obama was ushered into office, it’s actually quite difficult to hold together a coalition that is centered around knowledge economy professionals but attractive to less advantaged Americans as well.With respect to the Democratic party’s current core constituency, although knowledge economy professionals have been straying from the Democrats since the election of Biden, they seem poised to turn out in force for Harris. The record-breaking “White Women: Answer the Call” and “White Dudes for Harris” online events seem like a strong indicator – as does the huge outpouring of support from Wall Street, Silicon Valley and big law. The symbolic professions seem to be 100% coconut-pilled.Black people, on the other hand, seem much less enthusiastic. And should Harris lean heavily into her race or gender in an attempt to rally support – although this might be appealing to (disproportionately white) knowledge economy professionals – it would likely alienate non-white “normie” voters even more (who tend to prefer messages that are less identitarian and more focused on bread and butter issues).The big question for 2024 is whether or not Trump will continue to alienate white people at an equal or greater clip as Democrats are driving away voters of color. The answer will likely determine control of the White House.

      Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. He is a Guardian US columnist. More

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      Fifty years after Nixon resigned, a key player is still angry about his pardon

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      A sombre US president addresses the nation from the Oval Office. Despite all he has achieved, he will relinquish power and pass the torch to his vice-president. It is clear that he is bowing to pressure from his own party and leaving against his will.This was Joe Biden in 2024. It was also Richard Nixon in very different circumstances 50 years ago on Thursday. Disgraced by the Watergate break-in and cover-up, Nixon would claim an unwanted place in history as the first – and still only – person to resign the American presidency.For Elizabeth Holtzman, who at the time was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, it was a day of hope – an affirmation of America’s system of checks and balances holding Nixon to account for his role in the Watergate scandal. But her optimism did not last long. A month later, Nixon was granted a full pardon by his successor, Gerald Ford.“The pardon was unpardonable,” Holtzman, who turns 83 this week, says by phone from her home in Brooklyn, New York. “The pardon created a double standard of justice: one for the high and mighty in this country and another for everybody else.”Half a century later, she still suspects that Ford’s motives were less noble than are often portrayed and worries that he set a dangerous precedent for the likes of Donald Trump. But as she reflects on a long career as a trailblazer, Holtzman is optimistic about the potential for America to elect its first female president in November.She was a 31-year-old Harvard Law School graduate when, in 1972, she beat a five-decade incumbent, Emanuel Celler, to win a Brooklyn, New York, seat in the House of Representatives. Foreshadowing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Holtzman took to the streets and out-campaigned her better-known opponent, making her case to voters at every subway station in her district and queues outside cinemas showing The Godfather.The summer of 1972 had also seen the arrest of five men in a bungled operation to bug and steal documents from the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington – a dirty tricks scheme aimed at scuppering would-be challengers to Nixon in that year’s presidential election.Nixon and his aides attempted to cover up the White House’s involvement in the break-in and obstructed the investigation by law enforcement agencies. Journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post played a key role in uncovering the story with the help of a secret informant known as “Deep Throat” (later revealed to be the FBI associate director Mark Felt).View image in fullscreenThe Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Senate Watergate committee and a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, also investigated the scandal. It emerged that Nixon had a secret taping system in the Oval Office that recorded conversations. In 1974, after a long legal battle, the US supreme court ordered Nixon to release the tapes that contained evidence he had been involved in the cover-up from the beginning.Holtzman was one of the House judiciary committee members who recommended articles of impeachment against the president. She recalls: “The evidence was overwhelming. At some point I remember feeling as though I was in quicksand with no bottom, that we just kept hearing one fact of criminality, misconduct, abuse of power after another, and we just kept sinking further and further into that muck.”The gravity of the moment was profound. This would be only the second impeachment of a president in American history, following that of Andrew Johnson in 1868. Holtzman, who five years ago published the book The Case for Impeaching Trump, reflects: “Nobody was happy on the Democratic side or Republican side in voting for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.“It’s well known that the chair of the committee, Peter Rodino, a very liberal Democrat, went back to his office and cried after that first vote for impeachment. Nobody wanted to see it and I felt also very uncomfortable. It was a very difficult vote to cast.“Not that I had any questions about Nixon’s guilt or whether he should be impeached. It was obvious that the impeachment clause was written almost with Nixon in mind by the framers of the constitution. But that wasn’t the point. The point is that he was my president and I didn’t want to see any US president involved in this kind of misconduct, this degree and level and horror of abuse of power and criminality.”She adds: “I didn’t want to see it and it was awful to see and it was a very sobering moment. Nobody took any pleasure. This was not a gotcha! moment for Democrats. That’s the difference between then and now. People took impeachment seriously.”At first many Republicans had remained loyal to Nixon, denying that he was personally involved despite mounting evidence. But the “smoking gun tape” confirmed the allegation of the White House counsel, John Dean, that Nixon told aides to order the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation into the burglary.Holtzman adds: “That was a key part of the cover-up. The Republicans could no longer argue that there was no evidence that Nixon was oblivious to what was going on. Nixon was ordering the cover-up almost from day one.“At that point, all the what I call the ‘holdout Republicans’ said that they would support impeachment if it came to the House floor. In the end, the Republicans themselves were governed by the facts, although up to that point they would not accept anything less than a tape recording.”Three Republican leaders went to the White House to warn Nixon that there were no longer enough Republican votes to spare him impeachment. The following night, as crowds outside the White House gates chanted “jail to the chief”, Nixon announced his resignation in a nationally televised speech from the Oval Office that focused on the accomplishments of his presidency and contained no admission of guilt.On the morning of 9 August, a sweaty Nixon delivered an extemporaneous, grievance-filled speech to White House staff, some of whom broke down in tears. He said: “Always remember, others may hate you – but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” The remark has been described by Woodward as “one of the most interesting and important moments in presidential history”.But Holtzman was unmoved. “This was not a Shakespearean tragedy for me. This was a man who seriously abused his power, fought his political enemies. For a man to say treat your enemies well, he’d stick the IRS on his political enemies to try to get them to have harassing audits. This is a man who wiretapped journalists he thought were leaking information.“This is a man who went after Daniel Ellsberg [the defence analyst who leaked the secret history of the Vietnam war known as the Pentagon Papers] by approving a break-in into his psychiatrist’s office. He never acknowledged his guilt. He never showed remorse. Saying you shouldn’t do something, that’s very nice to preach to others, but what about practising what you preach? That we didn’t see and we never had any acknowledgment of his flaws ever.”View image in fullscreenNixon gave a final victory sign on the White House South Lawn before a helicopter spirited him away. On taking the oath of office as the 38th president, Ford remarked that America’s “long national nightmare is over”. Weeks later, he granted a full and unconditional pardon to Nixon. Bernstein exclaimed to Woodward: “You’re not gonna believe it. The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch!”Holtzman was incensed. At a hearing of the House judiciary committee, she questioned Ford about the pardon directly. The president insisted that a criminal indictment, trial and conviction would have diverted the attention of the White House, Congress and American people from the urgent problems they needed to solve at home and abroad.Fifty years later, Holtzman is still convinced that Ford got it wrong. “We did something at the House judiciary committee to hold the president accountable and set forth the basis for his accountability on a bipartisan basis and in a process that the public would understand.“Here you had a president who had said, ‘I’m not going to do anything right away’ but basically he acted within a month of the resignation, and where was the transparency? What were the grounds for this? Why would you do this? Let the system work.”The criminal justice system should not have been tampered with, she continues. “The special prosecutor should have been allowed to examine all the evidence to determine whether on a criminal basis it was justified to bring charges to the grand jury, to let the grand jury make its determination to bring the prosecution, to bring a trial if that was warranted, to see whether there would be a conviction.“To short-circuit the process was a gross political act and an abuse of power and raised the question which to this day has never been solved as to whether the pardon was part of a deal to get Nixon out of office to help the Republicans in the midterm elections. Do I know that was Ford’s motive? It could have been. It was obviously a potential motive for him.”Trump, facing federal criminal charges over his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection, has floated the idea of pardoning himself as well as his supporters who attacked police and stormed the US Capitol. Holtzman says: “The blatant use of the pardon power in a political way is wrong.“It’s an abuse of power and shouldn’t happen, and a lot of thought has to be given to reforming how the pardon power is being used, because for Donald Trump to say that he’s going to pardon the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6 is beyond reprehensible.”She also rejects that notion that a Democratic president should consider pardoning Trump. “Pardons don’t create national unity. There was no serious division among the American people about the Nixon impeachment. It was overwhelmingly approved by the American people.“The idea that the country had to be brought together because Nixon was being removed from office is nonsense. The American people came together because they realised that more important than any president, whether Republican or Democrat, was preserving our constitution and the rule of law. We came together on that principle, not on the principle of a particular person.”View image in fullscreenFord went on to lose the 1976 election to the Democrat Jimmy Carter. “Ford was kicked out of office. He was not re-elected because of the pardon so how did that unify anybody? The pardon appeared to have been used to my mind as a blatant political means to get Nixon out of office.”Holtzman spent eight years in Congress, leading efforts to bring Nazi war criminals living in America to justice, and went on to serve as Brooklyn district attorney. But she has suffered her share of setbacks, coming within a percentage point of being New York’s first female senator in 1980, losing a Senate primary election in 1992 and being defeated after one term as New York City comptroller in a banking-related scandal.Her record as the youngest woman elected to Congress eventually fell in 2014 to a then 30-year-old Republican named Elise Stefanik. Two years ago Holtzman made an unsuccessful bid to return to the House in a newly drawn congressional district spanning parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan.But Biden’s withdrawal from this year’s White House race in favor of Kamala Harris raises the prospect that she may see a woman occupy the Oval Office in her lifetime. She muses: “More and more women are holding more and more important offices in this country, and slowly but surely the American people are recognizing that women can do a great job and some women can do a terrible job, just the way men can do a great job and some men can do a terrible job.“To exclude women from the presidency because they’re women is wrong, it’s bias, it’s depriving us of great talent. I feel very optimistic about Vice-President Harris’s campaign and about her possibility of success and it would be a great thing for this country. It’s another way that we could be a beacon in this world.” More

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      Biden ‘not confident at all’ in peaceful transfer of power if Trump loses race

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      Joe Biden has said he is not confident there will be a peaceful transfer of power after the November presidential election.“If Trump wins, no, I’m not confident at all. I mean, if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all,” the president said in an interview with CBS News that is due to air in full this Sunday.Biden added: “He means what he says, we don’t take him seriously. He means it, all this stuff about ‘if we lose it will be a bloodbath’ … [and] ‘stolen election’, you can’t love your country only when you win.”The TV network posted the excerpt from the interview on Twitter/X.Donald Trump, who is the Republican nominee for president, said in March: “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

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      In choosing Tim Walz, Kamala Harris went for policies not electoral votes | John Zogby

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      Vice-President Kamala Harris has selected the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate and this big decision reflects more conventional history than inside-the-DC-beltway convention wisdom. While pundits focused mainly on which possible choice could help her ticket win a battleground state, their focus was on either Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes) or Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona (11 electoral votes). In this hotly competitive race, either selection made good sense in the scramble for a majority of the electoral college.But we have to go back to 1960 when the young Massachusetts senator John Kennedy picked the Texas senator and majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, to be his running mate to find the last time selecting a candidate who actually brought a state with him was the dominant concern. Johnson and Kennedy hated each other but the ticket carried Texas, so who cared?Since that time, other factors were in the ascendance. The very conservative governor of California Ronald Reagan opted for the more moderate, establishment, comfortable George HW Bush in 1980. Bush brought credibility and possibly modulation. A decade later, after Reagan and Bush were the two oldest men ever to serve in the White House, 46-year-old Bill Clinton chose 44-year-old Al Gore.Gore brought much-needed Washington experience, even more intellectual heft, and above all the image of youthful vigor to promote the mantra of change. In one of their first public appearances together, Clinton and Gore got off the campaign bus and played catch with a football, a powerful image of a new boomer generation ready to go.In 2000, Governor George W Bush, a successful and moderate Texas governor of Texas, needed an insider with gravitas and knowledge of the workings inside the nation’s capital. Actually, Dick Cheney, who Bush had appointed to conduct a vice-presidential search, chose himself.And eight years later, Senator Barack Obama, barely in the US Senate, was not thinking of Joe Biden’s state of Delaware with only three (comfortably Democratic) electoral voters. Rather, Biden brought decades of legislative and foreign policy experience, the wisdom of age, and hardworking ethnic working-class roots to the table.So, Governor Walz is much more than the man from Minnesota (10 electoral votes). Actually, he was born in rural Nebraska, taught high school and coached football in a small town, has served almost six terms in the House of Representatives and is into his second term as governor. He is wildly popular among his fellow Democratic governors who selected him to be their leader. He has lived and led since 1996 in Mankato, Minnesota, population 45,000. Walz has been on the inside but more significantly he has never left the outside. Walz is seen as an appealing option for independents and moderate Democrats as a working-class politician with a rural background, as well as a favorite among the progressive wing of the Democratic party who were not keen on either Shapiro or Kelly.Before running for office, Walz, a graduate of a state college in Nebraska, served in the army national guard. He worked as a teacher, first on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, then in China and later as a high school teacher in Mankato, Minnesota, south of Minneapolis. As a teacher, he was assigned the duty of supervising the cafeteria during lunch. (I suppose he can do anything!)As governor, he has passed tuition-free meals at participating state universities, enshrined abortion rights into state law, provided protections for gender-affirming healthcare, signed a bill last May expanding voting rights in Minnesota for formerly incarcerated residents, and in 2020, oversaw the state’s response to both the Covid-19 pandemic and police brutality protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police.He offers a combination of a rural/small-town family man, rooted in traditional values, while also pushing through legislative programs that are near-and-dear to the progressive base of the party. While his views on the war in Gaza are not out of step with mainstream congressional Democrats, it is notable that he expressed support for and understanding of the college demonstrators’ empathy for the suffering victims of the Gaza war.By selecting Walz, the vice-president has accomplished a few important things. First, she has chosen someone from and of the midwest and rural America, moving away from the big city/coastal elitism that the party has come to represent. Second, she has declared her independence from the Biden administration’s premise of Israel first and always as Middle Eastern policy. And third, she has chosen someone who is no “hillbilly” with fluid values, but an authentic midwesterner. We now have a possible injection of “prairie progressivism” v “hillbilly/Mar-a-Lago populism”. This will be no small debate.

      John Zogby is senior partner at John Zogby Strategies and author of Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should More

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      US election live updates: Kamala Harris and Tim Walz hit the campaign trail in Pennsylvania

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      Kamala Harris introduced her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, to supporters at a packed, energetic rally at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Harris sought to define Walz foremost as a teacher, veteran and football coach.Walz focused on a unifying, future-focused message, and attacked the Trump-Vance ticket with a focus on reproductive rights and other freedoms.Meanwhile Josh Shapiro, who had been a vice-presidential contender, still made his mark.Read the key takeaways here.Here are some images from the Harris/Walz campaign rally in Philadelphia last night.Kamala Harris introduced her running mate Tim Walz as “the kind of vice-president America deserves” at a raucous rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday that showcased Democratic unity and enthusiasm for the party’s presidential ticket ahead of the November election.Casting their campaign as a “fight for the future”, Harris and Walz were repeatedly interrupted by applause and cheering as they addressed thousands of battleground-state voters wearing bracelets that twinkled red, white and blue at Temple University’s Liacouras Center – a crowd Harris’s team said was its largest to date.“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” a beaming Walz told Harris after she debuted the little-known Minnesota governor as a former social studies teacher, high school football coach and a National Guard veteran.“We’ve got 91 days,” he declared. “My God, that’s easy. We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”Read the full story here. More

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      ‘Let’s kick ass!’: Hollywood celebrities share their support of Tim Walz

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      Hollywood figures, including Julianne Moore and Rob Reiner, have shared their support for Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz.The 60-year-old Minnesota governor was announced as the running mate of Harris, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, on Tuesday after weeks of speculation.The decision was praised on social media by stars such as Cynthia Nixon, best known for her role in Sex and the City and her unsuccessful campaign to be governor of New York. “I’m Walzing on air,” she wrote while thanking Harris.Film-maker and Democratic fundraiser Rob Reiner, who had called on Joe Biden to step down in early July, reposted a montage of Walz and then later wrote: “Harris/Walz. Let’s kick ass!”Paul Feig, director of Bridesmaids and The Heat, also shared his support, writing that he was “so happy” about the decision while sharing his Saturday Night Live dream casting. “If only Chris Farley was still around to play him opposite Maya Rudolph’s Kamala,” he wrote.Acclaimed documentary film-maker Ken Burns, who has previously warned against Donald Trump, reposted a tweet from Walz, adding his support. “You can’t go wrong with a social studies teacher,” he wrote. “Excited to have @Tim_Walz on the ticket. Good to have someone who knows American history.”Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis, who thanked the president for his “leadership, grace under pressure, strength and resilience” after he withdrew from the race, shared a picture of Harris and Walz, with the tagline: “LET’S GO AMERICA!” The same image was also shared by fellow Oscar winner Julianne Moore who wrote: “This is such exciting news! I cannot wait to vote for this ticket.”John Cusack, who had called for Biden to step down, expressed confidence over the decision in a post. “It’s no absolute guarantee dems win – but absolutely gives us the best chance,” he wrote.Wonder Woman actor Lynda Carter referred to Walz as “a champion who understands America” while Abbott Elementary star Sheryl Lee Ralph called him “an honest, forthright family man with morals and true values”.In a statement announcing Walz as her choice, Harris wrote: “As a governor, a coach, a teacher and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his. We are going to build a great partnership.” More

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      The Tim Walz cheat sheet: 10 things to know about Harris’s VP pick

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      In Kamala Harris’s “veepstakes” – the search for a running mate to take on Donald Trump and JD Vance – the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, came from relative obscurity to seize the glittering prize. So who is he and what should you know about him?He’s ‘Minnesota nice’According to the Star Tribune, the well-known phrase refers to “Minnesotans’ tendency to be polite and friendly, yet emotionally reserved; our penchant for self-deprecation and unwillingness to draw attention to ourselves; and, most controversially, our maddening habit of substituting passive-aggressiveness for direct confrontation”. Most of that holds true for Walz, 60, who was born in Nebraska but whose cheerful and friendly demeanour has made him popular in office and even seems to make his political attack lines more effective, as when he went after Donald Trump and JD Vance for being “weird”, the gambit that propelled him into the reckoning to be running mate to Harris.He’s not that ‘Minnesota nice’Walz was a high school football coach, a profession known for displaying and encouraging aggression – active rather than passive at that. For more than a decade at Mankato West high school, Walz was defensive coordinator, working out how to best tackle and silence opposing attackers. As he told Pod Save America this year, when he arrived, the school had lost 27 games in a row. “We said, ‘This is nonsense. Let’s turn this thing around.’ Three years later we were state champions, and now they’re a powerhouse.”He was a sergeant in the national guardWalz spent 24 years in the national guard, out of Nebraska, and then Minnesota. As reported by Stars and Stripes, he enlisted as an infantryman at 17, encouraged by his father, a Korean war veteran, then put himself through college on the GI bill. Re-enlisting after 9/11, Walz deployed during natural disasters on US soil and to Italy in support of operations in Afghanistan.In 2005, Walz retired as a command sergeant major in the artillery – and faced criticism for leaving as his battalion prepared to go to Iraq. In comments publicised by the US army as Covid struck, Walz, the highest-ranking enlisted soldier ever voted into Congress, said: “In the guard, you put your community first. Everything you do, you do to ensure the health, safety and security of the people who are depending on you. And as governor, those are principles of servant leadership that I rely on every day.”He’s good at winning electionsWalz was a high school social studies teacher – and adviser to LGBTQ+ students – until, in 2006, he beat a Republican incumbent in a rural area to win a seat in Congress. After six terms in the US House, he ran for governor of Minnesota in 2018. He won that race, against the Republican Jeff Johnson, by 11 points. First-term challenges included the response to Covid-19, imposing and maintaining lockdowns and school and business closures, and the fallout from the police murder of George Floyd, an epochal event that made Minneapolis both the focus of worldwide protests for racial justice and the site of serious rioting. Running for re-election in 2022, against Scott Jensen, Walz won comfortably again.He’s popular with progressivesOn defeating Jensen, Walz told Minnesotans they had “made a conscious choice … to reject negative, divisive politics and choose the whole path of each and every one of us to be the best we possibly can”. On Tuesday, campaigners saluting Harris’s choice of running mate emphasised Walz’s progressive achievements. NextGen Pac, a youth-led group, said Walz had passed “significant legislation … that protects our rights, fights for climate justice, and builds a stronger economy for everyday people … enshrining abortion rights, establishing paid sick and family leave, enacting a nation-leading child tax credit, and signing 40 climate initiatives into law”.Walz has also overseen significant gun control reform, a notable achievement from a politician once endorsed by the National Rifle Association who was encouraged by his daughter to come out in favour of an assault weapons ban, after a series of school shootings.He enrages RepublicansThe announcement that Harris had picked Walz was greeted with predictable rightwing attacks. Foreshadowing Vance’s invective in Philadelphia at lunchtime, the Republican National Committee called Walz “a far-left radical … weak on border security” (presumably the southern border, hundreds of miles from Minnesota, rather than its northern one with Canada), and slammed him for supporting universal healthcare, taxation to pay for such measures, and abortion and voting rights. Walz, the RNC said, is also “extremely woke … a climate radical who wants to phase out fossil fuels” and “soft on crime”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Republican National Committee also highlighted a remark in which Walz discussed the Minnesota electoral map in terms familiar both to students of national politics and those engaged by his folksy attacks on Trump and Vance: “You see those maps,” Walz said in Minneapolis in 2017. “Red and blue and there’s all that red across there. And Democrats go into depression over it. It’s mostly rocks and cows that are in that red area.”He’s a family manWalz’s wife, Gwen Walz, is a public school teacher like her husband and also a prominent campaigner for educational reform, in particular a champion of improving education in prisons as a means of reducing reoffending. Gwen Walz is also the mother of two children, Hope, 23, and Gus, 17, born with the help of in vitro fertilisation, or IVF – treatment under threat from Republicans and rightwing Christians seeking further victories after the removal of federal abortion rights. “If you have never personally gone through the hell of infertility, I guarantee you someone you know has,” Walz said in March, during his state of the state address.Walz’s children have appeared with him in public. At the Minnesota state fair last year, he told Hope, a vegetarian, she could have a turkey corn dog. “Turkey is meat,” Hope said.“Not in Minnesota,” her dad said. “Turkey’s special.”He knows a bit about ChinaThanks to a Harvard-run program, Walz taught in China for a year – it happened to be 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square protests and brutal government crackdown – and as a result he speaks some Mandarin. In 1994, he and Gwen spent their honeymoon in China, on a trip they had arranged for a group of students. According to Gwen Walz’s official state biography, the couple continued to arrange such trips through 2003.He doesn’t drinkIn September 1995, when he was 31, Walz was stopped while driving at 96mph in a 55mph zone. Having failed a sobriety test, he pleaded guilty to a charge of reckless driving and paid a $200 fine. Walz has acknowledged the incident and said he no longer drinks. His preferred tipple is Diet Mountain Dew – coincidentally, also favored by Vance, the Republican pick for vice-president.His name is a mystery to someIs it “Waltz”, as in the dance, or “Walls”, as in the things that hold up roofs, or even “Wal-tz” as in Walmart? Turns out it’s “Waalls”, as in “Walls” but with a slightly longer “a”. He says it that way himself. More