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      Donald Trump comes out in support of recreational-use marijuana in Florida

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      Donald Trump has come out in support for a proposed constitutional amendment that would legalize recreational marijuana in Florida, the state in which he resides.In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump said “personal amounts of marijuana will be legalized for adults” with Florida’s amendment 3, “whether people like it or not”.The former US president said “someone should not be a criminal in Florida, when this is legal in so many other States”. He added: “We do not need to ruin lives & waste Taxpayer Dollars arresting adults with personal amounts of it on them.”Trump, as a resident Floridian, will be able to cast a vote on the state’s amendment 3 in November, which would allow adults over 21 to legally buy and use marijuana without a medical card.Under the proposed amendment, growing marijuana independently would still be illegal, and individuals could possess no more than three ounces for personal use.Trump’s support contrasts with Florida’s governor and fellow Republican, Ron DeSantis, who has been a vocal opponent of the ballot measure. “This is bad policy and even worse constitutional law,” DeSantis wrote in an X post this week.DeSantis has said he opposes amendment 3 because of the smell, and has claimed, without evidence, that people would be “able to bring 20 joints to an elementary school”.In his social media post, Trump called on the state’s lawmakers to implement regulations that would ban the use of marijuana in public spaces “so we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go”.But advocates of marijuana legalization argue that Republican lawmakers are exaggerating the scale of the smell problem in order to support policies banning the public use of cannabis, which has become increasingly accepted by Americans for years.Most US states now allow medical or recreational consumption of marijuana. In recent years, 24 states and the District of Columbia have legalized the recreational use of cannabis – and 14 others have approved it for medical use, according to the Pew Research Center.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Florida amendment requires 60% voter support to pass. And public opinion polls show that a majority of Florida voters favor the measure.Voters in South Dakota and North Dakota will also decide ballot initiatives proposing to legalize recreational marijuana in the November election.Trump’s marijuana-related Truth Social post on Saturday came amid polls which generally show that he is trailing the vice-president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in key battleground states which could decide the White House race between them. More

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      ‘This was a terrible idea’: the incident that broke Republicans’ DeSantis fever

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      In the end, it wasn’t culture war feuding over restricting LGBTQ+ rights, thwarting Black voters or vilifying immigrants that finally broke Republicans’ DeSantis fever in Florida.Nor was it his rightwing takeover of higher education, the banning of books from school libraries, his restriction of drag shows, or passive assent of neo-Nazis parading outside Disney World waving flags bearing the extremist governor’s name that caused them to finally stand up to him.It was, instead, a love of vulnerable Florida scrub jays; a passion to preserve threatened gopher tortoises; and above all a unanimous desire to speak up for nature in defiance of Ron DeSantis’s mind-boggling plan to pave over thousands of unspoiled acres at nine state parks and erect 350-room hotels, golf courses and pickleball courts.The outcry when DeSantis’s department of environmental protection (DEP) unveiled its absurdly named Great Outdoors Initiative last week was immediate, overwhelming and unprecedented. The Republican Florida senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott penned a joint letter slamming an “absolutely ridiculous” proposal to build a golf course at Jonathan Dickinson state park in Martin county. The Republican congressman Brian Mast, usually a reliable DeSantis ally, said it would happen “over my dead body”.Scores of Republican state congress members and senators, whose achievements during the more than five years since DeSantis was elected governor have been largely limited to rubber-stamping his hard-right agenda, lined up to denounce the projects. Many noted the plans had been drawn up in secret, with no-bid contracts destined for mysteriously pre-chosen developers outside the requirements of Florida law.Thousands of environmental advocates and activists swamped multiple state parks on Tuesday in a day of action to protest against not only the ravaging of broad swathes of wildlife habitat, but DeSantis’s lack of transparency and intention to limit public comment to only one hour at each state park during meetings that would be held simultaneously.By Wednesday, DeSantis’s initiative was in effect dead, as the governor, clearly chastened by the unexpected all-quarters challenge to his previously unquestioned authority, furiously back-pedaled at an awkward press conference in Winter Haven.“They’re going back to the drawing board,” he said of plans he conceded were “half-baked” and “not ready for prime time”.Desperately trying to pin blame elsewhere for a misadventure that was very demonstrably his own, he continued: “This is something that was leaked. It was not approved by me, I never saw that. It was intentionally leaked to a leftwing group to try and create a narrative.”His implausible comment denying accountability hung out to dry his own inner circle, notably his communications director, Bryan Griffin, who barely a week earlier was enthusing on X about an “exciting new initiative of the State of Florida … expanding visitor capacity, lodging, and recreation options in state parks”.The volte-face did not go unnoticed. On Thursday, a headline in the Tampa Bay Times questioned: “Is DeSantis losing his grip on Florida?”, the newspaper citing his disastrous run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination as one possible catalyst for the fast-growing revolt.“The DeSantis administration is very tightly controlled and micromanaged from the top down, so the thought that he wasn’t aware of this or didn’t support it, or that somehow the people in those agencies would have pushed a huge plan like that without the governor’s knowledge or support, it’s just ludicrous,” said Aubrey Jewett, political science professor at the University of Central Florida’s school of politics, security and international affairs.“People just don’t freelance and come up with these things on their own. This was a totally self-inflicted political wound, a political error by Governor DeSantis and his administration. There’s just no reason to pursue a policy where you pave over state parks to build golf courses and hotels, right? There’s no demand, nobody was asking for this, and they just decided they were going to do it anyway. It was politically tone deaf.”Jewett said the parks debacle hurt DeSantis on two fronts.“It shows how ill-conceived this plan was, that you not only have Democrats, progressives, environmentalists, objecting to these plans, you also have mainstream Republicans in the legislature and at federal level all saying that this was a terrible idea,” he said.“It also shows DeSantis has lost some of the grip he’s had on Florida politics for the last four years. It didn’t seem like anyone or anything could stand up to him, and nor did most Republicans want to. He hit home run after home run, right? He’d pick an issue, exploit it, push it, and Republican conservatives were like, ‘Yeah, let’s go get those liberals, let’s go get those woke people.’ He just seemed to be on a winning streak.“They also didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him because he showed time and again that if you crossed him, he would come after you, he’d be politically vindictive.“Well, now it’s totally changed. We have virtually every big-name Republican in the state coming out and saying this was a terrible idea. This incident really highlights perhaps how far DeSantis has fallen in terms of political control and impact on Florida.”DeSantis, meanwhile, denied he ever had such a grip. Pressed further on the state park humiliation at a Thursday press conference, the governor said anybody who thought he was dictating anything was “misunderstanding politics”.“I’ve never categorized [it] as me having a grip on anything,” he told reporters, according to Florida Politics, insisting he merely had “an ability to set an agenda and deliver the agenda” working with lawmakers.Delighted Florida Democrats, naturally, seized the moment. State party chair Nikki Fried retweeted the article and alluded to animosity during the Republican primary campaign between Donald Trump and the governor he repeatedly demeaned.“I don’t know who is having more fun: Trump watching DeSantis losing power, or DeSantis watching Trump losing this election,” she wrote.Jewett doubts DeSantis, who will be termed out of office in January 2027, can be quite so effective during his remaining months in the governor’s mansion – especially with the Republican-dominated Florida legislature rediscovering its spine.“Without a clear political path forward to something bigger, he really is just one more lame duck governor with two years to go. He can’t be re-elected, and it becomes a little more difficult to influence people because they know you’re going to be gone,” he said.“It’s entirely possible that the legislature may become a more coequal branch again and stand up for themselves. It’s still going to be dominated by Republican conservatives and DeSantis is still conservative, so on a lot of things they’ll be on the same page.“But right now, your normal allies on the Republican side are giving you just as much grief as anybody else, and it’s entirely self-inflicted. You step on a rake and boom, the handle comes up and hits you right on the nose.” More

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      Trump Says He’ll Vote Against Florida’s Abortion Rights Measure After Conservative Backlash

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      Former President Donald J. Trump said on Friday that he would vote against a ballot measure in Florida that would expand abortion access in the state, clarifying his stance after having suggested a day earlier that he might support the measure.“I’ll be voting no,” Mr. Trump told Fox News, even as he said he disagreed with his home state’s current ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.Passage of the ballot measure, called Amendment 4, would allow patients to seek an abortion up to about 24 weeks of pregnancy.In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Mr. Trump, who had long avoided taking a firm position on the measure, said he was “going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” His campaign promptly sought to clean up those remarks, saying in a statement that they were not indicative of how he would vote in November.His comments were also met with backlash from social conservatives and abortion opponents. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a leading anti-abortion group, said Mr. Trump would be undermining a long-held opposition to abortions after five months of pregnancy if he voted for the measure.“We strongly support Florida’s current heartbeat law,” Ms. Dannenfelser said in a statement, adding that she had also spoken privately with the former president. “For anyone who believes in drawing a different line, they still must vote against Amendment 4, unless they don’t want a line at all.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Orange Blossom Trail,’ by Joshua Lutz and George Saunders

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      In “Orange Blossom Trail,” the photographer Joshua Lutz and the author George Saunders pay tribute to the hard living across one stretch of American highway.With an austere frankness, the 62 photos by Joshua Lutz in ORANGE BLOSSOM TRAIL (Image Text Ithaca Press, $40) document the hard living, low-wage jobs and big-box landscapes along a single stretch of highway that runs 400 miles from Georgia to Miami, cutting right through Orlando, Fla.High shutter speeds hide road workers’ faces in shadow. Corporate storefronts and commercial vans appear without ceremony, as if snapped from a camera phone. Commuters wait for a bus, reduced and sad, while a sign for “Mighty Wings” floats mockingly above them.Though not without dignity — see Lutz’s portraits of fruit inspectors, as they glance up from a conveyor belt of tumbling oranges — his photos lack any social agenda. They find an unlikely manifesto in the three previously published texts by George Saunders, our Chekhov of suburban realism, threaded through the book.Joshua LutzJoshua LutzSaunders’s 2022 allegory of death and hope, “My House,” casts a certain entropy over Lutz’s close-ups of oranges — the region’s alleged cash crop — overtaken by rot and snails. In “Exhortation” (2013), a story told in the voice of an embarrassing middle manager trying to psych up his employees, Saunders expertly confuses the objects of our allegiances. In a sincerely Buddhist essay from 2007, he asks us to view misfortune “with clarity, rather than judging.” It’s almost a caption for Lutz’s images, as attuned to ironically pleasing harmonies of shades of orange — across workers’ safety vests, loan shark signs, a child’s slightly tragic coloring book — as they are to any drama of the working class. Mindfulness, often prescribed for happiness, can be brutal.Joshua LutzNot quite an illustrated Saunders, nor an annotated Lutz, this bizarre almost-collaboration confronts the demoralizing American grind with an attitude between sympathy and resignation. An attitude that’s rare in art because we seldom admit it to ourselves. More

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      ‘Guys go where their buddies are’: the young men recruiting each other to fight for abortion rights

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      View image in fullscreen“Oh, no, no, I think you’re trying to get in contact with my wife.”That’s what a man in Florida recently told an activist who knocked on his door to talk about abortion rights. But the man was wrong. The activist, who represented a group called Men4Choice, was there to talk to him, because the group is dedicated to getting more men who support abortion rights involved in the fight for them.“They have to get off the sidelines,” said Dewayne Martin, the youth organizing director for Men4Choice, who relayed the activist’s account to the Guardian. “They have to become the foot soldiers of this movement.”Two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to ban almost all abortions, most men in the United States support abortion rights. Within months of the decision, 65% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 said they supported abortion being legal in all or most cases. But Men4Choice calls these young men “passively pro-choice”.Young women still support abortion rights at higher rates than their male peers – and young men are just not as motivated to take a public stand on the issue. Just 43% of gen Z men say that abortion rights are a “critical issue”, compared with 68% of gen Z women, the political scientist Melissa Deckman found in her forthcoming book The Politics of Gen Z. This indifference has consequences: compared with women, men between the ages of 18 and 44 are less likely to say that abortion is motivating them to vote in the 2024 elections, according to polling from the firm PerryUndem. They are also less likely to say that the state of abortion rights will affect whom they vote for.Men4Choice’s goal is to get these young men to vote, canvass and otherwise act on their beliefs – instead of leaving the work to women.“When we think about our organizing strategy, it’s: help men see the harm,” said Oren Jacobson, a Men4Choice co-founder. “Help men understand how this issue is not just a woman’s issue. It’s not just about abortion. It’s about freedom, it’s about power, it’s about control. It is an issue that impacts all of us, our families, our loved ones.”View image in fullscreenIt affects young men’s futures, too. Compared with young men whose partners got pregnant and gave birth, young men whose partners had abortions are almost four times more likely to graduate college. Young men who have been involved in an abortion are also more likely to make more money than those whose partners gave birth. Overall, an estimated one in five men has impregnated somebody who has had an abortion.Democrats have made abortion rights one of their central issues in the 2024 elections, while Republicans – wary of how outrage over Roe’s downfall probably lost them a much heralded “red wave” in the 2022 midterms – have tried to downplay the issue and their own role in overturning Roe. However, as they’ve backed away, rightwing commentators and politicians have become far more adept at discussing masculinity than their leftwing counterparts, experts have told the Guardian. These rightwing public figures are not only willing to acknowledge that young men are struggling – with getting into college, with their finances, with their mental health – but also to portray these struggles as the result of women’s growing social and political power.This kind of talk – which is so popular it has essentially spawned a cottage industry – is believed to be a major reason why, despite their past support for liberal causes, so many young men are now pivoting towards conservatism (and potentially towards supporting Donald Trump).“It feels good. It’s telling men: ‘You’re the priority. You’re the superior being,’” said Davan’te Jennings, a Men4Choice fellow who lives in Georgia. “‘You act like this, this is when you get all the cars, the women, the mansion. Grind 24/7. Don’t think about mental health. Depression isn’t real.’”In Jennings’ view, such “toxic masculinity” is part of the reason why young men don’t feel like they can be openly passionate about abortion rights. He hears references to it all the time: when Jennings talks to men through Men4Choice, the men often use phrases like “to be a man” and “the manly thing to do”. Expressing emotions – including caring about abortion rights – doesn’t fit into that mold of masculinity.View image in fullscreenMen4Choice, then, aims to reframe how abortion fits into antiquated and restrictive notions of masculinity. “Masculinity is taking action,” Martin said. “Masculinity is caring for the people that you love. Masculinity is ensuring that you are building a pathway towards freedom for you and your people, and realizing that those two things are not separate.”Christian Shephard, a 26-year-old Men4Choice fellow who serves as an organizer for the group in central Florida, tries to open up conversations about abortion rights with men by discussing how some men treat women, including how they may objectify or sexualize women.“It may sound like that has nothing to do with reproductive justice, but it certainly does,” Shephard said. “There is a clear connection between how people talk about women and how these [anti-abortion] laws are being created to deprive them of fundamental rights.”In a recent Men4Choice “community conversation” – virtual and in-person discussions where fellows are expected to bring male friends – one man claimed he didn’t have to take any responsibility for abortion because “women should keep their legs closed”, Jennings recalled.“That was literally the words he used,” Jennings said. “Most of us who are pro-choice on the call are like: ‘Now we see why it’s important to dismantle that way of thinking.’”Jacobson launched Men4Choice in 2015, but the group has exploded in the years since Roe’s demise. The Men4Choice fellowship program, which runs three times a year and is training 70 men between the ages of 18 and 28 this summer, has almost tripled in size since the summer of 2022. Many Men4Choice fellows are based in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina – all states with abortion bans.Though he was raised in a Democratic area of Miami, Martin, 22, said he hadn’t acted on his support for abortion rights until 2020. He was a high school senior working on organizing around school boards when a friend told him about Men4Choice.“It was in that moment that I realized, despite my being raised by a community of women who have served as my village and have made my life possible in several ways, I’ve never taken a direct action to support them on this issue,” recalled Martin, who became a Men4Choice fellow that year.View image in fullscreenIn the months before Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president, Men4Choice partnered with Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband and the second gentleman of the United States, to host events centered on energizing men to fight for abortion rights. (“This is an issue of fairness to women. Women are dying,” Emhoff told NBC in May. “It’s affecting men’s ability to plan their lives.”) Now, the group is trying to mobilize male volunteers and funnel them towards partner organizations working on the ground.“Guys go where their buddies are,” Jacobson said. “You have to create an ecosystem of men to get them to show up.”Men4Choice is also heavily focusing on Florida, which has banned abortion past six weeks of pregnancy – before many people even know they’re pregnant – and where voters will decide in November whether to amend the state constitution to protect abortion rights.Abortion-rights ballot measures previously have succeeded in Republican strongholds, such as Ohio and Kentucky. Exit polls found that 73% of male voters between the ages of 18 and 29 voted in favor of the Ohio measure – a significant share of voters, but still less than the 81% of young female voters who supported it.The Florida amendment must garner 60% of the vote to pass. This fall, Men4Choice wants to reach 400,000 voters through phone and text banking, according to Martin. The group also wants to hold 100 community conversations with men.There is, however, a limit to the organization’s activism. Men4Choice focuses on men who already support abortion rights or are at least open to having a discussion about it – not men who are adamantly opposed to the procedure. “If there’s not an understanding or a clear line of wanting to understand,” Jennings said, “and we’re just going to sit here and get into a debate – it’s pointless.” More

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      Ex-senator and university president’s spending is under state scrutiny

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      Increased spending by the recently resigned University of Florida president Ben Sasse is coming under scrutiny after a student-run newspaper found that he awarded secretive consulting contracts and gave high-paying jobs to former members of his US Senate staff and Republican allies – actions that he defended on Friday.Both Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida’s chief financial officer are calling on the state university system’s governing board to investigate after the Independent Florida Alligator reported this week that as school president, Sasse gave six former staffers and two ex-Republican officials jobs with salaries that outstripped comparable positions. Most did not move to Gainesville – but work remotely from hundreds of miles away.Sasse, a former Nebraska senator, became the school’s president in February 2023.Overall, Sasse’s office spent $17.3m during his first year compared with the $5.6m spent by his predecessor Kent Fuchs in his final year. The university has an overall budget of $9bn.DeSantis’s office issued a statement saying that the governor “take[s] the stewardship of state funds very seriously and [has] already been in discussions with leadership at the university and with the [governing] board to look into the matter”.The chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, wrote on the social media platform X that the Alligator’s report “is concerning” and that the governing board “should investigate this issue to ensure tuition and tax dollars are being properly used”.Sasse resigned on 31 July, citing his wife’s recent diagnosis with epilepsy after years of other health issues. His hiring by the governing board to head Florida’s flagship university (UF) had been controversial as his only previous experience was five years as president of Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska, which has just over 1,600 students. UF has 60,000 students and 6,600 faculty members and is one of the nation’s top research universities.In a lengthy statement posted to X on Friday, Sasse defended the hirings and consulting contracts, saying they were needed as UF launches new satellite campuses and K-12 charter schools around the state, increases its work with artificial intelligence and looks to improve in the fields of medicine, science and technology.He said all the hirings were approved in the normal budget process, that some got raises to secure their services amid “competing opportunities and offers”, and he welcomes an audit.“I am confident that the expenditures under discussion were proper and appropriate,” he said.According to documents obtained by the Alligator, Sasse hired Raymond Sass, his former Senate chief of staff, to be the university’s vice-president for innovation and partnerships, a new position. His pay is $396,000, more than double the $181,677 he made in Sasse’s Senate office. Sass still lives in the Washington DC area. He did not immediately respond on Friday to a phone message and email seeking comment.James Wegmann, Sasse’s former Senate communications director, became UF’s vice-president of communications, earning $432,000 annually. His predecessor had earned $270,000. He still lives in Washington. He did not immediately respond on Friday to an email seeking comment.Taylor Silva, Sasse’s former Senate press secretary, was given the new position of assistant vice-president of presidential communications and public affairs. The job has an annual salary of $232,000. Silva did move to Gainesville. No contact information for Silva could be located. Silva is not listed in the university directory.Three of Sasse’s other former Senate staffers also got jobs with UF.Besides his former staffers, Sasse hired two others with strong Republican party ties.He hired the former Tennessee commissioner of education Penny Schwinn as UF’s inaugural vice-president of pre-kindergarten to grade 12 and pre-bachelor’s programs at a salary of $367,500. She still lives in Tennessee. She did not immediately respond to an email on Friday seeking comment.He also hired Alice James Burns, former scheduler for South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, as director of presidential relations and major events at a salary of $205,000. She also did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.Because most of these appointees still live outside Florida, travel expenses for Sasse’s office ballooned to $633,000, more than 20 times the amount spent annually under Fuchs.Sasse also hired McKinsey & Company, where he once worked as an adviser, to a $4.7m contract. The secretive firm is one of the country’s most prominent management consulting firms. The university has declined to say what its work includes. The firm did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.He also awarded about $2.5m in other consulting contracts, the Alligator reported. More

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      Can Kamala Harris win over disenchanted Latino voters?

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      The abrupt substitution of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden as the Democratic party’s presidential nominee has energized two of the party’s bedrock bases of support – pro-choice women and African Americans – along with millions of young voters who felt dismay at the Hobson’s choice posed by two old white guys in the presidential contest.But the country’s estimated 36 million eligible Latino voters could be another story.Their importance in presidential races has been steadily growing over the past 50 years, and Latinos are projected to represent nearly 15% of eligible voters nationwide by November.Historically, Latinos have ranked among the Democratic party’s most reliable sources of votes, in about the same league as Black and Jewish voters. But the party’s once commanding advantage has been shrinking. Hillary Clinton trounced Donald Trump among Latinos nationwide in 2016 by a factor of 81% to 16%, yet four years later the former president upped his share to one out of every four votes cast by Latinos.A slew of prominent Latino politicians and trade unionists have endorsed the vice-president since the president’s withdrawal from the race on 21 July. They include some progressive Democrats who had condemned the terse message Harris had for would-be Latin American immigrants to the United States during a 2021 press conference in Guatemala City: “Do not come.”But it remains unclear whether Latino voters overall will give Harris a big boost in her bid to defeat Trump. For starters, they are diverse in national origin as well as the circumstances and histories of their communities’ immigration.Most southern California Chicanos reflect their state’s liberal tendencies and have little in common ideologically with the majority of Miami’s right-leaning Cuban Americans. Phoenix-based pollster Mike Noble notes that Latino voters whose roots go back to Colombia, Venezuela and other South American countries have been gravitating towards the Republican party over the past four years.Latinos are not yet digging deep into their pockets to support Harris. Two Zoom fundraising calls with Black women and men held on consecutive nights right after Biden bowed out brought in a total of $2.8m. Similar Zoom calls with Latinas and Latinos for Kamala on 24 and 31 July, respectively, posted a combined net haul of $188,000.Axios Latino has been tracking US Latinos’ views of Harris in conjunction with Noticias Telemundo and the Ipsos market research and public opinion firm since the first year of the Biden administration. By the end of 2021, Axios Latino found that 48% of Latinos had a favorable opinion of Harris – but that figure had slumped to 39% by last March. A different survey of Latinos in 10 states found that sentiment persisted in Arizona and Nevada even days after Biden’s fateful debate performance in late June.But a more recent survey of 800 Latino voters living in seven swing states brought Harris and the Democrats some very welcome news. Carried out by the pollster Gary Segura on behalf of the Washington-based Somos Political Action Committee in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s bombshell announcement, the survey gave Harris an impressive 18-percentage-point lead over Trump and surprisingly high favorability ratings among Latino voters in Arizona and Nevada, which have the highest percentage of eligible Latino voters among those swing states.In a separate poll by Equis Research released Wednesday, Harris is still a few points short of Biden’s support from Latino voters in the 2020 election, but is still leading Trump by 19 points among registered Latino voters in the seven most competitive states.Harris and her newly selected running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, addressed rallies in Phoenix and Las Vegas late last week, and a new 30-second TV spot aimed at Latino voters has started airing in both English and Spanish.“Throughout her career, she’s always worked to earn the support of Latino voters and has made core issues like healthcare, childcare and fighting gun violence her focus,” said the campaign’s Hispanic media director, Maca Casado. “Vice-President Harris’s campaign knows Latinos’ political power, and we won’t take their votes for granted.”In Harris’s performance at the polls among Latinos in her native California, she garnered a majority of the Latino vote in both of her successful campaigns for the office of state attorney general, in 2010 and 2014.But Latinos are not expected to play a decisive role in the Golden state or any of the other three states where they are most numerous. Both California and New York are widely considered to be a lock for Democrats, and the same is true of Texas and Florida for Republicans.That leaves Arizona and Nevada, and the outlook for Democrats remains cloudy.CNN exit polling in November 2020 showed Biden beating Trump handily among Arizona Latino voters by a 27-percentage-point margin, thanks in part to folks like Matthew Sotelo. The 37-year-old leader of a non-profit community organization in Phoenix is a registered Democrat who thinks that Biden has done a “solid” job as president. But Sotelo senses a welcome change in the political climate since Harris became the party’s standard bearer.“The energy is different, and despite what the polls say about Harris being in a dead heat with Trump, the momentum is swinging to her side,” says the Arizona-born Mexican American.During Harris’s abortive run for the presidency in 2019, Sotelo did have some reservations about her track record as a prosecutor in San Francisco who sought prison terms for people arrested for possession of small amounts of controlled substances. But he sees her as an open-minded politician.“Do I think she has done a perfect job [on the border]? Absolutely not,” says Sotelo. “But I understand there has been an opportunity for Harris to grow as a leader, and she’ll continue to learn and grow.”One seasoned Latino pollster warns that Republicans have made major inroads in Arizona. “The Democrats have been losing ground there, and a lot of it has to do with the border,” says Eduardo Gamarra, a Florida International University professor of political science who oversaw last month’s poll of Latino voters in 10 states.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFelix Garcia concurs. Born in the Mexican state of Sonora and a resident of Phoenix since 2000, the 42-year-old business consultant has spent his entire life on either side of the US-Mexican border.“We have so many people from different countries on the border every day, and Kamala has never tried to fix the situation on the border,” says the registered Republican, who describes himself as a moderate in the mold of the late Arizona senator John McCain.Garcia’s issues with Harris do not end with immigration. “We have so many problems with the Biden administration – inflation, Ukraine, Russia, Israel – and she is part of this administration,” he says.During a campaign rally in Arizona last Friday, Harris drew attention to the years she served as California’s attorney general. “I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and human traffickers,” she declared. “I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.”Mike Noble, a former consultant and manager of Republican legislative campaigns in Arizona, found that many Latino voters in Arizona and Nevada are focused on pocketbook issues like inflation and housing affordability. Those anxieties are not likely to favor Harris.“She’s done a little better in places like the midwest and Pennsylvania, but in the sun belt, Harris is basically starting off in the same position as Biden was,” he says.The ascent of Harris has left David Navarro unmoved. The 27-year-old native of Las Vegas is a registered Democrat who supported Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids in 2016 and 2020 and voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election. But he says he is done with both major political parties and will vote for Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein in the fall.“I don’t support their views or any of their policies towards Israel and Gaza, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are doing anything to address the causes of inflation, which are corporations and their price increases,” says the systems engineer whose father immigrated from El Salvador. “They don’t value us as Americans, and I don’t want a presidential candidate who is run by the major donors who are billionaires and the corporations.”A scholar from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) cautions that many Latinos in that state, like millions of Americans across the country regardless of their race or ethnicity, do not know all that much about Harris at this juncture beyond her name and current job title.“People know Biden and Trump, but when it comes to Harris, she has a lot more opportunity to shape the narrative, introduce herself and recalibrate things,” says Rebecca Gill, UNLV associate professor of political science. “She has the potential to move her numbers more than Trump or Biden.”In a volatile election cycle already punctuated by an assassination attempt, a debate debacle of historic dimensions, and the nomination of the first Black female presidential candidate of a major political party, Latino voters could spring surprises of their own even in swing states with relatively small Latino populations.“The Hispanic vote is large enough in virtually every state in the US that it could make the difference between winning and losing, including Pennsylvania and Georgia,” notes Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic pollster who specializes in tracking voting trends in the Latino community.“It’s the very reason why so many people are hyper-focused on the Hispanic vote.” More

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      In a Corner of Florida, Preparing for Storm Debby Stirs Familiar Feelings

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      Many on the state’s northwestern coast felt they knew what to expect from Debby, which is forecast to make landfall as a hurricane, after a much stronger storm hit the area last year.As Tropical Storm Debby churned through the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday, Lucia Trapani was securing patio furniture and offering refunds to people who had booked stays at the motel she manages on an island off Florida’s northwestern coast.Ms. Trapani had been through this before. Less than a year ago, as Hurricane Idalia approached, she shut off the water and electricity at the Sunset Isle RV Resort, where she worked at the time, and moved campers off the property. The Category 3 storm did so much damage to the resort that it still has not reopened.Ms. Trapani and Brooke Matthews — another manager of the motel, Park Place in Cedar Key — described Idalia with one word, in unison: “traumatizing.”Almost a year after Idalia became the strongest storm to hit the sparsely populated Big Bend region, known for manatees and marshlands, residents are bracing for Debby, which is expected to make landfall as a Category 1 hurricane early Monday. Storm surge of up to 10 feet was expected in some areas, andmandatory evacuation orders have been issued for parts of Levy County, including Cedar Key, as well as Franklin and Citrus Counties. By midday Sunday, Debby was still a tropical storm, with winds of 65 miles per hour. But it was expected to strengthen rapidly over the gulf before making landfall as a hurricane, with winds of at least 74 m.p.h.At a news conference Sunday afternoon, Gov. Ron DeSantis said that Debby was following a path like Idalia’s last year, but with a key difference: lower winds and a lot more rain are expected. Other states in the Southeast could also see heavy rain in the coming days, including Georgia and the Carolinas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More