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      Candidates try to divine trends as nearly 70m Americans have cast early votes

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      Almost 70 million Americans have already voted in the historic US election which comes to a head on Tuesday, prompting furious arguments over what early voting trends might mean as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris prepare for their final showdown.As both candidates and their top surrogates crisscrossed the country in a furious bout of last-minute campaigning, the race remains in a virtual dead heat – both in the head-to-head national polls and in the crucial seven battleground states that will actually decide the race for the White House.But as Trump and Harris made their pitches for what must now be a vanishingly small number of still undecided voters, tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots in the election through the various processes in the US that allow early voting.With so much at stake in the election, that huge number has triggered intense speculation as to what it might that mean with both Republicans and Democrats attempting to glean information that shows their side might already have the edge as voting day nears.Harris’s campaign is latching on to some key information from the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. The giant state – which stretches from New Jersey in the east to Ohio in the west – is a part of the “rust belt” dominated by former manufacturing cities that is seen as probably the most crucial region in the election.Nearly all the most likely paths to victory for both candidates involve picking up rust belt states with Pennsylvania as the biggest prize.In that state, voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots and registered Democrats account for about 58% of votes cast by seniors, compared with 35% for Republicans. That is a big lead in a demographic that usually trends towards Trump.At the same time, women have a 10-point gap over men when it comes to the early vote in Pennsylvania, according to analysis by the Politico website, using data from the University of Florida’s United States Election Project. Another analysis, by NBC, showed an even larger gap in favor of women in the state of 13 points.Harris and her team are hoping for a large showing of women in the election as they have made the loss of reproductive rights central to their campaign after the supreme court overturned federal abortion rights. Women have trended strongly Democratic in the election, while men have leaned more Republican and thus any signs of a strong turnout by women is potentially good news for the vice-president.“The gender gap is a key reason for hope among Democrats and concern among Republicans, especially when many states have abortion rights amendments on their ballots in the 2024 election,” Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University, told Newsweek.But Republicans too are seeing signs of hope in the early voting trends – a sign that America’s divisive election is still proving impossible to predict even after almost two years of furious campaigning by both parties.In Arizona, a crucial swing state in the so-called “sun belt” on electoral battlegrounds, male voters have been turning out in increased numbers – a sign that Republican strategies of turning out men who have not voted before might be working. In Arizona last week, the number of new voters in Arizona was 86,000 – far more than the tiny margin by which Joe Biden beat Trump in the state in 2020 – and the biggest share of those new voters were male Republicans.Overall, Republicans have traditionally been outnumbered in early voting with more Democrats choosing to go to the polls. In part, that has been because Trump and some of his allies have assailed early voting with baseless claims of fraud and conspiracy, despite Republican professional campaigners exhorting their supporters to get to the polls before election day.In 2024, there are signs that Republicans are indeed heading to the polls early in large numbers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Georgia – another key sun belt battleground in the deep south – there are strong signs of a significant early Republican turnout. More than 700,000 people who voted already in 2024 did not vote at all in 2020, according to Georgia Votes, and that is seen as a sign that many of them might be Republicans as the campaign has focused on that demographic. At the same time, the top three counties for voter turnout rates in Georgia are rural areas won easily by Trump in 2020.“We’ve got a lot of voters that voted in 2016 but didn’t vote in 2020 … What makes me believe that they are Trump voters is that most of them are … from parts of the state that are pretty strong Republican strongholds,” Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, told Fox News.Of course, as voting patterns shift for both sides, it could also be that an advantage in early voting for either Democrats or Republicans is quickly overwhelmed on election day itself when tens of millions of voters go to the polls in person.In the end, the 2024 race remains entirely unpredictable. The Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker has shown little change over the past week, after a slight erosion in Harris support over October, Harris retains a one-point advantage in national polls of 48% to Trump’s 47%, virtually identical to last week and well with the margin of error of most polls.The battleground states, too, remain in a dead heat. The candidates are evenly tied at 48% in Pennsylvania while Harris has single-point leads in the two other rust belt states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Trump is marginally ahead in the sun belt, where he is up by 1% in North Carolina, 2% in Georgia and Arizona, and ahead in Nevada by less than a percentage point.But one wildcard for both campaigns is the Muslim vote, angered by US support for Israel in its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. A poll released on Friday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations showed that 42% of the country’s 2.5 million Muslim voters favor Green party nominee Jill Stein for president while 41% favor Harris. Trump registered 10% support.In theory, those margins of support for Stein, as in 2016, could swing some key swing states, such as Michigan, to Trump if the contest there is very close. More

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      Contested state supreme court seats are site of hidden battle for abortion access

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      Abortion will be on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and it’s one of the top issues in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But it is also key to less publicized but increasingly contested races for seats on state supreme courts, which often have the last word on whether a state will ban or protect access to the procedure.This year, voters in 33 states have the chance to decide who sits on their state supreme courts. Judges will be on the ballot in Arizona and Florida, where supreme courts have recently ruled to uphold abortion bans. They are also up for election in Montana, where the supreme court has backed abortion rights in the face of a deeply abortion-hostile state legislature.In addition, supreme court judges are on the ballot in Maryland, Nebraska and Nevada – all of which are holding votes on measures that could enshrine access to abortion in their state constitutions. Should those measures pass, state supreme courts will almost certainly determine how to interpret them.Indeed, anti-abortion groups are already gearing up for lawsuits.“We’re all going to end up in court, because they’re going to take vague language from these ballot initiatives to ask for specific things like funding for all abortions, abortion for minors without parental consent,” said Kristi Hamrick, chief media and policy strategist for the powerful anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, which is currently campaigning around state supreme court races in Arizona and Oklahoma. “Judges have become a very big, important step in how abortion law is actually realized.”In Michigan and Ohio, which voted in 2022 and 2023 respectively to amend their state constitution to include abortion rights, advocates are still fighting in court over whether those amendments can be used to strike down abortion restrictions. Come November, however, the ideological makeup of both courts may flip.Spending in state supreme court races has surged since Roe fell. In the 2021-2022 election cycle, candidates, interest groups and political parties spent more than $100m, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. After adjusting for inflation, that’s almost double the amount spent in any previous midterm cycle.View image in fullscreenIn 2023, a race for a single seat on the Wisconsin supreme court alone cost $51m – and hinged on abortion rights, as the liberal-leaning candidate talked up her support for the procedure. (As in many other – but not all – state supreme court races, the candidates in Wisconsin were technically non-partisan.) After that election, liberals assumed a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court. The court is now set to hear a case involving the state’s 19th-century abortion ban, which is not currently being enforced but is still on the books.It’s too early to tally up the money that has been dumped into these races this year, especially because much of it is usually spent in the final days of the election. But the spending is all but guaranteed to shatter records.In May, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and Planned Parenthood Votes announced that they were teaming up this cycle to devote $5m to ads, canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts in supreme court races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. Meanwhile, the ACLU and its Pac, the ACLU Voter Education Fund, has this year spent $5.4m on non-partisan advertising and door-knocking efforts in supreme court races in Michigan, Montana, North Carolina and Ohio. The scale of these investments was unprecedented for both Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, according to Douglas Keith, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Judiciary Program who tracks supreme court races.

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      “For a long time, judicial campaign ads often were just judges saying that they were fair and independent and had family values, and that was about it. Now, you’re seeing judges talk about abortion rights or voting rights or environmental rights in their campaign ads,” Keith said. By contrast, rightwing judicial candidates are largely avoiding talk of abortion, Keith said, as the issue has become ballot box poison for Republicans in the years since Roe fell. Still, the Judicial Fairness Initiative, the court-focused arm of the Republican State Leadership Committee, announced in August that it would make a “seven-figure investment” in judicial races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.Balancing the federal benchAbortion is far from the only issue over which state courts hold enormous sway. They also play a key role in redistricting, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and more. And with the US Congress so gridlocked, state-level legislation and its legality has only grown in importance.For years, conservative operatives have focused on remaking the federal judiciary in their ideological image – an effort that culminated in Donald Trump’s appointments of three US supreme court justices and has made federal courts generally more hostile to progressive causes. Now, the ACLU hopes to make state supreme courts into what Deirdre Schifeling, its chief political and advocacy officer, calls a “counterbalance” to this federal bench.“We have a plan through 2030 to work to build a more representative court,” said Schifeling, who has a spreadsheet of the supreme court races that will take place across eight states for years to come. (As a non-partisan organization, the ACLU focuses on voter education and candidates’ “civil rights and civil liberties” records.) This cycle, the organization’s messaging has centered on abortion.“Nationally, you’re seeing polling that shows the top thing that voters are voting on is the economy. But these judges don’t really influence the economy,” Schifeling said. “Of the issues that they can actually influence and have power over, reproductive rights is by far the most important to voters.”Abortion rights supporters are testing out this strategy even in some of the United States’ most anti-abortion states. In Texas, where ProPublica this week reported two women died after being denied emergency care due to the state’s abortion ban, former US air force undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones has launched the Find Out Pac, which aims to unseat three state supreme court justices.Justices Jane Bland, Jimmy Blacklock and John Devine, the Pac has declared, “fucked around with our reproductive freedom” in cases upholding Texas’s abortion restrictions. Now, Jones wants them out.“Why would we not try to hold some folks accountable?” Jones said. “This is the most direct way in which Texas voters can have their voices heard on this issue.” (There is no way for citizens to initiate a ballot measure in Texas.) The Pac has been running digital ads statewide on how the Texas ban has imperiled access to medically necessary care.However, since state supreme court races have long languished in relative obscurity, voters don’t always know much about them and may very well default to voting on party lines in the seven states where the ballots list the affiliations of nominees for the bench. Although the majority of Texans believe abortions should be legal in all or some cases, nearly half of Texans don’t recall seeing or hearing anything about their supreme court in the last year, according to Find Out Pac’s own polling.“This conversation that we’re having in Texas, around the importance of judicial races, is new for us as Democrats,” Jones said. “It’s not for the Republicans.” More

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      in Elections

      Play: Election-Night Bingo

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      Listen up for these terms as the votes roll in. Find them on the board to be the night’s big winner.This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.After months and months and months of hearing about it, the election is finally here! Every four years, millions of Americans cast their ballots for president. Then, they wait and watch for the results on election night. It’s exciting! But also kind of … a lot.The news is a jumble of numbers, some very intense maps and a bunch of politics wonks talking a mile a minute about “exit polls” and “returns.” Not the most kid-friendly introduction to participatory democracy. But like most things, the more kids understand what’s going on, the more interesting it can be.That’s where this game comes in. Think of it as a mash-up of bingo and a language scavenger hunt. LINGO!InstructionsPrint out the bingo board and the definitions of the terms on it. Skim the terms to familiarize yourself.Set a timer for 30 minutes and settle in for an evening of election excitement.Anytime you read or hear one of phrases from the board, check it off. Check your printout (or scroll below) to read the explanation, too!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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      Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro barred from practicing law in New York

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      Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney for Donald Trump, has been suspended from practicing law in New York and could be disbarred just days after pleading guilty in what prosecutors claim was an effort to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.Chesebro was charged in 2023, alongside Donald Trump and 17 others, with violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering law relating to alleged efforts by the defendants to “knowingly and willfully” join a conspiracy to change the outcome of the 2020 election in the state.In the decision this week to suspend Chesebro’s law license, a panel in New York concluded that he had been “convicted of a serious crime”. The order reads: “Having concluded that respondent has been convicted of a serious crime, we accordingly suspend respondent from the practice of law in New York on an interim basis.”It defers to a court determination of whether a judgment of conviction has become “final” in Chesebro’s Georgia criminal proceeding.Chesebro pleaded guilty to a single felony charge in October 2023: conspiracy to commit filing false documents. He was sentenced to five years’ probation and 100 hours of community service, and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution, write an apology letter to Georgia’s residents and testify truthfully at any related future trial.Fellow attorney Sidney Powell separately pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy and will serve six years of probation, pay a fine of $6,000, and write an apology letter to Georgia and its residents.Last week, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, who is also a defendant in the Georgia election interference case, was ordered by a judge in a separate defamation case to turn over his Manhattan apartment, a Mercedes and a variety of other personal possessions to two Georgia election workers who won a $148m judgment against him.Giuliani was previously disbarred in July 2024. More

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      Five days out, Arab Americans are split on Harris v Trump: vote ‘strategically’ or ‘morally’?

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      It’s a Saturday afternoon at Al Madina Halal market and restaurant in Norcross, Georgia, and the line is four people deep for shawarma sandwiches or leg of lamb with saffron rice and two sides.A television on the wall by a group of tables has Al Jazeera correspondents reporting from several countries on a split screen about Israel’s attack on Iranian military targets the day before.Mohammad Hejja is drinking yogurt, surveying the bustle in the store he bought in 2012. There are shoppers and employees from Sudan, Ethiopia, Iran, Pakistan, Morocco and other countries – a clear sign of what makes surrounding Gwinnett county, with nearly a million residents, the most diverse in the south-east.Hejja has Jordanian and US citizenship, but his family is Palestinian. Soldiers of the nascent nation of Israel drove his grandparents out of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba – the Palestinian catastrophe caused by Israel’s creation.Asked about how he expects his community to vote when Americans head to the polls next week, he says: “Everybody is confused about this election.” His No 1 concern is to “stop the war”, referring to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza and recent attacks on Lebanon.The issue is top of mind for Arab American voters nationwide. Some polls suggest Arab Americans could abandon the Democrats in droves over the Biden administration’s support for Israel; elsewhere, advocates and community leaders are urgently organizing to prevent a Donald Trump victory, warning about impacts in the Middle East and on domestic issues such as immigration if the GOP candidate is re-elected.Less than a week from 5 November, one thing is certain: “You cannot assess Arabs as a coherent voting bloc,” says Kareem Rifai, a Syrian-American graduate student at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Rifai, who co-founded the University of Michigan Students for Biden chapter in 2020, calls himself a “foreign policy voter”, and is sticking with the Democratic candidate this cycle due to the party’s “strong stance on Russia”.Rifai weighed in on the Arab American vote on X recently, saying he was “pulling out my Arab Muslim from Metro-Detroit card” to let non-Arabs know that people hailing from across the Arab world have differing takes on the upcoming election.“Pro-Hezbollah socially conservative Arab community leaders … are not representative of Arab Americans in the same way that secular liberal Arabs or Christian anti-Hezbollah Arabs, etc, etc, are not representative of all Arab Americans,” Rifai wrote.At the same time, before this year, Arab Americans were clearer in their preference for Democrats – at this time in 2020, Joe Biden led Trump by 24 points, and exit polls showed that more than 85% of Arab American voters backed Democrats in 2004 and 2008.Today, Arab American voters seem more willing to look past Trump’s ban on travel from certain Muslim-majority countries – and his vow to reimpose a ban if re-elected – as well as his staunch support for Israel.Michigan, Rifai’s home state, is home to an estimated 392,000-plus Arab Americans – one of 12 states in which 75% of the nation’s estimated 3.7 million Arab Americans live.But as if to underscore its swing state status, dueling endorsements of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have come from Michigan in the last week alone. Over the weekend, a Yemeni-American organization upheld Trump as capable of “restoring stability in the Middle East”. The following day, a group assembled at the American Arab Chamber of Commerce in Dearborn, Michigan, to back Harris, calling her “the first to call for a ceasefire and also to call for Palestinian self-determination”. (The statement also noted that “Arab Americans are not a single-issue people, we care about the environment, an existential issue for families and children, workers, rights and a fair wage, civil rights, women’s rights and so much more.”)Also in the last week, dozens of “Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Progressive” leaders in Arizona issued a statement backing Harris, underlining that support for an arms embargo on Israel and a ceasefire in Gaza has mainly come from Democrats. “In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement,” the statement says.Arizona is home to an estimated 77,000 Arab Americans, according to the Arab American Institute.Meanwhile, back in swing state Georgia – with its estimated 58,000 Arab Americans – the staterepresentative Ruwa Romman spoke about her choice to vote for Kamala Harris.Romman is the first Muslim woman elected to the Georgia statehouse and the first Palestinian to hold public office in the state’s history. Speaking with fellow Muslims and Arabs about this election “feels like talking about politics at a funeral”, she wrote in a recent article for Rolling Stone.She believes that organizing for a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo would be easier under a Harris administration. “I don’t know how advocating for Palestine would survive under Trump,” she said, adding that many of her constituents – including immigrants – would suffer if he were re-elected.Over at Al Madina, owner Hejja was arriving at a different conclusion. His wife has aunts in Gaza; she had not been able to reach them in three weeks. “The minimum thing we can do is pray five times a day,” he said.As for the election, he said: “If the president of the United States wants to stop the war, he can – with one phone call to Israel. He has the power.” Hejja believes “if Trump wins, Netanyahu will stop the war … [Trump] said he wants peace, and I believe him.”About 12 miles south-west, at Emory University – site of some of the harshest police responses to pro-Palestinian protests early this year – the Syrian-American senior Ibrahim had already sent an absentee ballot to his home state of Kentucky, marked for the Green party’s Jill Stein. “I see it as an ethical decision,” he said of his first time voting for president.“Voting for an administration that is supporting genocide crosses an ethical red line,” he added, referring to Harris.Fellow student Michael Krayyem, whose father is Palestinian, said he would “probably be voting down-ballot” on 5 November, but not for president. “I can’t support Kamala Harris because of what her administration has done to my people,” he said.Romman says she feels this dilemma facing fellow Arab Americans deeply. At the same time, she says: “Ultimately, in this election, I view voting as a strategic choice, and no longer a moral one.” More

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      ‘This is too serious to drown out’: six US voters on what they’re most anxious about

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      Hundreds of US voters from across the country shared with the Guardian how they are coping with the stress of the looming election, and which issues and possible outcomes make them the most anxious or concerned.Here are six of them.‘I worry about a further erosion of women’s rights’As a gynecologist in Georgia, I worry about a further erosion of women’s rights. Pregnancy is already dangerous here. Once Roe was overturned, the six-week ban went into effect and we quickly saw we couldn’t provide medically appropriate care to our patients.It also created a lot of fear and confusion amongst healthcare providers who didn’t want to put their license or livelihood on the line. The confusion was the purpose of the law, causing delays in care and “preventing” abortion. Unfortunately all it did was mean that patients had to be very sick before a doctor would intervene. We are seeing women bear the consequences – getting very sick, unable to get pregnant again, losing babies, and in some cases, dying.As a queer family with children, our marriage, rights, privacy and ability to make healthcare decisions [may] be impacted. We can’t watch TV as is, with all the hateful anti-trans ads. It’s hard to sleep. B, an obstetrician gynecologist, from Georgia‘We need a strong leadership to handle international problems, whoever wins the election’I’m worried that other countries don’t realize what motivates Americans to vote for Trump. I don’t think he’s the best president we’ve ever had, he’s kind of like a New York playboy. But I think he had a good successful term, despite being an amateur politician, rather than a career one.The continuous character assassination of him when he first ran was a slick orchestration. Every newspaper was immediately against him, it was like somebody had pressed a button, like a set-up or something. This motivated me to vote for him, to oppose the organised media and political establishment.People in Europe seem to think we’re simple-minded for voting for him, but we’re not. We all just felt – ‘Let’s try him for a while.’ We’re all so tired of liberals from California running the country. They created a machine of sorts, and Trump startled that machine.I hope Trump gets his second term now, and I’m very much impressed by his running mate. But I’m concerned about the ability of both Trump and Harris to handle the many international problems we have now, such as threats from Russia. The dollar is losing security. In the Middle East, anything could happen. It’s important that we have a good leadership who can sort this all out, whoever wins. Rob, a retired computer programmer, from Maine‘American democracy will survive another excruciating Trump term’Calling the re-election of Trump the end of democracy is dramatic. Calling his return to power the end of democracy as we know it, is apt.I believe America’s democracy, flawed and vulnerable as it may be, is resilient enough to withstand another Trump term. I think it’s politically expedient to proclaim that a second Trump term would drive us directly into purely despotic rule.The day-to-day of watching [Trump] run the country that I love would be excruciating, again, but I think what really is nightmare fuel is [the prospect of a] Vance presidency, which feels likely and could [entail] a dismantling of nearly all social goods left in the US.Under either man, US support for beleaguered or aspiring democracies could crater; alliances with Nato and other democratically aligned organizations could be severed or allowed to atrophy. But perhaps most dishearteningly, the election of a Maga Republican would signal that the leader of the free world would now be supplanted by a leader of the strongman world.What makes it worse is the countervailing hope of a Democratic term or two, where the country would finally have room to heal. They actually give me hope, and I would grieve the loss of hope.I’m not drinking at the moment, on purpose. Quit weed, too. I feel this is too serious to drown it out. Nile Curtis, 48, a massage therapist, from Hawaii‘America is now unable to discuss different viewpoints’Our greatest concern about the election, aside from the outcome, is the potential eruption of violence. The inflammatory rhetoric, the noxious stereotypes and the intractable position of Trump’s supporters who might or might not like him, but will vote for him anyway, is proof that the US is currently incapable of conducting any sort of discourse. Regardless of who wins, the threat of impending doom feels very real.We are older parents of a disabled adult. While the economy is a pressing issue for everyone, social security seems to be in danger. As people who are closer in age to retirement, and caring for a disabled adult, we are unsure of the impact either candidate would have on our “bigger picture”, but we feel that Mr Trump’s rhetoric brings an added layer of threatening behavior from people on both sides, who have become increasingly defensive and unwilling to accept and discuss different viewpoints.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHow do we manage our anxieties around these issues? We keep to ourselves. We do not engage in political or ideological discussions with anyone and limit our time watching and reading the news. The constant barrage of reporting, which has become pseudo-journalistic in pursuit of increasing [audience] numbers, appears to be geared to stoke the anxiety. The 24/7 news cycle has injected a stream of fear into everyone. MG, a mother and grandmother, from North Carolina‘I’m tired of having to vote against a candidate instead of voting for one’I want to vote for a president who supports the causes that I’m most concerned with: climate change, healthcare, cost of living, availability of housing. I will vote for Harris, but more as a vote against Trump.I think the Democratic party has shown that they’re willing to invest in renewable energy, which is fantastic. But I’m concerned with the promotion of record oil and gas numbers by the Democratic campaign this election cycle. That being said, I think the Republican party would be significantly worse.I believe that not enough housing is being constructed, period, and what is being built is only for those who can afford it. There’s a lot of short-term Airbnb-type rentals in Portland that further reduce the housing stock, and I’m concerned about ever being able to afford a house.I think for gen Z the biggest issues aren’t being reflected by either campaign. The rapid spread of disinformation on divisive, extremist social media [is another one].I have close friends and family who are queer and am increasingly concerned with the way anti-LGBT rhetoric has, I feel, exploded back into popularity. I’m frustrated that the Harris campaign has made an effort to expand rightwards and not leftwards. This will be my second presidential election and I’m tired of having to vote against a candidate instead of voting for one. Nate, 24, Ocean engineer, Portland, Maine‘I no longer trust Trump after January 6’My voting record is quite mixed. I voted for Bush twice, then McCain in 2008, Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020 and I plan to vote for Harris in 2024. I disagree with much of the Harris-Walz platform on police reform, abortion and immigration. But after January 6, I no longer trust Trump or anyone allegiant to him in the White House.It feels like an election between poor policy choices or an overpowered executive branch that will stop at nothing to retain control. I will not vote for anyone who called the 2020 election “stolen”. So many of my neighbors and people who go to my church still believe Trump’s lies about the election.Trump is a divisive character in our family’s discussions and we’ve lost relationships with kin because of our not supporting him. We also expect violence, perhaps even at the polling places, regardless of who wins.[Part of our anxiety management strategy] is preparation: we have a few days’ food, water and household needs on-hand, and we’ll have a full tank of gas if we need to leave town. Some is avoidance. We live in a very Trump-heavy area, lots of Trump yard signs. I realized the other day that I’ve drunk every day for the last three weeks. I’ve made a point of walking every day and doing some kind of exercise. But really nothing can fully prepare us. An anonymous male IT worker in his 40s, from Missouri More

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      in Elections

      Michelle Obama, Rallying Young Voters Near Atlanta, Warns of ‘Apathy’

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      Michelle Obama, the former first lady and among the Democrats’ most popular surrogates, offered a bracing tutorial in the realities of political power on Tuesday night, beseeching thousands of people near Atlanta to vote and to “stop the spiral of disillusionment and apathy.”“It’s natural to wonder if anyone hears you, if anyone sees you,” Mrs. Obama told her audience, many of them students from Atlanta’s historically Black colleges and universities, at an arena just south of downtown. “It is healthy to push your leaders to be better, even to question the whole system.”But, she added, “It’s our job to show folks that two things can be true at once: that it is possible to be outraged by the slow pace of progress and be committed to your own pursuit of that progress.”Mrs. Obama’s pleas and warnings came as Georgia entered the final days of its early voting period, a stretch in which one participation record after another has fallen. Already, more than 3 million people in the state have cast ballots, according to the secretary of state’s office.With the state among the most contested this election year — Joseph R. Biden Jr. beat Donald J. Trump in Georgia by less than 12,000 votes in 2020 — Georgia voters have faced an onslaught of pressure to pick one side or another.Mrs. Obama, addressing a rally that was formally nonpartisan and unaligned with any campaign, made a different ask: Vote.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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      in US Politics

      ‘I’ve lost friends’: in bitterly divided Georgia, can Democrats score another win?

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      Mary Holewinski lives in Carrollton, Georgia, home turf for the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. But Holewinski is a Kamala Harris supporter and has a sign in her yard. It draws some nasty looks, she said. “I’ve lost neighbor friends.”It helps that Carrollton is a college town, and discussing politics is possible – to an extent. “I feel like the people I live around, you can sit down and have a conversation with them, and they are willing to listen … but not everybody. There are some people who don’t want to hear your side of it.”These tensions are ratcheting up, because for voters in Georgia, it can feel like the entire US election is on the line. The state went for Biden in 2020 by 11,779 votes, out of 5m ballots cast – the first time since 1992 that the state turned blue. Its 16 electoral college votes were a bulwark – psychological as well as practical – for Democrats, illustrating the nation’s rejection of Donald Trump, however slim.Georgia has personal significance for Trump, and his war on the 2020 election results. The former president still faces charges in an election interference case in Atlanta’s Fulton county, after he made what he described as a “perfect phone call” to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find” another 11,800 votes. A Georgia win would represent belated validation for the former president.Now the question is which Georgia will turn out in greater force this year: the Democratic-leaning Georgia represented by the burgeoning Atlanta suburbs, or the Georgia where conservatism holds sway in its smaller towns and rural regions. Polling suggests that Trump has a lead of one to two points, well within the margin of error.The election is already under way. About 7 million Georgians are registered to vote and about 3 million voters – more than 40% of the electorate – have already gone to the polls, setting early voting records each day.Both Harris and Trump may as well have leased apartments in Buckhead, an upscale part of Atlanta, for all the time they are spending in Georgia in the last-minute election push. Earlier this month, Trump rallied at a sports arena in the northern Atlanta suburb of Duluth, in the middle of one of the most diverse areas of the state. Harris appeared on Thursday with Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen.View image in fullscreenSuburban moderates in the Atlanta region turned on Trump in 2020, and he appears to have done little in the years since to win their favor. Much has been made of Republican hopes of targeting Black men – about 1 million of Georgia’s 7 million registered voters – as a potential swing bloc for votes. The difference between a Democrat winning 80% and 90% of their votes will probably be larger than the overall margin of victory.But Georgia is no longer a state defined by Black and white voters. Asian and Latino population growth has changed the political landscape in suburban Atlanta, which helped drive the Biden victory there in 2020. Turnout in that voting demographic has been a challenge for both parties.The politics of Georgia are a delicate dance of cooperation between Atlanta, which tends Democratic, and the rest of the state. More than half the state’s population lives in the metro area of Atlanta. Music by Atlanta’s hip-hop artists has long dominated the charts. Marvel films its movies on Atlanta’s streets. Dozens of Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in the Atlanta area, from Home Depot, UPS and Southern Company to mainstays Coca-Cola and Delta.

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      Outside Atlanta, Savannah and pockets of Black voters in south Georgia’s historic Black belt, Georgia is solidly conservative. The Republican governor, Brian Kemp, remains the most popular political figure in the state. Moderate liberals approve of how he handled Trump’s election interference claims. Even Maga Republicans grudgingly acknowledge that his resistance to pandemic closures and libertarian gun position matched their interests.Rural, conservative Georgia is more likely to be religiously fundamentalist, less diverse and occasionally reactionary. Georgia has a six-week abortion ban because even the business wing of the Republican party in Georgia, which is solidly in charge of the state’s government, crosses evangelicals on that issue at its peril.The party’s challenges are exemplified by Rabun county, in Georgia’s picturesque, tourist-friendly mountains on the border of North Carolina. Here, and elsewhere, it is attempting to heal the standing conflict between conventional conservative Republicans and the Maga insurgency on the right.Rabun county Republicans have hosted a range of events, from a traditional low-country boil to a firearm raffle and screenings of a Reagan biography at the last remaining drive-in, said Ed Henderson, secretary of the Rabun county Republican party. Local Republicans have established a detente between the Maga wing and traditional conservatives, he said.“We’re not imposing purity tests on candidates,” Henderson said. They also don’t view Democrats as an existential threat. “They’re not demons with horns on their head, or Satan worshippers. They’re the opposition.”People from traditionally Democratic areas began moving into Rabun county during the pandemic, attracted by its lower cost of living and extraordinary natural beauty. The area historically favors Republicans by about four to one.But in a close race, chipping away at that margin may make the difference, said Don Martin, chair of the Rabun county Democrats. “If we can get Republicans down to 70% here, we will win the state.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBoth parties now see early voting as key. Trump has reversed his skepticism of early voting and absentee ballots, a posture that may have made the difference between winning and losing in 2020. His repeated refrain on the road in Atlanta is for turnout to be “too big to rig”, falsely suggesting that Democrats stole the 2020 election and intend to steal this one.View image in fullscreenHistorically in Georgia, Democrats have been more likely to vote early than Republicans. But Trump has pointedly instructed his supporters to vote early in person in Georgia, and many appear to be doing just that. So far this year, there’s little difference in turnout between metro Atlanta counties with large Democratic voting majorities and Republican-heavy rural counties.Ralph Reed, director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a venerable figure on the Christian political right, made a point of telling conservative voters to vote early at a recent faith town hall in Zebulon, about 90 minutes south of Atlanta.“We cannot and must not wait until election day to vote,” he said. “If you let them dominate the early vote for two or three weeks and run up a million- or a million-and-a-half-vote margin, then we are like a football team trying to score three touchdowns in the fourth quarter … If you want the texts and calls to stop, you need to vote, and you need to vote early.”And early concerns about Hurricane Helene disrupting the election appear to be unfounded so far. Turnout in areas affected by the devastating September storm is only slightly below that of the rest of the state.Gwendolyn Jordan lives in Grovestown, two and a half hours east of Atlanta and in the damage zone of Hurricane Helene. Two weeks ago, as early voting started, some residents were still without power, she said.Yet early turnout in her county is very slightly above the state average. Though Columbia county went almost two to one for Trump in 2020, Jordan is a Harris supporter. The role of the federal government and the competence of a presidential administration is no abstraction in the wake of a hurricane, she said.“I believe there’s going to be a big difference, because Kamala Harris is more for the people under the $400,000 income range, the people that really need the help,” Jordan said. “You know that’s who is struggling right now. We just had a hurricane that did a lot of damage to people.”In 2020, it took two weeks for Biden’s victory in Georgia to be confirmed. This year there was the prospect of other delays, after an effort by the Trump-aligned state board of elections to allow local elections officers the right to withhold certifications, to conduct open-ended investigations into poll irregularities and to mandate hand-counts of ballots on election night.But two superior court judges ruled the changes unconstitutional and the state’s superior court let the rulings stand pending appeal, which will not be heard until after the election.Georgia’s wounds from the fight over the election results in 2020 haven’t completely healed. And people are preparing themselves for a fresh round after voting concludes in November.“I could care less about whether you like [Trump] or not. It’s not a popularity contest,” said Justin Thompson, a retired air force engineer from Macon. “It’s what you got done. And he did get things done before the pandemic hit. And the only reason why he didn’t get re-elected was because the pandemic hit.” More