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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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      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

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      These seven states will decide the election. Here’s what we learned reporting on the ground

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      Spare a thought for beleaguered Pennsylvanians. During the past few weeks, they have been pummeled with $280m worth of election ads blazing on their TV and computer screens, part of an eye-popping $2.1bn spent so far on the US presidential election.Pennsylvania is one of the seven battleground states that, when it comes to choosing presidents, can seem as revered as the seven wonders of the world. Forget Democratic California, ditch reliably Republican Texas – it is these seven states that, come 5 November, will decide the outcome of one of the most consequential elections in modern times.Their names are seared into the minds of politically aware Americans: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Under America’s arcane electoral system, the occupant of the Oval Office is elected not through the popular vote but by electoral college votes harvested state by state.Among them, the seven states control 93 electoral college votes (Pennsylvania has the largest number, 19, which is why its residents are so bombarded). In the final days, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and their running mates, JD Vance and Tim Walz, will be scrambling all over them in a bid to reach the magic number: 270 electoral college votes to win.The states are called battlegrounds for a reason – their loyalty cannot be taken for granted by either side. This year, though, their unpredictability has reached dizzying heights. The Guardian’s presidential poll tracker shows five of them essentially tied within a three-point margin of error, with only Arizona (where Trump is up four points) and Wisconsin (where Harris is up five) pulling away. Nate Cohn, the New York Times’ polling expert, has drily noted that the presidential polls are “starting to run out of room to get any closer”.Guardian reporters are on the ground in each of the seven battlegrounds to test these confounding waters.– Ed PilkingtonArizona‘Why isn’t Trump doing a little better here?’View image in fullscreenOn a stiflingly hot afternoon last month, Lynn and Roger Seeley relaxed into an air-conditioned co-working space in a suburb east of Phoenix. They had come to hear the Democratic candidate for US Senate, Ruben Gallego, make his pitch to a roomful of small-business owners. Lifelong Republicans, they might have felt out of place at a Democratic campaign event in the pre-Trump era. But not now.“The Arizona Republican party is not the same Republican party,” said Lynn Seeley, who plans to vote for Kamala Harris in November. “It just doesn’t represent me anymore.”The Seeleys are among a group of disaffected Arizonans known as “McCain Republicans” – moderates and independents who prefer the “maverick” brand of politics of the late Arizona Senator John McCain to Trump’s Maga movement.The Trumpification of the state GOP, as well as rapid population growth, a large number of young Latino voters and a suburban shift away from the Republican party have created an opening for Democrats in recent election cycles, turning once ruby-red Arizona into a desert battleground.View image in fullscreenPolling shows Donald Trump with a narrow edge over Harris in the presidential race. The Senate race, which is critical to the party’s slim hope of maintaining control of the chamber, appears to trend in Gallego’s favor. The state also features two of the most competitive House races in the country, both key to winning the speaker’s gavel. Arizonans are also voting on an initiative to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution.Across the sprawling Phoenix region, one of the fastest-growing in America, Trump and Harris signs dot xeriscaped yards. But roughly a third of Arizonans are unaffiliated, and since Trump’s election in 2016 they have broken for Democrats in key statewide races.In 2020, Trump lost the state by fewer than 11,000 votes, the narrowest of any margin. It was the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had won Arizona since Bill Clinton in 1996, and before then, it was Harry Truman in 1948.“Arizona is not a blue state,” said Samara Klar, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona. “Arizona has had very high inflation rates, very high increases in the cost of living, and an increase in the cost of gas. It’s a border state during a border crisis. A Republican candidate should be cleaning up in Arizona. So the question is: why isn’t Trump doing a little better here?”Lauren Gambino | Chandler, ArizonaGeorgiaEarly voting hits records – but offers few cluesView image in fullscreenMary Holewinski lives in Carrollton, Georgia, which is home turf for the far-right representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. But Holewinski is a Kamala Harris supporter and has a sign in her yard. It draws nasty looks, she said: “I’ve lost neighbor friends.”Those tensions are ratcheting up, because the presidential election is already well under way in Georgia. More than 2 million Georgians – a quarter of its electorate – have already gone to the polls, setting early voting records each day.Both Harris and Trump consider Georgia – no longer a stereotypical “deep south” state but one propelled by the economic and cultural clout of Atlanta – a crucial pickup. In 2020, the state went for Joe Biden by 11,780 votes– and Trump has since been charged in an election interference case after calling Georgia’s secretary of state and asking him to “find” those 11,780 votes. A Georgia victory would represent belated validation for the former president.The candidates may as well have leased apartments in Atlanta, for all the time they’re spending here. The difference between a Democrat winning 80% and 90% of their votes could 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 here in 2020. And the conflict between conventional conservative Republicans and the Maga insurgency may also be determinative: suburban moderates in the Atlanta region turned against Trump in 2020, and he has done little since to win them back.Still, while historically Democrats in Georgia have been more likely to vote early than Republicans, Trump has pointedly instructed his supporters to vote early in person in Georgia, and many appear to be doing just that.“I could care less about whether you like him 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.”George Chidi | Atlanta, GeorgiaMichiganTurnout is key in state where many are angry over GazaView image in fullscreenThe trade union official had much to say, but he wasn’t going to say it in public.The leader of a union branch at a Michigan factory, he was embarrassed to admit that most of its members support Donald Trump – even though he’s also disparaging about what he saw as the Democratic party elite’s failure to put the interests of working people ahead of powerful corporations.“I don’t want to disagree with the members in public because they have their reasons to do what they think is good for protecting their jobs,” he said. “I’ve tried to explain that they’re wrong but they don’t want to hear it.”Like many in Michigan, he found himself torn: despairing of Trump yet not greatly enthused by Harris. A Rust belt state that once prospered from making cars, steel and other industrial products, Michigan lost many jobs to Mexico after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) by Bill Clinton, an enduring source of resentment against the Democrats for some voters that helped Trump to power.That goes some way to explain why opinion polls continue to have the two candidates neck-and-neck in Michigan, even though the Harris campaign is heavily outspending Trump here and appears to have a better ground game with more volunteers.Turnout will be key: Trump won here by just 10,704 votes in 2016, then lost narrowly to Biden four years later. High on the list of demographic targets are Black voters in Michigan’s largest city, Detroit, whose low turnout in 2016 was a factor in Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the state. Harris is also targeting white suburban women, many of whom previously supported Trump but have cooled on him over abortion rights, his continued false claims of election fraud and his criminal convictions.For all of that, the election in Michigan may be decided by events far away.More than 100,000 Michigan Democrats, many of them from the state’s Arab American community around Detroit, abstained from supporting Biden in the Democratic primaries earlier this year because of his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. So far, Harris has not significantly wavered from Biden on the issue. With polls this close, it could be decisive if Harris loses a fraction of these voters.Chris McGreal | Saginaw, MichiganNevadaIs Harris or Trump better for the working class?View image in fullscreenUrbin Gonzalez could have been working inside, in the air conditioning, at his regular job as a porter on the Las Vegas Strip. Instead, in the final days before the US election, he had chosen to go door-knocking in the 104F (40C) heat.“I don’t care because I’m fighting for my situation,” said Gonzalez, dabbing the sweat from his neck. “All Trump wants to do is cut taxes for his buddies, for his rich friends, not for us. Not for workers … This is personal.”While the US economy broadly bounced back from the pandemic, Nevada has lagged behind. Nearly a quarter of jobs here are in leisure or hospitality, and although the Las Vegas Strip, where Gonzalez works, is back to booming with tourists, unemployment in Nevada remains the highest of any US state, and housing costs have skyrocketed.Both Trump and Harris have promised to turn things around: both have promised to eliminate federal income taxes on workers’ tips, and both have vowed to expand tax credits for parents – though their plans widely differ when it comes to the finer points.Although Nevada has leaned Democratic in every presidential election since 2008, winning candidates have scraped by with slim margins. About 40% of voters don’t identify with either Democrats or Republicans, and although a growing number of Latino voters – who now make up 20% of the electorate – have traditionally backed Democrats, the party’s popularity is slipping.The state, which has just six electoral votes, is notoriously difficult to accurately poll – in large part because the big cities, Reno and Las Vegas, are home to a transient population, many of whom work unpredictable shifts in the state’s 24/7 entertainment and hospitality industries. But many voters remember the days early in the Trump administration when costs were lower. “I think the economy was just better when Trump was president,” said Magaly Rodas, 32, while shopping at her local Latin market. Her husband, an electrician, has struggled to find work since the pandemic, while rent and other expenses have continued to climb. “What have the Democrats done for us in four years?”Maanvi Singh | Las Vegas, NevadaNorth CarolinaA hurricane is a wild card that could depress turnoutView image in fullscreenKim Blevins, 55, knows what it’s like to survive a disaster. She was locked inside her home without power for eight days when Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina last month.So when she uses the experience as a frame through which to view the impending election, she is not being frivolous. “If Trump doesn’t get in, it’s going to be worse than the hurricane,” she said.“It’ll be world war three. Kamala Harris wants to make us a communist country and we can’t survive that. The illegals coming over the border, the inflation of food and gas prices, we can’t do that.”Hurricane Helene has raised a critical challenge for Donald Trump.It affected a rural mountainous region that is Trump’s natural base – some 23 out of the 25 stricken counties are majority-Maga. So any decline in turnout would most likely hurt him.Trump needs to win North Carolina if he is to have an easy shot at returning to the White House. The state veers Republican, only voting for a Democratic president twice in recent times (Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008). Trump took it in 2020 by just 75,000 votes.Yet Harris has succeeded since she took over the Democratic mantle from Joe Biden in making this race neck-and-neck.In the final stretch, Trump is focusing on getting his base of largely white rural voters to the polls, hurricane be damned. His campaign has been heartened by the first week of early voting, which has smashed all records, with Republicans almost matching Democrats in turnout. (In 2020 and 2016, Republicans lagged behind.)On her side, Harris is waging an intense ground game, with hundreds of staffers fanning out across the state to squeeze out every vote. The thinking is that if Trump can be blocked in North Carolina, he can be stopped from regaining power.For that to happen, Harris has to mobilize her broad tent of support, with special emphasis on women in the suburbs of Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. She is also trying to shore up the male African American vote, which has shown some softness.Not least, she is trying to tie Trump to Mark Robinson, the state’s Republican gubernatorial candidate. Robinson has described himself as a “Black Nazi”, and has been revealed to have made extreme racist remarks.Ed Pilkington | Creston, North CarolinaPennsylvania‘If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing’View image in fullscreenPennsylvania provided one of the most enduring images of the fraught US election cycle: Donald Trump raising his fist to a crowd of supporters after a gunman attempted to end his life at a campaign rally in July. As Trump left the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, with blood dripping from his ear, his supporters chanted: “Fight! Fight!”Days later, Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, clearing the way for Kamala Harris to ascend to the Democratic nomination.Both Trump and Harris have returned to Pennsylvania dozens of times since, confirming that the Keystone state could play a definitive role in the presidential race. “If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania last month. “It’s very simple.”As the fifth-most-populous US state, Pennsylvania has the most electoral votes of any of the battlegrounds. Much of the population is clustered around Philadelphia and smaller cities like Pittsburgh and Scranton, where Biden showed strength in 2020, but the more rural regions could play an outsized role in the election. White, blue-collar voters in these rural areas have sharply shifted away from Democrats in recent elections.Some Democrats expected Harris to choose the popular governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate, given his impressive ability to secure consistent victories in such a closely-contested state. Harris instead chose Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, a decision that could come back to haunt her depending on the results in Pennsylvania.In her bid to sway undecided voters, Harris has walked back some of her most progressive proposals from her 2020 presidential campaign – such as a ban on fracking, a major industry in Pennsylvania, on which she has now reversed her stance.It could all come down to Pennsylvania. Tom Morrissey, a 67-year-old voter from Harleysville attending a Democratic campaign event last month, was optimistic . “We love the enthusiasm. It’s so important at this time,” Morrissey said. “We have to save democracy.”Joan E Greve | Ambler, PennsylvaniaWisconsin‘Let the anxiety wash over you and then refocus’View image in fullscreenWearing matching hats emblazoned with the words “Sauk County Democrats”, Deb and Rod Merritt, a retired couple from southern Wisconsin, joined the crowd to hear Barack Obama stump for Kamala Harris.“We’re so apprehensive that the polls say they’re close,” said Rod Merritt.Sauk county is one of a handful of Wisconsin counties that has flipped from Democrats to Republicans and back. It’s exactly the kind of place – a swing county in a swing state – that the campaigns are fighting over.A midwestern state in the Great Lakes region known for dairy production, manufacturing and healthcare, Wisconsin is considered to be part of the “blue wall” – the states Democrats consistently won in the 1990s and early 2000s.Trade unions historically helped drive voter turnout for Democrats, but a series of anti-labor laws passed under the Republican-controlled state government in 2011 dealt them a blow. Rural areas have increasingly turned to Republican candidates, leaving cities like Milwaukee – Wisconsin’s most racially diverse – and the liberal stronghold of Madison as Democratic bastions.With the economy the top issue, it all comes down to turnout, with Republicans focusing on rural voters and young men, who have increasingly looked to conservative politics.The Democrats, meanwhile, hope the closeness of the race – in which a half-million people have already voted – will mobilize volunteers. “In some ways, the most important thing is learning some breathing exercises so that you can let the anxiety wash through you – and then refocus on knocking on the next door,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic party of Wisconsin.Alice Herman | Madison, Wisconsin More