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      Gov. Brian Kemp Tiptoes Past Uproar Over Herschel Walker Abortion Report

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      ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia has been running a steady, drama-free campaign for re-election since he dispatched with his Trump-backed primary challenger in May. While screaming headlines and stumbles have dogged Herschel Walker’s Senate bid, Mr. Kemp has kept his head down and his mouth shut about his fellow Republican.On Wednesday, with only five weeks left in his race against Stacey Abrams, Mr. Kemp did not switch gears. He dodged a question about whether he would campaign with Mr. Walker, after his spokesman offered only general support of Republicans “up and down the ticket.”“I’m focused on my race,” Mr. Kemp said during a brief interview after a town hall event in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. “I can’t control what other people are doing. I certainly can’t control the past. But I can control my own destiny and that’s what we’re doing.”The governor has dodged several questions in recent days about the latest round of turmoil surrounding Mr. Walker: A Monday evening report from The Daily Beast said the former University of Georgia football player and outspoken abortion opponent paid for his then-girlfriend to have the procedure in 2009.The New York Times has not confirmed the report. Mr. Walker has denied the story and threatened to file a defamation suit against the outlet. The litigation, however, has not yet materialized.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.Asked about Mr. Kemp’s comments, Mr. Walker’s spokesman, Will Kiley, dismissed them as not “a real story.” In an interview with Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Walker said he was unfazed by the controversy and described himself as having “been redeemed.”“It’s like they’re trying to bring up my past to hurt me,” Mr. Walker said of Democrats and the media. “But they don’t know that bringing up my past only energizes me.”Mr. Walker also talks about his past in a 30-second direct-to-camera video spot called “Grace” that his campaign released on Wednesday, but only in broad terms. It outlines his struggles with mental illness and makes heavy appeals to faith, but does not directly mention the Daily Beast report. He instead accuses his opponent, Senator Raphael Warnock, who is also the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, of not believing in redemption. Mr. Warnock’s campaign declined to comment. Mr. Walker’s move to run negative messaging related to Mr. Warnock’s pastoral career is one that Republicans have tried to avoid, following major blowback during the 2021 U.S. Senate runoffs. Most national Republican figures, in addition to the party’s most ardent supporters in Georgia, rallied behind Mr. Walker immediately after the article published, hopeful that conservative voters in the state would dismiss the report as false or ignore it. But Mr. Kemp, an abortion opponent who signed into law Georgia’s six-week ban on the procedure, has offered no specific support nor condemnation. His spokesman put out a broad statement in response on Tuesday, saying the governor’s main objective at this stage was working to secure a second term.Mr. Walker with Black clergy members at an event in Austell, Ga, in August.Audra Melton for The New York TimesOn Wednesday, Mr. Kemp did not answer a question about whether he would campaign alongside Mr. Walker. The two have not yet held joint events. When asked by The Times if Mr. Walker’s troubles could damage the Republican ticket, Mr. Kemp said, “That’s a question the voters will have to decide.”“I’m not going to get into people’s personal lives,” he said. “Nobody’s asking me about that when I’m out on the road. They’re asking me, ‘Hey, how’s it going? What are you doing?’ Or they’re saying, ‘Thank you for keeping our economy open, we’re doing great.’”Mr. Kemp has little political incentive to wade into a messy episode. Most polls of the Georgia governor’s race show him running ahead of his Democratic opponent, Ms. Abrams. He has also polled better than Mr. Walker, who has appeared to be in a tighter race against Mr. Warnock.Still, the governor has implored his supporters not to trust the numbers as he continues to hold fund-raisers and support the state Republican Party’s grass-roots outreach efforts. On Wednesday, Mr. Kemp was focused on pitching a second term to Black men. Republicans in Georgia have made a strong effort to make more appeals to Black voters this year, hoping even tiny inroads with the solid Democratic constituency might make a difference in a close race.More than three dozen Black male business owners, entrepreneurs and party leaders gathered to listen to Mr. Kemp on Wednesday and asked questions largely related to business development and school choice. By the end of the event, its moderator, the Atlanta conservative radio host Shelley Wynter, asked if anyone present unsure of Mr. Kemp was “now sure” that they would support him. Several in the group raised their hands.In the interview afterward, Mr. Kemp said he believed the Republican Party in Georgia could have an opening with the state’s rapidly changing demographics.“I‘m proud of my record. I think we can earn a lot of minority votes with that,” he said. “And quite honestly, I think it will set the path for our party in the future.” More

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      Herschel Walker’s Son Is No Hero

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      This week, Herschel Walker’s 23-year-old son, Christian Walker, took a starring role in the elder Walker’s Georgia Senate campaign — to burn it to the ground.Christian published a blistering rant on social media, condemning Herschel for his lies after The Daily Beast published a report claiming that Herschel — who supports a complete ban on abortions with no exceptions — had not only urged a woman he was dating in 2009 to get an abortion, but paid for it.As a gentlemanly hypocrite, Herschel also sent her a “get well” card with a steaming cup of tea on the front — how apropos in retrospect — and signed with the message, “Pray you are feeling better,” according to The Daily Beast.Walker, of course, has denied this account. His lawyer told The Daily Beast the report is a “false story” and that he’s being targeted because he’s a Black conservative.No, sir. The verb you may be looking for is not “targeted,” it’s “exposed.”I have no way to independently verify The Daily Beast’s reporting, but Christian appears to believe it.In a message posted on social media after The Daily Beast’s story was published, Christian said:“The abortion card drops yesterday. It’s literally his handwriting in the card, they say they have receipts, whatever. He gets on Twitter, he lies about it. OK, I’m done. Done! Everything has been a lie.”Yes, it has all been a lie. Even before The Daily Beast’s report, Herschel Walker’s entire candidacy was a back-patting product of Donald Trump’s binary, friends-or-enemies approach to Blackness. Trump handpicked him to run because he was the anti-Colin Kaepernick: a Black football player who wouldn’t resist but acquiesce, one who wouldn’t campaign for Black lives but against them, one who wasn’t articulate and principled but unintelligible and fraudulent.Herschel spoke at the Republican National Convention during the summer of 2020, as Trump continued a more than three-year war against kneeling players “disrespecting” the flag and the national anthem. Herschel said in his R.N.C. speech:“Growing up in the Deep South, I’ve seen racism up close. I know what it is and it isn’t Donald Trump. Just because someone loves and respect the flag, our national anthem, and our country doesn’t mean they don’t care about social justice. I care about all of those things. So does Donald Trump. He shows how much he cares about social justice in the Black community through his actions, and his actions speaks louder than stickers or slogans on a jersey.”Herschel helped give cover for Trump’s racism in the heat of his re-election bid, so Trump rewarded him by supporting him for Senate.Of course, Trump issued a statement defending Herschel from the abortion claims, saying Herschel had “properly denied the charges” and that he had “no doubt” Herschel was “correct.”But Christian adds an interesting wrinkle in this narrative. He seems angry. And hurt.In his video, Christian spoke directly to the right:“And so, for the right to say I’m being suspicious for saying, ‘Hey, I’m done with the lies,’ when you all have been calling me saying, ‘Is this true about your dad? Ah, we’re not going to win Georgia.’ [unintelligible] That’s been you. You have no idea what I’ve been through in my life. You have no idea what me and my mom have survived. We could have ended this on Day 1.”Of course, Christian is a complicated character, and that’s being charitable. More accurately, he’s come across as a nasty piece of work.He is an election denier who opposes Black Lives Matter (he has called it a “terrorist organization” and “the K.K.K. in blackface”), as well as gay pride (even though, as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, “Walker has said he is not gay but is attracted to ‘big, strong, muscular men.’”). He is also anti-body positivity (He said on Instagram, “I’m tired of all these models who look like they’ve never seen a treadmill in their life”), anti-feminist (he said on Instagram, “Maybe men aren’t trash, and maybe you feminists should shave your armpit hair”), and he rages against Covid protocols (as he said when complaining about Covid restrictions, “I don’t care about your grandma, at all. I don’t.”).As someone who is Black and queer, allow me to borrow from that vernacular, and say in a tone dripping with disdain: “Child, please.”Christian says he could have stopped Herschel’s campaign from the beginning. But he didn’t. And neither was he passively disengaged. He was an active participant in the fraud. He knew when his father launched his campaign whatever Herschel had put him and his mom through, and he still actively supported him on social media and even sold campaign merchandise.Maybe, as he said on Tuesday, the lies just became too much for him as new revelations came to light. But to me his comments reveal some striking situational ethics on Christian’s part. He’s not opposed to lying, he’s just opposed to lying that personally affects him.He was perfectly OK with Trump’s lies. He even seemed to have bought into the lie of a stolen election and even the fake electors scheme, saying after the election:“The electors might have cast their vote today. They’re not counted until Jan. 6, when Congress meets. And for your information, seven states sent their GOP electors to vote for Trump today: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico. This preserves President Trump’s right to remedy the fraud with his own electors.”In fact, on the day of the 2020 elections, Christian posted a picture of him with Trump and wrote in the caption, “I’m so proud to know you and cherish my families relationship.” (I assume he meant to write about cherishing his family’s relationship with Trump.)In December, Christian spoke at a campaign event for his father held at Mar-a-Lago, and captioned his post about it, “Just a casual Wednesday with Uncle Don.”If Christian was truly offended by lies, he would have rejected Uncle Don long before he rejected his own father. And that’s not all. Christian revealed the root of his objection at the end of his social media rant: “Me, my mom, as we’re chased down by the media, terrorized, all these different things. People are questioning my authenticity. I’m done.”Herschel’s conduct, understandably, has touched Christian’s life for years, but Christian only spoke out with this kind of fervor after people started to question him — and doubt his authenticity.Listen, I’ll accept help from anyone willing to prevent the abomination of Herschel Walker being elected a senator from Georgia. And I’m not discounting any pain that Christian might feel.I am saying, though, that victims can also be villains. I am saying that one person’s trauma can spur another’s cruelties. I am saying that having a hard life doesn’t give you the right to make life harder for others. I am saying that the idiom remains true: Hurt people hurt people.Christian Walker is young. He has a lot of living to do. But he’s an adult. And if he’s old enough to act in ways that harm others, he is old enough to be called out for it.He has existed up to this point largely as an internet provocateur in a social media market that can reward self-aggrandizement with self-enrichment and social capital. He was all in. He threw flames like a pyromaniac.Now, he wants credit for calling out a sham campaign that he had participated in. But there are no laurels for him. He is a lot of things, but a hero isn’t one of them.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      In Speedy Embrace of Herschel Walker, Republicans Make Familiar Political Bargain

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      Herschel Walker walked into the First Baptist Church of Atlanta on Tuesday with his Senate campaign in turmoil. A day earlier, an ex-girlfriend said he had paid for her to have an abortion, despite his public opposition to the procedure. His son slammed him on social media as a liar.Mr. Walker had flatly denied the claim. And any question of whether the Republican Party, its grass-roots activists and evangelicals would break with him seemed quickly put to rest. The audience in the church did not wait to render a verdict: He was greeted with a standing ovation.From the closed-door confines of that church in Atlanta to the corridors of power in Washington, Republicans raced to close ranks behind Mr. Walker on Tuesday, fearing that any break with the former football star could cost the party a seat that is widely seen as central to the Republican Party’s chances to take control of the Senate in 2022.“Full speed ahead in Georgia,” declared Steven Law, the president of the Senate Leadership Fund. The group, the leading Senate Republican super PAC, is aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell and has booked more than $34 million in television ads in the state.“Republicans stand with him,” added Senator Rick Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.The quick consolidation behind Mr. Walker, less than 24 hours after The Daily Beast reported on the abortion claim on Monday, exposed a Republican Party that has become increasingly conditioned to discount questions about personal behavior in pursuit of political victories. While some Republicans said they didn’t believe the report, nearly all party leaders, elected officials and activists dismissed the abortion story as secondary to larger policy goals.“I have faith and confidence that Herschel will vote the right way,” said Debbie Dooley, a conservative activist in Atlanta who attended the church event specifically to support Mr. Walker, a former football star and first-time candidate.It’s a trade-off that has paid remarkable dividends in recent years. Social conservatives embraced Donald J. Trump despite his history as a brash former Democrat who once supported abortion rights. He rewarded the movement by appointing three conservatives to the Supreme Court, justices who delivered the long-sought decision to overturn federal abortion rights.At stake in 2022 could be no less than control of a United States Senate now divided 50-50 between the two parties. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, the Democratic incumbent who won the seat in a runoff election in January 2021, is seeking a full six-year term and is widely seen as one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the nation.Abortion has emerged as a key issue in the race. Mr. Walker is a staunch opponent, without exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother. “There’s no exception in my mind,” Mr. Walker told reporters in May.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.Democrats’ House Chances: Democrats are not favored to win the House, but the notion of retaining the chamber is not as far-fetched as it once was, ​​writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Latino Voters: A recent Times/Siena poll found Democrats faring far worse than they have in the past with Hispanic voters. “The Daily” looks at what the poll reveals about this key voting bloc.Michigan Governor’s Race: Tudor Dixon, the G.O.P. nominee who has ground to make up in her contest against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, is pursuing a hazardous strategy in the narrowly divided swing state: embracing former President Donald J. Trump.As abortion energizes Democratic voters this year, particularly in crucial suburban counties, the charges of hypocrisy on abortion, coming even from a son, could threaten Mr. Walker’s chances to make inroads with the independents and women who pushed Georgia into the Democratic column in the 2020 cycle.While local activists and national party figures attacked the news media and publicly rallied behind Mr. Walker on Tuesday, Republican strategists privately fretted about what might come next, with one answering a reporter’s question about the episode by sending an animated GIF of the Titanic sinking. The Walker Senate campaign has already been rocked by a series of revelations about his tumultuous personal history, including the existence of three children whom he had not mentioned publicly.The New York Times has not independently confirmed The Daily Beast’s reporting, which quoted an unidentified woman saying she and Mr. Walker had conceived a child in 2009 and decided to end the pregnancy. The woman produced a receipt from the abortion clinic and a deposit receipt with an image of a $700 check said to be from Mr. Walker, dated days later, that she said had covered the cost of the procedure, the outlet said. It also published a “get well” card that the woman said had been signed by Mr. Walker.Mr. Walker denied the account outright. “I never asked anyone to get an abortion, I never paid for an abortion,” he said on Fox News on Monday night. In a statement, he said he would sue The Daily Beast for defamation on Tuesday. His campaign and lawyer did not respond to questions about whether a lawsuit had been filed.Christian Walker, left, at a Los Angeles event in support of Donald J. Trump in 2020, has denounced his father, Herschel Walker, on social media.Chelsea Lauren/ShutterstockAdding to the drama was the response from Mr. Walker’s son Christian Walker. A TikTok star known for his unfiltered political posts, the younger Mr. Walker had largely been quiet about his father’s campaign. But in two videos posted on Tuesday he lashed out at his father as a liar who had committed “atrocities” against him and his mother.His mother, Cindy Grossman, has already been featured in weeks of bruising Democratic ads using old footage of her describing how Mr. Walker once held a gun to her head and threatened to pull the trigger. Mr. Walker has not denied that accusation and has said he once struggled with mental illness..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Christian Walker said on Twitter on Monday that “every member” of the family had urged his father not to run for Senate and in a follow-up video on Tuesday, he said conservatives who continued to back his father’s campaign were hypocrites.“Family values, people?” Christian Walker said. “He has four kids, four different women, wasn’t in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women.”Mr. Walker responded simply on Twitter on Monday: “I LOVE my son no matter what.” Mr. Walker’s allies drew comparisons to the “Access Hollywood” recording that threatened to derail Mr. Trump in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign — noting Mr. Trump won that race.Ralph Reed, a social conservative leader in Georgia, likened the Daily Beast report to the “Access Hollywood” recording that shook the 2016 presidential campaign.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“We’ve seen this movie before,” said Ralph Reed, the prominent social conservative leader based in Georgia, adding that he “100 percent” expected evangelical Christians would stick with Mr. Walker. He even argued that the latest report could lift Republican turnout by rallying social conservatives to defend Mr. Walker.Per one attendee’s account, as he greeted the audience in the church on Tuesday, Mr. Walker called himself a “sinner saved by grace.” And, before leaving, he gathered the group around him to lay hands and pray, according to attendees. Reporters were not allowed in the event.Some Republicans lining up behind Mr. Walker questioned the latest allegations. Some didn’t seem to care either way.“If y’all find a perfect candidate that has never had challenges in their life, I want you to bring them to me and let me meet him or her,” said Dominic LaRiccia, a Republican state representative backing Mr. Walker.Marci McCarthy, the Republican chair of DeKalb County in the metro Atlanta area, said, “Ultimately Georgia’s voters will put their own lives and livelihoods first because, in either case, they are not voting for fathers and husbands of the year.”Notably, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican who has been leading his race for re-election, has kept his distance from Mr. Walker. The two have yet to hold a campaign event together this year. Asked about the episode on Tuesday, a spokesman for Mr. Kemp, Cody Hall, did not mention Mr. Walker and said only that the governor was “laser focused” on fund-raising and voter turnout in the final weeks of the campaign.Mr. Walker has been found to have embellished or misrepresented key elements of his résumé, including claiming he worked in law enforcement, although he did not. For years, his food-distribution company said it would donate a portion of its earnings to charity, but there is little evidence that it did so. His convoluted and confusing stump speeches have made headlines for months.“You’re not going to convince people who made it this far that Herschel’s really a bad guy,” said Randy Evans, a former Republican National Committee member from Georgia, who supports Mr. Walker and spent Tuesday morning at a Republican county breakfast in northwestern Georgia. “Today’s reaction was everybody offering their ideas how to respond to Warnock’s lies,” he added. “The electorate is hardened — on both sides.”The base of the Republican Party, in particular, is primed to ignore allegations that appear in the mainstream media, especially anonymous ones, Republican officials say.“After the fake Russian smear and the lies about Justice Kavanaugh why would I worry about this?” asked Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who represented Georgia. “I am totally for Walker.”Mr. Walker entered the Senate race in the summer of 2021 with the vocal backing of Mr. Trump and it was immediately clear he would be unstoppable in a Republican primary. By the fall, Mr. McConnell backed Mr. Walker, later calling him “completely electable,” despite the string of controversies.Christian Walker hinted in his videos that he might have more to say. “I haven’t told one story about what I experienced with him,” he said. “I’m just simply saying, don’t lie.” More

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      in US Politics

      Republican Herschel Walker pledges to sue over report he paid for abortion – as it happened

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      Herschel Walker, the controversial Republican candidate in Georgia for a vital US Senate seat, is attempting to weather the latest tempest that has tossed his midterm election campaign from turbulent into full-blown crisis.The news broke last night that the former NFL football player turned political candidate, who is campaigning on a hard anti-abortion line, had paid for an abortion for a former girlfriend in 2009, according to a report by the Daily Beast.As the Beast puts it in the strap below the headline to its report: “The woman has receipts – and a ‘get well’ card she says the football star, now a Senate candidate, sent her.”Walker blasted out a top-line denial via Twitter, calling the story overall a flat-out lie, also calling it a “Democrat attack”, while the Beast insists its article is backed up to the hilt. Walker says he’ll sue the Beast today.Regarding the latest Democrat attack: pic.twitter.com/OjrDcGak95— Herschel Walker (@HerschelWalker) October 3, 2022
      He also appeared on Fox News to blame politics, saying: “Now everyone knows how important this seat is and they [Democrats] will do anything to win this seat. They wanted to make it about anything except inflation, crime and the border being wide open.”But Walker’s son, 23-year-old Christian Walker, then responded on Twitter. Yikes.I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us. You’re not a “family man” when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence.— Christian Walker (@ChristianWalk1r) October 4, 2022
      And:I don’t care about someone who has a bad past and takes accountability. But how DARE YOU LIE and act as though you’re some “moral, Christian, upright man.” You’ve lived a life of DESTROYING other peoples lives. How dare you.— Christian Walker (@ChristianWalk1r) October 4, 2022
      The sitting Senator from Georgia whom Herschel Walker is challenging, Democrat Raphael Warnock, is striving to stay above the fray – maybe hoping the former running back will be hoisted by his own petard?US politics live blog readers, it’s been a vigorous day of news. There will be more from us tomorrow, following events as they happen. Joe Biden is going to Florida to review the aftermath of Hurricane Ian. He’ll meet with the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, during the visit.For now, we’re closing this blog. There is a great selection of news and other stories on our front page and our blog of the war in Ukraine is here.Here’s how the day went:
      Lawyers for DonaldTrump have asked the US supreme court today to step into the legal fight over the classified documents seized during an FBI search of his Florida estate.
      Kamala Harris condemned the June decision by the rightdominated US supreme court to overturn Roe v Wade, as part of the pivotal Mississippi case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and tear up half a century of constitutional abortion rights in the US. “The Dobbs decision created a healthcare crisis in America,” she said at a White House event 100 days after the ruling.
      National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Rick Scott and other prominent Republicans are still behind Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker amid the scandal that’s blown his already-rocky midterm election campaign sideways.
      Joe Biden told the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, earlier today that Washington will provide Kyiv with $625m in new security assistance, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, the White House said.
      Giant tents for temporarily housing asylum seekers arriving in New York City after crossing the US-Mexico border are being moved to an island off Manhattan from a remote corner of the Bronx, after storms raised concerns over flooding at the original site.
      There is no sign of a lawsuit (yet) from Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker against the Daily Beast following the latest chapter of Walker’s tumultuous campaign for the Senate unfolded last night.
      US climate envoy John Kerry said today some western government ministers avoided a so-called “family photo” of participants at climate talks in Kinshasa because they were uncomfortable with the presence of Russia’s representative.
      Lawyers for former president DonaldTrump asked the US supreme court today to step into the legal fight over the classified documents seized during an FBI search of his Florida estate.The Trump team asked the court to overturn a lower court ruling and permit an independent arbiter, or special master, to review the roughly 100 documents with classified markings that were taken in the 8 August search at his Mar-a-Lago private club, resort and residence in Palm Beach, Florida, The Associated Press reports.A three-judge panel last month limited the special master’s review to the much larger tranche of non-classified documents.Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are convening the second meeting at the White House of the administration’s Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access.The vice-president condemned the June decision by the right-dominated US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, as part of the pivotal Mississippi case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and tear up half a century of constitutional abortion rights across the US.“The Dobbs decision created a healthcare crisis in America,” Harris said.She added: “A woman should have the freedom to make decisions about her own body. The government should not be making these decisions for the women of America.”Harris noted that if the US Congress could codify the right to abortion previously afforded under Roe, rightwing leaders “could not ban abortion and they could not criminalize providers, so it’s important for everyone to know what’s at stake. To stop these attacks on women, we need to pass this law,” she said.The vice-president also reminded people that ultra-conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, at the time of the June ruling, appeared to offer a preview of the court’s potential future rulings, and that they may return to the issues of curtailing contraception access and marriage equality, threatening LGBTQ+ rights, on the basis of constitutional privacy rights such as those just ripped up in the overturning of Roe v Wade.At the same event, the president said that he created the task force in the aftermath of the Scotus decision “which most people would acknowledge is a pretty extreme decision,” in order to take a “whole of government approach” to addressing “the damage” of that ruling.“The court got Roe right nerarly 50 years ago. Congress should codify the protections of Roe and do it once and for all. But right now we are short a handful of votes, so the only way it’s going to happen is if the American people make it happen.“Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are doubling down on their extreme position with the proposal for a national ban. Let me be clear what that means. It means that even if you live in a state where extremist Republican officials aren’t running the show, your right to choose will still be at risk.”National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Rick Scott is still behind Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker amid the scandal that’s blown a new hole in his midterm election campaign.NRSC Chairman Rick Scott sticks by Herschel Walker:”When the Democrats are losing, as they are right now, they lie and cheat and smear their opponents. That’s what’s happening right now.” pic.twitter.com/fC59lVFzen— Julie Tsirkin (@JulieNBCNews) October 4, 2022
      Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, last noticed by national and international audiences when the House January 6 committee showed the tape of him fleeing the Trumpist insurrectionists that he had previously publicly egged on, is also still walking the Walker walk. “You have done enough, have you no sense of decency?” @HawleyMO Hawley affirms support for Herschel Walker after report Georgia Republican paid for abortionhttps://t.co/zu8zWKvO0v pic.twitter.com/9V2WJd6oVM— Jewel Kelly For Missouri (@JewelCommittee) October 4, 2022
      The mother of the late congresswoman Jackie Walorski told Joe Biden that her daughter was in “heaven with Jesus” after the president apologized for mistakenly calling for Walorski during public remarks last week, despite her death in August.During a private meeting in the Oval Office with the Walorski family on Friday, Biden apologized, the New York Post first reported, for a gaffe he made during a summit on food insecurity on 28 September, when he called into the audience to see if Walorski was in attendance, as the Republican representative from Indiana had served as co-chairperson of the House Hunger Caucus.“Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie? She must not be here,” Biden said, seeming to forget, or be unaware, that Walorski had died. The congresswoman was killed in an August car accident in Indiana.When asked about Biden’s confusion, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, downplayed the president’s mistake, calling his comments “not all that unusual”.Jean-Pierre added that Biden was acknowledging the congresswoman’s work and keeping her “top of mind” because he would be meeting with her family later that week.While speaking to the president, the late congresswoman’s mother, Martha “Mert” Walorski, told Biden that her daughter was in heaven when he asked for her.Jackie’s father Keith Walorski said Biden and his staff were “very, very good” to his family but they do not plan on voting for him in 2024 because they strongly disagree with his policy.“Most of the Biden agenda is not what you would call a conservative Christian agenda,” Keith Walorski said. “That’s who we are.” The rest of that article is here.At an Oval Office meeting in July 2020, Donald Trump asked aides if Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend of the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein who had been arrested on sex trafficking charges, had named him among influential contacts she might count upon to protect her.According to a new book by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, Trump asked “campaign advisers … ‘You see that article in the [New York] Post today that mentioned me?’“He kept going, to silence. ‘She say anything about me?’”Epstein was convicted and sentenced in Florida in 2008, on state prostitution charges. He was arrested again in July 2019, on sex-trafficking charges. He killed himself in prison in New York a month later.Links between Epstein, Maxwell and prominent associates including Trump and Prince Andrew have stoked press speculation ever since.Maxwell, the daughter of the British press baron Robert Maxwell, was arrested in New Hampshire on 2 July 2020.The story which seemed to worry Trump, according to Haberman, appeared in the celebrity-focused Page Six section of the New York tabloid on 4 July 2020.It quoted Steve Hoffenberg, an Epstein associate, as saying: “Ghislaine thought she was untouchable – that she’d be protected by the intelligence communities she and Jeffrey helped with information: the Israeli intelligence services, and Les Wexner, who has given millions to Israel; by Prince Andrew, President Clinton and even by President Trump, who was well-known to be an acquaintance of her and Epstein’s.”Maxwell was ultimately convicted in New York in December 2021, on five of six charges relating to the sex-trafficking of minors. In July 2022, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison.Haberman’s eagerly awaited book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, is published in the US on Tuesday. Check out the whole report here.In February this year, Prince Andrew settled a civil case brought by an Epstein victim who alleged she was forced to have sex with the royal. Andrew vehemently denies wrongdoing but has suffered a collapse of his standing in public and private.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is emphasizing how much Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want the US Congress to enshrine the right to an abortion in the US into national legislation.It’s 100 days today since the now firmly right-leaning US Supreme Court in late June overturned Roe v Wade and ripped up half a century of a constitutional, federal rights to seek an abortion in the US.Jean-Pierre said the court “took away nearly 50 years of protections and we have seen women respond and Americans respond…they have made their voices loud and clear and I expect we will continue to see that type of reaction.”She added, of services such as abortion and contraception: “These are difficult decisions that women should be making for themselves with their health care provider, no-one else should be making that decision for them, not Republican officials…”Reuters adds in this report that 13 US states have begun enforcing abortion bans since the court decision, a swift and dramatic change after nearly 50 years of federal abortion protections.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has begun today’s media briefing and is reminding everyone that Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are going to Fort Myers, Florida, tomorrow, in the aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Ian.Yesterday, the US president and first lady were in Puerto Rico to announce funding in the wake of Hurricane Fiona that smashed into the island territory last month just before Ian howled in from the Atlantic.Biden admitted that aid and assistance to Puerto Rico in the five years since Hurricane Maria hit there and now Hurricane Fiona has not been timely or sufficient.Jean-Pierre says Biden will meet Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis while he’s in the state tomorrow.Here’s our colleague Martin Pengelly on the governor last week:Ron DeSantis changes with the wind as Hurricane Ian prompts flip-flop on aidRead moreIt has been called a textbook example of discrimination against Black voters in the US. And a ruling on it from the supreme court is expected any day.It isn’t the kind of explicit voting discrimination, like poll taxes and literacy tests, that kept voters from the polls in the south during the Jim Crow era. Instead, it is more subtle.Let us walk you through the case with our visual explainer.The case focuses on Alabama, where the Republican-controlled legislature, like states across the US, recently completed the once-a-decade process of redrawing the boundaries of congressional maps. If partisan politicians exert too much control over the redistricting process, they can effectively engineer their own victories, or blunt the advantages of the other side, by allocating voters of particular political persuasions and backgrounds to particular districts.Under the new districts, Black people make up 25% of the Alabama’s population, but comprise a majority in just one of the state’s seven districts.In late January, a panel of three federal judges issued a 225-page opinion explaining how the state was discriminating against Black voters.“Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the panel wrote. The judges gave Alabama 14 days to come up with a new plan and said the state had to draw two districts where Black voters comprise a majority.Check out the whole terrific interactive here, from Guardian US colleagues Sam Levine and Andrew Witherspoon.The US supreme court today has been hearing a hugely important case that could ultimately gut one of the most powerful remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that is one of America’s most powerful anti-discrimination measures.The case deals with the seven new congressional districts that Alabama adopted last year. Six of those districts are represented by a Republican in Congress and one is represented by a Democrat. That Democratic district is 55% Black, the only Black majority district in the state.The plaintiffs in the case argue that Alabama Republicans who control the state legislature packed as many Black voters as possible into the one Democratic district to weaken the influence of Black voters overall in the state. Black people make up about a quarter of Alabama’s population, but only are a majority in one district. The central question in the case is how much mapmakers are required to take race into account when drawing districts. The plaintiffs argue that the Voting Rights Act requires Alabama to draw a second district where Black people make up a majority.But Alabama argues that doing so would require the state to sort voters based on race, which is unconstitutional.If the court, which has been extremely hostile to voting rights and the Voting Rights Act in particular, were to embrace that latter view, it would make it enormously difficult to challenge districts in the future.A three judge panel agreed with the plaintiffs and ordered the state to redraw the map. But the US supreme court stepped in earlier this year and halted that order. Hello US politics live blog readers, it’s a lively day for news and there’s much more to come in the next few hours, but here’s where things stand right now:
      Joe Biden told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy earlier today that Washington will provide Kyiv with $625 million in new security assistance, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, the White House said.
      Giant tents for temporarily housing asylum seekers arriving in New York City after crossing the US-Mexico border are being moved to an island off Manhattan from a remote corner of the Bronx, after storms raised concerns over flooding at the original site.
      There is no sign of a lawsuit (yet) from Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker against the Daily Beast following the latest chapter of Walker’s tumultuous campaign for the Senate unfolded last night.
      US climate envoy John Kerry said today some western government ministers avoided a so-called “family photo” of participants at climate talks in Kinshasa because they were uncomfortable with the presence of Russia’s representative.
      Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign is in crisis in Georgia after the latest twist in the abortion row became very personal and turns the heat up further in the furious midterms battle for control of the US Senate. More

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      Can Democrats lock down Atlanta’s immigrant vote – or will Georgia slip away?

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      Can Democrats lock down Atlanta’s immigrant vote – or will Georgia slip away? Georgia in focus: A fragile coalition around Atlanta helped shift the state’s politics, but as the midterms loom the cracks are showing“Very normal” is how Rupal Vaishnav describes his experience as an entrenched resident of Atlanta. He moved to the city at the age of nine, after immigrating to the US from India in the late 1970s. When his parents settled in Clayton county – a suburb south of downtown that’s now home to the world’s busiest airport – it was still largely populated by white families living in 60s-era bungalows; before that, it was the fictional setting for Gone With the Wind.Vaishnav was one of two Indian kids in school – the other was his brother – and a strict vegetarian who spoke Gujarati at home. But he joined the school’s air force junior reserves, studied mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech and earned his law degree from Georgia State. For the past five years, he’s worked in the local district attorney’s office and this year he ran to be a state judge in Forsyth county, once infamous for its lynchings. “The biggest thing I struggled with growing up and that I still see in my son are the identity conflicts,” Vaishnav says, now 50. “Are you American? Are you Indian? You have to get comfortable knowing the two cultures. It’s a balancing act that you get better at over time.”The ‘all-out’ effort to overcome Georgia’s new restrictive voting billRead moreImmigrants like Vaishnav have played an important role in what has been a remarkable shift in the demographics of Georgia, and politics with it. Georgia went blue in the 2020 election – and Asian American voters could well decide whether that was an accident or the new normal. Between 1970 and 1980 roughly 80,000 people immigrated here, many from Asia, where they settled in the suburbs of Atlanta – counties like Clayton, Fulton and Forsyth, which gained national infamy in the 1980s as a sundown town after a spate of Klan attacks against civil rights activists. As Atlanta’s Black population has gradually recovered population share, wealth and civil rights after decades of domestic terrorism and redlining policies, the city’s Asian American population has exploded, too.As of the most recent census, Asian Americans comprised nearly 5% of metro Atlanta’s 6 million residents, putting them nearly level with the city’s Latino population. Most hailed from India and Pakistan, enticed by the city’s booming academic, medical and tech industries. The city is more obviously international now than it has ever been: the Confederate banners and whites-only placards have long since been replaced by Ethiopian restaurants, West Indian markets and businesses touting Spanish proficiency. In a 2021 essay, author Sanjena Sathian, whose critically acclaimed novel Gold Diggers follows an Indian-American teen in Atlanta, characterized her hometown as “a surprisingly Whitmanesque experiment in pluralism, in which unpoetic concrete strip malls substitute for lyrical spears of summer grass”. On television, Atlanta’s prosperous non-white coalition is reflected in programs such as Married to Medicine, in which an Indian-American plastic surgeon and his fashion blogger wife feature prominently within the show’s Black American ensemble.She’s Georgia’s great blue hope – but can Stacey Abrams win a crucial race?Read moreRecently, that non-white majority has played a pivotal role in overturning Georgia’s Republican control, registering to vote in the hundreds of thousands. After close defeats in the 2016 presidential election and Senate race, the Democrats finally squeaked to victory in 2020, winning Georgia for Joe Biden and wresting control of both Senate seats for the first time since the mid-1970s. The drama of election night came down to ballots being counted in Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Cobb counties – Atlanta suburbs that have all seen large population growth among people of color.That flip, from red to purple, doesn’t happen without Stacey Abrams, who avenged her narrow loss in the race for governor in 2018 by whipping together a coalition of voters of color, a long game that made her a national hero on the left. Another national figure to emerge is Raphael Warnock, who won the special US Senate election in 2020 against Kelly Loeffler, an outspoken critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, after players on the Atlanta Dream basketball team she co-owned led an insurrection campaign against her.But Georgia’s diverse voting bloc is fragile. Two years on, Abrams and Warnock are struggling in their Senate and gubernatorial races. And Democrats are finding that even the South Asian label is a broad one. “Even just in India, there are so many varieties of people,” says Ketan Goswami of Hindus of Georgia Pac, a bipartisan group that aims to build coalitions through religion. “Lumping us all together in this South Asian identity is, in my mind, actually very criminal.”Even the Democrats’ big sell to the immigrant coalition, a smoother or at least shorter path to citizenship, seems a careless enticement. Many of the Indians in Georgia, reckons Vaishnav, are temporary visa holders in specialty occupations who would vote for immigration reform – but cannot. The residents who can vote, on the other hand, often have homes and families and six-figure incomes to protect – at which point tax cuts and more cops on streets become priorities. “Once you get here”, Vaishnav says, “I think you’re sensitive to the idea that what you have you should share with others.”Mobilizing this coalition has its challenges, too. “There’s embedded historical resistance toward electoral civic engagement,” says Berenice Rodriguez of the Atlanta chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “The biggest gap is disinformation and language accessibility, which really affect the older generations.”Republicans won’t commit to honoring vote results this fall. That’s troubling | Robert ReichRead moreMeanwhile, Republicans are hitting back. Georgia’s GOP-controlled state legislature passed a sweeping voting law last April that cracks down on absentee balloting and voter identification, in part to short-circuit the Democrats’ hold on immigrant Atlanta. The White House also did its Georgia candidates few favors while entertaining the 2022 championship-winning Atlanta Braves, the last team with a Native-themed name in major pro sports besides hockey’s Chicago Blackhawks; press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre stopped short of calling for the team’s name to be changed, but said: “We should listen to Native Americans and Indigenous people who are the most impacted by this.” Robert Cahaly, a pollster and founder of the Atlanta-based Trafalgar Group, found that more than 70% of locals wanted the Braves to remain the Braves, and noted the political risk of arguing otherwise, pointing out that the Democratic senators “Warnock and [Jon] Ossoff did not make a comment on whether the Braves should change their name – and two Republicans said they should not.”More broadly, the conservative positions of the Republicans resonate with immigrant groups who value family and generational wealth – which is why efforts to court their support have suddenly become so intense. “A lot of money has funneled into the state to allow us to expand the work we’ve been doing for a long time,” says Rodriguez. “But I do fear that once the spotlight is gone, if Georgia doesn’t become a swing state, that funding will stop.”Vaishnav’s parents borrowed money from friends to start a printing business; Mr Quik Copy has been a fixture of Dekalb county, a former civil war battleground, for almost four decades. “The county gave them a proclamation for having it in the same location since ’85,” Vaishnav said. A similar sense of permanence for Democrats, though, will be much harder won.“People like to say South Asians are either all Democrat or all Republican,” Vaishnav says. “But I can tell you, there’s so much variety.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022GeorgiaUS politicsAtlantafeaturesReuse this content More

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      Herschel Walker: anti-abortion Senate nominee denies media report he paid for abortion in 2009

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      Herschel Walker: anti-abortion Senate nominee denies media report he paid for abortion in 2009Republican candidate for US Senate in Georgia who has vehemently opposed abortion rights denies a media report he paid for an abortion for an anonymous former girlfriend in 2009, describing it as ‘a flat out lie’ A Republican nominee for the US Senate, who strongly opposes abortion rights, has denied a Daily Beast report that he paid for an abortion for a former girlfriend in 2009. Herschel Walker, a former American football player who is running for the US Senate in Georgia, called the accusation a “flat-out lie” and says he will sue the news outlet for defamation.The Daily Beast published claims from a woman who says Walker paid for her abortion when they were dating. The woman, who was not named, claimed the allegation was supported by a receipt showing a $575 payment for the procedure, along with a get-well card, purportedly from Walker.According to The Daily Beast, her bank deposit records show the image of a $700 personal check, purportedly from Walker, dated five days after the abortion receipt.The woman claimed in The Daily Beast report that Walker encouraged her to end the pregnancy, saying that the time wasn’t right for a baby.In a statement, Walker said he would file a lawsuit against the news outlet.“This is a flat-out lie and I deny this in the strongest terms possible,” he wrote.Matt Fuller, the politics editor for The Daily Beast, tweeted in response: “I can tell you we stand behind every word and feel very solid about the story.”The allegation against Walker is the latest in a series of stories about the former football star’s past that have rocked the first-time candidate’s campaign in one of the most competitive Senate races in the country. Earlier this year, Walker acknowledged reports that he had three children that he had not previously talked about publicly.As a Senate hopeful, Walker has supported a national ban on abortions with no exceptions for cases involving rape, incest or a woman’s health being at risk.“I’m for life,” Walker has said repeatedly as he campaigns. When asked about whether he’d allow for any exceptions, he has said there are “no excuses” for the procedure.Walker has sidestepped many questions about his earlier support for a national abortion ban, instead trying to turn the issue against his Democratic rival, Senator Raphael Warnock, who supports abortion rights. Walker often characterises abortion as “a woman killing her baby” and says he doesn’t understand how Warnock, a Baptist pastor, can support the procedure being legal.Senator Warnock was dismissive when told of The Daily Beast story and when asked whether it might affect the outcome in Georgia. “I’ll let the pundits decide,” he said.On Monday night, Walker appeared on Fox News where he was asked if he recalled sending a $700 check to a girlfriend.“Well, I sent money to a lot of people,” he said. “I give money to people all the time because I’m always helping people. I believe in being generous. God has blessed me. I want to bless others.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022Roe v WadeGeorgiaAbortionUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Stacey Abrams helped swing Georgia for the Democrats. So why is she trailing?

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      She’s Georgia’s great blue hope. Can Stacey Abrams win her crucial race? Georgia in focus: Despite being hailed as architect of Georgia’s political transformation, Abrams is still an underdog in her rematch with Governor Brian Kemp for reasons that make Democrats nervousStacey Abrams was a high school senior the first time she was invited to the Georgia governor’s mansion. It was for a ceremony honoring the state’s class valedictorians, and Abrams was her school’s top academic achiever. At the time, her family did not own a car, so Abrams and her parents rode the bus from their working-class suburb to the stately mansion in downtown Atlanta.When they arrived, Abrams recalls a guard emerging from the security booth. Eyeing the bus, he told them: “This is a private event. You don’t belong here.” Never mind that her invitation was tucked into her mother’s handbag or that her name was second on the list of invitees.Ginni Thomas still believes Trump’s false claim the 2020 election was stolenRead moreA terse exchange ensued between her father and the guard, who grudgingly checked the guest list and let them in.“The thing of it is,” Abrams said at a recent campaign stop in Atlanta, “I don’t remember meeting the governor of Georgia. I don’t remember meeting my fellow valedictorians from 180 school districts … All I remember is a man standing in front of the most powerful place in Georgia, looking at me, telling me I don’t belong.”But the story doesn’t have to end there, Abrams tells supporters as she campaigns to become the first Black female governor in American history. With their help this November, she promises, they will “open those gates wide” and “win the future for Georgia”.Four years ago, Abrams came within a hair of it. She lost the Georgia governorship to Republican Brian Kemp by fewer than 55,000 votes, in a race dominated by allegations of voter suppression, which Kemp, then the secretary of state overseeing the election, denied.In her near-miss, national Democrats saw a promising leader – and the potential to reclaim the southern state that had long ago slipped away. Successive Democratic wins in the years that followed validated her work expanding the electorate, a decade-long project aimed at mobilizing the disillusioned and the marginalized.Abrams was even considered a potential running mate for Joe Biden in 2020, a prospect she welcomed. But she always kept her sights on the governor’s mansion, declining pleas to run for the Senate. Now, her second chance has arrived.Yet Abrams, hailed by Democrats as the architect of Georgia’s political transformation, enters the final weeks of her rematch with Kemp an underdog.Polls consistently show the 48-year-old Democrat trailing Kemp, now a relatively popular governor with the advantage of incumbency. The latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) poll found that the governor had significantly expanded his lead over Abrams, 50% to 42%. And while Abrams has stronger support among her base than Kemp, according to a Monmouth University survey, it concluded that her path to victory was “much narrower”.But Abrams is refusing to be counted out. A Yale-educated tax attorney, she says she trusts her math better than the polls. In the fast-growing and diversifying battleground state, she notes that as many as 1.6 million new voters have been added to the rolls since 2018, many times Kemp’s margin of victory that year.“Every success I’ve ever had in politics has been about building the electorate I need – building the electorate we should have, which is an electorate that’s much more reflective of the state,” Abrams said during an interview at a coffee shop in Atlanta.Georgia is nearly evenly divided between the parties, and in many ways, Abrams and Kemp embody the dueling factions of the state’s polarized electorate. Abrams, a former state house minority leader and prominent voting rights advocate, is working to mobilize Black, Latino and Asian American voters along with young people in Atlanta and its sprawling suburbs. While Kemp, a staunch conservative who easily defeated a Trump-backed primary challenge earlier this year, draws overwhelming support from white voters in the rural and exurban parts of the state.“This is 100% the battle of the bases,” said Nsé Ufot, leader of the New Georgia Project, a group founded by Abrams to register and engage young people and voters of color. “And it’s 100% going to be determined by who shows up to vote and whose votes get counted.”Canvassers with the New Georgia Project are pounding the pavement to register and turn out voters this cycle. Their goal is to knock on at least 2m doors by election day. Though some Democrats have expressed doubts about Abrams’ expansion strategy, Ufot said it has already proven effective by paving the way for Biden’s victory in 2020 and the election of two Democratic senators in 2021, which delivered the party control of the chamber.“Now is the time to double down, not to second guess ourselves,” she said.Despite a deeply loyal base, surveys suggest Abrams has become a more polarizing figure since her last campaign. Supporters say it is not surprising, after four years of being vilified by conservatives as a far-left extremist who views the governorship only as a stepping stone to the presidency.But it may be making it harder for Abrams to attract the vanishingly thin slice of independent and moderate Republican voters whose discomfort with Trump pushed them toward Democrats in recent elections. A Marist Poll found that 11% of Georgians who voted for Biden in 2020 plan to back Kemp for governor, while just 5% of Trump voters favor Abrams.“If Abrams looks to be more than a contender and she wants to win,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, “she really is going to have to shake the tree and find a few more Democratic voters.”Meanwhile, Trump loyalists who were once wary of Kemp have largely aligned behind him, persuaded by his conservative record and their fear of an Abrams victory.“We definitely cannot have a Stacey Abrams governorship in Georgia,” said Salleigh Grubbs, chair of the Cobb County Republican party, which censured Kemp in 2021. “That’s a very scary proposition.”Kemp’s refusal to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia during the turbulent weeks after the 2020 election infuriated Trump. In the months that followed, he made Kemp the target of a vengeance campaign, even once musing that Abrams would make a better governor.But since Kemp’s strong primary showing, Trump has mostly stayed away from the governor’s race. And Republican allies say Kemp’s independence will probably help him win back disaffected suburban voters.Abrams is vocal in her view that Kemp deserves no credit for withstanding pressure to subvert a free and fair election.“While I’m glad that he didn’t commit treason, that is not a reason to lionize him,” she said in the interview. “He simply did not do one thing and he has used that to cloak every other bad behavior.”Kemp, Abrams argues, has been relatively silent on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, even as the former president’s stolen-election myth continues to resonate deeply with conservatives in the state. He also backed an overhaul of the state’s voting laws that critics said was rooted in Trump’s groundless claims of widespread fraud.“Kemp is a Maga Republican who has done everything in his power to align himself with not only Trump’s values but Trump’s behavior,” she added. “He has just done it in a more subtle way.”In Georgia, like elsewhere, Democrats face a challenging political environment. Voters have soured on the president amid widespread economic malaise and anxiety about the rising cost of living.With the economy top of mind for voters, Kemp has sought to tie Abrams to Biden and warned that her economic plans would deepen inflation. At the same time, he is campaigning as a steward of Georgia’s bustling economy, which includes record-low unemployment and a record $21.2bn in state-tracked business investments.According to the AJC poll, Georgians were significantly more pessimistic about the direction of the country than the direction of their state. On the campaign trail, Kemp attributes the rosier outlook to his decision to reopen businesses after they closed during the earliest months of the pandemic. He also approved of popular policies that boosted teacher pay, provided tax rebates to families and suspended the state’s gas tax.“The courage that we have seen from Governor Brian Kemp has been extraordinary,” said Nikki Haley, the former Republican governor of South Carolina, during a campaign appearance with Kemp at a burger joint in Atlanta. “First state in the country to open up after Covid – he was vilified for it, and it turns out that he’s the one that saved the economy, saved our businesses … and allowed people to get back to work.”Abrams has sought to paint a starkly different picture of the economy under Kemp, one in which the wealthiest have profited while the poor have been left behind. At the center of her economic agenda is a plan to fully expand Medicaid, which she argues is critical to stopping a wave of hospital closures across the state, including a major trauma center in Atlanta that has become a flashpoint in the campaign.But it is a brewing national backlash to the supreme court decision overturning the federal right to an abortion that Abrams and Democrats believe could change the tide. In ads and on the campaign trail, Abrams has lashed Kemp for signing a 2019 law that bans abortion as early as six weeks in Georgia, before many women know they are pregnant. The law was allowed to take effect in the aftermath of the high court’s ruling.According to recent polling, most voters in Georgia disagree with the supreme court decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and more than half say the state’s abortion laws are too strict.“The No 1 issue that people talk about when I’m on the campaign trail is abortion rights,” said Nabilah Islam, the Democratic nominee for a competitive state senate seat in Gwinnett county.Islam, who has put abortion access at the center of her campaign, pointed to the rise in voter registration among women since the Dobbs decision. “There’s a feeling of helplessness,” she said, “but also hope because people are so angry that they’re organizing at levels unseen before.”Abrams is also working to shore up her base. Black voters are the cornerstone of the Democrats coalition in Georgia. While they still overwhelmingly prefer Democrats, there are some signs the party is struggling to motivate Black voters at the levels needed to win in Georgia.The trend is particularly pronounced among Black men, who have edged toward Republicans in recent years. In several polls, Kemp has notably improved his standing among Black voters from 2018.Ron DeSantis changes with the wind as Hurricane Ian prompts flip-flop on aidRead moreAbrams says she is taking no vote for granted. As part of her campaign’s outreach to Black men, she has hosted a series of conversations called “Stacey and the Fellas” to discuss how her initiatives on issues like healthcare and housing will benefit their communities.At one such event over the summer, she was blunt: “If Black men vote for me, I will win Georgia.”Andrekay Askew is among the roughly one in 10 Black voters who remain undecided in the state. The 27-year-old said he is skeptical of Democrats’ economic policies but was open to learning more about Abrams’s platform.Ultimately, he said, his decision would be guided by: “Who is better with the money?”Listening from the porch, his mother shook her head in disagreement. Laqua Askew, who works in special education, is a lifelong Democrat who voted for Abrams in 2018 and plans to do so again this year. She is worried about a lack of public school funding, as well as gun violence and crime, all of which she said takes a heavy toll on the low-income students she works with.“Kemp had the opportunity to make a change but he hasn’t,” she said. “We’ve got to try something else.”In a state as closely divided as Georgia, much could still change before election day. Kemp and Abrams will face off in a public debate that could help sway the critical few undecided voters. And if neither candidate wins a majority of the vote, the contest proceeds to a runoff election.Speaking at the AFL-CIO Labor Day picnic last month, Abrams asked supporters to spend the final weeks of the campaign focused on the “unfinished business” before them.“I can’t get this job if you all don’t show up,” she said. “I can get this job if you all do what you did in 2018.”
      Joan E Greve contributed to this report from Atlanta.
      TopicsUS midterm elections 2022AtlantaGeorgiaStacey AbramsUS politicsDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      The ‘all-out’ effort to overcome Georgia’s new restrictive voting bill

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      The ‘all-out’ effort to overcome Georgia’s new restrictive voting billSB202 is forcing officials and voting rights groups to use every resource to ensure elections run smoothly In 2021, the Election Integrity Act sent shockwaves across Georgia as citizens learned of new restrictions, such as curbing the way churches could provide pizza and water to voters. However, there are much broader effects of the bill being felt across the state as communities across Georgia prepare for midterm elections, the first major election since the signing of the controversial bill.The 98-page bill, also called SB202, impacts a litany of election elements ranging from voter ID laws to the distance at which food and water can be distributed to voters waiting in line. Election officials say they are being forced to use every resource at their disposal to navigate the bill and ensure this election season runs smoothly. But there is widespread concern that the new law will create fresh barriers to voters of color and the changing Georgia electorate.Kamala Harris says ‘everything on the line’ in midterm elections Read more“Internally, we are taking a multifaceted approach, strengthening leadership and expertise throughout departments, and working to beef up skillsets,” said Dele Lowman Smith, chair of the Dekalb county voter registration and election board. “Externally, we are expanding poll worker training and modernizing it to help better address voter concerns when they come up.”Lowman Smith, who was appointed to the position in July 2021, said it will take an all-out approach to ensure elections run smoothly in her county of more than 500,000 active voters.Although there were once 31 ballot drop boxes across the county in the 2020 election season, they are now allowed only six for the entire county as the bill prescribes one drop box per 100,000 voters. The time to request and return absentee ballots has dropped from 176 days to 59 days – more than 50% – forcing election officials to contend with a much quicker turnaround. Additionally, rather than completing absentee ballot applications solely online, voters must now include an original signature on their application, requiring access to a printer.Liza Conrad, deputy executive director of Fair Fight, a voting rights organization based in Georgia, said SB202 significantly burdens voters. “For voters who wish to vote by mail, many are now overcoming these barriers while attempting to make their voices heard,” she said. “If we look back to Georgia’s primary election in May, the rate of rejected vote by mail applications was much higher than that of 2020.”And while voter education once focused on civic engagement and political education, voting rights organizers such as Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, says engaging voters now has to include education around technology and intricacies of the law out of necessity.“What we have to do now is canvassing to really educate people about the process. We are trying to make sure people are still able to exercise their right to vote,” said Butler. “Every little thing seems to have had some kind of change. Even the secretary of state ‘my voter’ page [website] has changed, and now voters have to navigate through tabs instead of just having it all on one page, so we’re having to train voters on that now too.”Conrad, Butler, and Lowman Smith all think it is critical to note that the full breadth of the law goes well beyond absentee ballots, voter IDs and drop boxes. SB202 also limits poll workers’ ability to work at polls outside their county, limiting the capacity of many counties in Georgia as they struggle to find an adequate number of already dwindling poll workers.Shanice Amira Bennerson worked as a precinct manager for multiple elections between 2020 and 2022. However, after witnessing the impact SB202 changes had on voters during the May primaries, Bennerson decided not to continue her work as a poll worker.“Trying to help voters who were just so confused and dejected is heartbreaking. When you have limited precincts and voters who are confused by these changes, some voters just left. Tensions are high, and voters were understandably frustrated,” said Brennerson. “When you couple this with all of the new rules from [SB202] and the limited training we get, it almost feels like a disaster waiting to happen.”Voting organizations such as the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda and Fair Fight have sought ways to engage and encourage poll workers and election boards across the state to address capacity and education on a larger scale. Fair Fight is hosting a “Vote Gold Georgia” tour calling for intentional and expanded voting sites and voting times.Still, some voting rights organizations hope to call attention to the many changes prompted by SB202 by highlighting the voters most impacted by the law.“Anti-voter bills like SB202 are a response to Black, brown and young voters turning out and claiming their power in 2020,” says Conrad. “And so, we are working to continue to make sure that these communities continue to participate and make their voices heard and that the poll workers who keep our democracy functioning are empowered and protected.”Meredyth Yoon, litigation director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta, also thinks the bill unjustly targets voters of color, and hopes to bridge the gap in access it could create.Her group is reallocating resources and shifting its voter education approach to fully educate its communities around changes in timelines, requirements and other recent election changes.“Overall, the impact of the bill is on voters of color, and it was not an accident or unknown to legislators that these communities would ultimately be affected,” says Yoon. “These sorts of tactics are traditionally the types of restrictions that are intended to impact voters of color on the assumption of how voters of color will vote.”TopicsGeorgiaUS voting rightsUS midterm elections 2022RaceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More