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      Barack Obama to campaign for Harris across battleground states next week

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      Former president Barack Obama will crisscross the battleground states for Kamala Harris, with a kickoff in all-important Pennsylvania next week, according to a senior Harris campaign official.Obama will hold his first event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania next Thursday, the beginning of a blitz across the handful of rust belt and sun belt states that will probably decide the 2024 election.Obama will be appearing in the swing state after Republican nominee Donald Trump returns on Saturday to Butler, the Pennsylvania town where he survived an assassination attempt in July.Obama remains one of the Democrats most powerful surrogates, second perhaps only to his wife, Michelle Obama. His return to the campaign trail follows a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, in which he cast Harris as a forward-looking figure and a natural heir to his diverse, youth-powered political coalition.“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos,” he told the convention in August. “We have seen that movie before and we all know that the sequel is usually worse. America is ready for a new chapter.”Harris was one of Obama’s earliest supporters when he launched a long-shot presidential bid against Hillary Clinton in 2007. She would go on to knock on doors for him ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2008.Harris’s campaign already includes several former Obama campaign staff, including strategist David Plouffe, Stephanie Cutter – who was Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012 – and Mitch Stewart, Obama’s grassroots strategist for both campaigns. Stewart is Harris’s adviser for battleground states, among which Pennsylvania is a must-win for either side.Key to winning Pennsylvania could be winning the Latino vote. About 90,000 Latino voters might still be undecided, according to Penn State professor, A K Sandoval-Strausz, writing in the Conversation, who argues that an endorsement for Harris from Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny could have a greater impact on the election than Taylor Swift’s. In 2020, Biden won the state by 80,000 votes – or a single point. In 2016, Trump took the state with just 44,292 votes.According to the latest average of Pennsylvania polling from the Hill/Decision Desk HQ, Harris leads Trump by just 0.9 points in the state. More

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      Liz Cheney campaigns with Harris and urges voters to reject Trump’s ‘cruelty’

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      Liz Cheney, one of Donald Trump’s most prominent conservative critics, appealed to the millions of undecided Americans who could decide the outcome of the 2024 election, asking them to “reject the depraved cruelty” of the former president.A former representative from Wyoming, Cheney cast the stakes in November as nothing less than the future of American democracy as she appeared alongside Kamala Harris in Ripon, Wisconsin, on Thursday, the symbolic birthplace of the modern Republican party.The daughter of Dick Cheney, the Republican former vice-president, said she had never voted for a Democrat before, but would do so “proudly” to ensure Trump never holds a position of public trust again. Her father will join her in casting his ballot for Harris.“I know that the most conservative of conservative values is fidelity to our constitution,” Cheney said, speaking from a podium adorned with the vice presidential seal. The crowd broke into a chant: “Thank you, Liz!” A large sign looming over them declared: “Country over Party.”Harris praised Cheney’s “courage” for being willing to cross party lines to endorse – and campaign alongside – the Democratic nominee. During the event, a remarkable joint appearance that would have been unimaginable in the pre-Trump era, Cheney pitched Harris as a unifying leader who will safeguard American institutions.Cheney and Harris agree on little politically – only that Trump should not be allowed to serve a second term. But their union is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to win over Republican voters who, like Cheney, believe in “limited government” and “low taxes” but are repelled by Trump and his Maga movement.“No matter your political party, there is a place for you with us and in this campaign,” Harris said. “I take seriously my pledge to be a president for all Americans.”Harris touts a growing collection of endorsements from prominent Republican leaders and ex-Trump administration officials, including Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump White House who testified against him in the January 6 House hearings, as well as Anthony Scaramucci, former White House communications director, and Stephanie Grisham, a former press secretary.Adam Kinzinger, a former Illinois representative and the only other Republican to serve on the January 6 committee, also is backing Harris, and forcefully denounced Trump in a speech at the Democratic national convention in August.In a reprisal of her role as the vice-chair of the House select committee investigating the 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Cheney on Thursday methodically recounted for the crowd how Trump had refused for hours to intervene on January 6, instead watching the violence unfold on television.“After the Capitol had been invaded, he praised the rioters. He did not condemn them. That’s who Donald Trump is,” she said. Cheney rebuked Republicans who have sought to “minimize what happened” that day.“Do not let anyone lie about what happened and what they did,” she said, adding: “Violence does not and must never determine who rules us. Voters do.”Cheney was effectively exiled from her own party after she broke forcefully with the former president. But on Thursday, she said it was Trump, thrice chosen as the Republican nominee, who was failing to uphold the founding ideals of the “party of Lincoln”. With a dash of arch humor, she added: “I was a Republican even before Donald Trump started spray-tanning.”Harris’s appearance with Cheney came one day after a judge unsealed new evidence in a federal case against Trump for his attempt to cling to power in 2020. In the court filing, federal prosecutors allege that he amplified false claims of voter fraud and “resorted to crimes” in his failed bid to overturn the results of an election he lost.At a rally in Michigan earlier on Thursday, Trump repeated the false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election.“We won. We won,” Trump said in Saginaw, a swing county in the midwestern battleground. “We have to be too big to rig.”Harris will travel to Michigan on Thursday night, and campaign in Detroit on Friday, as the candidates battle for votes in the trio of “blue wall” swing states seen as the clearest path to the White House.Leaving the White House on Thursday, Joe Biden said he was hardly surprised by the razor-thin margins.“It always gets this close,” he told reporters. “She’s going to do fine.”He also praised her running mate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, for his performance against JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, during Tuesday night’s debate in New York. Near the end of the 90-minute exchange, Walz turned to the subject of the 2020 election: had Trump lost? he asked Vance.Vance replied that he was “focused on the future”.“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz replied, adding that Vance’s loyalty to Trump above all else was the reason he and not the former vice-president, Mike Pence, was there on stage that night. The response was clipped and immediately re-packaged by the Harris campaign into a television ad.On January 6, as protesters chanted: “Hang Mike Pence,” the then vice-president resisted pressure from Trump to reject the votes of the electoral college and returned to the Capitol after it was breached to certify Biden’s victory.On Thursday, Cheney claimed Vance, in Pence’s shoes, would have “thrown out the votes of the people of Wisconsin” because they had voted to elect Biden as president in 2020. “That is tyranny, and that is disqualifying,” she said.Cheney effectively ended her own political career by voting to impeach Trump over his role in stoking a mob of supporters that attacked the Capitol on 6 January 2021. She was one of just two Republicans willing to serve on the House select committee investigation into the attack that sought to hold Trump – and his Republican enablers – accountable for the sprawling effort to overturn his defeat.She lost a 2022 Republican primary, but has remained a vocal critic of the former president. Before Biden stepped aside, Cheney said she was mulling a third-party bid.But on Thursday, she made clear there was no other alternative to Trump. Cheney quoted from a letter that John Adams, the nation’s second president, wrote to his wife on the first night he spent in the White House: “May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”“Now I am confident,” she said, her smile widening, “that John Adams meant women, too.” More

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      Bruce Springsteen endorses Kamala Harris for president while criticising ‘dangerous’ Trump

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      Bruce Springsteen has officially thrown his support behind Kamala Harris, endorsing her for president and simultaneously opposing Donald Trump, calling him “the most dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime”.The Born to Run singer made the announcement in a video posted to his Instagram on Thursday evening (US time) in which he described the upcoming election as “one of the most consequential elections in our nation’s history”.“Perhaps not since the Civil War has this great country felt as politically, spiritually and emotionally divided as it does at this moment. It doesn’t have to be this way.”Springsteen, who was a vocal supporter of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in their respective presidential campaigns, is the latest high-profile endorsement for Harris, joining Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey and Barbra Streisand.In the video, he praised Harris and Walz’s commitment to “a vision of this country that respects and includes everyone, regardless of class, religion, race, your political point of view or sexual identity, and they want to grow our economy in a way that benefits all, not just a few like me on top”.“That’s the vision of America I’ve been consistently writing about for 55 years.”Trump, by contrast, “doesn’t understand the meaning of this country, its history or what it means to be deeply American”, the singer said.“His disdain for the sanctity of our constitution, the sanctity of democracy, the sanctity of the rule of law and the sanctity of the peaceful transfer of power should disqualify him from the office of president ever again.”Concluding, Springsteen said: “Now, everybody sees things different, and I respect your choice as a fellow citizen. But like you, I’ve only got one vote, and it’s one of the most precious possessions that I have. That’s why come November 5 I’ll be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Thanks for listening.” More

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      Trump falsely claims Helene victims had no federal help despite Biden-Harris sending $20m in aid – live

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      As Joe Biden visits the wreckage of Hurricane Helene, Donald Trump has been baselessly suggesting that the administration has ignored Republican victims and that federal aid is scarce because funds are being given to immigrants.“They’re dying, and they’re getting no help from our federal government because their money has been spent on people that should not be in our country,” Trump told his supporters.The Biden-Harris administration said that the government has provided $20m in “flexible, upfront funding” and deployed 5,000 federal personnel to aid in recovery.Donald Trump repeated lies about the Biden administration’s hurricane response, going so far as to claim that the president and vice-president were “stealing” Fema funds to give to immigrants.“They stole the Fema money like they stole it from a bank so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season,” he said.Trump and his allies have been repeatedly claiming that Fema is out of money because it allocated funds to help communities receiving an influx of immigrants at the border.Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, did warn that Fema is underfunded for the remainder of hurricane season. That’s in part because the stop-gap government funding bill did not contain enough funding for Fema, which is facing a $2bn deficit.Fema’s Shelter and Services Program allocated $300m during the 2024 fiscal year to help communities “offset the costs of providing food, shelter and other supportive services after receiving an influx of migrants”. That’s a small fraction of the agency’s overall budget. For 2025, it has requested a total of $33.1bn.At his rally, Trump also claimed he “had the best four years with hurricanes”.During his tenure …

      Trump imposed a hiring freeze at the National Weather Service, resulting in more than 200 of vacancies within the agency that predicts and oversees extreme weather warnings. The Washington Post reported in 2017: “Some of those Weather Service vacancies listed in the document, obtained by the Sierra Club through a Freedom of Information Act and shared with The Washington Post, were in locations that would be hit by the major hurricanes that barreled through the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.”

      Trump falsely claimed that Hurricane Maria’s death toll was being inflated by his Democratic rivals. In fact, studies suggest that far more people died than the official death toll suggested at the time. A report by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health estimates up to 4,600 people were killed.

      In 2021, a report by the housing department’s office of the inspector general found that Trump administration delayed more than $20bn in hurricane relief aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

      An internal report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency also found that it failed to properly prepare for hurricane season.
      In a review of Trump’s record responding to natural disasters, E&E also found a discrepency in aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, which primarily affected Florida; and Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
      On March 9, 2019, Trump signed an order directing FEMA to pay 100 percent of most disaster costs in Florida. As a result, FEMA paid roughly $350 million more than it would have without Trump’s intervention, according to an E&E News analysis.
      But less than two months earlier, Trump threatened to veto a disaster-aid measure in Congress that would have FEMA pay 100 percent of all disaster costs in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricane Maria killed more than 3,000 people.
      According to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s book, Trump said: “They love me in the Panhandle … I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?”The voting habits of residents did play into Donald Trump’s decision-making about disaster relief when he was president, reports E&E News.The outlet interviewed Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council, who revealed that the former president refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018.From E&E:
      But Harvey said Trump changed his mind after Harvey pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.
      ‘We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,’ said Harvey, who recently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris alongside more than 100 other Republican former national security officials.
      California’s governor Gavin Newsom, reacted to the report on Twitter/X, calling it a “glimpse into the future” if Trump is re-elected.Joe Biden, meanwhile, wrote: “You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you. It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it.”As Joe Biden visits the wreckage of Hurricane Helene, Donald Trump has been baselessly suggesting that the administration has ignored Republican victims and that federal aid is scarce because funds are being given to immigrants.“They’re dying, and they’re getting no help from our federal government because their money has been spent on people that should not be in our country,” Trump told his supporters.The Biden-Harris administration said that the government has provided $20m in “flexible, upfront funding” and deployed 5,000 federal personnel to aid in recovery.“His competition that night? He cannot be president. He cannot be president of the United States,” Donald Trump said of JD Vance’s vice-presidential opponent, Tim Walz.“How good did JD Vance do the other night?” Trump added, praising his running mate as the crowd descended into a cheers of “JD! JD!”“I drafted the best athlete,” Trump continued.Donald Trump pledged to bring back drilling in the Alaska arctic wildlife refuge if he becomes president.Trump said:
      We would have supplied the entire Asian continent. We would have supplied Asia. We would have supplied everybody. But we’ll have it redone very quickly … I actually got it approved in Congress as part of …the biggest tax cuts in history for this country. I got that approved in Congress. We got ANWR [Alaska National Wildlife Refuge] so they didn’t kill it in Congress, and I don’t think they ever could. So we’ll get it back very quickly. It’s going to be back very fast.
      Trump added:
      And it would have been great for Alaska but it would have also … been great for our country but we’ll have it approved very quickly.
      In 2021, Trump’s administration auctioned off portions of ANWR to oil drillers but failed to attract much bidders.Donald Trump has switched his attacks on Joe Biden, calling him “the worst foreign policy president”.The former president then went on to say: “We have to be too big to rig” before going on to repeat the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.The crowd, highly energized, descended into a chant of “Trump! Trump! Trump!”Donald Trump has walked on stage to Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA.“We’re going to make America great again,” Trump said in his opening remarks before launching into a tirade against Kamala Harris, calling her a slew of names including “Lying Kamala”.Donald Trump is scheduled to hold a rally shortly in Saginaw, Michigan.Stay tuned as we bring you the latest updates.Here are some images coming through the news wires of Hurricane Helene and its aftermath across the country:The Biden administration has provided nearly $4m directly to individuals and families in need of critical financial assistance, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said onboard an Air Force One gaggle as the president was en route to Tallahassee, Florida.She went on to add:
      Yesterday, we announced that the president approved 100% federal cost share for emergency response activities in Florida and Georgia, as well as Tallahassee [Tennessee] and North Carolina. This means that the federal government will cover 100% of the costs associated with things like debris removal, first responders, search and rescue, shelters, and mass feeding.
      This latest announcement builds the president’s previously approved requests for major disaster declarations from the governors of Florida and Georgia, which unlocked additional assistance for residents on their road to recovery. More

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      Major US firefighter union declines to endorse Trump or Harris for president

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      The International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) has declined to endorse a candidate ahead of next month’s US presidential election, despite efforts by both the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigns to court the union.“This decision, which we took very seriously, is the best way to preserve and strengthen our unity,” the IAFF said in a statement.The union, which has almost 350,000 members, was a key part of the coalition built by Joe Biden – and the first union to back the president’s run for election in 2020.It is the second leading trade union to refrain from endorsing either Harris or Trump as tens of millions of Americans prepare to cast their votes. The Teamsters International, a US transportation workers union that represents more than 1.3 million workers, also announced it would not back a candidate.Both campaigns had sought the IAFF’s support, with Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, and JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, addressing the union’s convention in August.Walz claimed in his speech that he had signed “the most comprehensive firefighter legislation in the nation” as governor of Minnesota. Vance, who grappled with boos from the audience, claimed that he and Trump represented a “new kind of Republican party” and would “never stop fighting” for first responders.On Thursday, the IAFF said its executive board had voted by a margin of 1.2% to not endorse a presidential candidate. “We encourage our members – and all eligible voters – to get out and make their voices heard in the upcoming election,” said Edward Kelly, the union’s president.It is not the first time the IAFF has refrained from backing a candidate. While it endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, it reportedly shelved plans to publicly support Hillary Clinton, the Democrat presidential candidate in 2016. More

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      ‘People are giving, sharing’: Augusta comes together as Kamala Harris surveys damage

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      As Kamala Harris descended on Wednesday into Augusta, she met a city contemplating how much of their lives have been unmade by Hurricane Helene.“I am here to personally take a look at the devastation,” Harris said after receiving a briefing by emergency response leaders in Georgia. “It’s particularly devastating in terms of loss of life that this community has experienced, the loss of normalcy, and the loss of critical resources.”The Augusta area hasn’t quite drawn the national attention given to western North Carolina, with its washed-out roads and severe flooding. Augusta is still marginally functional. Hurricane Helene shaved the land here with a dull razor. The damage resembles a tornado strike more than a hurricane, said Leroy Redfield, describing pockets of destruction that make what survived all the more remarkable.“Driving in, in a mile you’ll see at least 20 broken power poles,” he said. “I mean broken in half.” Redfield has taken to watching in the morning to see where new poles go up; that’s where the power is going next.Most people here have been without power since Friday morning. Some had been unable to leave their homes for days, as tall poplar, live oak and cedar trees littered the streets. Uprooted trees line every major road. Trees along Augusta’s downtown strip lie on their sides, torn out of the sidewalk straight through four inches of concrete.View image in fullscreenAnd yet, just as Harris was offering her assessment of the damage a few blocks away, Sherman Gartrell was tossing lemon pepper wings in a food truck next to a toppled tree on Broad Street, feeding people for free as they came. A furniture store owner on Broad Street had paid for him to come down from Athens and help, Gartrell said.Broad Street still had power, though most places could only take cash because internet service outages had rendered credit card processing useless. Water was out. Most things were out, frankly. And yet, somehow, the street still had some bustle because everything everywhere else seemed to still be some flavor of broke.“We’ve found that people down south, they still do the right thing,” said Melanie Lumpkin of Augusta. Wednesday was the first she had been able to venture out of her neighborhood, she said. “People are giving, you know, sharing. We were at a store, and the guy needed $2 in cash, and every single person in line immediately reached for their wallet. People are sharing gas and food and bringing their neighbors cooked meats.”Lumpkin has a tree visiting her attic, and two more that took out her carport and shed. Augusta’s aggressive humidity has already caused mildew and rot in the house. Water is spotty; power is nonexistent. She’s insured, but the first quote to get the trees off of her home came in at $60,000, Lumpkin said.It’s too soon to assess whether the state and federal emergency response has been effective, her son Will Lumpkin said. “Augusta is really coming together, but at the same time, there’s still a long way to go. “I don’t think we were prepared. This isn’t going to be months. For this, it will be years.”But Mary Katherine Gorlich said this could have been much worse. “This would have been very different with someone else in the White House,” Gorlich said. The army veteran said she loved Augusta but had been considering her options overseas in the wake of a possible Joe Biden loss before Harris’s ascent.View image in fullscreenRepublican voters were aware that Donald Trump had visited Georgia recently. Nonetheless, most voters may be locked in at this point, even with a hurricane reshaping their lives.“Nobody’s changing,” said John Oates, taking refuge in an Augusta hotel while the power is out. “Nobody’s changing their mind.”The politics of catastrophe have yet to reveal themselves in Augusta. But the Lumpkins are worried that Augusta’s racially fractious local government will end up relegating Augusta to last place on the repair list.The White House appears to be taking some measures to short-circuit local and regional competition for relief.“The president and I have been paying close attention from the beginning to what we need to do to make sure federal resources hit the ground as quickly as possible, and that includes what was necessary to make sure that we provided direct federal assistance,” Harris said.“We are at our best when we work together and coordinate resources, coordinate our communications to maximum effect.”People living in one of the counties under an emergency order are eligible for a $750 Fema payment to offset losses. Upfront funds can be used to help with essential items like food, water, baby formula and other emergency supplies. Funds may also be available to repair storm-related damage to homes and personal property, as well as assistance to find a temporary place to stay.Fema personnel have been going door to door to assess people’s needs and help them apply, Harris said. More

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      JD Vance’s debate lines were so polished you could forget they made no sense | Moira Donegan

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      Maybe he thought the pink tie could help. JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, clearly set out to make himself seem less creepy at Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, and a major target of this project was aimed at convincing women voters to like him. Vance, after all, has what pollsters call “high unfavorables”, which is a polite way of saying that people hate his guts.Much of this stems from Vance’s extreme and inflexible views on abortion, his hostility to childless women, and his creepy statements about families and childrearing. He had to convince women that he’s not out to hurt them or monitor their menstrual cycles; he had to try and seem kindly, empathetic, gentle. The resulting 90 minutes felt like watching a remarkably lifelike robot try to imitate normal human emotion. He smiled. He cooed. He spoke of an anonymous woman he knew whom he said was watching, and told her: “Love ya”. And occasionally, when he was fact-checked or received pushback on his falsehoods or distortions, the eyes of his stiff, fixed face flashed with an incandescent rage.A generous characterization of Vance’s performance might be to call it “slick”. Vance delivered practiced answers to questions on healthcare, abortion rights and childcare that were dense with lies and euphemism. Asked about his call for a national abortion ban, Vance insisted that what he wanted was a national “standard” – a standard, that is, to ban it at 15 weeks.He spoke in what was probably supposed to be empathetic terms about a woman he had grown up with who had told him that she felt she had had to have the abortion she got when they were younger, because it allowed her to leave her abusive relationship – without clarifying that the laws that Vance supports would have compelled that woman he purports to care about to carry her abuser’s child to term, and likely become trapped with him.He claimed that Americans didn’t “trust” Republicans on the abortion issue, but did not mention that they don’t trust Republicans because those are the ones taking their rights away.When asked about childcare, Vance spoke in eerily imprecise terms about encouraging people to choose their preferred “family model”, without specifying exactly which “model” he had in mind. He spoke of the “multiple people who could be providing family care options” but did not specify if these “people” had anything in common with each other. In media appearances throughout his career, Vance has been more explicit: he means that women will perform childcare for free – dropping out of paid work in the public sphere to do so, if necessary.Vance was confident and smiling as he delivered these lines; he had the greasy self-assurance of someone who is used to lying to people he thinks are stupider than him. He sounded every bit like the Yale Law lawyer that he is. Even when he was not degrading women’s dignity or condescending to the two female moderators, his answers were often delivered with a polish that seemed intended to conceal the fact that they made no sense.Asked about the housing crisis, for instance, he said that mass deportations – a horrific ethnic-cleansing operation proposed by the Trump campaign that would ruin communities, families and lives – would lower prices by decreasing demand. It was a kind of repeat of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, but this time it wasn’t satire. He also suggested that the government could build housing on federal lands – but neglected to mention that most of those lands are in the vast, rural, empty Mountain West, in regions with lots of tumbleweeds and absolutely no jobs.Perhaps Vance’s quintessential moment of the night came early, when he was attempting to further his smears of the Haitian immigrant community of Springfield, Ohio, whom he had previously targeted with lies that they eat pets. Vance was cut off by the moderators, but talked over them insistently. “Margaret. Margaret. Margaret. Margaret”, he said repeatedly, trying to strong-arm one of the women into letting him talk. As they corrected his misstatements, he whined to the women: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!”Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, reportedly told Kamala Harris when he was being vetted for the job that he does not consider himself a good debater. Going in, expectations for him were low. And indeed Walz had an uneven night, sometimes appearing flustered or nervous. An early answer on foreign policy, in particular, was confused and unconvincing. But Walz visibly gained confidence throughout the debate, issuing more forceful answers, attacking Trump and Vance’s record, and emphasizing himself, often successfully, as a homespun purveyor of goodwill and common sense.He was most convincing on what seems to be, for him, the most morally animating issues: healthcare and abortion. Walz named Amber Thurman, a woman killed by an abortion ban, as someone whose life could have been saved were it not for Trump’s policies; he spoke with passion and clarity of how Trump’s plan to reverse the Affordable Care Act would kick millions off their insurance.But perhaps Walz’s best moment came near the end of the debate, in a conversation about democracy, when he pointedly asked JD Vance to say whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance dodged.“That’s a damning non-answer,” Walz said. It could have summarized Vance’s whole performance.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More