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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

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      Middle East escalation, hurricane and strikes could cause Harris triple trouble

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      “100” was spelled out in giant numbers on the White House north lawn on Tuesday. It was a birthday tribute to the former US president Jimmy Carter, who served only one term after being buffeted by external events such as high inflation and a hostage crisis in Iran.The current occupant of the White House, Joe Biden, must know the feeling as he fights three fires at once. Iran has launched at least 180 missiles into Israel, six US states are still reeling from Hurricane Helene, and ports from Maine to Texas shut down as about 45,000 dockworkers went on strike.Unlike Carter, Biden already knows his fate: he is not seeking reelection next month. But what remains uncertain is whether the trio of troubles will drag down his vice-president and would-be successor, Kamala Harris. Certainly her rival, Donald Trump, smells an opportunity to tar her with the same brush of chaos.“The World is on fire and spiraling out of control,” he said in a written statement. “We have no leadership, no one running the Country. We have a non-existent President in Joe Biden, and a completely absent Vice President, Kamala Harris, who is too busy fundraising in San Francisco.”Will it stick? No one can be sure. Democrats must again be breathing a sigh of relief that they jettisoned Biden after his miserable debate performance in June. The president steeped in foreign policy is running at one catastrophe a year: the botched Afghanistan withdrawal of 2021, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the deadly Hamas attack on Israel in 2023.He has tried and failed to wield influence over the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Gaza. Last week Biden told reporters about a plan for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon and seemed to think Netanyahu was on board; a day later, a massive Israeli airstrike killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. It looked like a case study in presidential impotence and the limits of American power.Now, after the Iranian missile assault, Israel has vowed to retaliate and Republicans are ready to pounce. Nikki Haley, a former US ambassador to the UN, told Fox News: “You look at the time under Trump, there were no wars, there were no conflicts, and the reason is at least our allies knew where we stood. With Biden and Harris, they never know where we stand.”This talking point – a world in disarray under Biden, in contrast to years of glorious peace under Trump – should come with plenty of caveats, not least Trump’s decision to tear up the Iran nuclear deal and strike a deal to end the war in Afghanistan. It is also harder to make now that Biden has made way for Harris.The vice-president has spent her candidacy pursuing a Goldilocks principle: not too hot on Biden, not too cold on Biden, but displaying just-right loyalty. She heaps praise on the president and delivered an address at the Democratic national convention that channelled Biden on US leadership in the world. But she is also the candidate of “turn the page” and “a new way forward” who will never let the phrase “Bidenomics” pass her lips again.Current events are again testing where Harris the vice-president ends and Harris the candidate begins. Activists on the left are eager for any hint that she will give Palestinians a more sympathetic ear and take a harder line on Netanyahu. The Uncommitted National Movement has declined to endorse her, citing her unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy.At the White House press briefing, one reporter was eager to know what her engagement had been like during the Iranian attack on Israel. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, was at pains to say that Harris had joined the president in the situation room.“She was there,” Jean-Pierre said. “She was alongside him in getting that update, and she many times has been in the room or, as you just said, has called in when it’s come to really important, critical national security issues.”Later Harris herself made an unplanned public appearance to address the Middle East escalation – reaffirming her commander-in-chief credentials in a way she would not have felt obliged to do four months ago. She took care to note that she had been in the situation room and promised: “My commitment to the security of Israel is unwavering.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSimilarly, both candidates are racing to put their stamp on Hurricane Helene, which crashed ashore in Florida last Thursday with a wind field stretching 350 miles from its centre. It has killed at least 150 people and wiped out hundreds of homes and businesses. The homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, described it as being of “an historic magnitude”.Trump travelled to Georgia on Monday and falsely claimed that Biden had not spoken to its governor, Brian Kemp. Harris will travel to Georgia on Wednesday and to North Carolina in the coming days. The stakes are high: administrations have long been haunted by the failed response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.But it is the third crisis that could have the biggest electoral impact of all. The first dockworkers’ strike since 1977 could snarl supply chains and cause shortages and higher prices if it stretches on for more than a few weeks. That would be a political gift to Trump, whose polling lead on the economy has been eroded by Harris. Both are vying for trade union support.Trump, who has previously praised Elon Musk for firing workers who go on strike, said in a statement: “The situation should have never come to this and, had I been President, it would not have … Americans who thrived under President Trump can’t even get by because of Kamala Harris – this strike is a direct result of her actions.”All this and it was still only 1 October. The only surprise now would be if there are no more October surprises to come. More

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      JD Vance and Tim Walz keep it civil in policy-heavy vice-presidential debate – US elections live

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      Good morning and welcome to the blog as we wake up to reaction to Tim Walz and JD Vance’s vice-presidential debate which offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.It was a debate that was surprisingly civil in the final stretch of an ugly election campaign marred by inflammatory rhetoric and two assassination attempts.The two rivals, who have forcefully attacked each other on the campaign trail, mostly struck a cordial tone, instead saving their fire for the candidates at the top of their tickets, democratic vice-president Kamala Harris and Republican former president Donald Trump.The most tense exchange occurred near the end of the debate, when Vance – who has said he would not have voted to certify the results of the 2020 election – avoided a question about whether he would challenge this year’s vote if Trump loses.Walz responded by blaming Trump’s false claims of voter fraud for instigating the 6 January 2021, mob that attacked the US Capitol in an unsuccessful effort to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election.“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, before turning to Vance. “Did he lose the 2020 election?”Vance again sidestepped the question, instead accusing Harris of pursuing online censorship of opposing viewpoints. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.Meanwhile, CNN’s snap poll has viewers split over who won the debate – but Vance narrowly wins. The poll of 574 registered voters saw 51% say that Vance won the debate, with 49% choosing Walz.Polled before the debate, 54% of voters thought Walz was likelier to win.JD Vance refused to say whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and continued to sidestep questions over whether he would certify a Trump loss this fall during the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday.The exchange brought out some of the sharpest attacks from Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate and Minnesota governor, in what was otherwise a muted and civil back-and-forth with the Ohio senator.Walz asked Vance directly whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance responded: “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” Walz then cut in with one of his most aggressive attack lines of the evening: “That is a damning non-answer.”Vance has previously said that he would have asked states to submit alternative slates of electors to Congress to continue to debate allegations of election irregularities in 2020. By the time Congress met during the last election to consider electoral votes, courts, state officials and the US supreme court had all turned away efforts to block legitimate slates of electors from being sent to Congress.Pressed by CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell on whether he would again refuse to certify the vote this year, Vance declined to answer.“What President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020, and my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square,” Vance said. “And that’s all I’ve said and that’s all that Donald Trump has said.” He later said that if Walz won the election with Harris, Walz would have his support.Trump has warned of a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t win the election. He has also said supporters won’t have to vote anymore if he wins in November. Both the Trump campaign and Republican allies are seeding the ground to contest a possible election loss in November.Donald Trump’s senior aides saw JD Vance as having a slick debate performance over Tim Walz, according to people close to Trump, that made his campaign appear palatable despite the former president’s increasingly caustic threats such as vowing to prosecute his perceived enemies.The campaign aides also believed that Vance reset the narrative over his image and likely came across in a more favorable light to undecided voters after a brutal few months of being hammered for making disparaging remarks about women as “childless cat ladies”.Vance’s favorability issue was perhaps the principal priority for Trump’s senior aides because they saw it as potentially fixable and if so, beneficial to the Trump campaign with fewer than five weeks until election day in what has become a vanishingly close race against Kamala Harris.Afterwards, Trump predictably claimed Vance won the debate, but a CBS News poll confirmed how vice-presidential​ debates matter increasingly less in close elections compared to ground game efforts to drive turnout.In the post-debate poll, 42% of respondents said Vance won the debate, 41% gave the win to Walz, while 17% said it was tied – suggesting the main takeaway remains that it is unlikely to play any material role in which campaign wins each of the seven battleground states in November.Tim Walz and JD Vance took to the stage on Tuesday night for a vice-presidential debate that served up less drama than September’s presidential debate, but offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.Three weeks ago Kamala Harris and Donald Trump had endured a contentious hour-and-a-half, with an emotional Trump being goaded into ranting about the number of people who attend his rallies and declaring the vice-president to be a “Marxist”, before reportedly threatening to sue one of the debate moderators. Harris enjoyed a brief polling uptick from that performance.But on Tuesday, Walz and Vance largely avoided attacks on each other, and instead concentrated their fire on each other’s running mates. It was a more policy-driven discussion than that of their running mates’, but one with a few gaffes that might overshadow some of the substance in coming days.In a key exchange over abortion, Walz, the governor of Minnesota, followed Harris’s lead in using personal stories.Trump “brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v Wade”, Walz said. He noted the case of Amanda Zurawski, who was denied an abortion in Texas despite serious health complications during pregnancy – Zurawski is now part of a group of women suing the state of Texas – and a girl in Kentucky who as a child was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant.“If you don’t know [women like this], you soon will. Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said, which Vance contested.Walz also criticized the Trump-Vance position that states should decide whether women have access to abortion.“That’s not how this works. This is basic human rights. We have seen maternal mortality skyrocket in Texas, outpacing many other countries in the world,” he said.Good morning and welcome to the blog as we wake up to reaction to Tim Walz and JD Vance’s vice-presidential debate which offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.It was a debate that was surprisingly civil in the final stretch of an ugly election campaign marred by inflammatory rhetoric and two assassination attempts.The two rivals, who have forcefully attacked each other on the campaign trail, mostly struck a cordial tone, instead saving their fire for the candidates at the top of their tickets, democratic vice-president Kamala Harris and Republican former president Donald Trump.The most tense exchange occurred near the end of the debate, when Vance – who has said he would not have voted to certify the results of the 2020 election – avoided a question about whether he would challenge this year’s vote if Trump loses.Walz responded by blaming Trump’s false claims of voter fraud for instigating the 6 January 2021, mob that attacked the US Capitol in an unsuccessful effort to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election.“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, before turning to Vance. “Did he lose the 2020 election?”Vance again sidestepped the question, instead accusing Harris of pursuing online censorship of opposing viewpoints. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.Meanwhile, CNN’s snap poll has viewers split over who won the debate – but Vance narrowly wins. The poll of 574 registered voters saw 51% say that Vance won the debate, with 49% choosing Walz.Polled before the debate, 54% of voters thought Walz was likelier to win. More

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      Walz and Vance embrace an endangered US political species: agreement

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      There was a strange feeling as the vice-presidential debate got under way in the CBS News studios on Tuesday night that only intensified as 90 minutes of detailed policy discussion unfolded: was the United States in danger of regaining its sanity?After weeks and months of being assailed by Donald Trump’s dystopian evocation of a country on the verge of self-destruction, amplified by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s dire warnings of democracy in peril, here was something very different. The two vice-presidential nominees were embracing that most endangered of American political species: agreement.“Tim, I actually think I agree with you,” said JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, addressing his opposite number Tim Walz during the discussion on immigration.“Much of what the senator said right there, I’m in agreement with him,” said Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic nominee, as they turned to trade policy.It wasn’t true, of course. The two men were no closer to agreement than their bosses, who in their own presidential debate last month showed themselves to be worlds apart.But on Tuesday it was as if the CBS News studio in midtown Manhattan had been transported back to a prelapsarian – or at least, pre-Maga – times. To an era when politicians could be civil, and to get on you didn’t have to castigate your opponent as an enemy of the people.For Vance the metamorphosis was especially striking. He is, after all, running mate to the architect of “American carnage”.For his own part, the senator from Ohio has spread malicious untruths about legal-resident Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating people’s cats and dogs. Not to mention that he’s the “childless cat-ladies” guy.An unrecognisable Vance emerged on the New York stage. This one listened respectfully to his debating partner, spoke in whole and largely measured sentences, and went so far as to admit his own fallibility – three qualities that the former president rarely emulates.Vance had reason to present himself differently from Trump, perhaps. At 40, to Trump’s 78, he has the future to think about – his own future.But his affable demeanor was also artifice. When it came to the content of what he said, the Republican vice-presidential nominee was as economical with the truth as his overseer.He lied with abandon, in fact. He just did it with a silken tongue.He talked about the vice-president presiding over an “open border” with Mexico when numbers of border-crossers are actually at a four-year low. He claimed he had not supported a national abortion ban – oh yes he did, repeatedly during his 2022 senatorial race.On the Middle East crisis, he accused the “Kamala Harris administration” of handing Iran $100bn in the form of unfrozen assets – not true. It was $55bn, and it was negotiated under Barack Obama.Perhaps most egregiously, he said Trump had “salvaged” the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Obama’s wildly popular healthcare insurance scheme commonly known as Obamacare. “Salvaged” was an interesting choice of word to apply to Trump, who tried 60 times to destroy the ACA without offering any alternative.Yet it would have taken an attentive viewer to see behind Vance’s smooth comportment to the lies he was purveying. The former tech investor and bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy looked comfortable on stage and in his own skin, presenting himself as the reasonable Trump, a Maga lion in sheep’s clothing.Walz by contrast had moments in which he came across as tense and uneasy, the pre-debate nerves that had been reported by CNN appearing to have been genuine. While Vance beamed his piercingly-blue eyes direct to camera, the Minnesota governor frequently looked down at his notes.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe folksy, aw-shucks “Coach Walz” who has taken the US by storm since he was plucked out of Minnesota obscurity to be Harris’s running mate was largely absent.He stumbled on occasion, garbling his words to refer to having become “friends” with school shooters rather than their victims’ families. And he mishandled a question about why he had wrongly claimed to have visited China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, woodenly trying to dodge the issue by calling himself a “knucklehead”.But when push came to shove, Walz came through. On the subjects that matter most to Harris in her bid to become the first female president, and the first woman of color in the Oval Office, he hit Vance hard – civilly, but hard.On abortion he followed his running mate’s lead and spoke movingly about the personal impact of Trump’s effective evisceration of Roe v Wade. He invoked the story of Amber Thurman, who died as she traveled in search of reproductive care from Georgia to North Carolina.That even extracted one of the most surprising “I agree” remarks of the evening from the staunchly anti-abortion Vance: “Governor, I agree with you, Amber Thurman should still be alive … and I certainly wish that she was.”There was only one point in the evening when the kid gloves came off, and the cod display of gentility was discarded by both parties. It came when Vance had the audacity to claim – silkenly, naturally – that Harris’s attempts to “censor” misinformation in public discourse posed a far greater threat to democracy than Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election on January 6.“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance deflected when Walz asked him directly whether Trump had lost that contest. “That is a damning non-answer,” the Democrat shot back, his face pained.In the last analysis, both men were only there playing the role of side-kick. They may have raised hopes that civility could make a comeback to US politics, but let Trump have the last word.“Walz was a Low IQ Disaster – Very much like Kamala,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site shortly after the debate had ended. And just like that, it was business as usual. More