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      Ro Khanna says he’s not a fan of fellow Democrats calling Republicans ‘weird’

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      Congressman and Kamala Harris campaign surrogate Ro Khanna said he doesn’t support the trend among his fellow Democrats of calling Republicans “weird” on the election trail.“I’m not, in candor, a fan of calling each other ‘weird’ or names, I don’t think that advanced American democracy,” the California US House representative said during a live event with the Guardian at the Texas Tribune festival Saturday in Austin. “I think we have to – in this country, and as a party – not just win, but deserve victory. And to deserve victory means to offer a vision that is going to bring this country together with a common purpose.”That common purpose, he said, was economic growth, expanding voting rights, women’s dignity, and a “civic religion”.The term “weird” has been part of a campaign strategy by Harris’s vice-presidential pick Tim Walz and several others as a way of painting opponent Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance as destructive and out of line with US voters.“These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said in an interview in July. “They wanna take books away, they wanna be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to and don’t, you know, get sugar-coating this: these are weird ideas.”But in a sweeping conversation about democracy, the economy, and the role of tech platforms in the election, Khanna emphasized a focus on unity and reaching out to skeptical voters, including in his view of Harris’s strategy for her debate on Tuesday with Trump.Khanna said he realized “it’s not fashionable anymore” to do as his fellow Democrat and former first lady Michelle Obama once said: “When they go low, we go high.” But he said former Democratic presidents like Barack Obama and John F Kennedy Jr “were inspirational figures and inspiration”, and he added: “I still think that wins for a nation that’s hungry for some kind of new common purpose.”Khanna also weighed in on the role of tech platforms and social media in polarizing voters and spreading misinformation. Already this year voters have been faced with deepfake robocalls in a false Joe Biden voice, a fake Taylor Swift image posted by Trump himself, and various fake ads painting Harris as a communist leader.While Khanna said there was no way to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) systems in time for the 5 November election, the congressman – whose district includes a significant part of Silicon Valley – said he is hopeful that there is bipartisan support for policy in this sector.“We’re in much better shape than when we had the printing press. And you look at some of the pamphlets on the printing press … they actually went to war over those pamphlets in Europe,” he said. “ The internet in the early days was filled with, pornography, with things that were not salutary for society. But it took a governing structure so that today I don’t think anyone would say a life in the world or in America would be better without the internet.”He also sought to promote the careful balance of regulating social media and content moderation without compromising free speech.Khanna furthermore reiterated his support for unfettered free speech when asked about Biden and the president’s record of avoiding press and media during most of his term when compared to his predecessors, a criticism that’s also been lodged at Harris early in the vice-president’s campaign for the White House.“I think politicians benefit from being out there in the media,” Khanna said. “And, as much as possible, you’re taking hard questions and making gaffes and letting people see who you are. But if you do a lot of that, by the way, your gaffes are likely to be diminished because you’ve done so many.“I’m a classical liberal. I believe in free speech. I believe in persuasion. I believe that in this country you can still persuade people.”Asked outright if Biden should have given more interviews, Khanna said: “Of course.” More

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      Joy derision: Democrats turn Trump’s deadliest weapon against him

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      In Trump in Exile, her recent book on the former president’s life after losing power, the reporter Meridith McGraw describes how aides to Donald Trump set about destroying Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who threatened to lure Republican voters away.“One Trump adviser referred to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals,” McGraw writes. “Rule number five: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”Alinsky was a Chicago community organizer who died in 1972 but is still influential on the left and demonized on the right. Trumpworld put his fifth rule – which also says: “It infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage” – into concerted action.DeSantis was ridiculed for his lack of height and his heightened sanctimoniousness but most effectively for his simple weirdness: a discomfiting public manner the Trump camp indelibly linked to an alleged incident on a donor’s jet in which, lacking a spoon, the governor chose to eat a cup of chocolate pudding using his fingers.DeSantis disintegrated. Trump swept to the nomination.With Joe Biden as his opponent, it seemed Trump would once again dominate with nicknames and ridicule, based on “Sleepy Joe’s” (even more) advanced age. But then Biden dropped out, and something unexpected happened. Kamala Harris and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, turned fierce ridicule back on Trump and his VP pick, the Ohio senator JD Vance, deriding both for their simple weirdness: personal, social and of course political.If polling is any guide, the tactic has worked like a dream.To Molly Jong-Fast, a podcaster and MSNBC commentator now touring Politics as Unusual, a live show with the Republican operative turned anti-Trump organizer and ridicule merchant Rick Wilson, Trump, Vance and the rest of the GOP are simply easy targets.“They’ve just gone so far afield, this Republican party, that you can mock it all because it’s just so weird,” Jong-Fast said. “All this stuff about women’s reproductive cycles” – support for abortion bans, Vance attacking women who do not have children, endless tangles over IVF – “that stuff is quite weird from an adult man, and so it does lend itself to mockery.“I also think they got so high on their own supply that they didn’t pause and think, ‘Well, perhaps people won’t like this,’ you know?”Ridicule certainly worked for Trump in the past. In 2016, the Texas senator Ted Cruz was “Lyin’ Ted”, the Florida senator Marco Rubio was “Liddle Marco”, and, most infamously, Hillary Clinton was “Crooked Hillary”. Fair or not, the labels stuck.Eight years later, though, Trump “just can’t do it”, Jong-Fast said. “Maybe because he’s almost 80. Maybe because he just doesn’t have it any more.”Trump has road-tested nicknames for Harris but nothing has stuck. He tried “Kamabla”, arguably racist, and “Comrade Kamala”, alleging communist leanings. He tried more.Jong-Fast said: “‘Laffin’ Kamala?’ It just doesn’t do it because their whole plan of attack was that she laughs and somehow that makes her unserious, and being unserious is somehow bad for being president. But the problem with Trump is that his whole thing was that he was unserious, right? Like, you were supposed to vote for him because he was a reality television host, not because he was some genius.“I think Trump is just tired. He’s been running for president for a decade, and he’s just scared [of defeat and potentially jail in four criminal cases] and sick of it. One of the things that Trump was able to do really well was ridicule. He would pick these nicknames and you would always be a little bit horrified by them but a lot of times they actually were right … he was very good at summing people up.”Now, not so much.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCompounding Republican problems, under Harris and Walz – whose decision to call Trump and Vance weird on TV did much to put him on the ticket – Democrats have abandoned the political squeamishness, or just good manners, that long deterred them from firing back in kind.“I think Biden was in a different generation of politics and he just couldn’t meet the moment in the same way,” Jong-Fast said. “He wouldn’t let his people do that aggressive stuff. I think of Democrats now as trying to push back aggressively, which they have to, right? I mean, it’s completely asymmetrical otherwise.”As Walz led in ridiculing Trump and Vance, so party grandees followed. At the Democratic convention in Chicago last month, Barack and Michelle Obama mocked Trump from the podium. The former president even appeared to question the size of Trump’s penis. It was all a long way from “When they go low, we go high”, Michelle Obama’s 2016 appeal to purity of political action and thought.“They know it gets him mad,” Jong-Fast said. “Part of what’s happening here is this ‘audience of one’ idea, which is they know it gets Trump kind of upset when you make fun of him, so they’re doubling down. They know the way to beat him is to get him so agitated that he acts out and alienates voters.”Trump has certainly been acting out – and Jong-Fast’s colleague Wilson, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, is well-practiced in making him do so, attracting threats to sue. Asked about Wilson’s insult-comic style, ridiculing Trump onstage and on the Fast Politics podcast and his own platforms, Jong-Fast laughed and said: “It makes for good podcasting. I think it would make for scary live television.”Probably true. Nonetheless, live television will host the next huge campaign set piece, the debate between Trump and Harris on ABC on Tuesday. Ridicule seems sure to be on the menu. Saul Alinsky’s ghost will watch with interest.Recently, David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, a progressive magazine, pondered Harris’s likely tactics.“I would offer the same advice to Harris as I did to Biden,” Corn wrote. “Deride, deride, deride. But it looks as if she got the memo.” More

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      Prosecutor v felon: US prepares for presidential debate between Harris and Trump

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      It will be a study in contrasts around age, gender, race, temperament and policy. It will also be the first time in US presidential history that a former courtroom prosecutor will take the debate stage alongside a convicted criminal with the White House at stake.Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has served as a trial lawyer, district attorney and state attorney general in California. Former US president Donald Trump, her Republican rival, has been convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal.The pair will go head to head in Philadelphia on Tuesday night in their first – and perhaps only – debate, just 75 days after Joe Biden’s dire performance against Trump triggered a political earthquake that ultimately forced him from the race for the White House.Few expect such a transformative result this time. But Trump has his last best chance to end Harris’s extended “honeymoon” while the Democrat is aiming to prosecute her opponent’s glaring liabilities before tens of millions of voters watching on live television.“It’s the first time Donald Trump is actually going to be cross-examined in front of the American people,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “Kamala Harris’s career and experience as a prosecutor, attorney general and a senator is something that Trump should not underestimate in this debate.”This will be Trump’s seventh appearance in a national general election debate, making him the most experienced debater in US presidential history. Against Biden in June he repeated familiar falsehoods that mostly went unchallenged. Harris is expected to be a more formidable opponent and could put Trump on the defensive over facts, policy and his conduct following the 2020 election.View image in fullscreenThe 59-year-old has not been shy about embracing her career in law enforcement so far in the campaign. A video at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago declared: “That’s our choice. A prosecutor or a felon.” In a speech accepting the party’s nomination, Harris told cheering delegates: “Every day, in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge and I said five words: Kamala Harris, for the people.”She has also been touting her record taking on predators and fraudsters, telling crowds across the country: “I know Donald Trump’s type!” Harris brought that experience to bear in her memorable 2018 cross-examination of Brett Kavanaugh during Senate confirmation hearings after Trump, then president, nominated him as a justice on the supreme court.But she is unlikely to go after Trump directly over his convictions – or three other criminal cases still looming over him. When, at a rally in New Hampshire this week, an audience member shouted, “Lock him up!” Harris replied: “Well, you know what? The courts are going to handle that, and we will handle November. How about that?”In May Trump became the first former US president to be convicted of felony crimes when a New York jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush-money payment to an adult film performer. On Friday the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, delayed Trump’s sentencing until 26 November – after the election date of 5 November.For any other candidate on a debate stage, the convictions would be a huge liability. But Trump has repeatedly rallied his base by falsely claiming that the case, and others relating to election interference and mishandling classified information, are bogus and politically motivated. Should the topic arise on Tuesday, he is likely to cast himself as a martyr and also remind viewers that he was nearly assassinated in July.The 90-minute duel, held at Philadelphia’s National Constitutional Center, will be moderated by the ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis. In accordance with rules negotiated by both campaigns, there will be no live audience and candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak.The same rules seemed to work in Trump’s favour when he took on Biden in Atlanta in June. Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan, said: “Trump adjusted well to no audience and the cutting of the microphones in Atlanta. Biden clearly didn’t.“He had never debated when there’s no audience; same thing with Harris. Not getting any feedback and not knowing how things are going, you have to trust your judgment and who’s got better media instincts than a reality television host?”The muting of the microphones may not only save Trump from himself – he interrupted Biden 71 times during their first presidential debate in 2020 – but prevent Harris offering sharp rejoinders such as “I’m speaking”, a line she delivered against Mike Pence in the vice-presidential debate four years ago.Harris and Trump have never met before in person and, in the city of Rocky Balboa, are likely to take on the roles of boxer and fighter respectively. Trump, 78, is not known for his discipline, preparation or fidelity to the truth. His debate performances, like his governing style, are typically based on gut instinct rather than considered analysis.Kall, who has attended many presidential debates, added: “You can never count him out because he’s just all over the place in kind of a scattershot format and, when you think you’ve got him on something, he quickly moves to something else. It’s hard to keep up with him so she’s got to pick her spots.View image in fullscreen“He’s always been known as the more effective counterpuncher. He sometimes doesn’t lob the first volley or attack or argument but then, if she decides to go on the offensive as a prosecutor and treat him in that way, he can be even more deadly in response.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has struggled to find a coherent and effective line of attack on Harris since she entered the race. He has accused her of being a radical leftist while also suggesting she bears responsibility for Biden’s more centrist policy agenda. He has questioned her intelligence and racial identity. He has also floundered in trying to achieve consistency on the incendiary topic of abortion rights.Republicans will be hoping that his debate showing is more focused and avoids any blatantly sexist or racist behaviour. The last time he faced a female candidate, Hillary Clinton in 2016, he physically hovered behind her in one debate and referred to her as “the devil” and a “nasty woman”.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The Harris campaign was eager for his mic to be live because they think he’s his worst enemy and that’s true. He has a very limited attention span.“He’s a remarkably undisciplined candidate, particularly at this level, and he’s profoundly uncomfortable with women and people of colour. I don’t see any change in that orientation. Already in this campaign he’s come out with some pretty offensive comments about Kamala Harris. I’d expect more of that and it’s possible that Kamala Harris is going to push him in ways that might provoke that reaction.”Harris enters the debate with momentum. After she closed out the convention on 22 August, her campaign announced she had raised more than $500m since entering the race. The polling aggregator website 538 shows Harris up by three percentage points in national polls but much tighter races in some battleground states.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “Kamala Harris is a capable politician operating at the height of her powers. She’s going to come and have a good debate and he is, in all likelihood based on his current run of public performances, going to say things that are ugly and shocking and he’ll do further damage to an already damaged campaign.”But the vice-president may come under pressure to explain reversals in her positions on issues such as universal healthcare, fracking, plastic straws and decriminalising illegal border crossings. She could face questions over the Biden-Harris administration’s economic record, especially inflation, forcing her both to defend her boss and promise to turn a new page.Lanhee Chen, a fellow in American public policy studies at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Stanford, California, said: “The substance of what she’s rolled out so far either completely contradicts her past history or they’re just not really good ideas for the most part. If she’s able to actually propose some new ideas in this debate and give people some grist for the mill, that’s a much better approach.”History suggests, however, that debates are less about policy than memorable moments. Examples include Ronald Reagan’s “There you go again,” tease of Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush’s glance at his watch, Al Gore’s sighs and Trump’s apparent threat to jail Clinton. Political scientists also still question whether the impact on public opinion is fleeting or lasting enough to make a difference on election day.Chen, who was policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, cited the example of Romney’s forceful first debate performance against a lacklustre President Barack Obama in 2012. “We saw a significant bump for Romney in public polling as well as our private polling after that tremendous debate performance against Obama in 2012,” he recalled.“In that first debate, he picked up a number of points that was well outside the margin of error in many places. It was a couple of weeks of positive momentum and then the race kind of came back to stasis after that.”Chen added: “The debate doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. You have the debate but you also have world events and you have what the campaigns do after the debate as well. The debate will have impact but the impact is probably short term and will eventually wash out with other campaign events as they happen.” More

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      US ‘hero voters’ key to Harris win, say top ex-aides who plotted Labour UK victory

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      Keir Starmer’s former pollster, Deborah Mattinson, is to meet Kamala Harris’s campaign team in Washington this week to share details of how Labour pulled off its stunning election win by targeting key groups of “squeezed working-class voters who wanted change”.The visit comes ahead of a separate trip by Starmer to Washington on Friday to meet US president Joe Biden, his second since becoming prime minister. It will also be his first since Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee.With the race for the White House on a knife-edge, Mattinson, who stepped down from Starmer’s office after the election, and the prime minister’s former director of policy, Claire Ainsley, who will also attend the briefings, believe the same strategy that delivered for Labour could play an important role in Harris defeating Donald Trump on 5 November.Writing in the Observer, Mattinson and Ainsley say many of the concerns of crucial undecided voters will be similar on both of sides of the Atlantic.“These voters – often past Labour voters – had rejected the party because they believed that it had rejected them. Often Tory voters in 2019, they made up nearly 20% of the electorate. Labour’s focus on economic concerns, from affordable housing to job security, won them back.“For Harris, addressing core issues such as housing, prices and job creation could also win over undecided US middle-class voters, many of whom face similar economic pressures. Labour set about finding out as much as possible about these voters and applying that knowledge to all aspects of campaigning.“They were patriotic, they were family oriented, they were struggling with the cost of living: squeezed working-class voters who wanted change.”Mattinson coined the phrase “hero voters” to describe a group who were more often than not pro-Brexit and persuadable by political leaders if they felt they would address their fundamental core concerns.The collaboration, they believe, could help tilt the balance by delivering voters in key US battlegrounds.“Before November’s presidential election, Harris has turned on its head a contest that looked like a foregone conclusion in Trump’s favour. However, as the data shows clearly, it is still too close to call. We believe that adopting a similar hero-voter approach could make a vital difference, just as it did here in the UK.“The start point is to identify and understand Harris’s hero voters – undecided voters who have considered Trump and live in the handful of the most crucial battleground states.”Mattinson and Ainsley were invited by the Democratic thinktank the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), with which Ainsley has been working since leaving Starmer’s team in late 2022.Recently, they have been polling among US voters and conducting focus groups to try to understand what will win them over and which groups matter most.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The context is very different but the parallels are almost uncanny,” they write. “This group – who in the US self-define as middle class rather than working class, as the same group might in the UK – is struggling.“Its members believe that the middle class is in jeopardy, out of reach for people like them, denied the dream of homeownership that previous generations took for granted, unable to cover the essentials, and hyper-aware of the cost of groceries, utilities and other bills. Many work multiple jobs just to keep afloat.”Among those that the two former Starmer aides are likely to meet are Megan Jones, the senior political adviser to vice-president Harris, and Will Marshall, founder of the PPI, who had dealings with top New Labour figures, including Tony Blair, when the party was trying to learn from the electoral success of Bill Clinton’s Democrats in the early to mid-1990s, before the 1997 general election.View image in fullscreenMattinson and Ainsley say they had far more time to plan their strategy in detail than have members of the Harris campaign. But they suggest that fine-tuning the Democratic strategy could help sustain recent momentum and give the party a better chance of crossing the finishing line victorious.“From the point where we defined our hero-voter focus, we had three years to mainline the thinking through party activity. Team Harris has less than three months. But looking at what they have achieved in the past few weeks, success now looks within reach. Hero voters may just help to close that gap.” More

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      How the lessons of the UK election could help Kamala Harris defeat Donald Trump

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      On 4 July, against all odds, Labour overturned the most shattering defeat in decades to win a stunning landslide. A talented and energetic party team deserves huge credit for this victory: effective communications, innovative digital output, creative policy culminating in the five missions, organisationally brilliant events and a super-efficient ground force – all under the leadership of campaign director Morgan McSweeney and political leads Pat McFadden and Ellie Reeves.It was a cohesive campaign united by its sharp, disciplined focus on our very tightly defined “hero voters”. Could a similar single-mindedness help Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump on 5 November?Just three years before, Labour had suffered the devastating setback of the Hartlepool byelection. While Keir Starmer had made significant strides towards returning Labour to the service of working people in his first year as leader, the party still struggled to embrace a disparate coalition of voters stretching from its base to a wider group of progressive voters and including the “red wall” that had so dramatically abandoned Labour in 2019.It was an impossible task. As the party picked itself up, Starmer’s brief was to really understand the voters who were crucial to that Tory win. He redoubled his resolve to take the party to them. These voters – often past Labour voters – had rejected the party because they believed that it had rejected them. Often Tory voters in 2019, they made up nearly 20% of the electorate. Labour’s focus on economic concerns, from affordable housing to job security, won them back.For Harris, addressing core issues such as housing, prices and job creation could also win over undecided US middle-class voters, many of whom face similar economic pressures. Labour set about finding out as much as possible about these voters and applying that knowledge to all aspects of campaigning. They were patriotic, they were family oriented, they were struggling with the cost of living: squeezed working-class voters who wanted change.Starmer was the personification of this segment of the UK electorate. As someone who had grown up in a pebbledash semi, with hard-working parents who were so strapped for cash that at one point the family’s phone was cut off, he identified with these voters and understood them. This became our focus over the next three years. The discipline paid off, enabling the electoral efficiency that won 411 seats, even on a vote share of less than 35%.Before November’s US presidential election, Harris has turned on its head a contest that looked like a foregone conclusion in Trump’s favour. However, as the data shows, it is still too close to call. We believe that adopting a similar hero-voter approach could make a vital difference, just as it did here in the UK.The start point is to identify and understand Harris’s hero voters – undecided voters who have considered Trump and live in the handful of most crucial battleground states.Working with Democratic thinktank the Progressive Policy Institute, we have attempted to do just that, applying lessons from the UK election, conducting polling and focus groups to really understand the voters that matter most.The context is very different but the parallels are almost uncanny. This group – who in the US self-define as middle class rather than working class as the same group might in the UK – is struggling. Its members believe that the middle class is in jeopardy, denied the dream of homeownership that previous generations took for granted, unable to cover the essentials, and hyper-aware of the cost of groceries, utilities and other bills. Many work multiple jobs just to keep afloat.As one Michigan swing voter told us last week: “There’s less of a ‘legit’ middle class these days. People are just working, working, working – and I think that’s really unfair.” Another voter in Pennsylvania said: “The middle class is being eroded. You used to be able to work one job and buy a house, but those things are out of reach for people like us nowadays.”Unsurprisingly, these voters want change – change that redresses the balance. But they are also deeply insecure and want that change within a framework of stability.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris can use this balancing act to her advantage, offering a combination of stability and the change voters crave. By addressing concerns such as inflation and homeownership while promising steady progress, she can present a vision that contrasts with Trump’s record, appealing directly to the middle class’s desire for practical, lasting change.Like Starmer, Harris has an edge: she comes from the same background as these voters. Her middle-class upbringing and understanding of economic struggle give her a unique connection to working-class Americans. She can own this narrative – something that Trump’s rhetoric, despite his populist appeal, can’t match.There are takeaways for the new Labour government from our research too. US voters want tangible evidence of policies from the Democrats that have helped them and their country. In these early days of the new Labour government, the party will want to plan now what those markers of success will be to their hero voters, well before the next general election.In our project, we have explored how the lessons from Labour’s successful campaign may translate across, reflecting the mood of hero voters, creating clear dividing lines on party brand, and leader reputation and, ultimately, developing a compelling offer.From the point where we defined our hero voter focus, we had three years to mainline the thinking through party activity. Team Harris has less than three months. But, looking at what they have achieved in the past few weeks, success now looks within reach. Hero voters may just help to close that gap.Deborah Mattinson and Claire Ainsley will spend this week in Washington DC with the Progressive Policy Institute, briefing leading Democrats on their project More

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      US presidential polls: Harris leads Trump nationally, but key swing state races tighter

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      As next week’s crucial presidential debate looms into view, Kamala Harris has maintained her narrow lead over Donald Trump in head-to-head polls but is locked in a tighter race in the crucial swing states needed to win the US election.Ever since Harris entered the contest – after Joe Biden dropped out following a disastrous debate performance that highlighted fears over his age and mental acuity – the vice-president has ridden a wave of support and enthusiasm, turning the race on its head. A solid but slight Trump advantage morphed into a Harris lead.But as Harris faces her first ever debate as a presidential nominee, there are signs that her upwards swing has hit a ceiling. Meanwhile, Trump will be hoping the debate offers his campaign a chance to recapture some momentum.Yet the race remains so tight in the swing states – and with a Republican advantage in the electoral college – that one commentator on Politico this week called it the “equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth”.At the same time, the narrow geographical focus of the election is sharply coming into view, with the first ballots to determine the next occupant of the White House due to be mailed out to voters.North Carolina had aimed to start mailing out its presidential ballots on Friday. But in what might be seen as a metaphor for the cliffhanging nature of the contest between Harris and Trump, what should have been standard protocol was delayed by a dispute over whether Robert F Kennedy Jr, hitherto running as an independent candidate, should have a place on the ballot.Kennedy, who suspended his campaign on 23 August and endorsed Trump, is suing the North Carolina board of elections over its refusal to remove his name from the ballot in a state where surveys show the result on a knife edge.A judge on the state’s supreme court ruled against him on Thursday but gave him 24 hours to appeal – resulting in a temporary delay to ballots being dispatched. And on Friday, the state’s appeals court issued an interim stop on the dissemination of mail-in ballots to allow Kennedy’s appeal to be heard.The postponement added another layer of suspense to a contest that could not be tighter, according to fresh Guardian analysis of recent polls.In a state with 16 electoral college votes up for grabs but where a Democratic presidential candidate has won only once since 1980, Trump and Harris are deadlocked at 48.07%.The figures illustrate why Kennedy – who is trying to help Trump after concluding that his presence in the race was draining his support – is so keen to remove his name from the ballot.A tiny number of voters putting their cross next to Kennedy’s name on ballot papers could be enough to deprive Trump of the only one of seven swing states he won in his 2020 defeat at the hands of Joe Biden.The North Carolina imbroglio shows in a microcosm what has become a reality of this – and, increasingly, all – US presidential elections: that while voters will flock to the polls across all 50 states, some states matter more than others under America’s unique electoral college.The system designates a set number of electors for each state based on population – with 539 for the entire country, meaning that 270 electoral college votes are needed to win.While the outcome in numerous states is a foregone conclusion – with many southern and midwestern states reliably Republican and others like New York and California solidly Democratic – the roughly equal partisan division of such states in electoral vote terms means much rests on the small number where party loyalties are evenly split.It also means that the national polling figures – while indicative of overall trends – are not what necessarily decides the election. The Guardian’s latest national poll tracker, taken over a 10-day average, showed Harris at 47.5% compared with 43.9% for Trump, which is encouraging for her but probably not a big enough cushion to guarantee an electoral college win if replicated on polling day.In this context, arguably even more important than North Carolina is Pennsylvania, one of the Democrats’ designated “blue wall” states – along with fellow battlegrounds Michigan and Wisconsin – and sometimes given a “Rust belt” label because of its status as the heartland of the US steel industry.Biden won it by slightly more than 80,000 votes in 2020, capturing its 19 electoral votes.This time, various permutations suggest that it might be key to the paths being charted by both Harris and Trump to reach the magic 270 total.That explains why the state has become such a focal point of both campaigns’ activity in recent days; On Monday, Harris appeared with Biden at a Labor Day parade in Pittsburgh in their first joint campaign appearance since she replaced him atop the Democratic ticket, while Trump attended a televised town hall event hosted by Fox News and fronted by Sean Hannity on Wednesday.This Tuesday, the candidates will meet in their only scheduled presidential debate in Philadelphia, the biggest city in Pennsylvania.The data shows Harris with a wafer-thin lead in the state of 1.7% – 48.9% to 47.2% – within the margin of error. Other polls show the race even tighter; a CNN survey this week had candidates tied at 47% each.The tight scenario underpins why states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina – and others like Georgia and two “Sun belt” states, Nevada and Arizona – are now the targets of the lion’s share of campaign resources. Maga Inc, a Trump-backing Super Pac, recently spent a reported $16m in adverts for North Carolina while the Trump campaign has diverted its efforts away from other less winnable locations to focus on the seven battleground states.In the war of resources and ad spending, Harris may have the advantage. Figures published on Friday showed her campaign had outraised Trump’s by $361m to $130m in August, and had raised a total of $615m since she became her party’s nominee in July.It seems an eye-watering sum and surely enough to sustain a message across this vast country. But the clarion call will be heard loudest in those states where the result is likely to remain too close to call even after polls close. More

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      Former vice-president Dick Cheney confirms he will vote for Kamala Harris

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      The former vice-president Dick Cheney, a lifelong Republican, will vote for the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, in November’s presidential election, he said in a statement on Friday.“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said of the former president and Republican nominee. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris.”Liz Cheney, who herself endorsed Harris on Thursday, first announced her father’s endorsement when asked by Mark Leibovich of the Atlantic during an onstage interview at the Texas Tribune festival in Austin.“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” Liz Cheney said to audience cheers.“Wow,” Leibovich replied.Like his daughter, Dick Cheney has been an outspoken critic of Trump, notably during Liz Cheney’s ill-fated re-election campaign in 2022.In a campaign ad for Liz Cheney as she sought a fourth term as Wyoming’s lone congressperson, Dick Cheney called the former president a “coward” for trying to “steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him”.The ad did little good for his daughter in a deep-red state that once held the Cheney family dear but is now thoroughly in Trump’s corner. By a two-to-one margin, Liz Cheney lost her Republican primary to the Trump-endorsed attorney Harriet Hageman.Notably absent from Friday’s endorsement announcement was the 83-year-old former vice-president, who has made few if any public appearances over the past year or more.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Dick Cheney confirms he will vote for Kamala Harris, saying no ‘greater threat’ to US than Donald Trump – live

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      Dick Cheney has confirmed that he will be voting for the Democratic ticket in the US presidential election. The statement from the Republican former vice-president came hours after his daughter Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative for Wyoming, told a crowd that her father would be supporting Harris.His pronouncement comes days after Liz told a North Carolina crowd that she would also be voting for Harris.The Georgia bureau of investigations (GBI) has announced that threats directed at other Georgia schools in the wake of Wednesday’s mass shooting have been deemed non-credible.In a press release on its website, the GBI says that an increase in threats and subsequent tips from concerned people are common after these types of shootings, and that those who make these threats will be “investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”.The White House has condemned Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, over his interview with Darryl Cooper, a Holocaust revisionist and podcast host who, during an interview released on Monday, argued that the Holocaust was the result of Germany not knowing what to do with prisoners of war.The interview drew the ire of Jewish leaders, and in a statement to the New York Times, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said:
      Giving a microphone to a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda is a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans, to the memory of the over six million Jews who were genocidally murdered by Adolf Hitler, to the service of the millions of Americans who fought to defeat Nazism and to every subsequent victim of antisemitism.
      In a now-deleted tweet, Elon Musk described the interview between Carlson and Cooper as: “Very interesting. Worth watching.”A 15-year-old student has been shot and injured at Joppatowne high school in Maryland, about 24 miles north of Baltimore. The shooting appears to have stemmed from a fight on campus, and a 16-year old student has been arrested, ABC News reports.The injured student was airlifted to a local trauma unit and is in serious condition, authorities say. Deputies responded within two minutes and at least 100 other officers showed up to the scene.“It showed our response – as if it was one – is ready. I pray we never have to test that system,” Jeff Gahler, sheriff of Harford county, said during a press conference.The shooting on Friday comes days after two students and two adults were killed and nine others were injured during a mass shooting at Apalachee high school in Georgia.Here is video of the moment Liz Cheney revealed that her father, Dick Cheney, will be voting for Kamala Harris:
      Think about the moment that we’re in and you think about how serious this moment is … My dad believes … there’s never been an individual in our country who is as grave a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump is and that’s the moment that we’re facing and so I think recognizing that, Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” Cheney said.
      Dick Cheney will vote for Kamala Harris in November, the former vice-president’s daughter Liz Cheney said on Friday.In an interview on Friday at the Texas Tribune Festival, Liz Cheney said: “Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” NBC reports.Earlier this week, Liz Cheney addressed an audience at Duke University, where she said: “Because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”During her interview on Friday, Liz Cheney also said that she will support the senatorial bid of Colin Allred, Texas’s Democratic representative.Speaking of Allred, who is challenging Ted Cruz, the Republican incumbent, Cheney called him a “tremendous, serious candidate”, adding: “We need people who are going to serve in good faith … We need people who are honorable public servants, and in this race, that is Colin Allred, so I’ll be working on his behalf.”Tim Walz has responded to JD Vance’s comment following Georgia’s deadly school shooting in which he said school shootings are “just a fact of life”.Walz, who has previously voiced support for an assault weapons ban, said in response to Vance’s comment:
      This is pathetic. We can’t quit on our kids – they deserve better.
      Republicans have repeatedly criticised and rejected calls for gun safety reforms including increased background checks and red flag policies, and have instead pointed to mental health issues as a chief reason for mass shootings across the country.Before Donald Trump’s trip to North Carolina today, the Fraternal Order of Police issued the following statement of endorsement of him:
      In every election cycle, the FOP pays close attention to which presidential campaign highlights the issues most vital to the men and women of the FOP, including the challenges faced by the rank-and-file law enforcement officers, the real issues in public safety, and the problems in our criminal justice system …
      The National FOP endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. He led our nation through some very tough times. He provided our nation with strong, effective leadership during his first term, and now that he is seeking election to a second term, we intend to help him win it.
      In his decision, Judge Juan Merchan wrote that the “court is a fair, impartial and apolitical institution”.He went on to add that delaying Trump’s sentencing should “dispel any suggestion” that he tried “to give an advantage to, or to create a disadvantage for, any political party and for any candidate for any office”.Hello, US politics blog readers. It’s a very busy news day even though the election campaign trail itself is rather quiet.Kamala Harris is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, behind closed doors preparing for her historic debate next Tuesday with her opponent for the White House in November, Donald Trump. But she has been given good news in the form of her latest fundraising and polling results.Trump, meanwhile, has been dealing with legal troubles in New York. First, he appeared in civil court at a hearing in which he is appealing a civil judgment against him that he sexually abused the writer E Jean Carroll, before holding a press conference uptown and then getting a vital judicial decision in his New York criminal case.Here’s where things stand:

      The judge in the New York criminal case in which Donald Trump was convicted earlier this year of election-related fraud over hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and a cover-up has delayed sentencing of the former president until after the election.

      Donald Trump launched an angry tirade against E Jean Carroll, the Biden administration, Kamala Harris, news networks including ABC and CNN, and Iran and China in a long and aggressive press conference filled top to bottom with outlandish claims and personal attacks.

      More than 90 business leaders, including the heads of Yelp and Chobani, endorsed Kamala Harris’s presidential bid, in a new letter. It was also signed by current and former top executives including the former CEOs of PepsiCo, Ford Motor, Yahoo! and 21st Century Fox, and said: “Harris has a strong record of advancing actions to spur business investment in the United States and ensure American businesses can compete and win.”

      Trump’s lawyers argued at an appeal hearing in civil court in New York that the trial spurred by a lawsuit brought forth by the writer E Jean Carroll, where a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse, consisted of improper evidence.

      Kamala Harris’s election campaign brought in $361m in contributions the last month, nearly tripling the $130m raised by Trump’s campaign during the same period. The campaign of Harris and Tim Walz, her running mate and the governor of Minnesota, called it the biggest grassroots fundraiser in presidential campaign history.

      Joe Biden is due to arrive in Ann Arbor, Michigan, soon, where he will speak about his administration’s economic agenda.

      JD Vance sparked a political row after calling school shootings an unwelcome “fact of life” and saying schools need stronger security, while Democrats, led by Biden and Harris, want stronger gun control, especially a ban on assault-style rifles, including the semi-automatic gun that was used in the school shooting in Georgia earlier this week.
      Donald Trump and his legal team had asked Justice Juan Merchan to push back the former president’s criminal sentencing date until after the presidential vote on 5 November.Merchan moments ago announced the sentencing would be pushed back from 18 September to 26 November (a Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving).Here’s a fuller quote from Merchan’s response to both sides’ legal teams, picked out from the official decision by Reuters:
      This matter is one that stands alone in a unique place in this Nation’s history. Unfortunately, we are now at a place in time that is fraught with complexities rendering the requirements of a sentencing hearing, should one be necessary, difficult to execute,.
      Trump’s lawyers earlier this month had argued there would not be enough time before the original sentencing date for the defense to potentially appeal Merchan’s forthcoming ruling on Trump’s request to overturn the conviction due to the supreme court’s landmark decision on presidential immunity. Merchan had been scheduled to rule on that motion on 16 September.He wrote today that he now plans to rule on that motion on 12 November.The supreme court’s 6-3 ruling, which related to a separate criminal case Trump faces – the federal election meddling case – found that presidents cannot be criminally prosecuted for their official acts, and that evidence of presidents’ official actions cannot be used to help prove criminal cases involving unofficial actions. More