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      The Guardian view on Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential pick: Tim Walz is a smart choice for Democrats | Editorial

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      Kamala Harris’s own ascension to the top of the ticket has shone a brighter spotlight than usual on the Democrats’ choice of vice-presidential nominee, underlining why the second slot on the ticket matters. The impact of the running mate is usually limited unless they prove extraordinarily popular or unpopular. Growing concerns about the state of the US economy are likely to be far more consequential. But Ms Harris’s selection of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, on Tuesday, and the enthusiasm it is engendering, contribute to the sense of a rejuvenated campaign. Democrats are not taking poll improvements for granted, but now believe that it is possible to beat Donald Trump.Ms Harris stressed Mr Walz’s record of “fighting for middle-class families”. Originally from rural Nebraska, he is a former teacher and high school football coach who served in the army national guard for 24 years. As governor he has overseen – with Minnesota’s Democratic legislature – progressive policies including free school meals, abortion protections, pro-worker policies and gun restrictions. He has a better record on facing the climate crisis than rivals.He has been adept at winning over moderate Republicans, but also at attacking Donald Trump; Ms Harris’s description of the former president as “weird” was borrowed from him. The right has already argued that he should have been swifter to call in the national guard when protests following George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in Minneapolis turned violent. But the Trump campaign will surely find that the tag of “dangerously liberal extremist” is harder to pin on a folksy white Midwestern man who loves hunting than on a black woman from California. Critically, Mr Walz also has significant political experience and ties, having first been elected to Congress in 2006; friends there rallied behind him.Vice-presidential nominees tend to be important primarily in how they reflect on their boss and balance the ticket. JD Vance was meant to bring a shot of youthful energy when Mr Trump was running against Mr Biden; with Ms Harris as the de facto Democratic nominee, it is his extreme stance on abortion and remarks on “childless cat ladies” that grab attention. The disastrous bet on Sarah Palin threw doubt on John McCain’s judgment, experience and leadership. People need to believe that, in a crisis, the running mate would be capable of running the show: around one in five US vice-presidents have taken over under such circumstances.While some suggested that other candidates – notably Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor and reportedly the other finalist for the role – would bring a swing state with them, political scientists suggest that is a myth. Christopher Devine and Kyle Kopko, who analysed election data going back to the late 19th century, suggested that “the vice presidential home state advantage is, essentially, zero”.What vice-presidential picks can do is enthuse the party and help to establish a sense of unity and direction. Mr Walz was the most progressive of the Democratic politicians seriously considered for the role. While activists lobbied against other candidates, there appears to be real enthusiasm about both what he stands for and his ability to communicate that straightforwardly. Ms Harris’s pick contributes to a renewed sense of purpose, and is another welcome step in a campaign that still has a long way to run. More

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      Kamala Harris bets on Tim Walz as running mate: ‘We are going to win’

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      Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for US president, has named Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as her running mate ahead of the November election.The decision ends intense speculation over which candidate Harris would pick to go up against Donald Trump, the Republican nominee and former president, and his choice for vice-president, the Ohio senator JD Vance.Walz first ran for office in 2006 in a Republican-leaning congressional district, upsetting the incumbent. He kept the seat until he won the Minnesota governorship in 2018, then again in 2022. Under his leadership, the state has seen significant progressive legislative wins in recent years, including universal school meals, legalized marijuana, abortion protections and gun control measures.Before he entered public office, he was a school teacher in Mankato, Minnesota, teaching geography to high school students. He also served in the army national guard for 24 years.In an Instagram post announcing the pick, Harris said: “One of the things that stood out to me about Tim is how his convictions on fighting for middle-class families run deep. It’s personal.”She cited his upbringing in Nebraska, and how after his father’s death to cancer, his family relied on social security survivor benefits to make ends meet. He used the GI bill to attend college. He coached high school football and advised the high school’s gay-straight alliance. His background is “impressive in its own right”, but also informs his governing, she said.Minnesota Democrats’ legislative record played into her choice – she noted a law that constitutionally protects access to abortion and one requiring universal background checks for gun purchases.“But what impressed me most about Tim is his deep commitment to his family,” she added.“We are going to build a great partnership. We are going to build a great team. We are going to win this election.”Walz posted a short statement to X on Tuesday. “Vice-President Harris is showing us the politics of what’s possible. It reminds me a bit of the first day of school,” he said.His midwesterner dad charm and straight-talk propelled him up the list as a potential vice-presidential pick, though, and as the head of the Democratic Governors Association, he has been stumping for Biden and Harris for the past year.It was his simple retort against Trump and his allies that caught national Democrats’ attention most: he called them weird. His clips on TV shows went viral, showing him pushing back on Republicans’ “weird behavior” while showcasing a list of what he had accomplished as a Democratic governor and how Democrats would govern if they win the White House again.Walz explained in a TV interview why he had started calling Trump weird. It’s true that Trump’s policy would put women’s lives on the line and that he’s a threat to constitutional values, Walz said. But he’s also on the campaign trail “talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind”.“Have you ever seen the guy laugh? That seems very weird to me, that an adult can go through six and a half years of being in the public eye. If he has laughed, it’s at someone, not with someone. That is weird behavior,” Walz said of Trump.Walz grew up in small-town Nebraska, giving him rural bona fides that will help voters who have moved away from Democrats in recent years.“The golden rule that makes small towns work so we’re not at each others’ throats all the time in a little town is: mind your own damn business,” Walz said in one TV spot.His former colleagues praised his ability to connect with those crucial voters in the Rust belt, and to not only explain what’s bad about Republicans, but what Democrats would actually do in office.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTim Ryan, a former Democratic US representative and Walz’s friend, called to mind a recent clip in which Walz mentioned that Minnesota ranked in the top three for happiest states in the nation. “Isn’t that really the goal here? For some joy? When he mentioned that I was like, dang man, that’s really good. That’s really good, because it gets us out of the political space and into the human being space.”Some political commentators had suggested that, as the first woman of color nominated by a major party, Harris was mostly likely to pick a white man to balance the ticket.The 59-year-old former California senator is looking to build on a successful campaign launch after stepping in to replace Joe Biden, who bowed to pressure from Democratic colleagues and dropped out of the race after a disastrous debate performance against Trump.Harris and Walz can expect a rapturous welcome at the Democratic national convention in Chicago starting on 19 August. She has been endorsed by former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.A New York Times/Siena College national opinion poll published on 25 July found that Harris has narrowed what had been a sizable Trump lead. Trump was ahead of Harris 48% to 46% among registered voters, compared with a lead of 49% to 41% over Biden in early July.Republicans immediately began attacking Walz as a “radical leftist” and claimed that picking Walz was “a massive gift to Republicans”, suggesting his presence on the ticket will tank the Harris campaign.In a statement, the Trump campaign called Walz a “west coast wannabe” who has “spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden state”. The campaign brought up a clip from 2017 where Walz talks about electoral maps that show broad swathes of red, saying those areas are “mostly cows and rocks”.“If Walz won’t tell voters the truth, we will: just like Kamala Harris, Tim Walz is a dangerously liberal extremist, and the Harris-Walz California dream is every American’s nightmare,” the Trump campaign said.Speaking in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Vance first told reporters he could not “say a lot about who Tim Walz is because the Democrats have shown a willingness to put a little switcheroo on us”, by switching presidential candidate from Biden to Harris.Vance said he had called Walz to congratulate him on his selection and would debate him, but only after the Democratic convention later this month.“So that’s the first reason,” for not commenting too much about Walz, Vance said – though he subsequently attacked Walz freely in terms he himself indicated: “The second reason is that Tim Walz’s record is a joke. He’s one of the most far-left radicals in the entire United States government, at any level.” More

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      How could Tim Walz’s political record help and hurt Harris?

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      The presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, has chosen the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate in the presidential race, elevating a popular although relatively unknown leader who has attracted the support of progressive voters in recent days.Walz has served as Minnesota’s governor since 2019 after 12 years in the House of Representatives and now leads the Democratic Governors Association. He has built a reputation as a folksy politician who can get things done, as Minnesota has adopted a number of progressive laws during his tenure. According to a poll conducted earlier this year, Walz enjoys an approval rating of 55% among Minnesotans.Since Minnesota Democrats achieved a legislative trifecta in the 2022 elections, Walz and his allies have used their power to push a slate of progressive policies. The governor signed bills protecting abortion access, expanding background checks for prospective gun owners and legalizing recreational marijuana.“Right now, Minnesota is showing the country you don’t win elections to bank political capital,” Walz said last year. “You win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.”That philosophy has endeared him to progressives, who threw their support behind him as the veepstakes kicked into high gear over the past two weeks. They reshared clips of Walz lightly mocking his daughter’s vegetarianism and tinkering with his car to paint him as the dad that America needs right now. But as the running mate, Walz will need to introduce himself to a much wider audience. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll showed that only 13% of Americans knew enough about Walz to register an opinion of him.The other finalist in Harris’s running mate search was the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, whose popularity with his constituents could have helped Democrats in a key battleground state. Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by just one point in 2020, while he enjoyed a more comfortable seven-point victory in Minnesota. But Democrats are confident that Walz’s record will mobilize voters across the country.Last year, Walz signed a bill that provided free breakfast and lunch for all students attending public and charter schools in Minnesota. The program allows students to receive one free breakfast and lunch a day, regardless of their income, according to the Minnesota Reformer. Through the first few months it was in effect, the state saw a significant jump in the number of meals requested.When he was running for Congress in 2010, Walz received an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association. At the time, the group cited his support for legislation allowing people to carry guns in national parks, as well as his decision to sign on to a pro-gun amicus brief in District of Columbia v Heller, a 2008 supreme court case, that significantly expanded the second amendment.But since then, Walz has spoken out in favor of gun control measures. Last year, he approved a measure to enact a “red flag” law to remove guns from people deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. He also expanded background checks for gun purchases to include private transactions. And he has said he favors an assault weapons ban. When he ran for governor in 2018, Walz celebrated that the NRA gave him an “F” rating, and donated the $18,000 the group had given him throughout his congressional career to a veterans group, according to CNBC.After the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, Walz was the first governor to enshrine abortion protections in state law. He has also taken executive action to protect gender-affirming care in his state and enacted paid family leave supported by a 0.7% payroll tax on employers, according to CBS News.He has also approved legislation that requires Minnesota to generate all of its energy from carbon-free sources by 2040.Walz enacted a swath of expansive voting rights measures.He signed a bill last year making it easier for people with a felony conviction to vote in Minnesota. The measure automatically allows people with felonies to vote once they leave prison – they previously had to also complete probation as well as parole. The bill allowed at least 55,000 people to vote. He has also approved a state-level Voting Rights Act, cementing protections for minority voters at the state level as the US supreme court chips away at the federal version of the law. Walz also enacted legislation that allows for automatic voter registration, permits 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote, and lets Minnesotans sign up to automatically receive a mail-in ballot.Walz also legalized marijuana in the state, though his cannabis tsar was forced to resign after it emerged that she had sold illegal marijuana products in the state. He also approved a bill that allows undocumented people to get a driver’s license.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWalz hasn’t been without criticism during his time in office. A state audit of his department of education found that it “failed to act on warning signs” that could have prevented a giant $250m non-profit fraud related to pandemic funds, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune. Walz’s office has also clashed with the prosecutor in Hennepin county over some high-profile cases, CBS News reported.Republicans wasted no time in beginning to attack Walz.“It’s no surprise that San Francisco liberal Kamala Harris wants west coast wannabe Tim Walz as her running-mate – Walz has spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden state. While Walz pretends to support Americans in the Heartland, when the cameras are off, he believes that rural America is ‘mostly cows and rocks’,” the Trump campaign said in a statement.“From proposing his own carbon-free agenda, to suggesting stricter emission standards for gas-powered cars, and embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote, Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide. If Walz won’t tell voters the truth, we will: just like Kamala Harris, Tim Walz is a dangerously liberal extremist, and the Harris-Walz California dream is every American’s nightmare.”“The most liberal ‘nominee’ to ever appear on a presidential ballot has now chosen a progressive running mate who has voiced support for socialism, supports sanctuary cities and wants to give driver’s licenses to the millions of illegal aliens Kamala Harris has allowed into our country. No amount of spin from the campaign or the media can distract from the objective facts and the disastrous records of Harris and Walz,” Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, said in a statement on Tuesday.Walz also received criticism in May 2020, when the city of Minneapolis was engulfed in unrest following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer. After a police station was set on fire, Walz criticized the city’s response to the unrest as an “abject failure”.After days of increasing tensions, the state took over the response to the protests. Walz said he had followed the correct protocol by waiting for city leaders to request assistance before sending in the national guard, but some critics dismissed the governor’s action as too little too late.“Above all else, this is a failure in leadership, and that leadership rests on Governor Walz’s shoulders. The governor cannot blame the mayors of Minneapolis and St Paul,” Paul Gazelka, who was then the Republican state senate majority leader, said at the time.With Walz now back in the news as Harris’s running mate, he can expect that every piece of his résumé will be subject to the strictest scrutiny in the weeks ahead. More

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      Trump once seemed invincible. Then Kamala Harris broke the spell | Sidney Blumenthal

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      “It’ll begin to end when the act gets tired and the audience starts walking out,” Warren Beatty, a perspicacious observer, told me eight years ago, in the early summer of 2016, when Donald Trump had just secured the Republican nomination.At the time, Trump was calling in for hours to enraptured TV talk show hosts jacking up their ratings. It was a cocaine trade. In return he snorted $5bn in free media – more than all the other candidates combined. When Trump launched The Apprentice in 2004, a tightly edited fantasy of the six-time bankrupt as king of the heap, he had long been dismissed as a loser and bore in New York. His charade was popcorn fare for out-of-towners. Who knew that the fake reality show’s ultimate winner, announced years after its cancellation, would be JD Vance?But, in 2016, Trump’s pastiche of fast-talking narcissism, unapologetic insults and brazen lies was eagerly amplified by many of the “leftwing radical media elites” he stuck pins in while the “poorly educated” he claimed to “love” were living the vicarious dream of owning the libs. The shtick was taken as an authentic novelty rather than the rehearsed patter of “John Barron”, his transparent former pseudo-identity as his own huckster. JD Vance, aka Jimmy Bowman, aka James Hamel, isn’t the only one on the Republican ticket with multiple personalities.Trump’s routine was attributed to personal magic that levitated him to become seemingly inevitable. Yet Trump survived time and again, not because he ever won a popularity contest, but through the intercession of others, taken by his true believers to be divine intervention and proof of his higher election. His luck that an odd range of people with motives of their own happened to rescue him from his self-created messes built his mystique, even after he lost.The billionaire grabbing the mic as a stand-up comedian when he came down the escalator was laughing gas for many in the media. But the billionaire part itself was an act, since he wasn’t a billionaire, but scamming loans. “You guys have been supporters, and I really appreciate it,” Trump thanked popular TV hosts for giving him free access on 10 February 2016. “And not necessarily supporters, but at least believers. You said there’s some potential there.” He carried a grievance that he never won an Emmy for his shambolic boss-man routine on The Apprentice. Now, he gloried in the kudos for his performance. He had finally made it, phoning in to talk shows – his art form. His heartfelt racism, misogyny and nativism were mainly excused as the joker’s tradecraft. When the TV talkers called him out, he called them “dumb”, suffering “mental breakdown”, “low IQ”, “crazy”, “psycho”. Yet those taunts were seen as something new and exciting, too. That’s entertainment.Trump had gotten a pass in the city for decades for his fraudulent business practices. “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is,” said his sage mentor Roy Cohn – or the high-minded district attorney and how to grease his favorite philanthropy. But after the spoiled ne’er-do-well squandered nearly a half-billion dollars of his father’s fortune on casinos, yachts and planes, the New York banks cut him off. He waved his Page Six clippings about his sexual prowess, stories he had invented himself, but the bankers weren’t distracted by his flimsy celebrity. No one has accounted since for the flow of foreign funds through Deutsche Bank and other sources. Many in the media remained mesmerized by the song-and-dance.As the shock president, Trump would supposedly be reined in by the fabled adults in the room. His entourage of misfits couldn’t staff a government. He would be contained by the responsible grown-ups, his administration pressed into the mold of a sort of fourth Bush term, with Trump as the headliner to keep the customers chortling, while the serious business was done in the backroom. The theory was the Oval Office as day care center. The Federalist Society-types squeezed every drop they could out of him – the judges and justices – but the others became his chumps. They beguiled themselves with the illusion that he was their frontman. They hadn’t reckoned that he was a career criminal, not a juvenile delinquent. Eventually it would occur to them, but they kept what they thought was secret knowledge to themselves. Publicly admitting it would pull back the curtain on their embarrassment. Over time, he gratified his sadism by humiliating them one after another, his most personal kind of entertainment. You’re fired!Magnetic attraction was attributed to Trump in defiance of his granitic unpopularity and greater repellence. He never won the popular vote. He lost it by 2.5m in 2016 and 7m in 2020. Throughout his entire presidency, he never crossed the threshold of 50% approval in the Gallup Poll. He finished with the historically lowest approval rating for a president since polls were first taken.Trump was headed for defeat in 2016 after his final debate with Hillary Clinton on 19 October; four days later, CNN reported their poll showing she held a 13-point lead over him. Five days later, on 28 October, 10 days before the election, the deus ex machina in the form of FBI director James Comey intervened, in violation of justice department guidelines, to reopen an investigation into Clinton’s emails, to probe whether classified material was on her aide’s husband’s computer, which eight days later, two days before the election, he declared was not there. Two subsequent state department inquiries under the Trump administration would find she never held any classified material on a private email server.Comey’s interference, more than anything else, inspired the myth of Trump’s invincibility. Comey would be one of Trump’s first adult-in-the-room victims when he would not submit the FBI to serve Trump’s direct political orders. Having singularly elevated Trump, his sanctimony could not shield him from his defenestration.In 2020, Trump’s utter incompetence in handling the Covid pandemic cost him re-election. He told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that at its start, “I wanted to always play it down.” When Woodward published Trump’s coldly neglectful remarks, Trump slammed Woodward’s report as “FAKE”. Woodward produced the tapes.Anticipating defeat, Trump called the election “rigged”, organized the scheme to stop the constitutional counting of the electoral college votes on January 6, and incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol. Hang Mike Pence!Supposedly, Trump was done again. The consensus stretching from Mitch McConnell to Joe Biden to Merrick Garland was that he would be left by the wayside at Mar-a-Lago to disappear while regular order returned. McConnell had intervened to save Trump twice from removal after impeachments. Garland did nothing to probe Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection for 18 months. The lapse was critical to Trump’s ability to mount another presidential campaign.No outside force could halt Trump’s trial in New York for his 34 felony counts paying hush money to an adult film star to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 election. But in the case of his theft of national security documents and obstruction of justice, a federal judge he had appointed, Aileen Cannon, threw monkey wrenches into the process to ensure he would not face justice before the election. In the January 6 case, originally scheduled for 4 March, he appealed to the supreme court, whose conservative majority ruled on 1 July to grant him absolute immunity for his “official actions”. In order to protect him and his candidacy, the court fundamentally twisted the constitution to set the president above the law. The founding fathers and originalism went out the window. If their decision had been in effect during Watergate, Nixon would have walked scot-free. Trump had been rescued from facing the music in the nick of time. “Tell me who the judge is.”Biden demanded an early debate to dispel his age issue. He imploded on 27 June. Trump was saved. The immunity decision, coming three days later, seemed the ratification of his invulnerability.Fate intervened yet again. On 13 July, an assassin fitting the profile of a school shooter missed him. Trump arose streaked with blood with an upraised fist. His followers proclaimed his divine salvation. In the rush of triumphalism, he named as his running mate JD Vance, the 39-year-old Ohio senator, lately incarnated as a crusader in the Maga kulturkampf. Finally, on 21 July, Biden recognized his hopelessness and withdrew from the race.Circumstances had conspired to coronate Trump the once and future king, invested with the powers of a “dictator on day one” by the supreme court. But at the height of his hubris his nemesis appeared.The bullet that grazed Trump hit Biden. He had been Trump’s perfect foil, a lifelong politician appearing more fossilized than himself. The jack-in-the-box that jumped out was the 19 years younger, vital and unhesitatingly articulate Kamala Harris, whose very appearance unified the Democratic party that seemed about to burst at its seams. The inevitable and invulnerable Trump sank into his old and embittered persona. His close encounter gave him no pause; he underwent no character development. Vance flopped, his numbers the worst of any vice-presidential candidate since Thomas Eagleton dropped out as George McGovern’s running mate in 1972 after the revelation of his electro-shock therapy. Trump was aggrieved at the reversal of roles and the reversal of fortunes.Worse, Trump had worn out his material. His rally on 22 July, the day after Biden left the race, was a concert of golden oldies. There was his story about whether he should be electrocuted by a battery-supplied boat or eaten by sharks, the Hannibal Lecter joke, the Al Capone self-reference, Nancy Pelosi as “Crazy Nancy”, “low IQ” and still running against “Crooked Joe Biden.”Worse than that, he acknowledged his fear that his material was stale. He was filled with performance anxiety. He opened his monologue with an enigmatic: “Whenever I imitate him…” Suddenly, he brought up Melania. “She looked great the other night. She made that entrance. She made a lot of entrances. She’s just something. But she walked in. But I told her the other night, I said, ‘How good was I? How good?’ This was at a rally a couple of weeks ago. ‘How good was I?’ ‘Well, you were really good, but not great.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, it showed that you didn’t know how to get off the stage.’ Well, I was imitating Biden. So, what they do is they show the imitation of Biden. They said, ‘Trump didn’t know how to get off the stage.’ That’s our fake news.”Trump’s stream of consciousness disclosed his worry over his wife’s censorious judgment. He was needy for her praise. She hedged. Her withholding of unreserved flattery sent him spiraling. She suggested he was becoming Biden, someone having trouble selling his act, but Trump protected himself by casting the blame on the media. His awareness of danger to his image provoked an instinctive recoil. Showing him as Willy Loman was the true phoniness.His campaign grasped to find a thread to pull on Harris to unravel her, the equivalent of Biden’s age or Hillary’s emails. They decided to tar her as some kind of leftwinger, but it was the generic Republican negative campaign with risible additions. “Wants To Limit Red Meat Consumption”, Trump posted. He orders his steak burnt and douses it with ketchup. “More Liberal Than Bernie Sanders.” Yawn.Harris was rising, Trump struggling. His young sidekick hired to be his warm-up act, JD Vance, bombed on delivery. Trump was thrown back on himself. His predicament was reminiscent of the flailing music-hall hoofer played by Laurence Olivier in the grim 1960 film, The Entertainer, desperately trying to float his act, shamelessly manipulating and trampling everybody, but incapable of performing anything but the old numbers before a bored audience.So, Trump reached to the bottom of his repertoire. On 31 July, he calculatingly accepted to be interviewed at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, an ideal forum to serve as his backdrop. “I come in good spirits,” he lied. “I was the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”Then he launched his attack on Harris: “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? … All of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person … And I think someone should look into that, too.”Trump’s race-baiting is the hoariest of his riffs. He introduced his minstrel show 35 years ago when he took out full-page newspaper advertisements to demand capital punishment for five young Black men who were convicted of the rape and attempted murder of a white female jogger. The Central Park Five, as they became known, served years in prison, but had been falsely accused and were exonerated.Trump comes by his bigotry naturally. According to his nephew, Fred Trump III, in a new memoir, All In The Family, his uncle used the N-word to blame Black people for a car scratch: “Look what the n—–s did.” A producer for The Apprentice said Trump used the N-word to describe a finalist: “I mean, would America buy a n—– winning?” Trump laid the groundwork for his 2016 presidential run by promoting the birtherism fraud against Barack Obama that he was not born in the United States. As president, Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries”, And, so on and on. “The same old show,” remarked Harris.“I am the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered,” Trump stated in 2016, when asked about his birther campaign. In attacking Harris’s “roots”, Trump returned to his.Two days after his appearance at the NABJ, Trump “retruthed” a post on his Truth Social network from Laura Loomer, a fringe character in Maga circles notorious for her ethnic slurs, and labeled “disgusting” by the Anti-Defamation League. “I have a copy of Kamala Harris’s birth certificate,” she wrote. “Nowhere on her birth certificate does it say that she is BLACK OR AFRICAN. @KamalaHQ is a liar. Donald Trump is correct. Kamala Harris is NOT black and never has been.”Then, on 3 August, Trump backed out of a scheduled ABC News debate, proposing one on Fox News instead, issued insults that were obvious projections that Harris “doesn’t have the mental capacity to do a REAL debate against me”, that she was “afraid”, and that she and Biden are “two Low IQ individuals”. He offered as proof of her fear, that she could never “justify”, among other things, “her years long fight to stop the words, ‘Merry Christmas’.”The Entertainer, frantic to hold the crowd’s attention, is hamming it up with his cake walk. But the minstrel show that had once packed them in at the Hippodrome has descended into burlesque. He won’t listen to Melania. “Trump didn’t know how to get off the stage.”

      Sid Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist More

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      US supreme court won’t stop Trump sentencing from going ahead – live

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      The US supreme court has declined to halt Donald Trump’s upcoming sentencing for his conviction in state court in New York on felony charges involving hush money paid to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels, and a related gag order until after the 5 November election.The decision by the justices came in response to a lawsuit by the state of Missouri claiming that the case against Trump infringed on the right of voters under the US constitution to hear from the Republican presidential nominee as he seeks to regain the White House, Reuters reports.Trump is set to be sentenced on 18 September in Manhattan. He was found guilty in May of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.He is the Republican party nominee for president in the election in November, facing Kamala Harris for the Democrats.The Guardian’s George Chidi was at the Trump rally in Georgia this weekend, where the former president picked a fight with the state’s popular Republican governor. Here’s his analysis from the campaign trail:All Donald Trump had to do on Saturday in Georgia is show up, bring the tent together and not pick a fight with other Republicans. It might have been money in the bag.Instead, Trump attacked Governor Brian Kemp, who is substantially more popular in Georgia than he is. Early in his comments, Trump pointed to a few recent high-profile murders in Atlanta, saying: “Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor should get off his ass and do something about it.”Maga is not a majority in Georgia, if anywhere. Republicans cannot win this state when conventional conservatives abandon the party, as Herschel Walker’s Trump-inflected US Senate challenge against Raphael Warnock demonstrated two years ago.Georgia’s split-ticket-voting conservatives love Kemp and are indifferent at best to Trump. And Trump gave them no love on Saturday.“If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t be your governor. I think everybody knows that,” Trump bloviated, describing them as disloyal.Then Trump went after Kemp’s wife, who told people she wrote her husband’s name in for president in the Republican presidential primary this year.On and on …On Saturday, Trump handed his opponents soundbites about what he thinks about Georgia, its popular governor, and how he expects the state election board to overturn an election he may lose, that will be replayed on YouTube ads on every iPhone between the Fox Theater and the Lake Lanier for the next 91 days.And Republican political professionals know it.Earlier this morning, the Guardian reported that five secretaries of state were preparing to send Elon Musk a letter urging changes to X’s AI search assistant, Grok.As the Guardian’s Lauren Aratani reported, Grok told users that the ballots were “locked and loaded” and that “the ballot deadline has passed for several states” in nine states where the ballot deadline had not, in fact, passed.It seems the secretaries of state have gone ahead and sent the letter. Scripps News obtained a copy.“We urge X to immediately adopt a policy of directing Grok users to CanIVote.org when asked about elections in the US,” the officials from Minnesota, Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington wrote.Here’s more from Lauren:For those watching the veepstakes …Kamala Harris’s team is tamping down rumors and reporting that she has chosen a running mate. Here’s a Harris spokesperson, emphasizing that she has “made no decision on a running mate yet”:Harris is expected to announce her running mate tomorrow before a rally in Philadelphia. Reuters reported today that the search had narrowed to two governors: Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Tim Walz of Minnesota.Read more about it here:Donald Trump’s campaign attorney Jenna Ellis will cooperate with Arizona prosecutors in a fake electors case, the state attorney general’s office announced.Arizona’s attorney general Kris Mayes has agreed to drop nine felony charges against Ellis in exchange for her cooperation in an investigation into Republicans’ plan in 2020 to deliver the state’s 11 electoral votes to Trump rather than the rightful winner, Joe Biden.“Her insights are invaluable and will greatly aid the state in proving its case in court,” Mayes said. “As I stated when the initial charges were announced, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined – it is far too important. Today’s announcement is a win for the rule of law.”Ellis worked closely with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has pleaded not guilty to felony charges. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, has also pleaded not guilty for his role in trying to submit a document to Congress falsely declaring Trump as the winner.The White House has responded to the latest revelations that there is more free travel that the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas did not declare publicly, supplied by the conservative billionaire Harlan Crow.Press spokesperson Andrew Bates said: “As president Biden said at the LBJ Library last week, the supreme court is ‘mired in a crisis of ethics’ and today’s news strengthens the case he made for common-sense reforms that are backed by constitutional experts across the political spectrum – as well as the vast majority of the American people.”Bates added: “Congress should pass an enforceable code of conduct for the supreme court, in line with the requirements that every other federal judge already follows. The most powerful court in the United States shouldn’t be subject to the lowest ethical standards, and conflicts of interest on the supreme court cannot go unchecked.”In her interview broadcast by Fox News this morning – a friendly interview with Fox and Friends – Usha Vance discussed her husband’s swiftly infamous attacks on “childless cat ladies” among his Democratic foes, claiming the controversial remark was merely a “quip”.You can read more on those remarks here.But Usha Vance also addressed controversy over other past remarks that have come back to haunt JD Vance as the Ohio senator attempts to establish himself as an effective running mate for Donald Trump.In remarks to a former friend, reported last week, Vance said: “I hate the police.”“JD certainly does not hate the police,” his wife said in the interview broadcast by Fox on Monday, though she added: “He maybe had a negative interaction once or twice and made a remark like that, I don’t know.”The Yale law school friend to whom Vance made the remark about the police, Sofia Nelson, now a public defender in Detroit, is transgender.Last year, Vance introduced the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, a law to stop minors accessing puberty blockers, hormone therapy and other transition-related care.Nelson attended Yale with JD and Usha Vance and attended their wedding in 2014 – a time when Usha Vance was a registered Democrat.Nelson recently gave correspondence with JD to the New York Times, which added it to mounting evidence of his former distrust and dislike for Trump.“He achieved great success and became very rich by being a Never Trumper who explained the white working class to the liberal elite,” Nelson told the Times, referring to Vance’s authorship of Hillbilly Elegy, a 2016 bestseller about his Appalachian youth.“Now he’s amassing even more power by expressing the exact opposite.”Usha Vance told Fox: “It is hard to know that sometimes politics comes in the way of friendships.”More:There is a little more explanation of the supreme court ruling today that Donald Trump’s criminal sentencing next month won’t be pushed back beyond the presidential election as a result of a legal challenge.The Missouri attorney general went to the highest court with the unusual request to sue the state of New York after the supreme court justices in the last big decision of their term granted Trump broad immunity from prosecution – in a separate case brought in Washington, DC relating to federal charges over interference in the 2020 election, the Associated Press reports.The news agency described Missouri’s legal challenge as “a long shot” in Trump’s long-running legal saga.Andrew Bailey, the AG in question, argued the New York case’s gag order, which Missouri wanted stayed until after the election, wrongly limited what Trump can say on the campaign trail, and that Trump’s eventual sentence could affect his ability to travel.New York, meanwhile, said the limited gag order does allow Trump to talk about the issues important to voters, and the sentence may not affect his movement at all. The Democratic New York attorney general, Letitia James, argued that appeals are moving through state courts and there’s no state-on-state conflict that would allow the supreme court to weigh in at this point.The decision by the supreme court today not to delay sentencing following Donald Trump’s criminal conviction came in response to a lawsuit by the state of Missouri claiming that the case against Trump infringed on the right of voters under the US constitution to hear from the Republican presidential nominee as he seeks to regain the White House in this November’s election.The supreme court’s order was unsigned. Conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito indicated they would have heard Missouri’s case, Reuters reports.Trump was found guilty in May of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she has said she had with Trump in the past, which he denies. Prosecutors have said the payment was designed to boost his presidential campaign in 2016, when he defeated the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.Missouri’s Republican state attorney general, Andrew Bailey, filed a 3 July lawsuit against New York state asking the supreme court to pause Trump’s impending sentencing and the gag order placed on him by New York state judge Juan Merchan, who presided in the case.The US supreme court has declined to halt Donald Trump’s upcoming sentencing for his conviction in state court in New York on felony charges involving hush money paid to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels, and a related gag order until after the 5 November election.The decision by the justices came in response to a lawsuit by the state of Missouri claiming that the case against Trump infringed on the right of voters under the US constitution to hear from the Republican presidential nominee as he seeks to regain the White House, Reuters reports.Trump is set to be sentenced on 18 September in Manhattan. He was found guilty in May of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.He is the Republican party nominee for president in the election in November, facing Kamala Harris for the Democrats.Donald Trump is taking good political advantage of the falling financial markets today by blaming his rival for the presidency this November and calling the dive the “Great Kamala crash of 2024”.Shares on Wall Street and in London have fallen heavily amid a global stock market rout triggered by fears of a recession in the US, kicked off by something close to a panic sale on the Nikkei in Tokyo earlier today.Trump, the Republican nominee for president, hopped onto his platforms, Truth Social and his campaign communications machine, and blamed his rival in this November’s election, Kamala Harris.“Of course there is a massive market downturn. Kamala is even worse than Crooked Joe,” Trump posted online, referring to Joe Biden, the US president. There were a couple of other posts, and his election campaign put out an email. Then he went off in all caps.“VOTERS HAVE A CHOICE – TRUMP PROSPERITY, OR THE KAMALA CRASH & GREAT DEPRESSION OF 2024, NOT TO MENTION THE PROBABILITY OF WORLD WAR lll IF THESE VERY STUPID PEOPLE REMAIN IN OFFICE. REMEMBER, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!!!” he posted.Kamala Harris is poised to secure the Democratic presidential nomination this evening.Harris’s nomination will become official after a five-day round of online balloting by Democratic national convention delegates ends on Monday night and the party announces the results. The party had long contemplated the early virtual roll call to ensure Biden would appear on the ballot in every state, the Associated Press reports.Already Harris has telegraphed that she doesn’t plan to veer much from the themes and policies that framed Biden’s candidacy, such as democracy, gun violence prevention and abortion rights. But her delivery can be far fierier, particularly when she invokes her prosecutorial background to lambast Trump and his 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records in connection with a hush money scheme.
      Given that unique voice of a new generation, of a prosecutor and a woman when fundamental rights, especially reproductive rights, are on the line, it’s almost as if the stars have aligned for her at this moment in history,” said Democratic senator Alex Padilla of California, who was tapped to succeed Harris in the Senate when she became vice-president.
      Last Friday, Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, announced that the vice-president had earned the majority of delegates’ votes to become the party’s nominee to challenge Donald Trump in November, though her nomination would not be official until Monday, the end of the virtual roll-call vote.Hello again, US politics blog readers, the state of the blog this hour can be summed up with the phrase bated breath.Everyone is waiting for Kamala Harris to announce the name of her running mate. It could come today or tomorrow and one report has the shortlist down to two. Elsewhere, Donald Trump is calling the stock market dive the “Kamala crash” and Joe Biden is about to meet with his national security team in the situation room at the White House, with Harris also attending, as tensions rise again in the Middle East.Stick with Guardian US live blogs for the news as it happens. Our west coast colleagues will take the blog on later today.Meanwhile, here’s where things stand:

      Top Democratic US senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, has written to a lawyer about his client’s providing yet more travel on his private jet for US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas which has not been declared to the public. The client? Harlan Crow.

      Kamala Harris has narrowed her search for a vice-presidential running mate to two finalists, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Reuters reports, citing unnamed sources familiar.

      A Virginia man was charged with making violent online threats against US vice-president Kamala Harris days after she began her US presidential campaign last month. The man was charged in federal court after saying online that he could resort to burning the US vice-president alive. FBI agents seized a rifle and a handgun from his home.

      Harris has crept just ahead of her Republican rival, Donald Trump, in the 2024 presidential election, according to some influential new polls. The race is neck and neck, but Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, now leads Trump by 1.4 points in a national polling average presented yesterday by Nate Silver in his Silver Bulletin newsletter.

      Harris is very close to naming her choice of vice-presidential candidate to join her on the Democratic ticket to fight the 2024 election against Donald Trump this November. She has been talking to final contenders over the weekend and she needs to announce her choice before tomorrow evening, when Harris and her running mate are due to appear together at a rally in Philadelphia to raise the curtain on their campaign together.
      There’s some more news on Robert F Kennedy Jr.The independent presidential candidate arrived at a New York court today to fight a lawsuit alleging he falsely claimed to live in New York as he sought to get on the ballot in the state.Kennedy appeared and sat at his attorneys’ table during legal arguments on Monday morning, ahead of a civil trial expected to start later in the day in the state capital of Albany. Under state election law, a judge is set to decide the case without a jury, the Associated Press reports.The lawsuit alleges that Kennedy’s nominating petition falsely said his residence was in New York’s northern suburbs while he actually has lived in Los Angeles since 2014, when he married actor Cheryl Hines, known for Curb Your Enthusiasm.The suit seeks to invalidate his petition. The case was brought by Clear Choice Pac, a Super Pac led by supporters of Joe Biden. Kennedy has the potential to do better than any independent presidential candidate in decades, having gained traction with a famous name and a loyal base. Strategists from both major parties worry that he could win enough votes to tip the election.A senior Democratic US senator has written to a lawyer about his client’s providing yet more travel on his private jet for US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas which has not been declared to the public.Thomas failed to disclose publicly that he had taken a flight provided by the conservative donor Harlan Crow that fell outside what he had belatedly revealed to the public about freebie luxury travel and gifts, the New York Times reports.The letter is dated today and was sent by the Democratic US senator for Oregon Ron Wyden to Michael Bopp, a lawyer who represents Crow. It says that Thomas and his wife, Virginia, flew on a return trip between Hawaii and New Zealand in 2010 on Crow’s private jet, but that journey was not listed in financial disclosure forms justices fill our annually.This is the latest in a series of revelations about Thomas over the last year, and some other justices, mainly Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch on the supreme court, about gifts and favors, as well as alleged political bias. Thomas relatively recently said he didn’t need to disclose free travel and hospitality from “friends” such as Crow, unless individuals had business directly before the supreme court.He later amended disclosures, but more details are trickling out about other perks that he has not declared.Last month, Joe Biden called for sweeping reforms of the supreme court. He said the recent decision granting some immunity to presidents from criminal prosecution makes them a king before the law. And he said the scandals involving justices and free travel etc had caused public opinion to question the court’s fairness and independence and impeded its mission. Biden called for a binding code of conduct for the supreme court and term limits for justices.Nearing his 100th birthday and in hospice care in his hometown in Georgia since February 2023, former US president Jimmy Carter reportedly has one goal: voting for Kamala Harris against Donald Trump.“I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” Carter told his son Chip this week, as his grandson Jason Carter recounted to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.Harris, Carter’s fellow Democrat, will face the Republican Trump for the presidency on 5 November. Carter’s 100th birthday will fall on 1 October.A Democrat who was in the White House from 1977 to 1981, Carter is the oldest living president. In ill health for several years, his family announced that he entered hospice care on 18 February 2023.Carter is due to turn 100 on October 1. The presidential election is on November 5. As the Journal-Constitution noted, early voting in Georgia begins on 15 October. Full report here.The person who emerges as Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential choice for the Democratic ticket in this election will be informed of her decision tonight or in the morning, Reuters reports, citing three unnamed sources with knowledge of goings-on.The news agency reported moments ago that the competition has narrowed to two names, the governors of Pennsylvania and Minnesota, respectively, Josh Shapiro and Tim Walz.The Harris campaign plans an announcement via social media, featuring the nominee and her running mate, campaign officials familiar with the arrangements told Reuters.Over the weekend, Harris met with her vetting team, including former attorney general Eric Holder, whose law firm Covington & Burling LLP scrutinized the finances and background of potential running mates. Holder and his office made in-depth presentations on each of the finalists, according to multiple sources familiar with the process.Harris is weighing the decision with her husband, Doug Emhoff, brother-in-law Tony West and a small circle of aides and advisers, the sources said.Kamala Harris has spent the last few days interviewing contenders to be her running mate on the Democratic ticket this election and may have whittled her list from six to just two in recent hours, if a report via anonymous sources from Reuters comes true.The news wire says it’s down to Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, and Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz.Guardian US has not verified this report. At the top of the day there apparently were still six guys in the race, although some outlets appeared to be homing in on Shapiro, Walz and the US senator from Arizona Mark Kelly as the top three.Harris and her No 2 will debut as the presumptive Democratic ticket at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania tomorrow evening. So if it’s not Shapiro that would be hard for him to swallow.If it’s really down to two, here are our thumbnails on them.Shapiro, a congressional aide turned state representative and state attorney general, the 51-year-old father of four was elected governor in 2022. Close to two years later, he maintains historically high approval ratings. What are regarded as pros and cons of choosing him? Report here.Walz has captured the internet’s attention and swayed Democrats’ messaging recently by succinctly summing up how he views Republicans: they’re weird. Before he took up politics, Walz, 60, was born and raised in small-town Nebraska and became a teacher, first in China, then Nebraska, finally Minnesota. Report here.Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has narrowed her search for a vice-presidential running mate to two finalists, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, three sources with knowledge of the matter said today.Harris, the US vice-president, is expected to announce her selection by Tuesday, ahead of her first scheduled public appearance with her running mate in the evening at Temple University in Philadelphia, Reuters reports.It was unclear if a final decision has been made, the sources told the news wire. The rally will kick off a five-day, seven-city tour of the battleground states likely to decide the 5 November election.Speculation had focused on six men in all – four governors, a senator and a cabinet secretary in the Biden administration.The independent US presidential candidate, Robert F Kennedy Jr, called Donald Trump “a terrible human being”, the “worse [sic] president ever” and “barely human”.“He is probably a sociopath,” Kennedy said in texts to an unnamed person, the New Yorker reported on Monday.Kennedy has been linked to a job in any second Trump administration, not least after Kennedy’s son posted footage of such a move appearing to be discussed. Kennedy attended the Republican convention in Milwaukee in July.On Monday, a spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Kennedy’s reported remarks.They were included in an in-depth New Yorker profile otherwise remarkable for containing the story of how Kennedy came to dump a dead bear in the city’s Central Park 10 years ago.Last month it was reported that Kennedy held recent talks with Trump about endorsing his campaign for a second presidency and – if successful – taking a job in his administration. The election is on 5 November.Read Martin Pengelly’s report in full here.In the realm of how many flip-flop emojis you can garner, however, RFK Jr is running behind Trump’s veep pick, his underperforming and apparently lowly valued running mate JD Vance, a Republican Ohio senator and Maga convert.Meanwhile, here’s an interesting image from the campaign trail: More

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      Harris to announce VP pick on Tuesday ahead of Philadelphia rally – report

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      Kamala Harris is reportedly set to announce her choice of a running mate with a video released on Tuesday, before they appear together at an evening rally in Philadelphia to kick off a five-day tour of the swing states that are crucial to winning the presidential election.Politico, which first reported the Harris campaign’s plan, noted that Joe Biden also prepared a video to reveal Harris as his running mate in 2020.The culmination of what has been a lightning-fast vetting process – it is little more than two weeks since Biden, the 81-year-old president, made the historic decision to stand aside and Harris became the de facto nominee – has seen a round of interviews both in person and online.On Monday, Reuters reported that the search had narrowed to two governors: Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Tim Walz of Minnesota. Harris, 59, interviewed both men, as well as the Arizona senator Mark Kelly, over the weekend at the Naval Observatory, the Washington DC residence of the vice-president.Three other men were reported to be on her shortlist: the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker; the Kentucky governor, Andy Beshear; and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who is now the US secretary of transportation.With polling showing her gaining on Donald Trump – CBS gave the Democrat a one-point edge nationally and put the candidates level in battleground states – and a rocky rollout for Trump’s own vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, speculation has been rife as to whom Harris will select, with reporters seizing on even the smallest clues.Her choice of Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, for her first rally with her new running mate has fueled speculation that it will be Shapiro, while Kelly on Sunday tweeted then deleted the statement: “My mission is now serving Arizonans.” Reuters subsequently cited anonymous sources that Kelly was indeed out of the running.In Kentucky, meanwhile, Beshear was corralled by reporters in Frankfort while out walking his labradoodle, Winnie, responding only: “Just walking the dog this morning.”Each of the contenders was widely seen to bring strengths to the ticket. Kelly is a former combat pilot and astronaut from the border state of Arizona, which is is also an election battleground state.Pennsylvania, too, is a swing state, and Shapiro is strikingly popular with Republican voters, whom Harris courted this weekend by rolling out a slate of endorsements from anti-Trump conservatives, including former Trump White House officials.Although Minnesota is not a battleground state, Walz is more popular with young and progressive voters than Kelly or Shapiro, the latter having drawn heavy fire for his stance on Israel’s war in Gaza and pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.Whoever is chosen will then embark on a rapid-fire tour of battleground states with events in Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia.Vance, the US senator from Ohio attempting to improve his poor showing so far on the Trump ticket, has scheduled a Tuesday campaign stop in Philadelphia of his own.The CBS poll showed Harris and Trump level in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona. Harris was ahead by two points in Nevada. Trump was up by three points in North Carolina and Georgia, and by one point in Wisconsin. More

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      Democrats should run on a progressive economic agenda. Americans are ready | Bernie Sanders

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      One of the most extraordinary aspects of our corporate-dominated American political system is the degree to which the needs of working-class people, the majority of our population, are systematically ignored by political and media elites.Americans who are following the 2024 presidential campaign – and the vital campaigns for control of the US Senate and the US House – will see, hear and read a whole lot of rhetoric from political insiders and the corporate media about the “political game”.They’ll hear about horserace polls, how much money the candidates raise, what billionaire “donors” are demanding, who the vice-presidential candidate might be and, of course, the dumb things candidates said or did five years ago. Or 10 years ago. Or 20 years ago.But, in the midst of all the political gossip on TV and in the newspapers, what Americans will not encounter is a serious discussion of the multiple economic crises facing the 60% of our fellow citizens who live paycheck to paycheck – the working class of this country. What you will not hear about is why, in the richest country in the history of the world, so few have so much while so many have so little. What you will not hear about is the pain, the stress, the anxiety that tens of millions of Americans experience on a daily basis, and how governmental decisions can improve their lives.In order to combat a political system which ignores so many of the most important concerns facing the majority of our people, my campaign recently commissioned a poll in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It asked some pretty basic questions: what are the major concerns that you and your families have? What would you like your government to do about them?The results of the poll are not surprising, and not unlike other polls done over the years.They show that, at the time of huge income and wealth inequality, unprecedented corporate greed, a failing healthcare system, a grossly unfair tax structure, an extremely high rate of childhood poverty, and too many seniors struggling to pay for their basic necessities, the American people want strong governmental action which addresses the longstanding needs of working families.In other words, it turns out that progressive economic proposals are extremely popular – not only among Democrats but also among independents, Republicans and even the most ardent Trump supporters.One of the key findings of the poll is that, on core economic issues, by a wide margin, voters are more likely to vote for a candidate who favors expanding social security benefits by making the wealthy pay the same tax rate as the working class. They strongly support a candidate who favors expanding Medicare to cover vision, dental and hearing needs, who favors cutting the cost of prescription drugs in half by making sure that Americans pay no more than what they pay in Europe or Canada, and who favors hiking taxes on the rich and multinational corporations so that they pay their fair share.In other words: campaigning on an economic agenda that speaks to the needs of working families is a winning formula for Kamala Harris and Democrats in November. Indeed, it is the formula that could give Harris the sort of victory that sweeps in a Democratic Senate and House and allows her to govern in the best tradition of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Joe Biden’s Build Back Better program.In fact, whether a candidate is running for the White House or a city council seat, endorsing policies that support working families is not only the right thing to do, it’s good politics.I don’t usually say that candidates should pay attention to the polls. But, in this instance, Democrats should do just that.Here are some of the key results. The full poll can be read here.Swing-state voters are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports:Expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing;

      77% overall

      73% independents

      69% Republicans

      67% Trump voters
      Cutting the cost of prescription drugs in half by making sure that Americans pay no more than what they pay in Europe or Canada;

      75% overall

      68% independents

      68% Republicans

      65% Trump voters
      Expanding social security benefits by making the wealthy pay the same tax rate as the working class;

      72% overall

      72% independents

      56% Republicans

      56% Trump voters
      Making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes;

      70% overall

      68% independents

      54% Republicans

      53% Trump voters
      Instituting a cap on rent increases;

      63% overall

      57% independents

      46% Republicans

      46% Trump voters
      Establishing a Medicare for all single-payer healthcare system guaranteeing healthcare to all America;

      62% overall

      62% independents

      39% Republicans

      39% Trump voters
      Eliminating all medical debt;

      62% overall

      59% independents

      43% Republicans

      42% Trump voters
      Building at least 2m units of affordable housing;

      59% overall

      57% independents

      38% Republicans

      42% Trump voters
      Re-establishing the child tax credits;

      58% overall

      55% independents

      43% Republicans

      43% Trump voters
      Capping the amount of money families spend on childcare at 7% of their income;

      54% overall

      49% independents

      37% Republicans

      37% Trump voters
      Raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour;

      51% overall

      49% independents

      47% Republicans

      42% Trump voters
      Making public colleges and universities tuition-free;

      50% Overall

      51% independents

      25% Republicans

      25% Trump voters
      Passing the Pro Act, which would make it easier for Americans to join unions;

      48% overall

      41% independents

      29% Republicans

      28% Trump voters

      Bernie Sanders is a US senator, and chair of the health education labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont, and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress More

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      Young men in the US used to lean left. Could they now hand Trump the presidency?

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      View image in fullscreenA chill wind swept through Europe this summer. On the continent, far-right parties rose triumphantly in the EU elections, hoisted not just by the grumbles of older xenophobes but on the shoulders of young men. When news crews went out on the streets to train their cameras on these extremists in France, Germany, Finland and the Netherlands, they found no blackshirts, just barbershop trims and Zara chinos worn by young men, enthralled by dreams of ethnonationalism and a return to the values of the 1980s or the 1940s or some other period long before their birth. Then, in Britain this weekend, gangs of mostly young far-right men marauded through northern towns, attacking mosques and accommodation for asylum seekers. The nationalist right is rising once more on the tides of gelled-backed hair and Nike swooshes.A similar transformation could befall America in November. Until now, twentysomething voters were a thorn in Donald Trump’s side, opposing him robustly in previous elections and making their resistance corporeal as leaders in the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter protests and climate movement. Yet recent election polls suggest that while young women remain committed to the cause, there has been a tremulous withdrawal from young men. In 2016, 51% of young men identified with or leaned toward the Democratic party. By last year, it was down to 39%. Young men now favor Republican control of Congress and their support for Trump has grown since 2020.The Democratic strategist James Carville (he who told Bill Clinton “it’s the economy, stupid”) has been warning Democrats that the party’s eroding numbers among young men and young people of color are “horrifying”: “We’re not shedding them; they’re leaving in droves.”Of course, many of these fears were emerging when Joe Biden, an octogenarian white man, was still the presumptive Democratic nominee. But while early polling suggests that overall, gen Z is excited by Kamala Harris’s likely nomination, she hasn’t made much impact on gen Z men. Research by the Young Men Research Initiative (YMRI), a group set up in recent months to observe this unexpected drift, shows that men aged 18-29 are split 32% for Harris and 33% for Donald Trump, with Robert F Kennedy Jr taking 15%. This is an almost identical split to when Biden was the frontrunner.Young men used to vote more like young people: left. Now they might start voting like men: right. What changed?View image in fullscreenSome pollsters believe we are witnessing a new politics of resentment – that young men feel #MeToo has gone too far, that feminism has left them behind, and that they can only see a home for themselves in a testosterone-fuelled Republican party.Others – including Richard Reeves, head of the recently founded and influential American Institute for Boys and Men – say this isn’t a cultural issue. While a small, loud minority of men might have become more extreme in their views on feminism, most are responding to other economic and social factors that have meant they have lagged behind women for some time. Young men statistically are more depressed, financially worse off and less educated than young women, and looking for electoral answers. “This is less about young men being pulled towards the right than it is about them being pushed away from the left,” Reeves says.Blue-collar workers, Hispanic voters in Florida, white married women: Democrats have blundered before in assuming they had certain demographics locked up only to find they had taken them for granted. Unless the party can work out why it’s losing young men and how to win them back, Democrats may wake up to a cold new dawn in November, as Europe did in June.‘A very scary time’: the politics of resentmentIn 2018, a gaggle of the White House press corps asked Trump for his opinion on the allegations that Brett Kavanaugh, his nominee for the supreme court, had sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when she was 15 years old. Trump, almost drowned out by the whirring blades of Marine One, could only offer superlatives in response. “High quality”, “top student”, “a great judge”. The reporters sounded desperate: what does it say to boys that someone facing such a serious accusation is still being considered for the supreme court?“Well, I say it’s a very scary time for young men in America,” Trump replied. “You could be somebody that was perfect your entire life and somebody could accuse you of something … and you’re automatically guilty.”Trump had dismissed his own boasts of sexual assault as “locker room talk” during his 2016 campaign, but now he was making his pitch directly to the locker room. Having harnessed the racial resentment of white voters who felt society had become too diverse, could he do the same with young men who felt society had become too feminized?View image in fullscreenThe answer was a resounding no. One month later, in the midterms, the Democrats won 72% of young people’s votes overall, including at least 57% of young male voters. In 2020, Biden only won the popular vote narrowly but among young people (men and women aged 18-29), it was another landslide: a 24-point win. Time Magazine declared that young voters had reshaped “the contours of American politics” – if you were young, you were a Democrat.The feeling was that members of gen Z share a unique set of economic circumstances (a lifetime of renting, high student loans), will suffer most from environmental catastrophe, and are racially diverse and socially aware. A 2022 Gallup poll in the US found that more young people aged 18-29 had a favorable view of socialism than of capitalism. These sentiments have filtered into our cultural image of young people, too. Google images of gen Z and you’ll see groups of gender-ambiguous, ethnically diverse, septum-pierced activists clutching a smartphone in one hand and a protest sign in the other.Yet Trump’s dog whistles and Kavanaugh’s eventual appointment to the supreme court led to an embryonic neo-chauvinism. Kavanaugh, describing his confirmation hearing “as a national disgrace”, seemed to support Trump’s read that he was a victim of his gender and nod towards a politics of grievance.A few years later, Kavanaugh was instrumental in overturning Roe v Wade, destroying the hard-won freedoms of women and transforming the Democratic party – and its sometimes reluctant, whispered pro-choice position – into an explicitly pro-abortion-rights party. It also entrenched a situation in which young women passionately hated Trump; about 74% of young women had a negative view of him immediately after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, compared with 57% of young men.So if Democrats were clearly the party of young women, Republicans tried to take advantage of being the de facto party of young men.Tucker Carlson, the most powerful commentator on the right at the time, monologued nightly on Fox News about their plight.“[Young men] know that their lives will not be better than their parents, they’ll be worse,” he said. “Yet the authorities in their lives, mostly women, never stop lecturing them about their so-called privilege. ‘You’re male! You’re privileged.’ Imagine that. Try to imagine an unhealthier, unhappier life than that. So a lot of young men in America are going nuts. Are you surprised?”It was the night after the Highland Park Independence Day parade shooting, and Carlson was explaining why a 21-year-old man like Robert Crimo might want to murder seven people at random.View image in fullscreenThe Republican senator Josh Hawley, who raised his fist in salute to rioters at the US Capitol on January 6, picked up the baton in Congress and in his book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. “Why don’t you turn off the computer and log off the porn and go ask a real woman on a date – how about that?” the senator yelled at the rightwing Turning Point USA conference.The message was amplified by Trump-supporting figures outside the party too, chief among them Andrew Tate, the misogynist podcaster with a huge following among teenage boys.“Tate’s telling men that they are in a worse position than they should be because of feminism,” says Matt Shea, the journalist and documentary director who spent four years with Tate and hundreds of his young fans for two BBC documentaries and a new book, Clown World.He says Tate’s skill is in linking a feeling of incompetence in the dating world with a political impotence. Tate promotes the myth that the “sexual marketplace is dominated by a small number of alpha males, and that other men are sexually starved – and the reason for that is that women have more choice now”, says Shea.While there have always been sexually frustrated men, Shea believes that “now those men feel that they’re owed sex and have coagulated into a political movement that lays the blame on society for denying it to them”.Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market thinktank, agrees we need to look “upstream from politics” to relationships to see why men are becoming less progressive. “Women are less willing to overlook the same kinds of qualities that maybe their mothers and grandmothers were … in terms of what [men] need to contribute to a romantic partnership, the emotional labor that they need to do. Some young men have a kind of zero-sum mentality where if women are gaining, they’re losing.”In Germany, far-right candidates are already trying to capitalize on men’s supposed dating woes. The controversial AfD candidate Maximilian Krah posted on TikTok saying: “One in three young men in Germany has never had a girlfriend. Are you one of them? … Don’t watch porn, don’t vote green, go outside into the fresh air … Real men stand on the far right … That’s the way to find a girlfriend!”Within days of being re-elected to the European parliament this year, he was expelled from his party after making sympathetic comments about the SS.Unease about gender roles is reflected in polling. A July poll by YMRI found that 65% of young men aged 18-29 agreed that “guys can have their reputation destroyed just for speaking their minds these days” – an eerie refrain of Trump’s Kavanaugh statement – and 52% of men under 30 agreed that “things are generally better when men bring in money and women take care of the home and kids”.Armed with this sort of feedback, it seems Trump has been heavily courting the young, resentful male vote. He has attended Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts until the early hours, walking out to Kid Rock’s American Badass. He has lately worked hard to position himself as the crypto candidate and is heavily promoting himself on TikTok. When Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan and Dana White, CEO of UFC, introduced him at the Republican convention, Kid Rock screamed at everyone to put their fists in the air and shout “fight!” as Trump had done after the attempt on his life. Trump even attended a sneaker conference to launch his own golden hi-tops.There are millions of progressive young men who won’t be interested in his proposition. LGBTQ+ men, for example, remain solidly progressive, as do young Asian American voters. But for others, Cox says Trump’s effort could work. “Logan Paul just had Trump on his show. He’s got over 7 million followers. Some young men who are not very political might say, ‘Oh, hey, you know, Trump showing up, he’s talking, he’s engaging. I kind of like this.’”View image in fullscreen‘Shrugging shoulders, not raising fists’Fortunately for Harris, for all the many headlines about Trump’s successful overtures to young men, the polls are laden with caveats. Harris’s support jumps dramatically when pollsters measure only young men who are registered to vote (from 38% to 52% in a head-to-head matchup, according to the YMRI poll), suggesting that if Republicans want to capitalize on their popularity with this group, they will have to get them registered to vote (something they have made much harder over the past 20 years). She also takes a lead over Trump among all young male voters if RFK Jr isn’t offered as an option.The way in which age and gender overlap with race is also contested. Polling suggests a stark drop in support for Democrats in the past five years from both young Black men and young Hispanic men, with YMRI data showing both groups preferred Trump to Biden by a two-point and 19-point margin respectively. Harris changes things somewhat, but support for Trump remains high. “Young men, including men of color, are drifting away from the Democratic party,” says Shauna Daly, co-founder of YMRI, who conducted the research. “It’s just not reality if we don’t acknowledge that.”But Mondale Robinson, founder of Black Male Voter Project, which exclusively works with Black men who haven’t voted in previous elections, is dubious. He says that before every election, some polls say Black men are becoming less progressive, and yet in the elections it never comes to pass. He points to Black men in Ohio voting in 2023 on women’s right to abortion “more than anybody, 88%, even by eight points more than Black women”.What we do know is that women are becoming much more liberal. While the number of young men who identify as liberal has held pretty much steady around 25%, the number of young women who do soared in the space of a decade to almost 45%. A major Gallup poll unveiled by the Financial Times in January revealed that “women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries” in the US – a gap that opened up in just the last six years. (Polling found kindred patterns in the UK, Germany, South Korea and China.) Young women have become easily the most progressive generation in history – on abortion, healthcare, taxation and trans rights.But the shift in young men’s political attitudes can’t be explained simply by young women moving leftwards. Nor is it simply a story about young men resenting them for it.Richard Reeves – whose 2022 book, Of Boys and Men, has become a foundational text on what has gone wrong for young men in the country – is damning of framing that puts young men’s rightward turn in terms of UFC fights and incels, when he believes it’s about deep-seated inequalities of outcome in education, mental health and employment.“I want to talk about why only 60% of Black boys graduate high school on time in Michigan, or the fact that the share of male teachers has gone from 33% to 23%. Or that we’ve lost more than half the men who work in social work and psychology,” he says. “I’d want to talk about that rather than, for example, whether the Barbie movie was unfair on Ken.”View image in fullscreenHe says people are misinterpreting the polling. “It’s not enthusiasm for the reactionary right, it’s a sense of being taken for granted by the left. There are more young men shrugging their shoulders than raising their fists.”It’s true that there is now a growing gender gap in education; for every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, 74 are awarded to men. In many US cities, young women are earning more than young men and moving out of parents’ homes earlier than them.Reeves is careful to say that improving conditions for men and boys should not mean slowing down similar efforts for women and girls. But he says that government institutions do have a tendency to purposefully avoid naming the problems young men face. Suicide is one of the clearest areas in which there is a huge gender divide – there’s a fourfold gender gap in rates for young people – and yet, says Reeves, “the CDC website breaks down suicide rates by every demographic except gender. Why? Why don’t the Democrats have a taskforce on male suicide when there are 40,000 deaths a year?”He gives other compelling examples of how Democrats have failed to signpost their achievements to young men. Biden’s infrastructure bill – his key piece of legislative success – was a huge jobs creator for working-class men, “but the administration tied itself in knots not to say so”. Instead, it focused on the million women in construction initiative to ensure women got some of the funding. “That’s amazing. Now, er, where’s the million men into teaching initiative? … There are so many initiatives for women in Stem; why not one for men in teaching? Who is going to attack that?”On the Democrats’ own website is a page titled “who we serve” that lists 14 different groups. Men are not among them.Reeves believes there are some simple solutions – although he acknowledges they are “pallid” in terms of “the vividness” of Trump’s trips to UFC fights.“I’ve been thinking about writing the speech Biden should give,” he said before Harris became the likely Democratic nominee. “It would talk about vocational training, technical high schools, all things that are massively pro-men. And rather than apologizing for it, he could just say, ‘These would be particularly helpful for young men even though of course we want more women to do it too.’ Then I would want him to say, ‘I’ve asked the White House gender policy council to stop only focusing on women and girls’ issues, but also focus on some issues of boys and men, starting with issues of Black men, education, mental health.”Message testing by YMRI bears this out. Researchers asked two groups of men about the same hypothetical infrastructure bill, calling it “the Democratic Agenda for America” in one group and “the Democratic Agenda for Men” in the other. In another poll, they asked about a hypothetical female presidential candidate who promised one group to make history as the first female president, and the other group to focus on progressive policies like affordable housing and healthcare. There was “a 5-7 point swing in support, either an increase if you centered the policy agenda around men or a decrease if you focused on the historic nature of the candidate”, says Daly.View image in fullscreenPerhaps the “white dudes for Kamala” and “Black men for Kamala” fundraising calls are early steps towards Democrats acknowledging men as an important voting bloc in 2024 (even if those calls were mostly for rich donors). Biden’s attempt at masculine swagger, telling Trump to “man up” and debate Harris, could be seen as a sop towards that kind of messaging too.It’s not just about the message, though; it’s also about trusted messengers, says Robinson of Black Male Voter Project: “These young men don’t take marching orders from anyone.” He says turnout is a real issue, especially among non-college-educated Black men, among whom the distrust in both parties is so high that even having a Black candidate in Harris won’t make a difference. He says higher turnout can only come with grassroots organization – earning trust – that goes beyond election years.“[Our organization] doesn’t do that ‘Washington DC told us this is what works’ shit with Black men. Black men are suffering from not having their basic needs met … The Black men we engage with have no delusion that their vote is going to fix everything that’s plaguing them. But they do understand that when a vote becomes the tool to address the hunger, it starts yielding fruit.” Or, as he later put it, “if they’ve got a racist police chief, they can unelect the fucking mayor.”Reeves, however, says it almost doesn’t matter what the message is – the mere fact of someone from the Democratic party standing up and acknowledging men would be a huge shift. “Take someone like Jordan Peterson. His appeal does not lie in the brilliance of his policy proposals, or his advice. His appeal is simply in allowing a lot of young men to be heard. He says ‘I get it, you’re hurting’ and he fills stadiums with that message.”Can Democrats win men without losing women?Men, overall, are not the ones who are being legislated against. Over the past eight years, the Republican party, remade in Trump’s image, has cruelly gutted women’s right to abortion. It has decimated female representation at every level of government. It has given unwavering support to the police, even as police sexual assault against women reaches epidemic levels and police routinely murder Black women. They have emboldened the most misogynistic corners of the internet by putting forward a presidential nominee who has been found liable for sexual abuse, has bragged about sexual assault and rates women on a 1-10 scale (“in the same way that we do”, wrote the pick-up artist and alt-right blogger Roosh V after Trump won in 2016).View image in fullscreen“The messaging of the Republican convention was a message of male supremacy, of female submission. Women are afterthoughts in reproductive policy, health policy, the proposed marriage policy of no divorce,” says Bonnie Honig, professor of culture, media and political science at Brown University and author of Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump.When women’s very safety is at stake, should the Democrats really be worrying about how to appeal to disaffected men?First, Honig says, it’s a mistake to think of abortion purely as a women’s issue: “The loss of women’s rights is a loss for men.” She suggests that Democrats should start using the line “women’s health is not a women’s issue”, adding that “women who don’t have choices, in my opinion anyway, are not fun to live with”.More broadly, she feels that the Democrats need to avoid falling into the young men v young women dichotomy laid out by the Republicans – and pollsters. “To over-extrapolate from these polls risks feminizing the Democratic party, which is what Republicans want to do, so that they can claim to embody a kind of masculinity that is fascist-forward.”Republicans have used this gendered messaging before. “They made Obama into a representative of a kind of feminized liberal man,” Honig says. “With Biden, there was an objective fact of his age, but that was turned into saying he had aged out of any masculinity he might once have had. They did something quite similar to John Kerry, who was a war hero, but by the time they were done with him, he was just a guy who was married to a wealthy woman.”Rather than trying to appeal to young men as an aggrieved demographic group, she suggests, Democrats should try to think beyond gender to the other economic, class and community groups young men are part of: unions, professions, students, parents. “I think by supporting the United Auto Workers, for example, [Democrats] are supporting men between the ages of 18 and 30.”Three months out from the election, the political reality remains that Republicans have nothing to offer men legislatively, but lots to offer in messaging. The Democrats have lots to offer in policy but are afraid to say the “m” word.But things can change quickly. After the far right performed so well in the European elections, Emmanuel Macron called snap French parliamentary elections – an incredibly risky strategy that paid off. Among voters 18-24, the far-right National Rally still did well, with 33% of first round votes. But the leftwing New Popular Front fared even better, winning 48%. It did so by promising to invest in public services, freeze prices, raise the minimum wage and embargo arms to Israel.America is not in the same political reality as France, but its election is not a done deal either. Young men’s votes are still up for grabs. “Democrats are missing a huge opportunity to say that they see and hear the issues of a certain kind of young man,” Reeves says, “and that they are at least open to acknowledging them.” More