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    Harris and Trump tour key swing states as end of campaign draws close

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    Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch.Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin.At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.He repeated his aggressive attack on Liz Cheney, one day after he first said the former Republican US representative should be under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.Harris meanwhile sought to draw a contrast, emphasizing at a rally in Wisconsin in the afternoon that she is looking to be a political consensus builder.“Here is my pledge to you. Here is my pledge to you as president. I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris said. “I pledge to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. I will listen to experts. I will listen to the people who disagree with me. Because, you see, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy.”“He wants to put them in jail,” Harris said, repeating a line she’s has frequently invoked of late. “I’ll give them a seat at the table.”During his appearance in Warren in the afternoon and in Milwaukee in the evening, Trump repeatedly stoked fears about immigrants. In Warren, he said: “every state is a border state” and falsely claim immigrants were being flown into the south-west.He repeated some of his most racist tropes, saying: “All of our jobs are are being taken by the migrants that come into our country illegally and many of those migrants happen to be criminals, and some of them happen to be murderers.”The former president tried to tie Harris to the most recent jobs report, which showed the US added just 12,000 jobs in October.And he again attacked Cheney, one day after he called her a “radical war hawk” in a conversation with Tucker Carlson and said she should face being under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face,” he said.On Friday, Trump’s comments were similar.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. she wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.There was time for reflection, too. “We’re gonna miss these rallies, aren’t we?” Trump asked the crowd at one juncture.At another point, he remarked: “I’m studying my hair. It looks not so good today … not a good hair day for me, ay ay ay.”At a rally for Harris in the evening, Cardi B said the vice-president had inspired her to vote. “I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life”, the artist said.“I’m not giving Donald Trump a second chance,” Cardi B said. “I am not taking any chances with my future, and I damn sure ain’t taking no chances with the future of my children.“I’m with Kamala.”Harris praised Wisconsin’s motto, forward, and, addressed young voters at the rally: “Here’s what I love about you guys. You are rightly impatient for change. You are determined to live free from gun violence. You are going to take on the climate crisis. You are going to shape the world you inherit. I know that. I know that,” she said.She added: “And here’s the thing about our young leaders. None of this is theoretical for them. None of this is political for them. It’s their lived experience. It’s your lived experience, and I see your power, I see your power, and I am so proud of you.”Trump and Harris are neck-and-neck in swing state polling, and in Michigan, a Detroit Free Press survey shows her having a three-point lead.Republicans and Democrats, as well as their unofficial boosters, have pounced on the tight split. Harris’s camp is pushing hard to convince young voters, who overwhelmingly support the Democrats, to go out and vote.With mere days to go before the 5 November election, some Democrats in Michigan described being “freaked out” by the prospect of another Trump victory in this state. Biden won Michigan in 2020, but Trump defeated Hillary Clinton here in 2016. Relying on polls showing her far ahead, the Clinton campaign had prioritized campaigning in other states, neglecting key Democratic segments such as Black communities and auto workers in the state.Harris has spent more time on the ground in Michigan than in any other state with the exception of Pennsylvania. Harris and her running-mate, Tim Walz, have bounced around the state in an effort to attract Black voters, white suburban women, college students and factory workers.Last week, Barack Obama rapped with hip-hop legend Eminem at a rally in Detroit. Bernie Sanders, beloved by the Democratic left, tried to reassure young voters in the state that Harris is not just another corporate-minded Democrat.Trump, too, has upped his efforts to woo Michigan voters. On Friday, the former president stopped in Dearborn to court Arab-American voters, many of whom have been left deeply disappointed by Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict.Many of the city’s Muslim leaders declined to meet with Trump, including Dearborn’s mayor, Abdullah H Hammoud.“The architect of the Muslim Ban is making a campaign stop in Dearborn. People in this community know what Trump stands for – we suffered through it for years,” Hammoud, a Democrat, said on X. “I’ve refused a sit down with him although the requests keep pouring in. Trump will never be my president.”Hammoud, who is neither supporting Harris nor Trump in the race for president, also called fellow members of his party. “To the Dems – your unwillingness to stop funding & enabling a genocide created the space for Trump to infiltrate our communities. Remember that.”Meanwhile, Michigan residents have for months been bombarded by campaign ads, many of which feature exaggerated or blatantly false claims. With the state seeing $759m in political ad spending, Michigan ranks among the top for such disbursements in this election, per NPR. More

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      Liz Cheney calls Trump would-be tyrant as he imagines ‘guns trained on her face’

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      Donald Trump has called former congresswoman Liz Cheney a radical war hawk and said she should face being under fire with rifles “shooting at her” – prompting the anti-Trump Republican to warn the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.Cheney recently endorsed Kamala Harris and has campaigned with her, trying to persuade Republicans who don’t want Trump to win another term in the White House in this election to vote for the Democratic ticket of the US vice-president and her running mate, Tim Walz.Harris on Friday said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” ahead of the 5 November presidential election. Meanwhile, the Arizona attorney general, Kris Mayes, on Friday said her office had opened a “death threat investigation” surrounding Trump’s comments about Cheney.While still in office, Cheney co-chaired the bipartisan special House committee that investigated Trump’s conduct on January 6, when extremist supporters of his stormed the US Capitol to try, in vain, to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory over him. She lost her Wyoming seat in 2022 as Trump supporters turned against her. Trump has called for her to be jailed for investigating him.Trump was in Arizona on Thursday evening, doing a sit-down talk with the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson, and he brought up Cheney in the context of her father, Dick Cheney, the former vice-president who was a hawkish architect of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 during the George W Bush administration. Trump has been critical of that war and has also criticized the current US president, Joe Biden, for becoming involved in Ukraine’s struggling defense against the invasion by Russia.“She’s a radical war hawk,” he said of Liz Cheney. Then said: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”Early on Friday, Cheney issued a stinging response on X.“This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant. #Womenwillnotbesilenced #VoteKamala,” she posted.Trump made his comments on Thursday about Cheney after complaining that Democratic criticism of his campaign had fueled what according to authorities were two failed assassination attempts against him.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMayes told Arizona’s 12News it was not yet clear whether Trump’s comment amounted to protected free speech or a criminal threat.“That’s the question, whether it did cross the line. It’s deeply troubling,” Mayes said, according to Reuters. “It is the kind of thing that riles people up and that makes our situation in Arizona and other states more dangerous.”Cheney has said she has never voted for a Democrat before but will do so “proudly” for Harris in this election to ensure Trump never holds a position of public trust again. Her father will join her in casting his ballot for Harris. More

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      Is Kamala Harris alienating progressives as she courts anti-Trump Republicans?

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      As the daughter of a man who drove George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Liz Cheney seemed a strange political bedfellow for a Democratic candidate intent on reclaiming disaffected Arab support in one of the US presidential election’s key battlegrounds.But Cheney, the former third-ranking Republican in Congress before her career was derailed by her enmity with Donald Trump, was cast in precisely that role with Kamala Harris last week.The pair, whose ideologically conflicting views on abortion and a host of other issues would once have put them at loggerheads, appeared together in the vice-president’s trawl for votes in critical swing states, including Michigan. The state is home to a large ethnic Arab voting bloc that still remembers Dick Cheney’s controversial role as Bush’s vice-president but is now reassessing its traditional pro-Democratic sympathies amid anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.Trump, who has suggested that Cheney should be tried by a military tribunal for her congressional role in investigating his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, mocked it as a political gift.“Arab Voters are very upset that Comrade Kamala Harris … is campaigning with ‘dumb as a rock’ War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man that pushed Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to War with every Muslim Country known to mankind,” he posted on his Truth Social platform.The argument – however warped in its expression – summarises one part of Harris’s conundrum in Michigan. She faces a serious hurdle after the Uncommitted movement, a pro-Palestinian protest group that is calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza war and an arms embargo on Israel, declined to endorse her as she has sought to steer a careful middle path on the issue. The movement won more than 100,000 votes in Michigan when it contested last February’s Democratic primary against Joe Biden when he was still the party’s nominee.“I don’t think having Liz Cheney on the team helps at all, because she doesn’t bring a flock of votes with her,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute and a member of the Democratic National Committee.Yet the endorsement from Cheney – along with that of her father, who has also publicly backed the Democratic nominee – highlights a broader aspect of Harris’s campaign; to win, she is relying on the public support of high-profile anti-Trump Republicans to persuade enough hitherto GOP voters to set aside old habits and vote for her on 5 November.To that end, Harris’s coalition tent has expanded to include a broad swath of anti-Trump Republican refuseniks, including members of his former administration who have pledged themselves to the Democratic nominee in the interests of stopping him.Among them are Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary, Olivia Troye, a national security adviser to Mike Pence, Miles Taylor, a former homeland security department chief of staff, as well as Adam Kinzinger, a former Illinois congressman who – like Cheney – served on the House of Representatives committee investigating the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by a Trump-incited mob.Other Republican Harris-endorsers include Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general in the Bush administration and a man generally acknowledged as a legal architect of the US torture programme used in the post-9/11 “war on terror”. And last week, Fred Upton a former Michigan congressman who served for three decades before retiring in 2022 after voting to impeach Trump over January 6.Harris’s campaign has welcomed them all, though few so warmly as Cheney.The strategy has been accompanied by Harris moving to the centre by jettisoning previously held leftwing positions such as Medicare for all and support for a fracking ban, while embracing a tougher stance on immigration, Trump’s most emblematic campaign theme.Prominent Democrat progressives like the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the outspoken House member for New York, have remained quiescent in the interests of maintaining a united front – until now.Sanders, who had previously defended the vice-president’s retreat from progressive policies as “pragmatic” and essential to “win the election” broke cover last week, warning that her embrace of Republicans risked “losing the working class”.“The truth of the matter is that there are a hell of a lot more working-class people who could vote for Kamala Harris than there are conservative Republicans,” Sanders – who has spoken at two dozen campaign events for Harris in October alone but, unlike Cheney, not appeared on a podium with her – told the Associated Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“She has to start talking more to the needs of working-class people.”Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, a leftwing group founded as a spin-off of Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid, told AP that Harris’s approach could cost her 10% of the progressive vote – with some possibly casting a ballot for Trump.Zogby agreed. “Having an entire campaign focus on winning over quote-unquote moderate Republicans – and Liz Cheney is not a moderate Republican,” makes voters anxious, he said. “When somebody hears Liz Cheney being considered for a cabinet position, that makes people go into the panic mode. It may actually cost votes.“There is an importance in reaching moderate Republicans. [But] the definition of a moderate Republican is not somebody who rejects Donald Trump. It’s somebody who espouses policies that are themselves moderate in terms of their economic and foreign policy agenda.”But Mark Bergman, a veteran Democratic operative who has liaised with Republicans who have offered Harris their support, said that such ideological distinctions overlooked the personal risk many were taking by publicly disavowing Trump.“These people were not asked by the campaign. They took it upon themselves to act,” Bergman said. “By speaking out, they are putting a target on their backs. They deserve our utmost respect. There are lists of people [to be targeted if Trump wins] floating around. These are real conversations.”John Conway, strategy director of Republican Voters Against Trump – a group canvassing conservative-leaning voters to back Harris on the grounds that a second Trump presidency would endanger democracy – said it was a “false choice” to cast Harris’s embrace of dissident Republicans as a trade-off with maintaining her Democratic base.“This election is going to be decided by what the independents and centre-right swing voters do,” he said. “If Kamala Harris can win enough of them, she can win Pennsylvania, Michigan [and] Wisconsin and reach 270 electoral college votes.”For the strategy to succeed, Conway argued, Harris needed the example of GOP grandees of Cheney’s stature to win over diehard Republicans repelled by Trump but fearful of crossing a psychological barrier by voting Democrat.“It’s really important that she get all the endorsements from the right she can. So when somebody like Liz Cheney says, ‘I feel the same way you do. I’ve been a Republican like you’ve been. I’m going to get there on Kamala Harris, because we need to make sure that Donald Trump can never be president again,’ I think that does help [persuade] reluctant Republican voters.” More

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      ‘We have to blow it up’: can never-Trumpers retake the Republican party?

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      The former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney “hopes to be able to rebuild” the Republican party after Donald Trump leaves the political stage. Mitt Romney, the retiring Utah senator and former presidential nominee, reportedly hopes so too.Among other prominent Republicans who refuse to bow the knee, the former Maryland governor Larry Hogan is running for a US Senate seat in a party led by Trump but insists he can be part of a post-Trump GOP.“I think there are a lot of people that are very frustrated with the direction of the party and some of them are giving up,” Hogan told the Guardian. “I think we’ve got to stand up and try to take the Republican party back and eventually get us back on track to a bigger tent, more [Ronald] Reagan’s party, that can win elections again.”Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chair turned MSNBC host, advocated more dramatic action: “We have to blow this crazy-ass party up and have it regain its senses, or something else will be born out of it. There are only two options here. Hogan will be a key player in whatever happens. Liz Cheney, [former congressmen] Adam Kinzinger and Joe Walsh – all of us who have been pushed aside and fortunately were not infected with Maga, we will have something to say about what happens on 6 November.”That’s the day after election day, when Trump will face Kamala Harris. If Trump wins, all bets will be off. If he loses, the never-Trumpers could try to reclaim their party. Few are under any illusions about the size of the task.“It’s going to take somewhere between six, eight, 10 years to defeat the Maga piece of the party resoundingly and definitively,” said Reed Galen, son of the late GOP stalwart Rich Galen. Galen is an adviser to George W Bush and John McCain, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, and now running Join the Union, a coalition of pro-democracy groups.“If you think about it, 85% of Republican primary voters this year voted for Trump. Now, is that bad for somebody who owns the party and is a former president? Yeah, electorally, it could be. But it also says that the people who actually choose nominees are Maga, right?“Do I think there will be some erosion if Trump loses? Yeah, but I don’t think it’s going to be below 50% and I don’t think that anybody who considers themselves a diehard Republican or a Maga Republican is looking to go back to the days of George W Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney, or even Nikki Haley.“If the establishment, such as it is, wants its party back, then it’s going to have to do some pretty serious work to destroy the parts of it that are anti-democratic and fundamentally dangerous to the country. I don’t know, based on their track record, whether they’re willing to do that. Frankly, I don’t think they are. I think they’re going to try and figure out how to survive long enough that maybe the thing burns itself out on its own.”Among elected or formerly elected Republicans with national profiles, Cheney has gone furthest, campaigning for Harris in battleground states. Romney has stayed quiet. He might thus seem better positioned to shape a post-Trump party but Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist turned publisher of the Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative outlet, recently called his stance “genuinely insane”.View image in fullscreenShe said: “‘I can’t come out and endorse Kamala Harris because I have to maintain some juice to help rebuild the Republican party?’ No.”Trump and Trumpists’ grip on Romney’s party is too strong, Longwell said, to allow for such passivity.Cheney has hinted at interest in building a new rightwing party, telling an audience in Wisconsin that “it may well be [necessary] because … so much of the Republican party today has allowed itself to become a tool for this really unstable man”. But starting afresh would be tremendously difficult, not least because rightwing donors and advocacy groups have so successfully capitalized on Trump’s capture of the GOP, achieving epochal policy wins, not least the removal of the federal right to abortion.Galen said: “All of the people who built all of these front groups, whether the Heritage Foundation [originator of the controversial Project 2025 plan for a second Trump term] or the Conservative Partnership Institute, or [the dark money impresario] Leonard Leo, all these people have spent decades and billions of dollars building out this stuff. It’s not like they’re simply going to fold up their tent and say, ‘You guys in the establishment, take your party back.’ These people are true believers.”So are the younger donors, strategists and elected officials now led by JD Vance, the 40-year-old Ohio senator who once opposed Trump but became his vice-presidential pick with backing from billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.“The worst kept secret in the world is that JD Vance or [Texas senator] Ted Cruz or [Missouri senator] Josh Hawley all desperately want Trump to lose, because they want their shot,” Galen said. “Trump is [nearly] 80. They’re in their 40s, maybe early 50s, and they want him to go the hell away.“But even if he loses, they can’t separate themselves from them him completely. They they may try but the truth is we’re talking not just about the Republican party, but the American body politic. This a decade-long program, at least, to get this thing back into some sort of healthy state.“Beating Donald Trump is like surviving a car crash. It doesn’t mean you’re not in the hospital, and it doesn’t mean you’re OK. It just means that they got the jaws of life out and they yanked you out of the car.”To Galen, wondering if the Republican establishment can take back its party is ultimately a waste of time – with the emphasis on “time”. Cheney is 58, Hogan 68, Romney will be 78 next year. Mike Pence, the vice-president Trump abandoned to the mob on January 6 but who stays quiet, is 65 himself.“They’re the dinosaurs of the Republican party,” Galen said. “The comet has hit, the cloud has covered, it’s just a matter of accepting your fate.”In his late 40s, Galen professes energy for the fight to come. Nonetheless, he describes a sobering recent experience in London, when he sat with “Mehdi Hasan on Al Jazeera, and he was battering some Trump spokesperson in a debate”. That was fun, but Galen had a confrontation of his own. One of the panel participants, a younger Trump supporter, leaned over and told him: “You know, we killed your party, and we couldn’t be happier about it.”“The Republican party is a nationalist, nativist party,” Galen said. “All of this stuff that I grew up with as far as the party was concerned, the idea of moral and muscular foreign policy, fiscal responsibility, individual liberty?“All that stuff’s gone. It’s gone.” More

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      US elections live: Obama ridicules Trump’s boasts on economy as Walz dismisses Republican nominee’s McDonald’s ‘stunt’

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      Barack Obama is hitting on a key issue for voters: the economy.“Don’t have nostalgia for what his economy was. Because it was mine,” Obama said.Polls show voters tend to favor Trump on the economy, yearning for the time, early in Trump’s presidency, pre-pandemic, when housing and grocery costs were lower.“I spent eight years cleaning up the mess that Republicans left,” Obama said.Scrutiny is growing about the Montana aerial firefighting company once led by Tim Sheehy, the former Navy Seal and Republican Senate candidate who could oust the Democrat incumbent Jon Tester in next month’s election.According to NBC News, Sheehy’s Bridger Aerospace, a company he founded in 2013, negotiated a deal with Gallatin county in eastern Montana to use its pristine credit rating to raise $160m in bonds. The county was meant to benefit from Bridger’s plans to hire more workers and build two new aircraft hangers.But the company used most of the money, or $134m, from the 2022 bond issue to pay back previous investment from Blackstone, a New York-based investment giant.Bridger’s finances have been complicated by the fact that there were fewer wildfires to fight this year and thus less revenue for Bridger. As of Tuesday, the National Interagency Fire Center reported 42,603 wildfires nationwide this year compared to the 10-year average of 48,689 for the same period.In financial filings for the quarterly period that ended 30 June 2024, Bridger said it had “a substantial amount of debt” and that failure to service that debt “could prolong the substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern”.A victory for Sheehy in November could hand Republicans control of the Senate, making his connections to Bridger a vital topic as voters head to the polls.Election day is exactly two weeks away. And today has been a frenzy of campaign activity.

      Eminem reportedly set to introduce Barack Obama when he appears in Detroit tonight, and Bruce Springsteen to headline two concerts as part of a series that will hit every swing state.

      Obama also campaign with Tim Walz in Wisconsin.

      JD Vance dodged a question about whether he would strip migrants with legal authorization of their status, at an event in Arizona.

      Donald Trump will be in in North Carolina, where Walz is holdind a second event this evening.

      Trump held a round table with Latino leaders but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc.

      Harris will campaign in Houston on Friday, with an eye towards picking up Texas’s Senate seat and highlighting how abortion bans have affected women in the Republican bastion.

      The US economy is poised for stronger growth than many wealthy nations, the IMF said in forecasts released today.
      Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Joe Biden appeared alongside Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. to discuss his administration’s work on lowering prescription drug prices.But the president also took a chance to issue a warning that Trump and Vance were extreme. “This is not your father’s Republican Party,” Biden said, referencing Strom Thurmond, the late senator from South Carolina who famously conducted the longest speaking filibuster in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. But Thurmond later moderated his stance/“People change, but these guys just keep getting worse,” Biden of the party now. “Get to the vote. Because the nation’s democracy depends on it.”He shared an embrace with Sanders.At an early voting pop-up location at the University of Minnesota, hundreds of students waited in line to cast ballots on Tuesday – a sign of youth enthusiasm for the presidential election.The early voting location at the campus’ Weisman Art Museum, a one-day on-campus polling place for any Minneapolis voter, was a first-time occasion made possible by recent changes in state law to allow for pop-up polling places to help voters who can be harder to reach, like college students.“We brought the polls to them,” said Riley Hetland, a sophomore and undergraduate student government civic engagement director who helped plan the event. Hetland said the group has been going to classrooms and hosting tables around campus for weeks to get people registered to vote and help them make a plan to cast ballots. So far, they have gotten 12,000 voters to pledge to vote, double their goal of 6,000.Madelyn Ekstrand finished her class for the day and waited about an hour, all told, to cast her ballot. The 21-year-old senior said abortion access and climate change were important to her, so she was voting for Harris. She thought she’d vote early to get it done, but didn’t realize how popular the choice would be – she was glad it was so busy.“I’m happy to see people my age getting out and voting and being proactive and not waiting till the last second,” she said.The ruling upholds another order by a Fulton county judge, who invalidated last-minute rules made by Georgia’s state election board this year.The rules, which were approved by Trump-aligned members of the board, would have required all ballots to be counted by hand on election night – a feat that would probably yield results that are far less accurate than a count done by ballot scanners. The changes would also have allowed officials investigate discrepancies in vote totals and conduct “reasonable inquiries” into irregularities, without clarifying what such an inquiry entailed.The unanimous ruling by the conservative-majority supreme court did not touch on the legality of the seven rules – rather, it dismissed a request to hold a decision issued by a lower-court judge.It’s an arresting split screen: Barack Obama, in Madison, tells voters that when Trump and Vance are pressed to elaborate on their policies, “they’ll fall back on one answer: blame immigrants”.“He wants you to believe that if you let him round up whoever he wants and ships them out, all your problems will be solved,” Obama says.Meanwhile, in Arizona, JD Vance dodges a question about whether he would strip immigrants of their legal status.Barack Obama is hitting on a key issue for voters: the economy.“Don’t have nostalgia for what his economy was. Because it was mine,” Obama said.Polls show voters tend to favor Trump on the economy, yearning for the time, early in Trump’s presidency, pre-pandemic, when housing and grocery costs were lower.“I spent eight years cleaning up the mess that Republicans left,” Obama said.Tim Walz has wrapped up his speech, after introducing Barack Obama.The Democratic former president apologized for being late, saying he had an issue with his plane that forced him to drive to Madison from Chicago.“So we board the plane … and then the pilot comes in and says: ‘Sir, there’s a pile of oil leaking out of the back of the plane.’ Now, I do not know anything about planes, except for the fact that it should not leak oil. So we had a nice road trip instead, and I am glad I made it,” Obama said.Tim Walz encouraged the crowd not to grow sanguine about the possibility of a second Trump term, saying the Republican could retaliate against him if he returns to the White House.“Here’s another reason that the stakes are so high in this election, something that I don’t think many of us have seen. You hear some version of this from the people in your life, neighbors, relatives, brothers, in some cases, who said, look, we made it through the first Trump term, we’ll get through a second. This Donald Trump … is far more dangerous … He is not the 2016 Donald Trump. This is a brand-new version,” Walz said.He elaborated on why he believes that:
      As Kamala says, he is a very unserious person, but the consequences of putting him back in office are deadly serious. He’s talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names. Look, I recognize I’m going to be at the top of that list. You think he’s stopping with me? He’s talking about you. He’s talking about using the United States military to go after people who disagree with his idiotic ideas, his unpatriotic ideas, his traitorous ideas. And he’s talking about using the military. He talks about the enemy from within.
      After Donald Trump recently called Kamala Harris a “shit vice-president”, Tim Walz just used similar language to describe Elon Musk’s enthusiastic campaigning for the former president.Musk bounded on stage and briefly got airborne at a Trump rally in the Pennsylvania town where the former president nearly lost his life in an assassination attempt in July.Here’s what Walz had to say about that:
      So look, Elon is on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit on these things. You know it. Think about it … that guy is literally the richest man in the world spending millions of dollars to help Donald Trump buy an election.
      Now, look, they’re saying the quiet parts out loud now, because Donald Trump has already promised that he would put Elon in charge of government regulations that oversee the businesses that Elon runs.
      That’s a hell of a buy. He could spend billions to make more than $10bn on the back end. So in other words, Donald Trump, in front of the eyes of the American public, is promising corruption. That’s what he’s promising you. And you know what? I don’t believe, I don’t believe he keeps many promises, but he’ll keep that one.
      Tim Walz then took Donald Trump to task for the staged campaign event he held at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s over the weekend, saying the appearance amounted to a “stunt”.“He went to a McDonald’s and dressed up as the drive-thru worker. They found him an apron his size and put it on him. And I was thinking, it is possible he mixed up his weekends and thought that it was Halloween already. He’s been forgetting things lately, as you might have noticed,” Walz said.Pressing the attack, the Minnesota governor continued:
      That restaurant, that restaurant wasn’t even open. It was a stunt – fake orders for fake customers. They even staged the drive thru. We know that they won’t let you walk through the damn drive thru. We knew that. They saw that happening.
      But look, everything about this guy is fake. Everything he does is fake. Next, he’s going to be telling you he’s a cop or a construction worker because he dances to the Village People, so he knows the YMCA. And I’ll tell you this: so that five minutes he stood next to the deep fryer, I’ll guarantee you that’s the hardest that guy’s ever worked in his life. And that’s not a joke.
      Tim Walz laid into Donald Trump for the meandering tone of his recent speeches and for declining to debate Kamala Harris for a second time.“It takes stamina to run for president. It takes stamina to be president, and Donald Trump does not have stamina,” Walz began. “He has been rambling more than the normal rambling.”Noting that Trump has lately taken to describing his speaking style as “the weave”, Walz said: “We know there’s only one weave that you know anything about, and it is not this. It is not this … He’s ducks debates, but you can’t blame him. When you get your ass whipped that hard, you don’t come back for seconds.”After the customary playing of Beyoncé’s Freedom – the song used at just about every Harris campaign event – Tim Walz strolled on stage.He shouted out all the Democrats who introduced him, as well as the rally attendees: “But each of you, huge thank-you. Took time out of your busy lives, you came here, you came here because you believe in the promise of America and you believe in the democracy. Thank you.”Next up was Tammy Baldwin, the state Democratic senator who is locked in an increasingly tight re-election battle against Republican Eric Hovde.Like Tony Evers before her on the lineup, Baldwin centered her appeal to voters on her support for abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act.“Just a little bragging here: I wrote the provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they turn 26 and I will never stop fighting until all Americans have the quality, affordable healthcare that they need and deserve,” she said.Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, one of the early speakers at the Walz-Obama rally in Madison, didn’t hold back when describing what a second Donald Trump presidency would mean.“We know Trump and Vance will try to pass a national abortion ban, roll back access to birth control, emergency contraception and even fertility treatments. We know that they’re going to repeal the Affordable Care Act and deny coverage to folks like me and so many others here in the audience, and people you care about who have a pre-existing condition,” he said.The governor continued:
      What Trump said about that – he’s got the concept of a plan. Now you take that concept for a plan and go pay a bill, it ain’t going to work. And they’re going to give more tax breaks for the ultra-rich and the big corporations instead of helping working families get ahead. And we know that a second Trump term would mean unchecked power with no guardrails to hold them back. That’s just bullshit. More

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      Liz Cheney urges conservatives to back Kamala Harris over abortion

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      Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, condemned Republican-imposed bans on the procedure and urged conservatives on Monday to support Kamala Harris for president.Cheney was speaking at the first of three joint events with Harris in the suburbs of three swing states aimed at prising moderate Republican voters away from party nominee Donald Trump. She has become the Democrat’s most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumoured to be under consideration for a seat in a potential Harris cabinet.At the first event in Malvern, a Philadelphia suburb, against a blue backdrop that said “a new way forward” and red one that said “country over party”, Cheney suggested that Republican-led states have overreached in restricting abortion since the supreme court’s 2022 Dobbs decision ended it as a constitutional right.“I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life, but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need,” said Cheney, a former Wyoming congresswoman and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney.“I think this is not an issue that we’re seeing break down across party lines, but I think we’re seeing people come together to say: what has happened to women, when women are facing situations where they can’t get the care they need, where in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing, is suing, to get access to women’s medical records … that’s not sustainable for us as a country and it has to change.”Harris nodded repeatedly and applauded in response. The audience also clapped warmly.It was a striking attempt to build a permission structure for conservatives to back Harris, who has made reproductive freedom a centrepiece of her campaign and vowed to restore the protections of Roe v Wade if authorised by Congress. Cheney, by contrast, has an A rating from Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a group that grades members of Congress based on their anti-abortion credentials.Monday’s three events in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were being held in counties won by Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, had sought to neutralise abortion as an election issue by supporting states’ autonomy and rejecting calls for a national ban.Cheney has vocally opposed Trump since the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and was vice-chair of a congressional committee investigating the attack. Her recent endorsement of Harris fuelled speculation that she could play a part in a future Harris administration.

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      Earlier this month, appearing on the popular daytime talkshow The View, Harris said she would differ from Joe Biden by including a Republican in her cabinet. She was asked by radio host Howard Stern if that might be Cheney but avoided a direct answer. Appointing Cheney would carry considerable political risks given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war.Trump has frequently tried to paint Harris, who is from deep blue California, as a radical liberal but she struck a moderate tone during her appearance with Cheney, who lost her House seat after she co-chaired a congressional committee that investigated the January 6 attack.She promised to “invite good ideas from wherever they come” and “cut red tape,” and she said “there should be a healthy two party system” in the country. “We need to be able to have these good intense debates about issues that are grounded in fact,” she said.“Imagine!” Cheney responded.“Let’s start there!” Harris said as the audience clapped. “Can you believe that’s an applause line?”View image in fullscreenVoters in Chester county, which includes Malvern, narrowly voted for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 but the county was won by Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points in 2016 and Biden by 17 points in 2020.The discussion was chaired by Sarah Longwell, who runs the group Republican Voters Against Trump, and lasted 40 minutes including two questions from the audience.Harris said Trump “has been using the power of the presidency to demean and to divide us” and “people are exhausted with that”. The vice-president added: “People around the world are watching. And sometimes I do fret a bit about whether we as Americans truly understand how important we are to the world.”Cheney praised Harris, saying: “I’m a conservative. I know that the most conservative of all conservative principles is being faithful to the constitution. You have to choose in this race between someone who has been faithful to the constitution, who will be faithful, and Donald Trump.”Cheney said she was concerned about allowing a “totally erratic, completely unstable” Trump to run foreign policy. “Our adversaries know that they can play Donald Trump,” she said. “And we cannot afford to take that risk.”But some observers questioned the wisdom of campaigning with Cheney in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war. Many such voters are now wavering or abstaining because of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the crisis in Gaza.Trump weighed in on Monday, writing on his Truth Social platform: “Arab Voters are very upset that Comrade Kamala Harris, the Worst Vice President in the History of the United States and a Low IQ individual, is campaigning with ‘dumb as a rock’ War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man that pushed Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to War with every Muslim Country known to mankind.”More than a hundred former Republican officeholders and officials joined Harris last week in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, not far from where general George Washington led hundreds of troops across the Delaware River to a major victory in the revolutionary war. At a rally there, Cheney told Republican voters that the patriotic choice was to vote for Democrats. More

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      Endorsements from Republicans and CEOs won’t help Kamala Harris win | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney’s campaign event last week in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican party, was a dramatic component of Harris’s ongoing outreach to Republicans. That outreach, begun under President Joe Biden and continuing even more aggressively under Harris, was made clear in an open letter on Thursday in which two dozen Republican former officials and lawmakers in Wisconsin endorsed Harris and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz.“We have plenty of policy disagreements with Vice President Harris,” the Republicans wrote. “But what we do agree upon is more important. We agree that we cannot afford another four years of the broken promises, election denialism, and chaos of Donald Trump’s leadership.”This statement comes after the Harris campaign touted the endorsements of more than 100 former staffers and national security leaders from past Republican administrations, 10 retired military generals and admirals, and more than 90 business leaders including former chairs or CEOs of companies such as UBS, Aetna, Visa, Merck and American Airlines, as well as former high officials like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.The Harris campaign seems intent on convincing voters that she is the favored candidate of the bipartisan establishment. One problem with this strategy: voters probably already assume that about Harris. And if they didn’t, Trump reminds them regularly, painting her both as the “other” and as part of the establishment that has failed them. The danger: Harris is helping to make his case for him.Trump’s mendacity, duplicity, fraudulence and corruption are well known. So why is the race so close, and why does Trump enjoy such support from working-class voters, not simply white men, but growing numbers of Black people, Hispanics and single women? His poisonous racism and xenophobia surely play a part. But the central theme of his political campaigns since he came down the golden elevator in 2016 has been how working people have been fleeced by an establishment that enriched itself and failed them.In 2016, Trump’s focus was on trade, Nafta, China in the WTO. This year, his focus is on inflation and the cost of living. Even his slanders of immigrants focus on how they are taking jobs from working people, raising the cost of housing, the source of increasing crime, drugs and violence.And repeatedly, Trump indicts the establishment that has failed them. As he said in the 2016 campaign:“The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs … Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan – and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and across our country. They have stripped these towns bare and raided the wealth for themselves and taken away their jobs.”As Jared Abbott, of the Center for Working Class Politics, concluded after a study of Trump’s rhetoric in 2016, “Unlike virtually any politician they had ever heard before, Trump not only spoke over and over again to the economic pain felt by so many working-class Americans but also called out the elite culprits by name, something that traditional politicians typically shy away from.”On foreign policy, Trump is similarly openly scornful of the generals and foreign policy “blob” who led us into losing wars, squandering the lives not of their own children, but those of working people. When the generals and national security managers announced their endorsements of Harris, Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, responded: “These are the same people who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited off of them while the American people suffered,” followed by the lie that “President Trump is the only president in the modern era not to get our country into any new wars.”Trump’s lies, libels and shambling vaudeville rallies simply reinforce his message that he not only isn’t part of the establishment, but he’s hated by them.In this election, voters are looking for dramatic change. Polls show that, as Stan Greenberg has reported, only a quarter of battleground voters think the country is headed in the right direction. The overwhelming concern is inflation and the cost of living. The average household grocery bill is 20% higher than in 2020. The costs of necessities – housing, healthcare, childcare, college – seem increasingly out of reach.More and more voters are clear that a big cause of this is entrenched and corrupt interests – big oil, the drug companies, monopolies, multinationals. Greenberg reports that the percentage of voters with little or no confidence in “big business” is the lowest since the financial crisis of 2008.Harris has an agenda and a message that can speak to these concerns: cracking down on monopolies, starting with price gouging on groceries. Taking on pharma. A child tax credit, help for new families, help for new homeowners and small businesses paid for by taxes on millionaires and billionaires. Moving forward on rebuilding America and generating good jobs by investing in the growth industries of the coming years.The contrast with Trump’s agenda – of tax cuts for the corporations and the rich, of trade wars and higher costs of goods from across-the-board tariffs, of promising big oil a blank check if they support his campaign – is telling.But Harris has to prove that she is prepared to take on the powerful interests, dislodge the failed establishment, and force the changes she’s begun to talk about. When she arrays her support from the establishment, she doesn’t build her credibility, she weakens it. If 90 CEOS stand with her, why believe she’s prepared to take them on or tax them? If the generals who led us into one failed war after another are with her, why believe she’ll focus on rebuilding America and not on global misadventures?Rather than gaining media acclaim for joining Liz Cheney in Ripon, she might have been better off walking the (blessedly, short-lived) picket line with striking dockworkers, reinforcing Biden’s statement that the companies and executives have enjoyed staggering and record returns, and it’s time for the workers to get their fair share.The mainstream media will broadcast the bipartisan support behind Harris. Those who worked with Trump and now oppose him will find a ready platform. In the little time left before the election, Harris and Walz need to focus on providing a compelling answer to the famous union question: which side are you on? Liz Cheney, Robert Rubin and Mike Pence don’t help with that answer.

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has contributed to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times More

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

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