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      ‘How can I vote for Biden?’ Arab Americans in Michigan ‘betrayed’ by Israel support

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      Leading up to the 2020 election, Arab American organizers in south-east Michigan like Terry Ahwal worked to convince their community to go to the polls for Joe Biden. The message was simple: Donald Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric and policies such as the Middle East travel ban were a threat to Arab Americans. Voters mobilized to help push Biden over the top in this critical swing state.Several years on, amid Biden’s full-throated support of Israel in the current war and an unfolding humanitarian crisis that has claimed thousand of lives in Gaza, Ahwal feels deep regret: “I have to say “I’m sorry’ to my friends.’”Ahwal is among hundreds of thousands of Arab Americans in Michigan, many of whom are watching with horror as the US supports Israel as it carries out its bombing campaign. After the community backed Biden by a wide margin in November 2020, the feeling goes “beyond betrayal”, about a dozen Arab Americans in Michigan said.“This is a complete loss of humanity, it is the active support of a genocide, and I don’t think it gets any worse than that,” said Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American activist and attorney. “I’ve gotten a few comments, ‘Well, the GOP is going to be worse,’ and my question is: ‘How can you get worse than active support of a genocide?’”Polls show that Americans have generally been supportive of Israel and its response to the 7 October attack, though Morning Consult data released this week also shows the number of people who sympathize equally with Israelis and Palestinians is on the rise. That poll also showed support for Biden’s response is growing.But Arab Americans who spoke with the Guardian said they did not know of anyone in their community who would vote for Biden in 2024. That could have profound consequences in a state in which Trump won by 10,000 votes in 2016, and a tight rematch is taking shape.Still, the Biden administration has remained steadfastly supportive of Israel, proposing $14bn in aid; providing weapons such as missiles and armored personnel carriers; refusing calls for a ceasefire; and deploying US troops to the region. A Data for Progress poll released Thursday found 66% of Americans think the US should call for a ceasefire.The use of Arab American tax dollars to bomb Gaza is generating “widespread horror and fury”, Arraf said.Though Biden has called on Israel to show restraint and touted a deal he struck to allow trucks carrying aid to enter Gaza, Arab Americans who spoke with the Guardian view the gestures as pittances. They see the US’s support as ham-fisted and “shocking” in the context of the last presidential election.“Even our conservative members voted for Biden, only to get a guy who dehumanizes us, who is sending the weapons to Israel, and the only purpose of these weapons is to use Palestinian as target practice,” Ahwal said. “I don’t know anybody who would vote for him.”That sentiment was echoed by Muslim and Arab Americans elsewhere in the country. Zohran Mamdani, a New York assemblymember, called Biden’s response to the crisis “disgusting” and warned that the president is underestimating the Arab American voting bloc.“I have had many constituents of mine, as well as Muslims from beyond my district, reach out to me and ask me: ‘How am I supposed to vote for Joe Biden?’ And I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell them,” he said.A number of people also expressed fears that the Biden administration’s rhetoric and positions are fanning the flames of Islamophobia in the US and putting their communities in danger. People who are publicly critical of Israel or supportive of Palestine have lost jobs and faced harassment in recent weeks. Muslim and Arab American politicians are receiving death threats and the level of vitriol is above what was experienced in the wake of 9/11, said Abraham Aiyash, a Muslim American state representative in Michigan.The president’s comparison of Hamas’s attacks to “15 9/11s”, Aiyash said, “enhances Islamophobia”, referencing the recent murder in Illinois of a six-year-old Palestinian American boy in an alleged hate crime.“If you support [Israel’s war] abroad, you have to be ready for the consequences of it at home,” he said.Multiple Palestinian Americans who do not work in politics declined to speak with the Guardian over safety fears.Any potential for political fallout for Biden is greatest in Michigan, a critical swing state that is home to 300,000 Arab Americans who helped boost Biden after Clinton’s narrow 2016 loss. Biden beat Trump in 2020 by about 150,000 votes.Few – if any – issues are more important to this group than Palestine and Middle East foreign policy, said Amer Zahr, a Palestinian American activist and comedian. He noted that Dearborn, a majority Arab American city just outside Detroit, went for Bernie Sanders by a significant margin during the last two Democratic presidential primaries because Sanders was willing to challenge US policy on Israel.But Biden was viewed as better than Trump, so Arab-Americans turned out in the general election, Zahr said. Next time, many people have said, they will vote third party, or leave the top of the ticket blank.Dearborn went 63% for Clinton in 2016 when she lost the state by 10,000 votes, but nearly 80% for Biden four years later. In the four municipalities with the largest Arab American populations in metro Detroit, about 40,000 more people voted for Biden than Clinton.“They came into our community and asked us to vote for Joe Biden and save America from Donald Trump, and now we feel like we have to save Palestine from Joe Biden,” Zahr added. “The argument that we heard before is we have to save the country from Trump – that’s not going to work.”“If [2024] is going to be a close election then the loss of Arab American support for Biden could have an impact,” said the state pollster Bernie Porn.The White House’s “lazy” language and the skewed portrayal of the crisis in US media dehumanizes Arabs – Palestinians, in particular, said James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, a Washington DC-based civil rights advocacy organization.“This objectification of Palestinians and the humanization of Israelis – which is an old story going back to the beginning of the conflict – fed into the pre-existing narrative that it’s Israeli people versus the Arab or Palestinian problem,” he said.The White House, he added, “sets the tone”, and “it’s important for us to let the administration know, you’re at risk of losing this particular component group of the community.”Those who spoke with the Guardian said they found the situation especially frustrating because they expected this kind of policy and positions from Republicans, but not Democrats.“What makes me incensed with Democrats is that they preach human rights, preach equality and diversity, but when it comes to Palestinians, all the preaching goes away, and there is justification for the killing and slaughter,” Ahwal said.“I know the ramifications and I know the consequences but I cannot justify a vote for a guy who says it’s OK to kill Palestinians.” More

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      Trump fake elector scheme: where do seven states’ investigations stand?

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      As Donald Trump faces criminal charges in multiple cases across the country, several states are still investigating a scheme created by Trump allies and boosted by Trump himself to cast fake electoral votes for the Republican candidate for the 2020 election.As part of the US electoral college system, states cast a set number of votes for the candidate who wins the popular vote in their state, the winner of which then takes the presidency. Seven states that the former president lost saw slates of fake GOP electors falsely claim Trump had won their electoral votes. These fake electors included high-profile Republicans, such as sitting officeholders and state party leaders.Two prosecutors, in Michigan and Georgia, have already filed charges against fake electors. Others have confirmed investigations but provided few details. One state prosecutor said local laws did not address this kind of crime, which is unprecedented.Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump campaign legal adviser and the supposed mastermind of the fake electors scheme, pleaded guilty in Georgia over his role in subverting the election. Chesebro allegedly created the plan in a secret memo based on Wisconsin’s electoral vote.At the federal level, the special counsel Jack Smith and his team brought charges against Trump and his allies over their attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, which include the fake elector scheme. Several states have confirmed they are cooperating with Smith’s investigation, and news reports have indicated Smith offered limited immunity to some fake electors for their testimony.Since the scheme had no precedent, some states and experts have struggled to figure out which laws may have been broken, and whether the charges should be state or federal. In some states, the fake electors also face civil lawsuits. Here’s where they stand.ArizonaThe former Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich, a Republican, never publicly confirmed any investigation into the state’s fake electors, which included high-profile far-right figures such as the state senator Jake Hoffman and the former Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward. The state actually saw two separate sets of fake electors.His successor, the Democrat Kris Mayes, told the Guardian earlier this year that her office is investigating the fake electors, but has not provided any details of the investigation so far. On a recent Arizona Republic podcast episode, Mayes said she could not say much about the contours of the investigation, but that her office was taking it “very seriously” and that it was a “very important investigation”.While the cases in Michigan and Georgia are much further along, she noted that their prosecutors have been in place much longer than she has. Mayes took office in January 2023.GeorgiaThree fake electors in Georgia were charged as part of a broader case against Trump and his allies over election subversion attempts.The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, brought charges against the former Georgia Republican party chairman David Shafer, the state senator Shawn Still and the activist Cathy Latham, three of the 16 fake electors from that state. They face various charges, including forgery, impersonating a public officer and attempting to file false documents.Several of the others who signed on as false electors for Trump struck immunity deals or plea agreements with prosecutors.The three fake electors charged have pleaded not guilty. Their attorneys argued in September that they were not fake electors, but instead “contingent” electors who could be used should the courts overturn Biden’s win, the Associated Press reported. The three are trying to get their case moved from state court in Georgia to a federal court, arguing they were acting as federal officers who were keeping an avenue open for Trump depending on what happened in the courts.Sidney Powell, who was charged in the broader case, pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the prosecution. The unexpected move netted Powell six years of probation and some fines and marks a major shift in the Georgia case for Trump and his allies. Chesebro, on the day jury selection for his trial was set to begin, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents and probably will serve five years’ probation.MichiganThe Democratic attorney general Dana Nessel charged 16 Michiganders who participated as fake electors with eight felonies each, including multiple forgery charges, for their roles in the scheme. Those charged include party activists, candidates for office and state and local party officials.Attempts by two defendants to get the charges dismissed because of Nessel’s comments about how the electors were “brainwashed” were unsuccessful. The 16 people charged pleaded not guilty, and probable cause hearings are set for this month.This week, one of Michigan’s fake electors saw his charges dropped as part of a deal with the state’s attorney general. James Renner, a Republican who falsely signed that Trump had won, agreed to “full cooperation, truthful testimony and production of any and all relevant documents” in exchange for the dropped charges, filings from the attorney general’s office, obtained by NBC News, show. This includes information about how he was asked to become part of the fake slate and the circumstances of meetings among those involved in the scheme.NevadaNevada’s top prosecutor has said his office would not bring charges against the six people who signed on as fake electors there in 2020. The state’s Democratic attorney general, Aaron Ford, said current state laws did not address this kind of situation, “to the dismay of some, and I’m sure, to the delight of others”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Democratic state senator Skip Daly attempted to solve that problem, and the state legislature passed a bill that would have made it a felony for people to serve as false electors, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Ford had endorsed the bill.But the Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, vetoed the bill, saying the penalties were too harsh, though he said he believed those who undermine elections should face “strict punishments”.New MexicoThe former New Mexico attorney general Hector Balderas started an investigation into the five Republicans who signed as false electors there, then referred the matter to federal prosecutors, according to Source New Mexico.The office of the current attorney general, Raúl Torrez, confirmed there was an active state investigation into the fake electors to see if they violated state law, but details about the case have been scant. Torrez’s office said it would work with Jack Smith to get any evidence related to a state inquiry, according to KOAT Action News.Like Pennsylvania, the fake electors in New Mexico included a caveat in their documents that could help them, should charges be filed. They wrote that they signed the documents “on the understanding that it might be later determined that we are the duly elected and qualified electors”.PennsylvaniaThe 20 fake electors in Pennsylvania are unlikely to face any criminal charges because of how they worded the documents they signed. The documents say the false electoral votes would only be considered valid if the courts deemed the slate to be the “duly elected and qualified electors” for Pennsylvania.Governor Josh Shapiro, then the state’s Democratic attorney general, said the hedged language would spare the false electors from a criminal investigation by his office. His successor as attorney general, Michelle Henry, told Votebeat that the office’s position remained that charges were not warranted.“Though their rhetoric and policy were intentionally misleading and purposefully damaging to our democracy, based on our initial review, our office does not believe this meets the legal standards for forgery,” Shapiro said in 2022.WisconsinThe Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, has not said whether his office is investigating the state’s 10 fake electors for potential state law violations, though a civil lawsuit against the alternate slate is moving forward. Kaul has said he supports the federal investigation and that he expects to see “further developments” in that case.Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, said in August he wanted to see the Wisconsin fake electors “held accountable” via prosecution.“What those ten fake electors did was wrong,” Evers wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “People have to be held accountable for that, and I hope to hell somebody does.”Federal prosecutors, in the Trump indictment, said the fake electors scheme started in Wisconsin with the attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who suggested electors meet there to sign on to a slate in case Trump’s team won in the courts. More

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      Former US congressman says family members killed in Gaza church blast

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      The first Palestinian American to serve as a US Congress member said he was grieving after several of his relatives were killed at a Greek Orthodox church in Gaza that authorities report was hit by an Israeli airstrike.Justin Amash detailed his sorrow over losing family members amid the Israel-Hamas war in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.“I was really worried about this. With great sadness, I have now confirmed that several of my relatives … were killed at Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza, where they had been sheltering, when part of the complex was destroyed as the result of an Israeli airstrike,” Amash wrote in a post that pictured whom he identified as two lost family members, Viola and Yara.The ex-congressman’s post continued: “Give rest, O Lord, to their souls, and may their memories be eternal. The Palestinian Christian community has endured so much. Our family is hurting badly. May God watch over all Christians in Gaza – and all Israelis and Palestinians who are suffering, whatever their religion or creed.”Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Amash has previously said his father was a Palestinian Christian who lived in Ramla until his family was forced out during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948.The 43-year-old Amash served as a US House representative for Michigan from 2011 to 2021. He was elected as a Republican but declared himself an independent in 2019 after supporting the first impeachment of the party’s leader, then president Donald Trump.Amash was the first and only Palestinian American in Congress until Rashida Tlaib joined the US House in 2019. Tlaib, a fellow Michigander and progressive Democrat, became the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress.On Thursday evening, hundreds of Christians and Muslims were sheltering inside Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City when a missile took down part of the church, killing at least 16 people. The bodies of those killed – including four small children – were wrapped in white sheets and laid out in the church courtyard Friday for a mass funeral.The church authority that runs Saint Porphyrius, the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, said many of those inside at the time of the missile strike were women and children. The patriarchate also accused Israel of targeting churches, which it condemned.Israel’s military said in response it had damaged “a wall of a church” while hitting a Hamas “command and control center” nearby, but it denied deliberately targeting Saint Porphyrius.Saint Porphyrius is less than 300 meters (nearly 1,000ft) from the al-Ahli hospital compound where an explosion on Tuesday killed and injured hundreds of people who had fled there to escape Israeli airstrikes.Israel has blamed the hospital explosion on a failed Palestinian rocket, an assessment that has received US and French backing. Hamas blamed an Israeli missile.The US estimated between 100 and 300 people died in the hospital courtyard. Hamas-controlled local authorities have said the death toll was nearly 500.Amash’s lamentation over his late relatives was one of two statements he made on Friday about the war that Israel launched in retaliation for the 7 October attack by Hamas, in which 1,400 were killed as they overran military posts, murdered civilians in their homes and took nearly 200 hostages.He also commented on Hamas’s release on Friday of two American hostages.“This is fantastic news,” he wrote. But Amash also said Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad “need to unconditionally release all hostages of every nationality”. More

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      U.A.W. Will Not Expand Strikes at G.M., Ford and Stellantis as Talks Progress

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      The United Automobile Workers reported improved wage offers from the automakers and a concession from General Motors on workers at battery factories.The United Automobile Workers union said on Friday that it had made progress in its negotiations with Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler, and would not expand the strikes against the companies that began three weeks ago.In an online video, the president of the union, Shawn Fain, said all three companies had significantly improved their offers to the union, including providing bigger raises and offering cost-of-living increases. In what he described as a major breakthrough, Mr. Fain said G.M. was now willing to include workers at its battery factories in the company’s national contract with the U.A.W.G.M. had previously said that it could not include those workers because they are employed by joint ventures between G.M. and battery suppliers.“Here’s the bottom line: We are winning,” said Mr. Fain, wearing a T-shirt that read, “Eat the Rich.” “We are making progress, and we are headed in the right direction.”Mr. Fain said G.M. made the concession on battery plant workers after the union had threatened to strike the company’s factory in Arlington, Texas, where it makes some of its most profitable full-size sport-utility vehicles, including the Cadillac Escalade and the Chevrolet Tahoe. The plant employs 5,300 workers.G.M. has started production at one battery plant in Ohio, and has others under construction in Tennessee and Michigan. Workers at the Ohio plant voted overwhelmingly to be represented by the U.A.W. and have been negotiating a separate contract with the joint venture, Ultium Cells, that G.M. owns with L.G. Energy Solution.Ford is building two joint-venture battery plants in Kentucky and one in Tennessee, and a fourth in Michigan that is wholly owned by Ford. Stellantis has just started building a battery plant in Indiana and is looking for a site for a second.G.M. declined to comment about battery plant workers. “Negotiations remain ongoing, and we will continue to work towards finding solutions to address outstanding issues,” the company said in a statement. “Our goal remains to reach an agreement that rewards our employees and allows G.M. to be successful into the future”Shares of the three companies jumped after Mr. Fain spoke. G.M.’s stock closed up about 2 percent, Stellantis about 3 percent and Ford about 1 percent.The strike began Sept. 15 when workers walked out of three plants in Michigan, Ohio and Missouri, each owned by one of the three companies.The stoppage was later expanded to 38 spare-parts distribution centers owned by G.M. and Stellantis, and then to a Ford plant in Chicago and another G.M. factory in Lansing, Mich. About 25,000 of the 150,000 U.A.W. members employed by the three Michigan automakers were on strike as of Friday morning.“I think this strategy of targeted strikes is working,” said Peter Berg, a professor of employment relations at Michigan State University. “It has the effect of slowly ratcheting up the cost to the companies, and they don’t know necessarily where he’s going to strike next.”Here Are the Locations Where U.A.W. Strikes Are HappeningSee where U.A.W. members are on strike at plants and distribution centers owned by Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.The contract battle has become a national political issue. President Biden visited a picket line near Detroit last month. A day later, former President Donald J. Trump spoke at a nonunion factory north of Detroit and criticized Mr. Biden and leaders of the U.A.W. Other lawmakers and candidates have voiced support for the U.A.W. or criticized the strikes.When negotiations began in July, Mr. Fain initially demanded a 40 percent increase in wages, noting that workers’ pay has not kept up with inflation over the last 15 years and that the chief executives of the three companies have seen pay increases of roughly that magnitude.The automakers, which have made near-record profits over the last 10 years, have all offered increases of slightly more than 20 percent over four years. Company executives have said anything more would threaten their ability to compete with nonunion companies like Tesla and invest in new electric vehicle models and battery factories.The union also wants to end a wage system in which newly hired workers earn just over half the top U.A.W. wage, $32 an hour now, and need to work for eight years to reach the maximum. It is also seeking cost-of-living adjustments if inflation flares, pensions for a greater number of workers, company-paid retirement health care, shorter working hours and the right to strike in response to plant closings.In separate statements, Ford and Stellantis have said they agreed to provide cost-of-living increases, shorten the time it takes for employees to reach the top wage, and several other measures the union has sought.Ford also said it was “open to the possibility of working with the U.A.W. on future battery plants in the U.S.” Its battery plants are still under construction and have not hired any production workers yet.The union is concerned that some of its members will lose their jobs, especially people who work at engine and transmission plants, as the automakers produce more electric cars and trucks. Those vehicles do not need those parts, relying instead on electric motors and batteries.Stellantis’ chief operating officer for North America, Mark Stewart, said the company and the union were “making progress, but there are gaps that still need to be closed.”The union is also pushing the companies to convert temporary workers who now make a top wage of $20 an hour into full-time staff.Striking at only select locations at all three companies is a change from the past, when the U.A.W. typically called for a strike at all locations of one company that the union had chosen as its target. Striking at only a few locations hurts the companies — the idled plants make some of their most profitable models — but limits the economic damage to the broader economies in the affected states.It also could help preserve the union’s $825 million strike fund, from which striking workers are paid while they’re off the job. The union is paying striking workers $500 a week.G.M. said this week that the first two weeks of the strike had cost it $200 million. The three automakers and some of their suppliers have said that they have had to lay off hundreds of workers because the strikes have disrupted the supply and demand for certain parts.Santul Nerkar More

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      Why Trump and the Rest of the G.O.P. Won’t Stop Bashing Electric Vehicles

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      Fresh off a walking tour of blighted Flint, Mich., on Wednesday, Vivek Ramaswamy spoke excitedly about a comeback for the “forgotten America” that he has made a part of his long-shot bid for the presidency.He wasn’t promising that the automakers that had largely abandoned Flint would return. “We have opportunities, though, to look to the future of a lot that we need to bring to this country,” Mr. Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old entrepreneur, said, ticking through the industries that he’d like to see help drive a revival: semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, defense production.The industry he doesn’t want involved is the one already pouring money into the state: electric vehicles. He attributes the investments and the rising popularity of the cars to tax credits and favorable regulations that he would reverse as president.“That’s not only a market distortion, but a market distortion that is decidedly a step in an anti-American direction that I think is frankly dangerous to the future of the country,” he told reporters just outside Flint.Mr. Ramaswamy’s enmity toward electric cars, extolled in the ancestral home of the American automobile, does not exactly set him apart in the presidential field. The front-runner for the Republican nomination, Donald J. Trump, was in Michigan last week, reeling off a rambling bill of particulars against E.V.s, complaining falsely that they run out of power in 15 minutes, are bad for the environment, and would destroy the domestic auto industry within a few short years.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a distant second to Mr. Trump in national polls, recently railed against electric vehicles when he unveiled an energy policy platform that promised to roll back E.V. subsidies to “support Americans’ right to drive the cars they want.” Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s former vice president-turned-competitor, agrees with Mr. Ramaswamy and others that the transition to electric vehicles would send American auto manufacturing to China.Opposing electric cars — and the industry’s ongoing shift away from internal-combustion engines to battery power — allows Republican candidates to criticize China, the dominant economic force in the battery industry. It also pleases G.O.P. voters still hostile to the notion of climate change — what Mr. Ramaswamy disparaged Wednesday night as “that God-forsaken religion, the climate cult” and “the E.V. subsidy cult” — and to all things environmental and “woke.” And it evokes a nostalgic halcyon past, the same one that Mr. Trump conjured when he promised in 2016 to bring back coal mines, steel mills and basic manufacturing.But the steel mills and coal mines failed to roar back to their glory days, and the internal-combustion engine is unlikely to as well. In fact, the electric vehicle transition is well underway.That transition is driven in part by President Biden’s policies, which subsidize the manufacturing and purchasing of E.V.s and their components and impose strict fuel economy standards on automakers that can be met with zero-emission electric cars. But it’s also motivated by Detroit executives who have vowed to convert their corporations to all electric, by consumers reacting to environmental concerns and gas prices, and by aggressive policies from governments like those of California, Britain and Europe that are beyond the reach of a Republican White House.Those forces have prompted hundreds of billions of dollars to pour into states like Michigan and Ohio, but also to Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee, to assemble electric vehicles and build batteries and other parts with the warm embrace of Republican governors.“The free market and consumer demand should drive the automobile manufacturing industry like it has here in Georgia, creating thousands of high-paying E.V. jobs across our state because of Georgia’s first-class business environment, unmatched work force and strong logistics network,” Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, said in a statement this week. “The path to America leading industrial innovation in the 21st century is through Republican-led states.”But Republican presidential candidates say that, if elected, they will eliminate Mr. Biden’s tax incentives to build and buy electric cars and trucks, and roll back his fuel efficiency standards aimed at sharply reducing climate-warming greenhouse gases.“I support letting people choose the cars that they want without those perverse incentives and the tax code that suggests that buying an electric vehicle is somehow in the owner’s best interest,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said, though such incentives have helped prompt BMW, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz to expand E.V. operations in his state.The Republican Party’s attacks on E.V.s. stem in part from real concerns shared by the auto industry and foreign policymakers. China does dominate battery-making, and as lithium-ion battery imports soar — they were up 99 percent last year from 2021 — a weakening Chinese domestic economy is bolstered abroad.In Green Charter Township, Mich., where Gotion, a Chinese subsidiary, plans to build a battery plant, Mr. Ramaswamy showed up Wednesday evening at a horse farm dotted with signs reading “No Go on Gotion.” Alongside promises to “make sure that God-forsaken plant never gets built,” he criticized the “electric vehicle subsidy cult,” which, he said to cheers, “will end on my watch as your next president.”“If you want to buy an E.V., I’m fine with that — we don’t need to use our taxpayer dollars to subsidize it,” Mr. Ramaswamy said, declaring that subsidies involve “subsidizing the C.C.P. because those E.V.s require batteries made in China — now made by China across the street from here,” a reference to the Chinese Communist Party.And some attendees agreed.“I don’t have a problem with electric vehicles — if you want one, OK, cool, buy one. But don’t force me, because I got a Dodge Ram with a Hemi and I love it,” Randy Guppy, from Howard City, Mich., said, referring to a type of V-8 engine.John Bozzella, president of the auto industry’s Alliance for Automotive Innovation, also fretted that the Biden administration’s aggressive push for electrification was driving the auto industry faster than suppliers could ramp up battery production, strengthening China’s hand — and possibly opening the domestic market to cheap Chinese electric cars.And electric vehicles do take fewer workers to assemble than internal-combustion vehicles, driving labor unrest and Democratic political worries.But the notion that electric vehicles are economically out of reach, technically infeasible and will somehow cripple domestic auto production and shift manufacturing to China appears belied by what is actually happening. This spring, fully electric vehicle sales reached 7.2 percent of all car and light-truck sales, a 48.4 percent increase over the year before and on a trajectory that analysts believe will only accelerate, according to Cox Automotive. U.S. consumers chose from 103 different models of cars, pickup trucks, S.U.V.s and vans.The automotive industry said the average cost of an E.V. fell this year by $10,700, to $54,300 — $5,800 more than the overall average cost of cars and light trucks in the country.Some 77 percent of all E.V.s sold in the United States were produced in North America — almost 60 percent from Tesla, owned by Republican-friendly Elon Musk. The rest were from Japan, Europe and South Korea. More than 660,000 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids were sold in the United States in the first half of this year, by the industry’s count; only a few thousand were from China, and that number actually declined, according to automotive analysts.Money is pouring in. Around $115 billion has been pledged to build vehicles, batteries and components in the United States, much of that in Michigan and the Southeast. Georgia, a key swing state in 2024, has seen $25.1 billion in pledged investment alone, said Garrison Douglas, a spokesman for Governor Kemp.The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment in the industry will rise by more than 8.3 million by 2031, and while employment for basic assembly-line workers will decline by 96,000, higher wage jobs in engineering, software development and electronic assembly will shoot upward.Earlier this year, Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican, blocked Ford from considering his state for a new battery factory, saying he was worried that the automaker was being used “as a front for China,” which would have controlled much of the plant’s technology. Ford then moved its $3.5 billion investment to Marshall, Mich.Stacey LaRouche, a spokeswoman for Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic governor, talked up such investment on Wednesday, as Toyota and LG Energy Systems were announcing a $3 billion expansion of LG’s battery plant in Holland, Mich., to power Toyota E.V.s built in Kentucky.Electric vehicle and battery deals, she said, “are creating thousands of good paying jobs right here in Michigan, not overseas.” More

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      Turnover of Election Officials in Swing States Adds Strain for 2024, Report Says

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      A tide of resignations and retirements by election officials in battleground states, who have increasingly faced threats, harassment and interference, could further strain the election system in 2024, a national voting rights group warned in a report released on Thursday.The group, the Voting Rights Lab, said that the departures of election officials in Arizona, Pennsylvania and other swing states had the potential to undermine the independence of those positions.The 28-page report reveals the scope of challenges to the election system and underscores the hostile climate facing election officials across the nation. Resignations have swept through election offices in Texas and Virginia, while Republicans in Wisconsin have voted to remove the state’s nonpartisan head of elections, sowing further distrust about voting integrity.In Pennsylvania, more than 50 top election officials at the county level have departed since the 2020 election, according to the report, which said that the loss of their expertise was particularly concerning.In Arizona, the top election officials in 13 of 15 counties left their posts during the same period, the report said. Some of the defections have taken place in counties where former President Donald J. Trump’s allies have sought to require the hand-counting of ballots and have spread misinformation about electronic voting equipment.“They are leaving primarily due to citing harassment and security concerns that are stemming from disproven conspiracy theories in the state,” said Liz Avore, a senior adviser for the Voting Rights Lab.The Justice Department has charged at least 14 people with trying to intimidate election officials since it created a task force in 2021 to focus on such threats, according to the agency. It has secured nine convictions, including two on Aug. 31 in Georgia and Arizona, both battleground states.“A functioning democracy requires that the public servants who administer our elections are able to do their jobs without fearing for their lives,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement at the time.Along with the departures, the Voting Rights Lab report examined a series of issues that it said could create obstacles for the 2024 election, including the approval of new rules in Georgia and North Carolina since 2020 that are likely to increase the number of voter eligibility challenges and stiffen identification requirements.In another area of concern for the group, it drew attention to the expiration of emergency rules for absentee voting in New Hampshire that were enacted during the pandemic.At the same time, some other battleground states have expanded voting access. Michigan will offer at least nine days of early voting in 2024, accept more forms of identification and allow voters to opt in to a permanent mail voting list, while Nevada made permanent the distribution of mail ballots to all voters, the report said. More

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      in Elections

      James Craig, a Republican, Enters Michigan Senate Race

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      James Craig, a former Detroit police chief, announced on Tuesday that he was running for the Senate seat in Michigan being vacated by Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat who is retiring after more than two decades in the position.Mr. Craig, 67, ran for governor of Michigan last year and was leading early Republican primary polls until he was disqualified because of forged signatures on his nominating petition.He is likely to promote his background in law enforcement as he campaigns on some of the conservative priorities that have helped propel former President Donald J. Trump.But national Republicans have privately expressed concerns about Mr. Craig’s candidacy, worrying that personal issues, including multiple bankruptcies and divorces, could prove detrimental to his campaign.The campaign arm for Senate Republicans, the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, has recruited former Representative Mike Rogers, 60, to run for the seat.The Democratic Party’s best-known candidate so far is Representative Elissa Slotkin, who was elected to Congress in the blue wave of 2018 and has won re-election twice in a swing district. Her primary opponents include Hill Harper, an actor; Nasser Beydoun, a businessman; and Pamela Pugh, the president of the State Board of Education. More

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      in US Politics

      Voter drive: Biden and Trump battle for blue-collar votes in auto heartland

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      Joe Biden became the first sitting US president to join a picket line when he stopped at a General Motors facility just outside Detroit to show support for striking United Auto Workers last week. “Stick with it. You deserve a significant raise,” Biden told the crowd.A day later, Donald Trump told raucous blue-collar supporters at a speech north of Detroit: “Just get your union guys, your leaders, to endorse me and I will take care of the rest.”The tug-of-war remarks represented the unofficial opening salvoes of the 2024 election season as the parties’ likely candidates set out to woo blue-collar voters in Michigan, a critical bloc in a state that’s a must-win in any White House bid.“Politically, Michigan is ground zero right now because of the auto strike,” said Bill Ballenger, a conservative state political analyst. Biden, he said, was seeking to shore up his slipping support among unions, while Trump had spotted a “weakness in Bidenomics” that the former president was set on exploiting as the strike pushes into its third week.Trump won Michigan, an upper midwest swing state, by about 12,000 votes in 2016. Biden took the state by nearly 150,000 votes in the next election. Michigan is a heavily unionized state, and Biden won with 64% support among union members. But August polling found support among Michigan union members hangs at 49%, and Biden and Trump are in effect tied.“Clearly there’s division among the rank and file,” said pollster Bernie Porn, president of Epic MRA, a Michigan-based survey research firm. Political observers say Michigan is very much in play in the 2024 election.The dueling visits showcased two very different visions for America’s future. Trump criticized the Biden administration’s support for the auto industry’s shift to electric vehicles, which unions fear because they require fewer workers to make. “You can be loyal to American labor or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics,” Trump told the crowd in a meandering, hour-long speech. (Later he insisted he would make “sex changes for children” illegal.)Biden’s minutes’ long pitch zeroed in on the unions: “The fact of the matter is that you guys, the UAW – you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 … You made a lot of sacrifices. But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too.”The visits also put on display two competing styles. Despite the historic nature of Biden’s visit, the daytime visit was a low-key, invite-only event among a small crowd of UAW members. The tone was supportive, good-natured. At the nearby Ford Michigan Assembly plant, Biden’s supporters viewed it as a morale boost.Trump, by contrast, set up at night in a non-union shop in Macomb county, an Obama-to-Trump blue-collar swing county. Hundreds of boisterous supporters lined the streets, banging on drums and shouting “Freedom!” and breaking into chants of “USA! USA!” and “Back the blue!” The Trump campaign dismissed Biden’s visit as a “cheap photo op”, and said the rank and file support him, not Biden. Some of his supporters echoed that.“We’ve always known that the blue-collar workers are behind Trump, but the party heads and elites have such a command of the microphone that the floor worker is really underrepresented,” said Trump supporter James Anthony Minnick Jr after attending the former president’s Wednesday speech.Biden’s visit seems to convey an understanding of that, political observers say, but despite that the UAW leadership has been very clear in who it supports.“I see no point in meeting with [Trump] because I don’t think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for,” the UAW president, Shawn Fain, said before Trump’s visit. “He serves a billionaire class, and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”Biden had attended the UAW picket at Fain’s invitation, but the union has yet to officially endorse anyone, which could signal an understanding of rank-and-file divisions, or could be read as leverage to gain continuing White House support.Scott Malenfant, 47, an Obama-to-Ted Cruz-to-Trump supporter and union rep, was among those on the picket line outside Ford’s Michigan Assembly plant on Tuesday who split from UAW leadership. After Biden’s speech, the 23-year line veteran said Democrats lost him and other union members over the EV transition and their support of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Democrats are “on the record saying those jobs are never coming back”, Malenfant noted.“Trump is the first one who said ‘We’re going to bring these jobs back,’” he added while acknowledging that Republicans are typically anti-union. But Trump was different, he said: “All he cares about is whether the country does well … and at least he’s the one pushing for workers.”Biden’s Tuesday message that auto companies need to reward workers did resonate with some who are undecided, or describe themselves as “not political”, like Lisa Carter, 53, who works in the plant’s stamping department. She has two jobs despite 17 years on the line, and she cannot afford to buy a new Ford.“If you’re for the people, then I’m for you,” Carter said. “And Trump can stay where he’s at because when he was president he said we make too much money.”Biden needs to address the EV concerns, Porn said, and talk to union members about how batteries and chips could be produced by autoworkers in the state. The visit also comes in the wake of another Trump indictment, and Porn said the former president’s mounting legal numbers appear to be a drag on his favorability numbers, which are down to 37%.Some of that may be down to Trump’s ever mounting legal troubles. But those cases are unlikely to shake his diehard supporters “because they see him as he likes to see himself – a victim, a martyr being crucified by the deep state”, said Ballenger.For now, with more than a year to go before the election, Porn and Ballenger each say Biden has the edge in the state despite his concerning poll numbers. But Ballenger warned the race was far from decided. Just like in 2016: “It could be deja vu all over again,” Ballenger said. More