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      ‘It’s such a dramatic contrast’: Harris turns North Carolina into a toss-up

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      Landon Simonini found himself standing in the middle of a Charlotte highway lane at 2.30 in the afternoon, stuck in an artificial traffic jam while drivers waited for Kamala Harris’s plane to land and the motorcade to clear for the rally later that day.He was out of his car, because why not? He wasn’t going anywhere soon. His red Make America great again cap stood out among others cursing the traffic gods.Simonini, born and bred in Charlotte, builds houses. His livelihood depends to some degree on Charlotte’s tremendous growth. But not all growth is great, he said.“This is a traditionally southern state,” Simonini said. “Over 100 people move to Charlotte a day. That is changing the election map. I am born and raised in Charlotte, for 33 years. I have lived here my entire life. I went to school at UNC Charlotte. This is my city. It is a conservative city and I want to keep it that way.”But in America’s nail-biting 2024 presidential election, North Carolina is now in play. It rejoins a select list of crucial swing states whose voters will decide if Harris becomes America’s first woman of color to win the White House or if Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office from which he wreaked political chaos for four years.Up until about two months ago, the odds didn’t look like this.Though the margins in North Carolina have been close for decades in presidential races, Obama in 2008 was the last Democrat since 1976 to win the state, eking out a win by three-tenths of a percentage point. Biden’s weakness earlier this year threatened to turn North Carolina into an also-ran contest. Every poll through June had Trump beating the president by at least two points, with an average around six.Party affiliation can only tell so much in a state with a storied history of split-ticket voting. Almost four in 10 of North Carolina’s 7.6 million registered voters choose not to affiliate with a political party. But between August 2020 and August 2024, Republicans added about 161,000 new registered voters in North Carolina while Democrats lost about 135,000 registered voters.Trump won the state by about 75,000 votes in 2020, a margin of about 1.3 percentage points, his closest winning state, before losing the election. Biden won the four states with closer margins – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.Biden’s withdrawal and Harris’s ascent scrambled the math. North Carolina’s secretary of state, Elaine Marshall, described the reaction as euphoric.“It’s such a dramatic contrast from that venom, that poison, that hatred that’s coming from Republican events,” she said. “That contrasts so strongly with the hope and the expectations of the future from Democratic party events.”The Trump campaign reportedly abandoned its efforts to mount a serious contest in New Hampshire, Minnesota and Virginia recently. That leaves seven states in the political battleground – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and now North Carolina.Counting electors aside from the remaining non-battleground states, Harris starts with 226 and Trump with 219. North Carolina can deliver 16 electoral votes to the victor. A candidate must have 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Only Pennsylvania has more electors among the remaining battleground states.A re-energized Democratic electorate has been visible in polling data, which now shows the state as tied. Part of that is the roughly 20% of North Carolinians who are Black; increased African American voter turnout helped Obama win the state in 2008.But the enthusiasm is far more widespread, and was visible this week, when Harris drew 25,000 people to two rallies this week, one in Charlotte and another a few hours later in Greensboro. It was the vice-president’s 17th trip to North Carolina and her ninth just this year.If Harris wins North Carolina and holds in Michigan and Wisconsin, she need only win one of the four other swing states to clinch the presidency. But if Trump wins North Carolina, he can win the presidency with Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin even while losing elector-rich Pennsylvania and Michigan.Melissa Benton waited on one foot for traffic to clear on Tuesday night outside the Greensboro coliseum. Her right knee rested on a scooter, keeping her broken ankle off the ground. She came up from Charlotte for the event, she said.Benton is an Atlanta-area transplant. She left Georgia out of frustration with how her community had changed with growth. The irony is not lost on her.Locals complain about the rising cost of living, and soaring housing costs are first on the list. Even people who have weathered the slow-motion collapse of the furniture industry over the last 30 years are being saddled with property tax increases as their homes rise in value.“Every time I meet a native Charlottean, I’m always like, ‘Listen, I’ve been where you are right now,” Benton said. “I swear I’ll be a great citizen, because I understand what it’s like for new people to come in.” She has a keen eye on municipal problems, services and infrastructure. “But it’s also keeping Charlotte Charlotte, and we’ve lost sight of that in some big cities.”Affordable housing is a crisis in Charlotte, much like it is in Atlanta and Greensboro and most large cities in the US. But in North Carolina, it’s not just an urban problem. Lenoir – pronounced “len-OR” – up at the edge of the Brushy mountain range of the Appalachians, is in one of 73 rural counties in the state, and it has a problem with market rate housing too. About a third of North Carolina’s voters live in rural counties.The Democratic party has a field office in Lenoir. The lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, held a campaign event there on Wednesday for his gubernatorial run. Marshall, the secretary of state, held a discussion there last week. No part of the state can escape battleground politics today.View image in fullscreenDemocrats have long expected a brutal fight in North Carolina, and have been investing time, money and personnel into the state for the last year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The Democratic party is certainly trying to reach young people,” Marshall said. It’s also trying hard to connect with young women who may have abortion politics on their mind. “They’ve got Sunday school, and they’ve got work, getting the kids fed and kind of stuff. So suburban mom, working professional women, you know.”Harris’s visit to North Carolina for her first rallies since the debate is no accident. North Carolina is that important. Trump has planned a rally in Wilmington on North Carolina’s coast next week. JD Vance, his running mate, will be in Raleigh next week as well. The Republican campaign has been sending surrogates to local events regularly. Two weeks from now, the former housing secretary Ben Carson will speak at the Salt and Light conference of the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition.The Democratic party has 26 field offices in North Carolina with 240 paid staff, according to the campaign. The choices of placement for some of the offices, such as rural Wilson county in the state’s “Black belt” and Lenoir in western mountain country, speak to movement away from a focus on high-density urban territory that’s friendly to Democrats.Democrats are also using their significant financial advantages in fundraising to swaddle broadcast and social media in a blanket of Harris advertising. Organizers say they have been on the air with ads for a year. The ad tracking firm AdImpact notes that Democrats have reserved about $50m in ad buys through the end of the cycle, with particular attention paid to Black and Spanish-language media outlets. Trump only began advertising in earnest in August.But Republican campaign leaders view much of that effort as artificial.“We feel like, from our standpoint, that the race is a toss-up, but we feel like we still have an advantage,” said Matt Mercer, director of communications for the North Carolina GOP. “One of the big reasons is our leadership. You know, we didn’t abandon a ground game at any level in 2020. What you’re seeing from Democrats is an effort to catch up.”The Republican campaign is decentralized, Mercer said, accommodating far-flung efforts in a state that’s 560 miles wide from Manteo in the east to Murphy in the west. “You win statewide by going across the entire state, and that means going west of I-77 and east of I-95.”“For every person that’s moving to Charlotte or Raleigh, you’ve also got retired couples moving to the coast, or you’ve got military deciding to stay in the state,” Mercer said. “You know, I think Democrats kind of fall into this trap where they think growth is all going to benefit them, and they’re just missing it.”The GOP dominates North Carolina’s legislative branch, which has enough Republicans to override a gubernatorial veto. But North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, is a Democrat and the state has elected a Democratic governor for most of the last 30 years, even as it has delivered wins to Republican presidents.Josh Stein, North Carolina’s attorney general and the Democratic nominee to succeed Cooper, has maintained a consistent lead over Robinson throughout the year. Robinson is an unusually controversial candidate even by standards set in the Trump era, with a litany of offensive and antisemitic attacks made on social media or in public statements.View image in fullscreenRobinson has tried to keep a low profile over the last few months, even as Stein has used his financial edge to batter Robinson with ads drawing primarily on the lieutenant governor’s own words. In recent weeks, Robinson has taken to the campaign trail, meeting with small groups in small towns far away from urban centers, haranguing the media and calling Stein’s ads deceptive. “Josh Stein is a liar,” he said, demanding that a news reporter convey that message to his opponent, along with a demand for a debate.Stein has, so far, declined.James Adamakis watched a Robinson speech, from a seat at Countryside BBQ in the small town of Marion, North Carolina, on Tuesday. It’s a popular stop for politicians in North Carolina’s rural mountains. A picture of Barack Obama’s visit in 2011 hangs proudly on the wall next to the cash register.Adamakis works in juvenile justice. The military veteran supports Republicans because they’re tougher on crime he said. But he acknowledges that even people who share his political values may vote in peculiar ways in North Carolina.He described the conversion of one of his friends into a Republican. “It was the economics, where he just kept seeing the inflation and buying groceries and everything,” Adamakis said. “He was like, why is the media and Biden saying that it’s good when it’s not? I think that the economy cuts across lines.“Everybody you meet in western North Carolina still may vote Democrat, but they still don’t like that.”But political diversity is about more than race in North Carolina. The economy of a place like Research Triangle Park near Durham is fundamentally different from the banking sector in Charlotte, or the tourism of the southern coast, or mountain towns struggling to reinvent themselves.“It might be easier in my job if there were just one [swing voter], but there’s not,” Mercer said. “And I think that dynamism is what makes the state so interesting and so hard to win, and why you truly need to understand the entire state.” More

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      If Harris Wins North Carolina, This County Will Be the Tipping Point

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      For 16 years, the state has been a heartbreaker for Democrats, and so has Mecklenburg County — a reliably blue area that just hasn’t been blue enough.Ask any Democrat knocking doors, hosting debate watch parties or making phone calls in the blue pockets of North Carolina over the last several weeks, and they’ll say 2024 feels a lot like 2008.That was the year Barack Obama became the first Democrat to win the state in more than three decades. No presidential candidate for the Democrats has managed it since, but an outpouring of excitement for Vice President Kamala Harris has gotten their hopes up.Democrats eager to avoid another disappointment point to the state’s biggest metropolitan area — and the source of the party’s biggest recent heartbreaks — as the key.Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte and its suburbs, is a reliably blue region that, in the 16 years since Mr. Obama’s first and only victory there, just hasn’t been blue enough. In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the state by under two percentage points, his narrowest losing margin that year, and a key culprit was low voter enthusiasm and an underfunded county party operation. Two years later, when Cheri Beasley fell short in her Senate bid, her Democratic allies pointed to Mecklenburg’s record low turnout.Ms. Harris will visit Charlotte and Greensboro on Thursday in a trip that underlines both her campaign’s increased confidence in their North Carolina prospects and serves as a soft endorsement of her party’s strategy there: run up the score on friendly turf.“To impact the state, Mecklenburg has to overperform,” said Aimy Steele, a veteran organizer who leads the New North Carolina Project aimed at mobilizing voters of color across the state. Democratic candidates in the past, she said, “have not nurtured their voters as much as they probably should or could over time and over time, some of those voters have fallen off and not voted regularly.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      North Carolina court rules RFK Jr’s name must be taken off state ballots

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      A North Carolina appeals court on Friday ruled that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s name must be taken off state ballots for president, upending plans in the battleground state just as officials were about to begin mailing out the nation’s first absentee ballots for the 5 November presidential election.The intermediate-level court of appeals issued an order granting Kennedy’s request to halt the mailing of ballots that included his name. The court also told a trial judge to order the state board of elections to distribute ballots without Kennedy’s name on them. No legal explanation was given.State law otherwise requires the first absentee ballots to be mailed or transmitted no later than 60 days before the general election, making Friday the deadline. The process of reprinting and assembling ballot packages would probably take more than two weeks, state attorneys have said. The ruling could be appealed.Kennedy, the nominee of the We the People party in North Carolina, had sued last week to get off the state’s ballots after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. But the Democratic majority on the state board of elections rejected the request, saying it was too late in the process of printing ballots and coding tabulation machines. Kennedy then sued.Rebecca Holt, a Wake county superior court judge, on Thursday denied Kennedy’s effort to keep his name off ballots, prompting his appeal. In the meantime, Holt told election officials to hold back sending absentee ballots until noon Friday.A favorable outcome for Kennedy could assist Trump’s efforts to win North Carolina. The Republican nominee won the state’s electoral votes by just 1.3% over Joe Biden in 2020.More than 132,500 people – military and overseas workers and in-state civilian residents – have requested North Carolina absentee ballots so far, the elections board said.In an email, Paul Cox, state board attorney, told election directors in all 100 counties after Friday’s ruling to hold on to the current ballots but not send them. More than 2.9m absentee and in-person ballots have been printed so far.No decision has been made on appealing Friday’s decision, Cox wrote, and removing Kennedy and running mate Nicole Shanahan from the ballot would be “a major undertaking for everyone”, Cox wrote.Since Kennedy suspended his campaign, the environmentalist and author has tried to get his name removed from ballots in several states where the race between Trump and Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, is expected to be close.Kennedy on Wednesday sued in Wisconsin to get his name removed from the presidential ballot there after the state elections commission voted to keep him on it. Kennedy also filed a lawsuit in Michigan but a judge ruled on Tuesday that he must remain on the ballot there.Read more about the 2024 US election

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      ‘We captured magic’: the telenovelas reaching Latino voters in swing states

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      “Una chingona always knows when to use her own voice.”So begins the first installment of a telenovela geared toward young Latina voters. Chingonas, which means empowered women in Mexican Spanish, are the target audience for the non-profit Poder NC Action – a Latino North Carolina-based voter engagement group. This year, the largest ever cohort of young North Carolina-born Latinos will be eligible to vote in a presidential election.The unique eight-part series released last month on YouTube was created to close the gap between registration and turnout for Latino voters, who have historically voted less than some other groups, in the key battleground state. In the short films, the main character Alexia is a young Latina who goes from struggling to voice her opinions with her community and family to encouraging strangers to turn out to vote.“We captured magic somehow,” Irene Godinez, the executive director of Poder NC Action, said about the telenovelas. “The fact that 18-year-old boys to a 70-something-year-old woman feel seen in this and are excited about it is unheard of.”Now, the films’ reach has extended beyond North Carolina, with voter engagement organizations in California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Texas, Georgia and Colorado featuring them on social media platforms. The videos appear in Hulu and YouTube TV ads; the non-profit Voto Latino will use them in a digital public service announcement ahead of the election, and in the fall, Latino fraternal chapters, such as Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, Inc and Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, Inc, will screen the telenovelas on campuses around the country.Nationwide, an estimated 36.2 million Latino voters will be eligible to vote this year, nearly 15% of the electorate, according to Pew Research Center. Godinez foresaw the large swath of eligible voters coming to age when she launched the non-profit in 2020: “My calculation was, if we start talking to them right now that they’re in high school and we can get them in as volunteers,” said Godinez. “Then by the time that they become actual voting age, they’ll be not only informed, but they’ll be willing to inform their peers.”Before Poder NC Action’s inception in 2020, political parties and advocacy groups did not invest in voter engagement efforts for Latino voters in North Carolina, said Godinez. She sought to create culturally relevant voter engagement initiatives that spoke directly to young Latino voters.“The people who absolutely are being neglected, it doesn’t mean that they’re not interested,” Godinez said. “It just means that no one has made an effort to reach out to them.”The organization’s strategy has been to focus on courting around 150,000 Latino voters who have voted twice or less since registering to vote in 2016. Their outreach consists of political mailers, phonebanking, canvassing, and monthly social hours where voters meet local politicians.In 2020, Poder NC Action hand delivered 4,000 voter information cards throughout the state, made over 1m calls, delivered over 1m mailers, and worked with 130 young Latino volunteers. Godinez said that their efforts helped North Carolina Latino voters become 40% of the overall Latino voter turnout in 2020.And in 2022, a quarter of the organization’s targeted voters voted in the midterm election. The organization is taking cue from its members on whether they will endorse a presidential candidate. “It’s even likely that we would endorse Kamala Harris,” Godinez said, “but it will boil down to what our membership determines”.In February, Poder NC Action hosted a Barbie movie-themed event where volunteers escorted the 50 attendees down a pink carpet that led to a barbie photo booth so they could post photos on social media. It was the second time that the organization hosted the voter registration event called Ballots y Belleza, where attendees get free beauty services including makeup and waxing as they study sample ballots and volunteers inform them about voting issues. In September, the group will host another Ballots y Belleza event for Latinx Heritage Month that focuses on the theme “Poder (Power) is our Heritage, too,” said Godinez.View image in fullscreenThe event was inspired by a 15-year-old who begrudgingly attended one of the group’s social hour events with an older sibling last summer. The teen told Godinez that she would willingly sit through a daylong civic engagement meeting if she could simultaneously get her nails done. “We wanted to create a space where folks could come and learn and build community with each other,” Godinez said, “and then create some sort of connection with us as well”.Following Poder NC Action’s events, attenders have told Godinez that they feel “seen” in her programming. “Organizations create different types of programming tailored to voters, but they do it as if voters are different from their loved ones. They don’t look at voters particularly as an extension of themselves,” Godinez said. “We see our families in our voters. We see ourselves in our voters.”The work that Poder NC Action is doing to engage Latino voters could serve as a model for organizations in other states throughout the nation, said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic party strategist and president of consulting firm Solidarity Strategies. As a consultant to the organization for the past six years, Rocha said that Poder NC Action’s work stood out because it was rooted in the Latino community: Poder NC Action is run by a Latina woman, while the staff, consultants and artists that work on products are also Latino.“There’s lots of Spanish ads made by congressional candidates or governors candidates, but it’s just made by their same white consultants, normally translated from English,” Rocha said. “They’re all well-meaning, but it just doesn’t have the same look and feel when it’s made from the community, by the community, for the community.”At the end of September, Poder NC Action will launch another telenovela series that focuses on reproductive justice. Starting in mid-October, the organization will host a mobile Ballots y Belleza on a party bus where young voters will receive beauty services at historically Black colleges and universities, as well as public universities around North Carolina.Ultimately, Godinez hopes that Poder NC’s initiatives will help inspire a new generation of voters to become civically engaged. “We’re creating a paper trail of everything so that we can share it with organizations that our values align no matter where they are, so that way, if something is working well here, there’s no reason that we would hold on to it and not share it.” More

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      ‘Georgia’s ours to lose’: Trump and Harris camps zero in on swing states

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      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump brace themselves for what promises to be an ugly and bruising sprint to the finishing line in November, both presidential candidates’ campaigns are turning their sights back on the handful of desperately close swing states where the battle is likely to be decided.Georgia is coming into view as a critical battleground for both leaders as they struggle to gain voters’ attention in an epochal election. On Wednesday, the vice-president will travel from the White House to southern Georgia to hold her first campaign event in the state with her recently anointed running mate and former high school football coach, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.The duo will go on a bus tour of the region, attempting to reach out to diverse voting groups including rural areas where the former president is strong, as well as suburban and urban districts in Albany and Valdosta, where large Black communities are among their target demographics. On Thursday night, Harris is scheduled to cap the tour with a rally in Savannah, where she will talk to Georgians about the stakes of this election.The intense focus on Georgia by the Democratic campaign underlines that they are not resting on their laurels after what most commentators have agreed was a pitch-perfect convention in Chicago last week. Despite the pronounced bounce in popularity that Harris has enjoyed since she dramatically switched with Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket five weeks ago, the race remains essentially neck and neck.The latest poll tracker by 538 for Georgia puts Trump 0.6% ahead of Harris in Georgia, with Harris on 46.0% and Trump on 46.6%. That is bang in the middle of the margin of error – and suggests that the state is open territory for the two candidates.In Sunday’s political talkshows, Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is one of Trump’s closest surrogates, underlined the importance of Georgia to Trump’s re-election hopes. “If we don’t win Georgia, I don’t see how we get to 270,” he told CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.Graham added that he would be accompanying Trump to what he called a “unity event” in Georgia soon. He predicted that if Trump played the right game in the state he would win.“I do believe Georgia’s ours to lose. It’s really hard for Harris to tell Georgians that we’re on the right track – they don’t believe it,” Graham said.The problem for Graham and other top Republican advisers is that Trump frequently blatantly ignores their guidance. In his most recent trip to Georgia, Trump ranted about the state’s Republican governor Brian Kemp, whom he still blames for failing to back him in his attempt to subvert the 2020 election – and whose support he now needs to prevail in November.Graham implicitly admitted to CNN the trouble that the attack on Kemp had caused but insisted: “We repaired the damage, I think, between Governor Kemp and President Trump.“He’s going to put his ground game behind President Trump and all other Republicans in Georgia.”Three days after the Democratic convention, which went off in a blaze of red, white and blue balloons and an ecstatic response from delegates, the Harris-Walz campaign is now laser-focused on that same ground game. The key is to turn the palpable surge in energy that exploded from the Chicago convention into hard work making calls and knocking on doors in Georgia and the other six battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The chairperson of the campaign, Jen O’Malley Dillon, released new data on Sunday which she said demonstrated the positive impact of the convention throughout the battleground states. Chicago marked the biggest week so far in Harris’s nascent pitch for the White House, she said, with volunteers signing up for almost 200,000 shifts during the week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMoney also continues to pour in, with the campaign raising $540m in five weeks – a record in US presidential campaign history. About $82m of that was received during convention week.O’Malley Dillon said that it was all a sign of Harris building on her momentum: “We are taking no voters for granted and communicating relentlessly with battleground voters every single day between now and election day – all the while Trump is focused on very little beyond online tantrums.”A leading Harris surrogate, the Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis, appeared on Fox News Sunday to try to convince right-leaning voters and undecided independents that they could safely back Harris. “She’s come to the middle,” Polis said, when asked about some of the more progressive policies Harris previously espoused but has since dropped – including a ban on fracking and Medicare for all.Polis added: “She’s pragmatic. She’s a tough leader. She’s the leader for the future.“She’s going to be a president for all the American people.”As the euphoria of the convention fades, Harris has already begun to face tougher questions, notably when will she expose herself to tougher questions by facing an interviewer. The Democratic candidate has so far studiously avoided a sit-down with any major news outlet.Quizzed himself about Harris’s resistance to being questioned, Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, told CNN: “As this campaign goes on, she’ll be sitting for more interviews”.“She’ll be engaging in debates,” Booker said. “I think she wants to do more.”With the battleground states all still essentially anyone’s to win, there are growing fears that Trump might be tempted to unleash another conspiracy to overturn the result should he narrowly lose in November. There are numerous indications that Trump and his Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters may be laying down the foundations of a challenge.At a rally last week in Asheboro, North Carolina, Trump said: “Our primary focus is not to get out the vote – it’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we have all the votes you need.”Trump’s running mate, the US senator from Ohio, JD Vance, was asked by NBC News’s Meet the Press whether he believed the election would be free and fair. “I do think it’s going to be free and fair,” he replied.Then he added: “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that happens. We’re going to pursue every pathway to make sure legal ballots get counted.” More

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      Meet the Rural Voters Who Could Swing North Carolina’s Election

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      The most rural of the battleground states this year is North Carolina. About 3.4 million people, or roughly a third of the state’s population, reside in a rural area, more than in any other state besides Texas. Democrats have seen their support slip in rural areas, ceding ground to Republicans. As such, rural voters in […] More

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      Convention Insider: The Unexpected Reappearance of John Edwards

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      Of all the curious characters spotted bouncing around inside the Democrats’ big tent this week — the influencers, the ex-Trump White House press secretary, Lil Jon — the most curious of all might have been John Edwards.He was hanging at a bar in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood early Wednesday evening, hours before Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota would accept his party’s nomination as vice president. “I wanted to see what was going on!” Mr. Edwards, 71, exclaimed. “Especially this year.” He’s been out of the loop, west or otherwise, for a long while now. He was once the Democratic Party’s golden boy — a baby-faced senator from North Carolina, John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and then a presidential contender himself. It all started to fall apart in 2008. He withdrew from the Democratic primaries. An extramarital affair came to light. The other woman was a videographer paid by his campaign. There was a secret child. A terminally ill wife at home. A campaign finance scandal. Bunny Mellon, the widow of the banking heir Paul Mellon, was involved. It was messy. And then Mr. Edwards went away.When was the last time he was even at a Democratic convention?“Two thousand and uh…” his voice trailed off as he screwed up his face, pretending to think. “God, I wish you hadn’t asked me that, this is a memory test,” he laughed. “I think the last time I went was when I was the vice-presidential candidate. 2004.” (It was in Boston that year.)He said the Democratic National Committee sent him an invitation to attend this year — “which was really nice, very respectful” — and even offered to provide him with a car and driver. (Request for comment from the D.N.C. went unreturned.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Army Soldier Charged With Lying About Ties to Insurrectionist Group

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      The soldier, Kai Liam Nix, 20, who was stationed at Fort Liberty in North Carolina, is also accused of illegally selling firearms.An active duty U.S. Army soldier has been charged with lying to the military about his ties to a group dedicated to overthrowing the government and with illegally selling firearms, according to federal prosecutors in North Carolina.The soldier, Kai Liam Nix, 20, who was stationed at Fort Liberty in Fayetteville, N.C., was arrested on Aug. 15. A day earlier, a grand jury handed up an indictment accusing him of having lied on his security clearance application in 2022, when he stated he had not been involved in a group “dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the United States Government.”A redacted copy of the indictment did not name the group to which Mr. Nix was accused of having ties, and neither did a news release issued on Monday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina. He is also accused of stealing and illegally selling firearms at the end of 2023 and at the beginning of 2024.Mr. Nix, who prosecutors said also went by the name Kai Brazelton, is charged with one count each of making a false statement to the government and of dealing in firearms without a license, along with two counts of selling a stolen firearm. If convicted on all counts, he could face up to 30 years in prison.The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment further on the case.At Mr. Nix’s first court appearance on Monday, a judge ordered that he remain in custody until a hearing set for Thursday. He was also assigned a federal public defender, Robert J. Parrott, Jr, who said in an email to The New York Times that “we should avoid rushing to judgment.”“Mr. Nix looks forward to making his presentation in court,” he added.Although the authorities did not specify which group they claim Mr. Nix was affiliated with, his arrest came days before The New Yorker published an extensive article on Sunday about organizations outside of law enforcement that investigate far-right groups. The article mentioned Mr. Nix and his potential ties to Patriot Front, a far-right group that has engaged in white nationalist activism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More