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      ‘There’s an appetite for this brand of politics’: the independent politician making a bid for US Senate

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      Dan Osborn is a man who does not like to lose, and if you had asked him on election night last year whether he would run again as an independent for a US Senate seat representing the very Republican state of Nebraska, Osborn would have told you to, in his words, “pound sand”.Yet the results of his first bid for elected office were alluring, so much so that he has decided take another stab at becoming only the third current member of the US Senate who is not in either of the two parties. While he did not beat the Republican senator Deb Fischer last November, he did narrow her margin of victory to the single digits in a state that Donald Trump won by 20 points. Next year, Osborn will challenge the state’s other Republican senator, Pete Ricketts, in a contest he characterizes as a struggle between the working class and the wealthy.“I think there’s an appetite for this brand of politics,” Osborn told the Guardian by phone from Omaha. “It’s so important they see the value in having somebody like me, who knows what it’s like to put Christmas on a credit card, I suppose, versus somebody like Ricketts, who is probably just in it for himself.”Osborn’s campaign last year was a rare bright spot for many in an election that saw voters pummel candidates who were not on Trump’s team.Nebraska has only elected Republicans to the Senate since Democrat Ben Nelson’s victory in 2006, but Osborn managed to outperform Kamala Harris by more than any other non-Republican Senate candidate. In next year’s elections, Osborn may get a boost from the anti-incumbent sentiment that so often pervades midterms, but Ricketts, a former governor who is running for a full term after winning a special election last year, is one of the best-known Republicans in the state.“I do think he’s going to have a much tougher task this time around,” Dona-Gene Barton, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln who focuses on polling, said of Osborn. Compared to Fischer, Ricketts is “much more popular in the state. He has incredibly deep pockets, and he’s the sitting incumbent.”Osborn believes he has a compelling argument. As a union leader, he organized Nebraska workers during a nationwide strike at the cereal giant Kellogg’s, and now balances campaigning with his day job as an industrial mechanic. The working class may have broken for the real estate mogul Trump last year, but he believes that further down the ballot, they will vote for a candidate who is one of them.“Our government doesn’t look like me, so that’s certainly what I want to get in there and change. And I think that’s what’s on most people’s minds as well,” he said. Osborn draws a particular contrast to Ricketts, whose father founded stockbroker TD Ameritrade and whose net worth is estimated at $184m by the stock tracker Quiver Quantitative.View image in fullscreenAnother potential advantage: he’s not a Democrat. Last year, Osborn wrote in the United Auto Workers president, Shawn Fain, on the presidential ballot, and said that if he was elected, he would not caucus with either party.Independent lawmakers are rare in Congress. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine are the only two in the Senate, and both caucus with the Democrats, while the House has not had one since 2021. The last time Nebraska elected an independent federal lawmaker was in 1936.Voters, Osborn believes, are looking for a candidate who will break the two-party logjam in Washington, stand up to the rich and not clash with Trump simply on principle.“I’ll work with anybody … the problem, I think, inherently, with our government right now, is they don’t seem to want to work together,” Osborn said. Though Trump has bashed him on social media repeatedly, Osborn said: “I’m not just going to be anti just for the sake of being anti.”He criticizes how Joe Biden handled the influx of immigrants during his presidency, and repeats Trump’s aphorism that “without a border, we don’t have a country”. Yet he does not like everything he sees from the new administration, such as the way it celebrates new detention centers for deportees, or how Elon Musk pirouetted with a chainsaw at the outset of his so-called “department of government efficiency” initiative.“I just don’t understand the whole bragging about hurting people,” Osborn said.While his relationship with the state Democratic party last year was touchy at times, this year, the party has decided to support his campaign, though a Democratic candidate could also still jump into the race. Jane Kleeb, the state party chair, said in an interview that they view Osborn as an ally for their causes.“On the vast majority of issues, like the core issues that matter to working- and middle-class families, Dan is on the same side of where I think any of those votes would be,” Kleeb said.“Protecting Medicaid, Medicare – he’s not going to side with Republicans on that. Middle-class tax cuts, bringing back childcare credits, making sure that our American energy is diversified … protecting unions, name the issue.”Ricketts’s campaign responded by arguing that Osborn was essentially a Democrat. “Fake Dan Osborn can continue pretending to be an independent, but he is endorsed by the Nebraska Democratic party, funded by Democrats, and backs Democrats’ most extreme policy positions,” said spokesperson Will Coup. (Kleeb said the Nebraska Democratic party does not endorse candidates, and had not endorsed Osborn.)Now, Osborn’s candidacy has prompted the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics to change its rating of the race from “Safe Republican” to “Likely Republican”. Another prominent forecaster, the Cook Political Report, kept their rating unchanged at “Solid Republican”, but noted they may re-evaluate “if Osborn’s blue-collar messaging gets some traction”.On the campaign trail last year, Osborn said he found himself appearing before crowds at campaign events where half of those in attendance were wearing Trump gear, and the other sported shirts from the Harris campaign. He sees recapturing that spirit as key to his victory.“I would see people with both style shirts, grabbing yard signs before they left,” Osborn said. “So I made it not about red versus blue. It’s about uplifting everybody in the communities.” More

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      With Trump wreaking havoc, a question for the US Democrats: when will you ever learn? | Timothy Garton Ash

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      Nothing is more insufferable than someone saying “I told you so”; so please forgive me for being insufferable. On 29 September 2023, after a couple of months spent in the US, I published a column that was well summarised in its Guardian headline: “Unless Joe Biden stands aside, the world must prepare for President Trump 2.0”. We can never definitely say “what would have happened if …?”, but there’s a very good chance that had Biden cleared the way for a Democratic primary in autumn 2023 the strongest candidate could have defeated Trump. The entire world would have been spared the disaster now unfolding.“No use crying over spilt milk,” you may say. Yes, but it’s always worth learning lessons for the future. I’m back in the US now, and a recent poll for the Wall Street Journal found that 63% of voters hold an unfavourable view of the Democratic party. To put it mildly, the Democrats have a way to go.So what, given all that is happening and everything we now know, are the right lessons? The point of mentioning my old column is not to boast of some special insider insight into Washington high politics; the point is precisely that I had none. It was just obviously crazy to put up a visibly old and frail candidate who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. For comparison, the leaders of the Soviet Union who we think of as the epitome of decrepit gerontocracy were, at their respective moments of unlamented demise, 75 (Leonid Brezhnev), 69 (Yuri Andropov) and 73 (Konstantin Chernenko).It required no special knowledge to see this and most Americans already did. By the time I wrote my column, an opinion poll had found that 77% of Americans thought Biden was too old to be president for another four years. It was only the political insiders, the liberal commentariat, the Democratic establishment, who went on agreeing with the president, his family and what was (you couldn’t make this up) actually known informally as the “politburo” of his closest advisers that he was the only man for the job.In their recent, much noticed book, Original Sin, two leading Washington journalists, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios, argue that there was, as their subtitle suggests, a cover up. Biden’s family and the politburo tried to hide his precipitate cognitive decline, confining most of his meetings to between 10am and 4pm. Even cabinet members did not see him up close for many months and in-depth media interviews were as rare as a Pride parade in the Vatican.The authors generously apportion blame to the president, his wife, other family members and his closest advisers, but there’s one set of people they curiously spare: themselves and their fellow Washington insider journalists. Now, I haven’t gone back over all their reporting on CNN and Axios, and there are certainly some pieces that should be cited to defend their journalistic record. But there is no doubt that American political journalists in general, and the liberal commentariat in particular, were slow and late to say what most “ordinary” Americans had long since seen.Why? The New York Times writer Ezra Klein digs into this in an episode of his excellent podcast. Frankly acknowledging that his own February 2024 call for Biden to stand aside was “late”, Klein explores in conversation with Tapper why most others were even later. The answer seems to be a mix of ingredients: journalistic fear of losing access; the vindictive tribalism of the Democratic establishment; deference to an imperial presidency; fear of Donald Trump; worry about Kamala Harris as the presumptive alternative candidate.Fear of losing access is a professional disease of journalism. “You felt like you were destroying all of your relationships with the White House all at once,” says Klein, recalling his February 2024 demarche. “Yes, not just with the White House but the Democratic party,” adds Tapper. My own September 2023 notebook sums up a private conversation with a Washington-based columnist: “Yes, Biden should stand aside. He [the columnist] can’t say it.” (My note continues: “Jill Biden could, but she likes it.”)I know, also from other sources, just how threatening the Democratic establishment could be when trying to close down any questioning of Biden’s fitness to serve a second term. Even in the critical articles that did appear in US media there was a kind of residual deference to the presidency, almost as though they were asking a king to abdicate rather than just another politician to stand aside. Partly this stems from the 237-year-old US constitutional device of rolling your prime minister and monarch into one. In Britain, we confine our residual deference to the monarch while the prime minister gets roasted every Wednesday at prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons. Someone in Biden’s 2023 state of dotage wouldn’t have survived two weeks in Westminster.Then there’s the fact that people were already panicking about Trump and it was somehow thought, especially after Democratic successes in the 2022 midterm elections, that Biden was the only guy to beat him. The more so since the presumptive alternative was Harris, who was seen as a relatively weak candidate. And so, for fear of getting Harris and then Trump, they got Harris and then Trump.Some lessons, then, are clear. Tapper and Thompson open their book with a quotation from George Orwell: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” But Orwell also calls on us always to say what we do see, even if – no, especially if – it’s uncomfortable for our own side. There’s the double test for journalists: see it and say it.For the Democratic establishment: don’t try to intimidate the media into self-censorship with the argument that they are giving succour to the enemy. You would have been better served by journalists just doing their job, in the spirit of Orwell. Then: change out your old guard. Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, is older than Chernenko and rapidly catching up on Brezhnev. Oh yes, and simply listen to the people you’re meant to represent.The tragedy of this whole story is that the Democrats have a profusion of talent in younger generations – from Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom to New York’s new star, Zohran Mamdani. They don’t yet have the shared platform that could win a presidential election, but thinkers such as Klein and Derek Thompson, co-authors of Abundance, the other book of the moment, are already working up some good ideas. The Democrats can probably swing the House of Representatives in the midterm elections next year with a few fresh faces – and by focusing on the already visible negative consequences of Trump for working- and middle-class Americans. But by 2027, in the run-up to the next presidential election, they will need everything they so spectacularly failed to produce in 2023.

      Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist More

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      Texas Democrats flee state to prevent vote on redrawing congressional map

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      Texas Democrats are fleeing the state to prevent a vote on Monday that could see five new Republican-leaning seats created in the House of Representatives.About 30 Democrats said they planned to flee to Illinois, where they plan to stay for a week, to thwart Republican efforts by denying them a quorum, or the minimum number of members to validate the vote’s proceedings.In a statement, Texas Democrats accused their counterparts, the Texas Republicans, of a “cowardly” surrender to Donald Trump’s call for a redrawing of the congressional map to “continue pushing his disastrous policies”.“Texas Democratic lawmakers are halting Trump’s plan by denying his bootlickers a quorum,” the statement read.The scheme to flee the state is reported to have been put together by the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who met with the Texas Democratic caucus late last month and has directed staff to provide logistical support for their stay.The Texas group has accused Texas governor Greg Abbott of withholding aid to victims of Guadalupe River flooding last month in a bid to force the redistricting vote through.“We’re leaving Texas to fight for Texans,” Gene Wu, the Texas House Democratic caucus chair, said in a statement. “We will not allow disaster relief to be held hostage to a Trump gerrymander.”“We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent,” Wu added. “As of today, this corrupt special session is over.”Last week, Texas Republicans released a proposed new congressional map that would give the GOP a path to pick up five seats in next year’s midterm elections, typically when the governing party loses representation in congress.The areas affected by the redistricting plane would target Democratic members of Congress in and around Austin, Dallas and Houston, and two districts in south Texas that are Republican but nudging closer toward Democrat control.The plan to flee the state is not without potential consequences. Members of the Texas Democrats face a $500-a-day fine and possible arrest, a measure that was introduced in 2023, two years after Democrats left the state for three weeks to block election legislation that included several restrictions on voting access.Ultimately, that bill passed but not before Democrats were able to claim something of a moral victory after stripping the measure of some of its provisions.The latest plan to leave the leave the state came after a House committee approved new congressional maps on Saturday.“This map was politically based, and that’s totally legal, totally allowed and totally fair,” Cody Vasut, a Republican state representative and committee member, told NBC News.Vasut pointed to disparities in other states, including California, New York and Illinois, where the weighting of seats to votes is strongly in Democrats favor.“Texas is underperforming in that. And so it’s totally prudent, totally right, for Texas to be able to respond and improve the political performance of its map,” he said.The political backdrop to the Texas redistricting fight colors Pritzker into the picture of a national fight. Pritzker, a billionaire member of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, is seen as looking toward a bid for the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination.In June, he addressed Democrats in Oklahoma where he met privately in a “robust” meeting to discuss about Texas redistricting, according to NBC News. He later met with Texas Democrats, where offered assurances he would find them hotels, meeting spaces and other logistical assistance.The absence of the Democrats on Monday threatens to derail other issues Abbott is tabling, including disaster relief after to the deadly central Texas floods last month.“Democrats in the Texas House who try and run away like cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately,” Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, said in a post on X. “We should use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law.”Texas house speaker Dustin Burrows said that if, at 3pm on Monday, “a quorum is not present then, to borrow the recent talking points from some of my Democrat colleagues, all options will be on the table”. More

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      Senate confirms Trump ally Jeanine Pirro as top federal prosecutor for DC

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      The US Senate has confirmed Jeanine Pirro – a former Fox News host and staunch Donald Trump ally who boosted lies that he lost the 2020 presidential race because of electoral fraudsters – as the top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital.Pirro – a former New York state district attorney and county judge who joined Fox News in 2011 – was confirmed on Saturday in a 50-45 vote along party lines.In a statement issued by Pirro after the vote, the Republican said she was “blessed” to have been confirmed as the US attorney for Washington DC. “Get ready for a real crime fighter,” said Pirro’s statement, which called the US attorney’s office she had been confirmed to lead the largest in the country.Before her media career, Pirro spent over a decade as a Republican district attorney in Westchester county, New York, and also served as a county judge.She hosted her own Fox show Justice with Judge Jeanine. And more recently, she became a co-host on the Fox show The Five.Pirro used her time at Fox News in part to publicly support the baseless claims that Trump lost his first presidency to Joe Biden in 2020 because of voter fraud. In 2021, she was among several Fox News hosts named in the defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, which accused the network of knowingly airing false claims about the company’s voting machines after the previous year’s election.Fox ultimately settled the lawsuit for $787.5m and has acknowledged that the fraud claims were false.Pirro has been serving as the interim US attorney since May, when her fellow Republican Trump nominated her to the post months into his second presidency. She was nominated after Trump withdrew the nomination of conservative activist Ed Martin, his first choice for the role. A key Republican senator, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, had said he would not support Martin’s nomination.In announcing Pirro’s nomination in May, Trump praised her record, and said that she was a “powerful crusader for victims of crime” and someone who “excelled in all ways”.“Jeanine is incredibly well qualified for this position,” the president added.The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, on Saturday published a statement exalting Pirro as “a warrior for law and order”.At the end of his first presidency, Trump pardoned Pirro’s former husband, Albert Pirro Jr, after he had been convicted in 2000 on federal charges of fraud and tax evasion.Pirro is one of a number of Trump loyalists with ties to Fox who have joined the president’s administration. Other prominent ones include her fellow ex-Fox News host Pete Hegseth, the embattled defense secretary, and the former Fox Business personality Sean Duffy, the embattled transportation secretary.In June, US senator Adam Schiff accused Pirro of “blind obedience to Donald Trump is nearly unrivaled among his ardent supporters”.“For an important prosecutorial position like this one, the country has a right to demand a serious and principled public servant,” Schiff said. “Jeanine Pirro is not it.”Despite Pirro’s confirmation, the US Senate left Washington DC on Saturday night for its monthlong August recess without a deal to advance dozens of Trump nominees despite days of contentious, bipartisan negotiations.An irate Trump went on social media and told Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to “GO TO HELL!” More

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      Republicans slam Trump’s firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics chief

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      Senior Republican lawmakers are condemning the decision of their party leader, Donald Trump, to fire the leading US labor market statistician after a report that showed the national economy added just 73,000 jobs – far fewer than expected – in July.The disappointing figures – coupled with a downward revision of the two previous months amounting to 258,000 fewer jobs and data showing that economic output and consumer spending slowed in the first half of the year – point to an overall economic deterioration in the US.Trump defended his decision to fire US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer. Without evidence to back his claims, the president wrote on social media that were numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad” and the US economy was, in fact, “BOOMING” on his watch.But the firing of McEntarfer, who had been confirmed to her role in January 2024 during Joe Biden’s presidency, has alarmed members of Trump’s own party.“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” said Wyoming Republican senator Cynthia Lummis. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”Lummis added that if the numbers are unreliable, the public should be told – but firing McEntarfer was “kind of impetuous”.North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, said: “If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just … because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”Kentucky senator Rand Paul, another Republican, questioned whether McEntarfer’s firing was an effective way of improving the numbers.“We have to look somewhere for objective statistics,” he said. “When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that you know, the statistics won’t be politicized.”According to NBC News, Paul said his “first impression” was that “you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting”.Tillis and Paul were both opponents of Trump’s recent economic legislative package, which the president dubbed the “big, beautiful bill”.But Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who supported the legislation after winning substantial economic support for her state, remarked that the jobs numbers could not be trusted – and “that’s the problem”.“And when you fire people, then it makes people trust them even less,” she said.William Beach, a former BLS commissioner appointed by Trump in his first presidency, posted on X that McEntarfer’s firing was “totally groundless”. He added that the dismissal set a dangerous precedent and undermined the BLS’s statistical mission.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBeach also co-signed a letter by “the Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics” that went further, accusing Trump of seeking to blame someone for bad news and calling the rationale for McEntarfer’s firing “without merit”.The letter asserted that the dismissal “undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families and policymakers”.The letter pointed out that the jobs tabulation process “is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference”, adding that US official statistics “are the gold standard globally”.“When leaders of other nations have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science,” the letter said.Democrats have also hit out at Trump’s decision. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders described it as “the sign of an authoritarian type”, and he said the decision would make it harder for the American people “to believe the information that comes out of the government”.Paul Schroeder, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, described the president’s allegation against McEntarfer as “very damaging and outrageous”.He said: “Not only does it undermine the integrity of federal economic statistics, but it also politicizes data which need to remain independent and trustworthy. This action is a grave error by the administration and one that will have ramifications for years to come.” More

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      Texas Republicans unveil congressional map that could gift them five seats

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      Republicans have unveiled a new congressional map in Texas that would allow the party to pick up as many as five additional congressional seats, an aggressive maneuver that has already met decisive outcry from Democrats and comes as the GOP tries to stave off losses in next year’s midterm elections.Republicans already hold 25 of Texas’s 38 congressional seats. But at the urging of Donald Trump, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, called a special session this month to redraw the state’s congressional districts. After contentious hearings across the state, Republicans unveiled their proposed map on Wednesday.“We expected them to be greedy,” said Sam Gostomski, executive director of the Texas Democratic party. “The bottom line is, they are going to turn Texas into almost certainly the most gerrymandered state in the country.”Had the map been in place for the 2024 election, Trump would have carried 30 of the districts, while Kamala Harris would have carried just eight, according to data from Dave’s Redistricting App, an online tool that allows for analysis of voting districts.On first glance at the maps, “it was more packing and more trying to divide people,” said state representative Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, a Democrat from San Antonio and a member of the Texas house’s redistricting committee. “We’re trying to digest it and look at it and look at the numbers and see how it all plays out.”Republican legislators held three hearings to hear from voters about redistricting. But the proposed maps were not presented at the meetings, rendering the legally required hearings into a pro forma exercise.“How do people even know what to comment on if the maps aren’t published?” she said. “I call it a sneak attack to put the maps out after the hearing.”The map unveiled on Wednesday represents the most aggressive effort for Republicans. While analysts said Republicans could target three Democratic seats easily, trying to claim more risked spreading GOP voters too thin.One of the proposed changes in the maps would consolidate two Democratic seats in Austin, currently held by Representatives Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett. Other changes include shifting boundaries of districts in south Texas, where Republicans have made inroads among Hispanic voters.“Merging the 35th and the 37th districts is illegal voter suppression of Black and Latino Central Texans,” Casar said in a statement. “If Trump is allowed to rip the Voting Rights Act to shreds here in Central Texas, his ploy will spread like wildfire across the country. Everyone who cares about our democracy must mobilize against this illegal map.”The map also radically redraws district lines in Houston, eliminating one majority people of color seat held by Democrats.“The map is extreme invidious discrimination and accomplishes what the President has demanded of the governor and more,” said Al Green, a member of the US Congress. “The DoJ demanded that the race card be played, and the governor dealt the people of Texas a racist hand.”Green pledged to run for re-election, despite the changes in district boundaries.Democrats narrowly won two seats in south Texas where a majority of voters also chose Trump. The redistricting widens the margin a Republican congressional candidate might expect to win, given the 2024 result.Democrats have already denounced the Republican efforts as a naked partisan power grab and have contemplated redrawing maps in states where they hold the power to do so. A Super Pac supporting House Democrats has pledged to donate upwards of $20m to target Republicans.The redistricting process in states typically occurs at the start of each new decade, when new census data is available.“This proposed map is a racially discriminatory, brazen power grab. It is an insult to all Texans, who have demonstrated overwhelming, bipartisan opposition to President Trump’s order to draw a mid-decade gerrymander. Texans deserve better than this, and if the legislature and the governor follow through with enacting this egregious gerrymander, it will face fierce legal challenges,” said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, which has opposed the Texas effort.Democrats have few options to fight the redistricting. While a court challenge will be filed almost immediately, federal judges in the conservative fifth judicial circuit may not resolve the dispute before the 2026 election, and may not resolve it in their favor.The Texas house select committee on redistricting has scheduled a public hearing on the proposed maps for Friday. The Texas AFL-CIO put out a call on Wednesday afternoon to pack the capitol in Austin and testify.Democratic legislators may leave the state in order to deny Republicans a legislative quorum and prevent them from passing law. Doing so presents practical and legal costs for those who do, but may be the last remaining bargaining chip they have before the issue enters the courts.“I can tell you that our members are going to fight it for as long as it takes,” Gostomski said, “but at the end of the day, the only real legal mechanism in place is, at some point, the GOP leadership has to decide if they are more interested in representing their constituents than protecting Donald Trump’s power.” More

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      Kamala Harris announces she will not run for governor of California

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      Kamala Harris, the former vice-president and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, announced on Wednesday that she will not run for governor of California – a highly anticipated decision that leaves the contest to lead the country’s largest blue state wide open.“For now, my leadership – and public service – will not be in elected office,” Harris said in a statement, ending months of speculation about her political future after losing the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump.“I look forward to getting back out and listening to the American people, helping elect Democrats across the nation who will fight fearlessly, and sharing more details in the months ahead about my own plans,” she added.Harris, 60, who previously served as California’s attorney general and US senator, had been exploring a run for the state’s top job since leaving the White House in January. But, she said in the statement, “after deep reflection, I’ve decided that I will not run for governor in this election”. The decision does not rule out a future run for public office, including a third bid for the White House, after unsuccessful campaigns in 2020 and 2024.Among the other possibilities Harris is exploring is starting a non-profit or leading a policy thinktank, said a personal familiar with her thinking. Allies said she would be a sought-after surrogate and fundraiser ahead of the 2026 midterms.“I think we can expect her to continue to invigorate the younger generation who really vibed off of her energy, her authenticity, and, you know, her willingness to talk about things that you don’t normally talk about when you’re on the campaign trail,” said the California congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove, one of the Democrats Harris spoke with in recent months as she weighed a run for governor.Harris’s looming decision had in effect paralyzed the race to replace Gavin Newsom, the term-limited Democratic governor, with early polling suggesting she was Californians’ top choice. The Harris-less race to lead California will now take place in a political landscape dramatically reshaped by her loss to Trump in November, which plunged the party into a period of paralysis and soul-searching.In the months since, the Democratic base has grown increasingly furious with its old guard, demanding fresh leadership and a more combative approach to what they view as Trump’s increasingly authoritarian agenda.In a nod to the discontent roiling her party, and the country, Harris said: “We must recognize that our politics, our government, and our institutions have too often failed the American people, culminating in this moment of crisis. As we look ahead, we must be willing to pursue change through new methods and fresh thinking – committed to our same values and principles, but not bound by the same playbook.”While the decision was disappointing to supporters eager to see Harris square off again with Trump during the final years of his term, Harris had given few signals that she was deeply excited by the prospect of leading the state from the governor’s perch in Sacramento. The months-long slog to next year’s contest would have forced Harris to grapple with her role in Democrats’ losses in November, which has already drawn criticism from corners of the party eager for leaders to step aside and make space for a new generation of candidates.The crowded field of Democrats running for governor in California is so far made up of long-serving or well-known political leaders, including Xavier Becerra, the former attorney general of California who served with Harris in Biden’s cabinet as the secretary of health and human services; Antonio Villaraigosa, the former Democratic mayor of Los Angeles; the state’s lieutenant governor, Eleni Kounalakis, who is close friends with Harris; and the former representative Katie Porter.The most prominent Republicans in the race are Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside county, and Steve Hilton, the former Fox host and former adviser to then UK prime minister David Cameron. Ric Grenell, a longtime Trump ally, has also toyed with the idea of running.In a statement, Villaraigosa commended Harris’s leadership and said that her decision “reflects her continued commitment to serving at the highest levels of government”.Becerra described Harris’s decision as an “important turning point for her and our state” that would reshape the “race for governor, but not the stakes”.“California needs a governor who will treat the cost of living crisis like the emergency it is, and who will stand up to the chaos and corruption of the Trump White House,” he said in a statement.Meanwhile, Newsom, who came up in San Francisco politics with Harris, also praised the former vice-president. “Kamala Harris has courageously served our state and country for her entire career,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Whether it be as a prosecutor, attorney general, senator, or vice-president she has always kept a simple pledge at the heart of every decision she’s made: For the People. Grateful for her service and friendship – and looking forward to continuing the fight in whatever the future might hold for her.”Republicans – some of whom had been eager to elevate Harris as the face of the Democratic party – nevertheless touted her decision as a political victory for the president.“Kamala Harris’s political career is over thanks to President Trump,” said Kollin Crompton, a spokesperson for the Republican Governors Association, adding, perhaps prematurely: “Americans across the country can sigh in relief that they won’t have to see or hear from Kamala Harris any longer.”Harris had maintained a relatively low profile since she returned home to Los Angeles, offering few clues about her political future. She remained mostly out of view as protests erupted in response to the Trump administration’s immigration raids in Los Angeles earlier this summer. In a statement issued after Trump ordered national guard troops deployed Los Angeles, she said that protest was “a powerful tool” and said she supported the “millions of Americans who are standing up to protect our most fundamental rights and freedoms”.She has been selective about when to weigh in against the Trump administration’s actions. Earlier this year, Harris delivered a sharp speech in which she warned that the US was witnessing a “wholesale abandonment of America’s highest ideals” by the US president.On Wednesday, Harris vowed to remain politically engaged.“We, the People must use our power to fight for freedom, opportunity, fairness, and the dignity of all,” she said. “I will remain in that fight.”Dani Anguiano contributed to this report More

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      Ex-Trump lawyer Emil Bove confirmed to federal appeals court by US Senate

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      The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Emil Bove, a top justice department official and former defense attorney for Donald Trump, to a lifetime seat on a federal appeals court, despite claims by whistleblowers that he advocated for ignoring court orders.The vote broke nearly along party lines, with 50 Republican senators voting for his confirmation to a seat on the third circuit court of appeals overseeing New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the US Virgin Islands.All Democrats opposed his nomination along with Republican senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Tennessee senator Bill Hagerty missed the vote.Bove’s nomination for the lifetime position has faced strident opposition from Democrats, after Erez Reuveni, a former justice department official who was fired from his post, alleged that during his time at the justice department, Bove told lawyers that they “would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such court order” blocking efforts to remove immigrants to El Salvador. In testimony before the committee last month, Bove denied the accusation, and Reuveni later provided text messages that supported his claim.Last week, another former justice department lawyer provided evidence to its inspector general corroborating Reuveni’s claim, according to Whistleblower Aid, a non-profit representing the person, who opted to remain anonymous.On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that a third whistleblower alleged Bove misled Congress about his role in the dropping of corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams. Seven veteran prosecutors resigned rather than follow orders to end the prosecution, which Democrats allege was done to secure Adams’s cooperation with Trump’s immigration policies.“Like other individuals President Trump has installed in the highest positions of our government during his second term, Mr Bove’s primary qualification appears to be his blind loyalty to this president,” Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, said in a speech before the vote.The senator said he was trying to get a copy of the complaint made by the anonymous whistleblower who corroborates Reuveni’s allegations, and accused the GOP of pushing Bove’s nomination forward without fully investigating his conduct.“It appears my Republican colleagues fear the answers. That is the only reason I can see for their insistence on forcing this nomination through at breakneck speed before all the facts are public,” Durbin said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn addition to the whistleblower complaint, Democrats have criticized Bove for his role, while serving as acting justice department deputy attorney general, in the firings of prosecutors who worked on cases connected to the January 6 insurrection, as well as for requesting a list of FBI agents who investigated the attack.During his June confirmation hearing, Bove denied suggesting justice department lawyers defy court orders, or that political considerations played a role in dropping the charges against Adams. “I am not anybody’s henchman,” he told the committee.Democrats walked out of the committee earlier this month when its Republican majority voted to advance his nomination, despite their pleas that the whistleblower complaints be further explored. More