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      Tim Walz pick excites hopes of taking US healthcare beyond Obamacare era

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      When Kamala Harris picked the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as veep for the Democratic presidential ticket, advocates for healthcare reform felt a jolt of electricity.Here, they saw a man who proclaimed healthcare a “basic human right”, reformed medical debt collections, and who laid the groundwork for expanded government insurance and denied corporate health insurers contracts with Medicaid, a state-run health insurance program for the poor. Walz even once joined Harris at an abortion clinic in support of abortion rights.It was a sense of possibility some had not felt since the Obama era, and hard for some to contain their excitement.“We’re celebrating here at the cabin,” said the Democratic Minnesota state representative Liz Reyer, who helped Walz pass a medical debt collection reform bill in 2023. She was on vacation in northern Wisconsin, sipping coffee next to her sleeping dog – a quiet, midwestern kind of celebration. Reyer felt compelled to stress “how absolutely strongly I was pulling for Governor Walz to be the VP pick”.“It feels really important and like a huge opportunity,” said Reyer, about the possibility of making such reforms nationally. “I share with Governor Walz the bedrock belief that healthcare is a human right. So, to me – yeah, let’s go.”Since the Obama era, health reformers have had a tough run. After the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) better known as “Obamacare”, in 2010, the Democratic party suffered heavy midterm losses to what would become known as the conservative Tea Party movement.Perhaps worse, the ACA became a focal point of Republican rage well into the Trump administration. Republicans only abandoned calls to “repeal and replace” the ACA in 2017, after the now-deceased Republican senator John McCain stunned party leaders by casting the decisive vote against Trump’s plan, returning to Washington amid a brain cancer diagnosis.Although Republicans were not able to repeal Obamacare, they were successful in another way: years of attacks left little room to expand coverage or rein in healthcare prices, essentially the unfinished work of Obamacare.Republicans policy wonks have since retreated to time-worn proposals for a second Trump term, primarily fleshed out in the Project 2025 document. Among the early 2000s hits now on a nostalgia tour: Make healthcare shoppable! More privatization! Less regulation! Tax-free savings accounts!The former president has disavowed Project 2025, though the official Republican platform does not look dissimilar. Notably, Trump’s current campaign and former administration has close ties to authors of the project.The 2024 Republican platform focuses on “transparency”, “choice” and “competition” (read: shoppable prices and fewer regulations). It also promises “no cuts” to Medicare, a government program for the elderly, though Project 2025 promotes further privatizing the program.Today, about 92% of Americans have health insurance. That still leaves about 26 million people out of the system – potentially vulnerable to the full force of market prices in the world’s most expensive health system. A catastrophic illness or ailment can easily lead to financial ruin.What’s more, even for people who have health insurance, medical debt remains a persistent problem. Forty-one per cent of Americans owe money to a medical provider, credit card or family member for healthcare. Often, when people have or fear medical debt, they cut back on food, clothing and other household items, according to a widely cited Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker poll. People with medical debt tend to be sicker and die sooner.At the same time, the cost of healthcare now eats up 17% of America’s gross domestic product, nearly double that of peer nations. That is in spite of the fact that Americans see the doctor less than peers in other wealthy nations and have worse health outcomes.View image in fullscreenWhile not all of America’s health problems can be pegged to problems with the insurance industry, anecdotal reports show at least some can be – such as adults waiting until they reach Medicare eligibility age to get cataract surgery or Americans feeling reticent to smile for fear of revealing a mouth full of decay.Exactly what Harris and Walz’s healthcare platform will be remains to be seen. The 2020 Democratic platform included a call for a public option, reining in pharmaceutical spending and strengthening Obamacare. The administration accomplished some of this.Notably, the Biden administration just finished its first Medicare prescription drug price negotiation – a process common in peer nations but which was prohibited when Biden took office. The most recently released Democratic party platform came in July, before Biden dropped out of the race.What is clear is the similarities in Harris’s and Walz’s records. The Biden administration capped insulin prices at $35 a month for Medicare beneficiaries. So did Walz for Minnesotans not on Medicare – an act he named after resident Alec Smith, a 26-year-old who died from rationing his $1,300-a-month insulin supply.Walz worked closely with Reyer to pass a comprehensive package of reforms for medical debt collection, which included a prohibition on hospitals from denying care to patients with outstanding balances, and which stopped the automatic transfer of debt liability to spouses. Similarly, the Biden administration has sought medical debt restrictions through rule-making with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.Walz said in his inaugural address as governor that he believed healthcare was a “human right”. That’s widely accepted wisdom outside the US, and all but the unofficial tagline for single-payer healthcare advocates – the kind of government-run universal healthcare that is a source of pride for the UK’s National Health Service.Similarly, Harris co-sponsored 2019 legislation introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders that would have established single-payer healthcare nationally. The revolutionary proposal stood no chance of passing, and she has since sought to moderate from that moment. Her campaign has said she would “not push” single-payer as president. Still, it has got advocates excited.“From our standpoint, this is fantastic,” said Dr Philip A Verhoef, a critical care doctor in Hawaii and president of Physicians for a National Health Program, the nation’s largest single-payer advocacy organization.“Ten years ago, single-payer burst on to the scene,” with Sanders’s presidential run, said Verhoef. “Prior to that, nobody ever talked about this.” Similarly, single-payer advocates were “shut out” of Obamacare discussions, Verhoef added.Walz also laid the groundwork for a “public option” health insurance plan in Minnesota, where the government would allow people to buy into Medicaid, and banned private health insurance companies, such as behemoth UnitedHealth, from contracting with Minnesota’s Medicaid plan.How the Harris-Walz ticket will translate the excitement of reformers into action – and what exactly their proposals will be – remains to be seen. For the time being, activists are enjoying a sense of possibility, knowing difficult discussions lie ahead.“So often, we see people in positions of political power are thinking, ‘Well, what can we get done without blowing up the system,’” said Verhoef. “I appreciate that attitude – in a way that’s what the ACA was. It helped a lot of people. But it still left 30 million people uninsured in this country and it hasn’t stopped people from going bankrupt from healthcare bills.” More

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      ‘A different level than 2020’: Trump’s plan to steal election is taking shape

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      There wasn’t anything particularly controversial about Georgia’s presidential primary in March this year. Donald Trump won the Republican contest – picking up a little more than 400,000 more votes than Nikki Haley, who had long dropped out of the race.Nonetheless, two Republicans on the five-person Fulton county election board refused to certify the election.Julie Adams and Michael Heekin didn’t point to specific irregularities. Instead, they said they needed more information from election administrators, like chain-of-custody documents for ballots. Adams and Heekin were outvoted.But it didn’t end there. In May, Adams, who is a part of an election activist network founded by Cleta Mitchell, voted against certifying another Georgia primary election. Again, despite no irregularities, she said she needed more information. With the backing of a group closely aligned with Donald Trump, Adams had also recently sued the Fulton county board, asking a judge to declare that she and other commissioners could choose not to certify the election.It was an unusual request – verification of ballot totals happens in the extensive process that leads up to certification and state laws generally do not permit those responsible for certifying them the discretion to investigate.In early August, the Republican-controlled state election board in Georgia adopted a new rule that essentially gave Adams what she wanted. It requires local election board members to conduct an undefined “reasonable inquiry” into any discrepancies before they can certify the election. There are concerns that officials could use that discretion to hold up certification of the election.The episode in Fulton county, and the new rule in Georgia, could be an alarming dress rehearsal for how Donald Trump and his allies will try to challenge the election results in November if he loses.Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results, declining multiple times to do so during a 27 June debate. He has suggested that Christians would “never have to vote again” if he wins. The anti-democratic sentiment has been echoed by other prominent conservatives, including Mike Howell, the director of the oversight project at the Heritage Foundation, who said earlier this year there was a “0% chance of a free and fair election”.“I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election,” he said at a Heritage Foundation event this summer.The effort poses a challenge that again would test the strength of the US’s voting system and its democratic institutions. It could probably stretch from little-known county election officials to the Congress.In some ways, Trump’s attempt to challenge the election result in 2024 could look a lot like his effort in 2020. It has begun months before election day with the seeding of doubt about the integrity of the election and could continue after.There are two key differences.First, Trump may be better prepared. Mitchell, a close Trump ally, has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections. And the Republican National Committee’s election litigation team is now being led by Christina Bobb, an election denier who is now facing criminal charges for her efforts to overturn the 2020 race. The RNC claims it is recruiting an army of 100,000 poll observers who could provide significant disruption during voting and counting.“I think we saw efforts by Republicans in 2020 that were pretty ham-handed,” said Marc Elias, a top Democratic voting rights lawyer. “I worry that there will be both legal and extralegal efforts by Republicans to keep ballots from being counted.”But more significantly, the idea that the 2020 election was stolen has moved from the fringes to being a pillar of the Republican party. A January poll from PRRI found that 66% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen. “The most important thing we have to do is protect the vote. You have to keep your eyes open because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and, frankly, it’s the only thing they do well,” Trump said in a prerecorded video that played all four nights during the Republican national convention in July.The belief in stolen elections, Elias said, was “no longer the provenance of crazy people like Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell. This is no longer the province of people who thought that there were bamboo filaments in paper or mythical sea creatures involved in the election with Venezuelan dictators.“It has become now the standard position of the Republican party.”Seeds of doubt in 2020 to bloom in 2024Trump began seeding doubt in 2020 by pointing to mail-in voting as evidence the election was being stolen months beforehand. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, many states were quickly changing the rules around voting by mail, allowing expanded access because it was not clear if it would be safe to vote in person on election day.This year, Americans are unlikely to use mail-in voting at the same levels they did during the pandemic, and Republicans are now encouraging their supporters to take advantage of it. But Trump and allies are using a new messaging tactic in its place: that there are scores of non-citizens and other ineligible people on the voter rolls.Mitchell has played a key role in leading a coalition of groups that has pushed the false idea that there is a serious threat of non-citizens voting in US elections. Her coalition has supported federal legislation championed by the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and others to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Such a restriction would probably do little to prevent fraud, which is exceedingly rare. Instead, it would probably make it harder for millions of eligible voters to cast a ballot. Nearly one in 10 eligible voters – 21 million Americans – lack easy access to proof of citizenship documents, according to one study released earlier this year.Even though Johnson’s congressional bill passed the House, it will probably go nowhere in the Senate. But it helps create an impression that something is amiss with American elections. To make matters worse, when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, Republicans also immediately sought to suggest her candidacy was illegitimate, calling the effort a “coup”.A constellation of groups – including the RNC, the Public Interest Legal Foundation and United Sovereign Americans – has also filed several lawsuits in various states to create the false impression that voter rolls are not properly being cleaned in several swing states. These lawsuits use misleading methodology and legal claims to suggest that there are a suspiciously large number of people registered in certain jurisdictions. Among other issues, they compare up-to-date voter registration information and outdated data from the American Community Survey.View image in fullscreen“They’re hanging the hooks to later hang their hat on,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the top voting rights expert at the Brennan Center.“It’s all part of creating sort of a pretext to say, ‘Oh, we need to throw out this set of ballots’ or ‘We can’t really know who the real winner is,’” said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit Protect Democracy who works on voting rights issues. “I think much of it won’t stick, but I think the point is to have enough of it stick to create enough uncertainty for that critical post-election period.”‘Tricky legal questions and room for shenanigans’Any effort to challenge the election results will probably start at the local level.Just as there was in 2020, there’s likely to be a period of uncertainty after election day when votes are still being counted in key swing states. Two of those, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, still do not allow election officials to begin to process mail-in ballots until election day.“I’m definitely concerned that you’re gonna have a lot of efforts to disturb the process of counting those votes, if we go into the late evening, early hours of the next day and all of that,” said Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University who specializes in election law.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe observers amassed by Mitchell and the RNC could have a significant role. In 2020, chaotic confrontations at polling sites offered misleading evidence that Trump and allies used in their effort to try to overturn the election. Trump’s effort to challenge the election results in Arizona, for example, was undergirded by affidavits from observers and poll watchers who falsely claimed they saw ballots being rejected because of the type of pen voters were using.In Georgia, Trump pointed to reports from observers in Atlanta falsely claiming they were removed from the facility where mail-in ballots were counted. In Michigan, Trump’s team used as evidence an “incident report” from an election observer who falsely said she heard workers giving instructions to count a rejected ballot.Accusations of fraud may find a receptive audience at county boards responsible for certifying elections. Until 2020, no one gave much thought to these positions, sometimes filled by elected officials and other times by little-known party loyalists. In 2020, Trump’s campaign made a strong effort to try to delay certification at the local and state level as part of his effort to overturn the election.In Wayne county, home of Detroit, Trump personally called two Republican canvassers on the board responsible for certifying the vote there. The two officials briefly refused to certify, then reversed themselves and did. At the state level, Aaron Van Langevelde, a Republican on the state board of canvassers, faced pressure not to certify the vote, but decided to anyway.In Wisconsin, Republicans nearly got the state supreme court to block certification of the state’s election. In Arizona, Trump called the then governor, Doug Ducey, as he was certifying the vote amid a pressure campaign to stop the certification of votes there.Since 2020, there have been at least 20 instances in eight states of election officials refusing to certify election results.The first red flag came in 2022, when county commissioners in Otero county, New Mexico, refused to certify the results of a primary election, citing vague concerns about voting equipment. The secretary of state eventually went to court to force the commissioners to certify the election.In July of this year, two Republicans on the county commission in Washoe county, Nevada – a key county in a battleground state – refused to certify its primary vote, setting off alarms. The commissioners who refused to certify eventually reversed themselves. Nevada’s secretary of state, Cisco Aguilar, has since asked the state supreme court to clarify that county commissioners have an obligation to certify votes.Sometimes election officials who refuse to certify have pointed to mistakes that happened during the election, even though they did not affect the outcome. In other cases, like Adams’s in Georgia, officials have refused to certify to protest about what they view as unfair laws.While courts would probably force recalcitrant officials to certify the vote, significant damage could still be caused.“You can force certification through legal mechanisms, [but] those events tend to be like rocket fuel for conspiracy theories and misinformation and undermining confidence in the election. So there’s damage done even where certification is eventually forced,” said Berwick, the Protect Democracy lawyer.The timeline for certifying the vote is important because, under federal law, states must have an official election result by 11 December, six days before the electoral college meets. Delaying certification efforts at the local level could put states at risk of missing that deadline.“If we get past that deadline, it opens up a lot of questions, like tricky legal questions and room for shenanigans,” Berwick said.Pildes, the NYU professor, said that while he was concerned about efforts to block certification at the local level, he was confident that state courts could resolve any disputes by the time the electors meet.A new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, should provide a significant new layer of protection against election subversion. The bipartisan bill passed Congress at the end of 2022.The law makes it so that Trump and his allies cannot repeat what they did in 2020 and submit false slates of electors from key swing states. Significantly, it says that the slate of electors submitted by a state’s executive is the legitimate slate and raises the threshold in both houses of Congress to object to the electoral result.While the law controls what Congress must do once it receives certificates from electors, it doesn’t have much to say about what must happen in the lead-up to the electoral college vote. That could leave a lot of wriggle room for Trump and allies to try to slow down certification and go to court to try to force states to miss their certification deadline.Prepared for challengesAfter Donald Trump nearly succeeded in overturning the 2020 election, is the US better prepared to stop a similar effort in 2024?Lawyers and other activists say they are ready, having spent the last four years studying and understanding the vulnerabilities that Trump and allies targeted in 2020. Any effort to block certification is likely to be swiftly challenged in courts, where Trump has already been unsuccessful dozens of times.The new Electoral Count Reform Act should offer additional safeguards should there be an effort such as there was in 2020 to get Congress to stop its certification of the voteYet it would be a mistake to dismiss the threat altogether. The same pressure points that existed in 2020 exist in 2024, and in some places election deniers have been elevated to positions of power.“This has started earlier in the cycle and is louder and is more consistent,” said Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center. “That is all just at a different level than it was before 2020.” More

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      Elon’s politics: how Musk became a driver of elections misinformation

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      When Elon Musk took over as owner of Twitter, researchers and elections officials feared a rampant spread of misinformation that would lead to threats and harassment and undermine democracy.Their fears came true – and Musk himself has emerged as one of its main drivers.The tech billionaire has cast doubt on machines that tabulate votes and mail ballots, both common features of US elections. He has repeatedly claimed there is rampant non-citizen voting, a frequent Republican talking point in this election.Musk, the ultra-wealthy owner of Tesla and other tech companies, is scheduled to interview Donald Trump on Monday, where they are sure to find common ground on these election conspiracies. Musk is a vocal supporter of the former US president and current Republican nominee. He has restored the Twitter/X accounts of people banned under previous ownership, dismantling the platform’s fact-checking and safety features. Trump’s X account, which was suspended after the January 6 insurrection, was restored as well, though Trump has not returned actively to the platform.“Electronic voting machines and anything mailed in is too risky. We should mandate paper ballots and in-person voting only,” he wrote on X in July.Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer responded, asking if he could give Musk a tour of the large Arizona county’s facilities and run through the mail voting processes.“You can go into all the rooms. You can examine all the equipment. You can ask any question you want. We’d love to show you the security steps already in place, which I think are very sound,” Richer said.It wasn’t the only time Richer has sought to correct election misinformation Musk had shared. He previously tried to fix misunderstandings of Arizona voter data and rules for proof of citizenship.Social media platforms overall have taken less aggressive stances on fact-checking election falsehoods after an ongoing campaign by Republican lawmakers and their allies to attack the ways information was flagged by elected officials and researchers and how platforms responded.“I think X really kind of sticks out as a place where that change has been striking, and for it to come from the very top kind of just shows how much of an issue it is,” said Mekela Panditharatne, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s elections & government program.Musk shared a video that used an AI-generated voice for Kamala Harris, which raised concerns that it could fool some people into thinking it was real. Musk and the video creator defended it as parody.He has also written multiple times claiming that non-citizens are voting in US elections, which is illegal except in a few local elections. There are few instances of non-citizens voting, or even registering to vote. In late July, he shared a video of Elizabeth Warren talking about a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented people living in the US. “As I was saying, they’re importing voters,” he said, a nod to “great replacement” theory.Grok, the platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot that Musk has billed as an “anti-woke” antidote to left-biased chatbots, has spread false information that ballot deadlines had passed in nine states, meaning the vice-president couldn’t get on the ballot in those places, which is untrue. Secretaries of state are urging Musk to fix this issue for the chatbot that doesn’t have election information guardrails that other chatbots, like ChatGPT, do.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s important that social media companies, especially those with global reach, correct mistakes of their own making – as in the case of the Grok AI chatbot simply getting the rules wrong,” Minnesota secretary of state Steve Simon told the Washington Post. “Speaking out now will hopefully reduce the risk that any social media company will decline or delay correction of its own mistakes between now and the November election.”Off the platform, a political action committee Musk created is mining personal information from voters in key states in what appears to users to initially look like a voter registration portal, CNBC reported. America Pac, a pro-Trump group backed by Musk’s enormous wealth, is targeting swing states voters. The data scraping is now being investigated by at least two states.Despite his endless claims about election fraud, Musk told the Atlantic this month he would accept the results of the 2024 election – with a caveat.“If there are questions of election integrity, they should be properly investigated and neither be dismissed out of hand nor unreasonably questioned,” he said. “If, after review of the election results, it turns out that Kamala wins, that win should be recognized and not disputed.” More

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      Trump and Vance are unmatched in ‘the Olympics of lying’, says Pete Buttigieg

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      The Republican presidential ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance might be slipping in the polls, but remains unmatched in “the Olympics of lying”, according to transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.The senior Democrat was responding Sunday, the final day of the Paris Olympics, to remarks by the Ohio senator criticizing Tim Walz for misstating his military service in an interview six years ago.The Minnesota governor, announced this week as running mate to Democratic candidate and vice-president Kamala Harris, served 24 years in the army national guard, but never in a combat zone, which he seemed to suggest in the 2018 interview.In an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Buttigieg assailed Vance, himself a former marine corps journalist, for disparaging Walz’s military record at a rally this week and moments earlier on the same show.“I watched that interview and watched JD Vance present himself as suddenly very particular about precision in speech and very concerned about honesty,” Buttigieg said.“He’s running with Donald Trump, somebody who has set records for lying in public life. He just gave a press conference where fact-checkers estimate that he told 162 distortions or lies. That, frankly, is just impressive in terms of being able to physically do that. It’s like the Olympics of lying.”It was quite the zinger from Buttigieg, a former intelligence officer in the US navy reserve who has established a reputation for eloquent takedowns of Republican political positions.“The fact a veteran wants to go out and disparage another veteran just goes against certainly everything I learned during my time in service,” he said.“The fact they have to go back to find a clip from 2018 to find the one time that he slipped up when he talks about the weapons of war that he carried and said something instead about carrying a weapon in war, it’s kind of an exception that proves the rule in terms of how hard you have to look to find Tim Walz saying anything that isn’t precise and accurate.”On State of the Union, Vance insisted he was not impugning Walz’s military service, but “the fact that he lied about his service for political gain”.“I think that’s what Tim Walz did. That’s what I was criticizing. And, yes, I do think it’s scandalous behavior,” he said.A statement from the Harris-Walz campaign on Saturday turned Vance’s earlier criticism around. “Governor Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country. In fact, he thanks Senator Vance for putting his life on the line for our country. It’s the American way,” it said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He did handle weapons of war and believes strongly that only military members trained to carry those deadly weapons should have access to them, unlike Donald Trump and JD Vance who prioritize the gun lobby over our children.”Buttigieg, on CNN, also condemned Vance’s much-maligned commentary that senior Democrats were “a bunch of childless cat ladies”. As part of his clean-up effort for those remarks, Vance claimed Sunday he was not criticizing people for not having children, but for “being anti-child”.“I don’t know which part of that is worse, the lie that he just told when he says he never criticized people for not having kids, because of course he very much did, including Kamala Harris and me and a lot of other people, millions of Americans, in fact, who he disparaged as childless cat ladies,” said Buttigieg, who has two adopted sons with his husband.“The other part, just as troubling, is saying that anybody who disagrees with him is anti-child. It’s part of just who he is, right? He seems incapable of talking about a vision for this country in terms of lifting people up, or building people up, or helping people out.” More

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      The Guardian view on the politics of joy: Democrats are embracing the sunny side | Editorial

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      “Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Tim Walz told Kamala Harris in his first speech after agreeing to become her running mate. He has continued to invoke the emotion, describing himself and Ms Harris as “joyful warriors” against opponents who “try and steal the joy”. Donald Trump has attacked Ms Harris’s ready laughter, but the Democrats are embracing an upbeat coconut-and-brat-meme atmosphere while Republicans invoke American carnage.Rarely have two presidential campaigns had such contrasting moods. Asked by a reporter what made him happy, Mr Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, retorted that “I smile at a lot of things including bogus questions from the media”, and that he was “angry about what Kamala Harris has done to this country”. Mr Trump – along with other rightwing populists globally – has channelled fear and rage to extraordinary effect.“Visceral states and feelings appear at the forefront of the political conversation” in this era, writes Manos Tsakiris, director of the University of London’s Centre for the Politics of Feelings. Voters are less rational and more emotional than we like to believe. Feelings may also have different effects upon different parts of society. US research suggests that dissatisfaction with politicians is more likely to send white voters to the polls and minority voters to other forms of activism.In the past, Democrats have tried to counter lies and loathing with facts. Though fear of Mr Trump motivated voters in 2020, warnings about his return have not proved as effective. People can be indifferent or passive in the face of threats such as the climate crisis. (In contrast, deliberative democracy – such as citizens’ assemblies or community activism – can generate a sense of political agency and re-engage them.) Giving people something to fight for, not just against, may be potent. But there is more research on how emotions such as anger affect politics than there is on emotions such as hope.Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva beat Jair Bolsonaro’s dark vision of Brazil in 2022 with hope, and Rahul Gandhi walked the length of India with a message of love and solidarity, an appeal that cost India’s divisive prime minister, Narendra Modi, his parliamentary majority this year. In Britain, the joy of the Liberal Democrats’ successful election campaign bubbled over. But critiques of “cruel optimism” and “hopium” note that invoking positive emotions can sometimes encourage people to feel good about bad political choices. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos won the Filipino presidency in 2022 with a feelgood social media campaign glamourising his family and his father’s dictatorship.In the US, Ronald Reagan’s sunny “morning in America” advert won plaudits, but Hubert Humphrey’s “politics of joy” didn’t win the Democrat the presidency. For Ms Harris – like Humphrey, a vice-president aspiring to the top job – urging voters to get happy when they’re worrying about bills could be counterproductive. The wrongfooted Trump campaign appears to be pivoting towards attacking her record.Ms Harris seems to recognise the problem, tempering the buoyant mood by acknowledging that grocery prices are too high, for instance. But if a recession hits, striking the right note will be even tougher, and policy will be still more pressing. The Democrats are hoping for the best – but even in a short campaign, vibes will only carry them so far. More

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      ‘Maybe I’ve gotten worse’: Trump’s attempt at discipline unravels

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      His name was spelled out in bright lights reminiscent of a Broadway show. Donald Trump thanked God for sparing him from an assassin’s bullet. To thousands of devoted fans, the carefully stage-managed Republican national convention felt like the coronation of a man poised for victory over an ageing, ailing incumbent.But Trump’s long and grievance-filled address that night hinted at trouble to come. For months his US presidential election campaign had been praised as tighter, smoother and more professional this time around. Then, when Democrats upended the race by replacing Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as their nominee, the wheels came off.For the past three weeks the former president has been lashing out, pushing lies, hurling insults, trialling nicknames, trafficking in racism and trotting out nonsense as he struggles to regain the narrative from Vice-President Harris.“The campaign is disciplined; their candidate is not,” said Frank Luntz, a consultant and pollster who has a long track record of advising Republican campaigns. “Their candidate is single-handedly destroying his chance for re-election. This is the weakest Democratic nominee in terms of record in a long time but [Trump’s] insistence on making the attacks personal and vicious are blunting their impact and, in fact, backfiring on him.”Although Trump has amply demonstrated his inability to change, he seemed easier to rein in when times were good. The leaders of his third consecutive White House campaign, the veteran operatives Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, earned applause from Republicans as the former president steamrollered opposition during this year’s primary elections.The new sense of command and control seemed to hold as Trump, 78, held a consistent edge over 81-year-old Biden in opinion polls. The Republican nominee’s preposterous riffs about sharks and Hannibal Lecter on the campaign trail raised eyebrows but did nothing to blunt his momentum.Even criminal charges and convictions were rapidly turned into opportunities to raise money and galvanise his base. When Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania last month, and responded by raising his fist and urging supporters to “fight”, headline writers asked: “Did Donald Trump just win the election?”Some wondered if the brush with death would produce a softer, more contemplative candidate. But seasoned Trump watchers pointed out that there have been many false dawns and, ultimately, Trump is always Trump. His 92-minute convention address in Milwaukee recycled old false claims and recriminations and was by the far the longest of any nominee in history.Three days later, everything changed. Bowing to pressure from fellow Democrats, Biden announced that he would not seek re-election and threw his weight behind 59-year-old Harris, around whom the party quickly coalesced. A Trump campaign that had been honed to target Biden’s age was suddenly wrongfooted and trying to define a new opponent. His running mate JD Vance described it as “a political sucker punch”.John Zogby, a pollster and author of Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should, said: “The campaign was much more disciplined than last time and so disciplined that it had its message perfected, which was ‘Sleepy Joe’ and ‘Crooked Joe’. It was all based on Joe Biden. To a large degree Vance was correct when he said they were sucker-punched because this is a whole new situation.“Age and mental acuity are off the table. It’s all going to be about Kamala Harris’s record but she’s in a much better position to control that message than Biden would be. You do see Donald Trump flailing here and being reduced much more to those one-liners – and you wonder if people are getting tired of hearing them.”LaCivita and Wiles appeared to lose control of their candidate. Trump tossed around strange nicknames for his rival such as “Laffin’ Kamala Harris” and “Kamabla”. He unleashed a tirade on his Truth Social platform, describing her as too “low IQ” and “dumb” to debate him. His speeches have become increasingly unhinged.At a rally in Atlanta, he castigated Brian Kemp, the Republican Georgia governor whose support he needs in the swing state. Speaking to evangelicals in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump said: “Christians, get out and vote just this time. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”At a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, Trump turned on his interviewers and falsely questioned Harris’s mixed race heritage, saying: “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Thursday, Trump again demeaned Harris’s intelligence, falsely claimed that no one died at the US Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021 and asserted he had a bigger crowd that day than Martin Luther King when he spoke at the 1963 March on Washington.The Republican also insisted that he continues to lead Harris but polls suggest otherwise as the Democratic nominee and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, ride a wave of voter energy and enthusiasm. She raised $310m in the month of July alone, comfortably ahead of Trump’s $138.7m.Luntz said: “Right now she’s the frontrunner. Right now I think Trump’s gonna lose because he’s incapable of sticking to a message about inflation or immigration. His administration is considered much more successful on the two issues that matter to people yet he’s now tied with or losing to the vice-president of that administration. Why is that? It’s he himself.”The withdrawal of Biden following his dismal debate performance in June did not take Republicans entirely by surprise. Speakers at the convention often referred to the “Biden-Harris” administration in their speeches and the Trump campaign had prepared anti-Harris videos to swap in just in case Biden stepped down sooner.Their central argument is that Harris carries the baggage of Biden’s biggest failures on border security – she was tapped to lead efforts to tackle the migration challenge – as well as inflation and foreign policy. It is a message that needs to be prosecuted with scalpel-like precision. But Trump has come at the problem with a jackhammer.Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist based in Columbia, South Carolina, said: “In the words of Britney Spears, oops! he did it again. While all these people want to remake who Donald Trump really is, he consistently shows us who he is and we should learn that old lesson from the south: there’s no education in the second kick of the mule.”The new Trump turns out to be the same old Trump. Reflecting on the assassination attempt during a recent rally in Minnesota, the former president commented: “They all say, ‘I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him.’ No, I haven’t changed. Maybe I’ve gotten worse, actually.” More

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      Democrats’ joy is unconfined as Harris and Walz take upbeat message on tour

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      When Kamala Harris and the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, stepped onstage together for the first time on Tuesday, Philadelphia’s Liacouras Center glittered red, white and blue as Beyoncé’s Freedom blared and the crowd pulsed.Walz, who was plucked from relative obscurity just hours when he accepted the vice-president’s offer to join the Democratic presidential ticket, placed his hand over his heart, almost bewildered by the reception. He waved. He bowed. He pointed to the crowd, and back to Harris. He grinned and laughed and bowed again.When it was his turn to speak, Walz turned to Harris: “Thank you, Madam Vice-President, for the trust you put in me but, maybe more so, thank you for bringing back the joy.”It was a remarkable moment in a remarkable election cycle that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago, when the Democratic party appeared all but resigned to the prospect of a second, and even more devastating defeat to Donald Trump in November.But then Joe Biden abandoned his bid for re-election, and Democrats, with unusual speed and certainty, embraced his vice-president as their standard-bearer. Harris’s ascendance – and her choice of Walz as a partner, which drew plaudits from Democrats across the ideological spectrum – have transformed the party.“All of a sudden, an election that felt like it was slipping away from us, we are now in command,” said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and the relentlessly optimistic author of the substack, Hopium Chronicles. “In every way imaginable I would much rather be us than them.”​The Philadelphia debut was the first stop of a multi-day, battleground state tour through the Rust belt – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – and the Sun belt – Arizona and Nevada – designed to introduce “Coach Walz” and energize Americans for the three-month sprint to election day. (Stops in North Carolina and Georgia were postponed as tropical storm Debby churned through the mid-Atlantic last week.)Along the way, Harris and Walz cast themselves as “joyful warriors”. Unlike Biden’s campaign, which had framed the contest as an existential choice between a president who would defend US democracy and a former president who would destroy it, Harris has sought to present the race as a choice between her vision for a “brighter future” and Trump’s “backward agenda”. At events, crowds chant the campaign’s rallying cry: “We’re not going back!”“Do we want to live in a country of freedom, of compassion, of rule of law?” Harris said in the rural Wisconsin city of Eau Claire on Wednesday. “Or a country of chaos, fear and hate?”View image in fullscreenLater that day, the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, introduced Harris to a crowd of thousands at an airport hangar outside Detroit, declaring: “We need a strong woman in the White House. It’s about damn time.” If elected, Harris would be the first female president.At a union hall the next day, Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers, said Americans faced a “‘which side are you on’ moment” – and he was siding with the “badass woman who stood with us on the picket line”.At a rally near Phoenix, Harris drew her largest crowd yet, more than 15,000, according to an estimate by the campaign. Speaking ahead of Harris, John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona, asked his fellow Republicans and independents to “please join me in putting country over party and stopping Donald Trump”.The introductory tour concluded on Saturday evening at an arena in Las Vegas, where thousands braved triple-degree heat to see the Democratic ticket. There Harris marveled at the rise of their new Democratic ticket: a daughter of immigrants raised by a single mother in Oakland and a “son of the Nebraska plains” who grew up working on a farm.“Only in America is it possible that the two of them would be running together all the way to the White House,” she said.Recent polls reflect a stunning turnaround for the Democratic ticket, now locked in a highly competitive battle for the White House. Harris’s weeks-old campaign has regained lost ground with younger and more diverse voters who were turned off by the 81-year-old president. She has also significantly narrowed – and in several new surveys overtaken – Trump’s lead in the battleground states Democrats need to win.Last week, the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election, adjusted its outlook in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada – three states that seemed to be slipping out of reach forDemocrats – from “leans Republican” to “toss-up”.Harris maintains that they are the “underdogs”. And in an email to supporters on Friday, the representative Pramila Jayapal, acknowledged the excitement but cautioned against taking anything for granted.“That’s the most dangerous thing we could possibly do right now,” the Washington Democrat wrote.Harris raised $36m in the first 24 hours after naming Walz as her running mate, adding to her record-shattering haul in the past three weeks, since Biden stepped aside. On Wednesday the Harris campaign said supporters had purchased $1m-worth of camouflage hats with Harris/Walz in orange print, an apparent nod to the Midwest Princess hat sold by the pop star Chappell Roan.The boom in fundraising has been matched by a surge in volunteer sign-ups, while down-ballot Democrats, organizers and activists report similarly dramatic increases in donations and support.On social media, young people shared their excitement for the new Democratic ticket with coconut tree memes and big dad energy jokes.“We’re obsessed with coconut,” a young volunteer told Harris, during a visit to a campaign office in north Phoenix on Friday.View image in fullscreen“Some people say it’s just vibes, but you know what vibes are important because vibes open up the door for the wider conversation,” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter Fund, which has noticed a groundswell of support for the Democratic ticket since Harris became the nominee.“While we need to warn about the challenges and the dangers that Trump poses,” he said, “we also agree that it’s OK to laugh, right? It’s OK to bring some joy and some culture into into this voter mobilization.”As Harris and Walz crisscross the country, they are also racing against Republicans’ efforts to brand her running mate as a “far-left radical”. In their telling, Walz’s folksy persona conceals a liberal governing record that Democrats view as a blueprint for the country.Yet in Walz, the Nebraska-born former social studies teacher and high school football coach, many Democrats believe they finally have a credible ambassador to rural America, where white voters who once helped elect Barack Obama have since abandoned the party in favor of Trump.“Rural voters have entered the chat,” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic party, who supported Walz’s selection. “This new ticket really does expand the map for Democrats beyond the swing states and the east and west coast.”Nebraska is not usually considered a swing state in the traditional sense and it is not a part of the Democrats’ battleground state tour. But in a quirk of the electoral process, a single electoral college vote from the state’s second congressional district could be decisive in a close race. Kleeb expects a visit after the Democrats’ convention later this month.But Kleeb said Walz does not fit neatly in a political box, rather he embodies the midwestern ethos of neighborliness and, to borrow the governor’s phrase, minding your damn business.“In Minnesota, we respect our neighbor’s personal choices,” Walz said in Wisconsin. “Don’t like a book? Don’t read it!”View image in fullscreenRepublicans are deeply skeptical that Walz’s folksy demeanor will translate into support from rural voters who have shown fierce loyalty to the former president.“There’s no way in the world, despite [Walz’s] supposed affinity with blue-collar white voters, that he’s going to get any of those people,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant and pollster. “They’re Trumpies.”While Democrats have enthusiastically embraced Walz, Republicans too have celebrated, convinced Harris made a grave tactical mistake in passing over Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of swing state Pennsylvania.“She had a blindingly obvious right choice if she wanted to beat Donald Trump and she went the opposite direction,” Ayres said. “She could have thrown a bone to the Trump-skeptical Nikki Haley Republican voters, and she refused to do that.”Amanda Stewart Sprowls, a lifelong Republican from Tempe, Arizona, who backed Nikki Haley in the primary and will not vote for Trump in November, had hoped Harris would choose Shapiro. With Walz on the ticket, she’s not sure what she will do in November. “Your more informed voters in suburbia are just a little shocked and disappointed,” she said.Stewart Sprowls is not sure she can support someone who has championed the very progressive policies she believes are driving people toward Trump’s movement. But she intends to continue engaging with the Harris campaign, pushing for something “tangible” – like a commitment to name a Republican or independent to her cabinet – that might persuade her to vote for a Democrat for the first time in her life.“I think both camps need us,” she said. “And I think they both need to move to the center, for sure. But I think she has the greater potential to do it.”There were other criticisms. Walz ​was forced to address scrutiny over how he presented his military service, while Harris is under pressure to ​a​llow for more extensive questioning of her record and agenda.Two events were interrupted by activists protesting Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict. In Detroit, Harris affirmed their right to protest, but when the shouting didn’t stop, she replied curtly: “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”In Phoenix, she tried a different tack, telling them: “I have been clear: Now is the time to get a ceasefire deal, and get the hostages home.”View image in fullscreenIn Michigan on Wednesday, Harris met briefly with the leaders of the “uncommitted” campaign – an anti-war movement that could prove influential in the state – who said in a statement afterward that they “found hope” in the vice president’s willingness to open a dialogue with them.From his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump on Thursday attempted to seize the national attention that has eluded him since the vice-president’s elevation, a phenomenon the former president’s top pollster called the “Harris Honeymoon” and predicted would be short-lived.In a rambling, hour-long press conference, Trump lashed out at his new rival, calling Harris “barely competent” amid a litany of outlandish claims and outright falsehoods. The former president also brushed off questions about his relatively light footprint on the campaign trail as “stupid”.There was one potentially significant development, however: Trump committed to participating in a presidential debate with Harris on 10 September.In a brief exchange with reporters later that day, Harris reaffirmed her participation in the ABC debate and said she would be “happy” to discuss additional ones raised by Trump.On Friday night, Trump held a rally in Montana, a state he won handily four years ago that is home to a critical Senate contest. Still testing nicknames for Harris, Trump vowed: “We’re going to evict crazy Kamala.”Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, was dispatched to follow the Harris-Walz tour, hosting a series of rival events near their stops. On Wednesday, the candidates nearly crossed paths when the senator’s plane landed on the same tarmac in Wisconsin as Air Force Two. Vance, flanked by an entourage of staffers and aides, approached Harris’s plane, moments after she climbed into her motorcade.“I just wanted to check out my future plane,” he told a group of assembled reporters. He also taunted Harris for not yet holding a news conference or sitting for an unscripted interview, as questions swirl about her vision for the economy, the US-Mexico border and her foreign policy.In brief exchanges with the press, Harris told reporters she would release a policy platform later this week, and would schedule a sit down interview by the end of the month.View image in fullscreenAt an event in Detroit, Vance waved off the notion that the excitement surrounding Harris’s campaign would translate electorally.“I think most people in our country, they can be happy-go-lucky sometimes, they can enjoy things sometimes,” he said, “and they can turn on the news and recognize that what’s going on in this country is a disgrace.”In the final stretch before election day, Democrats hope their message of uplift will serve as an antidote to the darker themes animating Trump’s campaign. The former president, who opened his first term in office with a sinister depiction of the country as “American carnage”, has threatened to use a second term to seek “retribution” on his political enemies.“All the things that make me mad about those other guys and all the things they do wrong, the one thing I will not forgive them for is they tried to steal the joy from this country,” Walz said in Detroit. “But you know what? You know what? Our next president brings the joy. She emanates the joy!” More

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      Latinos in once true-blue Texas border zone are getting on the Trump train

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      Anna Holcomb is preparing her Ram pickup truck for the big event on Saturday, festooning it in Make America Great Again (Maga) flags that flap restlessly in the searing hot Texas wind.Holcomb is gearing up for a show of strength by Donald Trump supporters in the Rio Grande valley, the region of south Texas that flanks the Mexican border. From 8am on Saturday morning, thousands of similarly decked-out vehicles will form convoys along a 300-mile stretch, from Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico all the way north to Eagle Pass.They will converge on the fair grounds in Holcomb’s small town of Zapata, where the number of cars is expected to exceed the local 5,000-strong population. There will be a carne asada cook-off, prizes for the most lavishly decorated Maga vehicle, and a joining of hands in prayers for Trump.The convoys are known as “Trump Trains”, and though they have appeared in other states they have taken off in the Rio Grande valley. They symbolize the political drama that is unfolding in this overwhelmingly Hispanic community that has for generations been umbilically tied to the Democratic party: the seemingly unassailable rise of Trump.Presidential election results in Zapata county starkly tell the story. In 2012, the Republican candidate Mitt Romney was trounced by Barack Obama 28% to 71%.When Trump made his first bid for the White House in 2016 he barely improved on Romney’s record, attracting 33% of Zapata’s votes to Hilary Clinton’s 66%. But then in 2020 he sent shockwaves through the valley, winning the county by 53% to Joe Biden’s 47%.It was the first time in 100 years that a Republican presidential candidate had won Zapata. This rugged community of cattle ranches dotted with prickly pear cactus plants, which is 95% Hispanic and has been unswervingly Democratic since 1920, had fallen for the Apprentice star turned US president.View image in fullscreenHolcomb, 58, is part of the wind of change blowing through the valley. She is an American-born Hispanic woman whose mother immigrated from Old Guerrero on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande river.Holcomb, who worked in the local oil business, has been politically active since she turned 18. The politicians she canvassed for were invariably Democratic – it was the only party that ever fielded candidates.“We believed the Democratic party was the party for the working class. That’s what I understood it to be,” she said.Then Trump came along. She vividly recalls his 2015 speech after descending the escalator of Trump Tower announcing his presidential bid, in which he talked about some Mexican immigrants being “rapists” and others bringing in drugs and crime. Within minutes of the speech ending her phone began ringing as several of her first cousins – she estimates she has more than 40 in the Zapata area, all of Mexican descent – shared with her their alarm.She had a different response. “I liked his speech. I liked that he said he was going to be stricter with the influx of immigrants. He got me thinking, my country first. I am American. Sure I have Hispanic blood, but I am red, white and blue American.”Her cousins told her that anyone in Zapata who voted for Trump was crazy given his disdain for Mexicans. She replied: “Call me crazy, I’m voting for him.”She did vote for Trump in 2016, though she did so surreptitiously, telling no one. “Back then it felt like a sin to be a Republican,” she said. By 2020, she felt confident enough to join a Trump Train that did a victory loop around town after the county results came in.Now Holcomb is preparing to fight for Trump again and she expects him to win even more handsomely in Zapata this time. She guesses that her 40-plus first cousins are evenly divided this year between those who are pro-Trump and those who still virulently oppose him.Holcomb’s story is repeating itself throughout the Rio Grande valley. Trump has marched through the area, winning 14 out of 28 counties in 2020 that previously had been presumed Democratic.An opinion poll from April conducted by the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation (TxHPF) found that Trump was leading his then presumptive rival Biden in South Texas by 44% to 36%. That was an astounding statistic given the region’s previously lock-tight Democratic record, its Hispanic roots and Trump’s often unrestrained hostility towards immigrants from Mexico and Central America.View image in fullscreen“Trump is doing better in south Texas and the Rio Grande valley than he is in the big urban counties, and that’s of note because historically Texas Democrats relied on the RGV as their reservoir of votes,” said Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University.Analysts caution against drawing national conclusions from the valley, given its unique fusion of Texan and Mexican history and culture. Local people tend not to call themselves Hispanic, Latino, or Mexican American – they identify as “Tejanos”.It would be equally foolhardy, however, to ignore Trump’s surge. Hispanic Americans are among the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country, the Pew Research Center has found, accounting for 36 million eligible voters – 15% of the total – in November.Nationally, although most Latino voters continue to vote Democratic, the margins are falling – from 71% Democratic support in 2016 to 63% in 2020. The rate at which Trump is making inroads varies greatly by state, turning the country into a patchwork of contrasting loyalties.Biden did well in 2020 among Latino voters in Arizona, who were critical to his victory. His success came on the back of years of intensive grassroots organising by Democratic groups. They harnessed the backlash to the harsh anti-immigrant bill SB 1070 passed by state Republicans a decade earlier.By contrast, Trump did well in Florida, building on the longstanding Republican affinities of Cuban Americans around Miami. Trump also capitalised on voters’ feelings towards immigration, but in this case he did so in a diametrically opposed direction – he emphasised his own harsh attitude towards undocumented immigrants, an argument which played well with Cuban émigrés. .That the same issue – immigration – could polarise Latino voters in two key states cautions against making firm political assumptions. It is becoming ever clearer that America’s Hispanic population is not the left-leaning monolith that some Democratic strategists wish it to be.It is a demographic with rich and varied traditions, convictions and aspirations that are increasingly becoming reflected in diverse electoral choices. As Jones put it: “What’s happening in south Texas tells us that some Hispanic areas that the Democratic party has depended on, that were dark blue, may no longer be reliable.”The Rio Grande valley is a frontier community that feels cut off from the world around it. It belonged to Mexico until Texas gained independence in 1836, and only joined the US with annexation in 1848.Spanish remains the first language of many of the valley’s US citizens. A drive through the region passes the usual relentless repetition of corporate behemoths like Walmart and McDonald’s, but also local outlets like El Tigre Food Store and El Pueblo Express Mart.View image in fullscreenBy the side of the road, crumbling Spanish-style haciendas are painted blue and ochre, bleached under a brutal sun. Military Highway, which tracks the river, runs alongside miles of border wall, some of it constructed noisily by Trump (“Build the wall! Build the wall!”), other portions erected more quietly under Obama.In the sky above Zapata, a large white blob hangs over the blackbrush. It is a blimp – an aerial radar system on the lookout for drug and human trafficking.A joke told about the valley is that its people have only two political affiliations: Democratic and conservative Democratic. The region has strong religious and socially conservative traditions: residents tend to be pro-gun, anti-abortion, strongly on the side of law enforcement given the number of jobs locally in border security and policing, and pro-fossil fuel industries.In the Walmart in Rio Grande City, many of the customers don’t have a vote – some are Mexican citizens who have hopped over the river to shop, others undocumented immigrants. Of those who can vote, many expressed enthusiasm for Trump, others were full of disappointment about the Biden-Harris administration.View image in fullscreen“I’m for Trump, sure,” said Gilberto Maldonado, a 21-year-old electrician who described himself as a Democrat. “Economically, Trump’s better for the country, better for everybody.”Stella Solis, 65, whose family has lived for at least five generations in the valley, said she was with Trump too. “I don’t like what Biden has been doing, all these people coming over the border from Mexico. Trump would give more help to people, when Biden has done nothing for us.”Carmen Castillo, 44, a registered Democrat, is not going to vote. Speaking with the Guardian in Spanish, she explained she would never vote for Trump because of his lack of morals, but she had the same criticism as Solis about the past four years, saying that the current administration “hasn’t done anything for us”.Abel Prado, a Democratic operative in the valley, told the Guardian that since Biden stepped aside last month to make way for Kamala Harris there had been a leap in confidence. Within days of Biden’s announcement the inbox of the Hispanic civic engagement group he co-founded, Cambio Texas, had filled up with offers to volunteer in registering people to vote.View image in fullscreen“There’s renewed enthusiasm, a new general swagger of the people I work with in this space,” he said.Opinion polls conducted in key battleground states since the switch to Harris suggest that what Prado is detecting in the valley may be part of a wider shift. A survey of 800 Latino voters released this week by Somos Pac based on seven swing states has Harris leading Trump commandingly by 55% to 37%.Prado himself is one of the rarer breed of progressive Democrats in south Texas. He said his personal politics were “extremely radical” but he keeps many of his views private because it could harm his ambitions to build a broad coalition.“People think that because this place is a Democratic stronghold they can walk into any meeting with piercings all over their nose and rainbow hair and fit in just fine. The exact opposite is true.”He said that Trump’s projected image as a strongman resonates in the valley among the children of immigrants who have had to make their own way in life and for whom family is supremely important. But Prado also thinks the most regrettable aspect of Trump’s impact in the valley is that it has got people to think that “just because somebody else enjoys something, they took it from you”.View image in fullscreenIt’s also divided the community, setting residents against each other despite their common heritage. “You would think that having such strong Mexican roots would give people empathy towards those who come after them. But there’s one thing that people in the Rio Grande valley love doing, and that’s pulling up the ladder after they’ve reached the top.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPrado has heard such sentiments from his oldest brother, a hardcore Trump supporter. He recalls a conversation with him at a barbecue early on in Trump’s presidency in which his brother began ranting about “illegal immigrants” and the need to “send them all back”.Prado’s parents were born in Mexico and entered the US illegally. They gained citizenship under Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty.Prado said to his brother: “Bro, who do you think you are? We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for people like that. Have you forgotten your parents, your aunts and uncles, all these countless people who came here illegally?”He hasn’t spoken to his brother since 2019.The change that Trump has brought to the valley is etched into the individuals who now follow him. Literally so, in the case of Marcus Canales, who about a year into Trump’s presidency tattooed his arms with patriotic designs. “We the people” now dominates one arm, “In God we trust” the other.Canales, 56, was a committed Democrat until his late 40s, just like his parents before him. His grandparents crossed the river into the US as undocumented immigrants and his parents, born in Texas, were passionate Democrats after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal gave them hope during the Great Depression.Yet Canales is now solidly in Trump’s camp, to an extent, he said, that would make his late parents “turn in their graves”. The change came with Trump’s 2016 campaign when Canales was drawn to the real estate developer because “we saw him talking as a businessman, not a politician”.View image in fullscreenCanales started asking questions, he said, about how it was that Democrats have run the valley for generations and yet it remains among the poorest parts of the country. A 2017 report found that 68% of children in the valley live in high-poverty neighbourhoods, compared with 18% statewide.Like many valley residents the Guardian spoke to, Canales has bought the line peddled repeatedly by Trump that as president he presided over the “greatest economy the world has ever seen” (a claim rated “false” by factcheckers). “Look at what Trump did for our economy,” Canales said.“He concentrated on the energy sector, and they started drilling, and jobs started popping up all over the place. And all of a sudden a lot of people are getting very good-paying jobs.”Canales complained by contrast about the economy under Biden and the high cost of food and goods. The inflation rate has in fact declined dramatically since its 2022 peak of 9.1% and now stands at 3%, yet opinion polls conducted for the Guardian show most voters wrongly believe it is still rising.Canales said that the Biden-Harris administration was “printing money, devaluing our dollar, you have inflation in the valley and we’re earning less, we’re getting poorer”.Religion is another critical factor. Opinion polls suggest that Trump’s popularity in Texas is especially high among born-again Christians.According to the TxHPF poll, Trump held a clear lead within this religious community over Biden of 61% to 18%. Evangelical preachers have led the charge, urging their worshippers to back Trump.Jorge Tovar, pastor of Jordan River church in Laredo, is busy organising next month’s Trump Train. He was a Democrat until 2018, when he said he converted to Trump’s side after a policy clash at Laredo city council over LGBTQ+ rights.The council had proposed a new ordinance that would have banned discrimination at work and in housing based on sexual orientation and gender identity; Tovar and other religious leaders successfully blocked the measure.“Ever since then, the Lord woke me up to get involved,” Tovar told the Guardian. “He said I had been neglectful in my civic duty, voting without even researching the candidate. He showed me that they are pushing God out with their laws, but we can keep God in Texas if we go back to the America that we had when Trump was president.”View image in fullscreenThe rise of Trump across the Rio Grande valley presents Democratic leaders and activists with a conundrum. In recent years hopes have risen that Texas – in which no Democrat has won a statewide race since 1994 – might be turned purple, based on its changing demographics.But if Trump continues to grow in the Rio Grande valley all hope of that dies. The Democrats would lose a vital repository of votes upon which statewide success depends.Beto O’Rourke has articulated the dream of a purple Texas perhaps more forcefully than anybody, having come close to defeating the Republican US senator Ted Cruz in 2018. (He then ran for governor in 2022 and was handily beaten by the incumbent Greg Abbott.)“I think Democrats have historically taken the Rio Grande valley for granted,” O’Rourke told the Guardian. “Republicans saw an opportunity, they’re hungry, and they’ve gone after it, investing money and running strong candidates with resources behind them.”He added: “For the first time in my lifetime you are seeing real contested elections between Republicans and Democrats in the valley, and it’s painful for my party.”O’Rourke hopes that events here will act as a wake-up call for the national Democratic party to listen more carefully to the hopes and concerns of local people. “National Democrats have tended to talk to Hispanic communities about being pro-immigration, when here in the valley there’ll be families who have been on this side of the Rio Grande river for seven generations, and they’re like, ‘What the hell are you talking to me about immigration for, what I care about is the economy and world-class public schools’.”View image in fullscreenPrado of Cambio Texas agrees. He criticises Democratic party strategists from Austin or Washington DC of coming to the valley with their own sets of priorities without listening to the actual wants and needs of local people.“They parachute people in from outside, draw their salaries, lose the races, and then they go back to wherever they came from – leaving us here to pick up the pieces.”Such disconnect poses an existential threat for Jonathan Gracia, who is running as the Democratic party’s candidate in a high-priority contested race for a Texas House seat in district 37. The makeup of the constituency means Gracia should have the edge over his Republican rival, but that lead is threatened by Trump’s soaring popularity.Gracia reckons that he’s knocked on about 4,000 doors in the district in the past month in hardcore Democratic-Hispanic neighborhoods. By his estimation, about 7% of those households, all of them longtime Democrats, told him they were voting for Trump – a proportion that if it spilled over into his race would wipe out his advantage.His challenge is to bring those 7% back into the Democratic fold. “I need to win their hearts and minds,” he said.To do that, he begins by listening to people’s concerns. He hears complaints about rising prices and the economy, which he responds to by stressing that new jobs are being created in the valley with the building in Brownsville of launch facilities for Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a new liquid natural gas (LNG) export plant which Gracia promotes against the protests of environmentalists.In terms of his messaging, he avoids any discussion of social issues such as abortion or LGBTQ+ rights. “That’s a loser,” he said. Instead, he stresses that he is pro-business, pro the creation of good-paying jobs, pro-law enforcement.View image in fullscreenIt’s a formula that few in the Democratic party in New York or Chicago or San Francisco would recognise. But it’s worked in the valley for decades.The question is: how long can it hold?Back in Zapata, Anna Holcomb is not only dusting off her truck before next month’s Trump Train, she’s also preparing to campaign for a couple of Republican candidates standing for county seats. It’s the first time in her lifetime that Republicans have run for local office.It’s characteristic of the valley’s complex politics that Holcomb remains a registered Democrat. She said she doesn’t even like Trump: “I couldn’t stand him as a TV personality, every time he came on I would switch the channel. I still don’t like his personality, his arrogance, his mouth.”But she’ll be voting for him in November. “I vote for him because I believe he’s the guy that can get the job done.” More