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      Wisconsin progressives take battle to Trump – but warn Biden must do more

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      Four years ago, progressives in the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin were energized about the presidential race, feeling ready and eager to elect Joe Biden and end four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership.This year, the nominees for president remain the same, but much has changed. Before Biden’s damaging debate performance, leaders of progressive groups were already combating disillusionment and disengagement among many of their supporters, who sharply criticized the president’s response to the war in Gaza. Now, with days left before Republicans arrive in Milwaukee to nominate Trump for the third time, the groups’ leaders are confronting a fractured Democratic party wrestling with the question of whether to replace their presumptive nominee.Despite the immense challenges ahead, progressive organizers are determined to convince voters of the dire stakes of this election and turn out a winning coalition in November. They believe Trump’s re-election poses an existential threat to American democracy, while recognizing that Biden needs to do a better job of showing voters how he will use his second term to improve their lives.Wisconsin progressives have planned counter-programming to the Republican convention, with a number of groups participating in a march on the convention scheduled for Monday. But they have also been working for months to prepare for all of the November elections, not limited to the presidential race.They have little margin for error. In 2020, Biden won Wisconsin by just 0.6 points, or roughly 20,000 votes out of the 3.3m cast, and he appears to be in a much more perilous position today. An AARP poll conducted in the days after the debate showed Biden trailing Trump by six points in Wisconsin.“We’re in a very tough predicament,” said William Walter, executive director of the progressive group Our Wisconsin Revolution. “The progressive left recognizes that stopping Donald Trump at all costs is imperative. But we want the Democratic party to help us in in our goals because they are aligned.”Early warning signsWhen the state held its presidential primaries in April, prominent progressive leaders encouraged primary voters to cast a ballot for “uninstructed” as a means of protesting Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza, an effort inspired by the similar Listen to Michigan campaign. Although Biden won the Wisconsin Democratic primary with 89% of the vote, nearly 50,000 voters – more than twice the president’s margin of victory in 2020 – voted uninstructed.The political arm of Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant and workers’ rights group, was among those that endorsed the uninstructed campaign. Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, described the campaign as an effective mechanism to send a message to the White House.“We were simply a conduit to that message that people who were key to defeating Trump in 2020, this is how they’re feeling,” Neumann-Ortiz said. “They want to see something done.”The protest vote in Wisconsin – as well as other states like Michigan and Minnesota – was one of the early warning signs of Biden’s struggles to unite and energize his party. Those vulnerabilities have now taken center stage in the aftermath of the debate.“In 2020, with frankly the horrors of the Trump presidency still fresh in people’s minds, I think people were fired up,” said Emily Park, co-executive director of the climate advocacy group 350 Wisconsin Action. “Climate activism, racial justice activism, all sorts of progressive causes had been sort of newly reinvigorated. So I think that brought a huge sense of energy to the 2020 election. And this year, I think people are just not inspired.”Angela Lang, executive director of the Milwaukee-based group Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (Bloc), noted that many of voters’ top concerns remain unchanged since 2020. But regarding the cost of living, voters’ concerns have only intensified, as US prices have increased by roughly 20% since 2019. The rate of inflation has slowed significantly in recent months, as the 12-month consumer price index now stands at 3%, but many are not yet feeling the difference.“Things are expensive. People are still struggling despite the job numbers and things like that. They don’t see themselves reflected in those numbers,” Lang said. “When folks are often told this is the most important election of your lifetime over and over and over, and they’re not necessarily seeing the tangible changes in their lifetime, people start to get a little bit frustrated by that and start to wonder, ‘Do I continue to show up?’”That disillusionment could have ramifications far beyond the presidential race. Wisconsin is home to one of the most competitive Senate elections this year, as incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin fights to hold on to her seat, and the Republican representative Derrick Van Orden faces a competitive race in the third congressional district. Wisconsinites will also have the opportunity to elect state legislators with a new set of maps that give Democrats their first real opportunity in more than a decade to take control of a chamber.“If people are so disillusioned that they’re just not going to show up to the polls in November at all, then we lose our chance to make serious progress in our state legislature, which could mean critical things for the state of Wisconsin on all sorts of issues,” Park said. “It’s not just about the White House.”Democracy and bodily autonomy on the ballotDespite voters’ apparent lack of enthusiasm, their thoughts and fears about a second Trump term have grown more specific since 2020. As he has knocked on voters’ doors this year, Walter, who served as a delegate for Bernie Sanders in 2020, has heard more people express concern about the continuation of democracy if Trump wins the election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe pointed to recent comments from Kevin Roberts, president of the rightwing Heritage Foundation, to underscore the threat. Roberts told a radio host last week: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”Walter said: “They’re making it abundantly clear what their goals are for a second administration, and it’s terrifying. And a lot of people, I think, really are starting to recognize that.”Abortion access has also moved to the top of many voters’ priority lists. The race between Biden and Trump represents the first presidential election since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, and Democrats predict that Republicans will enact a national abortion ban if they have the opportunity.“That’s one thing that I hear quite often is, quite literally, democracy and bodily autonomy are on the ballot,” Walter said.Those high stakes have only increased the pressure on Biden since his poor debate performance, and progressive leaders in Wisconsin are conflicted about how to move forward. Some prominent progressive lawmakers, including representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, have said Democrats need to stick with Biden and focus on beating Trump, but doubts linger.Progressive leaders in Wisconsin emphasized that Biden has notched some important legislative wins, including the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, but they expressed varying opinions on whether the president should continue his campaign.“My feeling is that that conversation is only going to stop at the [Democratic] convention. And it is true that we do have primary elections, and people voted for Biden as the candidate,” Neumann-Ortiz said. “Ultimately, in this election, the conversation needs to be about, how can we build a strong, diverse, united front against the threat of a candidate that is promising dictatorship on day one?”Even as Democrats continue to squabble over Biden’s future, Wisconsin groups like Voces de la Frontera and Bloc remain focused on communicating the danger of Trump’s potential return to voters.“I think at the end of the day, our community, we know what’s at stake,” Lang said. “Folks end up coming around [in] September, October, and that’s usually when they start to get plugged in and engaged. I will caution, though, that if we’re still having the same questions and the same conversations around that time, I think it’s a little bit more of a red flag.”Walter warned that, if Biden chooses to continue on and loses to Trump in November, his defeat will become legacy-defining.“We won’t be able to talk about the Inflation Reduction Act. We won’t be able to talk about his massive labor wins,” Walter said.“Instead, the narrative in every history book will be on the last six months before the election – how we saw that he wasn’t as sharp as he may have been five years ago, that he didn’t have what it takes to beat Donald Trump. And because of that, we lost the American experiment.” More

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      Anne Applebaum on autocracies and signs of America’s move to join them – podcast

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      Back in December Donald Trump said the quiet bit out loud when he announced he wanted to be a dictator – if only on day one. Looking around the world in the 21st century, autocracy is getting a new lease of life – authoritarian regimes are working together, and the danger to democracies like the United States is getting closer to home.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland is joined by the political commentator and author Anne Applebaum to look at what the US should be doing to tackle the growing threat of autocracy

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Biden to speak at Nato summit in high-stakes press conference – live updates

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      Hello and welcome to our coverage of the Nato summit in Washington DC, where all eyes will be on Joe Biden this evening as he steps up to the lectern and answers questions from journalists in a critical test after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump a fortnight ago.Biden is scheduled to begin speaking at 6:30pm EST to close out the three-day Nato summit in his first solo news conference in eight months, amid growing calls for him to step aside his Democratic party’s presumptive nominee.The US president’s performance tonight will be closely watched by his aides and advisers, who have reportedly been discussing how to persuade him to leave the presidential race, as well as the Trump campaign who reportedly want him to stay.We’ll stream Biden’s press conference here and bring you more news coming out of the Nato summit.Earlier today, the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, was asked about his meeting with Joe Biden at the White House.Biden was “on good form” and went through serious issues at pace during their first bilateral talks, Starmer answered.The British prime minister said his personal view, having spent almost an hour in private talks with Biden and attended a dinner for Nato leaders at the White House, was that the US president was mentally agile.Asked in a round of broadcast interviews whether criticism of Biden was misguided, the prime minister said:
      Yes … my own personal view is he was on good form. I was very keen obviously to discuss Ukraine, but there were many other issues that we got through.
      Downing Street said Starmer had not raised the issue of Biden’s health or his future plans in their meeting, but reporters asked him about media speculation that Biden could have early dementia symptoms. Starmer said:
      No, we had a really good bilateral yesterday. We were billed for 45 minutes, we went on for the best part of an hour. We went through a huge number of issues at pace, he was actually on really good form.
      Joe Biden did not hear any concerns from world leaders during the Nato summit regarding his health or re-election campaign challenges, the White House said.The White House’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said leaders instead offered “a drumbeat of praise for the United States, but also for President Biden personally for what he’s done to strengthen Nato”, Associated Press reported.Biden was praised not just for his time as president but for his decades in politics, Sullivan said.Sullivan, who helped prepare Biden ahead of the disastrous debate performance, said he did not “have concerns” about the president’s health, adding:
      He said he had a bad night.
      Hello and welcome to our coverage of the Nato summit in Washington DC, where all eyes will be on Joe Biden this evening as he steps up to the lectern and answers questions from journalists in a critical test after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump a fortnight ago.Biden is scheduled to begin speaking at 6:30pm EST to close out the three-day Nato summit in his first solo news conference in eight months, amid growing calls for him to step aside his Democratic party’s presumptive nominee.The US president’s performance tonight will be closely watched by his aides and advisers, who have reportedly been discussing how to persuade him to leave the presidential race, as well as the Trump campaign who reportedly want him to stay.We’ll stream Biden’s press conference here and bring you more news coming out of the Nato summit. More

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      Don Jr to introduce Trump’s vice-president pick at Republican convention

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      Donald Trump’s running mate will be introduced at the Republican national convention next Wednesday by his eldest son, according to people familiar with the matter, raising speculation that Senator JD Vance will be named the vice-presidential pick after being endorsed by Don Jr.The fact that Don Jr will speak immediately before the running mate delivers remarks, earlier reported by Axios, is seen as notable inside the Trump campaign because of Don Jr’s close ties to Vance.Still, a person directly familiar with the matter cautioned that the speaking schedule was decided three to four weeks ago and they were uncertain how instructive Don Jr’s involvement was.Trump has said he wants his running mate to be revealed at the convention next week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but due to convention rules that require the ticket to be nominated by the first day, the former president has been forced to make a decision before Wednesday.For months, Trump has presided over a characteristically theatrical selection process in which he made dramatic pronouncements at rallies in an effort to drive media speculation before narrowing the list to a final three: the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, Senator Marco Rubio and Vance.The leading contenders have run through an emotionally draining fight to be Trump’s running mate, defending the former president in cable news interviews, mingling with members at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, coalescing support from Trump allies and trying to appeal to Trump’s core Maga voters at rallies.The Guardian has previously reported that Trump has told allies he wants a running mate who would be a “fighter” – someone who is media-savvy and will defend him on adversarial TV networks – and loyal to the extent that they would be “everything Mike Pence wasn’t”.Trump’s former vice-president was a valuable asset during the 2016 and 2020 campaigns because of his Christian conservative credentials that shored up support among Republicans who were suspicious of the thrice-married reality TV star.But Pence’s refusal to do one final favor and comply with Trump’s demand to block the certification of the 2020 election results in Congress led to a falling-out, and made Pence the target of the January 6 Capitol attack rioters.For his 2024 campaign, Trump is seeking a “Goldilocks” running mate: strong but loyal, in tune with Maga but not over-rehearsed, telegenic but not likely to outshine him. His choice will go up against Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to serve as vice-president.Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, has increasingly fit that profile.On Sunday, Vance said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he supported Trump’s vow to appoint a special counsel to prosecute Joe Biden, making apparent references to the House oversight committee’s search for evidence of impeachable conduct by Biden, which it has not found.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance also suggested it was reasonable for Trump to prosecute Biden on the grounds that Biden had supposedly weaponized the legal system against him, although there is no evidence Biden has been involved in prosecutorial decisions at the justice department or elsewhere.The NBC anchor Kristen Welker pressed Vance on his support for a special counsel: “If it’s not OK for Joe Biden to weaponize the justice department – as you say, which there’s no evidence of that – why is it OK for Donald Trump to do that?” she asked.Vance repeated the common complaint among Republicans that one former justice department official took a job as a prosecutor in the New York criminal case in which Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to influence the 2016 election with a hush-money scheme.“If Donald Trump’s attorney general had his No 2 or his No 3 jump ship to a local prosecutor’s office in Ohio or Wisconsin, and that person then went after Donald Trump’s political opposition, that’s a different conversation,” he said, though the prosecutor at issue was not as senior as the hypothetical.Trump has repeatedly vowed to prosecute his political enemies, sharing posts on his Truth Social website that advocated jailing top Democrats and Republicans who criticized him, including one that said the former House Republican Liz Cheney should face “televised military tribunals”. More

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      Don’t go, Joe: flummoxed Trump campaign wants Biden to stay in race

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      Donald Trump and his campaign want Joe Biden to stay in the race, according to people familiar with the matter, and have discussed taking steps to ensure they don’t push the president to withdraw amid escalating panic among Democrats following his recent debate performance.The latest thinking inside Trump’s campaign is for them not to pile on the concern about Biden’s age and mental acuity in case their attack ads push Biden to step aside.If that happened, the campaign advisers think Trump would lose two lines of attack that have been central to his campaign: claiming that Biden is “sleepy” and lacks the fitness for another term in office, and falsely claiming that Biden is to blame for inflation and an uptick in illegal immigration.The situation with Biden has flummoxed the Trump campaign as they now walk the tightrope of continuing to campaign against Biden in the likelihood that he remains the Democratic nominee for president, without hitting his age to the extent that it helps push him to withdraw.Trump’s senior campaign advisers are also concerned that if Biden leaves the race, they would not be able to deploy their contingency plans until a replacement at the top of the ticket was confirmed.A new opponent could open up new challenges for the Trump campaign. If Democrats coalesced behind a younger candidate, for instance, neither the lethargy portrayal nor the Biden administration record would work – and the campaign would need to come up with newly tailored attacks.A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.To preserve the status quo – Trump is marginally ahead of Biden in battleground states in private and public polling – the Trump campaign has settled on the message that it is too late for Democrats to change their nominee and Biden cannot step down.Trump himself has downplayed the idea that Biden would be replaced. “If you listen to the professionals that do this stuff, they say it’s very hard for anybody else to come into the race,” Trump said in an interview with John Reid, a Virginia-based talk radio host.And the message being blasted by Trump-allied Super Pacs, two weeks after the debate, is that Biden has to stay in the race at least until the Democratic national convention in August if any potential successor wants to acquire Biden’s substantial war chest.The Biden campaign and the White House have insisted that the president will be the nominee, and are planning a new round of campaign events and interviews. Biden faces an unscripted press-conference at the Nato summit in Washington on Thursday night, and an NBC interview next week Monday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden’s campaign announced raising $127m in June, ending the month with $240m in cash on hand. Trump raised a comparatively smaller figure of $111.8m, with $285m in the bank.Still, the Trump campaign has started to plan for contingencies, including if the vice-president, Kamala Harris, became the nominee, although they have been less concerned about a Harris-led ticket because they believe they can hit her with the Biden administration’s policy record, the people said.The Trump campaign has started to use ads trying to start the narrative that Harris was always planning to depose Biden, using clips of Harris laughing against the Biden-Harris logo collapsing into just the Harris text. The campaign is also accusing Democratic candidates of covering up Biden’s decline. More

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      Will Biden’s loss of celebrity support make a real difference?

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      The last two US presidential election cycles haven’t been especially notable in the already-marginal world of celebrity endorsements. Both 2016 and 2020 pitted a well-established Democrat with heavy ties to previous administrations against a fringe-gone-mainstream Republican candidate whose own previous occupation was as a celebrity, and not a particularly hip one. So it wasn’t surprising to see an even more dramatic divide between mainstream celebs endorsing the Democrat (or saying nothing more controversial than a bland “vote!”) and a bunch of C- and-D-listers stumping for Trump, as they might any number of faulty late-night infomercial products.This might well have gone similarly in 2024, if not for Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate a few weeks ago. Now a less lopsided divide has formed as a form of anti-endorsement has come in: celebrities who have called upon Joe Biden to step aside from the presidential race and let a younger candidate attempt to take the Democrats across the finish line.At first, it was an interestingly eclectic group, notable for aligning the likes of Michael Moore – who isn’t exactly the core constituency for a career politician fixated on bipartisan cooperation in the first place – with the likes of classic limousine liberals like Rob Reiner and Stephen King. This suggested some real traction to the idea that Biden should drop out, but was still largely limited to figures who seem a bit more likely to hop on social media and fire off some opinions. More writers than actors, in other words; same goes for figures with mock-pundit experience, like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. So there was particular headline-news grabbiness when George Clooney – who recently attended a Biden fundraiser – wrote a New York Times op-ed saluting the man’s service and integrity while also arguing that it was time for Joe to go. It may be the most talked-about celeb endorsement (or anti-endorsement) since Taylor Swift came out for Biden (and, probably more importantly, against Trump) shortly before the 2020 election. It even prompted a Biden response, with the president claiming – somewhat nonsensically – that Clooney, only being at the fundraiser he referred to for a brief period, couldn’t have gotten a proper impression of the president’s acuity.View image in fullscreenThough he doesn’t give off the glamour of his former running mate Barack Obama, Biden has long been able to claim some degree of default and/or anti-Trump A-list support: Julia Roberts attended the same fundraiser as Clooney earlier this year, while Robert De Niro, an outspoken critic of fellow New Yorker Trump, narrated a campaign ad, though this seems likely to stem from De Niro’s genuine – and, frankly, delightful! – seething hatred for Trump more than some personal allegiance to Biden. (In the meantime, who has been one of Trump’s biggest boosters on Insta? You guessed it: Frank Stallone.) Dwayne Johnson, who long identified as some manner of Republican, endorsed Biden late in the 2020 race. Earlier this year, though, Johnson announced that he wouldn’t be endorsing any candidates for 2024, Biden apparently not having done enough to help change the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe.It would be easy to see a shift like that as evidence of eroding support for Biden, and it probably is; having a major star specifically say, months and months before the election, that they don’t endorse either candidate (implying that this is unlikely to change), when it would be easy enough to simply say nothing or bide his time, feels unusual – just as it’s unusual for another major star to write an op-ed suggesting that a presidential candidate from his party must step down for the good of the country. But it’s also a sign of how micro-targeted a celebrity niche has become – maybe by force – in the social media era, where even silence has begun to seem like a tacit statement, rather than PR-managed decorum. Biden’s once-solid base of A-listers still skews on the older side, reflecting a time when endorsing a candidate felt at once simpler and less conspicuous. That’s true, too, of celebrities who have called for Biden to drop out: Michael Douglas and John Cusack are big names, but they’re sure not south of 50. Younger celebrities, mirroring younger demographics in general, may not be especially impressed with Biden’s handling of Israel and attendant failure to stop the bloodshed – which means they may not have been endorsing him to begin with.Of course, there’s a certain tempest-in-a-designer-teapot quality to tracking the whims of celebrity endorsements, which at least some of the general public probably views with skepticism – those clueless stars and their pet causes! George Clooney isn’t casting his vote in a swing state – or, for that matter, against Joe Biden, if it comes down to it. Biden could even argue that the shifting tastes of celebrities don’t interest him, as he’s maintained the image of a folksy, get-it-done underdog for much of his political career, even after ascending to the vice-presidency. Courting celebrity? Isn’t that a Trumpian hunger to begin with? Yet big celebrities can help with big-donor fundraising – and smaller ones arguably have bigger platforms than ever before. (John Cusack movies may not bring a million-plus people to the box office in a weekend, if they’re even released theatrically at all. But that’s his social-media audience.)From Hollywood’s love of Obama to Trump’s resurgence beginning on NBC to the sheer number of meme-based campaign posts, celebrity and politics have become more entwined than ever. Biden may not need celebrities to win, or for his sense of worth. But he does need actual support, and Clooney’s op-ed helped make him seem more like a cause than a candidate. More

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      Republicans to descend on Milwaukee – where they’ve been trying to dilute Black voting power

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      Shortly after the 2022 midterm elections, Robert Spindell sent out an email to his fellow Republicans explaining why he was pleased with the results even though Tony Evers, a Democrat, had just won a second term.Spindell, one of three Republicans on the body that oversees elections in Wisconsin, said “we can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”The comment sparked outrage and calls for Spindell to resign. Spindell, who also served as a fake elector in 2020, has refused, saying, “The last thing I want to do is suppress votes.”While it was astonishing to see a top Republican official boasting of lower voter turnout with such bluntness, it wasn’t surprising to anyone to see Republicans celebrating fewer votes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s most populous city.Nearly 223,000 Black people live in Milwaukee – roughly 60% of Wisconsin’s entire Black population. That means that Black voters in the city can have an outsize effect on election outcomes in the state – they have long been a bastion of Democratic votes and are crucial for any Democrat who wants to win the state (More than one out of every 10 votes Joe Biden received in Wisconsin in 2020 came from the city of Milwaukee). Activists have long understood attacks on the city to be code for attacks on Black voters.Now Republicans are set to descend on the city they have long attacked to formally nominate Donald Trump to a second term at the Republican national convention in July.“They’re not coming here because they love the city of Milwaukee at all,” said Angela Lang, the executive director of Black Leaders Organizing Communities, a non-profit in the city. The decision to hold the GOP convention in Milwaukee, a city Lang said Republicans often “say racist dog whistles about” was a “slap in the face”.Republicans have not shied away from using coded language to attack the city. In 2013, as Republicans debated a measure to curtail early voting, state senator Scott Fitzgerald said “the question of where this is coming from and why are we doing this and why are we trying to disenfranchise people, I mean, I say it’s because the people I represent in the 13th district continue to ask me, ‘What is going on in Milwaukee?’”Donald Trump, for his part, has directly insulted Milwaukee, reportedly telling fellow Republicans in June it was a “horrible city”.Both Democrats and Republicans have touted the economic benefits the event will bring to the city. And Reince Priebus, the former RNC chair who led the effort to bring the convention to Milwaukee, said having the event in the city would bring around $200m in economic benefits and would focus Republican attention on Wisconsin, a critical battleground state. The convention, Priebus said in 2023, “can turn a purple state where only 20,000 people will decide who those electoral votes will go to”.“They have no shame,” said Greg Lewis, a minister in Milwaukee who leads the Souls to the Polls, a non-profit that works to educate churchgoers and get them to vote. Historically, the program has been remarkably successful in mobilizing Black voters.“Even though they have totally tried to abolish folks in our community from expressing themselves with their vote, they still want you to support a system or an organization or a party that is totally against them expressing their power,” Lewis said.In 2018, Robin Vos, the Republican who serves as the powerful speaker of the Wisconsin assembly, said his party would have done better in statewide elections “if you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula”.Republicans have also used their impenetrable, gerrymandered majorities in the state legislature to attack Milwaukee and its Black residents, including passing a sweeping voter ID measure and moving to limit early voting in the city. Non-white voters are more than four times more likely to lack a current ID than their white counterparts. One study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that voter ID in Wisconsin discouraged up to 23,000 people in Milwaukee and Dane counties from voting in the 2016 election.In 2016, US district judge James Peterson struck down a Republican-enacted law trying to limit the amount of early voting in the state. He noted that the practice was especially popular among Latino and Black voters. Milwaukee at the time allowed for more early voting than other places in the state.“The legislature’s ultimate objective was political: Republicans sought to maintain control of the state government. But the methods that the legislature chose to achieve that result involved suppressing the votes of Milwaukee’s residents, who are disproportionately African American and Latino,” he wrote. An appeals court has since overturned Peterson’s ruling.Turnout in the city in 2016 dropped by 41,000 votes compared with 2012, nearly double Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the state. When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin in 2016, turnout in Black wards in the city was around 58%, according to a Journal Sentinel analysis. In 2020, it fell to 51%. Black turnout has lagged after white turnout in the city in the last presidential and gubernatorial elections, according to data analyzed by John Johnson, a researcher at Marquette University.“They’re going to places with large concentrations of Black people – that is the most hope we have at building Black political power in the state,” Lang said, referring to Republican efforts to restrict voting rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2020, Donald Trump and his campaign waged an aggressive, ultimately unsuccessful, legal effort to get votes in Milwaukee and Madison thrown out as part of his effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. He did not request a recount in any other county in the state.LaTonya Johnson, a Democrat who represents Milwaukee in the state senate, said it was no secret why Republicans were targeting the city. She said she had pleaded with her colleagues in the legislature to support legislation to curb gun violence in the city but had been rebuffed.“Republicans always make it seem like the bulk of – if they feel that there’s fraud – in the system that is coming from the city of Milwaukee, right? And the question is why? Because Milwaukee is majority minority,” she said in an interview.For the last few months, Lewis and Souls to the Polls have been calling for the executive director of the Wisconsin Republican party, Andrew Iverson, to resign. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published text messages earlier this year that showed Iverson trying to sabotage Souls to the Polls operations on election day in 2020. The text messages showed Iverson, then the head of Trump victory, a joint effort of the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, asking a Trump campaign staffer if he could get Trump supporters to use Souls to the Polls on election day.“I’m excited about this. Wreak havoc,” he said in one text message published by the Journal Sentinel. Iverson, who did not respond to an interview request, has denied wrongdoing, saying he was joking. Another Republican staffer told the Journal Sentinel that he took the messages to overwhelm Souls to the Polls.Beyond voting, Republicans have also attacked Milwaukee in other ways. As the city faced serious fiscal issues last year, lawmakers approved a measure allowing Milwaukee officials to raise taxes, but also imposed new restrictions on the city.The bill contained provisions that gave the city less control over the city’s fire and police commission and said it could not spend revenue on diversity initiatives, and limited how much could be spent on non-profits and the arts. The city was also blocked from using state funding on a local streetcar project.Lang said she and her staff planned to leave the city during the convention, but would have some virtual programming. “I have serious safety concerns,” she said.Attendees of the convention will be allowed to carry guns within the “soft” security perimeter around the Fiserv forum, the arena where the convention will be held, but not within a tighter “hard” security perimeter closer to the arena. The city could not ban the carrying of firearms because of a state law that prohibits localities from restricting them.“The same type of people who write manifestos, and shoot up grocery stores with people that look like me, they find home in the Republican party, and now we’re rolling out the red carpet to them in a predominantly Black and brown city that is largely Democratic, and I think that is a recipe for disaster,” Lang said.Still, Lang said she planned to use the convention as an opportunity to educate voters about the meaning of their vote.“If people are like, ‘I don’t really believe in politics or it’s so dysfunctional, I have no faith in it right now,’ well, there’s one party in particular that is happy when you don’t vote,” she said. More

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      Biden under renewed pressure to step aside as top Democrats make agonized appeals

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      Joe Biden came under renewed moral pressure on Wednesday to abandon his presidential candidacy amid agonised appeals by a succession of senior Democrats for him to consider the broader picture.Those calls came as the US president dug in his heels to make it hard to supplant him as the nominee.With the backlash over his 27 June TV debate fiasco refusing to abate, Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, became the most senior party member yet to subtly float the possibility of Biden stepping down while stopping short of explicitly telling him to do so.Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, gleefully sought to further tighten the screw by summoning three White House aides to testify about Biden’s mental fitness.The summons came in the form of a subpoena from James Comer, the GOP chair of the House oversight committee, who demanded testimony from Anthony Bernal, the top aide to the first lady Jill Biden; the deputy White House chief of staff Annie Tomasini, and the president’s senior adviser Ashley Williams, Axios reported.Pelosi, 84, who was speaker until Republicans regained control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “it’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run”, adding: “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”That remark came as the president seemed intent on running down the clock until next month’s Democratic national convention in Chicago, to make it practically impossible to replace him. Pelosi later qualified her comments, claiming they had been subject to “misrepresentations”, while adding: “The president is great.”But they prefaced further critical interventions from Senate Democrats, who followed the lead of Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado in voicing doubts over whether Biden could beat Donald Trump in November.Bennet told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday evening that Trump was likely to win November’s poll in a landslide because of the widespread concerns over Biden’s age and mental acuity.“This race is on a trajectory that is very worrisome if you care about the future of this country,” he said in an impassioned interview. “Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House. It’s not a question about politics, it’s a moral question about the future of our country.”He added: “I have not seen anything remotely approaching the kind of plan we need to see out of the White House that can demonstrate that he can actually beat Donald Trump, which is not going to be about the accomplishments that we all had, you know, three and four years ago. This is something for the president to consider.”Bennet’s comments stopped short of a full-blown appeal for Biden’s withdrawal, in contrast to Democrats in the House – where seven members have explicitly made such calls in the wake of the debate, where the president repeatedly appeared confused, mangled his words and allowed Trump to lie without effective contradiction.Soon after, Pete Welch of Vermont became the first senator to call on Biden to withdraw from the election. Welch said he was worried about the race because “the stakes could not be higher”.“I understand why President Biden wants to run,” Welch wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “He saved us from Donald Trump once and wants to do it again. But he needs to reassess whether he is the best candidate to do so. In my view, he is not.“For the good of the country, I’m calling on President Biden to withdraw from the race.”Richard Blumenthal, a senator from Connecticut, also voiced concerns.“I am deeply concerned about Joe Biden winning this November,” Blumenthal told reporters, adding that the party “had to reach a conclusion as soon as possible” and that Biden still retained his support.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA similarly circumspect call to reconsider came from Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor of Arizona, a battleground state that was one of six moved by the Cook Political Report – a non-partisan election forecaster – in Trump’s direction following the president’s post-debate poll slide.“I want the president to look at the evidence and make a hard decision,” Hobbs told reporters, adding that Biden had “a lot to do to assure Americans and Arizonans”.And on Wednesday evening, Representative Earl Blumenauer, the longest-serving Democrat in Oregon’s House delegation, put it bluntly: “President Biden should not be the Democratic presidential nominee.”
      “The question before the country is whether the president should continue his candidacy for re-election. This is not just about extending his presidency but protecting democracy,” he said in an emailed statement.“It is a painful and difficult conclusion but there is no question in my mind that we will all be better served if the president steps aside as the Democratic nominee and manages a transition under his terms.”There were even signs of slippage within the staunchly loyal Congressional Black Caucus, which had pledged its support on Monday night. On Wednesday one of its members, Marc Veasey of Texas, became the first to break ranks by telling CNN that Democrats running in tight races should “distance themselves” from Biden in an effort to “do whatever it is they need to do” to win.The public agonising illustrated how Biden’s debate failure has plunged the Democrats into paralysis as the campaign approaches a key phase.Yet there seemed little imminent sign of Biden – who has already written to the party’s congressional group en masse telling doubters to challenge him at the convention – yielding to pressure to bow out.Far from Biden retreating, plans were announced for a second primetime television interview – this time with NBC’s Lester Holt next Monday in the symbolic setting of the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas – to follow last Friday’s with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.The latest interview, coming on the heels of Biden’s hosting of Nato’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington this week – where he has been meeting a succession of world leaders – appeared designed to reinforce the message that he intends to stay the course.On Wednesday, the president visited the Washington headquarters of the main US trade union body, the AFL-CIO, an important Democrat constituency.The trade union visit followed a virtual meeting from the White House on Tuesday evening with about 200 Democratic mayors, in which he restated his determination to remain and reportedly won their support. More