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      US election live: Harris says Trump’s violent rhetoric about Liz Cheney ‘must be disqualifying’

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      Kamala Harris spoke of Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric about Liz Cheney in which he suggested Cheney be shot with “guns trained on her face”.Harris said:
      “He has increased his violent rhetoric, Donald Trump has, about political opponents and in great detail suggested rifles should be trained on former representative Liz Cheney. This must be disqualifying.”
      Hailing Cheney as a “courageous” and “incredible American”, Harris added:
      “I will tell you, I know Liz Cheney well enough to know that she is tough, she is incredibly courageous, and has shown herself to be a true patriot at a very difficult time in our country …
      We see this kind of rhetoric that is violent in nature, where we see this kind of spirit coming from Donald Trump that is so laden with the desire for revenge and retribution … I think that Liz Cheney is courageous and that we will always make sure that we are all fighting against and speaking out against any form of political violence.”
      Trump is now criticizing “Shawn Fain or whatever the hell his name is,” the president of the United Auto Workers, who is campaigning or Kamala Harris. The crowd boos.Trump says he can’t sleep easily and that he’s “always tossing and turning” thinking about China and the “Russia hoax” and how to make money for the American people.“I don’t feel like a senior. Does anybody feel like a senior?” Trump, 78, says, to some cheers. “I feel better – I think I’m sharper and better now than I was 25, 30 years ago. I do, I swear. I’ll let you know when I don’t.”Trump gives an update on sales of “Dark Maga” merchandise: Trump was talking about Elon Musk, and what role the billionaire will play in cutting government spending in a Trump administration. “You know where he is right now? He’s campaigning in Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. How cool is that,” Trump said.At one rally, Musk appeared and wore a “Dark Maga” black hat, Trump said, that the Republican candidate hadn’t even been aware his campaign made. That hat hadn’t sold well, maybe two hats, Trump said, until Musk wore it. Then the campaign sales of those hats took off.“They sold 71,000 black hats, can you believe it?” Trump says. “You make money with money, that’s how it is.”“But now that very low-IQ person who wants to be – have we ever had a low-IQ president before?” Trump asks of Kamala Harris.“It’s like your high school football team playing … what’s a good team today … oh, the Detroit Lions,” Trump tells his Michigan audience. He tells them Kamala Harris wouldn’t have been able to figure out which local sports team to reference.In a post on Truth Social, Trump appeared to be trying to walk back his comments about how Liz Cheney, one of his most prominent Republican critics, should face having rifles “shooting at her”.His comments yesterday have been widely condemned, including by Cheney and Kamala Harris, and are also under investigation by Arizona’s attorney general.“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said of Liz Cheney at an event in Arizona. Then said: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”“We love everybody right?” Trump says. He drops his voice. “No, we don’t.”Then Trump launches into an attack on Kamala Harris’s message of unity, a central part of her approach.“What about her, she’s always talking about, ‘You know I want to bring the country together, Trump is Hitler, ah, excuse me I shouldn’t have said that,’” Trump says, in a voice imitating Harris.He goes on with the imitation. “‘We want to get together as a country,’ ‘They’re all racists, they’re all this, they’re all that, but we want to have peace, and we want to get along.’”Trump tells his supporters that “the fake news” won’t even report on the bad jobs numbers. If you’re curious how just how false that claim is, you can Google it:Trump is now discussing the underwhelming economic numbers for last month.“This is not good news for them,” he says, of Harris and the Democrats. “How would you like to have an election in four days?”Some experts agree with Trump on this one:“You know, there are those that say that if we don’t win this election you may never have another election in this country … with these radical left lunatics that we’re dealing with,” Trump says.As you recall, Trump himself actually sparked this conversation over whether there might not be elections in the future, because of what he said to Christian voters earlier this year:Trump is now talking about the 2020 Democratic primary, talking about how early Kamala Harris dropped out and revisiting his rude nicknames for various Democratic presidential candidates from the previous election cycle, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.“This will be America’s new golden age,” Trump pledges. “Every problem facing us can be solved, and it’s going to be solved quickly.”Abortion rights advocates are mourning the loss of Nevaeh Crain, an 18-year-old pregnant teenager from Texas who died in October 2023 after three emergency room visits as she sought care for intense abdominal pain.ProPublica’s reporting on Crain, who would have turned 20 today, underscored the potentially fatal threat posed by abortion bans, argued Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All.“Pregnancy should not be a death sentence. Nevaeh Crain should be here, celebrating her 20th birthday today,” Timmaraju said in a statement.Timmaraju placed the blame for abortion bans on the shoulders of Republican politicians like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the incumbent senator who is facing a tough re-election fight against Democrat Collin Allred in Texas.“This has to stop,” she said. “And our best chance to do that is to vote for reproductive freedom, from vice-president Harris to Colin Allred and all the way down the ticket, so we can restore the right to abortion and end these bans.”“It seems so poignant,” Trump says, of the question he keeps asking, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The crowd roars: “No!”“We’re going to miss these rallies aren’t we?” Trump says onstage in Michigan, but promises his supporters that when he is back in the White House, the spirit of the rallies will continue in a different form.His supporters will someday look back and realize, “there was something very, very, special about what we all did together,” Trump says, speaking of his rallies. He also speculates about few people future presidential candidates will draw to their rallies.“This has been the thrill of a lifetime for me, and for you, and for everybody,” Trump says.The White House pool report has an amusing detail from Janesville for the punctuation nerds: Someone behind Harris on the stage was holding a “,la” sign (comma “la”), which is the proper pronunciation of her name. More

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      What to know about early voting and mail-in ballots

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      The US election is under way across the country, and so far more than 68.3 million people have voted early, according to the University of Florida’s election lab.In numerous states, the push to vote before election day, whether by mail or in-person, has amounted to an unprecedented wave of early voting.More than 97,000 voted on Wisconsin’s first day of early, in-person voting – an “unheard of” level of turnout, wrote the state elections commissioner, Ann Jacobs, on Twitter/X. On 15 October, Georgia’s first day of early voting, the state “shattered records”, according to the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. By 23 October, more than 1.9 million people had cast a ballot there in-person or by mail. And in North Carolina, which had been devastated by Hurricane Helene just weeks earlier, more than 353,000 voters turned out to cast a ballot early on 18 October – another state record. By 23 October, more than 1.7 million had voted in the election.Voting early in-person or absentee allows voters some flexibility in their schedule – by casting a ballot early, they can avoid contending with bad weather, long lines or unexpected scheduling conflicts on election day.What is early voting?States – with the exception of Mississippi, New Hampshire and Alabama – offer all voters the opportunity to cast a ballot in person at a polling place ahead of election day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In those places, registered voters can head to their polling location within the early voting time frame and cast a ballot early. Most states begin counting those ballots on election day, and some require officials to wait until polls are closed to begin counting. Some states offer a version of early voting called “in-person absentee” voting, in which a voter can obtain and submit an absentee ballot in person at a polling place before election day.What about absentee voting?Most states allow for some form of absentee voting, in which a voter requests a ballot ahead of time, which officials then send to them in the mail to fill out and return by mail. Some jurisdictions offer voters the option of returning absentee ballots to a secured dropbox. Fourteen states require an excuse for voters to cast a ballot by mail, such as an illness or work scheduling conflict. Eight states practice “all-mail” elections – in those places, all registered voters receive a ballot in the mail, whether or not they plan to use it.Federal law requires states to send absentee ballots to military voters and voters overseas.States regulate the “processing” and counting of absentee ballots; most states allow officials to immediately process ballots, which typically entails verifying the signature on the ballot with the voter’s signature from when they registered to vote. Other states require officials to wait until election day to begin processing ballots – which can slow the release of election results.When does early and absentee voting start this year, and how do I do it?The first ballots of the general election have already been sent to voters in states including Wisconsin and Maryland, and to some eligible voters in Alabama. Mail voting has stalled in North Carolina, where a legal battle over whether or not Robert F Kennedy Jr can appear on the ballot has slowed the process. By 21 September, election officials in many states will have begun sending out absentee ballots. The specific dates, locations and rules surrounding early and absentee voting vary by state, county and even municipality. First confirm that you are registered to vote and then contact your local election office or check their website for details about early and absentee voting.Who votes early and by mail, and does it benefit one party over the other?Research suggests that before 2020, implementing voting by mail did not benefit one party more than another. But in 2020, with the pandemic raging, Democrats urged people to vote by mail to avoid exposure to Covid, and fought legal battles to expand absentee voting in states where the practice had not already been widely adopted. Meanwhile, in the months ahead of the election, Donald Trump claimed falsely that the process was rife with fraud, probably scaring Republican voters away from the remote option. In the end, Democrats saw gains during the 2020 general election in counties that used mail-in voting, according to data from the Guardian and ProPublica. In the wake of the 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats outperformed expectations and maintained control of the Senate, Republicans began to reverse course on voting early – and have continued to advocate for voters to embrace the process since then. The reversal appears to have had an impact: in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, Republicans had outpaced Democrats slightly in early voting turnout by 23 October, according to data collected by the Associated Press.Is it safe to vote by mail?Mail voting is considered extremely secure in the US, and instances of fraud in mail voting are vanishingly rare. In a 2020 column, the elections expert Rick Hasen noted that between 2000 and 2012, there were fewer than 500 examples of vote-by-mail fraud, out of billions of votes cast. (As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, this makes mail-in voting fraud less likely than being struck by lightning). While mail-in voting fraud is extremely rare, election officials across the country have raised concerns about postal delays that could result in eligible voters’ ballots reaching election clerks after the deadline to count their ballots. More

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      Liz Cheney calls Trump would-be tyrant as he imagines ‘guns trained on her face’

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      Donald Trump has called former congresswoman Liz Cheney a radical war hawk and said she should face being under fire with rifles “shooting at her” – prompting the anti-Trump Republican to warn the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.Cheney recently endorsed Kamala Harris and has campaigned with her, trying to persuade Republicans who don’t want Trump to win another term in the White House in this election to vote for the Democratic ticket of the US vice-president and her running mate, Tim Walz.Harris on Friday said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” ahead of the 5 November presidential election. Meanwhile, the Arizona attorney general, Kris Mayes, on Friday said her office had opened a “death threat investigation” surrounding Trump’s comments about Cheney.While still in office, Cheney co-chaired the bipartisan special House committee that investigated Trump’s conduct on January 6, when extremist supporters of his stormed the US Capitol to try, in vain, to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory over him. She lost her Wyoming seat in 2022 as Trump supporters turned against her. Trump has called for her to be jailed for investigating him.Trump was in Arizona on Thursday evening, doing a sit-down talk with the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson, and he brought up Cheney in the context of her father, Dick Cheney, the former vice-president who was a hawkish architect of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 during the George W Bush administration. Trump has been critical of that war and has also criticized the current US president, Joe Biden, for becoming involved in Ukraine’s struggling defense against the invasion by Russia.“She’s a radical war hawk,” he said of Liz Cheney. Then said: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”Early on Friday, Cheney issued a stinging response on X.“This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant. #Womenwillnotbesilenced #VoteKamala,” she posted.Trump made his comments on Thursday about Cheney after complaining that Democratic criticism of his campaign had fueled what according to authorities were two failed assassination attempts against him.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMayes told Arizona’s 12News it was not yet clear whether Trump’s comment amounted to protected free speech or a criminal threat.“That’s the question, whether it did cross the line. It’s deeply troubling,” Mayes said, according to Reuters. “It is the kind of thing that riles people up and that makes our situation in Arizona and other states more dangerous.”Cheney has said she has never voted for a Democrat before but will do so “proudly” for Harris in this election to ensure Trump never holds a position of public trust again. Her father will join her in casting his ballot for Harris. More

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      Must-win Pennsylvania still bafflingly close as Harris and Trump fight for edge

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      Kamala Harris stood before a cheering crowd of hundreds of her supporters in Philadelphia and promised that she would deliver in Pennsylvania, a battleground state considered a must-win in the electoral college.“Nine days left in one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime, and we know this is going to be a tight race until the very end,” the vice-president told supporters in Philadelphia last weekend. “And make no mistake: we will win.”And yet, just a day earlier at a rally in State College, Donald Trump declared: “We’re going to pull this off. It’ll be the greatest victory in the history of our country for all of us – not for me, for all of us.”The contradictory comments reflect a neck-and-neck race in Pennsylvania that is hurtling toward the finish line with no clear frontrunner. The victor of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes, the most of any battleground state, will probably win the electoral college and determine the trajectory of the country for the next four years.View image in fullscreenJoe Biden won Pennsylvania by just 1.2 points in 2020, four years after Trump carried the state by 0.7 points. According to the Guardian’s polling tracker, Trump currently holds a lead of less than one point over Harris in the state.Conversations with voters in Pennsylvania underscore how close the election is, often to the bafflement of both Democrats and Republicans. And the outcome could perhaps shift with an unexpected turns of events, such as Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York last weekend. It was there that a comedian took the stage before Trump and insulted Puerto Rico, calling it an “island of garbage”. As pundits were quick to note afterwards, Pennsylvania is home to more than 470,000 Puerto Ricans.For Democrats, the focus is on firing up voters in Pennsylvania cities such as Philadelphia and Scranton and their immediate suburbs, home to many women and college-educated voters they view as amenable to their message of protecting democracy and abortion. Republicans are more focused on winning white working-class voters and a growing number of young men of color, by attacking Harris over the president’s immigration policies and the high inflation of his early presidency.This dynamic is exemplified by Lackawanna county, which includes Scranton. Hillary Clinton won it in 2016 by 3.4 points, but she decisively lost most of its neighboring counties, as white working-class voters flocked to Trump.Four years later, Biden won Lackawanna county by 8.4 points, though Trump’s persistent strength with working-class voters in the neighboring counties helped him keep the race in Pennsylvania close.The outcome here will depend, as it always does, on turnout, and Democrats are counting on a robust ground game to help them deliver a win. The culinary union Unite Here, for instance endorsed Harris in August and has knocked on more than 1m doors in Pennsylvania this election cycle, with a goal of surpassing 1.25m by 5 November.Jaime Hunt, a 22-year-old organizer with Unite Here, walked through South Philadelphia on a recent sunny Saturday, asking voters whether they planned to vote by mail, and encouraging them to fill out their ballots on the spot if they had already received them.View image in fullscreenThe canvassing efforts of Unite Here and other pro-Harris groups could make a critical difference in Pennsylvania. In 2020, Biden narrowly defeated Trump in the state by roughly 80,000 votes, in part by maximizing his advantage in Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs. This year, based on her many conversations with voters, Hunt is confident in Harris’s chances.“There is also a lot of – a good number – of Republicans who are voting for her. A lot of people are switching,” Hunt said. “I think it’s going to be her who wins.”Daniel Levin, a regional organizing director for the youth voting group NextGen America, has spent months on Philadelphia’s college campuses getting thousands of students registered to vote, and now helping them make a plan to vote for Harris and other Democrats.Despite concerns over whether young voters will support Harris, particularly because of widespread outrage over the Biden administration’s response to the war in Gaza, Levin predicted high youth turnout in Philadelphia. On a recent Friday, he convinced a young voter at Temple University to support Harris after explaining how her policies could benefit low-income residents of the city.“This is the place to be optimistic that we’re going to get a huge turnout,” Levin said. “And I think we will this year. I really think we will in Philadelphia, and we need to to carry [Pennsylvania].”In contrast to the broad network of pro-Harris groups working to turn out left-leaning voters, the Trump campaign’s comparatively meager ground operation in battleground states such as Pennsylvania has stoked concern among his allies. Trump and the Republican National Committee have instead directed more of their attention to combating alleged voter fraud, most recently highlighting concerns about potentially fraudulent registrations in Lancaster county.Despite Trump’s inattention to his turnout operation, he has managed to keep the race in Pennsylvania highly competitive, and his most ardent supporters seem as motivated as ever to cast their ballots for him.“I’ve never in my life seen a movement like this,” said John Spatig Jr, 46, who attended a rally by Trump in Allentown and lives in Northampton county, one of the biggest bellwethers in the state. He said the top issue for him was the government response for the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccine mandates.“How is the government going to guarantee me that there will never be a lockdown?” he said.View image in fullscreenMarilynn Raymond, 77, a retired bookkeeper from Reading, said at Trump’s rally in Allentown on Tuesday that she didn’t believe the polls showing a close race.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“All the crowds that Trump has done through the whole election far outweigh Kamala,” she said. “I think he’s way ahead.”As this campaigning season nears its close, Pennsylvania voters seem to be approaching election day with a mix of fatigue, excitement and fear.The fatigue was on display as Hunt made her rounds through South Philadelphia, with one resident responding to her knock by yelling through the door: “No one is home!”Both parties have already poured hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of campaign ads into Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia especially. The Philadelphia-based ABC affiliate WPVI completely sold out of ad inventory through election day by 24 October.Alex Pearlman, a comedian from the Philadelphia suburbs with a large following on TikTok, met with Tim Walz before a rally in Scranton, and he said he urged the Democratic vice-presidential nominee to keep voters energized for the final stretch.View image in fullscreen“Everybody’s tired,” Pearlman said. “Everyone’s been pretty set, the entire time. I think most people were holding their breath just to see who the candidates were going to be after the primaries. So now that we’re at this point, almost everyone has kind of made up their mind.”That dynamic has forced Harris and Trump to fight over an ever-diminishing number of undecided voters as they race toward election day. According to an Emerson College survey conducted in late October, only 3% of likely Pennsylvania voters were still undecided. And yet, that 3% could make all the difference, given that the state has been decided by roughly one point in the past two presidential elections.The narrow margins have triggered frustration and confusion among Democrats and Republicans in Pennsylvania. How, they ask, could the race for president still be this close?“[Harris] is going to win it, but I don’t believe the polls. I can’t believe that we’re 50-50 tied,” said Kathy Andrews, a 64-year-old voter from Philadelphia who attended Harris’s rally there. “I am giving a lot of credit to the American people, that everyone has a modicum of common sense.”Morgan Pastner Jaffe, a 32-year-old voter from West Chester, said the possibility of Trump’s victory makes her feel “very scared for the future – for women, for people of color and all different religions as well”.“She has to win or we’re screwed,” Jaffe said at Harris’s rally.With the race still a toss-up, the Trump campaign, wary of alienating a critical voting bloc, has tried to distance itself from the comedian who made the comment about Puerto Rico at Madison Square Garden.Rich Patti, 71, said at Trump’s Allentown rally that he didn’t think those remarks would hurt Trump’s chances with Latino voters.“They’re the backbone of our country and the backbones are hurting right now,” he said. “They work hard, they want the same thing. They want to be able to pay their bills, live well.”People of Puerto Rican descent in the state have suggested otherwise. “I was absolutely frustrated, I was angry – but I was not surprised,” Philadelphia councilmember Quetcy Lozada told the Guardian.The high stakes of the election are on display throughout Pennsylvania. Of the many signs adorning lawns and lamp-posts in Philadelphia, some eschew the traditional “Harris-Walz 2024” for slogans such as: “Defend Choice!” and “Defend Democracy!”“I don’t think you can walk around the city of Philadelphia and not know how important it is to people,” said Shane Ringressy, Pennsylvania organizing director for NextGen. “So I will say that Philadelphia itself, including all the young people in the city, definitely seem like they’re ready to fight and do their part.” More

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      Mormons were once reliably Republican – but they could tip Arizona Harris’s way

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      A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift from members towards Kamala Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Donald Trump slightly ahead in the swing state.With nearly 450,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as LDS or Mormons, living in Arizona, they make up about 6% of the state’s population and both the Harris and Trump campaigns have been going all out to woo them.While the church’s home base of Utah is one of the deepest red states, in neighboring Arizona there is a growing partisan rift.Mormons in Arizona are now “poised to support Kamala Harris more than any other presidential Democratic ticket in 60 years”, Jacob Rugh, an associate professor in the department of sociology at the LDS church-run Brigham Young University, said in a Harris-Walz campaign call in August.In the 2020 election, Joe Biden delivered the first Democratic win in Arizona in a presidential election in 24 years. He garnered an estimated 18,000 votes from the LDS community, double Hillary Clinton’s share of LDS voters there – and won the state by just 10,457 votes.“The 18,000 votes was more than the margin of victory, and it showed the significance of the LDS vote,” said Robert Taber, the national director of LDS for Harris-Walz.“Where Biden got 18% of the LDS vote in 2020, I think Harris could hit 25-30% of the LDS vote,” Taber added, citing the increased Democratic campaign efforts there this cycle, as well as the “post-January 6” environment.“I think there’s a decent chance that Harris does a little bit better than Biden,” he said, which, if it happens, could help the Democrats to “hold on to Nevada and Arizona”, he added.In the United States, members of the LDS church make up a relatively small, predominantly white voting bloc – about 2% of the population – and have traditionally been among the most loyal voting blocs for the Republicans over the last several decades, historically aligning on traditional conservative values such as religious freedoms, pro-life stances and small government.But in 2016, when Trump was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, some in the community felt conflicted. That year, after the Hollywood Access tape was published, Deseret News website, which is owned by the LDS church, called on Trump to resign, stating that he did not align with the community’s ideals and values.A small but increasing number of LDS voters continue to shift away from him.Julie Spilsbury, a Republican council member in Mesa, Arizona, and an LDS church member, recently endorsed Harris .“I think the character of our leaders matter,” Spilsbury, 47, said. “And when I hear him talk about – women, immigrants, refugees, people who disagree with him – I cannot, in good conscience, vote for someone like that.”Spilsbury voted for Trump in 2016 but later abandoned him due to his character, divisiveness and rhetoric, she said. She voted for Biden four years later – but quietly. Now she’s publicly supporting Harris.In 2020, about half of LDS voters under the age of 40 voted for Biden, and in Utah, he performed the best of any Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.While most LDS voters nationwide are expected to vote for Trump, if Harris can better the Biden numbers among the group, it could make a crucial difference in Arizona – and Nevada, where Mormon numbers are also strong, although there is less data available about their voting history in that state from 2020.View image in fullscreenThe Harris campaign launched an LDS advisory committee in Arizona in September and in Nevada in early October to canvas Mormon voters and hold events.The Republicans launched a Latter-day Saints for Trump coalition in early October, and Trump called in to an LDS for Trump video call as the campaign tried to shore up the vote.But in Arizona, John Giles, a lifelong Republican, LDS member and the mayor of Mesa – once dubbed the most conservative city in America – publicly backed Harris just eight days after Biden dropped out of his re-election campaign.He wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Republican saying Harris “is fighting to make sure Americans can get ahead and be safe from gun violence and to restore and protect the rights of women”, while Trump stood for the far right, “crudeness and vulgarity”.And at a recent Harris-Walz rally in Arizona, Giles said the GOP had been “taken over by extremists”, and described Trump as “morally and ethically bankrupt”.In recent years, Trump has also clashed with prominent LDS members, including Mitt Romney, Utah’s retiring US senator and past presidential nominee, who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol; Rusty Bowers, the former speaker of the Arizona house who resisted Trump’s demands to undermine the 2020 election in Arizona; and former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, who recently endorsed Harris.“I saw a lot of people really upset about the way that he attacked very well-respected Arizona politicians like Rusty Bowers,” said Lacy Chaffee, a member of the LDS church and a candidate for school board in Mesa.“Rusty campaigned for Trump, but he wasn’t willing to lie,” she added. “So I think that that’s something that speaks very deeply to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We hold very deeply the sense of integrity and truth, and I think that, for a lot of people, was the breaking point.”The Mormon church itself maintains political neutrality, but it encourages civic participation and for members to elect politicians who are “honest, wise and good”.Rugh, the sociology expert, said his analysis showed that candidates who denied that Biden won the 2020 election lost substantial LDS votes.Meanwhile, the church teaches members that the principles in the US constitution are divinely inspired, said Taber, the director of LDS for Harris-Walz. . But Trump has said the constitution should be “terminated”.The LDS youth vote is also shifting significantly. Brittany Romanello, an anthropologist and faculty associate at Arizona State University, said that Harris and the Democrats “have a very big opening” with young LDS voters because of greater diversity both of people and opinions in their ranks, and agreater willingness to disagree with the church majority.“Gen Z is the most politically, ethnically, sexually and romantically diverse generation, and they’re a huge part of the voting bloc, and this includes Mormons,” Romanello said.Rugh’s analysis also found that more than 50% of gen Z LDS members voted for Biden in 2020.View image in fullscreenIn terms of more LDS voters being willing to buck the norm, and be open about it, Spilsbury said:“If me speaking out helps some others, specifically LDS women, know that there’s another choice and that we don’t have to vote Republican just because it’s the thing we think we’re supposed to do, then that’s really important to me.”She said a lot of the reaction from her community to her choice had been “rough” but that she received some positive messages, too.Meanwhile, Mormonism is a conservative, pro-life religion but known as less fiercely anti-abortion than some, generally supporting exceptions for rape, incest and the health of the mother or child. Harris has zeroed in on reproductive rights since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, after Trump’s three appointees tipped the bench to the right.LDS Arizona resident Monica Chabot, 28, had a miscarriage last year and elected to have the fetus removed rather than wait for it to pass naturally. Her experience changed her perspective on the Republican party and its anti-choice stance, she said. She believes theprocedure would probably not have been allowed under an extreme ban dating from 1864 that briefly took effect in Arizona after Roe was overturned, before some Republicans crossed the aisle to repeal it, which the state’s Democratic governor signed off on, leaving a less harsh ban.“It made me realize how little Trump and other Republicans seem to care about me and my experiences and my body,” she said. “And hearing Kamala talk about it and fighting for that is a big reason why I’ve been involved in the Harris campaign.”Arizona voters have a ballot measure this November that would enshrine in the state constitution the right to abortion until viability, or around 24 weeks. It remains to be seen whether it will encourage split tickets as conservatives who want reproductive choice vote for the measure but also for Trump, or whether it boosts women’s turnout in a huge windfall for Harris.Chabot said that while she would never choose to get an abortion, or encourage others to get an abortion, she doesn’t believe in the government making that decision for a woman.She said: “We talk a lot about agency in the church, and how it’s one of our greatest gifts from God – the ability to choose.” More

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      Here’s how the winner of the 2024 US presidential election did it | Jonathan Freedland

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      Here’s one prediction about the US election you can take to the bank. When the result is finally known, there will be a stampede of experts and prognosticators rushing to insist that, in effect, they knew it all along – that, hard though it was to glimpse through the fog of polls and shifting data, the eventual outcome was obvious. Even inevitable.That will be truer still if, when the voters’ will is finally known, it turns out not to have been so close after all, with one of the two main candidates sweeping most of the swing states to rack up a healthy majority in the electoral college if not the popular vote.The funny thing is, if that happens – for either candidate – it would not entirely be a surprise. Even now, you can sketch out, in advance, a very plausible case for why Donald Trump could be about to retake the presidency. And you can do the same for why Harris might be on the brink of becoming the first woman to hold the world’s most powerful office. So, much as Boris Johnson drafted two columns on the eve of the Brexit referendum – one advocating leave, the other remain – here, while the US’s verdict is still unknown, is the story of how Trump, or Harris, pulled it off.Start with the scenario of a victorious Trump. To understand it might require a single number: 28. That’s the percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they believe the country is on the right track. A measly 28%. In that environment, incumbent parties lose. And, for all the drama and buzz of her swift installation as candidate, her positioning as the face of change, Harris is a member of the incumbent party and a senior figure in the current US government. A nation that made clear long ago that it wanted to fire Joe Biden, largely over the cost of living and rising prices, as well as immigration, was bound to seize the chance to do the next best thing – and reject his deputy.If there was a way to avoid that fate, it would have required Harris to make a cleaner break from Biden than she was willing to. Whether it was personal respect for the man, or fear of rupturing her coalition, she didn’t do what had to be done. In this narrative, a key moment will prove to be her October appearance on The View, when she was asked if, looking back over the past four years, she would have done anything differently from her boss. “Not a thing that comes to mind,” was her answer. At a stroke, she robbed herself of the mantle of change, and confirmed Trump’s core message: vote Harris, get Biden 2.Should the need arise to explain a Trump win in 2024, incumbency in tough times will be the meat of it. But it won’t be the whole story. Other factors, besides inflation and petrol prices, will have played their part, tied more to culture than politics. Trump’s astonishing lead among men, especially those without a college degree – including some, albeit qualified, evidence of increased support among Black and Hispanic men, previously beyond the reach of the Republican party – points to an element of Trump’s appeal that has endured for nearly a decade. Call it cultural defiance. It sees the wagging finger of all those who sit in judgment – whether that’s the media, the universities, the “woke”, foreign countries, especially European ones, or at its most loosely defined, women, especially educated women – and shows them a big, fat middle finger in response.This is what Trump’s critics took so long to understand. What, for years, they thought would hurt him – scandal, two impeachments, multiple criminal prosecutions and convictions – only made him stronger, confirming him as an outlaw, a transgressor who crossed the very boundaries so many of his followers, chiefly men, itched to cross with him. That photo of him, bloodstained, seconds after dodging an assassin’s bullet, urging his devotees to “fight, fight, fight!” – how, we may come to ask, did we ever think he could be beaten after that?After all, Harris was his ideal opponent. A liberal, accomplished, affluent woman from California, an avatar for the very cultural elite he and many millions of others despise. In case that impression of her were not sharp enough, she reinforced it with a parade of A-list stars campaigning for her in the final stretch, repeating the same mistake Hillary Clinton made in 2016.Finally, given that the US has hardly cured itself of racism or misogyny, it should not be a shock if, in the coming days, we see that a Black woman could not get elected to the White House. It may be 2024, but perhaps the US is still not ready.So much for a Trump win. How will we explain victory for Harris, if it comes? The answer may boil down to one word: women. Outraged by the supreme court’s Dobbs ruling, overturning abortion rights in 2022, women confounded the pollsters in that year’s midterm elections: there was no Republican red wave, despite soaring inflation, because women came out in big numbers to prevent it. Success in 2024 would mean that, once again, and with an intensity missed by most surveys, women in the US had quietly resolved to do the exact same thing to the man who shaped the supreme court, Dobbs’s ultimate author: Trump.In that sense, and others, Trump’s fate would have been sealed before the 2024 campaign even began. If he loses, it will surely be because he’d become too toxic a figure to win: witness his place on the losing side of every election cycle after that first, narrow victory in 2016. What’s more, the toxicity has only got worse recently, his authoritarian, fascistic tendencies laid barer than ever, whether in his threats to deploy the US military against “the enemy from within”, meaning his liberal critics, or his reported desire to be surrounded by “the kind of generals that Hitler had”, obedient to his every whim and diktat. For too many Americans, enough might just have been enough.Trump has torn through so many old-school verities of politics that it’s become tempting to think none of them holds good any more. But on-the-ground organisation still matters. If they win, the Democrats will point to a machine that got their vote out in the critical states, precinct by precinct. Trump outsourced that task to Elon Musk, but there are some things even money cannot buy.A Trump defeat would further confirm another old rule: no politician can ever fully escape his record. This time, to take one example, he hoped to make inroads with Arab and Muslim Americans, distressed and furious at the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. But that would have required those same, crucial voters to forget what Trump had promised a decade ago: a “Muslim ban”, denying entry to the US to people from a long list of Muslim countries. Amnesia exists in politics, perhaps especially in the US. But there are limits.All these different elements are real, even if they can be combined into two very different narratives. Who will win the US election? No one knows. But even if we don’t yet know the result, we can already understand it.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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      ‘Leaning into the whiteness’: journalist Paola Ramos on why some Latinos have turned to the far right

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      When the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made racist and disparaging comments about Latinos and referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage”, at a Donald Trump rally in New York on Sunday, it was met with outrage from many Latino politicians, voters and celebrities. Still, those comments did not deter some Republican Latinos from affirming their support for Trump.“If you were already supporting Trump, I don’t think this is a comment that will make you reconsider that choice,” said the journalist Paola Ramos, the author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for America.However, Ramos said that she has talked to some Latino voters who are now realizing that Trump’s xenophobia could include them: “The question is for those that are independent, or those that were flirting with the idea of voting for Trump. The biggest difference is that the narrative, for the first time in a while, shifted from being targeted at immigrants to suddenly being targeted, not just directly at Latinos, but even US citizens. That has sort of awakened a lot of people for the first time to be like, ‘Oh, wait a second.’“We’ve been so used to pinpointing a narrative at the border, on immigrants, on migrants, on undocumented people, and then suddenly the conversation has shifted to people within us and inside us.”

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      In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump has gained inroads from Latino voters, a base that was once reliably Democratic. While the majority of Latinos favor Kamala Harris, the shift is pronounced among Latino men, with 44% saying that they support Trump, up from 37% in 2020, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat political shift toward far-right sentiments in Latino communities can be attributed to tribalism, traditionalism and trauma, Ramos writes in Defectors. Tribalism refers to internalised racism, while traditionalism is based on conservative moral values and the ongoing effects of colonialism, and trauma comes from grappling with political upheaval in Latin America. Additionally, fantasy heritage, a concept coined by the civil rights activist and historian Carey McWilliams in the late 1940s in which Latinos whitewash their Indigenous or Black roots in favor of their Spanish ancestry, draws some Latinos to white supremacist values.“One of the entry points for far right Latinos into the world of white supremacy and white nationalism is by leaning into the Spanish heritage, leaning into the whiteness,” Ramos said. For instance, she interviewed Mexican American border vigilantes who held anti-immigration beliefs because they distanced themselves from their immigrant roots.Ramos also spoke with African Dominican Trump supporters in the Bronx who highlight their Spanish ancestry over their African roots, although they are racialized as Black in the US. “But in their minds, because of fantasy heritage, they see themselves more aligned racially with Trump’s America than they do with Blackness, and so I think that that’s where Trump is able to tap into some of that racial grievance.”View image in fullscreenThe path toward democracy in Latin American countries has often involved an authoritarian strongman, Ramos writes in her book. In the late 1970s, for instance, 17 out of 20 Latin American nations were ruled by dictators. Ramos interviewed Eulalia Jimenez, the leader of the conservative parents rights group Moms for Liberty, and Anthony Aguero, a border vigilante in Texas, whose political trauma manifested into far-right sentiments.Trauma is also what drew some supporters, such as the Cuban American Gabriel Garcia, a Proud Boys member, to join the January 6 insurrection after Trump lost the election. Garcia’s parents, who were unaccompanied minors airlifted out of Cuba during a covert US program in the 1960s, instilled in him a fear of communism and conservative sentiments that would inform his political beliefs. “At a time when democracy seems to feel a little messy for some folks,” Ramos said, “the elements of authoritarianism [aren’t] as scary for some Latinos.”In order to win back Latino votes, Ramos said, progressives must understand the complicated and rich nature of Latino identity and their quest for belonging in the US – which is all the more important now, as the country is projected to become a majority minority nation in 2045.Younger Latinos over the past decade have grown emboldened to challenge the Democratic party. “Part of that requires a level of curiosity to understand why internalized racism works so well, and why colorism is so present, and why anti-Blackness and these anti-immigrant sentiments can really manifest themselves,” Ramos said. “And I think part of that is just having conversations around identity that I think in the party they haven’t had.”Since her book launched in September, Ramos has talked to Latino voters while touring cities from New York to Los Angeles, an experience she described as “group therapy”. Some readers shared the pain that they felt of having undocumented immigrants as well as Trump supporters in their family, or young Latinos seeking acceptance from their religious families. “They’ve been really emotional, really personal, and I think painful too.” She urged progressives to understand “the pain that a lot of people are going through with not feeling a big solidarity right now”.While it is easy to see Trump supporters as radical, Ramos said that a deeper understanding of Latin American history is crucial to regaining the trust of Latino voters who are disillusioned by politics. Toward the end of Defectors, Ramos illustrated a future in which Latinos embrace their complex history and identity in a quest for collective liberation. “In that future, we finally wake up freer,” Ramos concluded in the book. “Welcome to the year 2045.” More