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      Appeals court strikes significant blow against Voting Rights Act – as it happened

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      A federal appeals court has issued a decision striking down a core element of the Voting Rights Act, further undermining protections for voters of color in the US, saying only the federal government – not private citizens or civil rights groups – is allowed to sue under a crucial section of the landmark civil rights law.The 8th circuit today upheld a lower court’s ruling that says private individuals can’t bring lawsuits under the law, meaning only the federal government can sue under the Voting Rights Act’s section 2 protections for people of color. That also means that civil rights groups wouldn’t be allowed to sue either.There appears to be a strong prospect that even the right-leaning US supreme court will not uphold this when, as is likely, it is appealed to the highest level. But as currently ruled the decision would be a massive blow to voting rights and racial equality.The civil rights law was implemented to increase minority representation in US national leadership.And:That’s a wrap for today’s politics live blog.Here’s what happened today:
      A federal appeals court has issued a decision striking down a core element of the Voting Rights Act, further undermining protections for voters of color in the US. The court ruled that only the federal government – not private citizens or civil rights groups – is allowed to sue under a crucial section of the landmark civil rights law.
      Lawyers representing Donald Trump and federal prosecutors clashed on Monday in federal court about the scope of a gag order placed on the former president. A gag order last month prevents him from attacking witnesses, prosecutors, or others associated with the election interference case.
      Judges at the hearing on Trump’s gag order appeared skeptical about complaints regarding the gag order’s prophylactic nature, but were sympathetic to claims made by Trump’s defense team.
      At one point during the hearing, a judge raised the hypothetical point that it wouldn’t be fair if Trump “has to speak Miss Manners while everyone else is throwing targets at him”, Forbes reported.
      Judges on the three-person panel also criticized another hypothetical situation where Trump would not be allowed to call a potential witness a “liar” if they said things that were untrue.
      Thank you for reading; stay tuned for the Guardian’s politics live blog tomorrow.US representative Tony Cárdenas of California will not seek re-election in 2024 after almost three decades of service, the Los Angeles Times first reported.A staffer confirmed to the Times that Cárdenas would not be running for office, the first time in 28 years that he has not appeared on a ballot, the Hill reported.“I’m just at the age where I have enough energy and experience to maybe do something [different] and have another chapter of a career where I don’t have to go to Washington DC, 32 weeks out of the year,” Cárdenas told the Times.Cárdenas has focused much of his political career in the House on lowering drug prices, developing immigration policy, and combatting climate change, his office told the Times.Cárdenas’ seat will likely remain in the Democrat’s control, but it may be a crowded race.Here’s more information on the hearing around the scope of Trump’s gag order, from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell:
      On Monday, at the hearing, which lasted more than two hours, the three-judge panel repeatedly suggested they found untenable Trump’s position that there could be no ‘prophylactic’ provision to ensure Trump was restricted from prejudicing the case until after it had already taken place.
      Trump’s lawyer John Sauer argued that prosecutors had not met their evidentiary obligations – that Trump’s statements directly led to threats to witnesses, for instance – to get a gag order. The legal standard, Sauer said, should be proof of an ‘imminent threat’.
      But the panel interjected that there was a clear pattern with Trump stretching back to the post-2020 election period that when he named and assailed individuals, they invariably received death threats or other harassment from his supporters.
      The pattern has included the trial judge Chutkan, who received a death threat the very next day after Trump’s indictment when he posted ‘If you go after me, I’m coming after you’ on his Truth Social platform, even if Trump had not directly directed his ire at her.
      ‘Why does the district court have to wait and see, and wait for the threats to come, rather than taking reasonable action in advance?’ the circuit judge Brad Garcia pressed Sauer.
      The Trump lawyer responded that posts from three years ago did not meet the standard required for a gag order, as he argued the supreme court has held that a ‘heckler’s veto’ – gagging a defendant merely because of fears about how a third party might act – was not permissible rationale.
      Read more here:Here’s more info on polling that shows a majority of Democrats believe Israel’s actions are “too much”:
      According to polling from Reuters/Ispos, the majority of Americans believe that Israel should call a ceasefire. About 68% of respondents said they agreed that ‘Israel should call a ceasefire and try to negotiate’.
      A majority of Democratic voters also believe that Israel’s overwhelming response to the 7 October Hamas attack, in which the Islamist extremists killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel and took hostages back to Gaza, is ‘too much’, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
      And 56% of Democrats have said that Israel’s military operations in Gaza have been too much, which is 21 points higher than a similar survey last month.
      People of color in the US as well as those under the age of 45 also believe that Israel’s response has been disproportionate, pointing to generational and racial splits around support for Israel.
      Meanwhile, 52% of Republicans viewed Israel’s response as ‘about right’, an increase from last month’s poll when more Republicans then viewed Israel’s reaction as ‘too little’.
      Overall, the majority of respondents say they are more sympathetic to Israelis than Palestinians.
      Read more information here and about US demonstrations in support of Palestine, from the Guardian.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre addressed a question about poll numbers showing that a growing number of American people don’t support Joe Biden’s handling of the conflict in Gaza.“We’re not gonna govern by poll numbers. We’re gonna focus on delivering for the American people … on what the American people expect him to do,” Jean-Pierre said, emphasizing Biden’s gains for the economy.Jean-Pierre added that she would not be going “point by point” on each poll.The White House briefing is happening now, with spokesperson John Kirby discussing the situation in Gaza with reporters.Kirby has said that he does not have an update regarding a potential deal to get hostages from Hamas.Kirby did not elaborate if the potential deal would focus on women and children, but added, “we’re closer now than we’ve been before” when it comes to a deal to guarantee the hostages’ safety.More quotes are coming out of this morning’s hearing on the scope of Donald Trump’s gag order, demonstrating that the judges were not entirely unsympathetic to the arguments of the former president’s defense team.At one point, a judge raised the hypothetical point that it wouldn’t be fair if Trump “has to speak Miss Manners while everyone else is throwing targets at him”, Forbes reported.Judges also criticized another hypothetical situation where Trump would not be allowed to call a potential witness a “liar” if they said things that were untrue.When the supreme court gutted the requirement for states with a history of racial bias to pre-clear changes to their voting laws with the federal government – in its 2013 landmark ruling in Shelby county v Holder that drastically weakened the Voting Rights Act – it expected that the capacity for individuals to sue was the safety net needed.That’s one element drawing expert ire today. Here’s Steve Vladeck:Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center is clearly furious at the appeals court’s ruling today:Some background from the Guardian:The decision from the 8th circuit court of appeal, which is based in St Louis, Missouri, and was ruling on a lower court redistricting case out of Arkansas, is drawing furious reaction from defenders of a fundamental element of the Voting Rights Act.Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is chiefly designed to prohibit voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of a person’s race and is one of the law’s last remaining powerful provision after years of attacks from the right.(The US supreme court, in a 5-4 opinion authored by chief justice John Roberts in 2013, gutted a key provision of the law that required states with a history of voting discrimination to get voting changes pre-cleared by the federal government before they went into effect.)Most challenges under section 2 are brought by private individuals or civil rights or voting rights advocacy and campaign groups, not the US government.A federal appeals court has issued a decision striking down a core element of the Voting Rights Act, further undermining protections for voters of color in the US, saying only the federal government – not private citizens or civil rights groups – is allowed to sue under a crucial section of the landmark civil rights law.The 8th circuit today upheld a lower court’s ruling that says private individuals can’t bring lawsuits under the law, meaning only the federal government can sue under the Voting Rights Act’s section 2 protections for people of color. That also means that civil rights groups wouldn’t be allowed to sue either.There appears to be a strong prospect that even the right-leaning US supreme court will not uphold this when, as is likely, it is appealed to the highest level. But as currently ruled the decision would be a massive blow to voting rights and racial equality.The civil rights law was implemented to increase minority representation in US national leadership.And:Joe Biden joked about his birthday and age while conducting the annual pardon of Thanksgiving turkeys.Biden, who turned 81 today, joked that he was only turning 60 while pardoning the poultry, the Hill reported.“I just want you to know it’s difficult turning 60, difficult,” Biden said.Biden also added that it was the 76th anniversary of the pardoning tradition in the White House, joking that he was “too young” to make the tradition up.Judges at the hearing on Donald Trump’s gag order appeared skeptical about complaints regarding the gag order’s prophylactic nature, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports.The hearing on the scope of the former president’s gag order in the election interference case is now over.After over two hours of arguments, judges are not expected to make a decision on the order today.The three-judge panel seemed unconvinced about legal complaints coming from Trump’s defense team, but also believed that the original gag order was “insufficiently narrow”. More

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      ‘Deliberate and anti-democratic’: Wisconsin grapples with partisan gerrymandering

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      The Wisconsin supreme court will hear oral arguments on Tuesday in one of the most closely watched voting rights cases in the country this year. The challenge could ultimately lead to the court striking down districts in the state legislature, ending a cemented Republican majority, and upending politics in one of the US’s most politically competitive states.The case, Clarke v Wisconsin Elections Commission, is significant because Wisconsin’s state legislative maps, and especially its state assembly districts, are widely considered to be among the most gerrymandered in the US. In 2011, Republicans redrew the districts in such a way that cemented an impenetrable majority. In the state assembly, Republicans have consistently won at least 60% of the 99 seats, sometimes with less than 50% of the statewide vote. In 2022, Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, won re-election by three points, but carried just 38 of 99 assembly districts.The Evers result underscored a disturbing anti-democratic reality in Wisconsin: the results of state legislative elections are determined before a single vote is cast. Because of that dynamic, the case could restore representation to Wisconsin voters, making their districts more responsive to how they vote.A ruling striking down the maps is likely to result in a legislature in which Republicans have a much narrower majority and could reshape policymaking in Wisconsin. Issues that have broad public support in Wisconsin, like Medicaid expansion and marijuana legalization, have been non-starters in a legislature where the GOP majority is ironclad. A legislature in which Republicans are fearful of losing their majority may be more willing to at least consider broadly popular issues.“What’s at stake in this case is really democracy in the state of Wisconsin,” said Jeff Mandel, president of Law Forward, which is representing some of the challengers in the suit.Republicans have wielded their legislative power ruthlessly and effectively for more than a decade. When Democrats won the governor’s and attorney general’s offices in 2018, Republicans stripped them of some of their power. Republican lawmakers ignored Evers’ requests for special sessions on a myriad of issues. More recently, they launched an investigation into the 2020 election that devolved into chaos, have floated impeachment for a supreme court justice and attacked the non-partisan administrator of the state elections commission.Then, liberals flipped control of the state supreme court in April in the most expensive state supreme court race in US history. Justice Janet Protasiewicz, the newest member of the court’s liberal majority, said during the campaign the maps were “rigged”, a comment that has led Republicans to call for her impeachment. The case was filed the day after Protasiewicz formally took her seat on the court in August.Tuesday’s case is one of several in recent years that have focused on state courts and state constitutions as a vehicle to strike down gerrymandered maps. In 2019, the US supreme court said that federal courts could not do anything to stop partisan gerrymandering, but encouraged litigants to turn to state courts.The challengers argue that the existing maps violate the Wisconsin state constitution for two reasons. First, they say, 75 of Wisconsin’s 132 state legislative districts are non-contiguous – 54 in the state assembly and 21 in the state senate. They argue that’s a clear violation of a state constitutional requirement that requires assembly districts to “be bounded by county, precinct, town or ward lines, to consist of contiguous territory and be in as compact form as practicable”. The constitution also says state senate districts must be “convenient contiguous territory”.The contiguity requirement serves a democratic purpose, Mandel said. When someone has a problem in their community, it should be easy for them to band together with their neighbors and bring their grievances to a common representative.“It is not easy or obvious for the people to figure this out when you scatter representatives from a district into these tiny municipal islands,” he said. “The vast majority of the districts in the state have this problem. It is a feature of the way they chose to draw this map. It is not a mistake or a slight mapmaking error or an oversight. It’s deliberate and it’s anti-democratic.”But lawyers representing legislative Republicans take a much different view of the contiguity requirement in their brief to the court. Districts are non-contiguous, they argued, because municipalities in the state have annexed islands that do not always touch the main part of its boundaries. The contiguity requirement in the state constitution refers to keeping towns and municipalities together, they said.“Literal islands are ‘contiguous’ because they are joined together by municipal boundaries,” they write in one brief. “Invisible district lines do not stop legislators or voters from traveling between municipalities and nearby municipal islands,” they argue in another.The challengers also argue that the process by which the maps were implemented violate the state constitution’s separation of powers.Wisconsin Republicans initially passed a new map in 2021 that Evers vetoed. The state supreme court, then controlled by conservatives, accepted a request from a conservative group to take over the redistricting process.The court, which had a conservative majority at the time, announced that it would make as little change as possible to the existing maps, a major win for Republicans since the districts were already heavily gerrymandered in their favor. The court then initially picked a map that had been submitted by Evers, but the US supreme court struck it down. The Wisconsin supreme court then picked maps that Republicans submitted. It was the same plan Evers had vetoed months earlier.The new map preserved the Republican tilt in districts and shored up their advantage in the few places where they had been able to make inroads.That decision by the court essentially amounted to an end run around Evers’ veto and violated the separation of powers in the Wisconsin constitution, the challengers in the case argue.“The court took away or negated the governor’s veto power without ever saying he used it inappropriately or something like that,” Mandel said. “They just said, ‘Well, nonetheless, that becomes the law.’ That can’t be right.”Republicans argue there was nothing unconstitutional about the process by which the court chose the maps. The court didn’t choose the map because it was rejected by the legislature, but picked it as one of several that were submitted by parties.“The Governor and the Legislature – like the other parties – briefed the issues to the Court and supported their proposals with expert reports. And the Court – treating the Governor and Legislature as parties – selected among proposals as an appropriate least-changes judicial remedy,” they wrote.Wisconsin election officials have said that any new map would need to be in place no later than 15 March 2024 in order to be used in next year’s elections. Because of that tight deadline, a ruling is expected in the case relatively quickly.A decision striking down Wisconsin’s map would also be a major symbolic victory in efforts to rein in extreme partisan gerrymandering over the last decade.The district is the remaining crown jewel of a 2010 Republican effort called Project Redmap, which successfully flipped state legislatures across the country in favor of of the GOP, giving them the power to draw heavily distorted districts. Using a combination of litigation and ballot measures, Democrats and gerrymandering reformers have been able to strike down those maps in many places, but Wisconsin’s have remained untouched.“The designers of these maps knew precisely how long these lines would endure. But almost no one else did,” said David Daley, a senior fellow at FairVote who wrote a book about Redmap called Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count. “I don’t think anyone understood that the consequences of the 2010 election in Wisconsin would be to leave Republicans in charge for another 14 years.”“It’s been difficult to call the state a functioning democracy since early in Barack Obama’s first term,” he added. “It’s perhaps the most cautionary tale of the dangers of runaway partisan gerrymandering in an age where polarization and technology can allow operatives to draw maps that lock themselves in power not just for one entire electoral cycle, but well into a second decade.” More

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      Musk ‘believes in America’: DeSantis defends X owner after antisemitic post

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      Ron DeSantis defended Elon Musk as “a guy that believes in America” on Sunday as the Florida governor refused to condemn X’s billionaire owner for an antisemitic post that caused numerous key advertisers to desert the social media platform.In an interview Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, the Republican Florida governor claimed he had not seen the message on the platform that was formerly known as Twitter. The message – in which Musk said an X user who accused Jewish people of hating white people was speaking “the actual truth” – was denounced by the White House on Friday as “abhorrent”.Instead, DeSantis dedicated his remarks on CNN to exalting Musk as a banner carrier for free speech. And he dismissed other prominent right wingers who have expressed antisemitic positions as “fringe voices”.“Elon has had a target on his back ever since he purchased Twitter, because I think he’s taking it into a direction that a lot of people who are used to controlling the narrative don’t like,” said DeSantis, whose campaign for the Republican 2024 nomination continues to crater. “I was a big supporter of him purchasing Twitter.”When State of the Union host Jake Tapper brought Musk’s widely condemned “actual truth” message to the screen, DeSantis said he had “no idea what the context is” and said he would not “pass judgment on the fly”, although he said he stood against antisemitism “across the board”.“I know Elon Musk,” DeSantis said. “I’ve never seen him do anything. I think he’s a guy that believes in America, I’ve never seen him indulge in any of that. So it’s surprising if that’s true.”Critics have previously accused the governor of being slow to condemn rallies by neo-Nazis in his state, some carrying flags with the words: “This is DeSantis country.” He has attempted to portray the criticism as a “smear campaign” by political opponents while a campaign aide posted a “reprehensible” tweet suggesting DeSantis’s Nazi supporters were actually Democratic party staffers.After Sunday’s CNN interview, senior Democrats were skeptical of DeSantis’s insistence he hadn’t seen Musk’s message. The message drew headlines globally and prompted disgusted major companies – including Apple, Disney, IBM and Warner Brothers – to suspend advertising on X.“The guy’s running for president, and Elon Musk [posted] that on Wednesday. It’s Sunday. So this is four days later, and he has not had the chance to read what Musk wrote? That is very hard for me to believe,” Democratic US House member Jamie Raskin of Maryland told Tapper.“You showed it to him, and he still refused to condemn it. If you’re serious about condemning and confronting antisemitism, and racism, and these bigotries, which are the gateway to destruction of liberal democracy, you’ve got to be explicit and open and full throated about it when you’ve got [the opportunity] to denounce antisemitism and racism across the board.”DeSantis has vocally supported Israel since its war with Hamas began in October. On Sunday, he urged greater US support for the Israeli’s military’s onslaught against Hamas in Gaza.“We need to let Israel win this war,” DeSantis said. “We should support them publicly and privately to actually finish the job, because if you just do some glancing blows, Hamas is going to reconstitute itself and we’re going to end up in the same cycle going forward.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Israel’s in a situation where they suffered the biggest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. You have an organization, Hamas, that wants to wipe Israel totally off the map. This is not just some minor dispute. This is an existential threat to the survival of the world’s only Jewish state [and] they have to do whatever they can to protect their people.”DeSantis pointed to his ban of a pro-Palestinian student group from Florida’s university campuses, a policy challenged in court this week on free speech grounds, as an example of standing up to terrorists.“We have Jewish students fleeing for their lives because you have angry mobs,” he said. “I have constituents in Florida whose kids don’t even want to go to campus … because of such a hostile environment.”Tapper, in a thinly disguised dig at DeSantis’s well publicized previous attacks on minority students on grounds of race and gender, replied: “Absolutely Jewish students, just like Muslim students, Black students, gay students, or all students, should feel safe on campuses.” More

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      Republicans secure all statewide offices in Louisiana after sweeping runoff races

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      Upon January’s arrival, Republicans will control every elected statewide office in once-bipartisan Louisiana after the GOP swept runoff races Saturday for attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer.The Republican success, in a state that has had a centrist Democrat in the governor’s office for the past eight years, means that political conservatives have secured all of Louisiana’s statewide offices for the first time since 2015. Republicans secured the governor’s mansion in October and also hold a two-third supermajority in the state house as well as the senate.Liz Murrill was elected as attorney general, Nancy Landry as secretary of state and John Fleming as treasurer. Murrill and Landry are the first women in Louisiana to be elected attorney general and secretary of state.Saturday’s election completes the shaping of Louisiana’s next executive branch. Most incumbents didn’t seek re-election and opened the door for new leadership in some of the most powerful positions.Louisiana’s gubernatorial election was decided on 14 October when Jeff Landry, a Republican backed by former president Donald Trump, won a multi-primary party outright and avoided a runoff.The outgoing governor, John Bel Edwards, the only Democratic governor in the US’s Deep South, was unable to run for re-election due to term limits.Also in October, lieutenant governor Billy Nungesser and commissioner of agriculture Mike Strain were Republican incumbents who won re-election. And Republican Tim Temple was newly elected as insurance commissioner.Despite a low voter turnout, Saturday’s election caught Trump’s eye. The former president and favorite to clinch the Republicans’ 2024 White House nomination endorsed the GOP’s candidates in each of the three statewide races, which featured little meaningful resistance from Louisiana’s Democratic party.The three Republicans “are outstanding in every way and have my complete and total endorsement”, Trump said in a statement issued by the Louisiana Republican party.Murrill will replace her boss Jeff Landry when he becomes governor in January. Murrill’s opponent in the attorney general race was Lindsey Cheek, a New Orleans-based Democratic trial attorney.The attorney general represents the state in a variety of legal disputes. However, Landry often made statewide and national headlines in the role, including his support for legislation banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths and a near-total abortion ban with no exceptions for cases of rape and incest.Murrill has joined Landry in championing conservative causes, including a lawsuit against the Joe Biden White House for the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors.On the campaign trail, Murrill pledged to fight overreach by the federal government, defending Louisiana’s abortion ban and pushing a tough-on-crime rhetoric that is antithetical to progressive criminal justice reforms.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFleming’s victory, meanwhile, vaulted a close Trump ally into the state treasurer’s office. Fleming is a conservative former congressman who co-founded the US House Freedom Caucus.After his time in Congress, Fleming served as a member of the Trump administration. He faced Dustin Granger, a Democratic financial adviser based in Lake Charles, in Saturday’s runoff.Nancy Landry, who is not related to Jeff Landry, beat Gwen Collins-Greenup – a Democrat from Louisiana’s capital of Baton Rouge – in the race for secretary of state. Nancy Landry is a former state House member from Lafayette and has worked in the secretary of state’s office for four years.She will handle replacing Louisiana’s outdated voting machines, which don’t produce the paper ballots critical to ensuring accurate election results.The lengthy and ongoing replacement process was thrust into the national spotlight after allegations of bid-rigging and when conspiracy theorists who support Trump’s lies that fraudsters robbed him of re-election in 2020 inserted themselves into the public dialogue.Though Landry is Louisiana’s first woman elected to secretary of state, the first woman to hold the position was Alice Lee Grosjean. Grosjean was appointed in 1930 by then-governor Huey P Long after the secretary of state at the time, James Bailey, died suddenly of pneumonia.
      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Can a socialist ex-marine fill Joe Manchin’s seat in West Virginia?

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      To launch his campaign for US Senate, Zach Shrewsbury chose the site of one of America’s most famous hangings.Charles Town, West Virginia, was where state authorities executed the abolitionist John Brown after he led an attack on a federal armory a few miles down the road in Harpers Ferry, a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the civil war. One hundred and sixty four years later, Shrewsbury – who decided against attempting to get a permit for the event at the site of the insurrection, which is now a national park – stood on the courthouse grounds where Brown’s hanging took place to announce that he would be the only “real Democrat” running to represent West Virginia in the Senate next year.“We need leaders that are cut from the working-class cloth. We need representation that will go toe to toe with corporate parasites and their bought politicians. We need a leader who will not waver in the face of these powers that keep the boot on our neck,” Shrewsbury said to applause from the small group of supporters gathered behind him.“So, as John Brown said, ‘These men are all talk. What we need is action.’ I’m taking action right now to stand up to these bought bureaucrats.”The remarks were a swipe at Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator who for the past 13 years had managed to represent what has become one of the most Republican states in the nation. In recent years he has used his power as a swing vote in Congress to stop several of Joe Biden’s legislative priorities – attracting the ire of progressives and prompting Shrewsbury to mount a primary challenge.A few weeks after Shrewsbury began campaigning, he was showing a friend around an abandoned mining town when his phone rang with news: Manchin had decided not to seek re-election, leaving Shrewsbury as the only Democrat in the race.By all indications, Shrewsbury, a 32-year-old Marine Corps veteran and community organizer, faces a difficult, if not impossible, road to victory. West Virginia gave Donald Trump his second-biggest margin of support of any state in the nation three years ago, and Manchin is the last Democrat holding a statewide office. Political analysts do not expect voters to elect the Democratic candidate – whoever that turns out to be – and predict Manchin will be replaced by either Governor Jim Justice or Congressman Alex Mooney, the two leading Republicans in the Senate race.Shrewsbury’s message to them is: not so fast.“People were really sold on the fact that Joe Manchin could be the only Democrat that could win in West Virginia, and I very much disagree,” Shrewsbury told the Guardian a week after the senator made his announcement.Also a former governor, Manchin is considered the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, and when the party took the majority by a single vote in the chamber in 2021, Manchin stopped the Biden administration from passing policies that would have made permanent a program to reduce child poverty, and more forcefully fight climate change.Sitting in a conference room at the Fayette county Democratic party’s headquarters in Oak Hill, where visitors pass a lobby displaying an American flag, a pride flag, and a stack of Narcan, the opioid-overdose reversal medication, Shrewsbury outlined his plans to run a campaign distinctly to the left of Manchin’s policies – and one he believes can win.“People want someone who’s genuine. They don’t want a politician. They want someone who actually looks like them. I mean, hell, you can’t get much more West Virginia than this,” said Shrewsbury, fond of wearing flannel shirts and hunting caps.Among his priorities are creating universal healthcare and childcare programs, and reducing the role of incarceration in fighting the opioid epidemic ravaging West Virginia.“Everyone here just is thankful for the scraps or crumbs that we get from whoever we elect. And that’s who we keep electing – whoever can keep the little crumbs coming along. I’m trying to say there is a better way,” Shrewsbury said.He also doesn’t shy away from identifying as a socialist, arguing the term may be less politically damaging than it appears – West Virginia Democrats voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary, and the independent senator, he argues, is popular even with the state’s Republicans.“If caring about working-class people, caring about people having bodily autonomy, water rights, workers’ rights, makes you a socialist, then call me whatever you want. Doesn’t bother me,” Shrewsbury said.Raised on a farm by a Republican family in rural Monroe county, Shrewsbury dropped out of college after a semester and joined the marines. In the years that followed, he guarded the perimeter at the US base in Guantánamo Bay, and was deployed to Japan, Malaysia and South Korea before eventually moving to Seattle and then returning to West Virginia, where he realized how bereft his home state was of the prosperity he saw elsewhere in the country and overseas.“Why can’t my home be as economically profitable as the rest?” Shrewsbury recalls thinking. “It woke me up in the Marine Corps a little bit, and once I got back home, I really just kind of put the nail in the coffin there for what I was gonna be for work. I want to help people.”He turned to community organizing, seeing it as a way to help a state with the fourth-highest poverty rate in the nation, which is struggling to transition from the declining coal and logging industries that have historically undergirded its economy.“I know Zach’s a long shot. It’s like David against three Goliaths,” said Pam Garrison, a fellow community organizer. “Zach is able to be hardline when he needs to be. I’ve seen him being forceful and steadfast in his principles and what things are. And then I’ve seen the compassionate and empathy side of Zach too, And that’s what makes a good politician.”Since 2020, Shrewsbury has helped towns dig out from flooding, door-knocked in the narrow Appalachian valleys – known as hollers – to find out what residents were looking for from the state legislature, and talked to mayors and city councils about the opportunities presented by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which incentivizes consumer usage of renewable energy, including home solar panels.Though Manchin played a key role in authoring the IRA, he also nixed the expanded child tax credit, which has been credited with cutting the child poverty rate by half in 2021, the sole year it was in effect. Shrewsbury was outraged by reports that later emerged of the senator privately expressing worries that people would use the program’s money to buy drugs, and jumped into the race.Despite the state’s conservative leanings, Sam Workman, the director of the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs at West Virginia University, believed Manchin may have had a path to victory had he decided to run. But he said the same cannot be said for Shrewsbury or any other Democrat.“It’s kind of a fall-on-your-sword moment,” Workman said. “Politics is like sports: you should never say never, but I do not see the Democrats winning the Senate seat, no matter who runs.”Shrewsbury may be alone in the Democratic primary at the moment, but he expects other candidates to enter. Since launching his campaign, he has not heard from the state Democratic party, nor the national party’s senate campaign arm.“I’m not exactly what the party wants, because I speak my mind. You know, I’m not going to toe the party line,” he said. “I wish the party would get back in more touch with the workers. But like I said, I have the message that many people aren’t saying.” More

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      He’s correctly predicting the US’s most critical elections. He’s still in college

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      In the days after Democrats won control of Virginia’s state legislature, Charles “Chaz” Nuttycombe was focused on the results in house of delegates districts 41 and 82, both of which you’ve probably never heard of.Neither of the competitive races would determine which party controlled the Virginia legislature, but it was one of a handful where votes were still being counted and the results too close to call. In the lead-up to election day, Nuttycombe, a 24-year-old senior at Virginia Tech, had predicted that the Republican candidates would win both. But his final forecast in Virginia gave Democrats a 61% chance of winning control of the house of delegates and a 71% chance of holding control in the state senate.When he spoke with the Guardian the day after the election, he had already correctly predicted 100% of the results in every other Virginia state legislative race – 98 other house of delegates seats and 40 in the state senate. Eventually, both races were called for Nuttycombe, giving him a perfect forecast.It was an astonishing feat that underscored the niche Nuttycombe has carved out predicting races at the state legislative level.Nuttycombe runs the forecasting site cnalysis.com, and these little-known legislative races are his expertise. While the science of forecasting presidential, gubernatorial, congressional and senatorial races has exploded in recent years, Nuttycombe is one of the only forecasters focused on the 7,383 state legislative districts across the country.His focus underscores the rising awareness of the importance of state legislatures in US politics. Long overlooked by parties and reporters, there has been a much greater understanding of the consequential power state legislatures have to set policies on issues like abortion, gun rights, education and voting. Just a handful of races in a single chamber can determine which party has control.“Your state legislature is going to affect your day-to-day life a lot more than Congress is,” Nuttycombe said. “State legislative elections are a million times more important than congressional elections, but I’m obviously biased on that front.”The effort can be much more difficult than forecasting a congressional race. Many of the candidates who run for the seats have no national profile. Polling, if it exists at all, is sparse. The site’s GIS team also breaks down data to figure out how state legislative districts voted in prior elections. Tracking down data from states can be a nightmare, since every state formats their information differently and some charge for it (the site also relies on precinct-level election data collected by the non-profit Voting and Election Science Team at the University of Florida).“It’s a monster endeavor to cover legislative races in multiple states, so most analysts don’t even attempt it,” said Dave Wasserman, a well-respected forecaster and election analyst at the Cook Political Report. “Big credit to Chaz Nuttycombe for having his finger on the pulse of every race in Virginia on Tuesday. He’s a rising star in our field.”Nuttycombe’s interest in state legislatures started in 2017, when he was starting his senior year in high school. He saw both professionals and amateurs posting their predictions on Twitter. He began offering his own, just for fun, and began doing some volunteer work with Decision Desk HQ, an online election forecasting website.He immediately caught the attention of J Miles Coleman, who was working for the site and is now a forecaster for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia. Going into the election that year, Republicans held a 66-34 advantage in the house of delegates, and the conventional wisdom was that Democrats could pick up 10 or so seats on a good night. Nuttycombe was much more bullish on their prospects and thought they had a chance to get a majority, and he was right. Republicans came away from the election with a 51-49 majority in the legislature, only winning the 51st seat after a tied race was determined by picking the winner from a hat.“He must have been like 17 or 18. I tell you, he was into every race, he knew all the candidates. And just had this kind of hustle to him that was hard to find,” Coleman said. “Basically Chaz will spend his weekend going through campaign finance reports for legislative races. I don’t know anyone else who does that to that extent.”Nuttycombe decided to turn his predictions into a full-blown website in 2019. He reached out to other people who were analyzing nitty-gritty election data to forecast results in an online community called #electiontwitter.“There are some of us sickos who stay up all night talking about poll numbers or precincts. I think that’s probably been good for him too,” Coleman said.In 2021, at a chance hangout watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, he met Aidan Howard, then a rising junior studying geographic systems at Virginia Tech. Afterwards, Nuttycombe asked him if he would be interested in joining the site and working on political maps though Howard had no political experience. He sent Nuttycombe samples of his work – fire prevention and flood maps – and joined the site.Some of the people on the cnalysis team – there are nine in total – have never met in person. They coordinate over Twitter, Slack and Discord. Nuttycombe relies on donations, Substack subscriptions, a small amount of ad revenue and some work for clients to pay a few a modest hourly wage (he declined to share the hourly rate, but said it was above the minimum wage anywhere in the country).Another member of the cnalysis team – someone who goes by the X handle @cinyc9 – helped Nuttycombe understand how to break down electoral data to the most granular level possible, and then reallocate it to current precinct boundaries.“Work-wise it’s cool that I assisted in it. But to me its a bigger win on a personal level because Charles is a good friend and knowing that I got to help him do something that’s been his dream for years … it means a lot to me knowing that I helped my friend achieve something he really wanted to achieve,” said Howard, who is now the site’s GIS technician.One of the people Nuttycombe got in touch with was Jack Kersting, then a college student at the University of Alabama, who had been making his own maps focused on congressional, presidential and Senate maps.Kersting, 22, is now the site’s chief oddsmaker, and builds the model that forecasts the chances of legislative control in each chamber. This year he built a live model for the forecast that ingested results from Virginia’s department of elections and provided real-time updates on election odds. He spent 50 to 60 hours on it over the last month.“This was the first thing I’ve ever done like this. It was very satisfying in the end,” said Kersting, who is now getting a masters in finance.Nuttycombe bases his predictions on a combination of previous election results in a district, campaign finance reports and internal campaign and party data he gets “through the grapevine”. He uses that information to assign each race a rating – toss-up, tilt, lean, likely, very likely and solid. The team at cnalysis feeds that information into a model that does 35,000 simulated election outcomes to predict a chamber’s outcome.There have been learning moments since he began forecasting. In 2018, he overestimated Democrats in rural areas and underestimated them in the suburbs, he wrote in a blogpost on Tuesday titled “The 2023 Virginia election was easy to predict.” In 2020, he said he paid too much attention to campaign finance data and polling.In 2022, Nuttycombe and cnalysis made forecasts in 83 of the 88 chambers. He made predictions in 3,380 races and was wrong in just 190 of them, a nearly 95% accuracy rate, according to his tally. His error rate, he said, was in part because he didn’t give his team enough time to analyze election data for new state legislative districts. He keeps a spreadsheet tracking the biggest missed prediction with an explanation of why the forecast was off.Nuttycombe said he usually works on the site in the evenings, after classes, the gym and dinner, and balances it with a full course load (he’s taking 18 credits both this semester and next as he finishes his degree in political science).The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which focuses on state legislative races, is aware of Nuttycombe and was following his work this year. The group relies on its own in-house data for forecasts, but they were watching Nuttycombe’s as well and could see it was consistent with internal projections.“It’s hard to not take him seriously when what we were tracking internally was very similar to what he was tracking with his analysis,” said Abhi Rahman, a DLCC spokesman. “He’s definitely a very talented forecaster.”Nuttycombe hasn’t been shy about his success, but acknowledges that he’s learned a lot since he began forecasting.“There will be races in even-numbered years where I’m dead wrong. Maybe upwards of 10 races where I’m dead wrong. It’s just a resource thing. I maybe missed a scandal or some sort of development. Or a candidate does really, really well,” Nuttycombe said.He’s also learned how to factor things into his forecast that can be difficult to quantify. In Virginia, for example, a Democrat in a competitive race this year had a scandal involving allegations she and her husband livestreamed sex acts. After the Washington Post broke the story on 11 September, Nuttycombe moved the state from a “toss up” to “tilt R”. In October, he moved the seat even more safely in the Republican column. The Republican candidate wound up winning by two points.Nuttycombe plans to work on the site full-time after he graduates in the spring and is already planning out ways to grow his effort. While most of the country will be focused on the high-stakes presidential race next year, there will be thousands of state legislative races to analyze and predict.“I’ll do this until they put dirt over me,” he said. More

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      Network of Lies review: Brian Stelter on Fox News, Trump and Dominion

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      This week, Rupert Murdoch formally stepped down as the chairman of News Corp. At the annual shareholder’s meeting, the 92-year-old media mogul inveighed against the “suppression of debate by an intolerant elite who regard differing opinions as anathema”. He also passed the baton to Lachlan Murdoch, his 52-year-old son, “a believer in the social purpose of journalism”.Murdoch also told those assembled that “humanity has a high destiny”. Unmentioned: how Fox News’s coverage of the 2020 election led to its shelling out of hundreds of millions to settle a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, or how other suits continue.Five days after the election, insisting Donald Trump could not have lost to Joe Biden – as he clearly did – Maria Bartiromo defied management to become “the first Fox host to utter the name ‘Dominion’”, writes Brian Stelter, a veteran Fox-watcher and former CNN host. “All gassed up on rage and righteousness, [Bartiromo] heaped shame onto the network and spurred a $787.5m settlement payment.”Bartiromo popularized the Trump aide Sidney Powell and her special brand of insanity. Their enthusiasm became fatally contagious. January 6 and the insurrection followed. Two and a half years later, Bartiromo is still on the air. Powell is a professional defendant. Last month, she pleaded guilty in Fulton county, Georgia, to six counts of misdemeanor election interference and agreed to six years of probation. She still faces potential civil liability and legal sanction.“What Bartiromo began on a Sunday morning in November … destroyed America’s sense of a shared reality about the 2020 election,” Stelter laments. “The consequences will be felt for years to come.”In the political sphere, Trump shrugs off 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats to dominate the Republican primary, focusing on retribution and weaponizing the justice department and FBI should he return to power.With less than a year before the 2024 election, Stelter once again focuses on the Murdochs’ flagship operation. Like his previous book from 2020, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, Network of Lies offers a readable and engrossing deep dive into the rightwing juggernaut paid for by the Murdochs and built by the late, disgraced Roger Ailes.Now a podcast host and consulting producer to The Morning Show, an Apple TV drama, Stelter also has journalistic chops earned at the New York Times. He wades through court filings and paperwork from the Dominion litigation, talks to sources close to Fox and the Murdochs, and offers insight into the firing of Tucker Carlson, the dominant, far-right prime-time host who was suddenly ditched in April. Stelter’s book is subtitled The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy. He overstates, but not by much.Unlike Bartiromo, Carlson didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. He was sly and calculated, not crazy.“Carlson privately thought Powell’s ‘software shit’ was ‘absurd’,” Stelter writes about the idea that voting machines were outlandishly rigged. “He worriedly speculated that ‘half our viewers have seen the Maria clip’, and he wanted to push back on it.” But Carlson didn’t push back hard enough. He went with the flow.He now peddles his wares on what used to be Twitter, broadcasts from a basement, and hangs out with Trump at UFC. For a guy once known for wearing bow ties, it’s a transformation. Then again, Carlson also prided himself on his knowledge of how white guys ought to fight, an admission in a text message, revealed by the Dominion suit, that earned the ire of the Fox board and the Murdochs.In Stelter’s telling, Fox “A-listers” received a heads-up on what discovery in the Dominion case would reveal.“‘They’re going to call us hypocrites,’ an exec warned.” Plaintiffs would juxtapose Fox’s public message against its internal doubts about voter fraud claims. “It was likened to ‘a seven-layer cake of shit’,” Stelter writes.The miscalculation by Fox’s legal team is now legend. It led Murdoch to believe Dominion would cost him $50m. But even Murdoch came close to concluding it was “unarguable that high-profile Fox voices” fed the “big lie”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStelter captures the Murdochs’ struggle to make money, keep their audience happy and avoid liability. It is a near-impossible task. The beast must be fed. There is always someone or something out there waiting to cater to Trump’s base if Fox won’t. After the 2020 election, Trump forced Fox to compete with One America News and Newsmax for his attention and his followers’ devotion.The Murdochs’ pivot toward Ron DeSantis as their Republican candidate of choice won’t be forgotten soon, at least not by voters during the GOP primary. Despite being assiduously courted by Fox to appear at the first debate, which it sponsored, Trump smirkingly and wisely declined to show. Fox still covers Trump’s events – until he plugs Carlson, the defenestrated star.Judging by the polls, none of this has hurt Trump’s hopes. He laps the pack while DeSantis stagnates, Nikki Haley threatening to take second place. At the same time, some polling shows Trump ahead of Joe Biden or competitive in battleground states and leading in the electoral college. For now, Fox needs him more than he needs Fox.In that spirit of “social purpose” reporting lauded by his dad, Lachlan Murdoch will be left to navigate a defamation action brought by Smartmatic, another voting machine company, and, among other cases, a suit filed by Ray Epps, an ex-marine who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges for his role in the January 6 insurrection but became the focus of conspiracy theorists. Sating the appetites of the 45th president and his rightwing base never comes cheap.In the Smartmatic litigation, Fox tried to subpoena George Soros, the bete noire of the right. It lost, but conspiracy theories die hard. US democracy remains fragile, the national divide seemingly unbridgeable. Expect little to change at Fox. The show must go on.
      Network of Lies is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      Mike Johnson to publicly release 44,000 hours of sensitive January 6 footage

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      House speaker Mike Johnson said Friday he plans to publicly release thousands of hours of footage from the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, making good on a promise he made to far-right members of his party when he was campaigning for his current job.“This decision will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials,” Johnson said in a statement.The newly elected speaker said the first tranche of security footage, around 90 hours, will be released on a public committee website Friday, with the rest of the 44,000 hours expected to be posted over the next several months. In the meantime, a public viewing room will be set up in the Capitol.For the last several months, the GOP-led House Administration Committee has made the video available by appointment only to members of the media, criminal defendants and a limited number of other people. The video shows some of the fighting up close and gives a bird’s-eye view of the Capitol complex – one that visitors rarely see – as hundreds of president Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the building, violently attacking police officers and breaking in through windows and doors.By expanding this access to the general public, Johnson is fulfilling one of the pledges he made last month to the most conservative members of his party, including the representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who orchestrated the ouster of the former speaker, Kevin McCarthy. Both Gaetz and Trump – who is currently running for re-election as he faces federal charges for his role in the January 6 attack – applauded Johnson’s decision.In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump congratulated the speaker “for having the courage and fortitude” to release the footage.The move by Johnson will grant the general public a stunning level of access to sensitive and explicit January 6 security footage, which many critics have warned could endanger the safety of staff and Congressmembers in the Capitol complex if it gets into the wrong hands. The hours of footage detail not only the shocking assault rioters made on US Capitol police as they breached the building but also how the rioters accessed the building and the routes lawmakers used to flee to safety.A request for comment from Capitol police was declined.Johnson said Friday that the committee is processing the footage to blur the faces of individuals “to avoid any persons from being targeted for retaliation of any kind”. He added that an estimated 5% of the footage will not be publicly released as it “may involve sensitive security information related to the building architecture”.Gripping images and video from the Capitol attack by Trump supporters have been widely circulated by documentarians, news organizations and even the rioters themselves. But until this year, officials held back much of the surveillance video from hundreds of security cameras stationed in and around the Capitol.In February, McCarthy gave then Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to the footage, a move that Democrats swiftly condemned as a “grave” breach of security with potentially far-reaching consequences.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe conservative commentator aired a first installment to millions of viewers on his prime-time show in the spring, working to bend perceptions of the violent, grueling siege that played out for the world to see into a narrative favorable to Trump.It is all part of a larger effort by Republicans to redefine the narrative around the deadly insurrection after the findings of the House January 6 committee last year. The select committee of seven Democrats and two Republicans spent months painstakingly documenting, with testimony and video evidence, how Trump rallied his supporters to head to the Capitol and “fight like hell” as Congress was certifying his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.The committee’s final report released last December concluded that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol.The panel passed their investigation to the justice department, recommending that federal prosecutors investigate the former president on four crimes, including aiding an insurrection. In August, Trump was indicted on four felony counts for his role in the attack as the justice department accused him of assaulting the “bedrock function” of democracy. More