Republicans

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Liz Cheney urges conservatives to back Kamala Harris over abortion

      by

      Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, condemned Republican-imposed bans on the procedure and urged conservatives on Monday to support Kamala Harris for president.Cheney was speaking at the first of three joint events with Harris in the suburbs of three swing states aimed at prising moderate Republican voters away from party nominee Donald Trump. She has become the Democrat’s most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumoured to be under consideration for a seat in a potential Harris cabinet.At the first event in Malvern, a Philadelphia suburb, against a blue backdrop that said “a new way forward” and red one that said “country over party”, Cheney suggested that Republican-led states have overreached in restricting abortion since the supreme court’s 2022 Dobbs decision ended it as a constitutional right.“I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life, but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need,” said Cheney, a former Wyoming congresswoman and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney.“I think this is not an issue that we’re seeing break down across party lines, but I think we’re seeing people come together to say: what has happened to women, when women are facing situations where they can’t get the care they need, where in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing, is suing, to get access to women’s medical records … that’s not sustainable for us as a country and it has to change.”Harris nodded repeatedly and applauded in response. The audience also clapped warmly.It was a striking attempt to build a permission structure for conservatives to back Harris, who has made reproductive freedom a centrepiece of her campaign and vowed to restore the protections of Roe v Wade if authorised by Congress. Cheney, by contrast, has an A rating from Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a group that grades members of Congress based on their anti-abortion credentials.Monday’s three events in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were being held in counties won by Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, had sought to neutralise abortion as an election issue by supporting states’ autonomy and rejecting calls for a national ban.Cheney has vocally opposed Trump since the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and was vice-chair of a congressional committee investigating the attack. Her recent endorsement of Harris fuelled speculation that she could play a part in a future Harris administration.

      Don’t miss important US election coverage. Get our free app and sign up for election alerts
      Earlier this month, appearing on the popular daytime talkshow The View, Harris said she would differ from Joe Biden by including a Republican in her cabinet. She was asked by radio host Howard Stern if that might be Cheney but avoided a direct answer. Appointing Cheney would carry considerable political risks given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war.Trump has frequently tried to paint Harris, who is from deep blue California, as a radical liberal but she struck a moderate tone during her appearance with Cheney, who lost her House seat after she co-chaired a congressional committee that investigated the January 6 attack.She promised to “invite good ideas from wherever they come” and “cut red tape,” and she said “there should be a healthy two party system” in the country. “We need to be able to have these good intense debates about issues that are grounded in fact,” she said.“Imagine!” Cheney responded.“Let’s start there!” Harris said as the audience clapped. “Can you believe that’s an applause line?”View image in fullscreenVoters in Chester county, which includes Malvern, narrowly voted for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 but the county was won by Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points in 2016 and Biden by 17 points in 2020.The discussion was chaired by Sarah Longwell, who runs the group Republican Voters Against Trump, and lasted 40 minutes including two questions from the audience.Harris said Trump “has been using the power of the presidency to demean and to divide us” and “people are exhausted with that”. The vice-president added: “People around the world are watching. And sometimes I do fret a bit about whether we as Americans truly understand how important we are to the world.”Cheney praised Harris, saying: “I’m a conservative. I know that the most conservative of all conservative principles is being faithful to the constitution. You have to choose in this race between someone who has been faithful to the constitution, who will be faithful, and Donald Trump.”Cheney said she was concerned about allowing a “totally erratic, completely unstable” Trump to run foreign policy. “Our adversaries know that they can play Donald Trump,” she said. “And we cannot afford to take that risk.”But some observers questioned the wisdom of campaigning with Cheney in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war. Many such voters are now wavering or abstaining because of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the crisis in Gaza.Trump weighed in on Monday, writing on his Truth Social platform: “Arab Voters are very upset that Comrade Kamala Harris, the Worst Vice President in the History of the United States and a Low IQ individual, is campaigning with ‘dumb as a rock’ War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man that pushed Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to War with every Muslim Country known to mankind.”More than a hundred former Republican officeholders and officials joined Harris last week in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, not far from where general George Washington led hundreds of troops across the Delaware River to a major victory in the revolutionary war. At a rally there, Cheney told Republican voters that the patriotic choice was to vote for Democrats. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Republican top Georgia elections officer says voting integrity lies hurt his party

      by

      Georgia’s top elections official says he believes Republicans’ claims of doubting the integrity of the vote in November’s presidential election “will really hurt” their party’s chances at the poll.In an interview on Sunday with NewsNation, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, defended the election process he oversees amid the casting of a record number of early votes in recent days. His comments came after the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Raffensperger’s fellow Republican, posted claims on X that a voting machine had misprinted a voter’s selections to the detriment of her party.Raffensperger, who took office in 2019, said that “spreading stories like that” will “really hurt our turnout on our side”.“I’m a conservative Republican, so I don’t know why they do that, it’s self-defeating,” Raffensperger added. “You know, you can trust the results.”Georgia, a battleground state, has been a central focus for Republicans in their unfounded claims of voter fraud. During the 2020 election, after Joe Biden won Georgia by a close margin and took the presidency from Donald Trump, Raffensperger announced a ballot recount. That recount confirmed that Biden had won the election.Ever since, legal and political showdowns have placed the state as a central focus for Trump’s attempt to return to the White House in a contest against the vice-president, Kamala Harris.Recent court rulings in Georgia have pushed back on Republican-led attempts to change how the state handles its elections.The Georgia state election board, a relatively obscure five-person panel primarily made up of Trump-aligned Republicans, passed a number of rules that would significantly change how the state handles its political races. The most controversial proposal sought to obligate poll workers to hand-count paper ballots on election night.Nonetheless, Georgia judges ruled against implementing those changes after Raffensperger warned they could lead to disrupting the certification of the election, confusion and delays. Georgia’s Republican party has appealed.More than 1 million voters have already cast their ballots in Georgia, cementing its status as a swing state in the race between Harris and Trump.After the 2020 elections, Trump-aligned Republicans lied that their candidate lost to Biden because of voter fraud. Fervor over those lies culminated in Trump supporters’ attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Raffensperger at one point received a phone call directly from Trump pressuring him to “find” him enough votes to prevent Biden from winning Georgia, though the secretary of state rebuffed him.

      Don’t miss important US election coverage. Get our free app and sign up for election alerts
      Georgia state prosecutors later filed criminal charges against Trump over his attempts to overturn the outcome of the presidential election there, all of which are part of the many legal problems that the former president has been confronting while running for the White House again.In an interview with the New York Times earlier in October, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, refused to answer whether the former president lost the 2020 election. Vance later clarified that he did not think Trump lost the 2020 race, saying: “So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use.”Raffensperger on Sunday maintained Georgia was “ranked number one” for election integrity by organizations on both sides of the political spectrum.“That just shows you we’re doing the right thing,” Raffensperger said. “Voters trust the process we have in Georgia. It’s easy to vote. It’s hard to cheat.” More

    • 188 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump campaigns in battleground Pennsylvania as Harris visits church on birthday – US politics live

      by

      During the town hall in Pennsylvania, a woman with a tattoo of Donald Trump on her leg asked the former president about his plan to lower taxes for working Americans.Trump accused migrants arriving from Central America of hampering the economy.“We’re not going to let foreign countries come in and steal our businesses, our jobs and everything else,” he said, continuing to make anti-immigrant remarks during his answer.“We want to have people come in, but they have to come in legally. We have to know they love our country,” he added.During an interview on MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation”, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with Reverand Al Sharpton in a one-on-one interview in Atlanta.Harris discussed the death of Yahya Sinwar and the conflict between Israel and Hamas.“We have got to get this war over with. We got to get the hostages out. We need the war to end”, Harris said. “The death of Sinwar I believe has removed an obstacle to that end. And so, we’ve got to work at it and we’ve got to work at it through diplomatic means and that’s what we intend to do.”The Democratic presidential nominee also spoke about the latest polling on support from Black men.“This narrative about what kind of support we are receiving from Black men that is just not panning out in reality,” she said. “I must earn the vote of everyone regardless of their race or gender.”Donald Trump said he’s completed two cognitive tests as opponents have increasingly questioned the 78-year-old Republican presidential nominee’s mental and physical fitness.“I aced the both of them”, Trump said during a town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “And the doctor in one case said, ‘I’ve never seen anybody ace them’”.“I’d like to see cognitive tests for anybody running for president or vice president”, Trump added. He later expressed age is but a number, using media mogul Rupert Murdoch as an example.During the town hall in Pennsylvania, a woman with a tattoo of Donald Trump on her leg asked the former president about his plan to lower taxes for working Americans.Trump accused migrants arriving from Central America of hampering the economy.“We’re not going to let foreign countries come in and steal our businesses, our jobs and everything else,” he said, continuing to make anti-immigrant remarks during his answer.“We want to have people come in, but they have to come in legally. We have to know they love our country,” he added.Musk entered the stage at the Roxian Theater in Pittsburgh as the sound system blared “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys.He carried a yellow “terrible towel” of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the city’s beloved NFL team, and jumped up and down as the crowd chanted his name.In a short speech, Musk told attendees, many wearing red Maga hats, that “the constitution is literally under attack” and urged a “clean sweep of those who believe in the constitution” in November.He then issued his second check for a million dollars to a signatory to his petition backing the first and second amendment. Kristine Fishell, who had sat on the balcony level, received the giant novelty check and smiled for the cameras before being whisked away.The event then pivoted to a lengthy town hall, where attendees asked a variety of conspiracy tinged questions and whether Musk would run for president in 2028.He could not, he explained, due to the natural born citizen clause of the US constitution, and did not want the job either. “I hate politics,” Musk said, explaining his purported reason for injecting himself into the 2024 race. “But the stakes are so high.”As the town hall began to wrap up, no attendee had asked whether Donald Trump’s promise to bring Musk, who is worth an estimated $247bn, into government as a “secretary of cost cutting” might be a conflict of interest. He told the crowd he was ready for the position, adding “I’d like to say it’s a hard job, but it’s not”.A few seconds earlier a member of the crowd had shouted “taxation is theft!”.Former ESPN anchor Sage Steele is moderating the town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump is taking questions from the audience.His first question was on whether he would protect social security and Medicare benefits.“Number one, no tax on social security for our seniors, that’s a big deal,” Trump said. “No tax on tips,” he said, and “no tax on overtime.”Former president Donald Trump has started delivering his remarks at an event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.His speech in the Lancaster County Convention Center follows a visit to a local McDonald’s, where he wore an apron and worked the french fries station.We’ll be following his comments as he rallies in the battleground state.The legendary singer Stevie Wonder rallied congregants at a church in Atlanta with a rendition of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song in support of Vice-President Kamala Harris.Wonder performed during a church service and early vote event at Divine Faith Ministries International. He also sang “Happy Birthday” as Harris celebrates her 60th birthday today.The Harris campaign responded to comments made by former president Donald Trump calling Democratic representatives “the enemy from within” during an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday.“Even in his Fox News safe space, Donald Trump cannot help but show himself as the unhinged, angry, unstable man that he is – focused on his own petty grievances and tired playbook of division,” Ammar Moussa, a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson, wrote in an email.“This is precisely why his handlers are hiding him from major mainstream interviews and refusing to let him debate again. They don’t want the country to see this candidate in decline,” he added.The legality of the America Pac $1m prize draw is unclear, and a justice department spokesperson did not immediately respond to an inquiry.But several legal experts said on Saturday the petition appeared to violate federal election laws that prohibits paying or offering to pay for someone to register to vote or actually vote under title 52 of the US code.According to the justice department’s election crimes manual, for an offer of payment to violate federal election law, it must have been intended to induce or reward the prospective voter for engaging in one or more acts necessary to cast a ballot.The election crimes manual distinguishes between making it easier for people to vote, such as offering free rides to a polling station, and inducing people to vote, which is unlawful.UCLA law professor Rick Hasen said in his blog that the America Pac $1m prize draw appears to be an illegal scheme because it offered the payments to registered voters.“Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal,” he wrote.At a town hall in Pennsylvania, billionaire Elon Musk has commented on his aims to expedite government agency procedures and his role under Trump’s presidency if he were to be elected.“I will do my best to ensure that that actions are taken that maximize the benefit to the American people,” Musk said. “I don’t know at the end of the day how much influence I’ll have. But I’ll do my best to be as helpful as possible.”“There are actually a huge number of of drugs that are stuck in approval at the FDA that can help people and they’re just stuck in bureaucratic molasses,” Musk said. “Simply expediting drug approval and the FDA, I think, will save millions of lives.”The CEO of Tesla and owner of X, Elon Musk, is speaking at a town hall in Pittsburgh today in support of former President Donald Trump.Musk is in McKees Rocks to promote voter registration and mail-in balloting ahead of the November election and a promise of cash for those who attend.He’s currently taking questions from the audience.Fromer president Donald Trump doubled down on his comments labeling Democrats as “the enemy from within,” this time specifically attacking Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.During an interview that aired Sunday on Fox News with Howard Kurtz, Trump said that “radical left lunatics… the enemy from within… should be very easily handled, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”“These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people. But when you look at ‘Shifty Schiff’ and some of the others, yeah, they are, to me, the enemy from within,” Trump said on Fox News’ “Mediabuzz.”“I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within,” he added. “She was supposed to protect the Capitol.”The former president sparked outrage last week after calling for the US armed forces to be turned against his political adversaries when voters go to the polls at next month’s presidential election.Former president Donald Trump, while working at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, sarcastically congratulated Kamala Harris on her 60th birthday.“Maybe I’ll get her some fries,” Trump said.He also took a moment to boast about his time in office while he was working the fryer at the fast food chain.“We had the best economy ever. We had the strongest borders ever, a military that knocked out ISIS in a few weeks,” he said.Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson accused SpaceX founder Elon Musk of “spreading dangerous disinformation.” The comments come after Musk alleged that “Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens.”“Here are the facts,” Benson wrote in a post on X. “There aren’t more voters than citizens in Michigan. There are 7.2 million active registered voters and 7.9 citizens of voting age in our state.”“Don’t feed the trolls,” she added. More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Harris marks birthday with church visit after Trump’s crude rhetoric at rally

      by

      Democratic governors from three states in the so-called blue wall that is key to their party’s aspirations for an electoral college victory delivered closing pitches for Kamala Harris on Sunday as their presidential nominee celebrated her 60th birthday with a visit to church.Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Tony Evers of Wisconsin and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer barnstormed the Sunday morning political shows to talk up the vice-president’s policy agenda – and highlight differences with Republican candidate Donald Trump, 16 days before an election that polls suggest is still on a knife edge.Acolytes of Trump, meanwhile, attempted to defend the former president’s extraordinary and vulgar rhetoric during a Saturday night rally in Pennsylvania, when he called Harris a “shit vice-president” and exalted the size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis.“I don’t want to go back to Donald Trump when he was in charge of the country,” Shapiro told NBC’s Meet the Press.“Remember the record? I know there’s still some people that have maybe a little brain fog, they don’t remember what it was like under Donald Trump. You had more chaos, you had less jobs, and you had a whole lot less freedom.“I don’t think we want to go back to a time of chaos. I want a stable, strong leader, and that’s Kamala Harris.”It also emerged Sunday that Harris has no plans to campaign with Joe Biden before election day on 5 November, a development appearing to confirm recent reports of friction between the two after the 81-year-old president was pressured out of running for re-election over age-related questions.“The most important role he can play is doing his job as president,” an anonymous White House official told NBC News, which said the decision was mutual following discussions between the campaign and Biden administration officials.Shapiro joined Evers and Whitmer, his fellow passengers on a weekend blue wall bus tour, for a joint interview on ABC’s This Week, in which the three spoke of polls showing the presidential race virtually deadlocked in all three states.“Both candidates believe that Pennsylvania is critical – I just think we’ve got a better candidate, a better message, and what we’re experiencing is a whole lot more energy,” Shapiro said.In Michigan, according to Whitmer, voters were comparing both candidates’ records ahead of the 5 November election.“While this is going to be close, I’d much rather be playing our hand in theirs,” she said. “We got a better candidate. We’ve got receipts on the issues that matter to the American people, on the economy, individual rights, affordable housing, and we got a better ground game.”Evers, a two-term governor, pushed back on Trump’s claims that a Harris administration would tank the US economy, using Democratic policies in Wisconsin as an example.“We have the best economy we’ve ever had, the largest budget we’ve ever had, and we’re in good shape, and people are making more money than they ever made. So we’re in a good place, and it had nothing to do with Donald Trump,” he said.The swing state governors were speaking as Harris rallied Black voters in another swing state, Georgia, on Sunday with “souls to the polls” visits to two community churches.“What kind of country do we want to live in – a country of chaos, fear and hate, or a country of freedom, compassion and justice?” she told the congregation of the New Birth Missionary Baptist church in Atlanta.“The great thing about living in a democracy is that we, the people, have the power to answer that question. So let us answer not just through our words, but through our actions and with our votes.”Harris has been attempting to shore up support from the Black community, particularly Black men. Polls have warned of a lack of enthusiasm for her campaign, though newer polling from the Howard Initiative on Public Opinion found Harris had built a lead among Black voters in swing states.Singer Stevie Wonder was scheduled to join her later at a rally at the Divine Faith Ministries International in Jonesboro. That gathering was set to occur ahead of Harris’s interview with civil rights leader Al Sharpton to be broadcast later Sunday on MSNBC.“We just have to keep doing the work,” Georgia US senator Raphael Warnock – a Black Democrat – said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “And the good news is – that’s exactly what Kamala Harris [is] … doing.”Trump remained in Pennsylvania for an afternoon rally in Lancaster and a photo-op at a McDonald’s restaurant, the day after his bizarre appearance in Latrobe, Palmer’s home town, in which he riffed at length – in an unrefined address – about how well endowed the golfer was with respect to his genitalia.Republicans appearing on the Sunday talk shows attempted to detract from Trump’s comments and other recent behavior, including suggesting in an interview this week he would use the US military against political enemies.View image in fullscreenThe South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham lost his composure when questioned about it on NBC’s Meet the Press – and tried to pivot to two recent assassination attempts on Trump, both conducted by pro-Republican persons.“When you talk about rhetoric, you gotta remember they tried to blow his head off,” Graham said. “He’s been shot at and hit in the ear, and we’re lucky they didn’t blow his head off. And another guy tried to kill him … so I’m not overly impressed about the rhetoric game here.”Graham also condemned Republican colleagues, including former members of Congress Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, as well as numerous ex-Trump administration officials who have denounced him and expressed support for Harris.The retired general Mark Milley, the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff, called Trump “fascist to the core”, according to veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s new book War.“To every Republican voting for her, what the hell are you doing?” Graham said. “You’re supporting the most radical nominee in the history of American politics. When you support her, you’re supporting four more years of garbage policy.”US House speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, was more restrained – but equally as determined to avoid questions about Trump’s commentary in an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, suggesting that it was host Jake Tapper who was obsessed with talking about Palmer’s penis.“The media can pick it apart, but people are going to vote what’s best for their family and they see that in Trump,” he said.Early in-person voting is under way in numerous states, with voters in Georgia setting a first-day turnout record Tuesday, even as polls have the candidates in a virtual dead heat.Shapiro said winning over the remaining undecided voters would determine the winner.“There are people that, frankly, don’t follow this on a daily basis, people that don’t follow the polls. They go to work, they got kids at home, they do their job with their kids and get up the next day,” he said.“The polls look at a small number. I know it’s a science, but at the end of the day I run into people all the time who just haven’t given it a thought, so we’re going to help them.” More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris joined by Lizzo at campaign event; Donald Trump rallies in Pennsylvania – live

      by

      Senator Bob Casey showed support for some Trump-era policies in his new ad, which aired on Friday in parts of the state,The ad features a Republican-Democrat couple from Old Forge praising Casey as an independent leader. They say he opposed Biden on fracking and backed Trump on trade issues like ending NAFTA and imposing tariffs on China.Barack Obama will hold an event on Saturday to rally voters for Kamala Harris on the first day of early voting in Nevada.The Harris campaign said the former president will encourage voters to turn out and vote for Harris, Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Democrats up and down the ballot.Former NFL star Antonio Brown is in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, for Donald Trump’s latest rally. Brown has continued to show his support for the former president before next month’s US presidential election.The ex-Steelers star addressed the crowd of Trump supporters after teasing his appearance on social media earlier this week.In Detroit, Kamala Harris was asked whether the war in Gaza could cost her the election. She didn’t directly answer the question, but she pointed to the Biden administration’s calls for peace days after the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.“This creates an opening that I believe we must take full advantage of to dedicate ourselves to ending this war and bringing hostages home,” Harris told reporters in Michigan.Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and the Democratic vice-presidential pick, paid a visit to the city of Chicago before heading to a rally in Omaha, Nebraska.He spoke at a hotel ballroom in the city’s downtown area and was introduced by Senator Dick Durbin.“It’s pretty clear the tired, divisive and old rhetoric of Donald Trump matches the tired, divisive and old Donald Trump,” Walz said.Americans are paying attention to Kamala Harris’s media blitz and Donald Trump’s campaign rallies, according to a CNN poll.A CNN polling project that tracks what average Americans are hearing, reading and seeing about the presidential nominees throughout the race revealed that the word most commonly used in describing the news about Harris was “interview”.Survey respondents referenced appearances on CBS’s 60 Minutes and the podcast Call Her Daddy, as well as interviews with Howard Stern and Stephen Colbert.When Americans were asked to describe the news about Trump, “rally” was the second-most commonly used word in response.Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, told reporters she’s seeing “record turnouts” of early voting in North Carolina and Georgia.“In Michigan, I will challenge the folks here to do the same,” Harris said during a campaign stop in Detroit.Kamala Harris told reporters that she’s dedicated more time on the campaign trail and called former president Donald Trump “increasingly unstable and unhinged” as she rallied in Detroit, Michigan.The vice-president was asked about her rapid response toward her rival, which seems like a more aggressive shift than the way she was handling his attacks before.“It requires that response,” she said. “The American people deserve better than someone who actually seems to be unstable.”On Friday, the Democratic vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, joined sportscaster Rich Eisen to discuss his football coaching past, which included a high school state championship. He also talked about his love for sports in general.“Look, people come here to get away from it like I do, I don’t watch political programs on TV. I watch ESPN, I watch sports,” Walz said. “It gives us that commonality. And I think there’s people that are hungry for that, and I’ve seen that at sporting events.”Montana park ranger says Senate candidate Tim Sheehy lied about combat woundA former Montana park ranger has now publicly accused Tim Sheehy – a Republican running for a US Senate seat in the state – of lying about getting shot while at war in Afghanistan.In an interview with the Washington Post published on Friday, 67-year-old Kim Peach went on the record about how Sheehy – a former US navy seal – actually shot himself on a family trip in 2015 at Glacier national park. Peach’s account explicitly contradicts Sheehy’s claim that he was shot in the arm during military combat, a story that the Republican candidate has shared throughout his US Senate campaign.Peach said that Sheehy’s allegedly self-inflicted wound left him with a bullet lodged in his right arm at Glacier national park in Montana’s Rocky Mountains. He told the Post that he first met Sheehy at a hospital in the area of the park during the aftermath of the 2015 episode.Read the full story here:The Vice President delivered remarks at Western International High School in Detroit, Michigan, on Saturday. Her comments come a day after Harris traveled across the state with presidential campaign rallies in Grand Rapids, Lansing and Oakland County.“We’re not falling for the other guy trying to get rid of the Department of Education, because we know what we stand for,” Harris said, referring to her rival Donald Trump.Donald Trump has previously said he wants to shut down the US Department of Education, saying that it should be disbanded to “move everything back to the states where it belongs”.Lizzo, who’s real name is Melissa Viviane Jefferson, showed her pride in being a Detroit native during the rally.“They say, if Kamala wins, then this whole country will be like Detroit. Well, I say proud, like Detroit. I say resilient, like Detroit,” said the singer. “This is the same Detroit that innovated the auto industry and the music industry. So put some respect on Detroit’s name.”Lizzo said she voted early, and encouraged the audience to do the same, calling an early vote “a power move.”“This is the swing state of all swing states. So every single last vote here counts,” she said.Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman said Elon Musk as a surrogate in the Trump campaign “could resonate with a demographic in Pennsylvania.”In an interview with Politico, the Democratic lawmaker recognized Donald Trump’s campaign is perfoming well in Pennsylvania.“He’s undeniably popular, and it’s going to be very close,” Fetterman said.He said that Musk, who’s been recently campaigning for the former President, is a “meaningful surrogate in a business where most surrogates really are not that critical.”Donald Trump’s campaign announced it will host a “Black Men’s Barbershop Talk Roundtable Event” on Sunday in Philadelphia.“This event will focus on the challenges facing Black men today, including economic struggles, community safety, and the negative impact of Kamala Harris’ policies on the Black community,” reads the campaign email.Florida Representative Byron Donalds and local community leaders are scheduled to host the roundtable at 4 pm ET.Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, shared a photo from her mother Ethel Kennedy’s memorial, showing her brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alongside President Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders.The image includes Kennedy family members gathered around a portrait of Ethel Kennedy, with Biden at the center next to Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Cheryl Hines, seen at the edge, were notably unsmiling. Many family members, including Kerry, criticized Robert’s challenge to Biden, and he now campaigns for Donald Trump after suspending his bid in August.As the US presidential election looms, the billionaire Mark Cuban has emerged as an energetic campaign surrogate for Kamala Harris. Making the case for business leaders to support the Democrat over Donald Trump, Cuban has drawn on his experience (in tech, investments, healthcare and now sports, as minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team), celebrity (as a lead “shark” for 15 seasons of ABC’s Shark Tank) and willingness to confront Trump-supporting billionaires, Elon Musk prominent among them.The road has not been smooth. Last week, Cuban clashed with congressional progressives after criticizing Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, over her tech-sector antitrust work. That issue and others, including Cuban’s thoughts on Trump’s championing of tariffs and the perennial question of whether Cuban harbors presidential ambitions of his own, are addressed below, in emailed answers to 10 questions posed by Guardian writers and editors.Read the full interview here: More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      How can the candidate with most votes lose? The US electoral college explained

      by

      Even though the United States touts its status as one of the world’s leading democracies, its citizens do not get to directly choose the president. That task is reserved for the electoral college – the convoluted way in which Americans have selected their president since the 18th century.Contrary to its name, the electoral college is more a process than a body. Every four years, in the December following an election, its members – politicians and largely unknown party loyalists – meet in all 50 states on the same day and cast their votes for president. Then they essentially disappear.In recent years there has been growing criticism of the electoral college, accelerated by the fact that two Republican presidents – George W Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 – have been elected president while losing the popular vote. But there’s no sign that US elections will change any time soon.Here’s everything you need to knowWhat exactly is the electoral college?Article II of the US constitution lays out the process by which a president is elected.Each state has a number of electors that’s equal to the total number of representatives and senators it has in Congress. Washington DC gets three electoral votes. In total, there are 538 electors. A candidate needs the votes of 270 of them, a simple majority, to win.The constitution says that state legislatures can choose how they want to award their electors. All but two states have long chosen to use a winner-take-all system – the winner of the popular vote in their state gets all of the electoral votes.To complicate matters further, two states, Maine and Nebraska, award their electors differently. In both states, two electoral college votes are allocated to the statewide winner. Each state then awards its remaining electors – two in Maine and three in Nebraska – to the winner in each of the state’s congressional districts.Why does the US have an electoral college?When the founding fathers gathered in Philadelphia to draft the US constitution in 1787, they had a lot of trouble figuring out a system for choosing a chief executive. Initially, they proposed a plan that would have Congress choose the president. But that led to concerns that the executive branch, designed to be independent from Congress, would be subject to it.A contingent of the delegates also favored electing the president through a direct popular vote. But the idea never got broad support and was shut down repeatedly during the convention, the historian Alexander Keyssar wrote in his book Why do we still have the electoral college.There were a number of reasons the idea was not widely popular. First, the convention had adopted the racist three-fifths compromise in which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for population purposes. This was a win for the southern states, in which slaves made up a sizable chunk of the population. A popular vote system would have disadvantaged the southern states because they had fewer people who could vote.There were also concerns about giving too much power to larger states and that voters would be unable to learn about the candidates from different states, according to Keyssar. It was a debate driven more about pragmatics than about political rights, he writes.Towards the end of the convention, a committee of 11 delegates was appointed to deal with unresolved matters and one of them was how to select the president. They proposed a version of what we have now come to understand as the electoral college.“This brief nativity story makes clear that the presidential election system enshrined in the Constitution embodied a web of compromises, spawned by months of debate among men who disagreed with one another and were uncertain about the best way to proceed,” Keyssar wrote. “It was, in effect, a consensus second choice, made acceptable, in part, by the remarkably complex details of the electoral process, details that themselves constituted compromises among, or gestures toward, particular constituencies and convictions.”What is a swing state?States that either presidential candidate has a good shot at winning are often called “swing states”.In the 2024 election, there are seven swing states: Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), Michigan (15 electoral votes), Georgia (16 electoral votes), North Carolina (16 electoral votes), Arizona (11 electoral votes), and Nevada (six electoral votes). Whichever candidate wins the election must carry some combination of those states, which is why the candidates will spend the majority of their time and resources there. Joe Biden carried all of those states bar North Carolina in the 2020 election.The idea of a swing state can also change over time because of changing demographics. Until recently, for example, Ohio and Florida were considered swing states, but they are now considered pretty solidly Republican. Michigan was considered a pretty solid Democratic stronghold until Donald Trump won it in 2016.Does the electoral college allow for minority rule?There have been five elections in US history – in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 – in which the candidate who became the president did not win the popular vote. This has led to wider recognition of imbalances in the system and a push from some to abolish the electoral college altogether.The loudest criticism is that it’s a system that dilutes the influence of a presidential vote depending on where one lives. A single elector in California represents more than 726,000 people. In Wyoming, an elector represents a little more than 194,000 people.Another critique is that the system allows a tiny number of Americans to determine the outcome of the presidential election. In 2020, about 44,000 votes between Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona allowed Biden to win the electoral college. Such a slim margin is extraordinary in an election that 154.6 million people voted in.In 2016, about 80,000 combined votes gave Trump his winning margins in key swing states.Do electors have to vote for a specific candidate?State political parties choose people to serve as electors who they believe are party stalwarts and will not go rogue and cast a vote for anyone other than the party’s nominee. Still, electors have occasionally cast their votes for someone else. In 2016, for example, there were seven electors who voted for candidates other than the ones they were pledged to. That was the first time there was a faithless elector since 1972, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Many states have laws that require electors to vote for the candidate they are pledged to. In 1952, the US supreme court said that states could compel electors to vote for the party’s nominee. And in 2020, the court said that states could penalize electors who don’t vote for the candidate they’re pledged to.How has the electoral college remained in place for so long?Since almost immediately after the electoral college was enacted, there have been efforts to change it. “There were constitutional amendments that were being promoted within a little more than a decade after the constitution was ratified,” Keyssar said. “There have been probably 1,000 or more constitutional amendments to change it or get rid of it filed since 1800. Some of them have some close.” (There were more than 700 efforts as recently as 2019, according to the Congressional Research Service.)When the idea of a national popular vote was proposed in 1816, Keyssar said, southern states objected. Slaves continued to give them power in the electoral college, but could not vote. “They would lose that extra bonus they got on behalf of their slaves,” he said.After the civil war, African Americans were legally entitled to vote, but southern states continued to suppress them from casting ballots. A national popular vote would have diminished their influence on the overall outcome, so they continued to support the electoral college system.The country did get close to abolishing the electoral college once, in the late 1960s. In 1968, George Wallace, the southern segregationist governor, almost threw the system into chaos by nearly getting enough votes to deny any candidate a majority in the electoral college. The US House passed the proposed amendment 339 to 70. But the measure stalled in the Senate, where senators representing southern states filibustered.That led to continued objections to a national popular vote so that southern white people could continue to wield power, according to the Washington Post. President Jimmy Carter eventually endorsed the proposal, but it failed to get enough votes in the Senate in 1979 (Joe Biden was one of the senators who voted against it).“It’s not like we are suddenly discovering this system really doesn’t work,” Keyssar said.Is there any chance of getting rid of the electoral college now?The most prominent effort to get rid of the electoral college today is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The idea is to get states to agree to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the outcome in their specific state. The compact would take effect when states having a total of 270 electoral votes – enough to determine the winner of the election – join.So far 16 states and Washington DC – a total of 205 electoral votes – have joined the effort.But the path ahead for the project is uncertain. Nearly all of the states that haven’t joined have either a Republican governor or legislature. And legal observers have questioned whether such an arrangement is constitutional – something that would probably be quickly put to the US supreme court. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Montana park ranger says Senate candidate Tim Sheehy lied about combat wound

      by

      A former Montana park ranger has now publicly accused Tim Sheehy – a Republican running for a US Senate seat in the state – of lying about getting shot while at war in Afghanistan.In an interview with the Washington Post published on Friday, 67-year-old Kim Peach went on the record about how Sheehy – a former US navy seal – actually shot himself on a family trip in 2015 at Glacier national park. Peach’s account explicitly contradicts Sheehy’s claim that he was shot in the arm during military combat, a story that the Republican candidate has shared throughout his US Senate campaign.Peach said that Sheehy’s allegedly self-inflicted wound left him with a bullet lodged in his right arm at Glacier national park in Montana’s Rocky Mountains. He told the Post that he first met Sheehy at a hospital in the area of the park during the aftermath of the 2015 episode.“I remember Sheehy obviously being embarrassed by the situation but at the same time thankful that it wasn’t worse,” Peach said to the Post. There, Sheehy also confirmed to Peach that he had mistakenly shot himself after his firearm discharged in his car.Peach said he then inspected Sheehy’s gun and observed a bullet casing, confirming the firearm had discharged. That same day, Peach issued Sheehy a $525 fine for discharging a firearm in the national park, according to government records.Peach also wrote about the case in a 2015 report about the gunshot, writing he was “grateful no other persons or property were damaged”, the Post reported.The Post first spoke with Peach – who initially came forward anonymously – in April to dispute Sheehy’s claim. But several Republican public figures quickly disclosed Peach’s identity, leading to harassment.Sheehy and others accused Peach of unduly attempting to discredit the candidate’s military service.In response to the Post’s reporting in April, Sheehy claimed that he actually lied to Peach in 2015 about accidentally shooting himself. Sheehy said that he fell and injured his arm during the hike in Glacier – but he lied about the self-inflicted shooting to conceal the fact that he may have obtained the bullet wound during friendly fire that he endured while fighting in Afghanistan.A spokesperson for Sheehy has said that Peach is a Democrat, and his most recent interview in an attempt to spread a “defamatory story”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNonetheless, Peach told the Post he was motivated to speak with his name on the public record because Sheehy has remained untruthful about having shot himself.“He said that questioning his military service was ‘disgusting’,” Peach said to the Post. “What is disgusting is saying a wound from a negligent, accidental firearm discharge is a wound received in combat.”Peach added: “I have no personal vendetta against Tim Sheehy. But when a person makes a statement that’s not true somebody has to call them on it.”Sheehy is challenging Democratic incumbent Jon Tester in a race that could determine which political party controls the Senate after the 5 November presidential election. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Harris and Trump pushed to extreme plays for support in knife-edge race

      by

      With just half a month to go, the US presidential election is deadlocked, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump jockey for any advantage in ways that illuminate their stark political differences; the Democratic nominee most recently announced a plan to campaign with the Obamas, while the Republican nominee doubles down on threatening his enemies.In the past week, Trump has gone further than ever in branding his political opponents “the enemy within” and talking about deploying the military against them, while Harris herself entered uncharted territory by finally agreeing to label him “fascist”.The latest polling figures seem to mirror such sharply polarised rhetoric, with the seven crucial swing states almost split down the middle in allegiance.In a particularly graphic example, a Brookings Institution/Public Religion Research Institute survey published on Friday showed more than a third of voters – 34% – agree with one of Trump’s most incendiary contentions: that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America, rhetoric that has drawn comparisons with Hitler and fueled warnings of looming fascism.Evidence that such warnings are failing to electorally hurt the Republican nominee is displayed in the Guardian’s most recent 10-day poll tracker. As of 16 October, it showed Harris ahead nationwide by just two points, 48% to 46% – figures unchanged from a week ago and a significantly tighter margin than she enjoyed several weeks ago.The races in the battleground states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona – are, if anything, even more cliffhanging, with numbers within error margins in each.The pair are level pegging in Michigan and North Carolina, well within any statistical margins of error. The latter state saw early in-person voting begin at 400 sites on Thursday, as it continues to clear up the devastation left by Hurricane Helene last month, an operation marked by lies and misinformation from Trump and his supporters.Harris has tiny leads in Pennsylvania and Nevada, while Trump is ahead in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, though the races remain far too close to predict with any certainty.With Harris scrambling for a vital edge, Barack and Michelle Obama announced on Friday that they would campaign alongside her next week. It will be the former first lady’s first appearance since a widely lauded speech at the Democratic national convention in August, when she skewered Trump.The lack of clarity over the election’s outcome seems all the more remarkable in a race that has had so many seemingly clarifying moments, not least within the past week.One came last Saturday when Trump, in a speech in Coachella, California – a state Harris is certain to carry emphatically – talked darkly about “the enemy within”. a description he applied to the Democratic congressman Adam Schiff. He repeated the riff the following day in a Fox News interview with a friendly host, going on to suggest that the armed forces or national guard should be used against agitators causing “chaos” on election day – while stressing that these would not be on his side.The line seemed to give Harris an opening. Last Monday evening, at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, she took it, labelling Trump “unstable and unhinged” while playing her audience footage of the most extreme rhetoric from the Republican nominee’s public appearances in what was seen as an unusual political innovation.At almost the same moment, in a scene of disconcerting levity, Trump stood onstage swaying along to some of his favourite songs after a town hall event near Philadelphia had been interrupted by two medical emergencies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRather than continue a question-and-answer session, he requested a playlist that included James Brown, Luciano Pavarotti and Guns N’ Roses while importuning the gathering to listen and dance along for the next 40 minutes.Harris’s campaign attempted to highlight the episode as more evidence of Trump’s unfitness for office and supposed declining mental condition.The vice-president went further the following day, agreeing with Charlamagne Tha God in an interview for a Black radio station in Detroit that Trump’s vision amounted to “fascism”.“Yes we can say that,” she said, while still avoiding actually uttering a word that has been applied to Trump by others, including Gen Mark Milley, the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff, who has called him “a fascist to the core”.The gaping chasm between the two candidates was further illustrated in contrasting appearances on two Fox News events on Wednesday.Trump went into one, an all-female town hall gathering, with the stated aim of wooing women voters, among whom polls shows he lags far behind Harris. In a comment that again provided fodder for Democrat mockery, he proclaimed himself to be “the father of IVF”, a form of fertility treatment that Senate Republicans voted against earlier this year. CNN later reported that Republican women’s groups had arranged for the audience to be packed with Trump supporters.For her part, Harris engaged in a combative interview with one of Fox’s Bret Baier in what was broadly viewed as a successful exercise in entering hostile terrain by going on a rightwing network that has vocally cheerled for Trump.Yet despite – or perhaps because of – these sharply diverging pictures, surveys show voters remain locked in entrenched positions,with the next couple of weeks likely to feature a desperate trawl on both sides for independent or undecided electors, bolstered by late get-out-the-vote efforts aimed at the less motivated sections of their respective bases. More