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      How local radio plays a pivotal role in securing Latino votes in Colorado

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      When Yadira Caraveo, a Democratic party member, won the race to represent Colorado’s eighth district in the House of Representatives in 2022, she eked out a victory, winning by the narrowest margin of any Democrat in the country. This November, Caraveo is facing yet another close race – one that could determine the balance of Congress.In a district where nearly 40% of residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, the community will be decisive in crowning a winner. The battle for their votes is mostly playing out not on TV or in town halls, but on social media and local radio.“[Latino voters] are listening to social media and the radio,” said Sonny Subia, Colorado’s volunteer state director for Lulac, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the largest and oldest Hispanic organization in the country.CD-8 stretches from the suburbs of Denver, where voters lean Democratic, to the agricultural areas around Greeley, where voters lean Republican. Caraveo, a pediatrician whose Mexican parents raised their four children in what is now the eighth district, is highlighting her efforts to lower healthcare costs and her ability to work across the aisle to represent a split constituency.View image in fullscreenHer Republican challenger, Gabe Evens, is also Latino. Evans is campaigning on his experience as a farmer and his background in law enforcement and the military, sharing how his Mexican grandfather received two Purple Hearts in the second world war.In CD-8, “people aren’t just one-sided”, said Angel Merlos, strategic director in Colorado of the Libre Initiative, a conservative organization that mobilizes the Hispanic vote around principles of limited government. “You have to make your case as to why you want their vote.”In a race that close, the battle for votes can be fierce. And voting rights groups have been sounding the alarm about disinformation targeting Latinos in the US. In September, the US justice department intervened in operations by Russian state media to spread disinformation about the general election to US audiences, including citizens “of Hispanic descent”.Roughly one in five Latinos prefers to get news from social media, where misinformation has found fertile ground. The key to the potency of mis- and disinformation in 2024 is how much cheaper and easier it is for lies to proliferate on social media platforms that enhance engaging material, said Laura Zommer, CEO and co-founder of Factchequeado, a Spanish-language factchecking organization.Spanish-language radio, too, has at times been a source of misleading and inaccurate information, repeating and reinforcing false narratives that are circulating in the wider information ecosystem. Nearly half of Latinos tune into the radio for news, and Latino immigrants are much more likely than U.S.-born Latinos to say they mainly consume news in Spanish.A 2024 study from the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas found that Latinos are not necessarily more vulnerable to misinformation than the rest of the population. But, the authors concluded, there is a need for culturally competent information, especially targeting more susceptible subgroups including Latinos who are Spanish-dominant and consume more broadcast news and Spanish-language media.In CD-8, a program that compares radio recordings against thousands of factchecked statements from respected organizations identified only a few instances of potential misinformation in a week’s worth of recording nine local Spanish-language stations.

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      For example, on a Monday evening at the end of October on KNRV a news bulletin inaccurately stated that Donald Trump was leading in national polls by nearly 8%, when most polls that day showed Harris in the lead by nearly 2 points. The station advertises that it rents air space to a variety of programs and hosts; this evening news segment came from the Mexican radio network Radio Formula.An ad in another news segment incorrectly cited a recent poll from the Colorado Health Foundation that asked respondents about their major concerns. The ad exaggerated how many Latino respondents expressed extreme worry about not being able to feed their families in the next year.Disinformation uses “content that activates our ire, our grievances, sometimes an incredible hope”, said Zommer. Sometimes the goal is to persuade someone of a lie, and sometimes it can be to sow doubt and mistrust or divide people. “Many times the most successful disinformation has an element of truth and it’s taken out of context, or it has an element of truth and it’s exaggerated,” she said.Conversations heard on the radio in CD-8 reflect heightened tensions around immigration in the local Latino community. Stacy Suniga, president of the Latino Coalition of Weld county said Latinos in her district are hearing more insults in public places like grocery stores. “I think there are issues on top of their issues, with the radical display of racism,” she said.In some instances, the tension is between Latinos. Merlos said Latinos are complaining to Libre organizers about Venezuelan immigrants getting what they see as preferential treatment from the government. On a midday program in mid-October KNRV, a caller expressed frustration with how Denver, like Chicago and New York, had deployed city resources to help newly arrived Venezuelans. “I’m going to go with Trump although he’s not someone I consider a good person,” he said, “but I’m against Biden’s party for what he’s done at the border.”View image in fullscreenThis could be part of a misleading narrative using the arrival of Venezuelan immigrants to drive a wedge between voters. Zommer highlighted the power of “fragmenting, dividing, between whites and Latinos, but also between Latinos: Latinos living, working, paying taxes – and the new Latinos.”Callers and guests are often a source of misleading and inaccurate claims that air on the radio. A 2021 report that analyzed disinformation about January 6 on four Spanish-language radio stations in south Florida found that hosts play an important role in contextualizing and correcting callers on the air. It’s important, as well, for stations to clearly distinguish between news segments and programs that air opinions or commentary.On KNRV, the host immediately jumped in, correcting the caller’s belief that the southern border is “open”, explaining that Venezuelans received political asylum for the crisis happening in their country, and insisting that while it felt unfair, Latinos should not let this issue divide them.For Zommer, this conflict is part of a wider disinformation narrative in effect updating “the big lie”, or the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, for 2024: that the Biden administration has allowed for an open southern border so immigrants can cross and vote in the election. “In this new narrative of disinformation, there is no way to factcheck it because it’s what they’re saying is going to happen in the future.”Jordan Rynning contributed reporting More

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      Alexi Lalas keeps tweeting Maga propaganda. Does it matter?

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      As the US men’s national team prepared to kick off against Panama earlier this month, Soccer Twitter warmed up for the first game of the Mauricio Pochettino era.Amid his routine match analysis, America’s most prominent soccer pundit retweeted old footage of Barack Obama discussing immigration policy that surfaced in an attempt to make the former president appear hypocritical and discredit Kamala Harris by association.The jarring mix of sports and politics is normal for Alexi Lalas, who stands out among soccer broadcasters for his open engagement with the imminent American presidential election and for his party affiliation.Lalas gave an interview on the Fox Business channel in July from the Republican National Convention which careened from how the event is “a cool place to be” to a discussion of the Barcelona prodigy Lamine Yamal. Speaking on Fox News radio from the convention, Lalas said he wants to challenge “the stereotype that exists when it comes to Republicans and certainly the right side of the political spectrum … I live in California, I work in soccer, I’m like a unicorn when it comes to politics out there and yet there are a lot of things that can unite us.”To judge by the volume of online abuse he attracts and airs on X – and to which he often responds with wit and generosity – his political output is having the opposite effect. That’s not surprising when his feed amplifies right-wing talking points, such as Lalas’ recent rehashing of video of a publicity stunt in which Donald Trump served fries to fawning supporters at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s in a specious attempt to taunt Harris.The ginger-bearded face of American soccer in the 1990s, a defender and rock musician who played in Serie A and won 96 caps for the USMNT, Lalas played every minute of the host nation’s four matches at the 1994 World Cup and became, wrote The Los Angeles Times, “the cult figure of America’s high summer”. After retirement he worked as an MLS executive, including for the Los Angeles Galaxy when they signed David Beckham.The mellow, mumbling kid who let David Letterman trim his pumpkin-hued goatee after USA ’94 is now a 54-year-old greying purveyor of indignant tirades for Fox Sports, proudly repping a segment of society who equate the profundity of their patriotism with the prominence of their Stars and Stripes flags and the decibel level of their bellowing about American greatness.With viral clips often attracting more views than live broadcasts on traditional TV channels, there is clear value in being the blowtorch of hot-take merchants. Given the sonic vanilla that is the corporate agenda-driven coverage of MLS on Apple TV, there may be a market for a celebrated American personality who provides and provokes trenchant opinions. But does that hold true when the talk moves from Pochettino’s right-wing to that of the GOP?“When you’re in the entertainment sector, going political tends to have very little upside because this country seems to be perpetually split, 49 to 48, and just in general it’s not going to make one side love you more because they’re just looking at what you’re doing on the field and in the announcer booth. But it will set off the other side,” says Mike Lewis, professor of marketing at Emory University and author of Fandom Analytics, a data-driven analysis of sports supporters.Lalas, a Ron DeSantis fan whose soccer podcast is called State of the Union in a nod to the president’s annual address, has more than 400,000 followers on X. “It’s my channel. I program it with what I like and what I find interesting. If it offends your sensibilities, there are millions of other channels for you to choose from. Go in peace,” Lalas wrote this month to a reader baffled by his divisive posts, which are typically retweets without additional commentary – an unusually coy style for him.That’s true for social media. But given his centrality to Fox’s coverage and the exclusivity of their rights, viewers will find it harder to swerve Lalas if they want to watch some of the biggest matches in the sport. And given how polarised and piqued the nation is and how intertwined party affiliation has become with personal identity, if viewers are aware of his political leanings, can they divorce that from his on-screen presence, even when he’s purely talking soccer? Do liberals want to hear a verdict on Christian Pulisic from Lalas any more than they want to buy a Tesla from the Trump super-booster Elon Musk?View image in fullscreen“It’s almost like a reflexive thing,” Lewis says, “that that’s an enemy now, and I don’t want to listen to an enemy while I watch the US men’s soccer team.” The risk of alienating roughly half your consumer base may be partially offset by the appeal of being perceived as bucking the liberal consensus as an unafraid and unfiltered Republican ambassador from deep blue Los Angeles in a progressive-leaning sport historically disparaged by conservatives.Like Trump, Lalas suggested the US were too woke after they went out of last year’s Women’s World Cup, and did not deviate from Republican orthodoxy in 2020 with a critical tweet when NWSL players took the knee for the national anthem. The Republican Party’s widespread antipathy towards diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives conflicts with the mission statement of the US Soccer Federation, which declares, “we integrate DEIB into everything we do”.There is a balancing act in playing a high-profile role in a mainstream channel – Fox, after all, has the rights to the 2026 World Cup – then sliding into the right-wing media ecosystem, where many conservatives have found audiences by stoking grievances and trolling the libs. One recent Lalas repost reads: “I check X for two reasons. Elon’s latest meme and seeing who Alexi ticked off today”.Fox Sports and Lalas declined to comment for this article. Like Fox News, Fox Sports is part of the Fox Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and family. So is the conservative-leaning sports news site, Outkick, which vows to question “the consensus and [expose] the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism” and often cites Lalas.Politics and soccer are far from strangers. Two of the UK’s leading soccer broadcasters, Gary Lineker and Gary Neville, drew ire from British right-wingers for their criticism of the last Conservative government, with Lineker briefly removed from the BBC’s flagship football programme in 2023 for tweets about asylum policy that the broadcaster said breached impartiality rules.The American landscape, however, has changed since Jemele Hill was suspended by ESPN in 2017 for calling Trump a “white supremacist” on X and the network introduced a social media policy discouraging employees from openly taking sides and offering commentary beyond sports. Sticking to sports now seems blinkered. The ESPN star, Stephen A Smith, frequently opines on politics on other platforms and recently sparred with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd also talks politics, as does Dan LeBatard, who started his own podcast after criticisms of Trump contributed to his departure from ESPN.“There’s a price to pay for it. That’s why it is so hard to figure out the right policy, it’s very challenging to sort through what is a restriction on someone’s free speech” versus protecting the employer’s brand and reputation, says Patrick Crakes, a media consultant and former Fox Sports executive.“One of the reasons a lot of major sports personalities don’t [talk politics] is because you are a very general market, and do you really want to have to take 50% of the people that see you and fight them, or alienate them or make them uncomfortable with you? Sports, traditionally, I feel it was neutral ground. That’s increasingly changed.”Though political talk remains rare during game broadcasts and few commentators have overtly revealed political stances, perceptions of partisanship have become ingrained. “Republican-identifying sports media consumers find NBC Sports to be the most biased sports media outlet; Democratic-identifying sports media consumers find Fox Sports to be the most biased sports media outlet,” according to a survey for the University of Texas’ annual Politics in Sports Media report. “This suggests that the sports networks are reputationally connected to their parent news organizations.” The poll also found that 80% of Republicans do not want athletes to share their political beliefs compared with only 42% of Democrats.The line has also blurred between voters and spectators. “In the Trump era, we’ve started to see these political rallies that look like sporting events where you can have guys essentially face-painted up, they’ve got the red hats, the matching uniforms,” Lewis says. “I think there’s really powerful similarities between sports and politics in the way fandom works, particularly in the way fandom is so closely related to people’s identities.”The subordination of issues to identity and policies to personality means affiliations are ossified and compromise impossible, with Democrats no more likely to switch to supporting Republicans than would a Liverpool fan change allegiance to Manchester United. “If I’m teaching a class on sports marketing and I’m talking about fandom and I ask someone a question, ‘who are you a fan of,’ if they start to tell me two teams, there’s almost a reaction: ‘well, you’re not really a fan. You can’t like the Yankees and the Mets!’” Lewis says.“I think of it all as culture at this point. There’s almost this seamless connection across all these categories, entertainment to sports to politics,” he adds. “They are the culture, they are all happening simultaneously and all affecting each other.” Strangely, when everything is linked it feels like everything is fractured.Last year, Lalas wrote of the USWNT: “Politics, causes, stances, & behavior have made this team unlikeable to a portion of America.” Well, they could respond: right back at ya. And left-leaning observers might doubt the analytical prowess of a professional critic who, to apply a football metaphor to the politics on his X feed, focuses on one team’s shirt-pulling while ignoring the two-footed tackles flying in from the other side, and hails the “authenticity” of a serial liar and flip-flopper.More broadly, though, in a climate where it’s standard that politicians speak out on sports and countless celebrities issue political opinions and endorsements, why shouldn’t sports personalities enjoy the same freedom of expression? If we feel Lalas should keep quiet, shouldn’t we also feel that way about Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift?One difference: other forms of artistic expression, such as music, drama and writing, are often conceived and performed as explicit political statements while sports have been treated as a break from reality, not a reflection of it. That’s no longer sustainable as social media entangles news and opinion, the public and the personal. Wisely or not, Lalas isn’t only opposing a liberal consensus, he’s contributing to the erasure of a naive illusion. More

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      Biden says he meant to condemn comedian, not Trump supporters, in ‘garbage’ comments

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      Joe Biden put out a statement that he had “meant to say” earlier on Tuesday that a pro-Trump comedian’s “hateful rhetoric” about Puerto Rico was “garbage”. But in an edited video clip already widely circulating on social media Tuesday evening, a phrase that came out of Biden’s mouth was “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters”.Republican politicians and rightwing media outlets quickly picked up the clip to argue that Biden had called Trump’s supporters garbage, comparing his remarks with Hillary Clinton’s labeling of half of Trump supporters as belonging in “a basket of deplorables” in 2016, a comment that is widely seen as undermining her campaign.Biden’s full comments on Tuesday are somewhat garbled, and some journalists transcribing the remarks argued that Biden really did seem to be trying to be refer to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s remarks, not all of Trump’s supporters, while others reported that the president had indeed suggested that Trump supporters themselves were garbage.Biden’s comment came during a zoom call with Voto Latino, in which Biden refered to Hinchcliffe’s comments and said the Puerto Ricans he knows are “good, decent, honorable, people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of things is unconscionable, and it’s un-American, and it’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done.” But it wasn’t entirely clear whether he had said the singular “supporter’s” or the plural “supporters”, describing Trump’s base more broadly.In the official transcript of Biden’s remarks released Tuesday night by the White House press office, the comment has an apostrophe: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”Speaking at a campaign event with Trump, Senator Marco Rubio picked up the remark as “breaking news” and told Trump supporters that Biden had dismissed a huge number of everyday Americans as “garbage”, while conservative outlets amplified the remark. Biden quickly tweeted that he had “meant to say” that the comedian’s remarks were “garbage”.The furore over Biden’s “garbage” remarks comes on what was supposed to be a big night for Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, as she attempted to make her closing argument of the campaign, urging the country to “turn the page” on Trump. Harris spoke in front of tens of thousands of supporters in Washington DC. She made her case in the location where Trump addressed his supporters on January 6, before many of them went on to storm to US capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of Biden’s 2020 election victory.Biden’s slightly garbled original comments mark another gaffe for a gaffe-prone politician on the eve of a very tight election.Polling averages show that Harris and Trump remain locked in what the Guardian’s poll tracker calls a nail-bitingly close presidential race.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Tuesday evening, the polling expert Nate Silver tweeted that, if Harris loses, “you’re going to get a hot take … from me about Joe Biden”.Hinchcliffe, the host of a podcast called Kill Tony, was the first speaker at a rally for Trump at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night. His racist comments have sparked broad condemnation, including from Republicans, and were even disavowed by the Trump campaign.“There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” Hinchcliffe said. He also said that Latinos “love making babies … There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”NBC reported that Hinchcliffe had tested the same joke about Puerto Rico, and that the joke had bombed, at a comedy set in New York the night before the Trump rally. More

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      Trump claims ‘nobody loves Puerto Rican community more than I do’ at Pennsylvania rally

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      Donald Trump praised Puerto Ricans on Tuesday during a Pennsylvania rally, days after a comedian made a racist joke and referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” at one of his rallies.“Nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do,” the former president said a little over an hour into a rally in Allentown, in the Lehigh Valley, which has a sizable Latino population.More than 68,000 people – over half of the total population – in Allentown are Hispanic or Latino, according to US census data. A few blocks from the rally, a home had a Puerto Rican flag posted on the door.He also claimed that he had done a lot for Puerto Rico as president. Trump drew ridicule for tossing paper towels into a crowd on the island after it was ravaged by a hurricane; blocked hurricane aid; and mused about selling the island.He also again praised the rally at Madison Square Garden, saying “the love was unbelievable” and told a rambling story about watching a SpaceX rocket that lasted longer than his discussion of Puerto Ricans.Many of the speakers on Tuesday, including the Puerto Rican official Zoraida Buxó, emphasized their Puerto Rican heritage, signaling the campaign’s effort to win Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania, the key battleground state in this election, where polls show a tight race.“We won’t get rattled, we won’t yield to ignorance, foolishness, or irrational thoughtlessness,” she said.Senator Marco Rubio, another speaker at the rally, also joined Trump onstage during the former presidents remarks to share with the crowd comments from Joe Biden Tuesday in which the president condemned the remarks about Puerto Ricans and said: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American”, according to a White House transcript. After Republicans circulated a clip of the statement, calling it an attack on Trump supporters, Biden put out a statement saying he meant to refer to the comedian who made the joke.A small protest arrived outside the arena just before the rally began on Tuesday. Some of the protesters were carrying signs that said Latinos for Harris-Walz, while others wore the Puerto Rican flag.

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      One of the people marching was Luis Gonzalez, a retired 65-year-old truck driver from Allentown. He wore a sweater with the Puerto Rican flag stitched on it.“The guy has no idea what he’s talking about,” he said. “I was born in Puerto Rico. That island as well as all the other islands around it are beautiful.“For anybody to say that it’s a garbage island – they’ve never been to the Caribbean.”But inside the rally, few people thought the fallout from the comment would have much effect on Trump. Some had not heard it.“It was made in poor taste, I have to admit. But Donald Trump is Donald Trump, ” said Mark Melendez, 55, who is Puerto Rican and traveled to the rally from New Jersey. “I don’t think it will affect him; it might.”At least one audience member was holding a sign that said “Boricuas for Trump”, using a term that describes people of Puerto Rican descent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJackie Beller, 60, who lives near Allentown, thought the joke was funny.“If you take a comedian out of context and you look at it as a serious thing, yes, you would be offended,” Beller said.“It’s all a joke – I’ve spoken to some Puerto Rican people and they weren’t offended, so I don’t know,” said Mary Mendez, 65, a retired paramedic from New York.Trump’s speech kicking off the final week of the presidential race mixed personal attacks, grievance, anti-immigrant rhetoric and a smattering of policies. He accused Democrats of having already cheated, misrepresenting an ongoing investigation in Lancaster county in an example of how he is priming his supporters to challenge the election results if he loses.His remarks were less an appeal to undecided voters than a full-throated appeal to his base, pledging that he would be able to fix all of the US’s ills.“This is gonna be a very special time. It’s going to be America’s new golden age. Every problem facing us can be solved,” he said.As Kamala Harris made her closing argument in Washington and called Trump “unstable” and “obsessed with revenge”, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ individual” and mused about getting retribution against Michelle Obama for criticizing him on the campaign trial.“Michelle Obama was very nasty,” he said. “I’ve gone out of my way to be nice to Michelle. Haven’t said a damn thing about her. She hit me.” More

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      Supreme court rejects appeal to remove Robert F Kennedy Jr from swing state ballots – live

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      The highest court rejected an emergency appeal to remove Robert F Kennedy Jr, a third-party presidential candidate that has dropped out of the race and endorsed Donald Trump, from the ballots in Wisconsin and Michigan.Kennedy wanted to have himself remove from the ballots in these key swing states, arguing that keeping him on would violate his first amendment rights. But with early voting already under way, Wisconsin and Michigan said that removing him from the ballot now would be impossible.It is unclear how Kennedy’s presence on the ballot will affect the election, and whether it will rob votes from Trump.Politeness and convention dictate that European leaders try to sound noncommittal when asked whether a Donald Trump presidency would hurt Nato. But despite the rhetoric about “Trump-proofing”, Nato cohesion will be at risk from a hostile or isolationist Republican president, who has previously threatened to leave the alliance if European defence spending did not increase.“The truth is that the US is Nato and Nato is the US; the dependence on America is essentially as big as ever,” said Jamie Shea, a former Nato official who teaches at the University of Exeter. “Take the new Nato command centre to coordinate assistance for Ukraine in Wiesbaden, Germany. It is inside a US army barracks, relying on US logistics and software.”US defence spending will hit a record $968bn in 2024 (the proportion the US spends in Europe is not disclosed). The budgets of the 30 European allies plus Canada amount to $506bn, 34% of the overall total. It is true that 23 out of 32 members expect to spend more than 2% of GDP on defence this year, but in 2014, when the target was set, non-US defence spending in Nato was 24%. Lower than now but not dramatically so.There are more than 100,000 US personnel stationed in Europe, more than the British army, a figure increased by more than 20,000 by Joe Biden in June 2022 in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. US troops have long been based in Germany, but a 3,000-strong brigade was moved by Biden into Romania, a forward corps command post is based in Poland, and US troops contribute to defending the Baltic states, while fighter and bomber squadrons are based in the UK and five naval destroyers in Spain.Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister, was recently asked whether Nato was ready for Trump. “Elections will have a result whatever,” he began, before acknowledging that much of Europe had been slow to increase defence budgets, missing the warning of Russia’s capture of Crimea in Ukraine in 2014 and only reacting substantively in 2022 after Russia’s full invasion. “What we did was push the snooze button and turn around,” Pistorius said.Read the full analysis here:In Wisconsin’s case, Kennedy had asked the supreme court to remove him from the ballot by covering his name with stickers, which officials said would be a herculean task.The state’s law prohibits the removal of a nominee’s name from the ballot, stating that “any person who files nomination papers and qualifies to appear on the ballot may not decline nomination”, with the only exception being in the case of that candidate’s death.Similarly, in Michigan, officials said that Kennedy’s request would be impossible to fulfill, requiring counties reprint and distribute new ballots, which would cause delays.Kennedy’s arguments to have his named removed from swing state ballots run contrary to his assertions in a New York case, where he fought to remain on the ballot after he was disqualified for listing a friend’s address as his residence.The highest court rejected an emergency appeal to remove Robert F Kennedy Jr, a third-party presidential candidate that has dropped out of the race and endorsed Donald Trump, from the ballots in Wisconsin and Michigan.Kennedy wanted to have himself remove from the ballots in these key swing states, arguing that keeping him on would violate his first amendment rights. But with early voting already under way, Wisconsin and Michigan said that removing him from the ballot now would be impossible.It is unclear how Kennedy’s presence on the ballot will affect the election, and whether it will rob votes from Trump.At the business roundtable in Pennsylvania, a woman from Puerto Rico who worked as a Medicare provider asked Trump about his plans for the health program.The campaign’s emphasis on the questioner’s Puerto Rican heritage was, no doubt, a way to manage the fallout from a comedian’s racist comments about the island during Trump’s rally this weekend. She told the former president that Puerto Ricans stand behind him.“I think no president said more for Puerto Rico than I have,” Trump responded, noting that the administration had approved aid for the island after Hurricane Maria. (It’s worth noting that his administration “unnecessarily” delayed $20bn in aid to Puerto Rico due to bureaucratic obstacles, according to an internal review)The roundtable is being hosted by Building America’s Future, an Elon Musk-funded Super Pac that has been putting out misleading campaign ads about Harris.At a business roundtable in Pennsylvania, where he was billed to discuss issues impacting senior citizens, Donald Trump is repeating a stump speech about migrants at the US border.He told the crowd of supporters that he doesn’t believe polls showing that the economy and inflation are the top issues for voters. “I think this is the biggest senior issue,” Trump said about migration. “They’re destroying our country, they’re ruining our country,” he said of migrants.As his campaign seeks to manage the fallout from this Madison Square rally, where a comedian’s racist joke about Puerto Rico has unleashed angry backlash, Trump has not scaled back any of the anger, vitriol or racist rhetoric that has been at the core of his message to voters.In his rambling comments, Trump also touched on transgender rights, lying that Democrats “want transgender operations for almost everybody in the world”.Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.The Washington Post has not commented on the reported numbers.The famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said on Tuesday he disagreed with the paper’s decision, adding that the outlet was “an institution reporting about Donald Trump and what he’s done and supported by the editorial page”.Bezos framed the decision as an effort to support journalists and journalism, noting that in “surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress”.But in this election year, he noted, the press had fallen below Congress, according to a Gallup poll.“We have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working,” he wrote.In her remarks this evening, Kamala Harris is also expected to say that returning Trump to power will bring “more chaos” and “more division”.“I offer a different path,” she will say, in a speech dedicated to the still-undecided slice of US voters. “And I ask for your vote.”Harris will pledge to “seek common ground and commonsense solutions”.“Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table,” Harris is expected to say.The Democrat has built a broad coalition that includes conservative anti-Trump Republicans such as Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman and her father, the former vice-president Dick Cheney.“I pledge to be a President for all Americans,” Harris will say, “to always put country above party and above self.”Kamala Harris will warn that Donald Trump is “unstable”, “obsessed with revenge” “consumed with grievance” and “out for unchecked power” during her speech at the Ellipse on Tuesday night, according to excerpts of her remarks released by the campaign. “Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. That’s who he is,” she will say. “But America, I am here tonight to say: that’s not who we are.”Harris is attempting to cast herself as a unifying figure who will work for “all Americans” as president, regardless of who they voted for in the November election, drawing a sharp contrast with Trump who has threatened a campaign of retribution against his political enemies. It’s a similar approach Biden took in the waning days of the 2020 election, but healing the tribalism and polarization proved elusive.Harris suggests that her election would “turn the page” on the Trump era entirely, though there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that Trump would accept his defeat and retreat from the national stage.At his press conference, Steve Bannon also flirted with the idea that Democrats would try to steal the 2024 election from Trump.He also continued to deny the results of the 2020 election, though there is no credible evidence of misconduct that undermines the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.“Were going to have a reprise of 2020 where they’re going to do everything humanly possible to nullify” Trump’s victory and “delegitimize his second term”.“The working-class people in this country that support Donald John Trump are not going to let that happen.”“The 2020 election was stolen,” Bannon said later.During a question-and-answer session, some sort of apparent interloper – it was unclear whether this was a comedian or performance artist or someone else entirely – asked Bannon: “When’s the next insurrection, and can we storm the Burger King after this?”This person appears to have been escorted out of the press conference.At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, about 12 hours after his release from prison, Steve Bannon railed against Democrat Nancy Pelosi, attorney general Merrick Garland and Harris, again claiming that he was a “political prisoner”.“The system is broken,” he said, claiming the justice department was “weaponized” to punish Trump supporters and gut his popular podcast, in an effort to thwart Maga’s influence.Bannon also claimed that he met a lot of “working class minorities” behind bars, saying he listened to, and learned from, them. They disliked Harris, he claimed, referring to the former prosecutor as the “queen of mass incarcerations”.Doubling down on his War Room statements this morning, where Bannon insisted that prison had empowered him, he also said: “Nancy Pelosi, suck on that.”Bannon also thanked the prison for giving him the opportunity to teach civics to about 100 students, noting that he had Puerto Rican and Dominican students. Bannon discussed his encounters with people of color at several points today, in an apparent effort to deflect anti-Latino commentary from Trump supporters.Nearly 3.2 million voters have cast ballots in the 2024 general election in North Carolina as of Tuesday at noon.The North Carolina state board of elections made the announcement on Tuesday, adding that 3.2 million voters represents a turnout of 40.7% of registered voters in the state.Just over 3m of the votes were cast in-person, and about 170,000 were cast via mail in ballot.Through the end of the day on Monday, more than 2.9 million voters had cast ballots in person during the first 12 days of the early voting period, which the elections officials said was an increase of 11.9% compared with 2020.Interestingly, turnout in the 25 western North Carolina counties affected by Hurricane Helene continue to outpace statewide turnout, the election board added.Jennifer Lopez will join Kamala Harris at a rally in Las Vegas on Thursday, the Harris campaign has announced.Lopez will speak on the importance of voting, what’s at stake for the country with this election, and why she is endorsing Harris and Tim Walz, the Harris campaign said.Mexican pop band Maná, will also perform at that rally.Grammy-winning Puerto Rican artist, Bad Bunny, posted a video on his Instagram on Tuesday in celebration of Puerto Rican culture.The post comes in response to the insulting remarks made at Donald Trump’s rally on Sunday against the island, where a comedian called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”.Bad Bunny’s eight-minute long video, posted to his more than 45 million followers on Tuesday, is captioned “garbage” and highlights Puerto Rican culture, history and people over inspirational music.On Sunday, Bad Bunny, whose official name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, signalled his support for Kamala Harris, sharing a video of the vice-president on his Instagram just moments after the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made the remarks about Puerto Rico at the Trump rally.Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of the pro-immigration group America’s Voice, said the speakers at Trump’s rally on Sunday makes clear that his nativist movement will never see “Latinos or immigrants are real Americans.”Cárdenas pointed to comments made by Stephen Miller, an influential immigration adviser to Trump. Speaking at the same Sunday rally, Cardenas pointed to Miller’s declaration: “America is for Americans and Americans only.”“These words reveal their thinking. In their eyes we are not real Americans, and as far as Trump and his team are concerned, we will never be,” she said. “It foreshadows the sort of administration they would run.”Puerto Ricans are heavily concentrated in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Georgia but they have a presence in all 50 states Hispanic leaders and Activists said on a call on Tuesday responding to the racist remark about Puerto Rico made at Trump’s rally on Sunday. Alex Gomez, executive director of LUCHA based in Arizona, said there were approximately 64,000 Puerto Ricans living in the state, which was decided by 10,000 votes in 2020.“Trump is showing us who he is,” Gomez said. “This is our warning signal of the types of policies and what he and the people that follow him believe and so our communities are not going to stand for that.”She said her organization has a goal of knocking on 500,000 doors before election day, next Tuesday.“We will make sure that our communities know what he has said,” she said.A racist remark about Puerto Rico made at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday was the “October surprise for the Latino community”, said Gustavo Torres, head of CASA in Action, a Latino and immigrant organization.Torres said his organization would work to inform Latino voters every day for the next week until election day. Trump, he said, “humiliate[s] and … underestimate[s] the Puerto Rican Community and the Latino community.”Polls suggest Trump has made notable inroads with Latino voters, particularly men and young people, despite his persistent attacks on immigrant communities and his pledge of mass deportations. The Hispanic leaders and activists on Tuesday’s call predicted a backlash that could cost Trump not only his support among Latinos but possibly the election.“We are going to see what is going to happen on November 5,” Torres told reporters on Tuesday.“Until he apologises and directly disavows those comments, it will leave a stain of racism and bigotry on him and his campaign for the Latino community,” said Janet Murguia, President, UnidosUS Action Fund. “If he understands the importance of Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania and Georgia in particular, it would be in his interest to at least make that effort.”Puerto Rico’s Largest Newspaper, El Nuevo Día, has endorsed Kamala Harris for President as of Tuesday morning.“On Sunday, continuing a pattern of contempt and misinformation that Donald Trump has maintained for years against the eight million of us American citizens who are Puerto Ricans, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe insulted us during a Republican Party event by referring to Puerto Rico as ‘an island of garbage in the ocean’” the statement from the newspaper reads.It continues, “Is that what Trump and the Republican Party think about Puerto Ricans? Politics is not a joke and hiding behind a comedian is cowardly.”The newspaper said that Trump “has for years maintained a discourse of contempt and misinformation against the island” pointing out the time Trump, as president, threw paper towels into a crowd after Hurricane Maria, “while we suffered without electricity for months.”Later in the lengthy piece, the newspaper asks readers, “Is this the great America we want?”.“On Sunday, as insults rained down on Puerto Rico, the Democratic candidate offered a message of hope, promising to maintain the interagency group dedicated exclusively to strengthening and creating new opportunities” the piece states.In its conclusion, the newspaper writes: “today we urge all those who love our beautiful island, the land of the sea and the sun, not to lend their vote to Donald Trump. To all Puerto Ricans who can vote in this upcoming United States election and represent those of us who cannot: Vote for Kamala Harris.”Former Michigan GOP Chair Rusty Hills has spoken out against Trump in a new opinion piece in the Detroit Free Press published on Tuesday.In the article, titled ‘Trump’s no Gerald Ford. He’s not even George W Bush’ Hills outlines the ways in which Trump is different from former Republican candidates for president.Hills pointed to Trump’s character, rhetoric, offensive insults toward political opponents, praise of Russia, and language regarding immigrants, among other differences he sees between Trump and former GOP candidates.He then asks the readers:
      Why would any Republican in Michigan who voted for Gerald Ford – or Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush or George W Bush, Sens. John McCain or Mitt Romney – ever cast a ballot for someone like Donald Trump?
      Hills, who teaches at the Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, then writes:
      The answer is clear – they shouldn’t.
      New polls show Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by one percentage point in Arizona, and Trump leading Harris in Nevada by the same margin.In the polls, published by CNN and conducted by SSRS polling between 21 October and 26 October, Harris received 48% support in Arizona among likely voters, while Trump received 47%.In Nevada, Trump received 48% support among likely voters, and Harris received 47%.It is important to point out that these numbers are within the margins of error for these polls. More

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      JD Vance hits out at critics over Trump ‘fascist’ claim

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      JD Vance hit back at those who say Donald Trump is a fascist, accusing Kamala Harris and her allies of disrespecting second world war veterans as he campaigned on Tuesday in one of the most hotly contested regions of battleground Michigan.A week before the election that will decide the next occupant of the White House and control of Congress and state legislatures nationwide, Democrats have increasingly argued that Trump – who has baselessly insisted that his 2020 election loss was fraudulent and recently proposed unleashing the military against his political opponents – is a follower of the far-right philosophy associated with Adolf Hitler.They have been aided in making their case by Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly, who last week said his former boss fitted the definition of a fascist, and by Trump’s Sunday evening rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, where Trump spent considerable time unleashing vitriol against immigrants and “the enemy from within”, as he describes his political opponents.Speaking at a recreational center in Saginaw, the seat of a central Michigan county of the same name that narrowly voted for Trump when he won the state in 2016, and then broke for Biden when he reclaimed it four years later, Vance sought to turn the tables on Democrats.“Look, politics is politics. I volunteered for this job – criticize me, attack me, insult me, it’s what I signed up for. But don’t you dare insult the brave Americans who are fighting for this movement. Don’t attack the voters of the United States of America. That’s what Kamala Harris is doing,” he said.

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      Vance turned to the Madison Square Garden rally, avoiding mention of warm-up act Tony Hinchcliffe describing Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage”, comments that have sparked fury among Latinos, a key voter group. Instead, he called the event “an incredible thing”, then decried how Democrats have compared it to a gathering of Nazis, such as the one held by American Hitler supporters in 1939.“I think it’s disgusting … and a person who would close out her campaign by running and attacking her fellow Americans has no business leading the greatest nation on Earth,” Vance said. Noting the presence of a war veteran who had led the pledge of allegiance at his event in Saginaw, Vance said: “It occurs to me that when they attack us as Nazis, it’s so disgraceful, because there are people in this room right now who have grandparents, who have parents, or who they themselves fought in world war two.”Last week, Harris said she agreed that Trump is a “fascist” and accused him of seeking “unchecked power”. The vice-president is searching for an edge in a race for president that, by all accounts, appears tied, with polls of Michigan and other swing states showing her neck-in-neck with the former president.Later on Tuesday, Harris is set to make what her campaign has billed as her closing argument to the American people from a park near the White House where Trump addressed his supporters before they attacked the US Capitol on January 6.Harris’s pitch to voters has centered on warnings that Trump is unfit for the presidency, and on promises to build an “opportunity economy” that would see the US government promote cutting-edge technologies and help Americans afford down-payments on their homes and care for their children and elders.Trump, by contrast, has described America as a country “destroyed” by foreign influence, from the undocumented migrants who have entered from Mexico to the manufacturers have have moved jobs overseas. Speaking in Saginaw, a medium-sized city that, like so many in Michigan and across the upper midwest, saw its manufacturing-centered economy collapse decades ago, Vance likened the struggles of American soldiers against Nazis to Trump’s own quest to win the presidency.“[Do] you think that the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy did it to give taxpayer-funded sex changes to illegal aliens? Do you think that the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy did it to ship all of our good manufacturing jobs off to China? Do you think the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy did it for a president who wants to open the American southern border?” Vance asked. “I don’t think so.” More

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      Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden: the ultimate daddy projection screen | V (formerly Eve Ensler)

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      I went to the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Or I tried to. I wanted to see it, to feel it, to know it. I spent two hours smushed in a crowd of thousands, waiting in the cold, unable to move, in the midst of belligerent conversations, alcohol consumption, rantings and racist posturings. There were older Jewish men, Black families, Asian couples and young Latina women. I heard south Asian men calling Kamala Harris hateful slurs, others saying women needed to just shut up and listen to men. I saw working men showing off their jackets with artistic renderings of Trump as bullfighter slaying the deep state dragon. What I mainly heard and felt was grievance.I’ve always thought America was a mean place. And what I mean by that is that it’s structured for meanness. It’s a place of winners and losers, people who matter and those who can be disposed of, a country built on violent theft of Indigenous lands and hundreds of years of enslavement of millions of Black people. It’s a place where when a person rises in status, they show it off to those who have less, rather than bringing them along. Where the rich and famous flaunt their wealth and clothes and fabulous lives every single day, and watching is a national past time. A place where most people get lost or abandoned, forgotten or judged. Where an ambitious few can turn that suffering into gold, but most get swallowed in self-hatred and despair.We’re almost 250 years into this American experience and I would say the one common thing that this patriarchal racist capitalism has wrought is a primal insecurity that what you have can easily be taken away and who you are can be suddenly and forever erased.And that insecurity is the rub.For when fascists come, when those narcissistic tyrannical daddy figures arrive looking bigger than life, they instinctively know how to manipulate that insecurity. They usually do it by creating a class of people or a group of people who are less, who are othered, making the majority feel special, superior and safe. It’s the oldest, but most effective trick in the fascist handbook. Externalize the abstract self-hatred and insecurity, turn it into a real enemy and blame everything on them.This demonization was over the top at Madison Square Garden. Whether it was a comedian talking about Puerto Rico “as a floating island of garbage” or suggesting Jews were cheap and Palestinians were rock throwers, or Tucker Carlson deriding Harris – the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father – with a made-up identity saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor to ever be elected president”. Or for that matter almost every speaker mispronouncing Kamala’s name.Then there was Trump rambling on and on for almost an hour, calling those seeking refuge and survival savages, animals, horrible people occupying America, invading it, as if he’d forgotten that except for the Indigenous people who were here and the African Americans who were dragged here in chains, every single other person is an immigrant who came in search of survival, safety and a new life.I’ve always somehow understood the banal evil of Donald Trump. It goes back as far as 1989. That was around the time he was turning a 14-story apartment building in New York City into luxury condos for the rich, attempting to force tenants out of the building by turning off hot water and heat in the middle of winter. We organized an event called Brunch at the Plaza and invited Trump, who at the time owned the hotel. We bussed in hundreds of homeless people and served them brunch on the Plaza lawn. The demand was simple. Give 1.3% of your net income to specific organizations developing housing for the poor. Trump did not attend. Cut to 2015. Months before he declared he was running for office, with a few activists, we invited people to my apartment to see if we could launch Stop Hate Dump Trump. A campaign to stop him from getting traction running for president. Many told us we were crazy and extreme, they told us that no one would ever take that buffoon seriously.Perhaps my own childhood with that same kind of narcissistic, abusive, seductive father was what gave me eyes to see Donald Trump, to understand that he was not necessarily dangerous in what he was (if you emptied that piggy bank nothing would be inside), he was dangerous for what he wasn’t – a shiny American hologram, an all too familiar dream or daddy just out of reach, totally disassociated except when he suddenly exploded with disappointment and rage. This daddy has come home indeed, home to roost, home to turn the house into chaos and terror, home to compare his children with one another so there’s always someone on top and someone stuck on the bottom, creating violent competition and hatred among his children so they never learn cooperation and solidarity, but fight instead with each other for his approval.All night long Trump’s surrogates spun us into an opposite world. They spoke of Trump as a man of peace and love, you know, one of the flawed ordinary people like most of us, an endless victim who has survived lawsuits and impeachment, being thrown off Twitter with no mention of a reason why any of this might have happened. Truth that night was as dispensable as the lives of immigrants, pregnant women, trans kids, critical race theory and our nation’s history. There’s plenty of blame to go around for how we got here. A racist colonialist history that has never been reckoned with, the Democrats settling for the most rudimentary approach to identity politics rather than seeing it as an entryway to an intersectional analysis of race and class. The list goes on.We are a nation of the lonely and abandoned, desperate for belonging and worth. Many have been seduced by Trump. They can’t believe this rich mogul and TV celebrity would actually care about them. And they’re right because there is absolutely no indication that he would ever invite most of the people in the New York crowd to his mansion or golf club. Remember reports of him talking of his followers as “basement dwellers”. He told the packed house on Sunday night that he could be sunning himself on the beach or playing golf at Turnberry in Scotland, but he chose to be there with them as if the act of running for president was the highest form of altruism and not a total power grab. Oh dear generous daddy.But there’s always the real story lurking on the edges, always the corruption and theft and dirty deals, always the sexual violence. A man told a woman I was with that she didn’t look like a typical Trump type. She was an older woman, he said, and most older women don’t like Trump. My friend asked him why he thought that was and he said something about it having to do with sexuality and my friend asked: “You mean because Trump’s a rapist?”But in a land of mirages and heroin dreams, he’s the daddy projection screen. Terror and protector. Killer and fixer. Longed-for object and rapist. In the end thousands of us didn’t get into the Garden. In hindsight I realize I wouldn’t have lasted a minute before getting found out. I wouldn’t have been able to handle the metastasized energy of a nationalistic, racist, misogynist mob in service of its daddy lord.As we walked away, Rudy Giuliani, a major felon and disgrace, barking madness on the jumbotron, a young woman doing an enthusiastic cheerleading act for “daddy Don” with red pompoms, I know more deeply than ever that it’s not enough to get rid of Trump, although that will be a very good thing. We have to devote ourselves to changing the conditions that gave birth to him.

      V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls More