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This week a rush of new stories and allegations came out about Donald Trump with the publication of two new books. Jonathan Freedland talks to Richard Wolffe about why it’s important to keep talking about the former president
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Fight to voteTexasRepublicans are about to lose Texas – so they’re changing the rulesFor years, Fort Bend county was a Republican bastion, but recently it has become more politically competitive as local organizers work against gerrymandering
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The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkThu 30 Sep 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 30 Sep 2021 11.45 EDTSign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,A few months ago, on the verge of the once-a-decade redistricting cycle, my editors and I started brainstorming how I could best write about the partisan manipulation of the boundaries for electoral districts – known as gerrymandering.Over the last few years, there’s been a growing awareness of what gerrymandering is and how it undermines people’s votes. But the process can be complex and confusing. We sought to find stories that would make gerrymandering tangible. What are the kinds of places that are going to get gerrymandered this year? And what are the consequences for communities that get carved up for political gain?Yesterday we published a story focused on Fort Bend county, Texas, which is just outside of Houston, that gets at both of these questions. I chose Fort Bend because it’s a place that almost perfectly encapsulates the political and demographic changes happening across the country. The county has exploded in population over the last decade, growing almost 40%, and it is extremely diverse, split nearly evenly between white, Black, Asian and Hispanic people. For years, the county was a Republican bastion, but recently it has become more politically competitive. Democrats flipped several seats at the county level in 2018, the same year Beto O’Rourke carried it in his failed US Senate run. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden also won the county.embedNabila Mansoor, a local organizer, told me it was exasperating to work against the wall of Republican gerrymandering. She pointed to two recent elections that Democrats lost in gerrymandered districts that she thought they should have been able to win. And it’s hard to get people to pay attention.“Trying to get the community to get really into this fight that is really kind of a political fight for our future has really been a kind of tough sell. No matter how hard we work. No matter how many voters we get out, no matter how hard we work, no matter how many new voters we get into the fold, that really our vote doesn’t count,” she said.Earlier this month, I spent a few hours one afternoon going door-to-door registering voters with Cynthia Ginyard, the energetic chair of the local Democratic party chairwoman. With a flood of new people moving in, Ginyard has made it a personal mission to make her party as inclusive as possible.“People ask me what’s my magic secret and I say ‘open my arms’,” Ginyard said as she bounded up the doorway of one house. “When I have functions and I have meetings, and everyone in the room is Black, I’ve got a problem. Because that is not Fort Bend.”embedDespite all of the change, almost everyone I spoke with recognized that Republicans would probably reconfigure the district lines this year to help them hold on to power. I was taken aback when Dave Wasserman, a senior editor at the Cook Political Report, told me that Republicans could transform the 22nd congressional district in Fort Bend from one that Trump won by about 1 percentage point in 2020 to one that he would have won by more than 20 points. Republicans, he said, could just cut out the most Democratic parts of the county and lump them in with already-Democratic districts in Houston. They would then probably replace those voters with Trump-friendly rural voters elsewhere. “That’s pretty easy to do,” he told me.On Monday, Republicans unveiled a congressional plan that does exactly that. Their proposed plan excises Democratic-leaning areas near Sugar Land and attaches two counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump to the 22nd congressional district. If the 2020 election were run under the new boundaries, Trump would have carried the district by 16 points, according to Planscore, a tool that evaluates the partisan fairness of districts.Non-white voters accounted for 95% of the population growth in Texas over the last decade the census found. But the congressional map Republicans unveiled on Monday actually has one less Hispanic majority district (the current one has eight) and zero Black-majority districts (the current one has one).The Fort Bend county Republican party didn’t respond to multiple interview requests, but I spoke to Wayne Thompson, a Republican who served as an elected constable in the county, to better understand how the politics were changing. “I think the party as a whole did not reach out to people maybe that talked different than we did and looked a little different than we did. I don’t think that’s a prejudice thing. I think that’s just a severe error,” he said.Also worth watching …
A partisan review of the 2020 election in Arizona failed to produce any evidence of fraud. Conspiracy theorists aren’t backing down and several other states are embracing similar partisan reviews.
Michigan Republicans are moving ahead with a petition drive to go around the state’s Democratic governor and enact new voting restrictions.
Please continue to write to me each week with your questions about voting rights at sam.levine@theguardian.com or DM me on Twitter at @srl and I’ll try to answer as many as I can.TopicsTexasFight to voteUS politicsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More
OpinionUS politicsArizona’s recount didn’t find more Trump votes. But Republicans got what they wantedDavid LittThe sham audit actually increased Biden’s vote. But Arizona Republicans’ goal was never to overturn the last election – it was to lay the groundwork for overturning the next one Thu 30 Sep 2021 09.32 EDTLast modified on Thu 30 Sep 2021 10.39 EDT“Humiliation.” “Embarrassment.” “Trump a Bigger Loser than First Thought.”Last week, the Arizona Republicans’ sham election “audit” ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Launched in April to help Donald Trump legitimize his false claims of voter fraud, the review of Phoenix-area ballots was – even by its own low standards – an incompetent mess. For months, would-be sleuths chased bizarre conspiracy theories, wasted taxpayer dollars and compromised private voter information. When the results were finally announced last week, they revealed that Joe Biden had not only won Arizona, but had in fact won it by an even larger margin than previously reported.Not exactly what big lie believers were hoping for.But the majority of Americans, those who reject the big lie, shouldn’t celebrate just yet. While the sham audit failed to substantiate Trump’s false fraud claims, Arizona Republicans’ goal was never really to overturn the last election – it was to lay the groundwork for overturning the next one. And it still may do just that.To understand why the Arizona “audit” remains so dangerous to American democracy despite its lackluster results, it’s important to recognize that after leaving office, Trump and his fellow big liars have been far less interested in looking for evidence of non-existent fraud than in sowing doubt about our general system of elections. By that standard, the audit was far from a failure. Nearly a year after their state’s vote was first counted, Arizona Republicans were able to use the pretext of protecting “election integrity” to avoid fully conceding defeat. In doing so, they undermined a central element of the peaceful transfer of power – the idea that the losers of elections acknowledge the winners’ legitimacy.At the same time, the Arizona Republican party’s fake election audit could undermine the credibility of real ones. Audits are an important tool for election officials – they help us understand the electorate and identify administrative issues, such as long lines, that can reduce access to the ballot. Most states conduct audits, and they’re one reason that, contrary to Trump and his allies’ wild claims, election fraud is extremely rare and difficult to get away with.Impartially conducted recounts play a similarly important role in extremely close elections – and historically, the votes initially left uncounted are disproportionately cast by younger or more sporadic voters, who tend to support Democrats. If a close race results in a recount in 2022, or if a Trump-affiliated election official commits fraud on Republicans’ behalf, the Republican party will probably point to Democrats’ condemnation of the Arizona “audit” to attempt to delegitimize any genuine effort to protect the integrity of elections.Finally, the Arizona audit has revealed that yet another norm of American democracy is supported by nothing more than both parties’ good faith. A year ago, despite then President Trump’s barrage of false fraud claims, it would have been hard to imagine that one of our two political parties could spend millions of taxpayer dollars attacking its own election and face no consequences whatsoever. Yet that’s where we are today.It’s no surprise, then, that Republican elected officials are pushing the envelope even further. Some Arizona Republicans are demanding even more taxpayer-funded audits, and Republican politicians outside the state are demanding equally spurious “audits” of their own. In Colorado, a county election clerk is suspected of going one step further, helping accomplices break into her own office to steal voter data for a vigilante ballot review. Across the country, volunteer election workers are facing unprecedented harassment and even death threats, just for doing their jobs.Morally speaking, it’s reprehensible that Trump and his Republican allies have doubled down on the big lie. As a practical matter, however, why would they stop now? If their strategy works, they might be able to hold on to power without having to worry about voters or elections. And if their strategy fails, there so far appears to be no cost to them.There would, however, be an enormous cost to America. There is now a new norm in US politics: if Republicans lose a close election, they will not recognize the winner until they are, by whatever arbitrary metrics they come up with, satisfied with the integrity of the result. We are careening toward a system of government in which elections are never settled and politicians are allowed to keep competing for power long after the final results are in. In such a system of government, politicians like Donald Trump would be free to seek power through means other than elections – and after 6 January, it’s not hard to imagine what form those means might be.But it’s not too late to turn Arizona’s sham audit into the spectacular failure that Donald Trump and his fellow big liars deserve. Democrats should not hesitate to tie the sham audit’s supporters directly to the violence of 6 January and to make it clear how much their reckless crusade cost taxpayers. Right now, Republican politicians undermine confidence in our elections because they think it will help them maintain power; if the incentives change, their behavior will, too.The Biden administration can also do its part to ensure that undermining elections comes with consequences. The Department of Justice should never be used as a political weapon – but if politicians commit federal crimes in an effort to overturn a fair and free election, they should be fully prosecuted. To do anything less would be to suggest that elected officials are above the law. Lawmakers can discourage sham audits by making it a crime to knowingly spread false election information, while local election officials can do more to publish their audit and recount rules in advance, drawing a clear distinction between genuine election-protection measures and the kind of dangerous political stunts embraced by Trump and his Republican allies.Ultimately, however, the single most important thing we can do in the face of an unprecedented threat to democracy is resist the temptation to ignore it. Republican politicians failed to overturn an election this time around, but they certainly don’t seem embarrassed. On the contrary, democracy’s opponents are acting more brazen than ever, and appear more confident that next time they’ll succeed. It’s up to us to take them seriously – and in doing so, to prove them wrong.
David Litt is an American political speechwriter and New York Times bestselling author of Thanks Obama, and Democracy In One Book Or Less. He edits How Democracy Lives, a newsletter on democracy reform
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AfghanistanBlame-shifting over US withdrawal ignores deeper failings in AfghanistanAnalysis: Senators’ questions to military leadership a contest in sharing out responsibility for failures Julian Borger in WashingtonTue 28 Sep 2021 18.52 EDTLast modified on Tue 28 Sep 2021 19.02 EDTThe deeply partisan US Congress is rarely a conducive place for national introspection and Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal did not provide an exception.In the midst of the point-scoring and blame-shifting on display in the senators’ questions to the nation’s military leadership, it was clear that it was a contest to apportion shares in failure.And behind the debacle of the pullout that left tens of thousands of vulnerable Afghans behind, there were fleeting references to the far deeper failure of the preceding two decades – a reckoning that has only just begun for the Pentagon and the US foreign policy establishment.US Afghanistan withdrawal a ‘logistical success but strategic failure’, Milley saysRead moreFor obvious reasons, the Republicans on the armed services committee sought to keep the focus on the past eight months, accusing Joe Biden of surrendering to terrorists, throwing in occasional demands for the immediate resignation of the three military leaders sitting before them: the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, the head of Central Command, Gen Kenneth McKenzie and the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin.The three witnesses, nudged from time to time by the Democrats, would occasionally point out that the surrender in question truly began in February 2020, with the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban in Doha.In return for a US withdrawal by 1 May this year, the Taliban agreed to seven conditions, but as Gen Milley pointed out, they only stuck to one of them: not to attack the departing Americans. Every other undertaking, such as entering into good-faith negotiations with Kabul and breaking ties with al-Qaida, the Taliban had reneged on. But Trump nonetheless sought to accelerate the withdrawal, at one point demanding it be completed by January.The Republicans barely mentioned the Doha agreement, preferring to frame the withdrawal as Biden’s original idea. It was hardly surprising. Over the past four years, the party has become accustomed to cognitive dissonance. The one backhanded Republican reference to Doha came from Thom Tillis who asked why Biden had stuck to Trump’s bankrupt deal.“I don’t buy the idea that this president was bound by a decision made by a prior president,” Senator Tillis said. “This was not a treaty. And it was clearly an agreement where the Taliban were not living up to it. President Biden could have come in, reasserted conditions and completely changed the timeline.”The answer the White House has given is that the Doha agreement gave the Taliban considerable momentum, boosting their morale, destroying Afghan government self-confidence, and freeing 5,000 Taliban fighters. Reneging on the deal by a new administration would have meant a return to war with far higher stakes, and probably tens of thousands of soldiers.Milley, McKenzie and Austin, however, took a different route in their testimony. They confirmed that in the policy of review in February, March and April, they had advocated retaining a small force of about 2,500.They were not questioned on how such a remnant could have withstood a resumption of direct attacks from an invigorated Taliban. Instead the focus of many of the exchanges centred around Biden’s baffling insistence in an ABC News interview on 19 August that he had received no such advice from his military advisers.The three witnesses tried to get around this awkwardness by saying that while they had believed a small force should have been retained, they could not possibly disclose the nature of their advice to the president.Asked by Senator Tom Cotton if Biden had been speaking the truth, Austin could only squirm and insist the president was “an honest and forthright man”.In his opening statement Austin had sought forlornly to widen the focus from the last few weeks of the US presence in Afghanistan to the preceding two decades and warned: “We need to consider some uncomfortable truths.”Mismatch of mindsets: why the Taliban won in AfghanistanRead more“Did we have the right strategy? Did we have too many strategies?” he asked. So much faith had been put in nation-building that the sudden collapse of the army and the government, and the panicked flight of President Ashraf Ghani “took us all by surprise”. “It would be dishonest to claim otherwise,” Austin said.Milley said the US military would be trying to learn the lessons of the Afghan failure for a long time to come, but he outlined some of his initial thoughts.One of his lessons, the general said, was not to give the enemy a fixed date for your departure as the Doha deal had done, but base it on a set of conditions. Another of Milley’s conclusions was “don’t Americanise the war” and don’t try to build another country’s army as the mirror image of US forces.But as Milley himself conceded, these were lessons that were supposed to have been learned in Vietnam. The Biden White House had been anxious to avoid parting scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975 but that is exactly what happened, in part because those lessons had been forgotten.The deeper question – never likely to be answered, or even asked, in the bearpit of Congress – is why the US has suffered from such recurrent amnesia each time it has gone off to war.TopicsAfghanistanUS CongressJoe BidenDonald TrumpRepublicansDemocratsTalibananalysisReuse this content More
