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      Pennsylvania steel workers, wooed by Harris and Trump, remain skeptical: ‘I don’t trust either one of them’

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      The Monongahela River winds through the tight Mon Valley south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, creating a main artery in the nation’s industrial heart, where the steel and coal industries have driven the region’s economy and shaped political landscapes since the late 19th century.In the weeks preceding the election, the region is once again playing an outsize role in determining the nation’s political future. A controversial Biden-Harris administration plan to kill Pittsburgh-based US Steel’s proposed sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel is viewed in part as an election-year strategy to shore up critical union support in a must-win swing state.On the ground in and around the city, evidence suggests the move may just work – unions oppose the sale and the administration’s position is at the very least maintaining recent Democratic gains in the tug-of-war for swing voters in the nation’s steel capital.Anecdotal evidence and polling point to Harris gaining momentum here.“I’ve learned not to be comfortable with any election because we didn’t think Trump could win in 16 … but I think people are going to vote more common sense this year,” said Keli Vereb, a steelworker union rep and Lincoln borough council member.Unusually in these fractious times, both presidential candidates oppose the deal, backing United Steelworkers International union members across the political spectrum who are determined to thwart a deal they see as a job killer that puts their pensions at risk.Recent memories of supply chain issues have also hardened US resolve to protect vital industries such as steel.Still, politics are omnipresent, and the deal undoubtedly will play a role in determining the next president. It comes eight years after blue-collar workers here defected from the Democratic party en masse when then candidate Hillary Clinton said during a debate that she would put coalminers out of business.Some union leaders say the comment may have cost her Pennsylvania, which Donald Trump won by 0.7%. After four years of pro-labor policies from Joe Biden, the party has begun to win back some who left, and with Trump proposing to block the US Steel sale if he were elected, Democrats risk a 2016 repeat if it is allowed to proceed.“Trump would pounce on them if they let [the sale] go,” said Allen George, a lifelong Democrat who worked in unions adjacent to the steel industry.The companies are making a powerful argument that the deal is vital to US Steel’s survival. US Steel claims it will be forced to cut Pennsylvania jobs and move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh if Biden blocks Nippon’s $14.1bn bid, while it has promised to invest $2.4bn in its facilities if the sale goes through. The company’s “scorched earth” public relations campaign on the factory floors has at least some rank and file supporting the sale, said Bernie Hall, Pennsylvania director for USI.“Some are scared and think: ‘We should just take this and live to fight another day,’ and that’s natural,” Hall said.Many more, however, oppose the sale. The union’s contract is up in 23 months and they fear a Nippon-US Steel would cut jobs, or continue to send them to non-union states. They point to Nippon’s long history of “dumping” steel in the US, which has cratered prices and cost American jobs, and many fear the purchase is a ploy to continue the practice.US Steel’s record of closing factories and failing to keep promises has generated a deep mistrust and disdain for the company, workers told the Guardian on a recent Monday afternoon outside the Harvey Wilner’s pub in West Mifflin, just south of Pittsburgh. They rattled off a list of facilities that have closed over the decades.“Nippon can have at it,” said Barry Fez, who has worked in manufacturing in the region for decades, but, he says, in a few years he expects they will go back on their word.But that sentiment is colliding with Wall Street and Beltway support for the deal. The latter argue that the administration’s protectionist plan would run counter to international trade norms because Japan is an ally and close economic partner.The idea that trade decorum with Japan is more important than Pennsylvania union members’ security drew scoffs from some workers.“And then they’ll wonder why they lost an election,” said Mike Gallagher, a retired union member.‘They lie all the time’Banking legend JP Morgan created US Steel in a mega-merger in 1901. It grew to be the largest US producer, employing more than 340,000 people at its second world war peak. Today, it is a shadow of its former self, has closed many of its Mon Valley facilities, and now employs about 4,000 people, although the company says it indirectly supports 11,000 jobs and generates $3.6bn in economic activity annually.In the face of waning American steel power, the company has looked for a buyer, and many feel a US-Japan alliance makes sense in countering increasing Chinese domination of the industry.But the union is opposed, and in Pennsylvania, 25% of the electorate is unionized, making it a formidable bloc intensely courted by both political parties.Trump in January said he would stop the deal. Biden has said the same, including in a private meeting with steel workers in April, when the president insisted “US steel will stay US-owned”, according to Don Furko, president of Local 1557 in Clairton. “He said he ‘guarantees’ it.”The administration’s decision on whether the deal should be blocked largely lies with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which is made up of Biden’s cabinet members and other appointees. It can veto mergers and acquisitions it finds present a national security risk.CFIUS was expected to issue an opinion on 21 September, but the administration punted until after the election. Union members say they aren’t worried.“President Biden and Vice-President Harris have been pretty clear and they will follow through,” Hall said.Harris has got the message: “US Steel should remain American-owned and American-operated,” she told a rally in Pittsburgh earlier this month.David Burritt, the CEO of US Steel, has warned of consequences if the deal is blocked. He says the company would “largely pivot away” from its blast furnace production in the region, and move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh.“We want elected leaders and other key decision makers to recognize the benefits of the deal as well as the unavoidable consequences if the deal fails,” Burritt said last month.That threat has further inflamed tensions. Furko said it reminds him of his young son flipping over the Monopoly board when he loses: “That’s really what’s going on here – if this deal doesn’t go through, then they’re going to flip over the Monopoly board.”Asked about US Steel’s claims that it will revitalize the region if the sale goes through, workers told the Guardian that there are no guarantees that the investment will be in Mon Valley. People would be “foolish” to believe that, Vereb said.That was echoed outside the Wilner’s pub. Fez recalled the pub’s heyday, when “you couldn’t get in there at 7am because it was so packed”, and the floor was littered with quarter wrappers from the slot machines.On a Monday afternoon around shift change time, a group of about a dozen retirees sat around the bar. They blamed US Steel for the region’s slowdown, and while they say they do not expect Biden or Trump to save the city, they have even less confidence that US Steel and a Japanese company will turn it around.“They lie all the time, and I don’t trust either one of them,” said Jack, a retiree who worked for US Steel for more than 30 years, who declined to use his last name.‘He gets credit for that’The political price that the Biden-Harris administration could pay for allowing the deal to go through can be seen in the 2016 election’s wake.Before 2016, the region was largely Democratic. But when Clinton made the comment about the clean energy industry putting coalminers and barons out of business, “Things turned on a dime,” Vereb said. Her borough of 900 was once about 80% Democrats. It’s now about 75% Republican, she estimates.About 75% of those working at US Steel’s Clairton Mill Works, several union leaders estimate, support Trump, and there is little Democrats can do to win back many of them.The situation is also complicated by US Steel’s intense campaign to convince workers that the sale will save their jobs. The company sends regular emails, holds meetings, takes out ads in newspapers and makes their case to reporters.“They say: ‘If you don’t support us, then we’re gonna shut this place down, and if that happens you can thank your union leadership,’” said Rob Hutchison, president of Local 1219. “When [rank and file] have that threat in their face eight to 12 hours per day, then it starts to become something they think about.”That also presents another political risk: if the Biden-Harris administration were to block the deal, and US Steel shuts down a plant, Democrats may again lose some voters.However, so far, the controversial move seems to be paying dividends.“I don’t know if the average Joe is thinking about CFIUS or is that in the weeds, but I think from a macro level, people see it, that it’s Biden supporting the union workers, and he gets credit for that,” Hall said. More

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      Harris to call for tougher border action on Arizona visit; Trump threatens to prosecute Google for ‘bad stories’ – as it happened

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      Kamala Harris has arrived at the US-Mexico border in Arizona, where the vice-president was briefed by two customs and border protection officials.Harris stepped out of her motorcade on a dusty desert road outside Douglas, Arizona, and shook hands with two men, the Associated Press reported. Harris chatted with the uniformed agents as they walked along the rust-colored border wall in temperatures that neared 100F (38C).The section of the wall Harris is viewing was constructed during Barack Obama’s administration, in 2011-2012, according to the White House pool reporter.Harris’s conversation with the CBP officers was not audible to the pool reporter on scene. A White House official told him that Harris had “heard directly from CBP officials on their efforts to combat traffickers and transnational criminal organizations”.Kamala Harris delivered a speech on immigration policy, laying out the balance she wants to strike: what’s important to her about the US immigration system is that “it works in an orderly way, that it is humane and that it makes our country stronger”.Donald Trump threatened to prosecute Google for “displaying bad stories” about him. In the middle of a busy day of presidential campaign events in Michigan, a key swing state, Donald Trump posted on his social media platform that, if elected president, he plans to prosecute Google for, he alleged, “only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J Trump” while “only revealing Good stories about Kamala Harris”.And, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Alabama for last-minute voter purges. The justice department is suing Alabama for what it alleges is an illegal attempt to remove voters from the rolls too close to November’s election.Here’s what else happened today:

      Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke after his meeting in New York with Donald Trump and said the two men had a “very productive” talk. Ukraine’s president said the two “thoroughly reviewed” the situation in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion more than two-and-a-half years ago, Reuters reports.

      In a video address on Friday, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, spoke of the indictment of three Iranian nationals for their role in a “wide-ranging hacking campaign sponsored by the government of Iran”. Wray said: “These individuals, employees of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, targeted a US political campaign, current and former US officials, and members of the American media, all in an attempt to sow discord and undermine our democracy.”

      Kamala Harris arrived in Tucson, Arizona, from Washington DC for election campaign events, including a visit to the US-Mexico border.

      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are tied among voters in North Carolina, a new poll shows. The CNN poll, released today and conducted from 20 to 25 September, shows Harris and Trump both receiving 48% of support among likely voters in North Carolina.

      Eric Adams, the New York City mayor, pleaded not guilty to corruption charges when he appeared in court in Manhattan. He denies federal bribery and fraud charges. The mayor’s arraignment began just after noon local time at a federal courthouse in New York. It is the first time that a sitting mayor of the city has been charged with crimes.
      After Kamala Harris spoke about her policies related to the southern border during a speech in Douglas, Arizona, the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union representing the US border patrol, said that Harris “has ignored the border problem she created for over three years”.“She goes down there for 20 minutes for a photo op and decides to repeat some of the things the NPBC has said before. But again, where has she been the last 3 1/2 years?” the union wrote on X, repeating a Trump talking point.Google followed up on Donald Trump’s claim that the search engine is illegally using a system to only reveal bad stories about him and good stories about Kamala Harris by issuing a statement:
      Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries,.
      Following up on a report by Fox News, Google continued: “This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”Hugo Lowell in Washington dug into these claims:The progressive advocacy group Center for American Progress Action Fund reacted to Harris’s speech tonight.“Donald Trump’s failed leadership fanned the flames of hate and did nothing to actually fix the problems at the border,” the group posted on X.During her speech, Harris said Trump made the challenges at the border worse.“He separated families, he ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages, and tried to end protection of Dreamers,” Harris said.Here’s some more in-depth reporting from the Associated Press, capturing how the reality of what is happening at the border has changed dramatically in the past few months, even as the political rhetoric (Trump’s in particular) really hasn’t:
      As midnight nears, the lights of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, fill the sky on the silent banks of the Rio Grande. A few months ago, hundreds of asylum-seeking families, including crying toddlers, waited for an opening to crawl through razor wire from Juarez into El Paso.
      No one is waiting there now.
      Nearly 500 miles away, in the border city of Eagle Pass, large groups of migrants that were once commonplace are rarely seen on the riverbanks these days.
      In McAllen, at the other end of the Texas border, two Border Patrol agents scan fields for five hours without encountering a single migrant.
      It’s a return to relative calm after an unprecedented surge of immigrants through the southern border in recent years. But no one would know that listening to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump talking about border enforcement at dueling presidential campaign events. And no one would know from the rate at which Texas is spending on a border crackdown called Operation Lone Star – $11 billion since 2021.
      Read the full Associated Press article here.If you’re looking to put both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s claims about what’s happening at the US-Mexico border in context, this article from August is a good place to start:Here’s how Hamed Aleaziz, a longtime immigration reporter, summed up the substance of Harris’s immigration policy today for the New York Times:
      In a sign of how the politics of immigration have changed, Harris is promoting a policy that resembles a Trump-era effort to ban asylum for those who cross the border illegally. Harris says that she understands that people are desperate to come into the United States, but that the system must be ‘orderly.’
      In the same speech, Harris slammed Trump for separating immigrant children from their families and putting “children in cages”, and called for a gentler rhetoric about immigrants, and a focus on solutions, rather than blame and attacks.Harris is getting big cheers from a Democratic audience as she shifts from talking about tough enforcement and Congress’s failures to pass immigration reform to talking about legal paths to citizenship for immigrants who have been in the US for years, the importance of helping “Dreamers” – undocumented young people who came to the US as children – and the many contributions of immigrant farm workers.Harris is repeating a central part of her immigration rhetoric: that Donald Trump deliberately torpedoed a bipartisan immigration reform bill because “he prefers to run on a problem than fixing a problem.”Harris’s campaign, like the Biden administration previously, is highlighting Mitch McConnell’s own remarks about Trump’s influence on the legislation.The White House has been using this approach to the immigration issue since early this year: “Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system,” Biden said in a statement in early 2024. “If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history.”As Kamala Harris begins her speech on immigration policy, she lays out the balance she wants to strike: what’s important to her about the US immigration system is that “it works in an orderly way, that it is humane and that it makes our country stronger”.Among the people who introduced Kamala Harris, who is beginning her remarks on immigration and border policy, was Theresa Guerrero, a woman from Tucson, Arizona, who has become an activist after her son, Jacob, died of a fentanyl overdose.Trump’s campaign also previously featured remarks, during the Republican national convention, from a parent of a child lost to fentanyl.The Harris campaign is already attacking Donald Trump using a video of his comments from Warren, Michigan, tonight, talking about tariffs and how prosperous the US was in the 1890s.Trump has been making the case for high taxes on imported goods, which Congressional Republicans who oppose tariffs hope they can “water down” if he’s elected, the Washington Post reported yesterday.Mark Kelly, the US senator from Arizona, has been shepherding Harris during her visit to the border town of Douglas on Friday.Kelly began his remarks by sending greetings from his wife, the former Arizona representative Gabby Giffords, setting off a round of cheers for the beloved former representative.He retold the story of negotiating the bipartisan border deal in Congress only to see Trump torpedo the package by pressuring Republican senators to reject it.“This is the most hypocritical thing I’ve seen in three-and-a-half years in Washington,” Kelly said, calling the plan “the deal that Arizona needs”. Harris has vowed to revive the bill, if elected, and said she would have signed it into law.Kelly ended his remarks by saying that the playbook for winning in November was simple: hard work.“This is not rocket science. If it was, I could help,” the former astronaut quipped, as he campaigned for the vice-president.Biden embraced a more Trump-like border policy. Trump still claims Harris is weak.Some context, as we wait for Harris to give a campaign speech in the border town of Douglas, Arizona, where she is expected to call for tougher action at the US border with Mexico:

      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris made criticism of Trump’s harsh immigration policies part of their bid for the White House in 2020. But the Democratic administration has increasingly moved right on immigration, leading to criticisms that, though Biden certainly does not verbally attack and revile immigrants as Trump does, Biden’s actual policy regarding the US-Mexico border made him a kind of Trump 2.0.

      This past June, Biden signed an executive order limiting the number of asylum seekers admitted at the US-Mexico border, a policy that that split Democrats, and that some advocates said “will only cause suffering.” The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued the Biden administration over the policy.

      Since June, migrant crossings have plunged, though Democrats are asking: at what price?

      Harris, who supported decriminalizing undocumented border crossings in 2019 during her brief presidential run, has moved away from that stance in her new campaign, also striking a more law-and-order tone, which she is expected to continue in her border policy speech today.

      In contrast with Biden or Harris, Trump’s current immigration policy is a pledge to carry out “mass deportations”, which he has promised will be the largest in US history. That is expected to include a legally dubious roundup of up to 11 million people, “deployments of military and police units, and the creation of vast detention camps along the southern border”.

      Trump has made political attacks against Harris, blaming her for the border crisis, a central part of his campaign against her. Polls have suggested US voters trust Trump more than Harris on immigration.

      The global picture: in the US, as in the UK and Europe, wealthy democracies have spent decades trying to deter immigrants from coming across their borders to seek a better life by making border crossings increasingly surveilled, militarized and deadly. This has not, broadly speaking, stopped people from continuing to migrate in hopes of finding safer lives for themselves and their families, particularly as wars, climate change and other crises provide reasons to seek asylum elsewhere. But deterrence policies do mean that children and adult attempting to migrate are more likely to die because of the conditions that wealthy countries create at their borders, in hopes of persuading people that it’s too dangerous to migrate.
      A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month found that 43% of voters favored Trump on the issue of immigration and 33% favored Harris, while 24% either didn’t know, chose someone else or declined to answer, Reuters reports.Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s town hall in Warren, Michigan, is running about an hour behind schedule, the New York Times reports. (The Detroit Free Press has a livestream here, should you wish to follow along.)PBS also has a livestream of Kamala Harris’s expected campaign remarks on border policy in Douglas, Arizona, that will go live in about a half-hour.Asked what she had learned from her conversation with customs and border protection officials, Kamala Harris told today’s White House pool reporter:
      They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job. They are very dedicated. And so I’m here to talk with them about what we can continue to do to support them. And also thank them for the hard work they do. More

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      Vance to talk at tour hosted by ‘prophet’ who thinks Harris practices witchcraft

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      JD Vance will speak at an event on Saturday hosted by the self-styled prophet and political extremist Lance Wallnau, who has claimed Kamala Harris practices witchcraft and has written that the US is headed toward bloody internal conflict.The campaign announced earlier this week that the Republican vice-presidential candidate will participate in a “town hall” as part of the Courage tour, a traveling pro-Trump tent revival, during a stop in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.Wallnau, who hosts the tour and broadcasts its speakers on his online show – drawing hundreds in-person and sometimes tens of thousands virtually – is a proponent of the “seven mountains” mandate, which commands Christians to seek leadership in seven key areas of society – the church, the education system, the family, the media, the arts, business and government.He is also a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a movement that features modern-day apostles and has taken hold in particular in non-denominational charismatic churches that embrace faith healing and believe that the Holy Spirit can speak directly through believers in the form of speaking in tongues and prophesy. These religious spaces often also practice “deliverance ministry” and “spiritual warfare” to cleanse people of demonic entities.Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood, a scholar whose research focuses on such groups, noted that NAR-aligned practitioners engage in a unique form of “spiritual warfare” – fighting malign forces in not only individuals who are believed to be inhabited by a malign entity, but also entire geographic areas.“Spiritual warfare is the belief that a demon has taken up residence and is controlling anything from a large geographic space to a culture, to the White House or the supreme court,” said Gaspard-Hogewood.Extremism researchers worry that spiritual warfare, which is by definition waged in the supernatural realm, could become dangerous if interpreted excessively literally. On January 6, spiritual warriors affiliated with the Jericho March rallied at the Capitol to protest against the election results, engaging in a form of spiritual warfare on the National Mall. Wallnau, who himself prophesied that Trump would win the 2016 election and rejected the outcome when he didn’t win again in 2020, doubled down on his position at a stop of the Courage tour in Wisconsin.“January 6 was not an insurrection – it was an election fraud intervention!” Wallnau exclaimed to the roaring crowd.Wallnau has also written in his book, God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J Trump and the American Unraveling, that he believes the United States is headed toward a potentially bloody clash – a “fiery trial” that will come “both to believers and nations”. In his book, in which he also claims to have met with Trump on multiple occasions, Wallnau writes that the US is entering a “crucible”, which will involve “a ‘conflict’ of ideologies, often arms, to determine a victor in the power clash”.The Courage tour has made stops in Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia.The inclusion of Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, in the tour highlights the Trump campaign’s increasing alignment with a movement on the religious right that seeks to subordinate US government and society to Christian doctrine.A typical day at the Courage tour involves faith healing and music in the morning, followed by a series of speakers preaching about the scourge of secular society and espousing their opposition to LGBTQ+ inclusion. Trump-aligned organizations including TPUSA Faith and America First Policy Institute have had a presence on the tour handing out pamphlets and posting up at stands outside the tent.Vance’s speech marks the first time the Trump campaign has officially linked with the tour. In response to a request for comment about Vance’s participation in the Courage tour, a Trump campaign spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, did not directly comment on Wallnau or Vance’s participation in the event, but wrote that neither “President Trump, nor any of his supporters, ever engaged in an alleged ‘insurrection’.”Wallnau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Republicans have long enjoyed the support of conservative, and in particular, evangelical Christians. In 2016, Trump, whose profile as a twice-divorced billionaire who has faced multiple accusations of sexual assault, managed to maintain that alliance by assuring his presidency would represent the Christian right through conservative judicial appointments. Trump made good on his promise, ushering in an ultraconservative supreme court, which in 2022 overturned Roe v Wade – delivering opponents of abortion a stunning win.Since 2020, a burgeoning movement of evangelical leaders who seek to separate the church from Maga politics could threaten that alliance. If Trump is able to hold on to those voters and turn out enough conservative Christians at the polls, he could win back the White House.With its 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania could be a make-or-break state for Harris and Trump. Some polling shows Kamala Harris holding a narrow lead over Trump in the state; other polls suggest the candidates are virtually tied there.Vance’s participation in the Courage tour could alienate some. The campaign is probably betting the support he could shore up from rightwing Christians there will outweigh the risk of appearing at an event with extremist overtones. More

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      Drop boxes and delays: under-fire election office ends up pleasing no one

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      A battleground Pennsylvania county with a history of election errors is facing heavy criticism from activists on both sides of the political spectrum over the way it is running its presidential vote in 2024.Conservative activists, who have dominated recent election board meetings, say the county isn’t processing voter registrations fast enough – something county officials say is simply untrue. Voting rights groups, meanwhile, are furious over a recent decision by the county manager in Luzerne county in the north-eastern part of the state to get rid of ballot drop boxes.A series of high-profile errors in Luzerne county have put its elections under a microscope. In 2020, a temporary employee accidentally threw out overseas mail-in ballots, an episode that Donald Trump used to claim voter fraud. In 2022, the county ran out of paper at some voting locations, an episode that Republicans used to question the results of the election (an investigation attributed the incident to human error). There has also been an extraordinary amount of turnover in the office. The current election director, Emily Cook, is the seventh person to hold the job since the fall of 2019.County officials have spent the last year working to get the county back on track to run a smooth election and regain the trust of voters. But the memory of the errors lingers and any error or delay can become fodder for those seeking to undermine the credibility of the vote – something that could create a volatile scenario if Trump contests the election results this fall.Voter registration is nearly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats in Luzerne county. Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, narrowly won the county in 2022. Donald Trump carried the county by more than 14 percentage points in 2020, a drop from his 20-point margin in 2016 .Scott Presler, a well-known Republican activist who organized events protesting against Trump’s loss in the 2020 election and is now leading an effort to register voters, appeared at a meeting of the county election board on 18 September and accused officials of intentionally delaying the processing of voter registrations. He cited a “reliable source”, but did not provide any more information.“If people are living in Florida and you are backlogged to the point that October 29 comes and mail-in ballots are sent by November 2, those mail-in ballots may not get here by November 5 at 8pm eastern time zone,” he said. Republicans have generally opposed allowing election offices to accept mail-in ballots that arrive after election day, even if the voter put them in the mail beforehand.Romilda Crocamo, the county manager, said the accusation that the county was delaying the processing of voter registrations was false.On Monday, the county said it had 4,101 pending voter registrations. Cook told the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader that the county had made progress on the backlog, but that it shot up before the weekend. The county has brought on 10 additional staff members to help with the backlog, the outlet reported.“I don’t know where those rumors are coming from. They’re not true. We’re on schedule,” Crocamo said in an interview. “We are on task. We will have all the registrations completed by the [21 October] deadline. And to me, it’s just another example that there’s a certain element of people that want us to fail and want us to redirect our resources or our attention to something that really isn’t a problem.”When someone turns in a voter registration application, she said, the county election office reviews the information before it gets verified by different state agencies. That process takes time, Crocamo said.Presler, who did not respond to interview requests, and other activists have been blanketing the county as part of an effort to get Republican voter registrations to outnumber Democratic ones. They succeeded in that goal earlier this week.Some of the registrations that activists are turning in are duplicates, Crocamo said. Others are applications for mail-in ballots – all of which take staff time to sort through and verify.The elections bureau has also been getting hounded with phone calls, inundating the half-dozen or so staff members who answer the phones. Crocamo has approved overtime and sent additional county staff to help.Cook told the Times-Leader that many of the calls appear to be scripted, asking about the backlog in voter registrations, illegal immigrants, voter purging and whether the county ordered enough paper.View image in fullscreenCrocamo is also under fire for a decision last week to eliminate mail-in ballot drop boxes for this fall’s election. The county previously used four drop boxes, but the county doesn’t have the staff to monitor them this fall, she said, and video surveillance “doesn’t prevent something from happening”.“We can’t afford to do it,” she said. “I cannot secure the drop boxes. And, you know, sometimes I have to make difficult decisions. And I know that there are people who feel that they rely on the drop boxes.”Rightwing activists quickly seized on the announcement to support the false claim that drop boxes facilitate voter fraud. The claim was quickly boosted by Elon Musk, who has spread several false claims about elections.Alisha Hoffman-Mirilovich, the executive director of Action Together NEPA, a progressive group, decried the decision to get rid of drop boxes. “We’ve even had members and folks reach out to us to actually say that they feel more, they feel safer going to a drop box than they do their polling location because of threats,” she said.She added that she didn’t think Crocamo had the authority to unilaterally get rid of drop boxes. Elections in the county are jointly overseen by a board of elections, which sets election policy, and the county manager, who reports to the elected county council. The board has supported drop boxes.“Your last-minute unilateral move and unsubstantiated public statements that the drop boxes are not secure elevates a false narrative about mail voting and sows distrust in election administration. It serves only to create chaos in the community,” Marian Schneider, a lawyer with the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a letter to Crocamo, urging her to reverse her decision.On Tuesday evening, In This Together NEPA held a press conference outside the county courthouse urging the restoration of drop boxes. A group of anti-drop box activists stood nearby and shouted over the speakers, making it difficult to hear them at times.One of the speakers was Carole Shearer, 69, who is retired and lives in Butler Township in Luzerne county. Just before the primary election, her grandson had a health emergency that caused her and her husband to have to leave the county.“We dropped everything and drove through the night to provide care for his three-year-old brother. If not for drop box voting in advance of election day, our right to vote would have been forfeited if an instance like this fell on election day. That’s unacceptable,” she said.Hannah Butterwick, another Luzerne county voter, said she relied on drop boxes because she and her one-year-old son were immunocompromised. She was skeptical that safety was a legitimate excuse for getting rid of the drop boxes.“These vague excuses of safety do not make sense. You’ve secured 130 polling locations, but you can’t manage to find a way to secure four drop boxes?” she said. “If security is truly the concern, then a solution should have been found well before now, instead of the total removal of one of our voting options.” More

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      Biden and Harris joined by Parkland school shooting survivor at event on addressing gun violence – US politics live

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      Donald Trump said he would meet with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday morning at Trump Tower.Yesterday, the former president attacked Zlenskyy directly and accused him of “refusing” to negotiate a peace deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. “The president of Ukraine is in our country. He is making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me,” Trump said. “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal: Zelenskyy.”A fued between Trump and Zelenskyy has escalated in recent days, as my colleague Andrew Roth reports:US and European officials have noted with varying levels of alarm the potential for a Trump administration to sharply reduce US aid to Ukraine in order to force Zelenskyy to accept terms for a ceasefire.Asked if the Democrats wanted to “Trump-proof” aid to Ukraine before a potential Trump presidency, a senior state department official said, “I don’t ever talk in those terms” but that the primary goal was to make sure Ukraine “has all the equipment it needs to keep fighting and manpower and other things”.“At the end of the year, regardless of who wins our election in December, as at the end of this fighting season, Zelenskyy and Putin need to look at the battlefield and say, here’s what we think next year will look like,” the official said.“And the primary factor there is, do I think the other side has all the equipment it needs to keep fighting and manpower and other things?”On Wednesday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a Republican, accused Zelenskyy of election interference and demanded he fire his ambassador to Washington over a visit to an ammunitions factory in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Johnson claimed the Ukrainian ambassador had failed to invite any Republicans to the event and called it a “partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats”.Zelenskyy sought to reduce tensions on Thursday as he thanked the US for the new arms package and praised political leaders’ “strong bipartisan support” in “Ukraine’s just cause of defeating Russian aggression”.“I am grateful to Joe Biden, [the] US Congress and both parties, Republicans and Democrats, as well as the entire American people for today’s announcement of major US defence assistance for Ukraine, totalling $7.9bn and sanctions against Russia,” Zelenskyy wrote.Donald Trump said he would meet with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday morning at Trump Tower.Yesterday, the former president attacked Zlenskyy directly and accused him of “refusing” to negotiate a peace deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. “The president of Ukraine is in our country. He is making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me,” Trump said. “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal: Zelenskyy.”A fued between Trump and Zelenskyy has escalated in recent days, as my colleague Andrew Roth reports:The joint appearance of Biden and Harris today highlights Harris’s role overseeing the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.“Over the years, I’ve held the hands of far too many mothers and fathers to try and comfort them after their child was killed by gun violence. And let us all agree, it does not have to be this way,” Harris said. “We know how to stop these tragedies, and it is a false choice to suggest you are either in favor of the second amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away.”The president today is marking the roll-out of an executive order that includes several gun-related measures, including the creation of a task force to assess the threat of machine gun conversion devices.Joe Biden took the podium to chants of “Thank you Joe.”The audience at the White House is full of survivors and the families of those killed by gun violence. Biden was also introduced by Birmingham mayor Randall Woodfin, whose city was rocked by gun violence on Saturday in the Five Points entertainment district. Four people were killed and 17 injured.“I know the scream of a mother when her child is killed. I know that because I heard it from the voice of my own mother when my brother was killed by gun violence,” Woodfin said. “I heard that scream again this past Saturday.”The president and vice president are speaking from the White House, and were introduced by a student who was 15 when a gunman on students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.We’ll follow their remarks.In a characteristically rambling news conference, Donald Trump ripped into Kamala Harris for visiting the border – and unleashed a slew of fiction and fear-mongering about the border and immigrants.Among his claims was that the CBP One app, which people arriving at the US southern border must use to schedule appointment for an asylum screening, was being used by “virtually unlimited numbers of illegals to press a button schedule their illegal immigration appointment at our ports of entry”.Using the app to schedule an asylum screening, is, of course one way to legally immigrate to the US. Seeking asylum is legal.Trump also repeated his fictitious claim about migrants contributing to increased crime, and that crime overall was “up” – dividing ABC’s presidential debate moderators for fact-checking his claims.Here’s my colleague Edward Helmore with more on the actual stats:
      Murder dropped by more than 11% from 2022 to 2023, the largest single-year decline in two decades, according to FBI data released on Monday.
      Meanwhile, the broader category of violent crime nationwide decreased about 3%, said the data, which is audited and confirms earlier reporting from unaudited statistics.
      Monday’s release of audited data contradicts a talking point that Donald Trump has made on the campaign trail as the Republican presidential nominee seeks a return to the White House during the 5 November election: that crime has been rampant and out of control without him in power.
      In its annual Crime in the Nation summary, the FBI said rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%, property crime dropped 2.4% and burglary fell by an estimated 7.6%.
      Some more background:After the 2020 election, Newsmax aired several false claims about the company, whose voting machines were only used in Los Angeles county in 2020. The network repeatedly aired false claims from Trump allies that the software was widely used across the country and that it had been hacked to change votes.Smartmatic sued Newsmax, Fox, One America News Network (OANN) and others for broadcasting their false claims. It settled the case with OANN earlier this year and the Fox case is still pending in New York.Smartmatic said in a statement: “We are very pleased to have secured the completion of the case against Newsmax. We are now looking forward to our court day against Fox Corp and Fox News for their disinformation campaign. Lying to the American people has consequences. Smartmatic will not stop until the perpetrators are held accountable.”First amendment scholars were closely watching the case and several others like it to see whether libel law can be used as an effective tool to police misinformation.The case was set to be a kind of sequel to the defamation litigation between Dominion, another voting machine company, and Fox over 2020 election lies. That case settled just before the trial was set to begin, with Fox agreeing to pay Dominion $747.5m. Eric Davis, the judge who oversaw the Fox case, also was overseeing the Newsmax case.Read the full story here:The voting machine company Smartmatic and the conservative outlet Newsmax have settled a closely watched defamation lawsuit days before it was scheduled to go to trial in Delaware.A spokesperson for the Delaware courts said the case had settled on Thursday. He did not offer additional details.Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Kamala Harris made an appearance together after meeting.Harris emphasized: “Nothing about the end of this war can be decided without Ukraine.”She also referenced, without explicitly mentioning, Donald Trump, who has said that Ukraine should have made concessions to Russian president Vladimir Putin before Russia’s attack:“There are some in my country who would instead force Ukraine to give up large parts of its sovereign territory,” she said. “These proposals are the same as those of Putin. Let us be be clear. They are not proposals for peace. Instead, they are proposals for surrender.”Here’s a look at where things stand:

      New York City mayor Eric Adams was charged in a 57-page federal indictment with crimes relating to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery and receiving campaign contributions by foreign nationals, wire fraud, solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national and bribery. He has maintained his innocence.

      Federal prosecutors called Adams’s alleged misconduct a grave breach of public trust. The US attorney for the southern district of New York Damian Williams strongly criticized the mayor at a press conference a little earlier.

      Williams vowed to continue to investigate the mayor’s case and to “hold more people accountable”. Charges against Adams include bribery, wire fraud and acceptance of illegal foreign campaign contributions including from Turkish government officials. Williams said the mayor “kept the public in the dark”.

      The indictment against Adams includes many luxury trips that were not put in annual disclosure forms, prosecutors say. Trips cost many thousands of dollars and included visiting Turkey and flying via Turkey while visiting countries such as China, India, France, Hungary and Ghana.

      Federal agents raided Adams’s official residence, Gracie Mansion, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the early hours today, as reports emerged of the mayor being hit with a federal indictment. The raid reportedly included a group of nearly a dozen people in suits entering the property, with several carrying briefcases, backpacks or duffel bags.

      Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are meeting at the White House as the Ukrainian president attempts to shore up support for his country’s war aims in its fight against Russia. Before the meeting, Zelenskyy thanked the US president for his support, saying: “Your determination is incredibly important for us to prevail … We must restore normal life, and we greatly value your leadership.”

      Before their meeting, Biden released a statement, saying: “I am proud to welcome President Zelenskyy back to the White House today.” As part of the US’s “surge” in security assistance to Ukraine, Biden has directed the defense department to allocate all of its remaining security assistance funding that has been appropriated for Ukraine by the end of his term. More

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      Rudy Giuliani disbarred in Washington DC over role in Trump election plot

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      Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who built a career as an uncompromising crime-fighter, has been permanently disbarred from practising law in Washington DC in a ruling stemming from his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour.The decision came in the form of a one-page order issued by the US capital’s court of appeal and followed a similar order issued in July in New York, Giuliani’s home state.Unlike that ruling, the decision in Washington was not directly related to his actions in Trump’s election-denying effort but was instead based on his failure to respond to a request that he explain why he should not be subject to the same penalty as meted out in New York.“ORDERED that Rudolph W Giuliani is hereby disbarred from the practice of law in the District of Columbia, nunc pro tunc [a Latin term used in legal parlance to mean retroactive] to August 9, 2021,” Thursday’s appeal court order said.In 2021, the appeals court had suspended Giuliani’s law licence in Washington after being notified of a similar decision in New York.The DC bar’s board of responsibility recommended in 2022 that Giuliani’s law licence be indefinitely revoked after its investigators found him guilty of unethical conduct over inaccurate and unsupported claims he made in testimony to a federal court in Pennsylvania while disputing the 2020 election results.The DC court of appeals order did not hinge on those findings. By contrast, the New York appeals court made similar judgments in issuing its ruling, asserting that Giuliani “repeatedly and intentionally made false statements, some of which were perjurious, to the federal court, state lawmakers, the public … and this Court concerning the 2020 Presidential election”.Ted Goodman, a spokesman for Giuliani called the order “an absolute travesty and a total miscarriage of justice”.“Members of the legal community who want to protect the integrity of our justice system should immediately speak out against this partisan, politically motivated decision,” he said.The order is the latest blow to the standing of a man who was dubbed “America’s mayor” for the leadership role he played in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001, which happened when he was the city’s mayor.Last year, two election workers in Georgia won $148m in damages after he defamed them by accusing them of fraud. A week later he filed for bankruptcy. More

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      The election deniers with a chokehold on Georgia’s state election board

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      A rule passed last week, which bipartisan election officials in Georgia say will delay the counting of votes in November, was introduced by an election denier who appears to believe in various rightwing conspiracies and whose apparent experience in elections dates only to February.The rule – which requires poll workers to hand-count ballots at polling locations – was passed by an election-denier majority on the Georgia state election board on Friday. It was introduced by Sharlene Alexander, a Donald Trump supporter and member of the Fayette county board of elections, who was appointed to her position in February. Alexander’s Facebook page alludes to a belief in election conspiracies, the Guardian has found.Alexander is one of 12 people – all election deniers – who have introduced more than 30 rules to the state election board since May, according to meeting agendas and summaries reviewed by the Guardian. Of those, the board has approved several, including two that give county election officials more discretion to refuse to certify election results, in addition to Alexander’s hand-count rule.Alexander’s lack of experience in elections underscores the recent phenomena of unelected, inexperienced activists in Georgia’s election-denial movement successfully lobbying the state election board to pass rules favored by conspiracists. Democrats, voting rights advocates and some Republicans have said the rules are not just outside the authority of the state election board, but may result in delays in the processing and certification of results.“There is widespread, bipartisan opposition to these anti-voter rule changes and opposition from the local elections officials, as well as experts in the field,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the voting rights group Fair Fight, said in a statement. Groh-Wargo noted that Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, and bipartisan county election officials from across the state as well as former governors Nathan Deal and Roy Barnes have said the recently passed rules are “destroying confidence” in Georgia’s election systems.Raffensperger and other Georgia election officials have warned that Alexander’s rule and the two certification rules “are going to make counting ballots take longer”. Those delays could be used by Trump and Republicans to call results of the election into question, representatives of Raffensperger’s office have said.Anyone can submit a rule to the state election board, but all but one of the 32 rules submitted since May have come from a small but vocal group of election officials and activists who believe in Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud, including Alexander. The board hadn’t implemented a new rule since 2021, and between September 2022 and May, no rules were introduced. Since then, Alexander and a group of election-denying officials and activists – called “petitioners” in the parlance of the state election board – have introduced 31 rules that will affect millions of Georgia voters.View image in fullscreenThese petitioners include Julie Adams, a member of the Fulton county election board who also works for the rightwing groups Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network, which is run by prominent national election denier Cleta Mitchell; Michael Heekin, Adams’ Republican colleague on the Fulton county election board, who has refused to certify results this year; David Cross, an election denier who has pressured the state election board since 2020 to take up investigations into unfounded claims of voter fraud; Garland Favorito, head of the election denier group VoterGA; David Hancock of the Gwinnett county election board; Bridget Thorne, a Fulton county commissioner who ran a secret Telegram channel in which she discussed election conspiracies; and Lucia Frazier, wife of Jason Frazier, an election denier whom Republicans in Fulton county tried and failed to appoint to the election board there, and who recently withdrew a lawsuit claiming the county had allowed ineligible voters to remain on voter rolls.Like many county election officials in Georgia, Alexander makes her beliefs in election and other rightwing conspiracies known on her personal Facebook page. Last week, she posted a claim that 53 counties in Michigan have more registered voters than citizens who are old enough to vote. The claim is part of a lawsuit brought by the Republican National Committee that seeks to purge voters from Michigan’s voter rolls – one of a slew of lawsuits that Republican groups have filed across the country claiming that voter rolls are bloated with ineligible voters.Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state, has called the lawsuit “meritless” and “filled with baseless accusations”, noting that her office has removed more than 700,000 voters from voter rolls in her tenure.Other posts from Alexander allude to a belief in conspiracies about the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as transphobic sentiment and fear of immigrants.“Vote like your daughters and granddaughters chances to compete in sports and their right to have private spaces to dress and undress in it depends on it. Because it does,” reads a post Alexander shared on 11 August.Alexander did not immediately respond to questions for this story.Under previous iterations of the board, rules introduced by election-denying activists were regularly dismissed, said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the board. But that began to change earlier this year, when Republicans in Georgia’s legislature appointed two new members to the board – Janelle King and Rick Jeffares – after pressure from Trump to replace the former board chair, Ed Lindsey, a more moderate Republican who didn’t concede to demands from deniers.Dr Janice Johnston, a driving force behind much of the board’s work on behalf of the election-denial movement, was appointed to her post in 2022.View image in fullscreenMatt Mashburn, a Republican who preceded Lindsey as chair of the state election board, told the Guardian that the board’s new members were in uncharted territory.“The people voting to pass these new rules at this late date don’t seem to have any idea how these new rules are supposed to be implemented and they don’t seem to care,” Mashburn said.Bipartisan election officials across the state have asked the board to stop implementing rules so close to the November election, with the Spalding county attorney calling them “unfunded mandates”. But Trump has lauded the trio of Johnston, King and Jeffares, calling them “pit bulls … fighting for victory” at a rally in Atlanta on 3 August. As the crowd cheered, Johnston stood and waved.Since then, the three – none of whom has previous experience administering elections – have passed several more rules.In August, the board passed a rule that allows county election officials to refuse to certify results if they feel a “reasonable inquiry” is necessary to investigate claims of fraud or irregularities, and another rule that allows local officials to request a virtually unlimited number of election-related documents before certifying results.Those rules were introduced by two election deniers, Adams and Salleigh Grubbs. Adams has sued for more power to refuse to certify results with the help of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute; Grubbs is the chair of the Cobb county Republican party whose involvement in elections stems from Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020.That year, she chased a refuse truck that she believed was carrying shredded paper ballots, the Atlantic reported. There is no evidence that paper ballots were discarded in that incident, election authorities have said.Both women are members of a behind-the-scenes network of election officials and activists who call themselves the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition, the Guardian revealed. The group has coordinated on policies and messaging key to the success of the election-denial movement in the state. Johnston has been in frequent contact with the group’s members, working with them to craft at least one of the certification rules the state election Board recently passed.The movement’s success continued last week when the board passed Alexander’s hand-count rule. The rule requires poll workers to open boxes of ballots collected by machines and count them by hand, increasing the chance that legal chain-of-custody requirements could be violated, according to Raffensperger.Alexander and others in Georgia’s election-denial community believe that the practice of hand-counting ballots will prevent falsified ballots from being scanned into voting machines – a conspiracy theory that bipartisan election officials have said has no basis in fact.

      This article was amended on 26 September 2024. A previous version incorrectly stated that former Georgia governor Roy Barnes was a Republican. More

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      ‘Be a man and vote for a woman’: Kamala Harris’s unlikely edge in America’s masculinity election

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      A man in a baseball cap strides through a field of corn. A woman in flannel turns and smiles, a line of trucks visible behind her. As piano music swells, an American flag ripples in a gentle breeze. This video is pure, uncut Americana. Naturally, it’s a political ad.Specifically, it’s an ad made by the Lincoln Project, a group of moderates and former Republicans united by a desire to topple Donald Trump and support Kamala Harris. And it’s making one of the most obvious appeals to men and masculinity yet in the 2024 election.As the ad nears its crescendo, the deep voice of Sam Elliott, an actor best known for playing grizzled but folksy cowboy types, demands: “What the hell are you waiting for? Because if it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that.” He continues: “It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman.”Masculinity and people’s views on gender roles may be more important than ever in 2024 – and not just because Harris is the first woman of color to ever secure a major-party nomination for president. The 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade thrust women’s rights to the forefront of the election. Numerous identity-based groups, including White Dudes for Harris, have gathered to drum up enthusiasm. An extreme gender gap has also yawned open among the youngest US voters: having come of age in the era of #MeToo, gen Z women are becoming the most progressive and politically active cohort ever measured – while gen Z men are increasingly apathetic to politics and drifting further to the right.Conservatives are openly using anxiety around masculinity to win this election, telling men that their problems stem from not being man enough. Josh Hawley, the influential Republican senator from Missouri, published a book called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. The Fox News host Jesse Watters went even further.“I don’t see why any man would vote Democrat. It’s not the party of virtue, security. It’s not the party of strength,” Watters said, shortly after White Dudes for Harris held a call with more than 190,000 participants. Watters added: “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”Watters is not a serious person, but Americans’ obsession with masculinity is, to the point that it can determine the outcome even of presidential elections where two men are running. (So, most of them.) Americans revere presidents as role models, fixating on their status – real or perceived – as founding fathers, real fathers, war heroes, and masters of diplomacy and making money and cheating on their wives without getting caught (or, at least, without getting divorced). Because presidents epitomize American notions of manhood, elections reveal what kind of man, what type and degree of masculinity, is most respected and deserving of power.View image in fullscreenTrump has turned his campaign into a pitch for hyper-traditional masculinity. At this year’s Republican national convention, he walked on stage to the James Brown song It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and was introduced by Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship who was caught slapping his wife on camera. On the campaign trail, he has hammed it up with YouTubers and podcasters who have male-centric audiences and dim views of women.With the general public and her opponent so preoccupied by masculinity, Harris is not emphasizing her pioneering nomination. Rather, in order to win a contest that no woman has ever won, she’s trying to take advantage of stereotypes about men, women and leadership – and, when they can’t work in her favor, using them to kneecap Trump instead.Masculinity, it turns out, may be the most partisan issue in US politics.A few good menWhen people conjure up the image of a “good man” or a “real man”, they tend to imagine the same qualities: someone who is dominant, successful and tough – and who is nothing like women, according to Theresa Vescio, a psychology professor who studies gender, politics and privilege at Penn State.This way of thinking is so pervasive that people gender political matters that, objectively, have no sex. National defense and the economy are seen as topics that men care about, because men are expected to prize being providers for and protectors of their families. Healthcare – including abortion rights – and education are seen as women’s issues, because women are supposed to be compassionate caregivers. (In reality, at least among gen Z, young women care about all of these issues more than young men do.) Even the political parties themselves are gendered: Republicans are associated with more masculine issues and traits, Democrats with feminine ones.These stereotypes inform American ideals of the presidency. “What we expect in a good leader is that they’re powerful, high status, top, able to lead. That overlaps substantially with stereotypes of masculinity and men,” Vescio said. “So when we think about who would be a good leader, stereotypes of men fit and complement. There’s no incongruity.”They complement one another so seamlessly, in fact, that the role of masculinity in elections was once invisible. We’re so used to seeing men run for office, and seeing “gender” only become a buzzword when a woman steps into the fray, that we often don’t even recognize that men have a gender, let alone that male candidates offer up different, competing visions of masculinity.But they do compete, even in the most animalistic ways. For example, presidential candidates are more likely to succeed when they have one key, traditionally masculine physical quality: height.The taller candidate is more likely to win more votes and be re-elected; they are also more likely to be seen by experts as being better leaders and simply “greater”. This link between height and presidential preference is so strong and so subconscious that when Richard Nixon ran against John F Kennedy in 1960, voters tended to think their chosen candidate was taller. (Kennedy was taller, and he won.) Ron DeSantis might have been laughed at for reportedly wearing ill-fitting heels when he ran for president, but he would have been right to worry.If you’re still not convinced, take the 2004 race between George W Bush and John Kerry, which hinged on the candidates’ supposed manhood to a startling degree. Bush sold himself as a down-home rancher who may have occasionally been “misunderestimated” but who you wanted to grab a beer with. Kerry, meanwhile, was a Vietnam combat veteran with a deep understanding of policy. This presented a problem for Bush: how could he be “the man’s man” when his opponent was part of the uber-masculine military?“What they did was, they went and they attacked his service record, because that was his greatest political strength,” said Jackson Katz, author of the book Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity. An advocacy group, technically formed independent of Bush, dedicated itself to questioning Kerry’s record.View image in fullscreenKatz continued of Kerry: “His attitude was like: ‘This is beneath me, to respond to these attacks.’ And it backfired. Because in the masculinity narrative, if you don’t defend your honor that’s being besmirched, you’re emasculated, you’re not strong.”Kerry, of course, lost.The architect of the attack to undermine Kerry is now working on Trump’s 2024 campaign, which is attempting to run the same playbook against Tim Walz. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has suggested that Walz left the national guard to avoid serving in the Iraq war.In fact, Walz was in the national guard for 24 years and left to run for Congress several months before his unit was deployed to Iraq. Walz has defended his record – but Team Trump isn’t typically all that worried about the truth.Masculinity subtext comes textWhen Trump descended down a golden escalator during the 2016 primary, we entered a new, far more obvious era of presidential masculinity. During that primary, Trump loved to talk about “Little Marco” Rubio, which prompted Rubio to attack Trump for his supposedly undersized hands. There is no better proof that masculinity underscores presidential elections than two candidates subtly accusing one another of having small penises.Well, maybe there is: Trump, the man who started the dick-measuring contest, won the one for the White House, too.The more people believe that traditional notions of masculinity are good and true, the more likely they were to vote for Trump in 2016, when Trump ran against a woman, and 2020, when Trump did not, Vescio found in a 2021 study. This finding held true regardless of people’s party, gender, race or level of education. It also held true even after Vescio controlled for people’s trust, or lack thereof, in government, undermining the idea that Trump’s popularity is due to his populism rather than his masculine posturing.When it comes to cosplaying masculinity, one of Trump’s greatest assets is his disinterest in reality. In other words: he’s good at making big, bold, often untrue statements, and people like that in a man.“Trump promises, more than anybody else: ‘I’m going to do this.’ Oftentimes, in violation of what the president can actually do,” said the political scientist Dan Cassino, who studies male gender identity at Fairleigh Dickinson University. “But he says he’s going to go in and fix a problem. ‘I’m going to do this on day one. Whatever Congress says doesn’t matter.’ That sort of agentic behavior is perceived as being very, very masculine.”Republicans, especially, really like this kind of behavior in a man. This can partially be chalked up to demographics. Both men and older people, who are more likely to embrace traditional gender roles, are likelier to be Republicans. It can be explained by the nature of conservatism itself. Conservatives want to preserve tradition.View image in fullscreenThere’s also another explanation: sexism.“As researchers, we differentiate between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is: ‘Women are terrible and it’s OK to beat your wife,’” Cassino said. “Benevolent sexism is more like: ‘Oh, women are pure and precious, we have to protect them.’ That means keeping them out of things like politics, putting up separate spheres.”Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies partisan identity, measured people’s hostile sexism by asking whether they agreed with statements like: “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.” Republicans, she found, were on average about twice as likely as Democrats to show signs of hostile sexism.“The better predictor of being Republican is not gender, but sexism,” Mason said. “There are a lot of women who hold sexist attitudes and are pro-patriarchy and believe that women shouldn’t be in power.”I’ve encountered shades of this attitude: in January 2020, I met a woman in her 30s from Louisiana, at the March for Life, the largest annual anti-abortion gathering in the United States. Women, she told me at the time, should not be president, because they just can’t be leaders in the same way as men.“Women and men are completely different biologically,” she said. “And so for that reason, I believe that they should have specific jobs for who they are, biologically.”She planned to vote for Trump.Sexism is more than a collection of views about women – it’s a belief system about how men and women should interact. (And that men and women are the only two genders.) But as much as Trump may benefit from the GOP’s sexism, he doesn’t seem all that interested in gender relations. He has praised and attacked individual women, including his accuser E Jean Carroll, often over their looks, but he rarely speaks about women as a category.Instead, he has largely delegated that to JD Vance.In addition to claiming that “traditional masculine traits are now actively suppressed from childhood all the way through adulthood”, Vance has denigrated childfree women as “childless cat ladies”, agreed that the purpose of the “postmenopausal female” is to help raise grandchildren, and claimed women who prioritize careers over families are on “a path to misery”.“Vance is very much doing appeals, I think, less about masculinity, more about benevolent sexism,” Cassino said. “At its edges, it goes into what is called natalism, that the job of women is to reproduce, which is the extreme, extreme end of benevolent sexism.”This is the Vance innovation on the already masculine Trump ticket: he operationalizes Trump’s static vision of white-man hypermasculinity into a blueprint for how genders should live with one another. If Trump and Vance win, that blueprint could be turned into policy.View image in fullscreenThere are signs that Trump is coming around to Vance’s approach – at least when it comes to abortion, one of Trump’s biggest electoral weaknesses and an issue that has quite a bit to do with male-female relations.“I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE,” he posted to TruthSocial over the weekend. “THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE.”The feminine catch-22When Harris walked out on stage at the Democratic convention to accept her party’s nomination for president, Kelly Dittmar was immediately struck by one thing.“She didn’t wear white,” said Dittmar, who, as the director of research at Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics, makes something of a living noting how powerful women present themselves in public.White is the color of the suffragettes who fought for women’s right to vote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Democratic women regularly don it for the major rituals of US politics, including the convention. “Like half the crowd was wearing white,” Dittmar pointed out.But not Harris. She wore a navy suit and a matching pussy bow blouse.It was an unmistakable declaration: Harris did not want to focus on how she has made history. In the weeks since, she has stayed true to that stance. When presidential debate moderators brought up abortion and Donald Trump’s racist lies about her identity, Harris didn’t respond with anecdotes about her experience as a woman of color. Instead, she told the audience: “I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us.”If Hillary Clinton stands accused of focusing on her gender too much when she ran for president in 2016, Harris is doing everything she can to avoid falling into the same trap. But the braided nature of masculinity, leadership and politics leaves female political candidates in such a bind that even the act of raising an eyebrow becomes fraught.During the debate, Harris didn’t bother to hide her skepticism at Trump’s boasts, lies and rambling. “If she wants to win, Harris needs to train her face not to respond,” the pollster Frank Luntz posted on X at the time. “It feeds into a female stereotype and, more importantly, risks offending undecided voters.”It’s not clear what “female stereotype” Luntz – who said nothing of Trump’s tendency to smirk while Harris spoke – was referring to. (The female stereotype of having expressions?) But it is true that “as a female candidate, you have to be feminine, because otherwise you’re not a good woman”, Cassino said. “But you also have to be masculine, because in the US, we’ve decided that leaders are masculine. So you have to have masculine traits and feminine traits.”When it comes to telegraphing her masculine credentials, Harris has a built-in advantage: she spent years working in law enforcement, a field associated with toughness, victory and men. In her very first speech as the presumptive Democratic candidate, Harris recalled her time as a prosecutor and California attorney general.“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said, using a line that has since become a part of her stump speech. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” Translation: she knows how to dominate the worst of the worst.“Democrats don’t need Harris to go out and shoot guns in her campaign ad or on the campaign trail,” said Nichole Bauer, a Louisiana State University professor who studies political communication. “But they do need her to display those masculine qualities that we associate with political leaders, and those are really masculine qualities that we don’t always think of as being gendered – like talking about her experience as a vice-president, an attorney general, a senator.”Last week, Harris sat down with Oprah, who had been stunned to learn, during the debate, that the vice-president owns a gun. “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris said. Then she laughed. “Probably should not have said that.”That exchange encapsulated Harris’s balancing act. She’s got a gun and she’s not afraid to use it, but she’ll laugh about it. That laugh, experts said, may be one of Harris’s best assets when it comes to convincing voters that she is both competent and warm. It helps burnish her claim that she’s a “joyful warrior”, an image that “creates a distinct persona that I think bridges those gendered expectations”, Dittmar said. Joy, she continued, “alludes [to] kindness and even empathy, which is more traditionally associated with femininity and women”.There are very few true independents in the US electorate; all but 3% of self-identified independents lean Democrat or Republican. But that tiny fraction of the population can decide a close election. When judging a candidate, undecided voters tend to rely heavily on racial and gendered stereotypes, according to Bauer.“If Harris displays masculinity in a super aggressive way, similar to how Trump and Vance might do it, then she risks falling into this ‘angry Black woman’ stereotype that we’ve been socialized to think of as a negative stereotype, as something incompatible with political leadership,” Bauer said. “It’s just this really narrow set of behaviors that she has to fit into to try to show her leadership qualities.”In past elections, the men who have tried to take down Trump attempted to outman him. Rubio suggested he had a bigger you-know-what; DeSantis sold himself to voters as the grown-up version of Trump; in a 2020 debate, Joe Biden snapped: “Donald, would you just be quiet for a minute?” But running on full-tilt masculinity would never work for Harris. Not only did it not work for most of those men, but as a woman, she cannot win a masculinity-off.View image in fullscreenInstead, her supporters’ best shot at defeating Trump may be to unman him. That Lincoln Project ad, for example, framed Trump next to images of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Harris, meanwhile, is pictured giving a salute. “The images of Trump in the ad are chaotic. It’s social unrest,” pointed out Erin Cassese, a University of Delaware political science professor. The ad seems to ask: would a real man lose control like Trump did?During the debate, Harris urged viewers to go to one of Trump’s rallies. “He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about ‘windmills cause cancer’,” she said. “And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”Those attacks – the kind of attacks that could once have been directed at Biden – also undermine Trump’s masculinity. Cassino summarized the message as: “He’s kind of old and confused and weird. This is not a masculine guy.”‘Toxic’ masculinityAs much as the internet may like to call traditional stereotypes of masculinity “toxic”, they are not necessarily bad. Success, hardiness, being a provider and protector – those can all be good qualities.The problem, for individuals, is that stereotypes of masculinity can be so strict and stifling that they are impossible for anybody to live up to. No one can be in power at all times. You might be the boss at the office, but when you get home, your teenage children are still likely to ignore your commands.And, for US society as a whole, clinging to a narrow notion of masculinity really can be toxic. “It allows for aggression towards groups that aren’t appropriately masculine, which would be different kinds of groups of men that we define as problems, and women,” Vescio said. “It masks racism and sexism.”Harris isn’t right or wrong to lean into some masculine stereotypes. After all, if a woman can harness them well enough to win the most masculine office in US history, then maybe such attitudes and behaviors won’t be considered “masculine” any more. Maybe they’re just ways that people, of all genders, can act. Maybe voters will start to value “feminine” traits in leaders, too.View image in fullscreen“The only way we can ever stop defining our politics in terms of men versus women is, have so many women run that is just not notable any more,” Cassino said.Sending Trump back to the White House may affirm his brand of masculinity on a national scale. The more Trump larps masculinity, the more Republicans grow to like it; the more deeply invested they become in masculinity, the more polarized the United States may become. People who support traditional masculinity also tend to show signs of sexism (benevolent and hostile), anti-Black racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia.But, in Dittmar’s view, voting Harris into office may indicate that people don’t want to shove women into a separate sphere.“We’re voting on a lot of things, but among them is that version of leadership and our evaluation of these gendered versions of it,” Dittmar said. “As well as, even more broadly, our sense of the appropriate roles of women, the ways in which women should be treated by our political leaders.” More