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      Joy derision: Democrats turn Trump’s deadliest weapon against him

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      In Trump in Exile, her recent book on the former president’s life after losing power, the reporter Meridith McGraw describes how aides to Donald Trump set about destroying Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who threatened to lure Republican voters away.“One Trump adviser referred to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals,” McGraw writes. “Rule number five: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”Alinsky was a Chicago community organizer who died in 1972 but is still influential on the left and demonized on the right. Trumpworld put his fifth rule – which also says: “It infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage” – into concerted action.DeSantis was ridiculed for his lack of height and his heightened sanctimoniousness but most effectively for his simple weirdness: a discomfiting public manner the Trump camp indelibly linked to an alleged incident on a donor’s jet in which, lacking a spoon, the governor chose to eat a cup of chocolate pudding using his fingers.DeSantis disintegrated. Trump swept to the nomination.With Joe Biden as his opponent, it seemed Trump would once again dominate with nicknames and ridicule, based on “Sleepy Joe’s” (even more) advanced age. But then Biden dropped out, and something unexpected happened. Kamala Harris and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, turned fierce ridicule back on Trump and his VP pick, the Ohio senator JD Vance, deriding both for their simple weirdness: personal, social and of course political.If polling is any guide, the tactic has worked like a dream.To Molly Jong-Fast, a podcaster and MSNBC commentator now touring Politics as Unusual, a live show with the Republican operative turned anti-Trump organizer and ridicule merchant Rick Wilson, Trump, Vance and the rest of the GOP are simply easy targets.“They’ve just gone so far afield, this Republican party, that you can mock it all because it’s just so weird,” Jong-Fast said. “All this stuff about women’s reproductive cycles” – support for abortion bans, Vance attacking women who do not have children, endless tangles over IVF – “that stuff is quite weird from an adult man, and so it does lend itself to mockery.“I also think they got so high on their own supply that they didn’t pause and think, ‘Well, perhaps people won’t like this,’ you know?”Ridicule certainly worked for Trump in the past. In 2016, the Texas senator Ted Cruz was “Lyin’ Ted”, the Florida senator Marco Rubio was “Liddle Marco”, and, most infamously, Hillary Clinton was “Crooked Hillary”. Fair or not, the labels stuck.Eight years later, though, Trump “just can’t do it”, Jong-Fast said. “Maybe because he’s almost 80. Maybe because he just doesn’t have it any more.”Trump has road-tested nicknames for Harris but nothing has stuck. He tried “Kamabla”, arguably racist, and “Comrade Kamala”, alleging communist leanings. He tried more.Jong-Fast said: “‘Laffin’ Kamala?’ It just doesn’t do it because their whole plan of attack was that she laughs and somehow that makes her unserious, and being unserious is somehow bad for being president. But the problem with Trump is that his whole thing was that he was unserious, right? Like, you were supposed to vote for him because he was a reality television host, not because he was some genius.“I think Trump is just tired. He’s been running for president for a decade, and he’s just scared [of defeat and potentially jail in four criminal cases] and sick of it. One of the things that Trump was able to do really well was ridicule. He would pick these nicknames and you would always be a little bit horrified by them but a lot of times they actually were right … he was very good at summing people up.”Now, not so much.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCompounding Republican problems, under Harris and Walz – whose decision to call Trump and Vance weird on TV did much to put him on the ticket – Democrats have abandoned the political squeamishness, or just good manners, that long deterred them from firing back in kind.“I think Biden was in a different generation of politics and he just couldn’t meet the moment in the same way,” Jong-Fast said. “He wouldn’t let his people do that aggressive stuff. I think of Democrats now as trying to push back aggressively, which they have to, right? I mean, it’s completely asymmetrical otherwise.”As Walz led in ridiculing Trump and Vance, so party grandees followed. At the Democratic convention in Chicago last month, Barack and Michelle Obama mocked Trump from the podium. The former president even appeared to question the size of Trump’s penis. It was all a long way from “When they go low, we go high”, Michelle Obama’s 2016 appeal to purity of political action and thought.“They know it gets him mad,” Jong-Fast said. “Part of what’s happening here is this ‘audience of one’ idea, which is they know it gets Trump kind of upset when you make fun of him, so they’re doubling down. They know the way to beat him is to get him so agitated that he acts out and alienates voters.”Trump has certainly been acting out – and Jong-Fast’s colleague Wilson, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, is well-practiced in making him do so, attracting threats to sue. Asked about Wilson’s insult-comic style, ridiculing Trump onstage and on the Fast Politics podcast and his own platforms, Jong-Fast laughed and said: “It makes for good podcasting. I think it would make for scary live television.”Probably true. Nonetheless, live television will host the next huge campaign set piece, the debate between Trump and Harris on ABC on Tuesday. Ridicule seems sure to be on the menu. Saul Alinsky’s ghost will watch with interest.Recently, David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, a progressive magazine, pondered Harris’s likely tactics.“I would offer the same advice to Harris as I did to Biden,” Corn wrote. “Deride, deride, deride. But it looks as if she got the memo.” More

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      Prosecutor v felon: US prepares for presidential debate between Harris and Trump

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      It will be a study in contrasts around age, gender, race, temperament and policy. It will also be the first time in US presidential history that a former courtroom prosecutor will take the debate stage alongside a convicted criminal with the White House at stake.Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has served as a trial lawyer, district attorney and state attorney general in California. Former US president Donald Trump, her Republican rival, has been convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal.The pair will go head to head in Philadelphia on Tuesday night in their first – and perhaps only – debate, just 75 days after Joe Biden’s dire performance against Trump triggered a political earthquake that ultimately forced him from the race for the White House.Few expect such a transformative result this time. But Trump has his last best chance to end Harris’s extended “honeymoon” while the Democrat is aiming to prosecute her opponent’s glaring liabilities before tens of millions of voters watching on live television.“It’s the first time Donald Trump is actually going to be cross-examined in front of the American people,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “Kamala Harris’s career and experience as a prosecutor, attorney general and a senator is something that Trump should not underestimate in this debate.”This will be Trump’s seventh appearance in a national general election debate, making him the most experienced debater in US presidential history. Against Biden in June he repeated familiar falsehoods that mostly went unchallenged. Harris is expected to be a more formidable opponent and could put Trump on the defensive over facts, policy and his conduct following the 2020 election.View image in fullscreenThe 59-year-old has not been shy about embracing her career in law enforcement so far in the campaign. A video at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago declared: “That’s our choice. A prosecutor or a felon.” In a speech accepting the party’s nomination, Harris told cheering delegates: “Every day, in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge and I said five words: Kamala Harris, for the people.”She has also been touting her record taking on predators and fraudsters, telling crowds across the country: “I know Donald Trump’s type!” Harris brought that experience to bear in her memorable 2018 cross-examination of Brett Kavanaugh during Senate confirmation hearings after Trump, then president, nominated him as a justice on the supreme court.But she is unlikely to go after Trump directly over his convictions – or three other criminal cases still looming over him. When, at a rally in New Hampshire this week, an audience member shouted, “Lock him up!” Harris replied: “Well, you know what? The courts are going to handle that, and we will handle November. How about that?”In May Trump became the first former US president to be convicted of felony crimes when a New York jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush-money payment to an adult film performer. On Friday the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, delayed Trump’s sentencing until 26 November – after the election date of 5 November.For any other candidate on a debate stage, the convictions would be a huge liability. But Trump has repeatedly rallied his base by falsely claiming that the case, and others relating to election interference and mishandling classified information, are bogus and politically motivated. Should the topic arise on Tuesday, he is likely to cast himself as a martyr and also remind viewers that he was nearly assassinated in July.The 90-minute duel, held at Philadelphia’s National Constitutional Center, will be moderated by the ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis. In accordance with rules negotiated by both campaigns, there will be no live audience and candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak.The same rules seemed to work in Trump’s favour when he took on Biden in Atlanta in June. Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan, said: “Trump adjusted well to no audience and the cutting of the microphones in Atlanta. Biden clearly didn’t.“He had never debated when there’s no audience; same thing with Harris. Not getting any feedback and not knowing how things are going, you have to trust your judgment and who’s got better media instincts than a reality television host?”The muting of the microphones may not only save Trump from himself – he interrupted Biden 71 times during their first presidential debate in 2020 – but prevent Harris offering sharp rejoinders such as “I’m speaking”, a line she delivered against Mike Pence in the vice-presidential debate four years ago.Harris and Trump have never met before in person and, in the city of Rocky Balboa, are likely to take on the roles of boxer and fighter respectively. Trump, 78, is not known for his discipline, preparation or fidelity to the truth. His debate performances, like his governing style, are typically based on gut instinct rather than considered analysis.Kall, who has attended many presidential debates, added: “You can never count him out because he’s just all over the place in kind of a scattershot format and, when you think you’ve got him on something, he quickly moves to something else. It’s hard to keep up with him so she’s got to pick her spots.View image in fullscreen“He’s always been known as the more effective counterpuncher. He sometimes doesn’t lob the first volley or attack or argument but then, if she decides to go on the offensive as a prosecutor and treat him in that way, he can be even more deadly in response.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has struggled to find a coherent and effective line of attack on Harris since she entered the race. He has accused her of being a radical leftist while also suggesting she bears responsibility for Biden’s more centrist policy agenda. He has questioned her intelligence and racial identity. He has also floundered in trying to achieve consistency on the incendiary topic of abortion rights.Republicans will be hoping that his debate showing is more focused and avoids any blatantly sexist or racist behaviour. The last time he faced a female candidate, Hillary Clinton in 2016, he physically hovered behind her in one debate and referred to her as “the devil” and a “nasty woman”.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The Harris campaign was eager for his mic to be live because they think he’s his worst enemy and that’s true. He has a very limited attention span.“He’s a remarkably undisciplined candidate, particularly at this level, and he’s profoundly uncomfortable with women and people of colour. I don’t see any change in that orientation. Already in this campaign he’s come out with some pretty offensive comments about Kamala Harris. I’d expect more of that and it’s possible that Kamala Harris is going to push him in ways that might provoke that reaction.”Harris enters the debate with momentum. After she closed out the convention on 22 August, her campaign announced she had raised more than $500m since entering the race. The polling aggregator website 538 shows Harris up by three percentage points in national polls but much tighter races in some battleground states.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “Kamala Harris is a capable politician operating at the height of her powers. She’s going to come and have a good debate and he is, in all likelihood based on his current run of public performances, going to say things that are ugly and shocking and he’ll do further damage to an already damaged campaign.”But the vice-president may come under pressure to explain reversals in her positions on issues such as universal healthcare, fracking, plastic straws and decriminalising illegal border crossings. She could face questions over the Biden-Harris administration’s economic record, especially inflation, forcing her both to defend her boss and promise to turn a new page.Lanhee Chen, a fellow in American public policy studies at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Stanford, California, said: “The substance of what she’s rolled out so far either completely contradicts her past history or they’re just not really good ideas for the most part. If she’s able to actually propose some new ideas in this debate and give people some grist for the mill, that’s a much better approach.”History suggests, however, that debates are less about policy than memorable moments. Examples include Ronald Reagan’s “There you go again,” tease of Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush’s glance at his watch, Al Gore’s sighs and Trump’s apparent threat to jail Clinton. Political scientists also still question whether the impact on public opinion is fleeting or lasting enough to make a difference on election day.Chen, who was policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, cited the example of Romney’s forceful first debate performance against a lacklustre President Barack Obama in 2012. “We saw a significant bump for Romney in public polling as well as our private polling after that tremendous debate performance against Obama in 2012,” he recalled.“In that first debate, he picked up a number of points that was well outside the margin of error in many places. It was a couple of weeks of positive momentum and then the race kind of came back to stasis after that.”Chen added: “The debate doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. You have the debate but you also have world events and you have what the campaigns do after the debate as well. The debate will have impact but the impact is probably short term and will eventually wash out with other campaign events as they happen.” More

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      Republicans want to steal reproductive freedom. Black women will suffer most | Monica Raye Simpson

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      As the 2024 elections continue to heat up, there are increasing concerns about the rise of fascism around the world and in the United States. Regardless of the word or label used, Black people, living with the legacy of slavery and multiple forms of reproductive oppression including rape and forced pregnancies, sterilizations and the killing of our children and loved ones by vigilantes and police, have a lot of experience with authoritarian regimes that oppress and dehumanize.There is a strategic agenda from the far right – laid out in clear language in Project 2025 to keep power in the hands of a chosen few and prevent the United States from becoming a truly representative, multiracial democracy that embraces and supports all people including those with the capacity for pregnancy.According to US census projections, people of color are on par to be the majority by the middle of the century. With this imminent reality, the focus on controlling our fertility and denying us bodily autonomy is the age-old strategy of authoritarian, democracy-denying regimes. And to have a conservative-leaning supreme court that has proved that it will roll back some of the most critical protections further supports their agenda.One of those critical protections was the right to abortion recognized and protected in Roe v Wade. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe – and not only denied women the right to abortion, but also laid the groundwork for dismantling all reproductive rights and aspects of pregnancy-related healthcare.For decades, we have seen a focus on reversing Roe v Wade with numerous states implementing barriers to access through proposing Trap (targeted regulation of abortion providers) laws, expanding funding to crisis pregnancy centers and promoting declarations of personhood for the unborn from the moment of fertilization, all while gerrymandering states to stack our state legislatures with conservative leaders. We are also fighting abortion bans and increased criminalization for those seeking abortions and for pregnant women who are targeted for creating imagined risks of harm to personified eggs, embryos and fetuses.And it is not just about ending a pregnancy. Before the Dobbs decision, the US already had an appalling and shameful rate of maternal mortality that is from four to 12 times higher for Black women. As OB-GYNs flee states that have banned abortions and women are forced to wait out ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages and stillbirths and continue pregnancies with non-viable or already dead fetuses – because doctors have been terrorized into inaction – that rate will no doubt go up. As if that wasn’t enough, research consistently finds that US Black maternal mortality is fueled by racism that goes unaddressed and reinforced by our opposition.While devastating, we can at least note that the Dobbs decision shook the nation and brought the longstanding fight for abortion to the mainstream. While so many wondered how we got here, Black women and people of color had warned about the danger of single-issue litigation and organizing strategies within the historically predominantly white-led reproductive health and rights movements for decades.Thirty years ago, Black women came up with the term reproductive justice and started a human-rights-based movement that not only fought for the right to prevent or end pregnancies but to expand the fight to have the children that we want, to parent them in safe and sustainable communities. This new intersectional movement centered the leadership and lived experiences and bodily autonomy of those historically pushed to the margins.Fascism thrives when the masses are conditioned to think, organize and create policies that are not intersectional thus creating fertile ground for authoritarianism. I believe the kryptonite to fascism is the work being done by those who laid the foundation for the reproductive justice movement – Black women.Black women have found every way possible to resist while also remaining innovative. We consistently vote for our values to save our democracy. From the Black women who were the backbone of the civil rights and Black liberation movements to the Black women who redefined feminism at the Combahee River, to the Black women who created new movements like reproductive justice, Black Lives Matter and Me Too – it is clear we have decades of receipts that show our commitment to dismantling white supremacist, patriarchal authoritarian regimes.With this election we are faced with a serious question: “What world do we want for ourselves and the generations to come?” Do we want to live in a world where we do not have the human right to make our own decisions around our bodies, our families and our futures? Or do we want to live in a world where our lives are dictated by insidious policies?Our future is in the hands of those who are ready to fight for our freedom. This is the time to not only vote but also organize. This is the time to sit at the table and build with people we don’t know and deepen our relationships with our current allies. This is the time to study and learn from the historical victories over fascism. Because fascism always loses when it comes against the collective power of those determined to achieve our human rights.

      Monica Raye Simpson is the executive director of SisterSong, the southern-based national Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. Monica is a proud Black queer feminist & cultural strategist who is committed to organizing for LGBTQ+ liberation, civil and human rights, and sexual and reproductive justice by any means necessary. She was also named a New Civil Rights Leader by Essence Magazine and as one of TIME 100’s most influential people of 2023. More

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      US ‘hero voters’ key to Harris win, say top ex-aides who plotted Labour UK victory

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      Keir Starmer’s former pollster, Deborah Mattinson, is to meet Kamala Harris’s campaign team in Washington this week to share details of how Labour pulled off its stunning election win by targeting key groups of “squeezed working-class voters who wanted change”.The visit comes ahead of a separate trip by Starmer to Washington on Friday to meet US president Joe Biden, his second since becoming prime minister. It will also be his first since Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee.With the race for the White House on a knife-edge, Mattinson, who stepped down from Starmer’s office after the election, and the prime minister’s former director of policy, Claire Ainsley, who will also attend the briefings, believe the same strategy that delivered for Labour could play an important role in Harris defeating Donald Trump on 5 November.Writing in the Observer, Mattinson and Ainsley say many of the concerns of crucial undecided voters will be similar on both of sides of the Atlantic.“These voters – often past Labour voters – had rejected the party because they believed that it had rejected them. Often Tory voters in 2019, they made up nearly 20% of the electorate. Labour’s focus on economic concerns, from affordable housing to job security, won them back.“For Harris, addressing core issues such as housing, prices and job creation could also win over undecided US middle-class voters, many of whom face similar economic pressures. Labour set about finding out as much as possible about these voters and applying that knowledge to all aspects of campaigning.“They were patriotic, they were family oriented, they were struggling with the cost of living: squeezed working-class voters who wanted change.”Mattinson coined the phrase “hero voters” to describe a group who were more often than not pro-Brexit and persuadable by political leaders if they felt they would address their fundamental core concerns.The collaboration, they believe, could help tilt the balance by delivering voters in key US battlegrounds.“Before November’s presidential election, Harris has turned on its head a contest that looked like a foregone conclusion in Trump’s favour. However, as the data shows clearly, it is still too close to call. We believe that adopting a similar hero-voter approach could make a vital difference, just as it did here in the UK.“The start point is to identify and understand Harris’s hero voters – undecided voters who have considered Trump and live in the handful of the most crucial battleground states.”Mattinson and Ainsley were invited by the Democratic thinktank the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), with which Ainsley has been working since leaving Starmer’s team in late 2022.Recently, they have been polling among US voters and conducting focus groups to try to understand what will win them over and which groups matter most.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The context is very different but the parallels are almost uncanny,” they write. “This group – who in the US self-define as middle class rather than working class, as the same group might in the UK – is struggling.“Its members believe that the middle class is in jeopardy, out of reach for people like them, denied the dream of homeownership that previous generations took for granted, unable to cover the essentials, and hyper-aware of the cost of groceries, utilities and other bills. Many work multiple jobs just to keep afloat.”Among those that the two former Starmer aides are likely to meet are Megan Jones, the senior political adviser to vice-president Harris, and Will Marshall, founder of the PPI, who had dealings with top New Labour figures, including Tony Blair, when the party was trying to learn from the electoral success of Bill Clinton’s Democrats in the early to mid-1990s, before the 1997 general election.View image in fullscreenMattinson and Ainsley say they had far more time to plan their strategy in detail than have members of the Harris campaign. But they suggest that fine-tuning the Democratic strategy could help sustain recent momentum and give the party a better chance of crossing the finishing line victorious.“From the point where we defined our hero-voter focus, we had three years to mainline the thinking through party activity. Team Harris has less than three months. But looking at what they have achieved in the past few weeks, success now looks within reach. Hero voters may just help to close that gap.” More

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      How the lessons of the UK election could help Kamala Harris defeat Donald Trump

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      On 4 July, against all odds, Labour overturned the most shattering defeat in decades to win a stunning landslide. A talented and energetic party team deserves huge credit for this victory: effective communications, innovative digital output, creative policy culminating in the five missions, organisationally brilliant events and a super-efficient ground force – all under the leadership of campaign director Morgan McSweeney and political leads Pat McFadden and Ellie Reeves.It was a cohesive campaign united by its sharp, disciplined focus on our very tightly defined “hero voters”. Could a similar single-mindedness help Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump on 5 November?Just three years before, Labour had suffered the devastating setback of the Hartlepool byelection. While Keir Starmer had made significant strides towards returning Labour to the service of working people in his first year as leader, the party still struggled to embrace a disparate coalition of voters stretching from its base to a wider group of progressive voters and including the “red wall” that had so dramatically abandoned Labour in 2019.It was an impossible task. As the party picked itself up, Starmer’s brief was to really understand the voters who were crucial to that Tory win. He redoubled his resolve to take the party to them. These voters – often past Labour voters – had rejected the party because they believed that it had rejected them. Often Tory voters in 2019, they made up nearly 20% of the electorate. Labour’s focus on economic concerns, from affordable housing to job security, won them back.For Harris, addressing core issues such as housing, prices and job creation could also win over undecided US middle-class voters, many of whom face similar economic pressures. Labour set about finding out as much as possible about these voters and applying that knowledge to all aspects of campaigning. They were patriotic, they were family oriented, they were struggling with the cost of living: squeezed working-class voters who wanted change.Starmer was the personification of this segment of the UK electorate. As someone who had grown up in a pebbledash semi, with hard-working parents who were so strapped for cash that at one point the family’s phone was cut off, he identified with these voters and understood them. This became our focus over the next three years. The discipline paid off, enabling the electoral efficiency that won 411 seats, even on a vote share of less than 35%.Before November’s US presidential election, Harris has turned on its head a contest that looked like a foregone conclusion in Trump’s favour. However, as the data shows, it is still too close to call. We believe that adopting a similar hero-voter approach could make a vital difference, just as it did here in the UK.The start point is to identify and understand Harris’s hero voters – undecided voters who have considered Trump and live in the handful of most crucial battleground states.Working with Democratic thinktank the Progressive Policy Institute, we have attempted to do just that, applying lessons from the UK election, conducting polling and focus groups to really understand the voters that matter most.The context is very different but the parallels are almost uncanny. This group – who in the US self-define as middle class rather than working class as the same group might in the UK – is struggling. Its members believe that the middle class is in jeopardy, denied the dream of homeownership that previous generations took for granted, unable to cover the essentials, and hyper-aware of the cost of groceries, utilities and other bills. Many work multiple jobs just to keep afloat.As one Michigan swing voter told us last week: “There’s less of a ‘legit’ middle class these days. People are just working, working, working – and I think that’s really unfair.” Another voter in Pennsylvania said: “The middle class is being eroded. You used to be able to work one job and buy a house, but those things are out of reach for people like us nowadays.”Unsurprisingly, these voters want change – change that redresses the balance. But they are also deeply insecure and want that change within a framework of stability.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris can use this balancing act to her advantage, offering a combination of stability and the change voters crave. By addressing concerns such as inflation and homeownership while promising steady progress, she can present a vision that contrasts with Trump’s record, appealing directly to the middle class’s desire for practical, lasting change.Like Starmer, Harris has an edge: she comes from the same background as these voters. Her middle-class upbringing and understanding of economic struggle give her a unique connection to working-class Americans. She can own this narrative – something that Trump’s rhetoric, despite his populist appeal, can’t match.There are takeaways for the new Labour government from our research too. US voters want tangible evidence of policies from the Democrats that have helped them and their country. In these early days of the new Labour government, the party will want to plan now what those markers of success will be to their hero voters, well before the next general election.In our project, we have explored how the lessons from Labour’s successful campaign may translate across, reflecting the mood of hero voters, creating clear dividing lines on party brand, and leader reputation and, ultimately, developing a compelling offer.From the point where we defined our hero voter focus, we had three years to mainline the thinking through party activity. Team Harris has less than three months. But, looking at what they have achieved in the past few weeks, success now looks within reach. Hero voters may just help to close that gap.Deborah Mattinson and Claire Ainsley will spend this week in Washington DC with the Progressive Policy Institute, briefing leading Democrats on their project More

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      US presidential polls: Harris leads Trump nationally, but key swing state races tighter

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      As next week’s crucial presidential debate looms into view, Kamala Harris has maintained her narrow lead over Donald Trump in head-to-head polls but is locked in a tighter race in the crucial swing states needed to win the US election.Ever since Harris entered the contest – after Joe Biden dropped out following a disastrous debate performance that highlighted fears over his age and mental acuity – the vice-president has ridden a wave of support and enthusiasm, turning the race on its head. A solid but slight Trump advantage morphed into a Harris lead.But as Harris faces her first ever debate as a presidential nominee, there are signs that her upwards swing has hit a ceiling. Meanwhile, Trump will be hoping the debate offers his campaign a chance to recapture some momentum.Yet the race remains so tight in the swing states – and with a Republican advantage in the electoral college – that one commentator on Politico this week called it the “equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth”.At the same time, the narrow geographical focus of the election is sharply coming into view, with the first ballots to determine the next occupant of the White House due to be mailed out to voters.North Carolina had aimed to start mailing out its presidential ballots on Friday. But in what might be seen as a metaphor for the cliffhanging nature of the contest between Harris and Trump, what should have been standard protocol was delayed by a dispute over whether Robert F Kennedy Jr, hitherto running as an independent candidate, should have a place on the ballot.Kennedy, who suspended his campaign on 23 August and endorsed Trump, is suing the North Carolina board of elections over its refusal to remove his name from the ballot in a state where surveys show the result on a knife edge.A judge on the state’s supreme court ruled against him on Thursday but gave him 24 hours to appeal – resulting in a temporary delay to ballots being dispatched. And on Friday, the state’s appeals court issued an interim stop on the dissemination of mail-in ballots to allow Kennedy’s appeal to be heard.The postponement added another layer of suspense to a contest that could not be tighter, according to fresh Guardian analysis of recent polls.In a state with 16 electoral college votes up for grabs but where a Democratic presidential candidate has won only once since 1980, Trump and Harris are deadlocked at 48.07%.The figures illustrate why Kennedy – who is trying to help Trump after concluding that his presence in the race was draining his support – is so keen to remove his name from the ballot.A tiny number of voters putting their cross next to Kennedy’s name on ballot papers could be enough to deprive Trump of the only one of seven swing states he won in his 2020 defeat at the hands of Joe Biden.The North Carolina imbroglio shows in a microcosm what has become a reality of this – and, increasingly, all – US presidential elections: that while voters will flock to the polls across all 50 states, some states matter more than others under America’s unique electoral college.The system designates a set number of electors for each state based on population – with 539 for the entire country, meaning that 270 electoral college votes are needed to win.While the outcome in numerous states is a foregone conclusion – with many southern and midwestern states reliably Republican and others like New York and California solidly Democratic – the roughly equal partisan division of such states in electoral vote terms means much rests on the small number where party loyalties are evenly split.It also means that the national polling figures – while indicative of overall trends – are not what necessarily decides the election. The Guardian’s latest national poll tracker, taken over a 10-day average, showed Harris at 47.5% compared with 43.9% for Trump, which is encouraging for her but probably not a big enough cushion to guarantee an electoral college win if replicated on polling day.In this context, arguably even more important than North Carolina is Pennsylvania, one of the Democrats’ designated “blue wall” states – along with fellow battlegrounds Michigan and Wisconsin – and sometimes given a “Rust belt” label because of its status as the heartland of the US steel industry.Biden won it by slightly more than 80,000 votes in 2020, capturing its 19 electoral votes.This time, various permutations suggest that it might be key to the paths being charted by both Harris and Trump to reach the magic 270 total.That explains why the state has become such a focal point of both campaigns’ activity in recent days; On Monday, Harris appeared with Biden at a Labor Day parade in Pittsburgh in their first joint campaign appearance since she replaced him atop the Democratic ticket, while Trump attended a televised town hall event hosted by Fox News and fronted by Sean Hannity on Wednesday.This Tuesday, the candidates will meet in their only scheduled presidential debate in Philadelphia, the biggest city in Pennsylvania.The data shows Harris with a wafer-thin lead in the state of 1.7% – 48.9% to 47.2% – within the margin of error. Other polls show the race even tighter; a CNN survey this week had candidates tied at 47% each.The tight scenario underpins why states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina – and others like Georgia and two “Sun belt” states, Nevada and Arizona – are now the targets of the lion’s share of campaign resources. Maga Inc, a Trump-backing Super Pac, recently spent a reported $16m in adverts for North Carolina while the Trump campaign has diverted its efforts away from other less winnable locations to focus on the seven battleground states.In the war of resources and ad spending, Harris may have the advantage. Figures published on Friday showed her campaign had outraised Trump’s by $361m to $130m in August, and had raised a total of $615m since she became her party’s nominee in July.It seems an eye-watering sum and surely enough to sustain a message across this vast country. But the clarion call will be heard loudest in those states where the result is likely to remain too close to call even after polls close. More

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      Trump rebrands his ramblings as ‘I do the weave’ – but is he just losing it?

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      For those baffled by Donald Trump’s forays into meandering discourses about electrocution, bacons sales or cannibal killers at his recent political rallies, the former US president had an explanation.Trump assured supporters in Pennsylvania on Saturday that what might look like incoherent ramblings as he frequently departed from his scripted speech were instead indicators of his brilliance that impressed other great minds.“I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like friends of mine that are like English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,’” he told a bemused audience.“But the fake news, you know what they say, ‘He rambled.’ It’s not rambling. What you do is you get off a subject to mention another little tidbit, then you get back on to the subject, and you go through this and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.”But, increasingly, many others are not persuaded, including some of his own supporters.Trump has a long history of deviating from written speeches as the words on the autocue fire up disparate thoughts and digressions he then pursues and embellishes. But Timothy O’Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, said that Trump’s’s manner of public speaking is now the subject of scrutiny and disquiet over his mental acuity – in some of the same ways that Joe Biden faced and that ultimately cost him his re-election bid.“The reason he’s now offering these convoluted explanations of his speech patterns in his public appearances is because he’s hyper-aware that people have noted that he’s making even less sense than he used to,” he said. “What we’re seeing now is a reflection of someone who’s very troubled and very desperate.”Recent examples of Trump’s claim to be weaving together complex explanations include repeated references to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibal serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, while talking about immigration. Trump frequently, and falsely, claims that foreign governments are emptying their prisons and “insane asylums” to send the former residents across the US border to commit crimes. Trump then makes the leap to talk about the sociopath he calls the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” who, at one rally, he bewilderingly described as “a wonderful man”.Last week in Wisconsin, Trump was asked what he would do “to make life more affordable and bring down inflation”. He turned the question into another opportunity to rail against green energy as he theorised that Biden’s expansion of wind power had driven up the cost of electricity and increased inflation. This in turn, said Trump, put the cost of bacon beyond the reach of many ordinary Americans.“You take a look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon any more. We are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down, you know, this was caused by their horrible energy – wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow we have a little problem,” he said.There’s no evidence that these things are linked other than in Trump’s head. Besides, demand for bacon hasn’t fallen significantly. Trump has previously claimed that wind farms are driving whales “batty”.To O’Brien it is classic Trump because he uses digressions, piled high with false claims, as a means to avoid proper scrutiny.“He’s a serial liar and a serial fabulist. So much of that comes out that by the time you start to fact-check a statement or a tale, eight others have already landed. I don’t think it’s strategic, I just think it’s Trump being Trump. It protects him from greater accountability because it wears people down trying to keep up with him,” he said.Jennifer Mercieca, a professor specialising in political rhetoric at Texas A&M University and author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, said that Trump regards his meanderings as a strength to the point of publicly belittling his advisers who tell him not to do it.“He sees himself as someone who is unscripted and not teleprompted, and a freewheeling conversationalist. He wants to be able to feed off the crowd. Another part of it is that his brain is not well-disciplined and it might also just be that he’s unable to maintain a thought and carry it through to his logical conclusion,” she said.However, Mercieca said that Trump was aware that his digressions are increasingly drawing questions about his mental fitness to be president again – the charge he once made against Biden. That, she said, has put him on the defensive.“Donald Trump, while not a good businessman, is very good at marketing and branding, and so he’s very good at putting a marketing spin on anything that might be perceived as a negative. He’s had a lot of criticism lately for rambling, for being low energy during his rallies, for failing to read the teleprompter properly, mispronouncing words and so his response is to spin it. He says, ‘I have experts, these friends of mine, unnamed others, who are very impressed with my ability to weave,’” she said.Trump’s speeches also appear all the more disorderly because they are no longer in contrast to Biden’s faltering campaign but compared with a far more coherent Democratic presidential candidate in Kamala Harris. O’Brien said that what might once have been an asset for Trump has become increasingly self-defeating.“It’s certainly doing more harm than good right now because he no longer has the foil of Joe Biden to bounce off of. Biden had become so visibly diminished and the media was more ready to take Biden to task on it on a regular basis. That allowed Trump to skate by. Now that he has a different, younger, more acute and vibrant political opponent, I think it does for him because he now often looks ridiculous or unhinged, unfocused or very, very old,” he said.Trump has a particular obsession with electric vehicles, a theme he returns to even when it is not the subject of his speech or discussion. At a rally in June he recounted a conversation with a boat manufacturer in which he speculated that an electric-powered boat would sink under the weight of the battery. Then he introduced a shark into the equation.“I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?” he told the crowd.Trump said he asked the boat manufacturer whether it would be better to be in the water next to the boat and risk electrocution from the battery or to swim toward the shark.“I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer,” he told the crowd. “He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’”Trump saw this as an indication of the cleverness of his thinking and then told the audience that he’d rather be electrocuted than fall victim to the shark before returning to his original point – that he doesn’t like electric vehicles.“So we’re going to end that, we’re going to end it for boats, we’re going to end it for trucks,” he said.When Trump was widely mocked for his musings on the shark, it only prompted him to double down by explaining what he meant at another rally.“You heard my story in the boat with the shark, right? I got killed on that. They thought I was rambling. I’m not rambling,” he said.“I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for many years, I think the longest tenure ever. Very smart, had three different degrees and, you know, so I have an aptitude for things. You know, there is such a thing as an aptitude.”Then Trump retold the shark and battery story.To some, the former president does little more than unleash a torrent of disconnected thoughts. Others see a logic to his performance in which a coherent pattern of thought can be discerned by joining up the points he is making between digressions.O’Brien, who has described Trump as using his rallies as a therapy session to work out his emotional and psychological issues on stage, said that it would be a mistake to try to make too much sense from his speeches.“To try to discern a method in his madness is a fool’s errand. He is someone who is so narcissistic and privileged that he’s willing to stand up in front of large crowds and essentially free-associate about whatever crosses his mind. It frustrates his political advisers. It frustrates the Republican party,” he said.“But it appeals to his base, which is somewhere between 25% and 30% of Republican voters, as performance art. Not as him offering a menu of public policy choices or real world solutions to their fundamental problems. It’s simply because they feel they’re invited into this world through these nonsensical, nonlinear bits of performance art.” More

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      Former vice-president Dick Cheney confirms he will vote for Kamala Harris

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      The former vice-president Dick Cheney, a lifelong Republican, will vote for the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, in November’s presidential election, he said in a statement on Friday.“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said of the former president and Republican nominee. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris.”Liz Cheney, who herself endorsed Harris on Thursday, first announced her father’s endorsement when asked by Mark Leibovich of the Atlantic during an onstage interview at the Texas Tribune festival in Austin.“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” Liz Cheney said to audience cheers.“Wow,” Leibovich replied.Like his daughter, Dick Cheney has been an outspoken critic of Trump, notably during Liz Cheney’s ill-fated re-election campaign in 2022.In a campaign ad for Liz Cheney as she sought a fourth term as Wyoming’s lone congressperson, Dick Cheney called the former president a “coward” for trying to “steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him”.The ad did little good for his daughter in a deep-red state that once held the Cheney family dear but is now thoroughly in Trump’s corner. By a two-to-one margin, Liz Cheney lost her Republican primary to the Trump-endorsed attorney Harriet Hageman.Notably absent from Friday’s endorsement announcement was the 83-year-old former vice-president, who has made few if any public appearances over the past year or more.The Associated Press contributed reporting More