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      Arizona to vote on enshrining abortion rights in state constitution in November

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      Arizona voters will decide this November whether to add abortion rights into their state constitution, a prospect that could turbocharge voter turnout in a critical battleground state in the 2024 election.Late Monday, the Arizona secretary of state’s office announced that it had validated an estimated 577,971 signatures in support of a ballot measure, the Arizona For Abortion Access Act, to establish a constitutional right to abortion in the state.On X, the office called the measure “the largest petition effort in Arizona history”. The measure will be listed on the ballot as Proposition 139.Arizona is not the only state to face the prospect of an abortion-related ballot measure this November. So far, states including Colorado, Florida and Nevada – another key battleground state – are also set to hold similar ballot measures. Tuesday also marks the deadline for the state of Missouri to determine whether to add its own abortion-related measure to its ballots.Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ballot measures that protect or preserve abortion rights have successfully passed even in red states such as Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky. However, they have never been tested during a presidential election. Democrats are hoping that enthusiasm for the measures will boost turnout among their base, especially since the vice-president, Kamala Harris, one of the Democrats’ most effective messengers on abortion rights, became the party’s nominee.Abortion is currently legal up until 15 weeks in Arizona. Earlier this year, the state supreme court ruled that a near-total abortion ban from 1864 – enacted before Arizona even became a state – could take effect. That ruling unleashed weeks of nationwide outrage and ultimately led a handful of Republicans to break with their party to vote in favor of a bill to repeal the 1864 ban.If passed, Arizona for Abortion Access Act would establish that Arizonans have “a fundamental right to abortion”. It would protect the right to abortion until fetal viability, which is typically dated to around 24 weeks of pregnancy, and allow for abortions past that point if a medical provider deems them necessary to protect a pregnant individual’s life, physical health or mental health.In May, a CBS poll found that 66% of Arizona adults want abortion to be legal in all or most cases. More

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      ‘He has a proven track record’: behind Tim Walz’s appeal to workers

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      Vice-presidential picks have little effect on who wins a presidential election, many political scientists say. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s choice as her running mate, could prove the exception to that rule. Not least because of his track record of successfully appealing to working people.Angela Ferritto, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, voiced confidence that Walz will help the vice-president win in three pivotal states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin: “I strongly believe that Governor Walz will help the ticket. He has a proven track record of accomplishing things for working people.”Ferritto noted that as Minnesota’s governor, Walz enacted paid sick days, guaranteed more protection to construction workers against wage theft, and gave teachers greater negotiating power “over class sizes so they can give students the attention they need”.Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster, said Walz had an underappreciated strength that is political gold. “He gets policies out of the left-right divide and gets people to agree that this is the right thing to do,” she said. “Who’s for large class size? Who’s for poorly paid teachers? Who’s not for letting Mom and Dad have time with their new baby? He has a way of taking ideology out of policies and making them seem like things we can get together on.”Steve Rosenthal, a political strategist and former political director of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation, said Walz had another important trait – he is the type of candidate blue-collar workers would be happy to have a beer with. Walz likes to hunt and fish, he was long a union member while a teacher, and his financial disclosure forms show he owns no stocks or bonds.“What the two parties’ vice-presidential picks say is that both sides recognize the critical nature of winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,” Rosenthal said. “I think Walz is a huge addition in those states.”He explained that people normally focus on who is at the top of the ticket, but “to the extent Harris has someone who can represent her in those three states, he can be a big help. He can camp out in those states. He can walk a picket line and go to union halls. He can be a huge plus.”While history shows that vice-presidents don’t often move voters to the polls, with Walz things “could be a little different”, said Lake, noting that Harris’s selection of Walz was getting huge attention partly because it was the biggest, early decision of her presidential campaign. “I think Walz definitely helps in terms of the blue wall strategy [of winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin]. It’s great to have someone from the midwest on the ticket. His story is great and complements hers.”On paper, political experts say, Walz should be an alluringly strong running mate because he served in the army national guard for 24 years, was a high school teacher for two decades and coached his football team to a state championship. Moreover, Walz, a 60-year-old father of two, grew up on a farm in a Nebraska town of just 300 people.Ever since Walz’s selection was announced, he and Harris have trumpeted his rural roots and decades of public service, while Donald Trump and his campaign have rushed to portray Walz as “dangerously liberal” and in other unflattering ways. In recent days, the Harris and Trump campaigns have been rushing to put forward clashing definitions of Walz, and which side prevails in defining him to the nation could have a major effect on how much Walz boosts the Democratic ticket.“A handful of national polls show that 60% and up of voters say they don’t know enough about Walz to have an opinion,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Milwaukee-based Marquette Law School Poll. “The Republicans are pushing hard to paint him in a negative way. Things are wide open as to whether he will be defined as a Minnesota dad or the socialist governor of Minnesota.”The Trump campaign’s attacks “are really exploding on him”, Franklin said, adding, “If Walz deals with them effectively, more power to him. If he ends up being swiftboated, just like John Kerry was, that’s not so good.”JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has accused Walz of leaving the military early to avoid serving in Iraq, but Walz says he retired from the national guard in 2005 to run for Congress, months before his artillery unit received orders to deploy to Iraq.Many Democrats voice confidence that Walz will beat back the Trump-Vance attacks and be a boon to the ticket. They point to his superb communications skills – he’s down to earth, clever and humorous, and he came up with the term “weird” to describe and deride Trump and Vance. Many Democrats applaud the policies he ushered in as Minnesota governor, including 12 weeks’ paid family and medical leave, free breakfasts and lunches for public school students, strong protections for reproductive freedom, and free college tuition at public universities for students from families making less than $80,000 a year.Even though studies have shown that vice-presidential picks usually affect election results by only a small margin, Walz’s addition to the ticket – and his midwestern, pro-worker bona fides – could make a crucial difference in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won each of those states by less than 1% in 2016.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn June, Emerson College Polling and the Hill did a poll in Minnesota that found that Walz was plus 12 with women, minus nine with men, and plus 11 with 18-to-29-year-olds. Spencer Kimball, director of Boston-based Emerson College Polling said Walz could certainly help Harris attract and motivate younger voters. “Younger voters had moved away from Biden, not necessarily to Trump, maybe to a third party,” Kimball said. “What we’ve seen recently is the youth vote moving toward Harris, and I think Walz helps double down on that. The youth vote is one of the Democratic party’s bases. To get young people excited about the race is a potential gamechanger and can help reset the election map.”With regard to the three key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Ken Kollman, director of the University of Michigan’s center for political studies, said that there was “a big mother lode” of votes in Detroit and that voter turnout in Philadelphia and Milwaukee was hugely important. “The national election may very well hinge on turnout in those areas,” he said, adding that he didn’t think Walz would make much difference in those three cities.Walz could prove important, however, Kollman said, in making overtures to Democrats and blue-collar voters who have gravitated to Trump. “There is a group of Trump supporters who are pretty liberal on issues, which is one of the paradoxes of Trump’s appeal – people who actually rely on or believe in government support and active government intervention in their lives, their industry or their company.”Kollman said that Walz, because of his rural background and pro-worker record, “might be able to get some of them to break away from Trump. That remains a big question.”Lake, the pollster, agreed that Walz “can provide an opening” to voters leaning toward Trump, but said that Walz’s personal appeal alone could not win over many Trump-leaning voters. Lake said the “whole ticket has to improve” its efforts to reach them and persuade them.Ferritto of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO voiced optimism about Walz’s ability to win over Trump voters. “He flipped a congressional district that borders Iowa from red to blue,” she said. “He wouldn’t have been able to accomplish that unless he appealed to blue-collar voters.”Some, perhaps many, blue-collar Trump supporters will never hear Walz’s or Harris’s message, Ferritto acknowledged, because they are inundated from one side. “But I believe there are blue-collar voters who are willing to listen,” she said. “They want to hear facts. They want to hear about achieving real results. I do believe that Walz can reach those voters.” More

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      Brain worms and dead bears: has RFK Jr finally tanked his presidential bid?

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      The controversy over Robert F Kennedy Jr’s exploits with a dead bear cub is just the latest bizarre twist to hit his presidential campaign and see him become a “laughingstock”, political experts said, but a laughingstock who, against all odds, could still have a serious impact on the election.Kennedy, the scion of the Democratic political family who is running as an independent candidate, was already known for unusual beliefs and actions before last week. His long-shot campaign for president had survived Kennedy’s claim that part of his brain was eaten by a worm, his longtime anti-vaccine activism, and his recent denials that he had eaten a dog.But the latest controversy to emerge around Kennedy might be the strange straw that broke the camel’s back. On 4 August it emerged that Kennedy had found a dead bear cub on the side of the road, loaded it in the back of his car, taken a photo with the corpse, gone to do some falconing, had a steak dinner, then staged the decomposing bear’s death to look like a bicycle hit-and-run incident in a local park before heading to the airport.“As soon as you start becoming a laughingstock in the public mind, you know you’re in trouble,” said Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington. “And when the two most prominent things people think about when they think of RFK Jr is brain worms and dead bear cubs, you’re definitely in trouble.”Kennedy revealed the bear cub incident in an interview with Roseanne Barr, in an apparent attempt to get ahead of an article in the New Yorker. But it’s not clear his explanation of why he drove around with a dead bear in the trunk of his car helped his cause. Kennedy who was 60 years old at the time, told Barr that the bicycle accident aspect of the incident was done because he thought it would be “amusing”, but few seem to agree.It was especially unhelpful for Kennedy given his polls have been dropping for some time. Earlier in the year Kennedy was averaging about 10% of the national vote – currently he averages about half that. While Kennedy, as an independent candidate, was always very, very unlikely to win the election outright, he was hoping for a strong performance – something that now seems unlikely.Hershey said, however, that given the majority of Americans are not engaged in day-to-day politics, Kennedy’s early strong performance was always something of a mirage.“So I’m sure that there was a certain proportion of people who just heard the name Robert F Kennedy Jr, and attributed to him some of the qualities that they remembered in his father, or who just have a certain kind of shine to the Kennedy name,” she said.“And so virtually anything they hear about him is likely to tarnish that initial feeling as people get more information.”While the bear cub incident was unsavory, there have been weightier complaints against Kennedy. In July a former babysitter for Kennedy told Vanity Fair that Kennedy assaulted her at his home in 1998. Kennedy responded by stating: “I am not a church boy.”Last year he was forced to apologize after he claimed that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people”, while Kennedy has claimed that wifi causes “leaky brain” and has linked antidepressants to school shootings. In 2023 he claimed that chemicals in water were making children transgender, while Kennedy has longstanding, and wrong, beliefs about apparently any and all vaccines.The video of Kennedy talking about how he hauled a bear carcass into the back of his car, then later staged a scene which attempted to make it look like the bear had been killed by a cyclist, might not actually be the most damaging footage of Kennedy to have emerged in the past month.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA video posted online on 16 July showed a phone call between Trump and Kennedy where the former president appeared to offer an opportunity for the pair to work together in the future. The video came after reports – denied by Kennedy – that he might drop out and endorse Trump.“Part of perhaps why we’re seeing his numbers shrink is because of his credibility issues. This bizarre story about the bear, coupled with this video a few weeks ago speaks directly to the candidate’s credibility, and some voters may simply have a second look. His supporters may become disillusioned and decide not to participate at all,” said Emmitt Riley, a professor of politics and African and African American studies at Sewanee University and the chair of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.Trump’s outreach suggests that he is fearful of Kennedy’s quixotic campaign. Kennedy’s aggressive attitude towards the border crisis, and promises to take on the Washington elite are reminiscent of some of Trump’s pledges, means they are fishing in at least parts of the same pool.“I see him more as a threat to Donald Trump, given that his supporters are looking for more of an ‘alternative’. I do not see voters who even at this stage would vote for RFK remotely even considering supporting Kamala Harris,” Riley said.But despite Kennedy’s past as an anti-vaccine campaigner who drove around with a dead animal in his car, and his present as an oddity, a punchline and someone sinking in the polls, Riley said he could still have an impact on the election – given how close the vote is expected to be in key swing states.“When we think about the margins that states like Michigan, Wisconsin, any of those midwestern states were decided in the last election, every single vote is going to count,” Riley said.“And so if it comes down to 30,000 votes, if it comes down to 5,000 votes, a small portion there [for Kennedy] would likely have a major impact on either Donald Trump’s ability to get to 270 or Kamala Harris’s ability to get to 270. And I think that that is what many people are concerned about.” More

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      Free meals v hungry children: is this the school lunch election? | Marcus Weaver-Hightower

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      The humble school meal is having a moment. With the nomination of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, as Kamala Harris’s running mate, many voters and pundits are suddenly talking about school meals. And that’s good, because the stakes are high for the national school lunch and school breakfast programs since the campaigns and their parties have very different records and plans.Since Walz became the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, an image of him has frequently circulated. In the photograph, he’s surrounded by smiling children hugging him after he signed a 2023 bill making school meals universally free for all Minnesota children. His was the fourth state to commit to feeding all children at school; now nine states have done so, and more are considering similar measures. No more forms to fill out to prove your income, which busy parents can forget or that get crumpled in a backpack. No more penalizing children when their parents fall behind on lunch accounts. Every kid gets fed, powering them up for their day’s work learning and growing.By most measures, the Minnesota program has been successful and popular. Participation in the meals program soared, increasing 15% at lunch and 37% at breakfast compared with the previous year. Due to those increases, the economies of scale improved, and some districts have been able to invest more in scratch cooking with ingredients from local farmers. It turns out that relieving cafeteria staff of the duty to go after parents who fall behind on lunch payments leaves them more time to focus on food quality.Minnesota’s registered voters are overwhelmingly happy with the program, too. A KSTP/SurveyUSA poll showed that 72% agreed with the legislation, including 90% of liberals and 57% of conservatives. Even 59% of Trump voters in 2020 agreed. In online forums, Minnesota commenters tend to be remarkably supportive of feeding all children, even if they don’t have any themselves or if they think the food could be better. Parents rave about the convenience and savings.Minnesota’s success isn’t an outlier, but a consistent feature of free meals for all. A 2022 study of the national Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which provides universally free meals nationwide in districts that have a poverty rate of 25% or more, found that more kids eat when the meal is free. That’s true even among kids who were already eligible for free or reduced-price meals, suggesting that stigma is keeping many from accepting assistance. Even more helpful, families with children in schools that provide meals tend to spend less at the grocery store while still improving the quality of their diets. And, perhaps most important, research consistently shows that school meals improve students’ academic performance, behavior and health outcomes.It’s not assured that a Harris-Walz administration would push such legislation nationally. Harris has mentioned school meal programs at least twice, once in a 2017 Facebook post deploring lunch shaming and recently on X, when she touted Walz’s school lunch program as a sign of support for the middle class. But if the Democratic ticket does put the issue on its platform or list of priorities, school meals would at least have a knowledgable champion in Walz. He has seen it work on the ground, and he knows the benefits that it brings to the vast majority of families with children in his state.Meanwhile, Minnesota Republican lawmakers have criticized the free meals program. State representative Kristin Robbins’s complaint is typical: “All the low-income students who need – and we want to provide, make sure no one goes hungry – they were getting [meals] through the free and reduced lunch program. This [new legislation] gave free lunch to all the wealthy families … Is that really a priority?” Walz’s reply to this argument dripped with irony: “Isn’t that rich? Our Republican colleagues were concerned this would be a tax cut for the wealthiest.” The year before, the Minnesota GOP proposed a $3.5bn tax cut that largely would have benefited the wealthiest 20%. Feeding all the state’s schoolchildren, even after going over budget because it was so popular, costs only about one-seventh of that.Republicans at the national level, too, disdain expanding access to free meals and improving nutrition standards. In March, the Republican Study Committee, a caucus to which roughly three-quarters of all Republican House members belong, released its 2025 budget proposal. It called for ending the CEP for high-poverty districts. Doing so would snatch school meals from millions of children currently receiving them, shifting that cost back to their families. It would also probably increase the bureaucracy for schools, though Republicans claim that this administrative system is rife with “fraud and abuse”. While there have been high-profile cases of fraud in the school meals programs (for instance, a Chicago area nutrition director was recently convicted of stealing $1.5m, largely in chicken wings), most identified “abuse” entails clerical errors like giving wrongly categorized meals (free or reduced-price) to kids very near the income cutoffs or ringing up a meal without one of the required components on the tray, like enough vegetables. I would also point out that, if all children got the meals free, there would be no “fraud” in giving a hungry child a school meal, and we could save the labor and cost of all that paperwork.Reducing access to free school meals is also a priority of the now-infamous Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next administration. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but his ties to it are indisputable and a second Trump White House would probably be well populated with its adherents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRegarding school meals, Project 2025 repeats the willful deception that the federal lunch and breakfast programs are “specifically for children in poverty”. In truth, from their beginnings, these programs were meant for all children. But they always made allowances for impoverished children’s access – not only poor children, but inclusive of poor children. The authors of Project 2025 argue that any expansion of free meals is against the “original intent” and creates “an entitlement for students from middle- and upper-income homes”. (I wonder what they think of all those wealthy children getting free textbooks?) Their stated policy goals are to “work with lawmakers to eliminate CEP” and to “reject efforts to create universal free school meals”.While Trump himself may know little about school meals policy (I have never found an instance of him directly talking about it), his first administration set out immediately to relax nutrition standards set under President Obama. The very first policy announcement from Sonny Perdue, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, was that his department would seek to bring back higher-fat chocolate milk, reduce whole grain requirements and stop sodium reductions. And despite the US Department of Agriculture’s own research findings that Obama-era rules had made school meals significantly healthier and debunking claims that plate waste was increasing, one of the last acts of the Trump USDA was to propose a further weakening of nutrition standards to require fewer fruits and allow yet more usually high-salt items such as pizza and hash browns. But the clock ran out on that proposal, and the Biden-Harris administration then increased school meals’ nutrition standards.Given the Republicans’ legislative goals and the direction of one of the GOP’s leading thinktanks, a second Trump administration would almost surely unravel access to school meals and gut hard-won, incremental gains that have made them healthier. All this despite nationwide polls that indicate a majority of US voters agree that all kids should get universally free school meals. More

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      Donald Trump is in full meltdown mode. Could he destroy his own campaign? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      What do you think Donald Trump does for stress relief? Massages, maybe? Or perhaps he binge-drinks Diet Coke while bed rotting. Maybe he writes down his grievances on pieces of paper and then flushes them down the toilet. It’s also possible he lets off steam by smashing gold trinkets with his golf clubs and throwing paper towels at Puerto Ricans. That feels very on-brand.Whatever Trump does to manage his stress, I imagine he’s doing a lot of it right now. The convicted felon has had a terrible three weeks. Ever since Joe Biden dropped out of the race, things have been going rapidly downhill for Trump. His campaign had been built around bashing Biden, whose frailty and questionable mental acuity made him an easy target. With the far more energetic and coherent Kamala Harris as his opponent, Trump clearly doesn’t know what to do. His campaign now seems to consist of nothing but racism, the revival of old grudges, conspiracy theories and insults.This strategy isn’t exactly working out for him. A New York Times/Siena College poll published on Saturday found Harris four points ahead in the crucial battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. This is a big deal: when Biden was the nominee, Trump was either always slightly ahead in those states or the two men were neck and neck. It’s not just the polls that have shifted, media coverage has, too. A month ago, every headline seemed to be questioning Biden’s mental competence; now, headlines are focused on Trump’s unhinged rambling.While Harris’s campaign has huge momentum and exudes competence, Trump is embroiled in chaos. One of the latest debacles? He was hacked. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed the hack was “by the Iranian Government” and added: “Never a nice thing to do!” No – but it provides a good opportunity to remind everyone that Trump’s Twitter (now X) account was compromised in 2020 by Victor Gevers who successfully guessed the password was “maga2020!” This was after the ethical hacker hacked Trump’s Twitter in 2016 by guessing the password was “yourefired”, the catchphrase from The Apprentice. The man who wants voters to think he can manage national security can’t even manage his own passwords.Even an interview on Monday night with his pal Elon Musk was a rambling, grievance-filled disaster. It was also beset by serious technical issues, leading a Harris spokesman to quip that Trump’s campaign is in service of “self-obsessed rich guys who … cannot run a livestream in the year 2024”.Trump isn’t dealing with his stream of setbacks very well; according to Republican sources quoted in a recent Axios report, he “is struggling to get past his anger”. The New York Times has similarly reported that a seething Trump repeatedly called Harris a “bitch” in private – claims that Trump has denied, despite the fact that he’s happily called the vice-president all manner of names in public. Essentially, he’s in full meltdown mode.So, too, are Trump’s allies, who are desperately begging their candidate to get a grip and start focusing on actual issues, rather than personal attacks. Instead of heeding this advice, however, Trump seems intent on alienating the people who can help him win. At a campaign rally in Atlanta earlier this month, Trump picked a fight with Brian Kemp, Georgia’s popular Republican governor, whom he termed “little Brian” and accused of having turned Georgia into a “laughing stock”. Georgia is an important state to win and, before Biden dropped out, it seemed as though it was in the bag for Trump. Now he’s polling the same as Harris. Making an enemy of Kemp is a terrible strategy.While it’s highly satisfying to think of a furious Trump setting his own campaign on fire, it’s important not to be complacent. As we know, things change quickly. Harris may be on the up now, but she hasn’t won this election yet. It’s also important not to underestimate the dangers a desperate Trump poses. There’s a chance he might implode, yes. But there’s also a chance he might explode, leaving a hell of a lot of collateral damage in his wake. In an interview this weekend, Biden said that, if Trump loses, he’s “not confident at all” there would be a peaceful transfer of power. Nor am I.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn case you were wondering, by the way, there is a real answer to the question about how Trump manages his stress. During a 2004 interview with Larry King, he said: “I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters … That’s how I handle stress.” I wish I could give that technique a go myself. The problem is, if you’re keen on things such as bodily autonomy and democracy, then this election really does matter. More

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      Kamala Harris must speak to the press | Margaret Sullivan

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      I can understand why Kamala Harris hasn’t given a sit-down interview to a major media organization or done a no-holds-barred press conference since she began her presidential campaign a few weeks ago.From a tactical or strategic point of view, there’s little reason to.After all, she’s enjoying a honeymoon phase with a lot of positive media and a nearly ecstatic reception from much of the public.Just this week, as one example, Time magazine published a story on her ascendency with the cover line: Her Moment. The illustration showed the Democratic candidate with a beatific expression, looking serenely (but somehow powerfully) into a promising future. Granted, Time isn’t the opinion-maker that it was decades ago, but you can’t buy that kind of exposure.What’s more, when the vice-president has interacted with reporters in recent weeks, as in a brief “gaggle” during a campaign stop, the questions were silly. Seeking campaign drama rather than substance, they centered on Donald Trump’s attacks or when she was planning to do a press conference. The former president, meanwhile, does talk to reporters, but he lies constantly; NPR tracked 162 lies and distortions in his hour-long press conference last week at Mar-a-Lago.But Harris needs to overcome these objections and do what’s right.She is running for the highest office in the nation, perhaps the most powerful perch in the world, and she owes it to every US citizen to be frank and forthcoming about what kind of president she intends to be.To tell us – in an unscripted, open way – what she stands for.We don’t know much about that, other than vague campaign platitudes about “freedom” and “not going back”.As journalist Jay Caspian Kang recently put it – under the New Yorker headline How Generic Can Kamala Harris Be? – the candidate hasn’t explained “why she has changed her mind on fracking, which she once said should be banned, and has wobbled on Medicare for all, which she once supported, or what she plans to do with Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is said to be unpopular among some of Harris’s wealthy donors; or much about how a Harris administration would handle the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East”. And that’s just a start.I don’t have a lot of confidence that the broken White House press corps would skillfully elicit the answers to those and other germane questions if given the chance. But Harris should show that she understands that, in a democracy, the press – at least in theory – represents the public, and that the sometimes adversarial relationship between the press and government is foundational.The pressure on Harris to open up is growing. It’s a constant complaint on Fox News, both by Fox anchors and by Republican politicians, including her rival Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance.And mainstream media, perhaps tiring of being so unnaturally positive, has picked up on it, too.“Time’s just about up on Harris to avoid this becoming a thing,” warned Benjy Sarlin of Semafor. He was responding to a front-page story in the New York Times about Harris’s inaccessibility, whose headline included another ominous phrase, describing her campaign as spirited but “shrouded from public scrutiny”.Hear the drumbeat building?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIdeally, Harris will do both a lengthy press conference and a televised, in-depth interview – perhaps with Lester Holt, Jake Tapper or Rachel Scott – or with a major newspaper or equivalent.Apparently feeling the heat, Harris has said she plans to get something scheduled before the end of this month. But that’s too long to wait.Not everyone agrees, of course. One Democratic politician, Jon Cooper, posted on Twitter/X: “My thoughts on Kamala Harris largely ignoring the media and instead speaking directly to American voters: F*** the corporate media.”Harris, while she will probably be effective in the 10 September debate with Trump, isn’t especially skilled when answering questions on the fly. She tends to conjure a vague “word salad” as she did when asked a softball question just after the prisoner swap involving Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.When she finally does speak to the press at length, I’m sure some unfavorable headlines will result. There will be some nonsensical controversies and unnecessary intrigue.Even if you very much hope that Harris prevails in November over her corrupt, felonious rival, that’s not a good enough reason to cheer on her press avoidance.If Harris is truly “for the people”, as she has long claimed, she needs to speak to their representatives – flawed as they may be.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Lone Democrat on Georgia state board defends elections amid new rules

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      Sara Tindall Ghazal was scouring her closet as 8pm approached on Wednesday night. She was preparing for her first appearance on cable news, something she has avoided her entire career.In fact, Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the Georgia state election board (SEB), has shunned media attention and appearances since she was appointed to the board in 2021. Back then, even as Georgia became the focal point of former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and as rightwing media and a nationwide network of election denial activists homed in on the state, Tindall Ghazal kept to herself, quietly carrying out her duties in previously obscure meetings of the board.But after two days of public board meetings last week in which her Republican counterparts on the board adopted myriad rules at the behest of some of those very election denier activists, Tindall Ghazal’s cable news debut had become unavoidable.“The makeup of this board has changed from being a board that followed the rule of law and made decisions based on what state and federal law required, and what was best for running elections, to one that is being driven by far-rightwing narratives,” she said.For more than 16 hours on 6 and 7 August, Tindall Ghazal had sat with her fellow board members, all Republicans, and listened to speakers complain that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump – and propose rules that would prevent that from happening again in November but that Tindall Ghazal said will “cause chaos” in November.They include a rule that gives local election officials more power to refuse to certify election results, and another that provides more complicated procedures for voters filling out absentee ballots, as well as constant video surveillance at ballot drop box sites. Tindall Ghazal also voted against reopening a case pushed by election deniers that claims results in 2020 in Fulton county were flipped to benefit Joe Biden.Voting with her in dissent was John Fervier, a Republican and the board chair. Voting for the rules and investigation into Fulton county were a trio of Republicans who were praised by Trump at a recent campaign rally in Atlanta. All three have expressed beliefs in widespread election fraud that even conservative groups have said does not exist.“It’s an iterative process,” Tindall Ghazal said of the SEB’s descent into election denialism. “The narratives exist already and are deeply embedded in the minds of some of the board members and certainly much of the audience and petitioners, and everything that is done in the meetings is done to perpetuate those narratives.”Just as Tindall Ghazal’s Republican colleagues voted to reopen the case against Fulton county, Trump was already promoting the decision on his social media platform, Truth Social.“The Attorney General of Georgia MUST get moving on this,” Trump wrote. “So must Governor Kemp, and the Secretary of State.”Despite Trump’s Truth Social post, nothing has changed in the Fulton county case. Following his loss in 2020, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, ordered an audit of votes in Fulton, the state’s most populous county and home to heavily Democratic Atlanta.The audit found 345 more votes for Trump than had been counted during the election. But that didn’t change the fact that Biden had received 243,000 more votes than Trump in Fulton county, the audit confirmed.Still, election deniers like those who have successfully pressured the board in recent years to investigate claims of voter fraud have insisted that the case needs further attention. Last week, they got a major win, when the pro-Trump trio of SEB members Janelle King, Rick Jeffares and Janice Johnston sent the case to the attorney general for a new investigation.“We take election integrity very seriously, and we will apply the constitution, the law and the facts as we have always done,” a spokesperson for the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, a Republican, told the Associated Press.The SEB also passed rules that Tindall Ghazal said were “far outside our authority as a rule-making body”. Of the rules passed last week, Tindall Ghazal says the most problematic is one that allows for county election board members in Georgia’s 159 counties to refuse to certify results – which courts have largely ruled is a “ministerial” task not up to the discretion of local election officials – if a “reasonable inquiry” can be conducted into allegations of election fraud or errors.“Reasonable inquiry is about as uncertain a standard as I can think of,” Tindall Ghazal said.Several Democratic members of the state legislature spoke out against the rule, as did voting rights groups. Former chair of the Fulton county board of elections Cathy Woolard, a Democrat, said that the certification rule will invite scores of lawsuits challenging the ability of county election board members to use their discretion to hold up certification of election results.“It’s hard for me to imagine the sheer volume of lawsuits that will be filed to challenge the process, the rules, the disregard for the rule of law,” Woolard said.In voting with Tindall Ghazal against the certification rule, Fervier, a political appointee of the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, previewed the legal fight ahead over certification.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Please make sure the votes are in the record for any potential future litigation,” Fervier said at the meeting.At a recent Trump rally in Atlanta, Johnston stood and waved to the crowd as they applauded her, King and Jeffares for “fighting for victory”, as Trump himself put it.“They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job,” Trump said, naming the three of them but not Fervier.“Three pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”After a second, eight-hour day on the dais on 7 August, Tindall Ghazal said she needed “some protein” before preparing for her first major television interview. Her hair was already sorted: close-cropped in a growing-out buzz from losing her hair to chemotherapy treatments for stage two breast cancer.Tindall Ghazal received her cancer diagnosis during a meeting of the state election board in October, then had a mastectomy the following month. The episode was “transformative”, she said, proving that she had a strong network of family and friends to support her. Undergoing the procedure and chemo, Tindall Ghazal never missed an election board meeting.“I don’t do well when I have too much time on my hands, so having the board work kept my mind busy on something that I care deeply about.,” Tindall Ghazal said.An eighth-generation Georgian and attorney, Tindall Ghazal has monitored elections and peace talks for former president Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center in Syria, Rwanda and Liberia, where she met her husband, Patrick, in 1998. After leaving the Carter Center, Tindall Ghazal became the director of voter protection for the Democratic party of Georgia.In 2021, Georgia Democrats appointed her to the SEB. At the time, she knew she’d be the only Democrat – but she also had faith that Republicans on the board would work for the benefit of all Georgians. For a time, Tindall Ghazal says, that was the case. Republicans had appointed relative moderates to the board.Since 2021, three moderate Republican appointees have been replaced by King, Johnston and Jeffares. Johnston has been receptive to complaints and calls for investigations from election denial activists, the Guardian found in March; Jeffares has openly posted about his belief in Trump’s election lies, although he told the Guardian that he believed Trump legitimately lost in Georgia in 2020. King, a conservative media personality with no experience managing elections, is married to Kelvin King, who ran against the former football star Herschel Walker in the Republican primary in 2022 but lost. (Walker went on to lose to Raphael Warnock in the general election.) King hosts a podcast and appears on a political panel at a TV station in Atlanta, but has no experience administering elections, nor does Jeffares.Leftwing groups like Fair Fight Action, which was founded by the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, said the trio of Johnston, King and Jeffares had been chosen for their roles on the board not because of their experience administering elections, but because of their fealty to Trump.“The state election board has become a Maga government body, with three new members likely chosen not because they have elections experience, but because they’re seen as loyalists who will defer to Trump’s 2020 election fraud lies,” Fair Fight’s communications director, Max Flugrath, said in a statement.As non-elected officials hearing complaints about elections, ballots and other minutiae of the election process, the SEB was a relatively obscure government body whose meetings have not typically provided scenes of great political theater. But that changed in 2020, when the SEB became the focus of election denial activists’ attempts to prove the election was stolen from Trump. Now the board’s meetings have garnered greater attention from a nationwide network of election deniers, Georgia’s political press, voting rights advocacy groups and left-leaning watchdogs.Trump’s mention of King, Johnston and Jeffares put an even bigger spotlight on the previously obscure body. Johnston, who attended Trump’s rally and waved at the cheering crowd, did not return a request for comment, but King said that while she did not attend the rally, if she had, she was well within her rights to “attend any Republican event freely as I would expect [Tindall Ghazal] to do the same if she wishes”. Jeffares also didn’t attend the rally, he said. In a lengthy conversation with the Guardian, Jeffares, a Trump supporter, said he believed Trump lost fair and square in Georgia in 2020, but repeatedly expressed belief in possible election fraud taking place in the state, especially in Fulton county.Jeffares said he wasn’t watching Trump’s rally in Atlanta when the ex-president mentioned his name. He heard about it several days later.“It makes me mad that we’ve been labeled” as election deniers, Jeffares said. “I didn’t even watch it, but when I heard he mentioned our name, you know my first thought was? Damn, we’re in trouble now.”But Jeffares’ concern over Trump’s mentioning of the board’s work didn’t stop him from saying he’d be open to a position in a second Trump administration. In a conversation with the Guardian, Jeffares said he proposed himself as a candidate for a regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency. The proposal came during a conversation with a former Trump campaign adviser, Brian Jack, who is running for a US congressional seat in November. Jeffares, who runs a company that deals with sewage and wastewater projects, helped Jack with his campaign, he said.“I said if y’all can’t figure out who you want to be the EPA director for the south-east, I’d like to have it,” Jeffares said. “That’s all I said.”With a Democratic ticket marked by surging enthusiasm following the replacement of Biden as candidate with Kamala Harris, Georgia’s status as a swing state has once again become a focal point of both Republican and Democratic campaign strategy. As the state election board continues to implement rules that will affect how Georgia’s elections are run – and is dominated by pro-Trump Republicans who hold the majority – the focus on Tindall Ghazal and her work on the board may be about to get a lot bigger.“All I know is this is where we are, and I am just trying to stop a disaster,” she said. More