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      Latinos in once true-blue Texas border zone are getting on the Trump train

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      Anna Holcomb is preparing her Ram pickup truck for the big event on Saturday, festooning it in Make America Great Again (Maga) flags that flap restlessly in the searing hot Texas wind.Holcomb is gearing up for a show of strength by Donald Trump supporters in the Rio Grande valley, the region of south Texas that flanks the Mexican border. From 8am on Saturday morning, thousands of similarly decked-out vehicles will form convoys along a 300-mile stretch, from Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico all the way north to Eagle Pass.They will converge on the fair grounds in Holcomb’s small town of Zapata, where the number of cars is expected to exceed the local 5,000-strong population. There will be a carne asada cook-off, prizes for the most lavishly decorated Maga vehicle, and a joining of hands in prayers for Trump.The convoys are known as “Trump Trains”, and though they have appeared in other states they have taken off in the Rio Grande valley. They symbolize the political drama that is unfolding in this overwhelmingly Hispanic community that has for generations been umbilically tied to the Democratic party: the seemingly unassailable rise of Trump.Presidential election results in Zapata county starkly tell the story. In 2012, the Republican candidate Mitt Romney was trounced by Barack Obama 28% to 71%.When Trump made his first bid for the White House in 2016 he barely improved on Romney’s record, attracting 33% of Zapata’s votes to Hilary Clinton’s 66%. But then in 2020 he sent shockwaves through the valley, winning the county by 53% to Joe Biden’s 47%.It was the first time in 100 years that a Republican presidential candidate had won Zapata. This rugged community of cattle ranches dotted with prickly pear cactus plants, which is 95% Hispanic and has been unswervingly Democratic since 1920, had fallen for the Apprentice star turned US president.View image in fullscreenHolcomb, 58, is part of the wind of change blowing through the valley. She is an American-born Hispanic woman whose mother immigrated from Old Guerrero on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande river.Holcomb, who worked in the local oil business, has been politically active since she turned 18. The politicians she canvassed for were invariably Democratic – it was the only party that ever fielded candidates.“We believed the Democratic party was the party for the working class. That’s what I understood it to be,” she said.Then Trump came along. She vividly recalls his 2015 speech after descending the escalator of Trump Tower announcing his presidential bid, in which he talked about some Mexican immigrants being “rapists” and others bringing in drugs and crime. Within minutes of the speech ending her phone began ringing as several of her first cousins – she estimates she has more than 40 in the Zapata area, all of Mexican descent – shared with her their alarm.She had a different response. “I liked his speech. I liked that he said he was going to be stricter with the influx of immigrants. He got me thinking, my country first. I am American. Sure I have Hispanic blood, but I am red, white and blue American.”Her cousins told her that anyone in Zapata who voted for Trump was crazy given his disdain for Mexicans. She replied: “Call me crazy, I’m voting for him.”She did vote for Trump in 2016, though she did so surreptitiously, telling no one. “Back then it felt like a sin to be a Republican,” she said. By 2020, she felt confident enough to join a Trump Train that did a victory loop around town after the county results came in.Now Holcomb is preparing to fight for Trump again and she expects him to win even more handsomely in Zapata this time. She guesses that her 40-plus first cousins are evenly divided this year between those who are pro-Trump and those who still virulently oppose him.Holcomb’s story is repeating itself throughout the Rio Grande valley. Trump has marched through the area, winning 14 out of 28 counties in 2020 that previously had been presumed Democratic.An opinion poll from April conducted by the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation (TxHPF) found that Trump was leading his then presumptive rival Biden in South Texas by 44% to 36%. That was an astounding statistic given the region’s previously lock-tight Democratic record, its Hispanic roots and Trump’s often unrestrained hostility towards immigrants from Mexico and Central America.View image in fullscreen“Trump is doing better in south Texas and the Rio Grande valley than he is in the big urban counties, and that’s of note because historically Texas Democrats relied on the RGV as their reservoir of votes,” said Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University.Analysts caution against drawing national conclusions from the valley, given its unique fusion of Texan and Mexican history and culture. Local people tend not to call themselves Hispanic, Latino, or Mexican American – they identify as “Tejanos”.It would be equally foolhardy, however, to ignore Trump’s surge. Hispanic Americans are among the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country, the Pew Research Center has found, accounting for 36 million eligible voters – 15% of the total – in November.Nationally, although most Latino voters continue to vote Democratic, the margins are falling – from 71% Democratic support in 2016 to 63% in 2020. The rate at which Trump is making inroads varies greatly by state, turning the country into a patchwork of contrasting loyalties.Biden did well in 2020 among Latino voters in Arizona, who were critical to his victory. His success came on the back of years of intensive grassroots organising by Democratic groups. They harnessed the backlash to the harsh anti-immigrant bill SB 1070 passed by state Republicans a decade earlier.By contrast, Trump did well in Florida, building on the longstanding Republican affinities of Cuban Americans around Miami. Trump also capitalised on voters’ feelings towards immigration, but in this case he did so in a diametrically opposed direction – he emphasised his own harsh attitude towards undocumented immigrants, an argument which played well with Cuban émigrés. .That the same issue – immigration – could polarise Latino voters in two key states cautions against making firm political assumptions. It is becoming ever clearer that America’s Hispanic population is not the left-leaning monolith that some Democratic strategists wish it to be.It is a demographic with rich and varied traditions, convictions and aspirations that are increasingly becoming reflected in diverse electoral choices. As Jones put it: “What’s happening in south Texas tells us that some Hispanic areas that the Democratic party has depended on, that were dark blue, may no longer be reliable.”The Rio Grande valley is a frontier community that feels cut off from the world around it. It belonged to Mexico until Texas gained independence in 1836, and only joined the US with annexation in 1848.Spanish remains the first language of many of the valley’s US citizens. A drive through the region passes the usual relentless repetition of corporate behemoths like Walmart and McDonald’s, but also local outlets like El Tigre Food Store and El Pueblo Express Mart.View image in fullscreenBy the side of the road, crumbling Spanish-style haciendas are painted blue and ochre, bleached under a brutal sun. Military Highway, which tracks the river, runs alongside miles of border wall, some of it constructed noisily by Trump (“Build the wall! Build the wall!”), other portions erected more quietly under Obama.In the sky above Zapata, a large white blob hangs over the blackbrush. It is a blimp – an aerial radar system on the lookout for drug and human trafficking.A joke told about the valley is that its people have only two political affiliations: Democratic and conservative Democratic. The region has strong religious and socially conservative traditions: residents tend to be pro-gun, anti-abortion, strongly on the side of law enforcement given the number of jobs locally in border security and policing, and pro-fossil fuel industries.In the Walmart in Rio Grande City, many of the customers don’t have a vote – some are Mexican citizens who have hopped over the river to shop, others undocumented immigrants. Of those who can vote, many expressed enthusiasm for Trump, others were full of disappointment about the Biden-Harris administration.View image in fullscreen“I’m for Trump, sure,” said Gilberto Maldonado, a 21-year-old electrician who described himself as a Democrat. “Economically, Trump’s better for the country, better for everybody.”Stella Solis, 65, whose family has lived for at least five generations in the valley, said she was with Trump too. “I don’t like what Biden has been doing, all these people coming over the border from Mexico. Trump would give more help to people, when Biden has done nothing for us.”Carmen Castillo, 44, a registered Democrat, is not going to vote. Speaking with the Guardian in Spanish, she explained she would never vote for Trump because of his lack of morals, but she had the same criticism as Solis about the past four years, saying that the current administration “hasn’t done anything for us”.Abel Prado, a Democratic operative in the valley, told the Guardian that since Biden stepped aside last month to make way for Kamala Harris there had been a leap in confidence. Within days of Biden’s announcement the inbox of the Hispanic civic engagement group he co-founded, Cambio Texas, had filled up with offers to volunteer in registering people to vote.View image in fullscreen“There’s renewed enthusiasm, a new general swagger of the people I work with in this space,” he said.Opinion polls conducted in key battleground states since the switch to Harris suggest that what Prado is detecting in the valley may be part of a wider shift. A survey of 800 Latino voters released this week by Somos Pac based on seven swing states has Harris leading Trump commandingly by 55% to 37%.Prado himself is one of the rarer breed of progressive Democrats in south Texas. He said his personal politics were “extremely radical” but he keeps many of his views private because it could harm his ambitions to build a broad coalition.“People think that because this place is a Democratic stronghold they can walk into any meeting with piercings all over their nose and rainbow hair and fit in just fine. The exact opposite is true.”He said that Trump’s projected image as a strongman resonates in the valley among the children of immigrants who have had to make their own way in life and for whom family is supremely important. But Prado also thinks the most regrettable aspect of Trump’s impact in the valley is that it has got people to think that “just because somebody else enjoys something, they took it from you”.View image in fullscreenIt’s also divided the community, setting residents against each other despite their common heritage. “You would think that having such strong Mexican roots would give people empathy towards those who come after them. But there’s one thing that people in the Rio Grande valley love doing, and that’s pulling up the ladder after they’ve reached the top.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPrado has heard such sentiments from his oldest brother, a hardcore Trump supporter. He recalls a conversation with him at a barbecue early on in Trump’s presidency in which his brother began ranting about “illegal immigrants” and the need to “send them all back”.Prado’s parents were born in Mexico and entered the US illegally. They gained citizenship under Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty.Prado said to his brother: “Bro, who do you think you are? We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for people like that. Have you forgotten your parents, your aunts and uncles, all these countless people who came here illegally?”He hasn’t spoken to his brother since 2019.The change that Trump has brought to the valley is etched into the individuals who now follow him. Literally so, in the case of Marcus Canales, who about a year into Trump’s presidency tattooed his arms with patriotic designs. “We the people” now dominates one arm, “In God we trust” the other.Canales, 56, was a committed Democrat until his late 40s, just like his parents before him. His grandparents crossed the river into the US as undocumented immigrants and his parents, born in Texas, were passionate Democrats after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal gave them hope during the Great Depression.Yet Canales is now solidly in Trump’s camp, to an extent, he said, that would make his late parents “turn in their graves”. The change came with Trump’s 2016 campaign when Canales was drawn to the real estate developer because “we saw him talking as a businessman, not a politician”.View image in fullscreenCanales started asking questions, he said, about how it was that Democrats have run the valley for generations and yet it remains among the poorest parts of the country. A 2017 report found that 68% of children in the valley live in high-poverty neighbourhoods, compared with 18% statewide.Like many valley residents the Guardian spoke to, Canales has bought the line peddled repeatedly by Trump that as president he presided over the “greatest economy the world has ever seen” (a claim rated “false” by factcheckers). “Look at what Trump did for our economy,” Canales said.“He concentrated on the energy sector, and they started drilling, and jobs started popping up all over the place. And all of a sudden a lot of people are getting very good-paying jobs.”Canales complained by contrast about the economy under Biden and the high cost of food and goods. The inflation rate has in fact declined dramatically since its 2022 peak of 9.1% and now stands at 3%, yet opinion polls conducted for the Guardian show most voters wrongly believe it is still rising.Canales said that the Biden-Harris administration was “printing money, devaluing our dollar, you have inflation in the valley and we’re earning less, we’re getting poorer”.Religion is another critical factor. Opinion polls suggest that Trump’s popularity in Texas is especially high among born-again Christians.According to the TxHPF poll, Trump held a clear lead within this religious community over Biden of 61% to 18%. Evangelical preachers have led the charge, urging their worshippers to back Trump.Jorge Tovar, pastor of Jordan River church in Laredo, is busy organising next month’s Trump Train. He was a Democrat until 2018, when he said he converted to Trump’s side after a policy clash at Laredo city council over LGBTQ+ rights.The council had proposed a new ordinance that would have banned discrimination at work and in housing based on sexual orientation and gender identity; Tovar and other religious leaders successfully blocked the measure.“Ever since then, the Lord woke me up to get involved,” Tovar told the Guardian. “He said I had been neglectful in my civic duty, voting without even researching the candidate. He showed me that they are pushing God out with their laws, but we can keep God in Texas if we go back to the America that we had when Trump was president.”View image in fullscreenThe rise of Trump across the Rio Grande valley presents Democratic leaders and activists with a conundrum. In recent years hopes have risen that Texas – in which no Democrat has won a statewide race since 1994 – might be turned purple, based on its changing demographics.But if Trump continues to grow in the Rio Grande valley all hope of that dies. The Democrats would lose a vital repository of votes upon which statewide success depends.Beto O’Rourke has articulated the dream of a purple Texas perhaps more forcefully than anybody, having come close to defeating the Republican US senator Ted Cruz in 2018. (He then ran for governor in 2022 and was handily beaten by the incumbent Greg Abbott.)“I think Democrats have historically taken the Rio Grande valley for granted,” O’Rourke told the Guardian. “Republicans saw an opportunity, they’re hungry, and they’ve gone after it, investing money and running strong candidates with resources behind them.”He added: “For the first time in my lifetime you are seeing real contested elections between Republicans and Democrats in the valley, and it’s painful for my party.”O’Rourke hopes that events here will act as a wake-up call for the national Democratic party to listen more carefully to the hopes and concerns of local people. “National Democrats have tended to talk to Hispanic communities about being pro-immigration, when here in the valley there’ll be families who have been on this side of the Rio Grande river for seven generations, and they’re like, ‘What the hell are you talking to me about immigration for, what I care about is the economy and world-class public schools’.”View image in fullscreenPrado of Cambio Texas agrees. He criticises Democratic party strategists from Austin or Washington DC of coming to the valley with their own sets of priorities without listening to the actual wants and needs of local people.“They parachute people in from outside, draw their salaries, lose the races, and then they go back to wherever they came from – leaving us here to pick up the pieces.”Such disconnect poses an existential threat for Jonathan Gracia, who is running as the Democratic party’s candidate in a high-priority contested race for a Texas House seat in district 37. The makeup of the constituency means Gracia should have the edge over his Republican rival, but that lead is threatened by Trump’s soaring popularity.Gracia reckons that he’s knocked on about 4,000 doors in the district in the past month in hardcore Democratic-Hispanic neighborhoods. By his estimation, about 7% of those households, all of them longtime Democrats, told him they were voting for Trump – a proportion that if it spilled over into his race would wipe out his advantage.His challenge is to bring those 7% back into the Democratic fold. “I need to win their hearts and minds,” he said.To do that, he begins by listening to people’s concerns. He hears complaints about rising prices and the economy, which he responds to by stressing that new jobs are being created in the valley with the building in Brownsville of launch facilities for Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a new liquid natural gas (LNG) export plant which Gracia promotes against the protests of environmentalists.In terms of his messaging, he avoids any discussion of social issues such as abortion or LGBTQ+ rights. “That’s a loser,” he said. Instead, he stresses that he is pro-business, pro the creation of good-paying jobs, pro-law enforcement.View image in fullscreenIt’s a formula that few in the Democratic party in New York or Chicago or San Francisco would recognise. But it’s worked in the valley for decades.The question is: how long can it hold?Back in Zapata, Anna Holcomb is not only dusting off her truck before next month’s Trump Train, she’s also preparing to campaign for a couple of Republican candidates standing for county seats. It’s the first time in her lifetime that Republicans have run for local office.It’s characteristic of the valley’s complex politics that Holcomb remains a registered Democrat. She said she doesn’t even like Trump: “I couldn’t stand him as a TV personality, every time he came on I would switch the channel. I still don’t like his personality, his arrogance, his mouth.”But she’ll be voting for him in November. “I vote for him because I believe he’s the guy that can get the job done.” More

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      Republicans are on the offensive, and ‘Tampon Tim’ Walz is to the rescue | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Watch out world, Republicans are on the offensive. Still smarting from being called “weird”, it looks like a bunch of GOP strategists got in a room this week to workshop devastating nicknames for Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz. After combining their dozen or so braincells, they came up with a winner: Tampon Tim. The name has been trending on social media as people on the right desperately try to make #TamponTim stick.Apart from the fact that it alliterates, what prompted this moniker? Well, in 2023 Walz signed a wide-ranging Minnesota education bill that, along with a number of other provisions, mandated public schools offer free menstruation products in their bathrooms.To anyone with an ounce of common sense, this sounds like a great thing to do. Tampons are expensive! And “period poverty” – the inability to afford menstruation supplies – is a serious problem in the US. According to a 2021 study commissioned by Thinx, a period product company, 38% of US teenage students who menstruate said that they “often or sometimes cannot do their best schoolwork due to lack of access to period products”. A 2019 edition of the same study also found that more 84% of students in the US have either missed class time or know someone who missed class time because they did not have access to period products.For a long time, period poverty was an overlooked problem; in recent years, however, there has been a wave of legislating to address it. According to the Alliance for Period Supplies, 28 states and Washington DC have passed legislation to help students have free access to period products while in school. So, while the bill Walz signed was commendable, it wasn’t radical in any way – it was part of a nationwide trend to combat a serious problem.I’ve got to hand it to the Republicans, it’s quite difficult to turn “implemented a mainstream policy making kids’ lives easier and helping them stay in school” into something negative, but it seems they are always happy to try. Predictably the right has been using the bill as a way to attack, not just Walz, but trans people.“As a woman there is no greater threat to a woman’s health than leaders … who support putting tampons in men’s bathrooms in public schools. Those are radical policies Tim Walz supports,” a Trump campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt,told Fox News on Tuesday.The actual legislation, I should be clear, does not explicitly state that tampons should be put in men’s bathrooms. It says that free menstrual products “must be available to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students in grades four to 12”. But the very idea that a policy might be inclusive and help trans students seems to drive Republicans up the wall.The “Tampon Tim” attacks aren’t just born out of a hatred of trans people, they also reflect the Republicans’ disdain for women. There are memes with Walz’s head on a tampon and showing him menstruating into his jeans – all of which are meant to convey the idea that Walz is feminine. Which, to many men on the right, seems to be the most insulting thing you can call a man. Last week, for example, the Fox News host Jesse Watters wondered why any self-respecting man would vote for a woman. “[T]o be a man and then vote for a woman just because she’s a woman is either childish – that person has mommy issues – or they are just trying to be accepted by other women,” Watters said. “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.” Ah yes, that is exactly what the scientists say.While Republicans may be having fun with their silly nickname, I’m not sure it’s going to help them in the polls. If anything, it will help Walz. As Hillary Clinton posted on Twitter: “How nice of the Trump camp to help publicize Gov. Tim Walz’s compassionate and common-sense policy of providing free menstrual products to students in Minnesota public schools.”Republicans’ juvenile tampon jokes also reinforce how Walz represents a very different model of masculinity than the one Trump and JD Vance embody. In 1999, for example, when Walz was a high school teacher and football coach in rural Minnesota, he helped students create the school’s first Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). Walz has said he thought it was important for him to be the adviser to the GSA because “it really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married.” He wanted to show, in other words, that masculinity didn’t have to be toxic, that a real man had empathy.All of this to say: thanks for the nickname, guys! Rather than being the insult they think it is, Tampon Tim is a compliment. One that reinforces the fact that the GOP is suffering from a severe case of Toxic Schmuck Syndrome.New York’s oldest person said her secret to longevity is staying single“That’s why I am living … because I didn’t get married,” Louise Jean Signore, 112, told reporters this week. “I’d rather be single. When you are married, you have a lot of trouble.” The fact that Signore doesn’t drink or smoke probably also has something to do with it.Outcry on social media prompts new IUD insertion guidelinesWho says that complaining online is a waste of time? After TikTok users recently shared their painful experiences with getting intrauterine devices inserted, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued updated guidance on how doctors should share options for pain management with their patients. This is one small step towards taking women’s pain more seriously.Bulgaria’s parliament bans LGBTQ+ ‘propaganda’This mirrors regressive legislation passed in Russia and Hungary in recent years.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe gender police consistently target female athletes of colour“More women from the Global South or developing countries are affected by sex testing in sports,” the executive director of a sports advocacy organization told the AP in the wake of the Imane Khelif “controversy”. The AP further notes: “International sporting federations don’t tend to promote an understanding of diversity in sex and gender identity and that gender tests have often targeted female athletes of color who don’t conform to typically Western, white ideals of femininity.”Israel minister says starvation of millions in Gaza might be ‘justified and moral’While extremist Israeli leaders are fantasizing about starving 2 million people to death and defending rape, Harris has said she doesn’t support an Israel arms embargo. It is becoming clear that, just like Joe Biden, Harris has no red line when it comes to Palestinian suffering.Women in China spread secret, female-only languageNushu, sometimes called “script of tears”, is a secret language that goes back centuries in China.A political candidate who told voters not to be ‘weak and gay’ lost her raceValentina Gomez, the Missouri Republican who released homophobic campaign videos, lost her bid to become secretary of state by an embarrassing margin.The week in pawtriarchyBehind their prickly demeanor, cats are big softies. New research suggests cats will grieve after the death of fellow pets. They’ll even grieve dogs. Cats, it would appear, have more empathy than the average Republican politician. More

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      Not done yet: still-smarting Joe Biden to focus on his legacy in final months

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      When a reporter asked if the White House had already started the transition process, Karine Jean-Pierre seemed bemused. “Why?” the press secretary retorted. “Are you trying to kick us out already? We’ve got five months.”Whatever excitement there is in American politics at the moment, the White House is not the centre of the action. What was expected to be a hectic final sprint towards the presidential election, with Joe Biden pinballing between swing-state rallies, has been replaced by long, languorous afternoons in humid Washington.Since 81-year-old Biden ended his re-election campaign after losing the confidence of fellow Democrats, his schedule has been appreciably quieter and his public appearances more scarce. As the party’s new nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris, 59, barnstorms the country and electrifies crowds, there are some days when Biden lies low and is not seen at all.Jean-Pierre recently acknowledged that the president and White House were still “recalibrating” after his decision. “We are trying to figure out what the next six months are going to look like,” she told journalists. “Just give us a beat.”Such absences can create an impression that Biden is less running through the tape than staggering across the finish line. The vacuum can be filled by baseless rightwing conspiracy theories suggesting that Biden is no longer fit for office and that Harris, former president Barack Obama or some other deep state operative is actually running the government.However, analysts say, Biden is making a deliberate choice to work on cementing his legacy – and ensuring the election of Harris to protect it from Republican rival Donald Trump. Though his relevance is diminished, the fact he no longer needs to worry about getting re-elected could prove liberating.Domestically he hopes to keep money flowing from a series of major legislative wins early in his term that could be undone should Trump return to the White House. He will press to quickly fill federal judiciary vacancies and last month he proposed reforms for the supreme court, calling on Congress to establish term limits and an enforceable ethics code for the nine justices.View image in fullscreenForeign policy represents Biden’s best hope for a final defining moment. Last week he helped secure the release of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former US marine Paul Whelan and others in the biggest prisoner swap between Moscow and the US since the cold war.Now he is racing against the clock to persuade Israel and Hamas to agree to his proposed three-phase ceasefire deal to bring home remaining Israeli hostages and potentially pave the way for an end to the 10-month-old war in Gaza. At the same time, he is desperate to avoid tensions with Iran escalating into an all-out regional conflagration.Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “I would imagine that he is going to devote a lot of time and energy to the situation in the Middle East. He surely doesn’t want history to record that the final months of his tenure witnessed the outbreak of the first comprehensive Middle East war in decades, a war that he, like others, has been struggling to avoid.“I would think that it’s going to be all hands on deck to try to contain the ripples of the Iranian attack when it comes, to try to prevent Israel and Hezbollah from moving from tit-for-tat to something much worse, and finally figure out a way of getting the Gaza ceasefire done.”Governing well might also be a more effective way of helping Harris than making speeches. Enthusiasm for the vice-president at rallies and online has already far exceeded anything that he could muster. Biden is not expected to feature prominently as a campaign surrogate for reasons of both style and substance.His low approval rating, especially on issues such as immigration, inflation and Gaza, would saddle his deputy with unwanted baggage. Moreover, the gaffe-prone oldest president in American history would not be a natural fit for Harris’s optimistic, future-focused campaign. Her running mate, Tim Walz, told her this week: “Thank you for bringing back the joy.”Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, added: “She needs a chance to separate herself from him without breaking ranks with him and that will be easier if she draws a bright line between her candidacy and his presidency. I’m not saying that he should become invisible but I don’t think he should be highly visible either, except in his presidential capacity.”Past lame-duck presidents have used their waning days to seek one more big policy win. In 2000 Clinton launched negotiations between the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, and the Palestinian Authority leader, Yasser Arafat, at Camp David in one last – and ultimately doomed – effort at securing Middle East peace. In 2008 George W Bush signed into law a $700bn bailout of the financial services industry as the global crisis deepened.View image in fullscreenBut Biden may still be brooding over how a dismal debate performance in June destroyed his hopes of a second term. He is reportedly smarting over those who orchestrated the end of his 51-year political career and the even swifter embrace of Harris as his replacement. His first in-depth interview since the announcement will be broadcast on CBS News on Sunday.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “I can imagine that there’s a lot of frustration in Biden world because Biden would most definitely like to be rounding out his administration and pursuing his policies but the energy and the resources of the Democratic party are about winning the next election.”Jacobs added: “If he is campaigning he becomes the subject of the Trump campaign for being frail and clueless. There’s nothing good that Joe Biden can do. Also, Kamala Harris needs to clearly identify herself as a distinct and separate brand and she can’t do that if Joe Biden is on the campaign trail.”However, Biden is still sure to receive a rapturous welcome later this month in Chicago, where he is expected to give a prime-time address on the first night of the Democratic national convention before leaving the stage clear for Harris and Walz. The party will be eager to project unity and gratitude for his selfless act in passing the torch.Donna Brazile, a political strategist and former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “He has done more to get this country on the right track than any other president at least in modern history and it’s up to him to decide when and where he will enter in the 2024 race.“Look, he left the vice-president with millions in the bank, with hundreds of thousands of volunteers, over 400 campaign offices. I don’t know how much more we want from Joe Biden but he has given the vice-president a head start and a very healthy start in this 90-day marathon.” More

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      Democrats bask in optimism of Harris surge: ‘Enthusiasm is off the charts’

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      With Kamala Harris now poised to take on Donald Trump in the 5 November US presidential election, her fellow Democrats are enjoying a resurgence of optimism that was sorely lacking for much of this year, as Joe Biden struggled through a bumpy re-election campaign that he ultimately abandoned.Since the president’s stumbling performance in his late June debate against Trump and his shock decision to withdraw from the race weeks later, Harris has rapidly ascended to become the party’s presumptive presidential nominee. Polls have shown her drawing even with, and sometimes overtaking, Trump in the support of voters nationally, and in the handful of crucial swing states that will determine the election.The vice-president has pressed her attack by holding energetic rallies across the country, most recently with Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor who Harris this week selected as her running mate. Democratic strategists and activists say Harris has given the party a much-needed reset after months of jitters over whether Biden’s struggling candidacy was setting the party up for a historic wipeout.“Among the base, the enthusiasm is off the charts, probably the most excited I’ve seen people since the Obama campaign,” said Ben Tribbett, a Democratic strategist in Virginia. “And I think a lot of that has to do with a sense of relief. I think people really felt like we were in a situation that was unfixable and untenable.”Biden resoundingly defeated Trump in the 2020 election, but in the years that followed, the former president strengthened his grip on the Republican party, while his Democratic successor struggled to maintain the support of voters as the US economy weathered its worst bout of inflation since the 1980s, and voters grew skeptical of the 81-year-old’s ability to do the job.View image in fullscreenTrump swept the Republican primaries at the start of the year, while Biden embarked on a re-election campaign with arguments that Trump was unfit to serve, and posed a threat to democracy and reproductive freedom.But despite the former president’s conviction in May on felony business fraud charges and three pending criminal cases against him, polls showed that Biden never gained a clear advantage over Trump, particularly in the six states – Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia – expected to decide the election.Worse still for Democrats was the possibility that Biden’s presence on ballots nationwide would harm the party’s chances of regaining the majority in the House of Representatives, and keeping control of the Senate, particularly after he struggled to articulate his points and parry Trump’s attacks in their debate.That nervousness has, at least for now, been alleviated by Biden’s decision to bow out and endorse Harris, a former California senator who made an unsuccessful bid for the party’s nomination in 2020, and who would be the first Black female president, as well as the first of south Asian descent, if elected.“It’s kind of like just a big sigh of relief,” said Iva King, who co-leads a group of the progressive Indivisible movement in Athens, Georgia. “A lot of us really appreciated President Biden. I think he has done a great job. But like many people around the country, after we saw the debate, it was like, oh, this isn’t looking good.”View image in fullscreenPublic opinion surveys taken since Harris launched her campaign have shown the vice-president with a level of support that the Biden campaign did not have.A slew of recent national polls show her with the lead over Trump nationally, though in swing states they have been less conclusive about which candidate is ahead. Nonetheless, two major forecasters, Cook Political Report and the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, this week announced new ratings that moved swing states where they previously believed Tump had a narrow lead back into their toss-up category.While noting that Trump has stronger poll numbers than he did at this point four years ago, Cook Political Report’s editor-in-chief, Amy Walter, said: “For the first time in a long time, Democrats are united and energized, while Republicans are on their heels. Unforced errors from both Trump and his vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, have shifted the media spotlight from Biden’s age to Trump’s liabilities. In other words, the presidential contest has moved from one that was Trump’s to lose to a much more competitive contest.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe former US president has begun characterizing Harris as too liberal, and seized on stances against fracking she took in her 2020 campaign and her role, under Biden, in attempting to stem the flow of migrants crossing into the US from Mexico. Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, questioned Walz’s military service after his selection this week.Dan Moore, a member of Wisconsin’s Grassroots Menomonee Falls Area, which is affiliated with Indivisible, credited Harris with energizing Democratic faithful and shifting the age conversation from Biden to Trump, who is 78. But he warned of the potency of attacking the vice-president as a “California liberal”.“I think that has the ability to get some traction, and it’s just something that I hear from people” who say, “she’s way too liberal for me”, Moore said.Some of Trump and Vance’s arguments have backfired. Trump drew condemnation for questioning Harris’s identity as African American, while Vance is on the defensive after comments of him dismissing Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies” resurfaced. On Wednesday, the prominent Republican strategist Karl Rove issued a public warning in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which are closely read by conservatives.“The Trump-Vance ticket needs to become much more disciplined and settle soon on an effective line of attack against Harris-Walz that wins over swing voters and then stick to it. If it can’t achieve both these goals, a race Mr Trump was on the verge of winning three weeks ago could be lost,” Rove wrote.Plenty can change in the less than three months remaining before election day, and Republicans have further avenues of attack, including lingering discontent over inflation, Tribbett said.But Harris will have more opportunities to reintroduce herself to the public, including her 10 September debate against Trump. More pivotally will be her address at the Democratic national convention in Chicago later this month, where she will have the chance to further enliven a Democratic base that has already been fired up by her candidacy.“I think if she does it right, I think she will emerge from the convention with a bounce,” he said. “If she’s fully engaged the Democratic base, that bounce will put her in the lead everywhere.” More

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      Biden, Harris to attend first joint event since he quit campaign race – live

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      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to attend an event together in Maryland next Thursday, according to the White House.No further details were given. Ordinarily, this would not be significant news, but so much has changed in the last three weeks and this will be their first appearance together in person since the US president announced on Sunday, July 21 that he would no longer seek re-election.Minutes later, he endorsed his vice president, Harris, to take up the baton and rise to the top of the Democratic ticket for the election this November against the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.Biden dialed in to a boisterous public happening that week when Harris went to what had formerly been the Biden-Harris election campaign headquarters in Delaware and talked to staff, as it became transformed into the Harris for President campaign – and is now the Harris-Walz campaign, since she chose the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate. Biden was effusive about his anointed successor.Now the two will make their first public appearance together in person since that seismic shift in the election. We’ll update you when we know a time, place and nature of the event next Thursday.On Sunday, “CBS News Sunday Morning” will air an interview with President Biden, discussing the president’s decision not to seek reelection.“When I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition president,” Biden told CBS News. “I can’t even say how old I am – it’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth.”“Although it’s a great honor to be a president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do what I– most important thing you can do. And that is — we must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he said.Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential election on July 21, and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, immediately after.Read David Smith’s analysis on Biden’s decision to withdraw for more background ahead of the interview this weekend:With Kamala Harris’s rally in Phoenix this evening still more than two hours away, footage of the crowds gathered inside and out of the venue have begun circulating on social media.The Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, where Harris will speak at 5pm local time, can hold 20,000 people.The number of Harris-Walz campaign rally attendees has made headlines recently – in contrast to the quieter crowds attending rallies for Joe Biden just weeks ago. They’ve also attracted attention from former president Trump, who has complained about the media supposedly exaggerating crowd sizes for his Democratic opponent, at his expense.Ahead of today’s rally in Phoenix, the Harris-Walz campaign released a new ad playing up Harris’s strict views on immigration.“Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime,” the ad says. “As a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border. As vice-president, she backed the toughest border control bill in decades. And as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking. Fixing the border is tough, so is Kamala Harris.”The ad foreshadows the tone Harris may take as she takes the stage in Phoenix this evening – especially as Republicans criticize her record on immigration as vice president. For more on Harris’s views on immigration, read Lauren Gambino’s analysis:The justice department on Friday announced criminal charges against three executives at the voting machine company Smartmatic in connection to an alleged 2016 bribery scheme in the Philippines.The indictment, filed in federal court in south Florida, comes as the company has faced false accusations it was involved in rigging the 2020 election. Smartmatic was only used in Los Angeles county in 2020. Elon Musk, who has become a large spreader of misinformation, immediately shared news of the indictment on X.Prosecutors alleged three executives, including the president of the company, Roger Alejandro Pinate Martinez, bribed the chairman of the Commission on Elections of the Republic of the Philippines “to obtain and retain business related to providing voting machines and election services for the 2016 Philippine elections and to secure payments on the contracts, including the release of value added tax payments.” The scheme allegedly involved “at least $1m in bribes,” the justice department said in a statement.“Regardless of the veracity of the allegations and while our accused employees remain innocent until proven guilty, we have placed both employees on leaves of absence, effective immediately,” the company said in a statement. “No voter fraud has been alleged and Smartmatic is not indicted. Voters worldwide must be assured that the elections they participate in are conducted with the utmost integrity and transparency. These are the values that Smartmatic lives by.”The indictment comes as the company has several defamation lawsuits pending against several conservative news outlets, including Fox and Newsmax. It settled a suit with One America News Network and also has sued Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell for defamation.Alpha Kappa Alpha, the historic Black sorority that Kamala Harris joined in college, has created a political action committee, according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission dated Friday, the New York Times reports.Alpha Kappa Alpha was the first Black sorority formed in the United States. Harris became a member while enrolled at Howard University.The Pac is the first in the sorority’s history, spokeswoman Carisma Ramsey Fields told The Times.Read more about the power of Black sororities from Guardian reporter Helen Sullivan:Make America Great Again, Inc, a political action committee dedicated to re-electing former president Donald Trump, has shared reporting from Fox News today on Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s record on policing:After police murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Walz signed a number of bipartisan police reforms, including a ban on certain types of chokeholds and a ban on “warrior style” police training, which emphasizes the use of force.For more coverage of Walz’s views on policing, read Gloria Oladipo’s reporting in The Guardian:Here’s a look at where things stand:

      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to attend an event together in Maryland next Thursday, according to the White House. This will be their first appearance together in person since the US president announced on July 21 that he would no longer seek re-election.

      Newly released body cam and dashboard camera footage from local Pennsylvania police officers on 13 July shows the moments right before the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The footage, obtained by CNN through a public records request, shows the moment one police officer climbed up to the roof of the building overlooking rally, and saw the shooter just before the firing began.

      A man who stood in front of a gallows and attacked police with poles on January 6, 2021 on Capitol Hill has been sentenced to 20 years in prison, the second longest sentence delivered in the riot. According to prosecutors, who sought 262 months, or 21 years, for David Dempsey, he climbed over rioters like “human scaffolding,” as well as used “his hands, feet, flag poles, crutches, pepper spray, broken pieces of furniture, and anything else he could get his hands on” as weapons against police, NBC reports.

      The US district judge overseeing the 2020 federal election interference case against Donald Trump has agreed to delay the case by several weeks after special counsel Jack Smith’s team requested an extension earlier this week. Smith’s office asked the court for extra time on Thursday, as the prosecutors said that they had not finished assessing how the US supreme court’s immunity decision issued last month.

      Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, has signed an executive order ordering public hospitals in Texas to collect and report information on the immigration status of patients they treat, in order to assess the expenses of providing medical care of undocumented immigrants. Texas congresswoman Sylvia Garcia called it “unacceptable”.

      Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s rally in Detroit, Michigan was the duo’s largest campaign rally to date, featuring over 15,000 voters, the campaign announced today. It added that the crowd broke the campaign’s own record of more than 14,000 voters in Philadelphia on Monday.

      FiveThirtyEight’s new poll shows Harris leading Donald Trump by 2.1 points in the national average. Before Harris entered the race late last month, Joe Biden, who was then running for re-election, before dropping out and handing the torch to Harris, “was behind [Trump] by a significant number, not just at the national popular vote, but in battleground states.
      On Friday, Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster who has been criticized for using racist and sexist language in the past, as well as espousing Covid-19 misinformation, appeared to take a dig at Trump.Rogan said Robert F Kennedy Jr – who has become widely known as a vaccine conspiracy theorist – is “the only one that makes sense to me.”After drawing the ire of Trump who wrote on Truth Social, “It will be interesting to see how loudly Joe Rogan gets BOOED the next time he enters the UFC Ring??? MAGA2024,” Rogan took to X and wrote:
      “For the record, this isn’t an endorsement. This is me saying that I like RFKjr as a person, and I really appreciate the way he discusses things with civility and intelligence. I think we could use more of that in this world. I also think Trump raising his fist and saying “fight!” after getting shot is one of the most American fucking things of all time.”
      Nick Fuentes, the 25-year old white supremacist and Holocaust denier who once dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, has revoked his support for the former president.Referring to the loose network of white nationalist activists, alt-right and internet trolls known as Groypers, Fuentes wrote on X:
      “Tonight I declared a new Groyper War against the Trump campaign. We support Trump, but his campaign has been hijacked by the same consultants, lobbyists, & donors that he defeated in 2016, and they’re blowing it. Without serious changes we are headed for a catastrophic loss.”
      He added that he plans to present a “detailed statement of the facts, a mission statement, and a plan of action” on Monday.In 2022, Democrats, civil rights organizations and some Republicans criticized Trump for dining with Fuentes, who has a history of spewing violently misogynistic rhetoric, in addition to homophobic and Islamophobic views.Newly released body cam and dashboard camera footage from local Pennsylvania police officers on 13 July shows the moments right before the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.The footage, obtained by CNN through a public records request, shows the moment one police officer climbed up to the roof of the building overlooking rally, and saw the shooter just before the firing began.The officer, who was hoisted up to the roof by his colleague, is seen quickly dropping down after he sees the shooter. The officer is then seen running to the other side of the building to get a look at the roof, as the first three shots can be heard on the officer’s dashboard camera, followed by five more.In total, eight shots were fired by the shooter on 13 July, which resulted in Trump’s ear being grazed, one spectator killed and two others were injured.In the videos, the officer can be seen running back to his car to grab his rifle, and shouting at his colleagues to not put their heads up. “He’s right there,” he tells them. At this point, government snipers had killed the shooter, according to CNN.Other footage obtained by CNN shows local police officers expressing frustration and confusion, and complaining that they had previously told the Secret Service to put officers near the building the gunman fired from.“I told them that fucking Tuesday” one officer says. “I told them to post fucking guys over here”. When another officer asked who he told that to, he responded: “The Secret Service.”A man who stood in front of a gallows and attacked police with poles on January 6, 2021 on Capitol Hill has been sentenced to 20 years in prison, the second longest sentence delivered in the riot. According to prosecutors, who sought 262 months, or 21 years, for David Dempsey, he climbed over rioters like “human scaffolding,” as well as used “his hands, feet, flag poles, crutches, pepper spray, broken pieces of furniture, and anything else he could get his hands on” as weapons against police, NBC reports. According to documents reviewed by the outlet, prosecutors also wrote:
      “Though Dempsey has pled guilty only for his assaults on Detective [Phuson] Nguyen and Sergeant [Jason] Mastony, his violent assault on other officers defending the Capitol was relentless: swinging pole-like weapons more than 20 times, spraying chemical agents at least three times, hurling objects at officers at least ten times, stomping on the heads of police officers as he perched above them five times, attempting to steal a riot shield and baton, and incessantly hurling threats and insults at police while rallying other rioters to join his onslaught.”
      In a bizarre attempt to repeat the Republican attack line that Kamala Harris refuses to speak to the press, JD Vance wrote:
      “If we could convince Kamala Harris that illegal aliens are actually journalists trying to ask her questions she’d build that border wall in five seconds.”
      On Thursday, prior to departing from Detroit, Michigan on Air Force Two, a reporter asked Harris whether there is an update on when she will sit down for her first interview since being the Democratic presidential nominee.In response, Harris said:
      “I’ve talked to my team. I want us to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month.”
      The US district judge overseeing the 2020 federal election interference case against Donald Trump has agreed to delay the case by several weeks after special counsel Jack Smith’s team requested an extension earlier this week.Smith’s office asked the court for extra time on Thursday, as the prosecutors said that they had not finished assessing how the US supreme court’s immunity decision issued last month, which awarded former presidents some immunity from criminal prosecution, would narrow their case.“The Government continues to assess the new precedent set forth last month in the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v United States, including through consultation with other Department of Justice components,” prosecutors wrote in the filing requesting the extension.The joint status report that was previously due by 9 August is now due by 30 August, according to the court order, and the status conference hearing, previously scheduled for 16 August, has been postponed until 5 September.Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to attend an event together in Maryland next Thursday, according to the White House.No further details were given. Ordinarily, this would not be significant news, but so much has changed in the last three weeks and this will be their first appearance together in person since the US president announced on Sunday, July 21 that he would no longer seek re-election.Minutes later, he endorsed his vice president, Harris, to take up the baton and rise to the top of the Democratic ticket for the election this November against the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.Biden dialed in to a boisterous public happening that week when Harris went to what had formerly been the Biden-Harris election campaign headquarters in Delaware and talked to staff, as it became transformed into the Harris for President campaign – and is now the Harris-Walz campaign, since she chose the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate. Biden was effusive about his anointed successor.Now the two will make their first public appearance together in person since that seismic shift in the election. We’ll update you when we know a time, place and nature of the event next Thursday.Hello again US politics blog readers, it’s a fascinating news day even if a little less frenzied than most recent ones. The Democratic and Republican campaigns have rallies coming up later today and there is a lot of polling information around and other stories moving. We’ll keep you abreast as it happens.Here’s where things stand:

      Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, has signed an executive order ordering public hospitals in Texas to collect and report information on the immigration status of patients they treat, in order to assess the expenses of providing medical care of undocumented immigrants. Texas congresswoman Sylvia Garcia called it “unacceptable”.

      Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s rally in Detroit, Michigan was the duo’s largest campaign rally to date, featuring over 15,000 voters, the campaign announced today. It added that the crowd broke the campaign’s own record of more than 14,000 voters in Philadelphia on Monday. The presumed Democratic nominees for president and vice president, respectively, addressed a gathering of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.

      FiveThirtyEight’s new poll shows Harris leading Donald Trump by 2.1 points in the national average. Before Harris entered the race late last month, Joe Biden, who was then running for re-election, before dropping out and handing the torch to Harris, “was behind [Trump] by a significant number, not just at the national popular vote, but in battleground states.

      Meghan McCain, political commentator and daughter of the late US Senator for Arizona, John McCain, shared a video of Donald Trump comparing his crowd sizes to Martin Luther King Jr’s and then she simply posted the message: “Vice president Harris is going to win.”

      Harris and Walz plan to highlight reproductive rights – the Republicans’ war on choice and Democrats’ efforts to codify choice – and immigration policies, which have been a mess, when they hold campaign events in Arizona tonight and Nevada tomorrow. More

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      Joe Rogan calls RFK Jr the only candidate ‘that makes sense to me’

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr’s independent presidential campaign may be seeing poll numbers fall and funds dwindle, amid bizarre tales about brain worms and pranks with dead bears and accusations of dangerous conspiracy mongering, but he has nonetheless secured a sought-after supporter: Joe Rogan.The popular podcaster appeared to offer his endorsement on Thursday, saying Kennedy was “the only one that makes sense to me”.Rogan said: “He doesn’t attack people, he attacks actions and ideas, but he’s much more reasonable and intelligent. I mean, the guy was an environmental lawyer and he cleaned up the East River. He’s a legitimate guy.”Rogan was referring to Kennedy’s work in the years before he became widely known as a vaccine conspiracy theorist – views which last weekend led John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight on HBO, to call Kennedy “a full-blown menace”.“You don’t get to say ‘I’m not anti-vaxx’ then wander around the woods telling people not to vaccinate their babies like you’re some red-pilled version of Smoky the Bear,” Oliver said, adding: “The idea of RFK is appealing but so many of the reasons to support him do not stand up to the slightest of scrutiny.”Rogan disagrees. Democrats and Republicans, he told listeners, “gaslight you, they manipulate you, they promote narratives – and the only one who is not doing that is Robert F Kennedy Jr”.Rogan has hosted Kennedy, including an appearance highlighted by Oliver in which Kennedy endorsed a book, Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022, which claims Covid vaccines kill young people and for which Kennedy wrote an introduction.Rogan has also voiced vaccine conspiracy theories, causing controversy he references in a new Netflix comedy special, saying: “Before Covid, I would have told you that vaccines are the most important invention in human history. After Covid, I’m like, ‘I don’t think we went to the Moon. I think Michelle Obama’s got a dick. I think Pizzagate is real. I think there’s direct energy weapons in Antarctica.’“I’m just kidding – I don’t think Michelle Obama’s got a dick, but I believe all of that other shit.”Rogan has a huge audience, with more than 14.5 million listeners just on Spotify, which this year gave him a deal worth a reported $250m.Accepting Rogan’s earlier support, Kennedy said: “This election is not about left vs right. It’s about Americans of goodwill coming together to end the tyranny of corruption in our system – so that we once again have a government and economy that works for all people.”On Friday afternoon, Rogan clarified his stance on Kennedy, telling his followers on X: “For the record, this isn’t an endorsement. This is me saying that I like RFK Jr as a person, and I really appreciate the way he discusses things with civility and intelligence. I think we could use more of that in this world.”He also recalled the moment after the attempt on Trump’s life in July, pointing to the moment the former president raised his fist to the sky and exclaimed, “fight”, Rogan said it was “one of the most American fucking things of all time.”He added that he’s “not the guy to get political information from”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKennedy is a member of a famous Democratic family: his father was Robert F Kennedy, the US attorney general and New York senator who was killed in Los Angeles in 1968, his uncle John F Kennedy, the 35th president who was killed in Dallas in 1963.Now 70, Kennedy first ran for the Democratic presidential nomination before switching to be an independent.He has struggled to gain ballot access and polling now gives him around 5% support: nowhere near enough to win the White House but enough to tip the result in battleground states that will decide a tight election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.Last week, Rogan said he thought Harris could win, adding: “I’m not saying it because I think she’s going to, and I’m not saying it because I want her to. I’m just being honest. I could see her winning.”Kennedy has flirted with backing Trump, the two men reportedly discussing a cabinet role for Kennedy – as secretary for health and human services.On Friday, Trump seemed displeased by Rogan’s decision to endorse Kennedy.“It will be interesting to see how loudly Joe Rogan gets BOOED the next time he enters the UFC Ring,” the former president wrote on his Truth Social platform, referring to a shared interest in professional mixed martial arts. More

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      Polls show Kamala Harris building lead over Trump in 2024 election

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      Kamala Harris continues to gain strength in the US presidential election, as polls nationally and in battleground states show her building leads or catching Donald Trump.On Friday morning, FiveThirtyEight, a leading polling analysis site, puts Harris, the Democratic party’s presumptive nominee for president, up by 2.1 points over her Republican rival in its national average.In averages for swing states, where control of the White House rests, Harris led in Michigan by two points, Pennsylvania by 1.1 point and Wisconsin by 1.8 points. Trump led in Arizona by less than half a point and in Georgia by half a point.In battleground states without enough polls to calculate averages, Trump was ahead by about three points in North Carolina and the candidates were about level in Nevada. In the latter state, recent CBS and Bloomberg polls have given Harris two-point leads while on Friday the Nevada Independent reported a poll showing the Democrat six points up.The US vice-president, 59, has changed the election race since mid-July, when Joe Biden, 81, finally heeded calls from his own party to step aside for a younger candidate to take on Trump, who is 78. He endorsed Harris to take over the top of the Democratic ticket for this November, while he serves out his single term.On Thursday night, Amy Walter, of the non-partisan Cook Political Report, told PBS that before Harris entered the race, Biden “was behind by a significant number, not just at the national popular vote, but in those … battleground states. You can see almost six points in a state like Georgia and Nevada.“Now, just in the time that Harris has been in the race, you have seen those numbers move pretty significantly toward Harris, four- or five-point shifts in those battleground states, which is mirroring what we’re seeing in the national poll as well.“It hasn’t turned those states, though, from ones that favored Trump to ones that now favor Harris. It just means now that the race is no longer as lopsided in Trump’s favor as it was, say, in late July … which is why we’re calling this race a toss-up.”The same day, the Cook Political Report changed its ratings for three Sun belt swing states – Arizona, Georgia and Nevada – from “leans Republican” to “toss-up”.Another analysis site, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, based at the University of Virginia, changed Georgia from leans Republican to toss-up. Looking north, the site changed Minnesota and New Hampshire, states where Trump made gains while Biden was top of the Democratic ticket, from leans Democratic to likely Democratic.Harris’s choice for vice-president, Tim Walz, is governor of Minnesota. Any Walz effect on polling has not yet been felt but some observers expressed surprise that Harris passed over Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, a battleground state.Others argued back. For Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Joel K Goldstein said that though Shapiro and Mark Kelly, the Arizona senator who was also closely considered, were “both from competitive states that were … important pieces of the 306 electoral votes Democrats won in 2020”, in choosing Walz, “Harris demonstrated yet again that vice-presidential selection turns on matters other than the over-hyped criterion of home-state advantage.“Walz also had the most experience (17 and a half years) in traditional vice-presidential feeder positions (senator, governor, member of the House of Representatives, holder of high federal executive office) of her options, which contrasts with the very limited experience (one and a half years) of his Republican counterpart, Ohio senator JD Vance.”Among widely noted individual polls, Harris led for a second week in the Economist/YouGov survey, maintaining a two-point advantage. Reuters/Ipsos found Harris up five points, 42%-37%, up two on the last such survey, taken just after Biden withdrew. Ipsos said it also found in a separate poll Harris leading Trump 42%-40% in the seven battleground states, though it “did not break out results for individual states”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA national poll from Marquette University in Wisconsin showed Harris up six points, with 53% support among likely voters to 47% for Trump. Harris maintained that lead when other candidates were included. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the leading independent, took 6% support. In the Reuters/Ipsos poll, Kennedy’s support had fallen six points to 4% since July.The Marquette poll contained further good news for Harris, pointing to her energizing effect as the campaign heads for the home stretch: an 11-point rise in respondents saying they were very enthusiastic about voting in November.“Enthusiasm has increased substantially among Democrats, with a small increase among Republicans,” the Marquette pollster Charles Franklin wrote. “Republicans had a consistent enthusiasm advantage over Democrats in previous polls, but this has been mostly erased now.”It was not all good news for Harris and Democrats. In a poll released on Thursday, CNBC put Trump up two points and firmly ahead on who voters thought would make them financially better off.Micah Roberts of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican pollster who worked on the survey with a Democratic counterpart, said the election was “less now a referendum on Trump than it is a head-to-head competition between the two candidates”.Harris, Roberts said, was “still carrying a lot of water for the [Biden] administration. She has to answer for that and define herself independently … That’s a lot of baggage to carry when you’ve got a compressed time frame against a mature campaign on Trump’s side.” More

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      Black US voters’ economic priorities revealed in new advocacy agenda

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      Black Americans strongly support initiatives that would increase the minimum wage to $17, make affordable housing more accessible and create an equitable tax system, according to Black to the Future Action Fund, a political advocacy thinktank. On Thursday, the group released a 55-page economic agenda based on its 2023 survey of 211,219 Black people across all 50 states. The organization hopes that the report will serve as a roadmap for elected officials to address policy holes, and for advocates to generate campaigns that hold politicians accountable.“We have to start imagining what it is that we want and not be so afraid to break out of what is,” said Alicia Garza, founder and former principal of Black to the Future Action Fund, at a Thursday symposium in Atlanta.The agenda suggests a range of policy shifts around worker protections, housing, healthcare, childcare, higher education and taxes, along with examples of successful models already implemented by some state governments and municipalities. “Economic insecurity experienced by Black communities cannot be resolved solely by individual actions like working more hours, getting a college degree or saving money to buy a home,” the agenda’s authors wrote. “These issues are systemic, and government intervention is required to eliminate these inequities and improve outcomes for our people.”Along with increasing the minimum wage to $17, the authors also recommended that elected officials pass labor protections for domestic workers, many of whom are Black women. The expansion of paid family and medical leave laws would help workers care for their household. And on the topic of affordable housing, the thinktank recommended laws that ensure rent payments are incorporated into credit scores so that renters have greater access to obtaining home mortgages.Another suggestion for affordable housing included the development of shared equity programs, which use public or private investments to build or buy homes that are then sold at a reduced rate to low-to-moderate income homebuyers. There are currently 250,000 shared equity models mainly in New York City, according to the agenda. Christopher Towler, a political science associate professor at Sacramento State University and director of the Black Voter Project, called the programs “a really good model to try and get people into the housing market for there to be more first-time homebuyers”.The origins of the US’s persistent racial wealth can be traced back to the transatlantic slave trade, when enslaved Black people were barred from accessing capital generated by their forced labor. During the Reconstruction period after the civil war, then president Andrew Johnson rescinded the 40 acres (16 hectares) of land promised to formerly enslaved Black people.When Black communities did secure economic freedom, they were sometimes violently attacked by angry white mobs, including during the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, where an estimated 300 people were killed. Additionally, banks often denied home loans to Black Americans from the early 20th century until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed housing discrimination.View image in fullscreen“The failures of Reconstruction have yet to be made up,” said Towler. “And a large part of that is the continued residential segregation and how Black Americans have been locked out, not only of the housing market, but of the resources, the wealth, the opportunity that comes along with where you live and your access to community.”The legacy of systemic inequality has a continued impact on Black workers today, who earn less than US workers overall, according to 2022 Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by Pew Research Center. The median weekly earnings of Black full-time wage and salary workers is $878, compared to $1,059 for all US workers, according to Pew.During Thursday’s symposium, the actor and activist Kendrick Sampson, the singer and songwriter Trae Crockett, and the digital storyteller Conscious Lee spoke with Garza about the need for Black communities to brainstorm needed solutions and to band together to effect political change.“When it comes to healthcare,” said Lee, “a lot of us … have internalized the Black inferiority when it comes to that industry. So for me, it’s really reimagining what it looks like for my grandma to get affordable insulin.”Black census respondents listed a lack of affordable healthcare as their fourth most immediate economic concern. Expanding Medicaid to the 10 states that have not done so under the Affordable Care Act could help keep rural hospitals open. “The communities most affected when these rural hospitals close often have significant Black populations,” the report stated, “and closure means rural residents must drive 25 or more miles to access medical care.”While Towler lauded the agenda as the first one he’s seen that addresses the concerns of Black communities nationwide, he believes that it will be a “tough sell” to mobilize Black voters. “Any sort of policy promises right now are going to be looked at with some hesitations, simply because the Biden administration’s policy agenda, although very numerous in its accomplishments, is still in some ways misunderstood,” said Towler. “There’s not a lot of knowledge with the common voter about how the policies that Biden passed have actually affected their individual lives.”According to his research, Towler said that people are encouraged to be civically engaged when they’re taught how political institutions uphold the status quo to resist change: “If you even want there to be a possibility of reparations, we have to continue to vote, continue to be active and continue to put in place policy makers and legislators that are working towards that.”At the end of the symposium, organizers asked participants to share the agenda with their network and elected officials. In the eyes of the Black to the Future Action Fund, the electorate is capable of shifting policy through mass mobilization.“We are the power,” Sampson said toward the end of the symposium. “If we all are in alignment and we go in the same direction, now we are more powerful.” More