US elections 2024

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris will announce VP pick in ‘next six, seven days’, Democrat says

      by

      Kamala Harris will announce her running mate for the US presidential election against Donald Trump and JD Vance “in the next six, seven days”, an influential Democratic campaign co-chair said.“I would imagine we’ll know who her running mate is, and we’ll get ready for the convention,” Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, told CBS on Monday, referring to Democrats’ national gathering in Chicago next month.Whitmer also said she was not under consideration herself.“I have communicated with everyone, including the people of Michigan, that I’m going to stay as governor until the end of my term at the end of 2026,” Whitmer said.Harris is widely reported to have narrowed her field of possible picks to three – all white men from states expected to play key roles in the November election. On Sunday, a new poll said the navy pilot and astronaut turned Arizona senator Mark Kelly was seen most favourably by voters.According to ABC News and Ipsos, 22% of respondents saw Kelly in a favourable light against 12% who did not, giving him a net favourability of +10.The two other men widely reported to be in the final reckoning are the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, and Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania. In the ABC/Ipsos poll, Walz scored -1 for favourability, Shapiro +4.Strikingly, Kelly’s favourability rating was a striking 25 points better than that of Vance, the Ohio senator whose first steps in support of Trump have been beset by controversy and Democratic attacks, leading to reports of doubts among senior Republicans.Under fire for misogynistic comments including disparaging leading Democrats as “childless cat ladies”, and widely shown to have said he despised Trump before changing his tune, Vance’s favourability rating in the ABC/Ipsos poll was -15, a poor score surpassed only by Trump himself, at -16.Lest Kelly supporters get too confident, the ABC/Ipsos poll also noted that he and most other potential Democratic picks “remain unknown to large sections of the American public”. Among all possible Democratic nominees for vice-president, the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg (+4 favourability), and the governor of California, Gavin Newsom (-12), were the best-known to voters.Harris was seen favourably by 43% of voters and unfavourably by 42%. Among possible picks who might help boost that rating, Kelly represents a border state, central to the fight over immigration, and is married to Gabby Giffords, a former congresswoman who survived a shooting and campaigns for gun control reform.Shapiro governs a rust belt state that proved pivotal in 2016, when Trump won it, and in 2020, when it went for Joe Biden.Walz’s state, Minnesota, has voted for the Democrat in every presidential election since 1976 but Trump has targeted it this year, trumpeting polling gains before Biden dropped out of the race.Biden, 81, withdrew from his re-election campaign amid polling that showed most Americans thought him too old to be president. That means that, at 78, Trump is now the oldest candidate ever to run for the White House.Whitmer told CBS she expected a “convention of happy warriors” in Chicago. Harris advisers are reportedly placing emphasis on potential running mates’ ability to take the fight to Vance, who they want to portray as too inexperienced to step up should Trump fail to serve a full term.Now 39, Vance was a US marine, a bestselling author and a venture capitalist before winning a US Senate seat in 2022.On Monday, Mitch Landrieu, a Harris campaign co-chair, called Vance “one of the most unprepared people … ever put up to hold the vice-presidency of the United States”.Landrieu told CNN: “He’s never run anything. And he’s about to be one heartbeat away from the largest entity in the world, and the one that’s the most important.“So it’s a fair question to ask: ‘How would we know whether you have the capability to run domestic and national security policy for the most powerful country in the world, which you may be called to do on a moment’s notice?’”Kelly, 60, was elected to the Senate in 2020. Walz, 60 and a former teacher and national guard sergeant, was a US congressman for six terms from 2006 before being elected governor of Minnesota in 2018. Shapiro, 51, sat in the Pennsylvania state house before becoming state attorney general in 2017, then governor in 2023.CNN quoted “a Harris adviser” as saying the running-mate selection process would be informed by Harris’s own experience.Now 59, Harris was a former California attorney general and US senator when she was picked by Biden in 2020. Her four years as vice-president have generated reports of struggles but also effective displays on key campaign issues, particularly threats to abortion rights.“She knows the challenges of this world in a way that you have to have somebody who has a deep amount of resilience,” the unnamed adviser told CNN.A campaign spokesperson, James Singer, told the same network Harris would “select a vice-president who is qualified and ready to serve the American people, protect their freedoms, and fight for their future”.All three men reportedly under closest consideration have chosen their words with care.“This is not about me,” Kelly told reporters. “But always, always when I’ve had the chance to serve, I think that’s very important to do.”Walz said: “Being mentioned is certainly an honour. I trust Vice-President Harris’s judgment … I would do what is in the best interests of the country.”Shapiro said Harris would “make that decision when she is ready, and I have all the confidence in the world that she will make that decision, along with many others, in the best interests of the Amercian people”. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Pennsylvania officer spotted Trump shooter 90 minutes before open fire – report

      by

      Donald Trump has agreed to participate in a victim interview with the FBI regarding his attempted assassination earlier this month, the bureau told reporters on Monday.This comes as authorities continue their investigations into the 13 July shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, where 20-year-old Thomas Matthews Crooks fired eight shots from an assault rifle which hit and injured the former president, killed a rally attendee and injured several others. Crooks was killed by government snipers moments after the shooting began.On Sunday, new details around the shooting emerged from text messages between local security units, obtained by the Republican senator Chuck Grassley and published and verified by the New York Times, including that local law enforcement had spotted the shooter 30 minutes earlier than what officials had previously said.The published text messages show that a local countersniper first noticed a man, who was later identified as Crooks, loitering in the area where the countersnipers were set up more than 90 minutes before the shooting occurred.The Times reported that at 4.26pm, the countersniper alerted his colleagues of Crooks, and that he had parked near their vehicles and was sitting on a picnic table near the warehouse, where several countersnipers were, outside the fenced area of the grounds where Trump would be appearing later.The countersniper told his colleagues that Crooks knew they were there and saw him leaving with his rifle.One of the countersnipers took pictures of Crooks and the photos were shared in a group chat and another text went out among the local officers at 5.38pm, saying they should inform the Secret Service, per the New York Times.“Kid learning around building we are in. AGR I believe it is. I did see him with a range finder looking towards stage. FYI. If you wanna notify SS snipers to look out. I lost sight of him,” read one of the texts, accompanied by photos of Crooks.One of the two remaining countersnipers reportedly ran out of the building attempting to keep eyes on Crooks until other law enforcement arrived, per Butler County officials, but Crooks ran off, taking a backpack with him.At 6pm, one officer in the group texts guessed that Crooks was moving toward the back of the warehouse complex and away from the event, the Times reported. But instead, Crooks climbed on to a building in the complex closest to the stage.At 6.11pm, Crooks began firing, grazing Trump’s ear, killing a rally-goer and injuring several others. Moments later, Crooks was shot and killed on the roof of a warehouse that was connected to the one the countersnipers were stationed in.The newly released messages also suggest that the shooter was often one step ahead of security forces and law enforcement.The New York Times reported Crooks had scoped out the rally site a day before the Secret Service did on 8 July. The report also states the Secret Service excluded the entire warehouse complex from its inner security perimeter. This meant that on the day of the rally, Crooks was able to get to the building without passing through a security screening.After the Secret Service walk through on 8 July, the Times reported that the agency had asked local agencies to provide more help, and that text messages showed that Beaver county struggled to find enough volunteers to cover the 12-hour shift.Questions continue to be asked about the apparent failures in communication between different law enforcement agencies and how someone was able to get to close to assassinating Trump.Local police officers on a special tactical team, who were assigned to help protect Trump on 13 July, have also said they had no contact with Secret Service agents before the gunman opened fire.“We were supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service members whenever they arrived and that never happened,” Jason Woods, lead sharpshooter on the Swat team in Beaver county, Pennsylvania, told ABC News over the weekend.The Secret Service has not commented directly on the remarks by Woods. But an agency spokesperson, Anthony Guglielmi, has said the Secret Service “is committed to better understanding what happened before, during and after the assassination attempt of former president Trump to ensure that never happens again”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSeparately, members of Trump’s Secret Service detail and his top advisers have questioned why they were not told that local police assigned to guard the outer perimeter of the fairgrounds had spotted a suspicious person who turned out to be the would-be assassin.Last week, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, testified to the House judiciary committee that the shooter appeared to have used a drone at the rally location about two hours before the attack, to scope out an area about 200 yards (182m) from the stage where Trump was scheduled to speak.The drone was found in the gunman’s car, along with two explosive devices. According to the New York Times report, the Secret Service did not seek permission to use a drone for the rally.Wray also testified that the AR-style rifle used in the attack may have had a collapsible stock, making it easier to conceal, and that in the days leading up to the shooting, Crooks had searched online for information about the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy.Despite the new information about the shooter’s focus on the Kennedy assassination, Wray said that the FBI had yet to find any clear indication of Crooks’ motivations or ideology.“It does appear he was interested in public figures more broadly,” he said.According to the New York Times, Crooks had started searching online for information on well-known figures, including Wray, US attorney general Merrick B Garland, Joe Biden and Trump, and he had also looked up “major depressive disorder”.In the immediate days after the shooting, Trump initially called for unity, writing on Truth Social that “in this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win.”Delegates at the Republican National Convention also made much of how Trump’s campaign would pivot to a more message less divisiveness. But although Trump’s keynote speech at the convention began with him saying all Americans are ‘bound together by a single fate’, he soon reverted to attacking Democrats over the numerous criminal convictions he is facing and falsely accused the party of cheating in the 2020 election.More recently, on Saturday, Trump told supporters in a speech in Minnesota that the shooting may have made him “worse”.“I want to be nice,” Trump said. “They all say, ‘I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him.’”“No, I haven’t changed”, he continued. “Maybe I’ve gotten worse, actually. Because I get angry at the incompetence that I witness every single day”. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Why Kamala Harris should pick Tim Walz as running mate | Mehdi Hasan

      by

      Have you seen the touching images from March 2023, of the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, being hugged by a group of elementary school kids after signing into law a bill that provided them with free school meals?Or the fun clip from September 2023, of Walz with his daughter Hope laughing and screaming on a ride at the Minnesota State Fair?How about the viral video of Walz on MSNBC last week, mocking Donald Trump, JD Vance and the Maga Republicans as “weird people”?That video has had more than 4.6m views on Twitter/X alone and, per Politico, is credited with the Democrats’ new shift “toward a more gut-level vernacular that may better capture how many voters react to far-right rhetoric” of the Trump/Vance variety.Kamala Harris herself has now borrowed Walz’s lingo and is also calling her opponents “weird”, while Walz is all over our television screens, bolstering the vice-president’s candidacy and playing “attack dog” against the Trump/Vance Republican ticket.I’ll be honest: last month, I would have struggled to pick Walz out of a lineup.This month? I’m Walz-pilled. I have watched dozens of his interviews and clips. And I’m far from alone. He has an army of new fans across the liberal-left: from former Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign co-chair Nina Turner, to one-time Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke, to gun-control activist David Hogg. “In less than 6 days, I went from not knowing who Tim Walz is,” joked writer Travis Helwig on X, “to deep down believing that if he doesn’t get the VP nod I will storm the capitol.”According to Bloomberg, the Harris campaign has narrowed down its “top tier” of potential running mates to three “white guy” candidates: Walz (hurrah!), plus the Arizona senator Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.Both Kelly and Shapiro have their strengths – and both represent must-win states for the Dems. Allow me, however, to make the clear case for Walz.First, there’s his personality. The 60-year-old governor would bring energy, humor and some much-needed bite to the Democratic presidential ticket. There’s a reason why his videos have been going viral in recent days. Tim Kaine he ain’t. Pick the charismatic and eloquent Walz and you have America’s Fun Uncle ready to go.Then, there’s his résumé. A popular midwest governor from a rural town. A 24-year veteran of the army national guard. A high school teacher who coached the football team to its first state championship. It’s almost too perfect!Finally, there’s his governing record. You will struggle to find a Democratic governor who has achieved more than Walz in the space of a single legislative session. Not Shapiro. Not JB Pritzker of Illinois. Not even Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.In May 2023, Barack Obama, of all people, shared a piece from the MinnPost on X, which laid out Walz’s very successful – and very social-democratic – legislative record in the North Star state:“Democrats codified abortion rights, paid family and medical leave, sick leave, transgender rights protections, drivers licenses for undocumented residents, restoration of voting rights for people when they are released from prison or jail, wider voting access, one-time rebates, a tax credit aimed at low-income parents with kids, and a $1bn investment in affordable housing including for rental assistance.”Got that? Walz basically did Biden’s “Build Back Better” on steroids, despite only a single-seat majority in the state senate.But wait, there’s more!“Also adopted were background checks for private gun transfers and a red-flag warning system to take guns from people deemed by a judge to be a threat to themselves or others. DFL lawmakers banned conversion therapy for LGBTQ people, legalized recreational marijuana, expanded education funding, required a carbon-free electric grid by 2040, adopted a new reading curricula based on phonics, passed a massive $2.58bn capital construction package and, at the insistence of Republicans, a $300m emergency infusion of money to nursing homes.”Democrats at the national level can only dream of such progressive legislative victories.Policy wins aside, Walz also comes with less political baggage than his two main rivals and is, therefore, much less likely to divide the party.Think about it. Democrats can have Tim Walz on the ticket, who called the anti-war, pro-Palestinian ‘uncommitted’ movement “civically engaged” and praised them for “asking for a change in course” and “for more pressure to be put on” the White House, or they can have Josh Shapiro, who called for a crackdown on anti-war, pro-Palestinian college protesters and even compared them to the KKK.They can have Walz on the ticket, who has reportedly “emerged among labor unions as a popular pick” after signing “into law a series of measures viewed as pro-worker” including banning non-compete agreements and expanding protections for Amazon warehouse workers, or they can have Mark Kelly, who opposed the pro-labor Pro Act in the Senate.They can have Walz, who guaranteed students in Minnesota not just free breakfasts but free lunches, or Shapiro, who has courted controversy in Pennsylvania with his support for school vouchers.They can have Walz, who calls his Republican opponents “weird” and extreme, or Kelly, who calls his Republican opponents “good people” who are “working really hard”.This isn’t rocket science. Walz is the obvious choice. Not only is he the ideal “white guy” running mate for Harris, against both Trump and Vance, but he is already doing the job on television and online, lambasting Vance in particular over IVF treatment and insisting he mind his “own damn business”.And you know who is paying attention to all this? “Weird” Donald Trump, who was especially infuriated after Walz attacked him for cosying up to Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán on … Fox.“Why did Fox News put up Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota, where I am leading?” the former president wrote in a post on Truth Social. “They make me fight battles that I shouldn’t have to fight!”Has there ever been a better endorsement for a Democratic vice-presidential nominee?

      Mehdi Hasan is the founder and editor-in-chief of the new media company Zeteo More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      The Republican party’s obsession with families has taken a fanatical turn | Moira Donegan

      by

      “It’s possible,” writes Jessica Winter in the New Yorker, “that if JD Vance had his way, citizenship in the United States would be conferred not solely by birthright but by marriage and children.” This is no exaggeration. In a now viral 2021 clip, JD Vance said: “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power – you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic – than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”This position now represents large swaths of the Republican party, which has taken on an angry and aggressively prescriptive approach to family life.If you’re a woman in America, Republicans want you to be a mother whether you care to or not. They want you to risk your health to give them more babies. Then, when those babies get bigger, they want to make sure that those children’s fathers – or, excuse me, “parents” – have a near-total control over both them and you.They don’t want you to be able to get a divorce if your marriage turns unhappy or even abusive. They don’t want your daughter to be able to get birth control if her father doesn’t approve of it; they don’t want your other daughter to be able to get the hormone treatment she needs to thrive as her truest self. They want to inspect your kids’ genitals before they let them play on the high school softball team. They want to ban books, and decide what your kids can and can’t read.They want to bar the medical treatments that allow you to plan your family and have children on your own terms – things like egg freezing and IVF. They want to make you have your children young, and they want to stigmatize those of us women who pursue our own careers, interests and ambitions instead of popping out as many children as they deem appropriate.If you say no – if you resist their prescription for marriage, motherhood and perpetual feminine self-sacrifice – they want to let you know, in sneeringly condescending terms, that you’re “childless cat ladies”, that you’re not as good as them, that step-parents are not real parents, blended families are not real families, that women who don’t have children are disgusting, worthless and deserving of contempt. If you say no, they want to denigrate you in public, punish you financially, dilute your vote and lessen your citizenship.As the 2024 presidential election heats up following Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate and Kamala Harris’s emergence as the new Democratic standard-bearer, it is becoming clear that much of the stakes of the November contest will revolve around questions of gender – and specifically, questions of family. And the view of the family that is emerging from the Republicans is a dark one indeed.Because the version of “family” that the Republicans are putting forward is one that can only look a very particular way. In their eyes, family is a compulsory relation of domination, an institution in which marriage and parenthood function to grant men near-total private control over women and children. Women, meanwhile, face a grim fate in the Republicans’ preferred vision of family: they are forced into motherhood, trapped into marriage, and punished for resistance.It’s not just that Vance, the VP pick and heir presumptive to the post-Trump Republican party, has made repeated, creepy remarks disparaging childless women and suggesting that adults without children should pay higher taxes and receive fewer votes. It’s that Vance’s obsessive, invasive and prurient investment in other people’s sexual and reproductive lives is the logical conclusion of the Republican party’s gender politics.Vance’s belief that women must be either compelled into childbirth or denied full citizenship is obviously of a piece with his party’s ambition to impose a national abortion ban. But it also flows from their opposition to no-fault divorce rights; their insistence that teens must not be able to access sexual, reproductive or transition-related healthcare without the approval of their parents; their rejection of IVF, diversity initiatives, and anti-discrimination protections; and their opposition to myriad other public policy initiatives that have helped advance women’s health, protect their safety, and allow them full access to work, education and the public sphere.The Republican plan, in short, is to sabotage or revoke any cultural or policy change that allows women to live as men’s equals. They instead aim to reshape policy, culture and the law to keep women in the home, dependent, without control over their own bodies and at the mercy of men.They aim, that is, to advance so-called “family values” in which birth is mandatory, marriage is inescapable, children are property rather than persons with rights of their own, and men are in charge. There’s a word for this dark vision of a world in which the private sphere is wholly controlled by husbands and fathers. That word is “patriarchy”.But the creepy and unsubtle patriarchal vision of gender and the family that is being advanced by the Trump-Vance Republican party may also present an opportunity for Harris and the Democrats to reclaim the mantle of “family”, and to redefine it for a better future. Rather than a compulsory, inescapable and unequal institution based on sexist domination, a “family” might instead be an alliance of equality, mutuality and care – one in which sovereign individuals can choose one another, and come together in an effort to love one another, respect one another, and help one another to thrive.These are, after all, the kinds of families that many Americans find themselves inhabiting: ones in which romantic partners might be gay or straight, married or not, but view themselves as equal partners; ones in which ties of blood, marriage, love, history and affinity all blend together in layers of connection and mutuality, ones in which children are wholly voluntary, chosen and loved, and in which women are sovereigns over their own bodies and lives, whose ambitions in the public world are neither impeded nor resented in the private one.These non-hierarchical, non-domineering, voluntary families can be encouraged through policy: through free, safe and legal abortion access, through free childcare, through paid family leave, affordable healthcare, high-quality care for seniors, insurance coverage for assisted reproductive technology, access to the full range of healthcare services for children and teens, and a thriving public school system. Such investments would help the sorts of families that most people want to build: ones that honor the dignity and worth of everyone in them.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Bitcoin price hits six-week high after Trump backs cryptocurrency

      by

      Bitcoin has hit its highest level in more than six weeks after Donald Trump said at the weekend he would end the “persecution” of the crypto industry if he wins the US presidential election.The cryptocurrency’s price rose by more than 3% on Monday to peak at about $69,745, the highest since 12 June when the currency changed hands at more than $69,800.The increase comes after supportive comments from Trump at the Bitcoin 2024 convention in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said on Saturday he would make the US the world’s cryptocurrency leader and embrace a more pro-bitcoin stance than his rival, Kamala Harris.The former president said: “I pledge to the bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s anti-crypto crusade will be over … If we don’t embrace crypto and bitcoin technology, China will, other countries will. They’ll dominate, and we cannot let China dominate. They are making too much progress as it is.”He also said he would sack the chair of the US financial watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), on the first day of his presidency if he won the election. “On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler,” Trump said, to cheers of approval from the audience.Gensler is a noted sceptic about cryptocurrencies, despite aiding them in January by approving exchange-traded funds (ETFs) – a basket of assets that can be bought and sold like shares on an exchange – that track the price of bitcoin.The SEC chair said in a statement approving the ETFs that bitcoin was a “speculative, volatile” asset used for illegal activities including ransomware and terrorist financing. Since 2023 the SEC has launched more than 40 crypto-related enforcement actions.Speaking at the bitcoin convention, Trump said he would establish a crypto presidential advisory council and create a national “stockpile” of bitcoin using cryptocurrency the US government held that was largely seized in law enforcement actions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Never sell your bitcoin,” Trump said. “If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, the United States of America, to keep 100% of all the bitcoin the US government currently holds or acquires into the future.”The Financial Times also reported on Saturday that Harris’s advisers had approached top crypto companies to try to “reset” the relationship between the Democratic party and the sector. Approaches had been made to the Coinbase crypto exchange, the stablecoin company Circle and the blockchain payments group Ripple Labs, the FT said. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Monday briefing: ‘Not going back’ – why Kamala Harris has reason to hope

      by

      Good morning. In the week since Kamala Harris became the de facto Democratic nominee, the contest for the presidency has been transformed. Money has poured in, the polls have tightened, and the campaign is about something fundamentally different. The same Democrats who were almost catatonic over Joe Biden’s chances of victory because so many voters saw him as too old to do the job now believe that Donald Trump can be defeated.But none of that means that Harris is sure of taking the Oval Office – or even that she is the favourite. Today’s newsletter explains how she has changed the race, and how much she still has left to do. Here are the headlines.Five big stories

      Social care | Teachers, NHS staff and other key workers who balance part-time work with caring for loved ones are quitting their jobs to avoid being hit with huge cash penalties for breaching carer’s allowance rules, according to a study by Carers UK. The report details carers being forced to take desperate measures to avoid breaching tight earnings limits, including quitting their jobs, cutting their hours, turning down pay rises, one-off cost of living payments and performance bonuses, and even working free hours each month.

      Israel-Gaza war | Global leaders were engaged in intensive diplomacy on Sunday to dissuade Israel from increasing attacks on Lebanon, in response to a rocket strike that killed 12 children in the occupied Golan Heights. Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he would determine the “type” and “timing” of the response to Hezbollah’s attack.

      Immigration and asylum | A woman has died trying to cross the Channel in an overcrowded dinghy, as a number of small boats made the dangerous journey over the weekend.

      Home Office | Environmental groups are among 92 civil society organisations who have warned the home secretary Yvette Cooper against “the steady erosion of the right to protest” in the UK, and called on her to reverse the previous government’s crackdown on peaceful protest.

      Venezuela | Nicolás Maduro has been declared the winner of Venezuela’s presidential election by the government-controlled electoral authority – a result that appeared to dash opposition hopes of ending 25 years of socialist rule and looked certain to be bitterly contested.
      In depth: ‘The Republicans are road testing a lot of different messages’View image in fullscreenOn Friday, Barack and Michelle Obama formally endorsed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president, completing the set of high-profile party leaders who have publicly given her their support.Her ascent to the nomination appears to have gone much more smoothly, and with her party much more united behind her, than anyone imagined before Biden stepped aside.But the disastrous Biden campaign is a low bar for comparison – and Trump still holds plenty of cards. Here’s what you need to know as the Harris campaign moves from being a novelty act to the new normal.Her messages on the campaign trailEven though she’s been vice-president for more than three years, Harris is still relatively undefined for most voters, and so this is a crucial moment to set up the rest of the campaign.Her first campaign ad sought to draw a sharp contrast with Trump through the prism of freedom: to the tune of Beyoncé’s song of the same name, she talks about “the freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body.” Trump’s vision of America, she meanwhile said, was “a country of chaos, of fear, of hate”.She struck a similar note in an address to a teachers’ union in Houston, saying: “We are in a fight for our most fundamental freedoms” and warning that “we want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books”. And in a speech to more than 6,000 Black women in Indianapolis, she said: “Ours is a fight for the future and a fight for freedom.”In her first rally in the battleground state of Wisconsin a couple of days earlier – which saw a hasty venue change because it was so oversubscribed – she set up what is likely to be the consistent contrast drawn with Trump in the months ahead: she is a prosecutor, he is a convicted criminal. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said. “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”Two slogans, meanwhile, have come to the fore – and they have a vigorous, defiant tone that sounds like it’s meant to enthuse the Democratic base. She led the fired-up crowd in Wisconsin in a chorus of “When we fight, we win.” And when she said: “America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back,” the crowd chanted: “Not going back! Not going back!”How the Trump campaign has respondedOne analysis of Harris’s impact on the campaign came from Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, who sent a memo to staffers acknowledging a “honeymoon” with “wall-to-wall coverage … from the mainstream media” but added: “the fundamentals of the race stay the same”.But that seems obviously untrue: Harris is a very different candidate to Biden, and is invulnerable to the case that the Trump campaign has been set up to make – that their opponent is too old.Trump’s own approach was crystallised at the Bojangles Coliseum (real name) in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he held his first campaign rally since Biden’s exit. He called her the “ultraliberal driving force” behind Biden’s policies and said she was a “radical-left lunatic who will destroy our country”. He also branded her “lyin’ Kamala Harris” and repeatedly pronounced her name wrong. While immigration is meant to be a central line of attack, he did not mention it once in an interview with Fox News last Monday. Fox News contributors, meanwhile, seem to be obsessed with her view on plastic straws.All of that suggests that the Republicans are yet to settle on a message that is likely to appeal to swing voters, although that’s not to say they won’t: “They’re road testing a lot of different messages, have not really narrowed down what resonates, what people care about,” Republican strategist Jason Roe told Politico.How Democrats have reactedThe scale of the fundraising improvement – $200m in the week since she was endorsed by Joe Biden – is well documented, but also important is where it comes from: the Harris campaign said that 888,000 grassroots donors made donations of less than $200 in the first 24 hours. About 66% of the weekly total came from first-time donors, according to the campaign, opening up a potential new revenue stream in the months ahead. Late last week, Harris’s team hosted a zoom call with 160,000 attendees which appeared to break records in donations.Meanwhile, Future Forward, the biggest Democratic political action committee – which operates independently of the campaign – said it raised $150m in the first 24 hours.The campaign also said that 100,000 people had signed up to volunteer by Wednesday, and 2,000 had applied for campaign jobs. As supporters waited for new Harris for President signs – her design team came up with six options in three hours last Sunday and had to take them to campaign headquarters while they were still wet – some of them made DIY versions by lopping the incumbent president’s name off the top of existing BIDEN HARRIS signs. All of that, along with the memeification of Harris via Charli xcx’s “brat summer”, suggests an early rush of enthusiasm of an organic kind that is gold for political campaigns.How the polls have changedThe first concrete evidence that the race has changed came in a spate of polls released towards the end of last week, which showed a significant narrowing of the gap between Trump and Harris as compared to Biden’s performance.A national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College showed Harris behind 47 to 48 – closing the Biden-Trump gap by five points. An aggregate of 80 polls from the Hill and Decision Desk HQ had Harris 2.1 points behind, where Biden had been trailing by 3.3 points.Polls in the crucial battleground states, meanwhile, tend to show Trump with leads, but Harris improving on Biden’s position. And the Democrats say that they believe Harris at the top of the ticket can put them in contention in a swathe of states that appeared to be out of Biden’s reach: a memo from Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon argues that her greater popularity with young and minority voters means that North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada – all which were leaning towards Trump – are now in play.While all of that looks like very good news for Harris, there are strong caveats. Most polls say that Trump is still winning. And the improvement in national polls may overstate her chances because she is less popular with older, white working-class voters than Biden was – and they are the key constituency in the states most likely to decide the election.It’s also probably true that Harris is enjoying a honeymoon – and her momentum may slow. But the Democratic convention is two weeks away, and she will make more headlines when she announces her pick for vice-president before that. The hope for the Harris campaign is that by the time Trump has the chance to wrest back control of the agenda, she may be in an even better position than she is today.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat else we’ve been readingView image in fullscreen

      Ann Lee’s interview with Sean Wang (above) about his new debut film Dìdi is delightful. The pair discuss the significance of the semi-autobiographical film and why he felt compelled to make it. Nimo

      “You just don’t imagine these complications happening to a top athlete”: the Guardian’s Fascinating Olympians series ends with an interview with Allyson Felix, who tells Tobi Thomas about the highs and lows of elite competition, and why she has spent the last few years advocating for better maternal health outcomes for Black mothers. Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters

      Public inquiries can be an important way to uncover wrongdoing. In recent years though, they have become a routine response to institutional failures and rarely prompt significant change. “If justice delayed is justice denied, then inquiries that take years to report, after taking decades to get off the ground, look as though they are simply kicking difficult issues into the long grass,” Samira Shackle writes. Nimo

      From burpees to shoulder circles, Phil Daoust has got some exercise “snacks” to pepper throughout your day – even if you’re in the office. Hannah

      Michael Safi and William Christou’s dispatch from Lebanon finds that despite the high tensions with Israel and deadly strikes, the tourism industry is still booming. Dalya Farran, the owner of a beach club, said that while it’s bizarre, “you eat some good food, have some beers – or juice – and then go for a swim, and the sea washes away your worries and stress.” Nimo
      SportView image in fullscreenOlympics | Adam Peaty missed out on a third consecutive Olympic 100m breaststroke title by 0.02sec, sharing silver with Nic Fink of the US in a desperately close race won by the Italian Nicolò Martinenghi. Countless celebrities lined the stands as Simone Biles returned to compete in front of the world. Biles effortlessly worked her way through a smooth, ­efficient ­opening beam routine, qualifying for the all-around final in first place with a score of 59.566.F1 | George Russell won the Belgian Grand Prix, pulling off a surprise victory for Mercedes at Spa Francorchamps after a thrilling and impossibly tense battle with his teammate, Lewis Hamilton, who was second, completing a Mercedes one-two.Cricket | “In the end, resistance was futile,” writes Ali Martin about England’s decisive victory over West Indies, with the team securing a 10-wicket victory for England and a 3-0 series clean sweep.The front pagesView image in fullscreenThe Guardian leads with “Reeves paves way for cuts and tax rises to fix finances”. The Times characterises the Chancellor’s comments as “Squeeze on spending to lift UK from £20bn hole”.The i reports “GPs threaten to bring NHS to ‘standstill’ by capping daily patient numbers”. The Mail has “GPs: We will bring NHS to a standstill”. The Mirror covers the same story under the headline “Bitter pill”.The Telegraph leads with “Israel ‘to retaliate’ against Hezbollah”. The Financial Times reports “Harris raises $200mn in first week of ‘record shattering’ election campaign”.Today in FocusView image in fullscreenWhy Spain wants tourists to go homeFor decades, Spain has been the destination of choice for Brits desperate for sun, sea and sand. But now there is a growing backlash against tourism. What went wrong? Sam Jones reports.Cartoon of the day | Ella BaronView image in fullscreenThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badView image in fullscreenA new report by the development agency FSD Africa has found that greener economies could bring millions of jobs to some of the largest countries in Africa by 2030. About 10% of the jobs created, which will mostly be in renewable energy, will require university degrees, 30% will be “specialised” work that needs certification or vocational training, and 20% will be administrative. “Unskilled” labour will be more stable, with opportunities for upward mobility, the study predicts. The researchers behind the report are urging policymakers, funders and educational institutions to invest in training a workforce in green industries. They say it could “contribute to the formalisation of African economies”.Kevin Munjal, director of development impact at FSD Africa, says investing in greener economies provides ample opportunity to address the continent’s demographic crisis: “Africa has the youngest, fastest-growing workforce but … the youth need jobs.”Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

      Quick crossword

      Cryptic crossword

      Wordiply More

    • 163 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris allies deploy new Trump attack line: he is ‘just plain weird’

      by

      US Democrats have spent recent days trying out a relatively new attack line on Donald Trump: that he is weird. The tactic is almost certainly calibrated to resonate with young and independent voters who, polls show, are moving from marked disinterest in the now-dropped matchup between Joe Biden and his presidential predecessor to engagement in the 100-day contest between Trump and Kamala Harris.In a press release Thursday, vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris issued a list of the main takeaways of what Trump had given the American people. “Is Donald Trump OK?” the X message said. The seventh of nine entries was: “Trump is old and quite weird?”At a fundraising event in Massachusetts on Saturday, Harris tried out the line again, describing what Trump and running mate JD Vance had been saying about her as “just plain weird”.“I mean that’s the box you put that in,” Harris said after Trump had called her “a bum” the previous day and Vance disparaged her in 2021 as a “childless cat (lady)”.The Harris campaign, working to redefine the race with particular attention to the youth vote, including colorizing online HarrisHQ banners lime green after Charli xcx’s “brat” endorsement, has sought to draw attention to Trump’s rally storytelling. Particularly, they have highlighted his frequent but references to fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs fame as well as the choice between being shocked by a sinking electric boat or being eaten by a shark.But “weird” is what seems to be sticking, in part as an apparent simplification of warnings about the threat to democracy that Trump poses – which dominated 15 months of Biden’s re-election campaign.Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz appears to have started the “weird” political trendline. He posted on X, “Say it with me: Weird,” in response to a video of Trump speaking about Lecter. Walz later followed up with “these guys are weird” to describe Trump and Vance.During a Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Walz was asked if “weird” had replaced existential threat to democracy as a more effective attack strategy. The retired high school educator and football coach replied: “It’s an observation because being a schoolteacher I see a lot of things.”Walz added that a second Trump presidency could indeed put women’s lives at risk over reproductive rights after three of his US supreme court appointees helped eliminate federal abortion rights in 2022. He also said Trump could end other constitutional liberties – but musing about his embodiment of a threat to democracy “gives him way too much power,” Walz argued.“Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and whatever crazy thing pops into his mind,” Walz said.“I think we give him way too much credit. If you just ratchet down some of the scariness and just name it what it is. Have you seen the guy laugh? It seems very weird to me that an adult can go through six-and-a-half years of being in the public eye and when he laughs it’s at someone – not with them.”“That’s very weird behavior,” Walz explained on State of the Union. “I don’t think you call it anything else. It’s simply what we’re observing.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, also an outside contender for Harris’ vice president pick, tried a slightly amended line, telling Fox News that Trump is “clearly older and stranger than when America first got to know him”.The 78-year-old Trump’s campaign, he added, has maintained its candidate “is strong as an ox, leaps tall buildings in … bounds, but we don’t have that kind of warped reality on our side”.“I’m pretty sure voters are worried about the age and acuity of president Trump compared to Kamala Harris, who represents being a generation younger,” Buttigieg said. “And how could anybody not watch the stuff he’s saying, the rambling on the trail, and not be just a little bit concerned?”The new Democratic line on Trump comes after several days of criticism aimed at Vance not only about the “childless cat” lady comment – but also because of reportedly resurfaced comments calling Trump “morally reprehensible” and expressing his hatred for police officers, who generally enjoy the support of Republicans.Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer described Vance’s selection as an “incredibly bad choice” to CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, adding that the Ohio Republican senator “seems to be more erratic and more extreme than President Trump”.“I’ll bet President Trump is sitting there scratching his head and wondering, why did I pick this guy? The choice may be one of the best things he ever did for Democrats,” Schumer said.The discursions come as a new ABC News/Ipsos poll on Sunday found that Harris’ favorability rating had jumped to 43% from 35% a week earlier. It found a major jump in her favorability rating among electorally crucial independent voters, with 44% saying they viewed her favorably compared to 28% the previous week.Also significant is the 59-year-old Harris’s numbers within the swing group of “double haters” – voters who liked neither Biden nor Trump. Within that group, the number who liked neither candidate has dropped from 15% to 7%. More

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on female political leaders: new strains of misogyny fuel old battles | Editorial

      by

      In 1989, a schoolgirl asked Gerald Ford what advice he had for a young lady wanting to become US president, as he had been. “It won’t happen in the normal course of events,” he predicted. Instead, a man would win the presidency with a female running mate, and the woman would take over because the man would die in office. After that, he suggested, men would have to fight hard to even become the nominee.Video of that encounter went viral after Joe Biden quit his re-election bid and Democrats rallied behind Kamala Harris. Ford’s prediction and his acknowledgment that female politicians are unfairly dismissed had new resonance, though of course Mr Biden is alive and it is still a matter of hope, not fact, that the US will see its first female president. Any Democratic nominee would face a difficult race. But even after Barack Obama became the first black president, and after female leaders such as Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern have commanded international respect and admiration, some fear that the racism and misogyny Ms Harris faces could prove insurmountable, though she inspires and energises other voters.Four years ago, Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud, remarking of her that “we’re not going to have a socialist president. Especially any female.” JD Vance, his running mate, described Ms Harris and others as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”. Online attacks from their supporters have been even more vicious, bigoted and graphic – and may well alienate moderate voters. For many, however, the prejudice is unconscious. Research has repeatedly shown that in politics, as in other walks of life, “women leaders are perceived as competent or liked, but rarely both”.Macho attitudes and patriarchal values have been fostered and legitimised by strongmen worldwide in recent years. Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen are ample proof that women can also be prominent in far-right movements and do little for other women. But a marked political gender gap has emerged in many places in the last few years. In the US, polling suggests women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than men of that age.Similar gaps are evident in countries from the UK and Poland to Tunisia and South Korea – where a backlash against demands for women’s rights was central to the 2022 election. The country has the highest gender pay gap of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nation, yet President Yoon Suk Yeol claims structural discrimination does not exist, and won over angry young men by vowing to abolish the ministry of gender equality. The contest was an alarming harbinger of how not just regressive but explicitly anti-feminist attitudes can be politically weaponised. In Argentina, Javier Milei followed suit and won the presidency.Ford predicted that the 1990s would see a female president; the US had already seen a vice-presidential nominee (and in the UK, of course, Margaret Thatcher was then prime minister). But it took until 2008 before there was another, Sarah Palin, and 2016 before Hillary Clinton became the first female presidential nominee of a major party. Now Ms Harris has her shot. Like women around the world, she faces not only old stumbling blocks, but new strains of misogyny. The unfairness and extremity of attacks upon her, however, could yet help to fuel a groundswell of support.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More