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      Trump leads 2024 race in new poll as some Biden aides reportedly discuss how to convince him to end campaign – as it happened

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      Joe Biden is holding a press conference this evening.The US president’s performance tonight will be closely watched by his aides and advisers, who have reportedly been discussing how to persuade him to leave the presidential race, as well as the Trump campaign who reportedly want him to stay.You can follow live coverage of the press conference below:Signs are emerging that people close to Joe Biden may be gearing up to convince him to exit the presidential race. The New York Times dropped two significant reports, one saying that his re-election campaign is looking into how Kamala Harris might fare against Donald Trump, and the other, which was similar to a report by NBC News, saying that aides were discussing ways to get Biden to step aside. However, the leaders of his re-election campaign argue in a new memo that Biden still has a path to victory, and that his standing with voters has not changed as much as commonly believed since his troubling debate against Trump. Later this evening, Biden will take questions at the conclusion of the Nato summit, and you can follow our live blog for the latest on that.Here’s what else happened today:
      Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, wants to talk to every single one of his lawmakers about Biden before deciding on the “next step”, Punchbowl News reports.
      Add Cori Bush to the list of House Democrats not saying if they think Biden can win.
      A meeting between top advisors to Biden and Senate Democrats was reported to have not gone particularly well.
      Most voters think Biden and Trump are “embarrassing”, but the former president has the edge in a new Pew Research Center poll.
      George Clooney gave Barack Obama a heads-up before publicly announcing that he thought Biden should step aside – and Obama did not offer any objections, Politico reported.
      Punchbowl News reports that the meetings between top advisers to Joe Biden and Senate Democrats did not go particularly well.Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon as well as top White House aides Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon went to meet with the president’s allies in the Capitol to reassure them that the president has a path to win. According to Punchbowl, senators were skeptical:Later today, Joe Biden will hold a press conference following the conclusion of the Nato summit in Washington DC, which will give the president another opportunity to reassure detractors that he is up for another four years of the job.The president will begin taking questions at 6.30pm ET, and we have a separate live blog following the event:Despite their bitter rivalry, Donald Trump’s campaign wants Joe Biden to stay in the race as the president faces increasing calls from his own party to step aside due to his old age.The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:Donald Trump and his campaign want Joe Biden to stay in the race, according to people familiar with the matter, and have discussed taking steps to ensure they don’t push the president to withdraw amid escalating panic among Democrats following his recent debate performance.The latest thinking inside Trump’s campaign is for them not to pile on the concern about Biden’s age and mental acuity in case their attack ads push Biden to step aside.If that happened, the campaign advisers think Trump would lose two lines of attack that have been central to his campaign if Biden steps aside: claiming that Biden is “sleepy” and lacks the fitness for another term in office, and falsely claiming that Biden is to blame for inflation and an uptick in illegal immigration.For the full story:Missouri’s Democratic representative Cori Bush declined to say whether Joe Biden would win the 2024 presidential election.Speaking to ABC correspondent Rachel Scott on Thursday who asked whether Bush supports the president, Bush replied, “What does that mean?”“Do you want to see him be the nominee?” Scott asked, to which Bush said, “I want to beat Trump in November.”“Can Biden do that?” Scott followed up, to which Bush said, “That is a question for Joe Biden.”Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia said he would have to decline to comment because he did not attend the briefing due to another commitment he couldn’t postpone.Meanwhile, senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut says he remains concerned but refused to share any details from the briefing, which he described as “serious”.Senate Democrats are arriving at the Capitol after a briefing by Joe Biden’s campaign officials billed as an opportunity for campaign officials to quell democrats’ panic about the president’s chances of winning the White House in November.Whether it worked, they would not say.As they did earlier this weeks, senators brushed by reporters, ignoring questions about whether the Biden team’s presentation convinced them that he still had a path forward and helped forestall further defections. On Wednesday night Vermont senator Peter Welch became the first senator to ask for Biden to drop out.Concern is mounting and, as the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said the day before, Democrats believe time is running short for the president to step aside. So far there is no indication Biden will heed the growing calls to abandon his reelection bid, even as calls grow.The president’s supporters – and his doubters – will be watching his performance tonight at a press conference following at the conclusion of the Nato summit.Actor Michael Douglas said that it is “hard to imagine” Joe Biden serving another four years.Speaking to the BBC, Douglas said:
      “It’s a painful, painful decision because I admire the man tremendously, I personally had a fundraiser for him at our house in April and I think he’s done an incredible job.
      But I am worried, not this week or next week but let’s say, next year. It’s just so hard for me to imagine a man four and a half years down the line from now, particularly in a time that’s so combative, that requires someone to really be so articulate.”
      Douglas’s comments follow actor George Clooney, a major Democratic fundraiser, who published a New York Times op-ed in which he called Biden to step aside, saying, “This is about age. Nothing more.”Signs are emerging that people close to Joe Biden may be gearing up to convince him to exit the presidential race. The New York Times dropped two significant reports, with one saying that his re-election campaign is looking into how Kamala Harris might fare against Donald Trump, and the other, which was similar to a report by NBC News, that aides were discussing ways to get Biden to step aside. However, the leaders of his re-election campaign argue in a new memo that Biden still has a path to victory, and that his standing with voters has not changed as much as commonly believed since his troubling debate against Trump. There are two major events happening later today that will be important to watch. The first is a meeting between Democratic senators and three top Biden advisors, which could prove crucial to gauging how his congressional allies feel about his prospects. The second is the president’s press conference following the Nato summit, which is scheduled for 6.30pm ET. An eloquent performance by Biden here could quell doubters who think he is too old to effectively convey his message to voters.But that is not all the news that has happened today:
      Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, wants to talk to every single one of his lawmakers about Biden before deciding on the “next step”, Punchbowl News reports.
      Most voters think Biden and Trump are “embarrassing”, but the former president has the edge in a new Pew Research Center poll.
      George Clooney gave Barack Obama a heads-up before publicly announcing that he thought Biden should step aside – and Obama did not offer any objections, Politico reported.
      In recent days, many Democrats in Congress and elsewhere have responded to questions about whether they support Joe Biden by saying that the president needs to show his strategy for winning.Today’s memo from his campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez could be seen as serving as an answer to those concerns. Beyond indicating that his campaign believes his best path to victory is by winning the traditionally Democratic battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the memo also argues that the race has not changed as much since the debate as some believe.“While there is no question there is increased anxiety following the debate, we are not seeing this translate into a drastic shift in vote share,” Chávez Rodríguez and O’Malley Dillon say, pointing to this ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll from today showing a tied race.They go on to argue that Biden remains within the margin of error of many polls of battleground states, and that key voters view him more positively than Donald Trump:
      Our internal data and public polling show the same thing: this remains a margin-of-error race in key battleground states.
      The movement we have seen, while real, is not a sea-change in the state of the race – while some of this movement was from undecided voters to Trump, much of the movement was driven by historically Democratic constituencies moving to undecided. These voters do not like Donald Trump. In internal polling, our post-debate net favorability is 20 percentage points higher than Trump’s among these voters. These voters have always been core persuasion targets for the campaign and we have a very real path to consolidating their support since they are not considering Trump as an alternative.
      They also downplay the possibility of another candidate performing better against Trump:
      In addition to what we believe is a clear pathway ahead for us, there is also no indication that anyone else would outperform the president vs. Trump. Hypothetical polling of alternative nominees will always be unreliable, and surveys do not take into account the negative media environment that any Democratic nominee will encounter. The only Democratic candidate for whom this is already baked in is President Biden.
      There is a long way to go between now and Election Day with considerable uncertainty and polls in July should not be overestimated, but the data shows we have a clear path to win. As we’ve always said, in today’s fragmented media environment, it will take time for our message to break through with trusted messengers and a strong ground game. That remains the case.
      We’ll see if it’s enough to quell Democratic concerns. Three top Biden aides, including O’Malley Dillon, are meeting today with Democratic senators, in what may be a key moment in shoring up confidence in the president.NBC News has just published a similarly grim report about the chatter by those close to Joe Biden over his chances of hanging on to the presidency.“He needs to drop out,” a Biden campaign official told NBC.They say several of his closest allies, including three people involved in his campaign to win a second term, believe he has “zero” chance of winning, and may swamp Democrats in down-ballot races.Here’s more, from NBC:
      The set of Democrats who think he should reconsider his decision to stay in the race has grown to include aides, operatives and officials tasked with guiding his campaign to victory. Those who spoke to NBC News said the sentiment that he should exit and leave the Democratic nomination to someone else — most likely Vice President Kamala Harris — is widespread even within the ranks of the campaign and the outside Democratic entities supporting it.
      “No one involved in the effort thinks he has a path,” said a second person working to elect him.
      A third person close to the re-election campaign said the present situation — the questions swirling around Biden’s cognitive abilities, the dearth of fundraising and more polls showing Biden dropping in support and other candidates faring better — is unsustainable. This person also said they didn’t see how the campaign could win.
      All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because they don’t want to be seen as further damaging a candidate they appreciate for his victory over then-President Donald Trump in 2020 and his policy wins in the White House. But two others close to Biden told NBC News that while they haven’t given up all hope of a turnaround, they see that as an increasingly unlikely outcome. And they believe the goal of defeating Trump in November should take precedence over backing Biden.
      “The question for me, and a lot of us, is: Who is the best person to beat Donald Trump?” another person working to elect Biden said. “There are a lot of us that are true blue that are questioning our initial thoughts on that.”
      Ultimately, the decision rests with Biden on whether he stays in, and the president has been insistent this week that he’s not going anywhere. But these sources say that Biden is done — whether he drops out before November or loses to Trump on Election Day.
      In their report, the New York Times says that while people who work with Joe Biden are discussing how to convince him to step aside, the talks do not appear to include his inner circle of confidants.“The people who are closest to the president, a group that includes some of his longest-serving advisers and members of his family, remain adamant that Mr. Biden will stay in the race. A person familiar with the group dynamics said that such conversations are not happening in the group closest to Mr. Biden, that he is still committed to staying in the race, and that he still believes he is the best person to beat Mr. Trump,” the Times reported.“The conversations have been happening outside that small orbit.”The New York Times reports that some aides to Joe Biden are strategizing ways to convince the president that he cannot win re-election, and that stepping aside to make way for another Democrat is the best way to keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House.A White House spokesman denied the story. Here’s what the Times reported:
      Some longtime aides and advisers to President Biden have become increasingly convinced that he will have to step aside from the campaign, and in recent days they have been trying to come up with ways to persuade him that he should, according to three people briefed on the matter.
      A small group of Mr. Biden’s advisers in the administration and the campaign – at least two of whom have told allies that they do not believe he should keep trying to run for a second term – have said they would have to convince the president of several things.
      They said they have to make the case to the president, who remains convinced of the strength of his campaign, that he cannot win against former President Donald J. Trump. They have to persuade him to believe that another candidate, like Vice President Kamala Harris, could beat Mr. Trump. And they have to assure Mr. Biden that, should he step aside, the process to choose another candidate would be orderly and not devolve into chaos in the Democratic Party.
      Those discussions were recounted by three people familiar with them who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. There is no indication that any of the discussions have reached Mr. Biden himself, one of the informed people said.
      In a memo acquired by the Guardian, top officials in the Biden-Harris campaign acknowledge that the president has lost standing following the first debate against Donald Trump, but that they believe the race is still winnable.The most likely path for Joe Biden to be re-elected is by winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, reads the memo, which a source familiar said was shared internally by campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez. However, the sun belt states that Biden won in 2020, but which recent polls indicate are drifting away from the president, “are not out of reach”, they write.“No one is denying that the debate was a setback. But Joe Biden and this campaign have made it through setbacks before. We are clear eyed about what we need to do to win. And we will win by moving forward, unified as a party, so that every single day between now and election day we focus on defeating Donald Trump,” the memo reads.The Biden-Harris campaign has commissioned a survey to measure how Kamala Harris would fare in a head-to-head matchup against Donald Trump, the New York Times reports, in a new indication that it is possible Joe Biden could call off his re-election campaign amid mounting concerns about his ability to win.Here’s what the Times says the campaign is doing, and what it might mean:
      The survey, which is being conducted this week and was commissioned by the Biden campaign’s analytics team, is believed to be the first time since the debate that Mr. Biden’s aides have sought to measure how the vice president would fare at the top of the ticket. It was described by three people who are informed about it and insisted on anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information. They did not specify why the survey was being conducted or what the campaign planned to do with the results.
      The effort, which comes as a growing number of prominent lawmakers call for Mr. Biden to step aside or suggest he should reconsider his plans to run, indicates that his campaign may be preparing to wade into a debate that has consumed the Democratic Party behind closed doors: whether Mr. Biden should step aside for his vice president.
      While some of Mr. Biden’s top aides have quietly argued that Ms. Harris could not win the election, donors and other outside supporters of the vice president believe she might be in a stronger position after the debate, and could be a more energetic communicator of the party’s message.
      The Pew Research Center is out with a new poll that indicates voters are very much worried about Joe Biden’s age, and generally Donald Trump in the presidential race.The survey, taken after their late June debate in which Biden appeared to struggle to respond to Trump’s attacks, showed a mere 24% of voters describe the president as “mentally sharp”, while more than twice that number feel that way about Trump. Pew notes that views of Biden as mentally sharp are down significantly from 2020, and by six percentage points from January alone.And while the presidential election will likely be decided in a handful of swing states, Pew found that Trump had a 4 percentage point lead over Biden among registered voters nationwide.That said, the survey confirms that both men are not exactly well thought of. Identical 63% shares of those surveyed described both Trump and Biden as “embarrassing”, including big shares of their own supporters. More

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      Don Jr to introduce Trump’s vice-president pick at Republican convention

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      Donald Trump’s running mate will be introduced at the Republican national convention next Wednesday by his eldest son, according to people familiar with the matter, raising speculation that Senator JD Vance will be named the vice-presidential pick after being endorsed by Don Jr.The fact that Don Jr will speak immediately before the running mate delivers remarks, earlier reported by Axios, is seen as notable inside the Trump campaign because of Don Jr’s close ties to Vance.Still, a person directly familiar with the matter cautioned that the speaking schedule was decided three to four weeks ago and they were uncertain how instructive Don Jr’s involvement was.Trump has said he wants his running mate to be revealed at the convention next week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but due to convention rules that require the ticket to be nominated by the first day, the former president has been forced to make a decision before Wednesday.For months, Trump has presided over a characteristically theatrical selection process in which he made dramatic pronouncements at rallies in an effort to drive media speculation before narrowing the list to a final three: the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, Senator Marco Rubio and Vance.The leading contenders have run through an emotionally draining fight to be Trump’s running mate, defending the former president in cable news interviews, mingling with members at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, coalescing support from Trump allies and trying to appeal to Trump’s core Maga voters at rallies.The Guardian has previously reported that Trump has told allies he wants a running mate who would be a “fighter” – someone who is media-savvy and will defend him on adversarial TV networks – and loyal to the extent that they would be “everything Mike Pence wasn’t”.Trump’s former vice-president was a valuable asset during the 2016 and 2020 campaigns because of his Christian conservative credentials that shored up support among Republicans who were suspicious of the thrice-married reality TV star.But Pence’s refusal to do one final favor and comply with Trump’s demand to block the certification of the 2020 election results in Congress led to a falling-out, and made Pence the target of the January 6 Capitol attack rioters.For his 2024 campaign, Trump is seeking a “Goldilocks” running mate: strong but loyal, in tune with Maga but not over-rehearsed, telegenic but not likely to outshine him. His choice will go up against Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to serve as vice-president.Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, has increasingly fit that profile.On Sunday, Vance said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he supported Trump’s vow to appoint a special counsel to prosecute Joe Biden, making apparent references to the House oversight committee’s search for evidence of impeachable conduct by Biden, which it has not found.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance also suggested it was reasonable for Trump to prosecute Biden on the grounds that Biden had supposedly weaponized the legal system against him, although there is no evidence Biden has been involved in prosecutorial decisions at the justice department or elsewhere.The NBC anchor Kristen Welker pressed Vance on his support for a special counsel: “If it’s not OK for Joe Biden to weaponize the justice department – as you say, which there’s no evidence of that – why is it OK for Donald Trump to do that?” she asked.Vance repeated the common complaint among Republicans that one former justice department official took a job as a prosecutor in the New York criminal case in which Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to influence the 2016 election with a hush-money scheme.“If Donald Trump’s attorney general had his No 2 or his No 3 jump ship to a local prosecutor’s office in Ohio or Wisconsin, and that person then went after Donald Trump’s political opposition, that’s a different conversation,” he said, though the prosecutor at issue was not as senior as the hypothetical.Trump has repeatedly vowed to prosecute his political enemies, sharing posts on his Truth Social website that advocated jailing top Democrats and Republicans who criticized him, including one that said the former House Republican Liz Cheney should face “televised military tribunals”. More

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      Don’t go, Joe: flummoxed Trump campaign wants Biden to stay in race

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      Donald Trump and his campaign want Joe Biden to stay in the race, according to people familiar with the matter, and have discussed taking steps to ensure they don’t push the president to withdraw amid escalating panic among Democrats following his recent debate performance.The latest thinking inside Trump’s campaign is for them not to pile on the concern about Biden’s age and mental acuity in case their attack ads push Biden to step aside.If that happened, the campaign advisers think Trump would lose two lines of attack that have been central to his campaign: claiming that Biden is “sleepy” and lacks the fitness for another term in office, and falsely claiming that Biden is to blame for inflation and an uptick in illegal immigration.The situation with Biden has flummoxed the Trump campaign as they now walk the tightrope of continuing to campaign against Biden in the likelihood that he remains the Democratic nominee for president, without hitting his age to the extent that it helps push him to withdraw.Trump’s senior campaign advisers are also concerned that if Biden leaves the race, they would not be able to deploy their contingency plans until a replacement at the top of the ticket was confirmed.A new opponent could open up new challenges for the Trump campaign. If Democrats coalesced behind a younger candidate, for instance, neither the lethargy portrayal nor the Biden administration record would work – and the campaign would need to come up with newly tailored attacks.A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.To preserve the status quo – Trump is marginally ahead of Biden in battleground states in private and public polling – the Trump campaign has settled on the message that it is too late for Democrats to change their nominee and Biden cannot step down.Trump himself has downplayed the idea that Biden would be replaced. “If you listen to the professionals that do this stuff, they say it’s very hard for anybody else to come into the race,” Trump said in an interview with John Reid, a Virginia-based talk radio host.And the message being blasted by Trump-allied Super Pacs, two weeks after the debate, is that Biden has to stay in the race at least until the Democratic national convention in August if any potential successor wants to acquire Biden’s substantial war chest.The Biden campaign and the White House have insisted that the president will be the nominee, and are planning a new round of campaign events and interviews. Biden faces an unscripted press-conference at the Nato summit in Washington on Thursday night, and an NBC interview next week Monday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden’s campaign announced raising $127m in June, ending the month with $240m in cash on hand. Trump raised a comparatively smaller figure of $111.8m, with $285m in the bank.Still, the Trump campaign has started to plan for contingencies, including if the vice-president, Kamala Harris, became the nominee, although they have been less concerned about a Harris-led ticket because they believe they can hit her with the Biden administration’s policy record, the people said.The Trump campaign has started to use ads trying to start the narrative that Harris was always planning to depose Biden, using clips of Harris laughing against the Biden-Harris logo collapsing into just the Harris text. The campaign is also accusing Democratic candidates of covering up Biden’s decline. More

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      Will Biden’s loss of celebrity support make a real difference?

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      The last two US presidential election cycles haven’t been especially notable in the already-marginal world of celebrity endorsements. Both 2016 and 2020 pitted a well-established Democrat with heavy ties to previous administrations against a fringe-gone-mainstream Republican candidate whose own previous occupation was as a celebrity, and not a particularly hip one. So it wasn’t surprising to see an even more dramatic divide between mainstream celebs endorsing the Democrat (or saying nothing more controversial than a bland “vote!”) and a bunch of C- and-D-listers stumping for Trump, as they might any number of faulty late-night infomercial products.This might well have gone similarly in 2024, if not for Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate a few weeks ago. Now a less lopsided divide has formed as a form of anti-endorsement has come in: celebrities who have called upon Joe Biden to step aside from the presidential race and let a younger candidate attempt to take the Democrats across the finish line.At first, it was an interestingly eclectic group, notable for aligning the likes of Michael Moore – who isn’t exactly the core constituency for a career politician fixated on bipartisan cooperation in the first place – with the likes of classic limousine liberals like Rob Reiner and Stephen King. This suggested some real traction to the idea that Biden should drop out, but was still largely limited to figures who seem a bit more likely to hop on social media and fire off some opinions. More writers than actors, in other words; same goes for figures with mock-pundit experience, like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. So there was particular headline-news grabbiness when George Clooney – who recently attended a Biden fundraiser – wrote a New York Times op-ed saluting the man’s service and integrity while also arguing that it was time for Joe to go. It may be the most talked-about celeb endorsement (or anti-endorsement) since Taylor Swift came out for Biden (and, probably more importantly, against Trump) shortly before the 2020 election. It even prompted a Biden response, with the president claiming – somewhat nonsensically – that Clooney, only being at the fundraiser he referred to for a brief period, couldn’t have gotten a proper impression of the president’s acuity.View image in fullscreenThough he doesn’t give off the glamour of his former running mate Barack Obama, Biden has long been able to claim some degree of default and/or anti-Trump A-list support: Julia Roberts attended the same fundraiser as Clooney earlier this year, while Robert De Niro, an outspoken critic of fellow New Yorker Trump, narrated a campaign ad, though this seems likely to stem from De Niro’s genuine – and, frankly, delightful! – seething hatred for Trump more than some personal allegiance to Biden. (In the meantime, who has been one of Trump’s biggest boosters on Insta? You guessed it: Frank Stallone.) Dwayne Johnson, who long identified as some manner of Republican, endorsed Biden late in the 2020 race. Earlier this year, though, Johnson announced that he wouldn’t be endorsing any candidates for 2024, Biden apparently not having done enough to help change the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe.It would be easy to see a shift like that as evidence of eroding support for Biden, and it probably is; having a major star specifically say, months and months before the election, that they don’t endorse either candidate (implying that this is unlikely to change), when it would be easy enough to simply say nothing or bide his time, feels unusual – just as it’s unusual for another major star to write an op-ed suggesting that a presidential candidate from his party must step down for the good of the country. But it’s also a sign of how micro-targeted a celebrity niche has become – maybe by force – in the social media era, where even silence has begun to seem like a tacit statement, rather than PR-managed decorum. Biden’s once-solid base of A-listers still skews on the older side, reflecting a time when endorsing a candidate felt at once simpler and less conspicuous. That’s true, too, of celebrities who have called for Biden to drop out: Michael Douglas and John Cusack are big names, but they’re sure not south of 50. Younger celebrities, mirroring younger demographics in general, may not be especially impressed with Biden’s handling of Israel and attendant failure to stop the bloodshed – which means they may not have been endorsing him to begin with.Of course, there’s a certain tempest-in-a-designer-teapot quality to tracking the whims of celebrity endorsements, which at least some of the general public probably views with skepticism – those clueless stars and their pet causes! George Clooney isn’t casting his vote in a swing state – or, for that matter, against Joe Biden, if it comes down to it. Biden could even argue that the shifting tastes of celebrities don’t interest him, as he’s maintained the image of a folksy, get-it-done underdog for much of his political career, even after ascending to the vice-presidency. Courting celebrity? Isn’t that a Trumpian hunger to begin with? Yet big celebrities can help with big-donor fundraising – and smaller ones arguably have bigger platforms than ever before. (John Cusack movies may not bring a million-plus people to the box office in a weekend, if they’re even released theatrically at all. But that’s his social-media audience.)From Hollywood’s love of Obama to Trump’s resurgence beginning on NBC to the sheer number of meme-based campaign posts, celebrity and politics have become more entwined than ever. Biden may not need celebrities to win, or for his sense of worth. But he does need actual support, and Clooney’s op-ed helped make him seem more like a cause than a candidate. More

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      Republicans to descend on Milwaukee – where they’ve been trying to dilute Black voting power

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      Shortly after the 2022 midterm elections, Robert Spindell sent out an email to his fellow Republicans explaining why he was pleased with the results even though Tony Evers, a Democrat, had just won a second term.Spindell, one of three Republicans on the body that oversees elections in Wisconsin, said “we can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”The comment sparked outrage and calls for Spindell to resign. Spindell, who also served as a fake elector in 2020, has refused, saying, “The last thing I want to do is suppress votes.”While it was astonishing to see a top Republican official boasting of lower voter turnout with such bluntness, it wasn’t surprising to anyone to see Republicans celebrating fewer votes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s most populous city.Nearly 223,000 Black people live in Milwaukee – roughly 60% of Wisconsin’s entire Black population. That means that Black voters in the city can have an outsize effect on election outcomes in the state – they have long been a bastion of Democratic votes and are crucial for any Democrat who wants to win the state (More than one out of every 10 votes Joe Biden received in Wisconsin in 2020 came from the city of Milwaukee). Activists have long understood attacks on the city to be code for attacks on Black voters.Now Republicans are set to descend on the city they have long attacked to formally nominate Donald Trump to a second term at the Republican national convention in July.“They’re not coming here because they love the city of Milwaukee at all,” said Angela Lang, the executive director of Black Leaders Organizing Communities, a non-profit in the city. The decision to hold the GOP convention in Milwaukee, a city Lang said Republicans often “say racist dog whistles about” was a “slap in the face”.Republicans have not shied away from using coded language to attack the city. In 2013, as Republicans debated a measure to curtail early voting, state senator Scott Fitzgerald said “the question of where this is coming from and why are we doing this and why are we trying to disenfranchise people, I mean, I say it’s because the people I represent in the 13th district continue to ask me, ‘What is going on in Milwaukee?’”Donald Trump, for his part, has directly insulted Milwaukee, reportedly telling fellow Republicans in June it was a “horrible city”.Both Democrats and Republicans have touted the economic benefits the event will bring to the city. And Reince Priebus, the former RNC chair who led the effort to bring the convention to Milwaukee, said having the event in the city would bring around $200m in economic benefits and would focus Republican attention on Wisconsin, a critical battleground state. The convention, Priebus said in 2023, “can turn a purple state where only 20,000 people will decide who those electoral votes will go to”.“They have no shame,” said Greg Lewis, a minister in Milwaukee who leads the Souls to the Polls, a non-profit that works to educate churchgoers and get them to vote. Historically, the program has been remarkably successful in mobilizing Black voters.“Even though they have totally tried to abolish folks in our community from expressing themselves with their vote, they still want you to support a system or an organization or a party that is totally against them expressing their power,” Lewis said.In 2018, Robin Vos, the Republican who serves as the powerful speaker of the Wisconsin assembly, said his party would have done better in statewide elections “if you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula”.Republicans have also used their impenetrable, gerrymandered majorities in the state legislature to attack Milwaukee and its Black residents, including passing a sweeping voter ID measure and moving to limit early voting in the city. Non-white voters are more than four times more likely to lack a current ID than their white counterparts. One study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that voter ID in Wisconsin discouraged up to 23,000 people in Milwaukee and Dane counties from voting in the 2016 election.In 2016, US district judge James Peterson struck down a Republican-enacted law trying to limit the amount of early voting in the state. He noted that the practice was especially popular among Latino and Black voters. Milwaukee at the time allowed for more early voting than other places in the state.“The legislature’s ultimate objective was political: Republicans sought to maintain control of the state government. But the methods that the legislature chose to achieve that result involved suppressing the votes of Milwaukee’s residents, who are disproportionately African American and Latino,” he wrote. An appeals court has since overturned Peterson’s ruling.Turnout in the city in 2016 dropped by 41,000 votes compared with 2012, nearly double Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the state. When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin in 2016, turnout in Black wards in the city was around 58%, according to a Journal Sentinel analysis. In 2020, it fell to 51%. Black turnout has lagged after white turnout in the city in the last presidential and gubernatorial elections, according to data analyzed by John Johnson, a researcher at Marquette University.“They’re going to places with large concentrations of Black people – that is the most hope we have at building Black political power in the state,” Lang said, referring to Republican efforts to restrict voting rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2020, Donald Trump and his campaign waged an aggressive, ultimately unsuccessful, legal effort to get votes in Milwaukee and Madison thrown out as part of his effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. He did not request a recount in any other county in the state.LaTonya Johnson, a Democrat who represents Milwaukee in the state senate, said it was no secret why Republicans were targeting the city. She said she had pleaded with her colleagues in the legislature to support legislation to curb gun violence in the city but had been rebuffed.“Republicans always make it seem like the bulk of – if they feel that there’s fraud – in the system that is coming from the city of Milwaukee, right? And the question is why? Because Milwaukee is majority minority,” she said in an interview.For the last few months, Lewis and Souls to the Polls have been calling for the executive director of the Wisconsin Republican party, Andrew Iverson, to resign. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published text messages earlier this year that showed Iverson trying to sabotage Souls to the Polls operations on election day in 2020. The text messages showed Iverson, then the head of Trump victory, a joint effort of the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, asking a Trump campaign staffer if he could get Trump supporters to use Souls to the Polls on election day.“I’m excited about this. Wreak havoc,” he said in one text message published by the Journal Sentinel. Iverson, who did not respond to an interview request, has denied wrongdoing, saying he was joking. Another Republican staffer told the Journal Sentinel that he took the messages to overwhelm Souls to the Polls.Beyond voting, Republicans have also attacked Milwaukee in other ways. As the city faced serious fiscal issues last year, lawmakers approved a measure allowing Milwaukee officials to raise taxes, but also imposed new restrictions on the city.The bill contained provisions that gave the city less control over the city’s fire and police commission and said it could not spend revenue on diversity initiatives, and limited how much could be spent on non-profits and the arts. The city was also blocked from using state funding on a local streetcar project.Lang said she and her staff planned to leave the city during the convention, but would have some virtual programming. “I have serious safety concerns,” she said.Attendees of the convention will be allowed to carry guns within the “soft” security perimeter around the Fiserv forum, the arena where the convention will be held, but not within a tighter “hard” security perimeter closer to the arena. The city could not ban the carrying of firearms because of a state law that prohibits localities from restricting them.“The same type of people who write manifestos, and shoot up grocery stores with people that look like me, they find home in the Republican party, and now we’re rolling out the red carpet to them in a predominantly Black and brown city that is largely Democratic, and I think that is a recipe for disaster,” Lang said.Still, Lang said she planned to use the convention as an opportunity to educate voters about the meaning of their vote.“If people are like, ‘I don’t really believe in politics or it’s so dysfunctional, I have no faith in it right now,’ well, there’s one party in particular that is happy when you don’t vote,” she said. More

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      Only one group can actually persuade Biden to exit the race: his rich donors | Robert Reich

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      At a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, last Friday, Joe Biden said: “Some folks … are trying to push me out of the race.”To whom was the president referring?Certainly not to Donald Trump or the Republicans, who have been uncharacteristically silent about the whole question of whether Biden should drop out. They couldn’t push him out of the Democratic race anyway.Nor was he referring to Democrats in Congress. Almost all have been publicly supportive of Biden. Only eight House Democrats out of 213 have called for him to drop out, and just one Senate Democrat has gone that far.Was Biden referring to the leaders of the Democratic party? Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Senate majority leader and House Democratic leader, respectively, have been supportive of Biden, at least in public.He couldn’t have been talking about the Democratic National Committee. Not a single DNC member has called for Biden to exit from the race.Was Biden talking about the elite punditry on cable TV and on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post – almost all of who have called for Biden to drop out?Doubtful. The chattering class has little or no influence on the preferences of average voters. How many people at that Wisconsin rally avidly read opinion pieces in the New York Times?Did Biden have in mind some collection of gray-bearded leaders of America – a group of unofficial elder statesmen, perhaps including Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, whose counsel carries extraordinary influence behind the scenes?There is no longer any such group. (I recall a time decades ago when a bipartisan cabal of old hands held significant sway behind the scenes of official Washington – people like Lloyd Cutler, George Shultz and Jim Baker. But in the hyper-partisanship of today’s Washington, no such group exists.)The fact is, only one small group of people in the US has the power to push Joe Biden out of the race. Who are they? The major donors to the Democratic party.They’re the ones Biden is angry with.On Monday morning, Biden called into MSNBC’s Morning Joe and railed against the big-ticket donors who have been pushing him to withdraw.“I’m getting so frustrated with the elites … the elites of the party,” he said on the air. “I don’t care what the millionaires think.”Bingo. It was the first time any modern president has admitted that the elites of the party are the millionaires (and billionaires) who fund it, which gives them extraordinary political power – perhaps enough to push Biden out of the race.In truth, the Democratic party is little more than a national fundraising machine, as is the Republican party.I’m not blaming Biden. He’s simply stating the truth. America’s donor class has become extraordinarily powerful in both parties.Biden and his top aides aren’t hiding this reality. To the contrary, they’re actively portraying the effort to remove him as driven by the party’s wealthy elite.This may be an exaggeration. The polling data I’ve seen suggests that concerns about Biden’s age and evident decline worry a wide swathe of the public.But Biden continues to court the party’s major donors. Soon after Biden shared with the hosts of Morning Joe his frustrations with the moneyed elite of the party, he held a video conference call with that very same elite.In that call, according to the New York Times, he told them he was staying in the race. He also told them that they had to shift the focus of the campaign away from him and on to Trump.Telling them to shift their focus seemed to offer further evidence that the party’s biggest donors were responsible for focusing on Biden’s age and his stumbles since the debate. And it was they who must shift their focus to Trump.Over the last week and a half, I’ve been immersed in countless discussions about whether Biden should drop out of the race. I expect you have as well.But those discussions are irrelevant. You and I aren’t going to persuade Biden to stay in or drop out of the race.Only one group is going to persuade him – the Democratic party’s biggest donors. If they decide to stop funding the Biden campaign, Biden has no chance of winning.It’s rapidly becoming a game of chicken. If the biggest donors stop funding Biden and Biden stays in the race notwithstanding, he clearly loses. Yet so do we all.Biden’s efforts over the last few days confirm much of what I’ve increasingly observed over the years. The real political power in the US, regardless of party, lies in the hands of big money.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      This article was amended on 11 July 2024 to update the number of members of Congress who have called for Biden to drop out More

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      Biden under renewed pressure to step aside as top Democrats make agonized appeals

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      Joe Biden came under renewed moral pressure on Wednesday to abandon his presidential candidacy amid agonised appeals by a succession of senior Democrats for him to consider the broader picture.Those calls came as the US president dug in his heels to make it hard to supplant him as the nominee.With the backlash over his 27 June TV debate fiasco refusing to abate, Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, became the most senior party member yet to subtly float the possibility of Biden stepping down while stopping short of explicitly telling him to do so.Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, gleefully sought to further tighten the screw by summoning three White House aides to testify about Biden’s mental fitness.The summons came in the form of a subpoena from James Comer, the GOP chair of the House oversight committee, who demanded testimony from Anthony Bernal, the top aide to the first lady Jill Biden; the deputy White House chief of staff Annie Tomasini, and the president’s senior adviser Ashley Williams, Axios reported.Pelosi, 84, who was speaker until Republicans regained control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “it’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run”, adding: “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”That remark came as the president seemed intent on running down the clock until next month’s Democratic national convention in Chicago, to make it practically impossible to replace him. Pelosi later qualified her comments, claiming they had been subject to “misrepresentations”, while adding: “The president is great.”But they prefaced further critical interventions from Senate Democrats, who followed the lead of Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado in voicing doubts over whether Biden could beat Donald Trump in November.Bennet told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday evening that Trump was likely to win November’s poll in a landslide because of the widespread concerns over Biden’s age and mental acuity.“This race is on a trajectory that is very worrisome if you care about the future of this country,” he said in an impassioned interview. “Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House. It’s not a question about politics, it’s a moral question about the future of our country.”He added: “I have not seen anything remotely approaching the kind of plan we need to see out of the White House that can demonstrate that he can actually beat Donald Trump, which is not going to be about the accomplishments that we all had, you know, three and four years ago. This is something for the president to consider.”Bennet’s comments stopped short of a full-blown appeal for Biden’s withdrawal, in contrast to Democrats in the House – where seven members have explicitly made such calls in the wake of the debate, where the president repeatedly appeared confused, mangled his words and allowed Trump to lie without effective contradiction.Soon after, Pete Welch of Vermont became the first senator to call on Biden to withdraw from the election. Welch said he was worried about the race because “the stakes could not be higher”.“I understand why President Biden wants to run,” Welch wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “He saved us from Donald Trump once and wants to do it again. But he needs to reassess whether he is the best candidate to do so. In my view, he is not.“For the good of the country, I’m calling on President Biden to withdraw from the race.”Richard Blumenthal, a senator from Connecticut, also voiced concerns.“I am deeply concerned about Joe Biden winning this November,” Blumenthal told reporters, adding that the party “had to reach a conclusion as soon as possible” and that Biden still retained his support.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA similarly circumspect call to reconsider came from Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor of Arizona, a battleground state that was one of six moved by the Cook Political Report – a non-partisan election forecaster – in Trump’s direction following the president’s post-debate poll slide.“I want the president to look at the evidence and make a hard decision,” Hobbs told reporters, adding that Biden had “a lot to do to assure Americans and Arizonans”.And on Wednesday evening, Representative Earl Blumenauer, the longest-serving Democrat in Oregon’s House delegation, put it bluntly: “President Biden should not be the Democratic presidential nominee.”
      “The question before the country is whether the president should continue his candidacy for re-election. This is not just about extending his presidency but protecting democracy,” he said in an emailed statement.“It is a painful and difficult conclusion but there is no question in my mind that we will all be better served if the president steps aside as the Democratic nominee and manages a transition under his terms.”There were even signs of slippage within the staunchly loyal Congressional Black Caucus, which had pledged its support on Monday night. On Wednesday one of its members, Marc Veasey of Texas, became the first to break ranks by telling CNN that Democrats running in tight races should “distance themselves” from Biden in an effort to “do whatever it is they need to do” to win.The public agonising illustrated how Biden’s debate failure has plunged the Democrats into paralysis as the campaign approaches a key phase.Yet there seemed little imminent sign of Biden – who has already written to the party’s congressional group en masse telling doubters to challenge him at the convention – yielding to pressure to bow out.Far from Biden retreating, plans were announced for a second primetime television interview – this time with NBC’s Lester Holt next Monday in the symbolic setting of the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas – to follow last Friday’s with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.The latest interview, coming on the heels of Biden’s hosting of Nato’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington this week – where he has been meeting a succession of world leaders – appeared designed to reinforce the message that he intends to stay the course.On Wednesday, the president visited the Washington headquarters of the main US trade union body, the AFL-CIO, an important Democrat constituency.The trade union visit followed a virtual meeting from the White House on Tuesday evening with about 200 Democratic mayors, in which he restated his determination to remain and reportedly won their support. More

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      Bearded JD Vance remains a contender for Trump VP – by a whisker

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      JD Vance is still in contention to be named Donald Trump’s running mate, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee indicated on Wednesday, despite the Ohio senator committing what Trump is reported to consider a heinous faux pas.According to multiple reports, Vance’s offence does not lie in past decisions to call Trump “America’s Hitler” and Trumpism the “Opioid of the Masses”.Vance’s mistake, according to a bristling mass of pundits, is to have a beard.“JD has a beard,” an unnamed “Trump confidant” and Vance supporter told the Bulwark this week. “But Trump is a clean-shaven guy. He just doesn’t like facial hair.”That judgment seemed to check out, given proliferating reports about Trump’s dislike for beards, as sported by his sons Donald Jr and Eric and senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, and indeed for the moustache sported by John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser.But on Wednesday, in an interview with the Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade, Trump brushed off the subject.“Real quick,” Kilmeade said, “on your vice-president candidate, word is that you won’t pick JD Vance because of his facial hair. Is that true?”Trump said: “No.”“He looks good,” Trump added. “Looks like a young Abraham Lincoln.”Trump did not discuss Vance further. But he also said he would announce his running mate – with the Florida senator Marco Rubio and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum both empirically clean-shaven and reportedly in contention – “close to” the Republican convention in Milwaukee next week.“It used to be picked during the convention,” Trump said, “and it made the convention frankly, more interesting. The pick used to be during the convention – that’s what I’d like to do.”Unsurprisingly, Trump’s comparison of Vance to “a young Abraham Lincoln” was not strictly accurate.At 39, Vance is a former “public affairs marine” turned venture capitalist and bestselling author who first resisted Trumpism but then adopted it as he won a Senate seat in 2022, emerging as a fiery rightwing populist voice.When Lincoln was 39, in 1848, he was a clean-shaven lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, a former Whig congressman ejected from Washington after one term.Lincoln grew his beard – but not a moustache – when he was well into middle age, at 51, after winning the presidency as a Republican and apparently at the suggestion of a correspondent 40 years his junior.“I have got four brothers,” Grace Bedell, 11 and of Westfield, New York, told Lincoln in a letter in October 1860, “and a part of them will vote for you anyway, and if you will let your whiskers grow, I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you.“You would look a great deal better, for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers, and they would tease their husbands to vote for you, and then you would be president.”Vance may have a similar motive for keeping his beard, as he seeks to project the necessary experience and toughness to appeal to Trump and voters.“Without the beard, Vance looks like he’s 12,” an unnamed Trump adviser told the Bulwark this week. More