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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

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      George Clooney implores Biden to step aside in opinion article

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      The Hollywood actor George Clooney, one of the Democratic party’s biggest fundraisers, has called on Joe Biden to step aside to save democracy from Donald Trump.In an opinion article in the New York Times, Clooney expressed deep affection for the US president but said that personal interaction with him at a recent fundraising event in Los Angeles – the Democratic party’s most successful ever, raising more than $30m – suggested that the stumbling performance in last month’s debate in Atlanta was not an aberration.“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” the actor and longtime Democratic party member and fundraiser wrote.“He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.“Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw,” he said, referring to explanations from the White House and Biden himself for his bad debate performance.More bluntly, he said explicitly that Biden could not prevail in an electoral rematch with Trump: “We are not going to win with this president.”Stressing that his call was made reluctantly, Clooney paid tribute to the political battles that Biden had won throughout his career but said his age represented an insurmountable adversary.“But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can,” he wrote.Clooney’s plea came as Biden continues to insist on staying in the race while senior Democrats agonise about how to apply pressure on him to change his mind, and serious questions continue over Biden’s health and viability for re-election.The actor called on leading party figures to come off the fence and make the case to Biden, while dismissing as “disingenuous” the president’s argument – stated in a letter to Democrats in Congress this week – that the party’s membership had already chosen the nominee in the primaries.‘Most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks,” he wrote in remarks clearly critical of continuing inaction. “But the dam has broken. We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe concluded: “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”Clooney’s intervention comes weeks after a disagreement with the White House over Biden’s criticism of the international criminal court’s move to issue an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over allegations of war crimes in Gaza.The actor’s wife, Amal Alamuddin Clooney, worked on the case. Clooney called Steve Ricchetti, the president’s counsel, to complain about Biden’s labeling the warrant as “outrageous”.Warrants were being sought for the arrest of Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, and three leaders of Hamas, which controls Gaza.Shortly afterwards, however, Clooney appeared at a huge fundraising event in Los Angeles for the campaign, which headlined with Biden and Barack Obama. More

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      ‘What we’ve been saying all along’: where do critical voters stand on Biden dropping out?

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      Concerns about Joe Biden’s fitness for re-election on the left may have been muted over the last year. But they were not absent.“There’s a lot of people, especially on the left, that have been talking about this,” said Alex Johnson, an IT worker in Atlanta.Democrats in the center of the party would chastise critics on the left as ageist or radical when bringing up the president’s age before the disastrous debate, he said. “They’re telling everybody that they were crazy. And then one thing happened, and all of a sudden, all of the people who have been calling progressives crazy, they’re like: ‘You know, maybe they were right.’”Biden has repeatedly reiterated that he will not withdraw from the race. Democratic party leaders are locking arms behind the president, instructing their ranks to be circumspect in conversation with news reporters and are strategizing ahead of the Democratic national convention.The conversation about Biden’s fitness ratcheted up after his debate performance last month. But they did not begin then, even among Democrats. Editorials from David Ignatius at the Washington Post and Mark Leibovich at the Atlantic last year called for Biden to refrain from running. Cenk Uygur, progressive co-creator of The Young Turks program, wanted Biden to give up re-election for more than a year and has been more than vocal about it, describing Biden’s supporters on the left as dead-enders.“At this point, eight out of 10 Americans think that Joe Biden’s mental health is not sufficient to be president,” Uygur said. “That’s what we’ve been saying all along. That number was already sky high before the debate.”Uygur has been arguing that it’s more than Biden’s age; no president with poll numbers in the 30s at this point in the election cycle has won re-election. Uygur tried to run as a candidate himself, despite being born in Istanbul – a constitutional disqualification for the office – simply to make the point.Karl Olson in St Louis Park, Minnesota, generally votes for Republican candidates. In 2020, “to save democracy”, Olson made the maximum possible legal contribution to the Biden campaign, he said. He voted for Biden in 2020, but has been calling for Biden not to run for re-election for years.He voted for Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary. Now he is considering a vote for Trump.“I have long held that [Biden] should quit while he’s ahead,” Olson said. “I have concluded that if the Democrats insist on renominating Biden and Harris, they deserve to lose.”“Here’s the thing,” he added. “If Donald Trump is a political antichrist who will destroy democracy, then why are Democrats insisting on renominating Biden-Harris when he’s too old and she’s not enough of a leader to win?”Much of the anger today is being directed at the media, both for ignoring the substance of concerns about Biden’s age before the debate, and now the seeming pile-on after it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe headlines may be overdue, said Blue Tannery, a radio engineer in Atlanta. But they are not helpful.“The age thing in particular; yes, it’s an important problem. I’m really, really, really sick of seeing headlines about it,” Tannery said. The one thing that Biden said that makes any sense: you should all shut up about how old that I am and start talking about what I’ve done over the last four years.”Tannery said he had wanted Biden not to run, but also said the standard the media applies to Biden is unfair. “This is eight years of being in this country, watching Trump just open his mouth onstage and exhale a horde of locusts and the headline is about Biden,” Tannery said. “Because that’s what Trump does every time. That’s not news anymore. It is exhausting.”Samantha Ruddy, a comedy writer in Philadelphia, may be typical of reluctant Biden voters. She’s still voting for Biden. But now she also thinks he’s going to lose.“I have wanted Democratic candidates more politically aligned to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders during the past two election cycles,” Ruddy said. “In 2020, I felt Biden was better than Trump. I still feel he’s better than Trump. However, I don’t think he can win in 2024. I believe the best move is to replace him on the ticket. That being said – much like Donald Trump – I’m an entertainer who looked at the eclipse, so what do I know?” More

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      The Republicans’ new party platform is scary – because it can win | Dustin Guastella and Bhaskar Sunkara

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      The new Republican platform was released yesterday. Some liberal journalists – the opinion-makers of what has been called the Democrats’ “shadow party” – dismissed the new platform as a “joke”. They’re wrong. The Republican party platform is scary. Not because it rolls out the usual litany of conservative policy preferences, but precisely because of where it breaks from that orthodoxy.The new party platform is scary, because it can win.Remember, the Republican party did not release a platform in 2020. Presumably, many in the party had not yet accepted that Trumpism was not an aberrant virus but instead the new normal for conservative politics. But in 2024 party leaders, billionaire donors, and rightwing media have embraced Donald Trump without reservation. The new platform reflects his political formula: moderate, at least rhetorically, on abortion; double down on immigration; and reject the small-government Republican tradition.In addition to the ex-president’s signature anti-immigrant positions, consider the following changes: the drafters have dropped the party’s longstanding commitment to cut “entitlements” and now say that Republicans “will not cut one penny” from social security or Medicare. The platform also does not mention reducing the national debt, opting instead for vague language about slashing “wasteful spending”. The platform endorses an industrial policy to make the US the “Manufacturing Superpower”. The platform rails against the “unfair trade deals” and politicians who “sold our jobs and livelihoods to the highest bidders overseas”. And there is a new commitment to “rebuild our cities and restore law and order”.Most strikingly, the platform does not mention any national abortion ban, only opposition to “late-term abortion”. The platform describes itself as “a return to common sense” and Trump has distanced himself from the radical framing of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.In US politics, platforms typically don’t mean much, and both Democrats and Republicans tend to throw together broad programs designed to triangulate between appeasing ideologues and appealing to swing voters. But platforms can be consequential if they signal a genuine break from past orthodoxy, and if legislators take them seriously. Given the sudden advocacy of platform positions from several leading Republican figures such as JD Vance and Marco Rubio, the new Republican platform does not seem like window dressing.This is the new core of the Republican party’s appeals: moderate on certain cultural issues and economic issues. That can win against a feeble Democratic party that is too busy wrestling over who their nominee should be to promote a second-term agenda. (“Let’s Finish the Job” says Joe Biden, in a recent ad, with no indication what that job is.)Democrats seem to have tricked themselves into thinking that the voting public’s general rejection of the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision means that polarization around abortion will catapult them to victory. They seem to think that because Ron DeSantis lost by making his campaign all about “wokeness”, voters really don’t mind corporate DEI language. They seem to think that because the Republican party is unwilling to follow through on the populist economics presented in their 2016 and 2024 platforms, voters will laugh off those promises. And, of course, they underestimate the degree to which inflation has soured voters on the president and the Democrats.Much was made in the lead-up to 2016 about the civil war within the Republican party between “Never Trump” conservatives and the Steve Bannon populist wing of the party. Moderate figures like Joe Scarborough and Colin Powell left the party in opposition to their presumptive candidate, while Marco Rubio said that Trump’s nomination would “fracture the party and be damaging to the conservative movement”. Far from crippling the Republican party, however, Trump brought it back to power. And in office, he reassured establishment figures by coupling largely symbolic protectionist measures with the deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy that one would have expected from a Mitt Romney administration.And now, instead of moving the Republican party to the radical right, Trump, on key issues like abortion, is at least theoretically moving his party closer to the center. Indeed, the Republican platform appears to be a winning one. Yet while the Republican party is offering a relatively coherent program, Democrats are all over the place, with a nominee unable to effectively communicate with the American people and no unifying theme other than opposition to Trump. Rather than running on the Biden administration’s oversight of job growth in distressed areas and its new industrial policy, liberals seem content to do battle on the cultural front.This discursive failing has allowed common sense policies that are more reflective of the governing practice of today’s Democratic party – from defending the social safety net to growing manufacturing jobs – to become rebranded as the bread-and-butter of the Republican party.In power, it’s likely that Trump will once again betray his working-class supporters and govern like a typical business conservative, because he is utterly committed to more tax cuts and weakening trade unions. He’s promised his richest political donors whatever they want if they help him get back in power. As a result, we’ve seen billionaires lining up to shower him with cash.Yet Trump has displayed surprising political discipline lately. While the Democrats bicker among themselves about Biden’s fitness, Trump is only now beginning to spend big money in swing states like Wisconsin – where he is already leading in the polls.This is a side of Trump we haven’t previously seen; he is campaigning to win in a dangerously coherent way. If progressives don’t wake up and offer an appealing alternative, Trump might do more than rule through the courts and through executive orders – he might forge a long-lasting, majoritarian movement.
      Dustin “Dino” Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia
      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin, and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      ‘Blitz primary’: the scenario that could turn replacing Biden into a ‘riveting spectacle’

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      In the morass in which the Democratic party now finds itself over Joe Biden’s troubled presidential candidacy, a prominent narrative is that the party is confronted by two dire options: an aged and weakened Biden stumbles on to November, or he stands down, igniting an acrimonious and chaotic scramble for his replacement.Either way, Donald Trump wins.Over the past few days, however, energy has been building around a third, more optimistic solution. Advocates of this alternative model believe it could reinvigorate Democrats by putting the spotlight on young fresh talent, inspire the country with a powerful articulation of the party’s values and, critically, prevent Trump from returning to the White House bent on unleashing a full-blown attack on American democracy.The idea is being floated by a loose affiliation of Democratic party stalwarts, including former senior government officials and elected representatives, major donors, and current party officeholders. They are calling their plan the “blitz primary”– a quickfire, tightly controlled selection process that would culminate with a younger successor to Biden being nominated at next month’s Democratic national convention.“The question is: how can we flip this disaster into something remarkable?” said Ted Dintersmith, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who is a leading proponent of the blitz primary idea. “What would totally shift the national narrative, turning bad options into an opportunity?”Dintersmith, who in 2012 was appointed by Barack Obama to represent the US at the UN general assembly, estimates that about 70 prominent individuals have participated in the search for an alternative. Discussions have focused on how to move beyond the crisis in which the Democratic party has been propelled by Biden’s lamentable performance in last month’s presidential debate which has sown doubt both about the president’s mental acuity and his electability.The blitz primary is posited on Biden voluntarily stepping down as the party’s nominee and playing an active role in the process. With his involvement, a shortlist of five to eight younger candidates would be identified, drawn from the Biden administration, Democratic state governors and other rising stars of the party.Names mentioned include Vice-President Kamala Harris; Governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, and Andy Beshear of Kentucky; the US senator from Georgia, Raphael Warnock; and Biden cabinet members such as the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, and the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg.View image in fullscreenA controversial aspect of the blitz primary model is that Harris would be required to compete on equal terms – there would be no anointing her as Biden’s heir. Allan Katz, the former US ambassador to Portugal under Obama who has helped frame the blueprint, said that if she emerged as the nominee she would do so “as a much stronger, much better candidate than if the nomination was just handed to her”.The younger generation of leaders would be introduced to the nation through a series of televised town halls running up to the convention in Chicago on 19 August. Moderators would be selected for their dynamic ability to attract large primetime audiences especially of younger voters, snatching back the media limelight from Trump.Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and even Taylor Swift have been floated as fantasy interlocutors.“It would increase the number of Americans actually paying attention,” said Rosa Brooks, a key advocate of the blitz primary who held senior positions in both the Obama and Bill Clinton administrations and was a volunteer policy adviser for Biden’s 2020 campaign. She added: “For delegates it would be a chance for them to see how the candidates performed in front of the American people – because in the end this is about finding a candidate who is most likely to defeat Trump.”Brooks pointed out that under party rules, if and when Biden agreed to withdraw he would release his 3,904 delegates who would then be free to pick a new nominee of their choice. Under the blitz primary formula, a vote would be staged before the Chicago convention to avoid the risk of an ugly and bruising spectacle at the event itself.Selection would be by ranked choice voting. Delegates would vote only once, but list all candidates in order of preference.View image in fullscreenContenders would then be eliminated one by one, and their votes redistributed to those remaining, in a process that could be staggered over several days for maximum TV suspense and exposure. That would have the dual benefit of increasing public engagement, as well as ensuring that the final winner would have very broad appeal.“It would be a riveting spectacle,” Brooks said. “It would be a way of getting people focused on the issue and the fact that the Democrats are not, in fact, a one-person party.”Blitz primary advocates report that the model has proven to be popular among those they have tested it against. Brooks said that she has had private conversations with senior Biden administration officials who expressed support.“People in very senior positions within the administration have said to us privately, ‘Thank you, we’re glad you’re doing this. We need Biden to withdraw and we need some better process,’” Brooks said.The architects of the blitz primary have no illusions about how difficult it would be to achieve – not least because the entire plan rests upon Biden agreeing to quit the race. So far he has shown no sign of doing that, stating in interviews and an open letter that he intends to stick it out.“It’s a very long shot, I know, as there are a whole bunch of things that have to line up,” Dintersmith said. “But our party is bursting with creative talent, and we have the ability to transform the election, energize the country, and come out of this in a better place as a nation than we are today.”Brooks said: “We are up against a failure of imagination and courage – a failure to see that there are other possibilities if we are willing to move quickly and be creative. There are risks associated with that, of course, but there is a huge risk with the current approach – the risk of an autocrat determined to destroy democracy getting back into the White House.” More

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      Trump airs list of false grievances at Florida rally: ‘We don’t eat bacon any more’

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      Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail in Florida on Tuesday night, hurling insults at Joe Biden and airing a litany of familiar grievances, but declining to name a running mate for November’s general election.The former president and presumptive Republican nominee was speaking to a crowd of several hundred supporters at his golf club in Doral, a western suburb of Miami, keeping them waiting in 90F heat for a freewheeling monologue that began more than an hour later than scheduled.There was speculation that he might use his first public appearance since last month’s debate with the president to announce Florida senator Marco Rubio, who was present, as his vice-presidential pick, six days ahead of the Republican national convention (RNC) in Milwaukee.Instead, Trump delivered a rambling 75-minute speech that included a succession of attacks on Biden and his faltering debate performance, which has raised questions among Democrats on whether the 81-year-old president was robust enough for a second term of office.He seized on the post-debate turbulence that has prompted calls from some senior Democrats for Biden to step down and nominate Kamala Harris.“The radical left Democratic party is divided in chaos, and having a full scale breakdown all because they can’t decide which of their candidates is more unfit to be president, sleepy, crooked Joe Biden or laughing Kamala,” he said, repeating previous derogatory terms for the pair.“Despite all the Democrat panic this week, the truth is it doesn’t matter who they nominate because we are going to beat any one of them in a thundering landslide.”Trump has kept a lower than usual profile in the days since the debate, a strategy an aide described as designed to allow Democrats to tear into each other following Biden’s dismal debate performance.His remarks on Tuesday were notable for adding the vice-president’s name to numerous attacks on Biden policies, and sprinkling in mentions of both Rubio and Byron Donalds, a Republican Florida congressman also believed to be on Trump’s shortlist for vice-president.Otherwise, it was a standard Trump stump speech, full of evidence-free claims that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent; baseless accusations that overseas nations were sending to the US “most of their prisoners”; and a laughable assertion that a gathering of supporters numbering in the hundreds was really a crowd of 45,000.It also touched on the surreal. Biden, he insisted, had raised the price of bacon four-fold.“We don’t eat bacon any more,” Trump said.Electric cars, he said, “cheated” the US public because drivers had to stop for three hours to recharge their vehicles after every 45 minutes of driving. And, in an echo of one of the more bizarre debate exchanges with Biden over who was the better golfer, he challenged his White House successor to 18 holes over the Doral course while granting a 10-stroke concession.“It will be among the most watched sporting events in history, maybe bigger than the Ryder Cup or even the Masters,” Trump said, pledging $1m to a charity of Biden’s choosing if he lost.Returning to politics, Trump assailed Democrats for tax rises he said they wanted to impose; criticized Biden for the US military’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan; and promised to build an “iron dome” missile defense system for the US, if he was elected in November.Perhaps worn down by the energy-sapping humidity, the crowd appeared mostly subdued, including yawns in the bleachers behind him as Trump drew to a close with slow music playing, and others tapping disinterestedly on their phones.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHis campaign had touted the possibility of Trump announcing a vice-presidential pick on Tuesday, but in the end his only reference to the post was suggesting that Rubio might or might not still be in the Senate to vote to allow Nevada waitresses to keep their tips untaxed.There was no mention of Ohio senator JD Vance, or North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, other Republicans said to be on the shortlist. Trump will rally again on Saturday in Pennsylvania, close to the Ohio border, with Vance expected to be a speaker.Earlier on Tuesday, Democrats, on a Biden campaign call featuring first lady Jill Biden, and previewing Trump’s Doral rally, mocked him for his low-key approach since the debate.“I hope he hasn’t exhausted himself with all the golf that he’s been playing,” Texas congresswoman Veronica Escobar said.“Speaking of staying off the campaign trail, Trump has been hiding a lot recently, not just from voters and from the press, but from Project 2025.“Donald Trump tried to pretend that he had nothing to do with Project 2025 despite the fact that it was written for him by the people who know him best. And yesterday, his campaign preview of the RNC platform, was just as unhinged and extreme as Trump himself. They left out some of the most unpopular specifics that we know they support.“As usual, they’re trying to hide the ball from the American public.”Trump, in his speech Tuesday, avoided mention of Project 2025 or his policy on abortion. More