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      ‘What a circus’: eligible US voters on why they didn’t vote in the 2024 presidential election

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      The 2024 US presidential election had been widely characterized as one of the most consequential political contests in recent US history. Although turnout was high for a presidential election – almost matching the levels of 2020 – it is estimated that close to 90 million Americans, roughly 36% of the eligible voting age population, did not vote. This number is greater than the number of people who voted for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.More than a month on from polling day, eligible US voters from across the country as well as other parts of the world got in touch with the Guardian to share why they did not vote.Scores of people said they had not turned out as they felt their vote would not matter because of the electoral college system, since they lived in a safely blue or red state. This included a number of people who nonetheless had voted in the 2020 and 2016 elections.While various previous Democratic voters said they had abstained this time due to the Harris campaign’s stance on Israel or for other policy reasons, a number of people in this camp said they would have voted for the vice-president had they lived in a swing state.“I’m not in a swing state, and because of the electoral college my vote doesn’t count. I could have voted 500,000 times and it would not have changed the outcome,” said one such voter, a 60-year-old software developer with Latino heritage from Boston.Having voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, he voted in 2020 but left the presidential slot blank “as a Quixotic protest against the electoral college and my preference for Bernie Sanders”, he said.He said he felt “heartbroken” over Joe Biden and Harris’s stance on Gaza. “If I were in a swing state I would always vote for Dems, though,” he added, echoing several others.A 40-year-old carpenter from Idaho who voted in the previous two elections because he then lived in the swing state of Arizona – giving his vote to Clinton and Biden – also said he did not vote this time because he felt his vote did not matter due to the electoral college system.“I didn’t find Harris compelling, just more of the same. Politicians from both parties seem unwilling to make the kind of fundamental economic and political changes that would make a meaningful difference for all people, namely a move towards a more democratic socialist system. That being said if we didn’t have the electoral college I probably would have voted for Harris,” he said.A large number of people said they abstained because no candidate represented working- or middle-class interests and people such as themselves, including several people who voted in the previous two elections but did not vote this time.Some people from swing states said they did not vote because both parties were too similar and did not address concerns of the common voter, among them John, a 29-year-old financial professional from Pennsylvania who is a registered independent, but voted for Clinton and Biden in the previous two elections.“What is the point [of voting]?,” he asked. “Aside from a handful of weaponized issues, the parties are nearly identical. They both hate the poor and serve only their donors.”A number of former Trump and Biden voters said they had not voted in this election as they disliked both candidates, among them Jared Wagner, a 34-year-old from Indiana who works in the trucking industry and said he had voted for Trump in 2016 but had abstained in both the 2020 and 2024 election.“I refuse to put my name on either candidate when I know neither of them are truly the best we have to offer. We need a major overhaul to the two-party system,” he said.
      “As a man with young children I worry about what kind of country they will grow up in. It terrifies me; we deserve better.”John, a 58-year-old from West Virginia, said he had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, but had decided that not voting this November “felt most authentic and appropriate”.“I wasn’t apathetic about this election, I followed it closely,” he said. “But most of the candidates and issues left me cold and disinterested and seemed to be simply perpetuating the existing system, especially the status quo of authority and law and order, or rampant human development on the land.“On the presidential level, I was shocked and disgusted that the Harris campaign chose to completely ignore discussing climate change. Fundamentally, this election seemed to have very little to do with my interests and concerns.”Anne, a 65-year-old retired white woman from California, was among various people who said they had voted but not for any presidential candidate.She said she had always previously voted for the Democratic candidate, but could not bring herself to do so this time.“I did vote for all other down-ballot candidates and initiatives,” she said. “I would have voted for Harris had my vote made a difference, but I could not vote for a president who will continue the complete destruction of Gaza and annexation of the West Bank.”Various people said they did not vote for a presidential candidate in the 2024 election because they had only wanted to cast a positive vote for a candidate rather than merely an opposition one, and that neither candidate had offered a compelling vision for change.Among them was a 62-year-old professional working in process planning from Texas, who said he had voted for the Republican presidential candidate at every election between 1984 and 2016.“In 2020 I voted Libertarian as a protest vote,” he said. “This year I was so turned off by Trump’s low character, economic ignorance, disregard of our national debt, hostility to Ukraine and so on that I was trying to convince myself to vote for Harris. But her economic policy was just a grab bag of voter payoffs and she doesn’t care about the debt either.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“So I did not vote for president. I voted for Senate, congressman, and many other down ballot races. I split my ticket, too. I just no longer want to vote against anyone. I want to vote FOR someone. And none of the candidates for president wanted my vote enough.”A 35-year-old Black male voter from Portland, Oregon, who works at a gas station, said he disliked Kamala Harris but now regretted not voting for her, as he had thought Trump would lose the election.“I did not vote in 2016 or 2020 either because I did not like any of the candidates in those elections either. I last voted in 2012, for Obama,” he said.“I felt both candidates fell well short of the presidential standard, and didn’t feel I could cast a vote for either,” said a 47-year-old engineering manager and registered Republican from Texas.“VP Harris failed to demonstrate she was ethically or intellectually capable of executing the office, repeatedly failing to detail out her policies and generally running her campaign like a popularity contest – ‘collect enough celebrity endorsements, by paying them, and the masses will elect you,’” he said.Trump, he felt, “cares about the US and believes his own ideas will ‘save’ the country – but he’s a terrible human being. I don’t feel he represents a majority of Americans at all, but is more a reaction to some of the issues we face as a country.”Various people who did not vote in other recent elections either said that again this time no candidate was leftwing enough, among them 37-year-old Elly, a mother of four daughters from the midwest.“Bernie Sanders was the last candidate I was excited to vote for,” she said. “This election came down to two parties who have utterly abandoned everyday people and their problems with affordability and worries about climate change, but one party, the Republicans, were savvy enough to pretend they felt the collective pain of the common folks, whilst the Democrats mostly said ‘all is well.’ I couldn’t in good conscience support either side on the national level.”Several people who usually always voted Democrat in the past said the Harris campaign had been overly focussed on progressive identity politics for them to be able to lend it their support this election, such as Simon, a father from California in his 60s who had voted for Clinton in 2016 and for Biden in 2020 in protest against Trump, but had abstained this year due to Harris’s embracing of “trans ideology”, among other reasons.“I am not a fan of the Democrats, but I would have voted to keep Trump out of office if there was an economically literate, competent, law and order candidate who was willing to challenge the excesses of ‘woke’,” he said. “The Dems are out of touch on social issues, and have tacked too far to the left to appease a minority of progressives.“I support some policies that would be considered rightwing on immigration, but also investing in social housing, so I’m looking for candidates capable of taking difficult decisions based on rational analysis.”Leigh Crawford, a 56-year-old hedge fund manager from California, who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012, for Clinton in 2016 and for Biden in 2020, said he had abstained this time as both candidates were fiscally irresponsible in his view, because he strongly disliked Trump’s anti-immigration and pro-tariffs stance, and because Harris had been “pro-censorship” and “too tolerant of antisemitism”.Several people said they did not vote this time because of a growing disillusionment with the extreme polarization in US politics, including Chris, an architect in his 40s from Tennessee who had voted twice for Obama, and once for Trump in 2016, but had abstained in 2020 and 2024 as he had lost hope in politics.“Skip the debates, what a circus,” he said. “I’m so sick of hearing about politics.“The political system in the US is broken. Things are so polarized, there is no cooperation for the good of the people. There is just so much hate, even in everyday conversation with average people.“There is just so much of this ‘if I don’t win, I’m taking the ball and going home’ mentality. It just causes nothing to get accomplished.” More

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      Did gerrymandering keep Republicans from a bigger majority? Absolutely not | David Daley

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      Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, will soon have the challenge of leading a three-seat Republican majority. He has an interesting theory about why the Republican edge will be so slender. Last week, on Fox News, he blamed Democratic gerrymandering.While it’s always a delightful surprise to hear a Republican leader express concern about the evils of gerrymandering, Johnson has the facts and the math completely backwards.The truth is the opposite: Republicans drew the district lines of nearly three times as many US House seats as did Democrats – 191 to 71. Republicans gerrymandered more than three times as many seats than Democrats. They started from a position of power after drawing historic gerrymanders in 2011 that lasted a decade in states like Wisconsin, Ohio and North Carolina. And the Republicans’ gerrymandered advantage was preserved and protected by the Republican supermajority on the US supreme court.Johnson is right about one thing: he holds the speakership because of gerrymandering – but because of the election rigging done by his own side.The Republican party’s three-seat majority would not exist at all without a new, mid-decade gerrymander in North Carolina that gift-wrapped the Republicans the three additional seats that made the difference. Before the Republican-controlled state supreme court upended North Carolina’s congressional map, the purple state elected seven Democrats and seven Republicans. (When Democrats controlled the court, they mandated a fair map, not a Democratic one; when Republicans took over, the gerrymander returned.)And what happened after the newly seated Republican court destroyed the balanced map and returned it to the Republican legislature to be tilted in its direction? The new map produced 10 Republicans and four Democrats. Many experts believe it could yet elect 11 Republicans and three Democrats. The gerrymander handed Johnson the three seats that made him speaker. Without it, Democrats might even control the House.Johnson, quite simply, couldn’t be any more wrong. Both parties certainly gerrymandered where they could. But Republicans had the power to gerrymander far more districts in far more places.Overall, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University law school, it all adds up to a 16-seat edge for Republicans nationwide. “The bias in this cycle’s maps strongly favors Republicans due primarily to aggressive gerrymandering in GOP strongholds in the South and Midwest,” a Brennan report concludes.There are no redistricting angels. The US supreme court made sure of that with their 2019 decision in Rucho v Common Cause, which closed the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering cases at exactly the time when lower-court judges appointed by both parties had found the tools they needed to determine when partisan gerrymanders went too far.But when the Republican court ended the possibility of a national solution, it launched a game of mutual assured destruction: the Republican party built its advantages in state legislature and Congress throughout the 2010s via redistricting. With no hope of help from neutral courts in leveling tilted playing fields in Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia and elsewhere, Democrats were left with little choice but to maximize gerrymanders of their own. This is terrible for voters. It’s bad for democracy. Sometimes it is even hypocritical. Yet doing nothing while Republican gerrymanders run wild isn’t a better strategy and presents no moral victory.So in 2021, Democrats turned a 13-5 map in Illinois into a 14-3 edge, gaining one seat and wiping away two from the Republicans. (Illinois lost a member in reapportionment.) Democrats also helped themselves to an additional seat in Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico, and retained their gerrymander of Maryland. This year, a court-ordered redistricting in New York resulted in one additional Democratic seat, and mildly strengthened a handful of others, each by no more than a percentage point. (Only one flip in New York this cycle can be attributed to redistricting.)Those are the only gerrymanders Johnson wants you to know about. The truth is that they are dwarfed by what Republicans did themselves.Start in Florida, where Ron DeSantis, the governor, oversaw an aggressive and likely unconstitutional gerrymander that netted the Republican party four additional seats, wiped away two historically Black districts and created a wildly disproportional 20-8 Republican delegation.The North Carolina gerrymander added three more seats. This was hardball politics to the core: national Republicans deeply wired into Leonard Leo’s court-packing, billion-dollar dark money entity helped fund the takeover of North Carolina’s state supreme court. The new Republican majority quickly did the national party’s dirty work and overturned a year-old decision that created the balanced 7-7 map and enabled the Republican state legislature to radically tilt it toward Republicans.Florida and North Carolina alone account for more Republican gerrymanders than Democratic ones. They don’t stop there.Republicans gerrymandered two additional seats in Texas, creating an unbalanced 25-13 Republican delegation. In Ohio, Republicans lawlessly stiff-armed the state supreme court not once, not twice, but seven times to preserve gerrymanders of the state’s legislature and congressional delegation. A federal court packed with Federalist Society and Leonard Leo acolytes allowed them to get away with it.Republican judges similarly abused the legal process to allow Wisconsin to get away with its congressional gerrymander which awards the Republican party a 6-2 edge in the ultimate swing state. The US supreme court slow-walked cases on racial gerrymandering, which also accrued, unsurprisingly, to the Republicans’ benefit.In Tennessee, the Republican party wiped a Democratic seat in Nashville off the map by cracking the blue city in half and attaching small pieces to conservative, rural districts. They played similar tricks with swing seats in Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City and Indianapolis, and reinforced a Republican seat in Omaha, Nebraska, swapping suburban areas for more Republican, rural ones. It might well have tipped Democratic this year otherwise.Republican hardball with Iowa’s redistricting commission added another seat. In Arizona, Republicans didn’t bother playing games at all; they simply hijacked the entire process by taking over an obscure state board that vets the commissioners and packing the field of supposedly independent chairs with longtime partisans, friends and family of Republican leadership, and business acquaintances. Arizona now consistently sends a 6-3 Republican-dominated delegation to Washington, even in years where Democrats all but sweep statewide offices.Mike Johnson doesn’t want to admit it, but Republican gerrymanders are the only reason he will wield the gavel for another term.Whether Democrats should control the chamber is a trickier question; Republican candidates did win four million more votes nationwide. Yet the “national popular vote” for the House is a statistic that has also been distorted and made meaningless by gerrymandering. Uncompetitive gerrymandered seats generate weak opposition and lower voter turnout. Nearly all of that bulge comes from states where gerrymanders gutted competitive elections and created Republican delegations wildly disproportionate to the presidential vote: Florida, Texas, Ohio and North Carolina.Fair maps and competitive contests in those Republican and mixed states – rather than districts rigged so one side comes away with three-quarters of the seats in a 50/50 state – would make the “popular vote” look entirely different. (It is, of course, equally exciting to see Republican leaders talk about the popular vote as it is to hear them discuss gerrymandering concerns.) No one would look at the results in nations where district lines have been so drastically warped and suggest that they reflect the will of the people. We shouldn’t either.Johnson’s gaslighting, however, probably has a deeper purpose. He may well be laying the groundwork for a Republican package to change how we vote. What if the Republican party advanced a package of redistricting “reforms” that actually reverberated to their advantage – say, ending any consideration of race, counting population based on citizenship rather than all residents, requiring congressional districts to be drawn by the legislature and not an independent commission, and making it more difficult to challenge maps in the courts? Or if they required prioritizing “compactness”, which could naturally pack Democratic voters in a handful of urban districts and benefit the party that is spread out more efficiently?We live in a gerrymandered nation twisted into extremism by one side as eager to warp the map as they are to protect their ill-won gains. And every time you think it can’t get worse, or harder to overcome, Johnson’s mistruths suggest that it very much still can.

      David Daley is the author of the new book Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count More

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      ‘Incredibly harmful’: why Trump’s FBI and DoJ picks scare civil liberties experts

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      By tapping two combative ultra-loyalists to run the FBI and the justice department, Donald Trump has sparked fears they will pursue the president-elect’s calls for “revenge” against his political foes and sack officials who Trump demonizes as “deep state” opponents, say ex-justice department prosecutors.Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, who Trump has nominated to run the FBI and Department of Justice, respectively, have been unswerving loyalists to Trump for years, promoting Trump’s false claims that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was due to fraud.Patel was a top lawyer on the House intelligence panel under rightwing member Devin Nunes for part of Trump’s first term and then held a few posts in the Trump administration including at the national security council advising the president.Bondi, a recent corporate lobbyist and an ex-Florida attorney general, defended Trump during his first impeachment and was active on the campaign trail during the late stages of his 2024 run.Patel and Bondi have each echoed Trump’s calls for taking revenge against key Democrats and officials, including ones who pursued criminal charges against Trump for his aggressive efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat and his role in inflaming the January 6 attack on the Capitol that led to five deaths.Trump has lavished praise on both picks, calling Patel a “brilliant lawyer” and “advocate for truth”, while hailing Bondi as “loyal” and “qualified”. But critics say their rhetoric and threats are “incredibly harmful to public trust” in the two agencies undermining the integrity of the FBI and justice department, and potentially spurring violence.Patel promised last year on Steve Bannon’s show to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections”.Patel, 44, who last year published a “deep state” enemies list as part of a book, added:“We’re going to come after you … Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”At the end of his first term as Trump scrambled aggressively to block Biden’s win, he briefly tried to install Patel as number two at the FBI or the CIA for support, but the idea died when the then attorney general, Bill Barr, vowed “over my dead body”.Meanwhile, Bondi, 59, told Fox News last year that when Trump wins “you know what’s going to happen: the Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated. Because the deep state … they were hiding in the shadows.”Bondi added: “But now, they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated, and the House needs to be cleaned out. Because now we know who most of them are; there’s a record of it, and we can clean house next turn. And that’s what has to happen.”Fears about the two nominees were compounded by Trump’s comments on Meet the Press on Sunday when he said he wouldn’t tell the justice department to prosecute his political enemies, but added threateningly that the House members on the panel that investigated the January 6 insurrection “should go to jail”.Ex-justice department prosecutors worry that Trump’s two picks will exact retribution against Trump foes, undermining the independence of both the justice department and the FBI and damaging the rule of law.“The rhetoric of Bondi and Patel is incredibly harmful to public trust in our government institutions and the reputations of individual public servants,” said Barbara McQuade, a former top prosecutor in eastern Michigan who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. “There’s absolutely no public evidence of wrongdoing to ‘rig’ the 2020 election.“Pledges to prosecute the prosecutors and investigate the investigators based on the complete absence of evidence is reckless because even if investigations do not materialize, unhinged members of the public will hear these bombastic accusations as a call to action.”Similarly, the former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich said: “Bondi and Patel are election deniers, in the face of the adjudication of more than 60 cases rejecting claims of election fraud in 2020. This is alarming.“Members of the Senate judiciary committee have a duty to explore the basis of those often-repeated beliefs. If Bondi and Patel maintain that the election was stolen, they either are liars – and lying under oath is a crime – or they are so detached from reality that they shouldn’t be trusted to run a two-person convenience store, much less the DoJ and the FBI.”The former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman likens Trump’s nominees to his heavy reliance in his real estate career on Roy Cohn, the late mafia lawyer and chief counsel to rightwing senator Joseph McCarthy.“Still casting about for a Roy Cohn replacement, Trump has gone to people like Bondi and Patel whose loyalty comes from their utter dependence on his favor,” Richman said.Richman added: “But their lack of experience with the agencies he wants them to lead promises a rocky road ahead, both for them and the agencies.”Richman noted: “Presidents can pardon and otherwise kill cases and his loyal minions can disrupt agency operations, but I suspect they will soon be railing at what they call ‘resistance’ and what everyone else calls rule-following.”Such concerns about both nominees have been reinforced by their eager echoing of Trump’s conspiratorial obsession of going after “deep state” foes, as well as their old ties to Trump and backgrounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPatel, who lacks experience leading an agency, shares Trump’s obsession and vindictiveness towards political critics and the press who Trump has branded an “enemy of the people”.Last year in his book Government Gangsters, Patel went further in an appendix where he included 60 “members of the Executive Branch Deep State” that consisted largely of top Democrats and Trump critics. Patel also wrote that Trump “must fire the top ranks of the FBI”.“Then, all those who manipulated evidence, hid exculpatory information, or in any way abused their authority for political ends must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Patel said.Patel’s incendiary comments and writings could lead to confirmation problems by the US Senate during hearings. Chris Wray, who Trump appointed as director after firing James Comey in 2017 and who Trump has often criticized, has three years left in his 10-year term, so he would have to resign or be fired to make way for Patel.“Kash Patel is manifestly unqualified,” said the ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “Given his intemperate support for retribution against the deep state and Trump’s political ‘foes’, he is temperamentally unqualified for the job.”While Bondi is an equally staunch Trump loyalist, she is expected to have fewer confirmation problems. Trump tapped her for the post within hours of his first candidate for AG, the ex-Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, dropping out after serious allegations arose of sexual misconduct that led to a House ethics inquiry while he was in office.Still, Bondi’s vociferous election denialism and attacks on the so-called “deep state” represent a sharp break historically with the rhetoric of attorneys general which critics are raising strong fears about.After Trump’s defeat in 2020, Bondi co-chaired the law and justice section at the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute, which has supplied a few of Trump’s new picks, including billionaire Linda McMahon for education secretary.Bondi also spent several years as a lobbyist for the powerhouse Florida firm led by the Republican fundraiser Brian Ballard, where her clients included Amazon, General Motors, and the government of Qatar.Often seen as a political operator, Bondi has ties to Trump that go back further and have raised some red flags. When Bondi was Florida’s attorney general in 2013, Trump donated $25,000 to a Pac backing her re-election. The donation’s timing drew scrutiny given that Bondi’s spokesperson told a newspaper just days before the donation that the AG’s office was reviewing a class-action lawsuit by New York which had been filed against Trump University for fraud.Veteran prosecutors warn that if the Senate confirms Bondi and Patel they could create a climate for violence against Trump’s foes.“I’m more worried about threats, harassment and political violence than I am in the success of baseless investigations,” McQuade said. “Bondi and Patel will be unable to get bogus charges past a grand jury, a judge or a trial jury, but someone who believes this deep state nonsense could decide to take matters into their own hands.”Looking ahead, Bromwich stressed too that if Patel and Bondi pursued baseless inquiries, they could boomerang.“Lawyers and investigators who willingly participate in the pursuit of a revenge and retribution agenda risk losing not only the respect of their peers but their future livelihoods. In particular, lawyers who initiate investigations and pursue prosecutions without factual predicates risk being the subject of ethics complaints and the loss of their law licenses.” More

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      Tim Walz ‘surprised’ that he and Kamala Harris lost election to Donald Trump

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      In his first television interview since their defeat in the 5 November presidential election, Tim Walz said he was “a little surprised” that he and his fellow Democrat Kamala Harris lost the race to the Republican ticket headed by Donald Trump.“It felt like at the rallies, at the things I was going to, the shops I was going in, that the momentum was going our way,” the Minnesota governor told KSTP, one of his state’s news outlets, in an interview published on Thursday. “So, yeah, I was a little surprised.“I thought we had a positive message, and I thought the country was ready for that.”Walz said “history will write” whether the outgoing vice-president erred in choosing him as her running mate before Trump clinched his return to the White House.“Are there things you could have done differently? Since we lost, the answer is obviously yes,” Walz remarked. “On this one, I did the best I could.”During the conversation with KTSP, Walz also described the frantic morning after Harris called him on 6 August asking him to serve as her vice-president if she were elected. His acceptance led to him being flown to Philadelphia on a private jet to be introduced at Temple University – where he said he and Harris shared a humorous moment.“She turns to me and she says: ‘Well, let’s not screw this up,’” Walz recalled. “And we went out there.”Walz’s election debrief with KTSP came after his participation in the presidential race with Harris initially generated excitement with Democrats. His midwestern, former high school football coach persona charmed on the campaign trail at first, and his popularity surged after he perturbed Trump by labeling him and his allies “weird”.Nonetheless, Walz became less visible as the Harris campaign adopted more conventional strategies on the home stretch. Many ultimately regarded Walz as having performed less effectively than his Republican counterpart, US senator JD Vance of Ohio, by the time the two men debated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris ended up losing the electoral college to Trump by a 312-226 margin. The Republican candidate also captured the popular vote 49.9% to 48.4%, leaving him free to attempt to deliver on promises of mass deportations of immigrants and retribution against those who worked to hold him accountable for trying to forcibly overturn his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.Walz told KTSP he “certainly got to see America” during his failed run for the vice-presidency but is now prepared to focus on his gubernatorial agenda in Minnesota.“It was a privilege to do that,” Walz said. “Coming back here now and having the privilege to do this work feels really good.” More

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      Elon Musk revealed as sole funder of RBG Pac that claimed Trump and Ginsburg were aligned

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      Elon Musk has emerged as the sole financial architect behind a provocative political action committee that appropriated the name of late US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to bolster Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, according to federal campaign finance reports released on Thursday.The RBG Pac, funded entirely by the world’s richest man with a $20.5m donation in the final two weeks of the campaign, ran advertisements and mailers suggesting an ideological alignment between Trump and Ginsburg on abortion.That’s a narrative that Clara Spera, the justice’s granddaughter, denounced as fundamentally misleading.“The use of her name and image to support Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, and specifically to suggest that she would approve of his position on abortion, is nothing short of appalling,” she told the New York Times in October.​​The RBG Pac’s strategic advertising push arrived at a critical political moment, following months of Democratic attacks on Trump’s abortion stance. Its website featured a photo of Trump and Ginsburg with the caption “Great Minds Think Alike” – a claim that directly contradicts Ginsburg’s well-documented judicial philosophy and her personal opposition to Trump.“Why did Ruth Bader Ginsburg agree with Donald Trump’s position on abortion?” the website asked. “Because RBG believed that the federal government shouldn’t dictate our abortion laws.”The Pac claimed that Trump doesn’t support a federal abortion ban – something Trump himself said on the campaign trail – although he will face pressure from Republicans and opponents of abortion to enact one once he takes office anyway.Spera has shared in the past that Ginsburg’s dying wish in September 2020 had been that she was not replaced on the court until a new president was sworn in. That request was ignored by Trump when he appointed Amy Coney Barrett, who would later be part of the conservative majority overturning Roe v Wade.Musk’s political spending far exceeded this single Pac, ballooning to more than $260m in the 2024 election cycle. His primary vehicle was America Pac, which raised about $252m, with Musk making high-profile campaign appearances and conducting voter outreach initiatives that included controversial $1m giveaways in swing states.The billionaire’s political donations also extended to a $3m contribution to a Super Pac linked to Robert F Kennedy Jr and nearly $1m directly to Trump’s campaign committee.Now with the Trump win, Musk is positioned to play a significant role in the incoming administration. He’s set to co-lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” alongside biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, pledging to dramatically reduce federal bureaucracy. More

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      Biden library reportedly under threat by Democrats enraged by Hunter pardon

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      Senior Democrats are reportedly considering withholding contributions to Joe Biden’s future presidential library amid a mounting backlash over his decision grant a blanket pardon to his son Hunter.The threat has emerged as simmering anger among congressional Democrats – already building over the president’s insistence on seeking a second term before belatedly stepping aside as the party nominee in favour of Kamala Harris – has burst into the open over Sunday’s pardon, which Biden had previously vowed not to give.Axios reported that party grandees were considering taking out their “rage” on Biden’s library project. Planning for the library, in the president’s home state of Delaware, is being spearheaded by the White House deputy chief of staff, Annie Tomasini, and Anthony Bernal, senior adviser to Jill Biden, the first lady.“If they had their shit together, they would have been doing the work on this over the summer – right after he announced he was stepping aside,” the site quoted one unnamed Democrat as saying. “Now, it’s just too late. Hopefully they are rightsizing their expectations and budget!”Presidential libraries – a tradition begun by Franklin D Roosevelt – are generally funded by a combination of private donors, state and local governments, and university partners. Maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration, they are used to house presidents’ papers and documents after they leave office.A source familiar with Biden’s project played down the possibility of donations being withheld, telling Axios: “That sentiment hasn’t come up in a single donor conversation, and work is well under way.”However, the fact that it is being publicly mooted is a sign of the internal party disenchantment following the pardoning of Hunter Biden, 54, who was convicted of lying on gun ownership application forms and separate charges of tax evasion. He had been due to be sentenced on both convictions this month. The act of clemency came less than a month after a demoralising election defeat that many privately blame Biden for.Biden, in his statement, said his son “was treated differently” than other people who had been late paying taxes because they were undergoing addiction problems. Biden pardoned his son for all possible offences committed between 2013 and 2024 – foreclosing the possibility of the incoming Trump administration reopening a case against the younger Biden that might be driven by the president-elect’s often-repeated desire for “retribution” against his political enemies.The judge in the tax case, Mark Scarsi, accused the president of “rewriting history” in a ruling penned after the pardon. He added that Hunter Biden’s tax offences had been committed after the period of his drug and alcohol addiction.A procession of Democratic senators and congressmembers have publicly accused Biden of putting his feelings for his son above the national interest and handing Donald Trump an excuse to abuse the presidential clemency powers.Even Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate and normally a loyal ally of the president, damned him with uncharacteristic reticence this week, telling reporters “I’ve got nothing for you on that” when asked his view.But party insiders say the outrage is a lightning rod for lingering resentment over Biden’s refusal to drop his bid for a second term until it was too late for Harris or other presidential contenders to be stress-tested in primaries and launch a well-prepared presidential campaign.“The pardon is simply a resentment delivery vehicle, like dressing on lettuce,” Philippe Reines, a veteran strategist who helped prepare Harris for September’s debate against Trump – which she was widely viewed to have won – told the New York Times.David Axelrod, a former adviser to Barack Obama, said the pardon gave “a free throw for people who think they can gain political advantage” from separating themselves from an unpopular, outgoing president.“But,” he added, “there’s also genuine concern and anger about the way the last year went down.” More

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      ‘This is not time for retreat or apathy’: Black women dissect Harris loss

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      Misogynoir, the intersection of racism and sexism, was the main reason behind Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 general election, a panel of Black female experts argued, noting how post-election coverage has failed to contend with how white supremacy undergirded the election results.In a conversation titled “Views from the 92%: Black Women Reflect on 2024 Election and Road Ahead”, several academics dissected how and why the vice-president lost, particularly given Trump’s problematic history.The panel was hosted by the African American Policy Forum, a social justice thinktank co-founded by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and Columbia University.“Racism is designed in such a way to make you question your humanity, but sexism is also. Sexism is really a power move,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund. “When you combine those two things together, I think that that best explains what [Harris] experienced.”Throughout the 2024 election campaign, Trump and other conservatives launched an onslaught of racist and sexist attacks against Harris: repeatedly claiming that Harris “slept her way” into political power, was unintelligent and that she was not a Black woman.Such attacks are unsurprising given American’s history with racism against Black women, the call participants said. But what was especially frustrating were platforms Trump was given to spread disinformation, Crenshaw argued, specifically calling out Trump being featured at the 2024 National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention.Karen Attiah, the former co-chair of the convention, who stepped down after the announcement that Trump would be interviewed, said the interview was a “viscerally painful experience” which was excused by many “white liberals”. During the contentious interview, Trump questioned Harris’s race, saying she suddenly “became a Black woman”. “Is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of sudden she became a Black woman.” Trump was also repeatedly combative with the interviewer Rachel Scott, the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News, accusing her of being “rude”.“The responses that I personally got for stepping down from white allies or people who are white leaders, was, ‘Well, he was racist and he destroyed your conference, but we needed to see that’ and I was like, ‘At the expense of our dignity[?]’,” she said.Following the general election on 6 November, exit polling showed that 53% of white women voters still supported Trump, calling into question who the legitimate allies of Black women’s interests are, said Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.“After going through this last presidential election, we really have to reassess and have real deep conversations about when these people say they’re your allies. What does that really mean?” she said, arguing that internal organizing of Black women needed to continue taking place.“There was a majority of white women who voted against democracy, against women’s interests, for a racist, for somebody who is proud to have taken away our right to choose.”Crenshaw also called out the mainstream media for failing to hold Trump accountable, as well as post-election coverage that ignored voter suppression tactics carried out by Trump supporters, including a multimillion-dollar initiative led by the billionaire Elon Musk.“Donald Trump was the biggest beneficiary of identity-based preferential treatment in terms of his media coverage,” she said. “He was like a Teflon-coated pan. Unlike Kamala, who was rendered by the media like a static, clean repository, anything would stick to her over and over again. It’s hard to imagine anybody other than a wealthy white male claiming he could shoot someone in broad daylight and get away with it, and then prove to us that this is, in fact, virtually true.”In light of Trump’s win, Black women – who voted for Harris more than any other demographic, need to be prepared to deal with racist attacks from far-right Republicans, argued Barbara Arnwine, president and founder of Transformative Justice Coalition.“It is critical for Black women to not just talk about our magic … We gotta talk about how we fight, how we become a fighting formation, how we are able to know that these battles are going to come, that these kind of things are going to be said, that these kind of attacks are going to be launched.”Looking forward, experts emphasized the importance of continuing to organize internally despite feelings of despondency.Rebuilding freedom schools – educational programs in marginalized communities – creating spaces of communication on social media, akin to “Black Twitter”, targeting disinformation being spread by artificial intelligence, and addressing ongoing attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion are just some of the potential strategies, said the speaker Fran Phillips-Calhoun, an Atlanta Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta.“This really is not time for retreat or apathy,” said Phillips-Calhoun. “We really do have to turn inwards so we can build again.” More

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      California Democrat Adam Gray unseats Republican as last House race decided

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      Democrat Adam Gray captured California’s 13th congressional district on Tuesday, unseating Republican John Duarte in the final US House contest to be decided in the 2024 elections.Gray’s win in the farm belt seat that cuts through five counties means Republicans won 220 House seats this election cycle, with Democrats holding 215 seats.Gray won by a margin of fewer than 200 votes, with election officials reporting on Tuesday that all ballots had been counted.Duarte captured the seat in 2022 when he defeated Gray by one of the closest margins in the country, 564 votes. He was often listed among the most vulnerable House Republicans given that narrow margin of victory in a district with a Democratic tilt – about 11 points over registered Republicans.Gray said in an earlier statement: “We always knew that this race would be as close as they come, and we’re expecting a photo-finish this year, too.”Duarte told the Turlock Journal he had called Gray to concede, adding “That’s how it goes.”“I’m a citizen legislator, and I didn’t plan on being in Congress forever,” Duarte told the newspaper, though he didn’t rule out a possible future campaign.In a tough year for Democrats nationally, the party picked up three GOP-held House seats in California.Both Gray and Duarte stressed bipartisan credentials during the campaign.Gray, a former legislator, was critical of state water management and put water and agriculture at the top of his issues list. He also said he wants improvements in infrastructure, renewable energy and education.Duarte, a businessman and major grape and almond farmer, said his priorities included curbing inflation, crime rates and obtaining adequate water supplies for farmers in the drought-prone state.There is a large Latino population in the district, similar to other Central Valley seats, but the most likely voters statewide tend to be white, older, more affluent homeowners. Working-class voters, including many Latinos, are less consistent in getting to the polls. More