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      Mainstream media is playing into Trump’s neo-fascist hands. I’m sticking with democracy and the Guardian | Robert Reich

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      The reason I write a column for the Guardian is the same reason I read it daily: I trust it.Not just the facts it conveys but also its judgment about what to convey – the stories it believes worthy of reporting, and doing it in ways that illuminate what’s really happening.That judgment is especially important as the US faces an election in 2024 in which one of the two likely candidates was engaged in an attempted coup and has given every indication of wanting to substitute neo-fascism for democracy.Again and again, the mainstream media have drawn a false equivalence between Donald Trump and Joe Biden – asserting that Biden’s political handicap is his age while Trump’s corresponding handicap is his criminal indictments.But Trump is almost as old as Biden, and Trump’s public remarks and posts are becoming ever more unhinged – suggesting that advancing age may be a bigger problem for Trump than for Biden.The Guardian has been picking up on this, but why isn’t the mainstream media reporting on Trump’s increasing senescence?Similarly, every time the mainstream media reveal another move by the Republican Party toward authoritarianism, they point out some superfluous fault in the Democratic party in order to provide “balance”.So readers are left to assume all politics is rotten.A recent Washington Post article was headlined: “In a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics.”“How do Americans feel about politics?” the New York Times asked recently, answering:“Disgust isn’t a strong enough word.”But where is it reported that the mainstream media have contributed to making people tired and disgusted with politics?And where is it acknowledged that this helps Trump and his Republican allies?They want voters to be so turned off of politics that they’re unaware of Biden’s accomplishments, such as an economy that continues to generate a large number of new jobs, with real (adjusted for inflation) wages finally trending upward, inflation dropping and no recession in sight.Plus, billions of dollars pumped out to fix and improve the nation’s roads, ports, pipelines and internet. Hundreds of billions allocated to combat climate change. Medicare, now lowering the cost of prescription drugs. Billions in student debt canceled. Monopolies attacked. Workers’ rights to organize, defended.One person interviewed by the Post admitted, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.”As if the “us-against-them politics” is the fault of Democrats as much as it is Republicans, when in fact the GOP is the party of dysfunctional politics.Much of the GOP no longer accepts the rule of law, the norms of liberal democracy, the legitimacy of the opposing party or the premise that governing requires negotiation and compromise.Why isn’t this being reported?Trump and his allies want Americans to feel so disgusted with politics they believe the nation has become ungovernable. The worse things seem, the stronger Trump’s case for an authoritarian like him to take over: “I’d get it done in one day.” “I am your voice.” “Leave it all to me.”By focusing on Trump’s rantings and ignoring Biden’s steady hand, the mainstream media are playing directly into Trump’s neo-fascist hands.I’m sticking with democracy, and the Guardian.
      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 More

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      Trump expected to challenge removal of name from states’ primary ballots

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      Donald Trump is reportedly expected to file legal challenges early next week to rulings in Maine and Colorado knocking him off primary ballots amid mounting pressure on US supreme court justices to rule on whether his actions on 6 January 2021 constitutionally exclude him from seeking a second term in the White House.The New York Times said that Trump’s legal moves could come as early as Tuesday.The impending collision of legal, constitutional and political issues comes after the two states separately ruled that the former US president was ineligible under a constitutional amendment designed to keep Confederates from serving in high office after the civil war.In Maine, the secretary of state, a political appointee, issued the ruling and a challenge will be filed in state court. Meanwhile, in Colorado the decision was made by the state’s highest court and will probably have a swifter passage to the conservative-leaning US supreme court – should it wish to hear the case.The conservative justices on the supreme court are sympathetic to “originalism”, which holds that the meaning of the constitution and its amendments should be interpreted by what its authors wrote. On the other side are justices more in tune with a contemporary application of the spirit of the original wording.The precise wording of the passage in question – section 3 of the 14th amendment – says anyone who has taken the oath of office, as Trump did at his 2017 inauguration, and “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”, is ineligible.But at the heart of the anticipated challenges will be whether individual states have the authority to interpret constitutional matters outside their own constitutions. “Every state is different,” Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said on Friday. “I swore an oath to uphold the constitution. I fulfilled my duty.”The rulings have received pushback from elected officials. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said Trump should be beaten at the polls and back-and-forth ballot rulings in states are a “political distraction”.After Maine’s decision on Thursday, Republican senator Susan Collins said voters in her state should decide who wins the election – “not a secretary of state chosen by the legislature”. Former New Jersey governor and trailing nomination rival Chris Christie told CNN the rulings make Trump “a martyr”.“He’s very good at playing ‘poor me, poor me’. He’s always complaining,” Christie added.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, told Fox News that the Maine decision violates Trump’s right to due process – a jury decision on the now-delayed insurrection case. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley said: “It should be up to voters to decide who gets elected.”One Trump adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Post that all state appeals court decisions on multiple efforts to kick Trump off state primary ballots – 16 have failed, 14 are pending – have ruled in the former president’s favor.“We don’t love the Colorado ruling, of course, but think it will resolve itself,” the adviser said.According to the New York Times on Saturday, Trump has privately told people that he believes the US supreme court will rule against the decisions. But the court has also been wary of wading into the turbulent constitutional waters of Trump’s multiple legal issues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast week, the court denied special counsel Jack Smith’s request to expedite a ruling on whether Donald Trump can claim presidential immunity over his alleged crimes following the 2020 election.But the argument that voters, and not courts or elected officials, should decide elections has been under stress since the 2000 election when Republican George W Bush was elected after a stinging legal battle with then vice-president Al Gore over Florida ballot recounts that was ultimately decided by the court.According to the Times, Trump is concerned that the conservative justices, who make up a “supermajority”, will be worried about the perception of being “political” and rule against him.Conversely, the justices might not want to be steamrollered into making decisions on a primary ballot timetable set by individual states that are themselves open to accusations of political coloring.For now, both the Maine and Colorado decisions are on hold. The Colorado Republican party has asked the US supreme court to look at the state’s decision, and Trump is anticipated to repeat that request and has said he will appeal the Maine decision.Maine’s Republican party chair, Joel Stetkis, told the Washington Post that “Shenna Bellows has kicked a hornet’s nest and woken up a sleeping giant in the state of Maine. There’s a lot of people very, very upset that one person wants to take away their choice.”Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told the outlet: “We are witnessing, in real time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter.”Democrats in blue states, he said, “are recklessly and un-Constitutionally suspending the civil rights of the American voters by attempting to summarily remove President Trump’s name from ballots. These partisan election interference efforts are a hostile assault on American democracy.” More

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      Democratic long-shot candidates to debate in New Hampshire – without Biden

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      The lonely political vigil of long-shot Democratic presidential candidates Marianne Williamson and Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips will be transformed on to the debate stage early next month in New Hampshire – without Joe Biden, who is neither on the state ballot nor agreeable to any debate interaction with competitors.The debate between self-help author Williamson and Phillips is set to be held at the New England College on 8 January, and moderated by Josh McElveen, former political director of radio station WMUR, two weeks before the state holds its primary.Biden elected to skip the New Hampshire primary after a spat between state election officials and the Democratic National Committee, after the DNC opted to move South Carolina to the top of the primary calendar. New Hampshire, which has held its primary first for more than a century, pushed ahead anyway.Like the Republican candidates who have been debating without their frontrunning candidate, Donald Trump, the mission is something of a death watch, lest either the Democrat or the Republican frontrunner fail to make it to next year’s presidential vote, and as a symbolic marker of the widespread dissatisfaction with both candidates.Williamson is polling at 12% and Philips at 4%, according to a Quinnipiac University poll published last month. Another puts Phillips at 17% and Williamson at 6%.Williamson said in a statement to the Hill that her expectations of the debate were that “it will be substantive and my definition of success is that I blow it out of the park”.Last week, Phillips quoted a poll that found 60% of New Hampshire voters didn’t want Biden to stand. “His approvals are cratering to historic lows,” he posted on X. “The DNC is ignoring reality, deluding Democrats, suppressing competition, and handing 2024 to the GOP.”Both participants will have 90 seconds for opening and closing statements and one minute for answers, the Hill reported. If a candidate invokes the other, they will be given 30 seconds to respond. More

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      US supreme court under pressure to rule swiftly on states’ Trump ballot bans

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      A decision by Maine’s secretary of state to prevent former president Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s presidential election ballot will now probably end up before the US supreme court. Maine’s move follows a similar decision in Colorado this month.There is mounting pressure on the conservative-leaning judicial body to swiftly rule on Maine and Colorado’s application of section 3 of the 14th amendment prohibiting anyone who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office. But neither decision will be the last ballot eruption in an already convulsive election which is likely to see a rematch of Trump versus Joe Biden.Lawsuits seeking to remove Trump from the ballot have been filed in about 30 states but more than half have already been dismissed, including in California where this week the secretary of state, Shirley Weber, decided to keep Trump on the certified list of candidates for the state’s 5 March primary, and in Michigan.There are now active lawsuits in 14 states, including Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming, seeking to remove Trump ahead of their primaries citing the same constitutional clause.The 14th amendment, ratified three years after the conclusion of the civil war in 1865, covered a range of issues, including guaranteeing rights to former slaves and a provision to disbar anyone who had taken the oath of office to uphold the constitution who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”.Like other civil war-era laws that have been utilized to try to contain political extremism – including a failed attempt to prosecute the leaders of a 2017 neo-Nazi Unite the Right torchlight rally under a federal civil statute known as the KKK Act – the section 3 clause was only rediscovered after January 6 riot at the US Capitol.Technically, section 3 doesn’t require a criminal conviction to take effect.Nor is it clear if section 3 applies to the presidency. An early draft mentioned the office, but the final draft did not. If it does apply to the presidency, Trump’s lawyers will argue that it is a political question that should be decided by voters and any effort by judges to get involved is a denial of the candidate’s right to fair legal procedure because it was made without the benefit of a public trial.They may also argue that January 6 was not an insurrection but more akin to a riot that Trump was not himself involved in and that he wasusing his rights of free speech when he cajoled the crowd: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”In Maine, the secretary of state, Democrat Shenna Bellows, broke ranks with other similarly positioned officials in other states. In her decision, she cited the Colorado supreme court ruling that the January 6 attack “was violent enough, potent enough, and long enough to constitute an insurrection”.In her ruling, Bellows said that Trump had “used a false narrative of election fraud to inflame his supporters and direct them to the Capitol to prevent certification of the 2020 election and the peaceful transfer of power” and that he “was aware of the likelihood for violence and at least initially supported its use given he both encouraged it with incendiary rhetoric and took no timely action to stop it”.The Maine decision was immediately appealed by the state’s Republican party and must first travel through the state’s court system before it can reach the US supreme court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut both Colorado and Maine are small players in the electoral college system that decides presidential elections. In Maine, Democrats won in in 2016 and 2020 but Trump won one of four electoral votes under an unusual system that allows the state to split its four votes proportionally. In Colorado, Trump failed to win its nine votes in both elections.Across the political spectrum, private lawsuits aimed at getting Trump off the ballot are being treated as funky, freelance efforts by elected politicians.The California governor, Gavin Newsom, said Trump should be beaten in the polls and warned that while the former president was a “threat to our liberties” the lawsuits and back-and-forth ballot rulings were a “political distraction”.After Maine’s decision on Thursday, the Republican senator Susan Collins said voters in her state should decide who wins the election – “not a secretary of state chosen by the legislature”, adding that the decision would “deny thousands of Mainers the opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choice, and it should be overturned”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Trump’s removal from Maine ballot ‘opens Pandora’s box’, DeSantis says

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      The removal of Donald Trump from Maine’s presidential ballot “opens Pandora’s box”, one of his main rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination said, as reaction to the ruling.The comment by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, was among many from politicians on the right decrying the decision by Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, to preclude Trump, which the former president’s campaign called the “attempted theft of an election”.Democrats and some legal experts, meanwhile, largely praised Maine’s decision to remove Trump’s name as the correct interpretation of the insurrection clause of the US constitution.DeSantis was one of two Trump rivals for their party’s presidential nomination, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, to immediately accuse Bellows of engaging in partisan politics.“The idea that one bureaucrat in an executive position can unilaterally disqualify someone from office turns on its head every notion of constitutional due process this country has abided by for over 200 years,” DeSantis said on Fox News.“It opens up Pandora’s box. Can you have a Republican secretary of state disqualify Biden from the ballot?”The Florida governor had previously claimed the Colorado supreme court’s decision earlier this month to disbar Trump was a “stunt” by Democrats designed to bolster his position in the Republican primary race.Ramaswamy, who had threatened to withdraw from the Colorado primary in protest, issued a statement following the Maine ruling accusing “the system” of targeting Trump.“This is what an actual threat to democracy looks like. The system is hellbent on taking this man out, the constitution be damned,” it said.Two other Republicans still in the race, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, were more muted. “Nikki will beat Trump fair and square. It should be up to voters to decide who gets elected,” the former South Carolina governor’s campaign said in a statement.A spokesperson for Christie pointed to his earlier position that Trump should remain on the ballot until convicted of insurrection following a trial that featured “evidence that’s accepted by a jury”, according to the New York Times.Among the critics of the ruling in Maine was Susan Collins, one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump at his 2021 impeachment trial for inciting the deadly 6 January Capitol riot. Trump was acquitted, but at the time Collins denounced his “abuse of power” and “betrayal of his oath” to the constitution.Collins said in a tweet that Bellows’s ruling should be overturned. “Maine voters should decide who wins the election – not a secretary of state chosen by the legislature,” she wrote. “The … decision would deny thousands of Mainers the opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choice.”Her position was immediately challenged by political commentator Keith Olbermann, who replied: “I want to vote for Bill Clinton again. So by your logic, I can – right?”Maine’s Democratic congressional delegation was split. “We are a nation of laws, therefore until he is actually found guilty of the crime of insurrection, he should remain on the ballot,” Jared Golden, who voted to impeach Trump in 2021, said in a statement.But Cherrie Pingree, who represents a more strongly Democratic district, was unequivocal. “The text of the 14th amendment is clear. No person who engaged in an insurrection against the government can ever again serve in elected office,” she wrote in a tweet.“Our constitution is the very bedrock of America and our laws and it appears Trump’s actions [on 6 January 2021] are prohibited by the constitution.”John Dean, a former White House lawyer for Richard Nixon, said Bellow’s ruling could lead to Trump’s removal from the ballot in even more states.“The Maine decision is very solid. It was fully briefed, there is ample due process in this proceeding, and they just lost by a straight, honest reading of the 14th amendment,” he said in an interview with CNN.“Trump’s in trouble. He’s in trouble wherever this is legitimately raised and addressed. So yes, the supreme court is going to have to weigh in. I want to see those strict constructionists, the originalists, get around that [insurrection] language. It looks so applicable, I don’t know what they can do with it other than take him off the ballot.” More

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      Republicans seek winning strategy on abortion for 2024 – with Democrats also in a tricky spot

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      As the 2024 election season ramps up, Republicans continue to struggle to find a winning national strategy on the flashpoint issue of abortion – where restricting the procedure has animated the conservative movement for half a century but tormented the party since the fall of Roe.The supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade delivered Republicans one of their most significant policy victories in a generation. But in the year and a half since the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling has also become one of their biggest political vulnerabilities.Over the last 18 months, voters have favored abortion rights in seven consecutive ballot measures, including in conservative states. Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterm elections while Democrats scored off-year election wins in Wisconsin, Kentucky and Virginia – results that again emphasized the enduring power of abortion rights.Now the presidential election year brings a further huge test.“With abortion, there’s really a kind of catch-22 for Republicans,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis and a leading expert on the history of abortion in the US. “On the one hand, you have a lot of base Republican voters who really care about opposing abortion and on the other you have a huge group of something like 70% of Americans who don’t like abortion bans.”The US supreme court meanwhile set the stage for another major showdown over abortion rights, this time just months before the 2024 presidential election. The court has agreed to decide a case that could determine the accessibility of a widely used abortion pill, including in states where the procedure remains legal.But whether abortion will continue to fuel Democratic victories in a presidential election year is also unclear.Despite delivering a long list of anti-abortion victories, voters tend to view the Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, a thrice-married former Democrat from New York, as less socially conservative than his rivals, says Gunner Ramer, political director for the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Pac.“Donald Trump likes to stoke culture wars and own the libs but on social issues he’s seen as more moderate,” Ramer said, adding: “If Trump is the nominee, Democrats are in a much trickier position on abortion.”For decades, the Republican party championed the mission of the anti-abortion movement – to overturn Roe – without clearly articulating what would follow. Now they are contending with the real-world consequences: pregnancy resulting from rape and incest, life-threatening complications, fatal fetal conditions and miscarriages that require the procedure.Sixteen states now ban abortion at conception or after six weeks, before many women know they’re pregnant. Among them is Texas, where Kate Cox, a pregnant woman whose fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition, was forced to leave the state this month to receive an abortion after Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, threatened legal action – “including first-degree felony prosecutions” – against doctors or anyone else who assisted in performing the procedure. The Texas supreme court ultimately ruled against Cox’s request to have an emergency abortion in the state.Seizing on the turn of events, top officials on Joe Biden’s re-election campaign assailed the “unspeakable reality” now facing women in states with limited or no access to abortion.They drew a direct line to Donald Trump, the former president and likely Republican presidential nominee, blaming his appointment of three supreme court justices who cast decisive votes to overturn Roe.“Kate had to leave her home state to seek the healthcare she urgently needs,” said Julie Chávez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager. “This is happening right here in the United States of America and it’s happening because of Donald Trump.”In the increasingly noncompetitive race for the Republican presidential nomination, disagreements among the White House hopefuls over how to approach or even talk about abortion reflect a wide lack of unity within the GOP on the issue.Trump, in conspicuous fashion, is trying to have it both ways. He has blamed conservative activists’ uncompromising positions on “the abortion issue” for costing Republicans at the ballot box while touting his anti-abortion legacy to the party’s socially conservative base.In Iowa, which launches the Republican presidential primary contest next month, Trump is running ads declaring himself “the most pro-life president ever”. But on the major litmus test for anti-abortion activists – support for a national ban – he has been noncommittal.At a CNN town hall this month, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is challenging Trump for the nomination, accused the former president of “flip-flopping on the pro-life issue”. Trump has said DeSantis made a “terrible mistake” when the governor signed into law earlier this year a six-week abortion ban. Pressed to commit to a national standard, DeSantis has said he would support a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.Nikky Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and the only woman in the race, has sought a different tack, calling for “consensus” and “compassion”. Haley, who as governor of South Carolina in 2016 signed a 20-week ban, has suggested that as president she would enact any abortion restrictions that reached her desk, but said such measures were unlikely in the narrowly divided and deeply polarized Congress.Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who is running for president, is incredulous that Republicans are calling for federal action on abortion after waging a 50-year legal battle to return the issue to the states.“I trust the people of this country, state by state, to make the call for themselves,” he said during a recent debate.It’s a view shared by the entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy, who opposes a federal ban but says he supports state laws outlawing abortion after six weeks.Among the Republican presidential candidates, the two most avowed abortion opponents Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, have already exited the race.Furthering the divide, leading anti-abortion groups are pressuring Republican candidates to back a national ban starting at least at 15 weeks of pregnancy if not earlier, while some party strategists are advising them to clearly state their opposition to any such federal limit.In a post-election memo Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, said the losses were “major disappointments for the pro-life movement” and “warning signs for the GOP”.“It is long past due for the GOP to define where it stands on the issue nationally,” she wrote. “Having a clear position and contrasting it isn’t enough – campaigns and the party must put real advertising dollars behind it, going toe-to-toe with the Democrats.”Her group has urged candidates to support a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks of gestation at a minimum or risk losing its endorsement.Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, has criticized Republicans for not confronting the issue more aggressively. “You can’t hide in a corner and think abortion’s not going to be an issue,” she said on NBC News in November, adding: “We can’t just say it’s a state’s issue and be done.”Others have urged candidates to emphasize its support for exceptions, while expressing more compassion and empathy when discussing what can be a deeply personal – and in some cases medically advisable – decision. Still, some say its a matter of semantics, suggesting Republicans avoid terms like “pro-life” and “ban”.According to Politico, a group of prominent Republican pollsters suggested candidates change the subject, presenting polling to members of Congress that showed they could sharpen their appeal with women and independent voters by focusing on protecting contraception rather than banning abortion.“Abortion is, as the courts decided, an issue for states to decide, not the federal government,” states the campaign website for Kari Lake, who is expected to be the Republican Senate nominee in the race for Kyrsten Sinema’s seat. It’s a retreat from her position as a candidate for governor in 2022, when the far-right Republican cast herself as an outspoken ally of the anti-abortion movement and embraced Arizona’s territorial-era law that would ban nearly all abortions in the state.Lake is one of several Republican candidates running in battleground Senate races who have adjusted their stance – and their rhetoric – on the issue.Meanwhile in the House, now led by Mike Johnson, the Louisiana congressman, one of the chamber’s staunchest anti-abortion crusaders, vulnerable Republicans have sought to distance themselves from absolutists in the party.“The supreme court needs to stand down,” said Mike Lawler, a New York Republican who represents a district Biden won in 2020, in response to the high court’s decision to take up the abortion pill case. In a statement, he emphasized his opposition to a national ban.**As Republicans struggle, Democrats say the problem is taking positions that are deeply unpopular with the American public.When Democrats won full control of the Virginia state legislature in November, the Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, declared support for what he called a “reasonable” 15-week abortion ban.That same night Andy Beshear, the Democratic Kentucky governor, won re-election after his campaign ran a powerful ad featuring a woman who was raped by her stepfather as a child. In the video, she criticized Daniel Cameron, Beshear’s Republican opponent, for supporting Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban, which does not include exceptions in cases involving rape or incest.And in beet-red Ohio, 56.6% of voters chose to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.“In every election since the overturning of Roe, voters have sent a resounding message: they want more freedom, not less – and come 2024, Republicans will once again face the repercussions of their unrelenting crusade to strip away our rights,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.At the state-level, abortion-related ballot initiatives could help Democrats mobilize Republican women and independent voters who have helped make up their winning coalition in the years since Trump was elected.Building on the success of abortion-related ballot initiatives, abortion rights advocates are working to put the issue before voters in battleground states, including Arizona and Florida. An effort is also underway in Montana, where Democrats hope a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion protections could boost turnout and help one of the party’s most vulnerable incumbent senators, Jon Tester, win re-election.As long as abortion is severely restricted in large swaths of the country where Republicans hold power, candidates at the national level will likely struggle to convince voters that they have moderated on the issue, even if they now champion later-stage “consensus” limits and exceptions, Ziegler said.“If the pro-life movement has a different agenda that they continue to pursue in a large swath of the country, national Republicans either have to say, ‘that’s not what we’re doing. We’re not for that’; or they’re going to be associated with that,” she said.Even so, the road ahead for Democrats is not straightforward.A string of recent surveys found a mixed picture: Biden is trailing Trump nationally and in several swing states. In a Wall Street Journal poll, voters said Trump was better equipped to handle most major policy issues with the exception of abortion, which Biden led by a double-digit margin.The Biden campaign has vowed to put abortion front and center this election cycle. They have argued that Trump – or any of his Republican rivals – would seek to ban abortion as president, possibly through policy changes that would not require congressional approval as some conservatives have proposed.There are risks to the strategy, especially if Trump is the nominee, says Ramer, from the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Pac.Ramer says there was a key dynamic in play in 2022. While Democrats harnessed voter fury over the loss of constitutional abortion rights, he said they were helped by Republicans, who nominated candidates with “extreme” absolutist positions on the issue, such as Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Tudor Dixon in Michigan.That may not continue in 2024.“Abortion is a very nuanced issue for voters,” he said. “And the economy, at the end of the day, is more top of mind for Republicans and swing-state voters.” More

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      Lauren Boebert announces change of congressional district for 2024 elections

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      Colorado’s Republican representative Lauren Boebert has announced that she will be changing congressional districts ahead of her 2024 Republican nomination bid for the House.In a Facebook video on Wednesday, the 36-year old, far-right representative announced that she would be moving from Colorado’s third district to its fourth district.The fourth district, which has been categorized as “solidly Republican” according to the Cook Political Report, is currently led by Ken Buck who has served in Congress since 2015. In November, Buck announced that he would not be seeking re-election, citing the Republican party’s reliance “on this lie that the 2020 election was stolen”.Boebert’s current third district has been categorized as a toss-up, according to a Cook Political Report rating from earlier this month. Following her announcement, the Cook Political Report changed its categorization of the third district to a “lean Republican”, the Hill reports.In her announcement on Wednesday, Boebert called her decision a “fresh start”, adding, “I promised I would do whatever it takes to stop the socialists and communists from taking over our country. That means staying in the fight but also not allowing Hollywood elite and progressive money groups to buy the third district, a seat that they have no business owning.”She went on to say: “We cannot lose the third and Colorado’s fourth district is hungry for an unapologetic defender of freedom with a proven track record of standing strong for conservative principles.“I will be moving to the fourth in 2024 and will continue to take my conservative fight directly to them. And the Aspen donors, George Soros and Hollywood actors that are trying to buy the seat, well they can go pound sand. We aren’t going to give them the opportunity to steal the third. Republicans will hold the third and I’ll proudly represent the fourth and Republicans will be stronger for it,” Boebert continued.In 2022, Boebert won her re-election bid for Colorado’s third district by beating her Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch, by just 546 votes.Earlier this year, Frisch, a 56-year-old former banker, announced that he would be running against Boebert again, tweeting in February that he was launching his campaign to unseat her and “restore dignity to #CO03 representation”.In response to Boebert’s announcement, Frisch said, “From Day 1 of this race, I have been squarely focused on defending rural Colorado’s way of life, and offering commonsense solutions to the problems facing the families of Colorado’s 3rd congressional district,” the Hill reported.“My focus will remain the same, and I look forward to bringing these issues with me to Congress in 2024,” Frisch added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBoebert’s announcement follows what she called a “pretty difficult year for me and my family”. In May, Boebert filed for divorce from her husband with whom she has four sons. The former couple also ran a gun-themed restaurant called Shooters Grill which shut down in 2022.In September, Boebert faced widespread backlash after she and a male guest were kicked out from a Beetlejuice production in Denver for inappropriate behavior including vaping, recording video and groping each other.Following Boebert’s announcement on Wednesday, Richard Holtorf, a Colorado Republican state representative who is also running to represent the state’s fourth district in the House, criticized her.“Seat shopping isn’t something the voters look kindly upon. If you can’t win in your home, you can’t win here. I’m in it to win it and I welcome the lady from Rifle to the race,” he said, adding, “She is grossly lacking in understanding the needs of the 21 counties in eastern Colorado that make up this district. She knew she’d lose in her own district and I’ll show her that she’ll lose here too.” More