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      Will white women abandon Republicans and vote for Kamala Harris?

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      White female voters have been the backbone of the GOP for decades – but polls indicate their support for the party may erode this November, thanks to younger white women who are moving left at breakneck speed.In the weeks after the 2016 presidential election, after Donald Trump stunned the world by defeating Hillary Clinton, media outlets seized on white women to explain his shock win. Forty-seven per cent of white women voted for Trump, while 45% backed Clinton, according to an analysis of validated voter files by the Pew Research Center.Trump’s success with white women highlighted a longstanding truth: this group votes for Republicans. Over the last 72 years, a plurality of white women have voted for the Democratic candidate in only two presidential elections – in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson won 44 states, and in 1996, when Bill Clinton ran in a three-way race. Trump’s lead with white women even grew in 2020, when 53% supported him. In contrast, 95% of Black women voted for Joe Biden in 2020, along with 61% of Hispanic women, Pew found.But quite a bit has changed since 2020 – especially for women. The US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, transforming abortion rights into a major election issue. Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic candidate from Joe Biden, becoming the first woman of color to secure a major-party nomination for president. All this raises the question: will 2024 be the year that white women, who make up almost 40% of the national electorate, finally join women of color in supporting the Democrats?Well, not necessarily. But the gap very well may shrink.There are signs that younger white women are peeling off from the GOP – a trend that is linked to a steady drift by all young women to the left.“Young women of color and young white women, in my research, are pretty uniformly liberal and feminist,” said Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the recent book The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy. “I think Harris’s selection as the nominee now – as opposed to Biden – has really further made them enthusiastic about voting. So I strongly suspect that young, white women voters are going to defy the longer-term trend of white women in general voting for Republicans.”Young women are increasingly queer, increasingly secular and getting married later in life – all characteristics that tend to be linked with liberalism and support for the Democratic party. (People who identify as liberal are very likely to be Democrats, though the inverse is not necessarily true – not all Democrats identify as liberal.)Between 2011 and 2024, liberal identification among white women rose by 6%, according to a Gallup analysis shared with the Guardian. Such identification also rose by 6% among Black women, but fell by 2% among Hispanic women.Gen Z is the most diverse generation of Americans yet, but Gallup research suggests that doesn’t explain young women’s leftward drift. Between 2017 and 2024, 41% of white women between the ages of 18 and 29 identified as liberals – 2 percentage points more than their peers of color.Young women are also unusually involved in politics. Women have long outvoted men, but in 2020, 60% of 18- to 29-year-old white women voted – more than any other group of youth voters, according to an analysis of AP VoteCast data by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Fifty-five per cent voted for Biden.Trump’s 2016 victory may have something to do with these trends. Raised by Democratic-leaning independents, Chloe Fowler said Trump’s election was a critical inflection point in her political evolution. She was a sophomore in high school when Trump won; the day after, somebody in her school hallway shouted gleefully: “Grab ’em by the pussy!”“Things like that stick with us,” recalled Fowler, who is white. A few months later, her mom took her to the Women’s March in Omaha, Nebraska. “That was a very pivotal moment for me, honestly – doing a bunch of chants with her and wearing the pink cat ear hats.”Fowler is now the vice-president of Nebraska Young Democrats. The 23-year-old has been phone-banking furiously in her home district – Nebraska’s second congressional district, which may end up deciding whether Trump or Harris becomes president.‘Why is this race so close?’A 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll in September found that white women narrowly prefer Harris to Trump, 42% to 40%. (The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 1%.) The remaining 18% can make or break the election, of course. The gender gap between white women and white men is larger. Fifty per cent of white men prefer Trump, with only 36% supporting Harris.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA majority of Black women support Harris, that poll found, as do pluralities of Hispanic and Asian American women.Jane Junn, a political science professor at the University of Southern California, says what is often misunderstood as a “gender gap” between male and female voters is really a race gap. While women as a whole may end up voting for Harris – a September New York Times/Siena poll showed that 54% of women planned to vote for Harris, compared with 40% of men – white women, Junn predicted, will remain Republicans in 2024. “If all of a sudden, the white women were like: ‘Oh, my God, I’m burning my bra and my Barbie shoes and my long fingernails and all the plastic sprays I put into my body’ – we’re not seeing that,” Junn said. “Why is this race so close? It’s so close because these groups remain fairly consistent in their partisan loyalty.”Polling from Galvanize Action, an organization that seeks to mobilize moderate women – especially in the critical “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – has found the race in a dead heat among moderate white women, who are split 43% to 44% in favor of the former president. These women, who Galvanize Action defines as not ideologically entrenched as Democrats or Republicans, account for more than 5 million voters in those three states.Trump has the edge when it comes to these women’s top issues of the economy and immigration, but the women polled by Galvanize Action trust Harris more on democracy and reproductive freedom.“Even among women who say that economy or democracy is their No 1 issue, a good segment of those people also say: ‘I’m not going to vote for anyone that won’t protect abortion,’” said Jackie Payne, Galvanize Action’s executive director and founder.Democrats are hoping that abortion rights-related ballot measures – which voters will decide on in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Nevada and Nebraska’s second congressional district – will spur turnout among their base. However, white women may in effect vote split-ticket, simultaneously voting for a pro-abortion rights measure and for Republicans. More than half of white women voted for Ohio’s 2023 abortion-related ballot measure – but more than 60% of white women supported Mike DeWine, the Republican governor who signed a six-week abortion ban into law, in 2022, just months after Roe fell.“This is going to be all about turnout. This is going to be a very, very close election,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. “The Democratic party counts on women. They count particularly on Black women to turn out. Will they be more energized?” More

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      Georgia residents on Trump and Harris’s post-Helene trips: ‘He’s here to get votes, she’s here to help’

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      Mayor Garnett Johnson didn’t want to put his troubles in front of people wrestling with despair in his community of Augusta, Georgia. On Friday, he was upbeat as he spoke about shelter availability and repair trucks a week after Hurricane Helene mowed down trees and ripped roofs off of houses, leaving half the city without power. But as he talked about unburying Augusta while helping hand out boxes of grapes and bananas and carrots in a church parking lot to a line of cars stretching a mile and a half, he let something slip.“We got seven confirmed deaths as a result of Hurricane Helene. I personally was … unfortunately, I had to witness one, but we’re getting through it.”The night of the hurricane, his cousin Melissa Carter needed help.“She called me,” Johnson said. “One of the lowest points in all of this was on Friday morning, I was wondering why she called me so frantically. She said: ‘I need you to come to my house. Daverio. I can’t … there’s a tree on him, and I can’t get the tree off.”Daverio Carter, her husband of 11 years, had been crushed by a tree that fell on their house. Johnson drove there in the storm. “Of course, you know, there’s nothing I could do.”Carter died in front of them while they waited for help. He was 51, and had five children.“They were able to recover his body at about 9 o’clock that night,” Johnson said. “They actually had to call in a crane to remove the tree to recover him … You’re looking at her as a mayor. I could do a lot of things. But I couldn’t get a crane to get it off of her husband, and for them to see him actually take his last breath while he’s laying in bed.”Daverio Carter’s funeral was Saturday. Johnson made that much time to grieve.“I literally don’t have power in my home. No water,” Johnson said. Debris still blocks his personal vehicles, he said. “On Friday, I had to literally climb old trees and power lines just to get out of the neighborhood to get down to the emergency operations center. So, we have so many dedicated city employees that have been working tirelessly, sometimes 16, 20 hours a day just to try to get this city back running around. I think we’re close.”Johnson has been burying himself in work while his family buries its dead. He did talk to Kamala Harris about it when she came for an emergency management briefing Tuesday, he said. Harris also spoke to Melissa Carter.“Mayor, I want to thank you for your leadership, in particular,” the US vice-president said in Augusta on Wednesday during a visit to access damage and console families. “I was just talking with one of the members of the community and her daughter who lost her husband. And there is real pain and trauma that has resulted because of this hurricane and what has happened in terms of the aftermath of it.”Thanking first responders and local leadership, she said: “The local folks are folks who have personally – and their families have personally – experienced loss and devastation. And yet they leave their home, leave their family to go to centers like where I was earlier to do the work of helping perfect strangers. And it really does highlight the nobility of the kind of work that these public servants have dedicated themselves to, which can be, in moments of crisis like this, so selfless in the way that they do that work.”Harris pointedly toned down her presence in Augusta, giving little advance notice of her arrival last week. She toured some of the poorest parts of the city, where the downed trees on roofs and in yards from the storm compete with rotten siding and missing windows after decades of decay.People living in these neighborhoods who turned out for the fresh produce said they understood why Harris would play things quietly, even five weeks before election day. At the time, people were still struggling to find a gas station with the lights on, dodging price gougers selling gas in five-gallon jugs for $40 on the side of the street.“It shows concern, and shows that she cares,” said Annie Gardner. At 95, she’s the oldest member of Augusta’s Good Samaritan Missionary Baptist church, where people were redistributing food from nearby DeKalb county to local residents. “I’m very impressed already, I was liking her already, and I even like her even more now.”View image in fullscreenShe’s a skeptic of political theater right now, though. “Trump’s not coming here in this neighborhood. He’s out with the rich white folks. If he does, I’d be really surprised. I don’t think nobody cares if he doesn’t come, either.”Both Harris and Donald Trump have a delicate dance to perform. Visibility matters.Michael Thurmond, DeKalb county’s CEO, arranged for the delivery of hundreds of thousands of dollars in produce to Augusta after seeing the reports of devastation in Augusta. “People are looking to see that their leaders are doing something,” he said.But photo-op politics in a crisis leads to images like Trump tossing paper towels at hurricane victims. The former president and Republican presidential nominee seemed somewhat more aware of that in his appearances in Georgia over the last week.“If [Trump] brought a thousand trucks like this, he would still not get my vote,” said April Terry, an Augustan waiting for a box of produce Friday morning. “All that is showing that he’s got money, showing that all he wants is your vote.”Trump spoke to reporters in Evans, Georgia, just north-east of Augusta, on Thursday. There was no attempt to stage a massive rally, though about 100 supporters staked out the road near the venue to wave flags. But he did appear side by side with Governor Brian Kemp, whom the former president has pointedly attacked as unsupportive of his election claims.On Thursday, Trump said Kemp “is doing a fantastic job”.Kemp in turn praised the former president for “keeping the national focus on our state as we recover”, then recited the litany of destruction, noting that major Georgia crops had been all but wiped out. The Georgia governor noted that that the federal government is quickly approving his requests for federal disaster declarations, which will help move relief funding and federal reimbursement.View image in fullscreenAhead of those comments, the state insurance commissioner John King took issue with the political implications of Harris’s promise of 100% federal reimbursement. Doing so would require an appropriation that hasn’t yet been made, essentially daring the House speaker Mike Johnson to refuse. “It’s political blackmail,” he said.Evans, in Columbia county, Georgia, is comparatively affluent. But it also sustained catastrophic damage, and its mostly conservative voters are digging out of much the same hole as everyone else in the region.“You’ll see, if you go in there, at least our street, all the yards along the road are lined with cut-up logs,” said Gage Gabriel, a 19-year-old Trump supporter watching for the motorcade. Public reaction to the storm could change the way people vote, he said. “Depending on the concern showed from the federal government. If the federal government doesn’t seem to show concern to a large section of the country … it should at least sway some results, depending on how caring politicians seem to the plight of especially North Carolina.”Gabriel wants to see leaders with a chain saw in their hands cutting down trees. “Not just shaking the hands of people putting up some power lines.”Jordan Johnson, a Richmond county commissioner, said: “It’s hard to really focus on politics in this very moment, because folks are trying to find power and folks are trying to find food.” But the contrast between the two candidates is stark, he added.“If you look at where Kamala Harris went, she went to a very hard struck part of town in south Augusta. She went to a shelter. She spoke to people, she gave food. Donald Trump is going to one of the most affluent parts of the [Augusta area]. I don’t know what impact their business will have. I’m not really interested in the campaign aspect. He has no purpose here in Augusta other than as a campaign stop. Kamala Harris came as vice-president of the United States announcing that help and aid is on the way. I mean, it tells you a lot about the two candidates are and what their missions are. He’s here to get votes, and she’s here to help.” More

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      Pennsylvania swing county to keep ballot drop boxes after controversy

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      A battleground county in north-eastern Pennsylvania will have ballot drop boxes this fall after its county manager faced pressure and reversed her decision to eliminate them.The announcement on Friday came less than a month after Romilda Crocamo, the county manager in Luzerne county, said she was getting rid of the county’s four drop boxes over concerns the county could not secure them. “I cannot secure the drop boxes. And, you know, sometimes I have to make difficult decisions,” she said in an interview last month.But voting rights groups sued Crocamo last week, saying she could not unilaterally get rid of the drop boxes.Elections in the county are jointly overseen by a five-member board of elections who are responsible for setting election policies, and the county manager, who is responsible for personnel. A hearing in the case had been scheduled for Monday. Voters in the state – a critical one for both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden – have already begun receiving and returning mail-in ballots.Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Michelle Henry, sent a letter to Crocamo advising her that county board of elections had the power to set policies over drop boxes.An agreement filed on Sunday in the Luzerne county court of common pleas says Crocamo does not concede she is under a legal obligation to deploy drop boxes, but that she won’t block their deployment this election cycle.“This is a huge victory for Luzerne county voters,” said Alisha Hoffman-Mirilovich, the executive director of In This Together NEPA, which sued the county over drop boxes.View image in fullscreen“All Pennsylvanians have the freedom to choose how they cast their ballots – in person on Election Day, by mail-in ballot, or by using a drop box. We applaud the Luzerne County Board of Elections for making drop boxes accessible in Luzerne County since 2020, and we applaud the County Manager for reversing course in the best interest of voters throughout the county,” Hoffman-Mirilovich said in a statement.Crocamo said in a statement that drop boxes at two county facilities were deployed “and under video surveillance”. She said the county was still waiting on approval from two private locations.“While Ms Crocamo remains quite concerned about security, manpower, and fiscal issues associated with deployment of ballot drop boxes in Luzerne County, she agrees that given the importance of the November 5th election, the residents of Luzerne County should have every opportunity to attend to their important civic duty and vote in the upcoming election,” Mark Cedrone, her lawyer, said in a statement. More

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      Trump appointees must prove ‘fidelity and loyalty’, says campaign official

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      A senior official on Donald Trump’s campaign has said any appointees in a second Trump administration would need to prove “fidelity and loyalty”.The official also sought to distance the former president from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation plan calling for a far-right federal government in the event of a Trump victory at the voting polls in November.Howard Lutnick, the chief executive officer of Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chairperson of the former president’s transition team, told the Financial Times that appointees to any second Trump administration are “all going to be on the same side, and they’re all going to understand the policies, and we’re going to give people the role based on their capacity – and their fidelity and loyalty to the policy, as well as to” Trump.The comments come as the Trump team are trying to dispel concerns that a second Trump government would be as chaotic as the first, marked in part by infighting and a staff turnover calculated at 92% as of the day Joe Biden took office as president in 2021.“Those people were not pure to his vision,” Lutnick told the outlet.It is unlikely Lutnick’s comments will calm concerns among those who believe government officials should place American democracy above Trump or any other president.Lutnick joined Trump’s transition team in August along with Linda McMahon, the head of the Small Business Association under the former president and wife of the ex-World Wrestling Entertainment boss Vince McMahon in August.He maintained that Project 2025 was “radioactive”, though its authors openly support Trump and his running mate, JD Vance.“Project 2025 is an absolute zero for the Trump-Vance transition,” the billionaire said. “You can use another term – radioactive.”Democrats have made the controversial document part of their campaign, describing it as a blueprint for a fast-tracked program to increase presidential power and “strip away our freedoms – by forcing states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, cutting Social Security and Medicare, and eliminating the Department of Education”.While Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, Democrats’ campaigns for congressional seats have launched billboards in more than two dozen districts harnessing the document to the Republican agenda.“All of the data we have shows that Project 2025 just has huge interest and traction, more so than virtually every other issue,” Represenative Jared Huffman of California, the leader of a task force on countering the project’s agenda, told Axios.The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from the document and its authors. But lines to the heart of the campaign are clear enough, among them Vance’s foreword to Dawn’s Early Light, a book by the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLutnick told the FT that his job selecting candidates to become Trump appointees was that of “a painter of a mosaic” – and they would need to prepare for a “fast and furious” term if the former president was re-elected.Lutnick said he had given more than $10m to Trump’s 2024 effort and another $500,000 for the transition. He also said he had raised about $75m for the campaign in total.Furthermore, Lutnick appeared on Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice in 2008 and had previously donated to Democrats.His firm, Cantor FitzGerald, lost 658 employees in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, including his brother. Lutnick said his experience hiring new employees was akin to his work for the Trump transition team.“You go to world-class people that you rate highly, and you ask them to help you,” he said. More

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      John Oliver on VP debate’s ‘civility’: ‘Etiquette is kind of beside the point’

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      On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver ripped into those praising the “civility” of last week’s vice-presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. “Etiquette is kind of beside the point” when the stakes include immigrant rights and women’s bodily autonomy, he contended.“It’s like reading a ransom note and going, ‘This cursive is just so lovely. Look at the capital Y in ‘You have 24 hours before he dies.’ There are still some people who were raised right,’” he quipped.Oliver tore into Vance’s refusal to say, when asked directly, that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. In what Walz called “a damning non-answer”, Vance deflected with: “I’m focused on the future.”“‘I’m focused on the future’ is one of the most generic store-brand fuckboy deflections there is,” Oliver fumed. “It’s no wonder Tim Walz broke the fourth wall there like he was in Abbott Elementary. Because ‘I’m focused on the future’ is what you say when you want to change the subject. If not, you just answer the question.”Oliver also touched on special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page report detailing the ways Trump and his cohort attempted to overturn the 2020 election, “reminding us yet again of the ridiculous steps he took to avoid leaving office”. According to the document, Trump allegedly told people in the White House he knew he had lost but that he would “fight like hell” anyway.“But it super matters if you lost,” Oliver countered. “It’s kind of the main thing that matters. That is the most unsettling thing you could possibly overhear if you work at the White House.”The report also notes that Trump muted his lawyer Sidney Powell during a phone call “when she was outlining her bogus fraud claims” and called her ideas crazy.“If I ever found out that I lied so badly that Donald Trump muted the call to say this is some crazy shit, you would never see me again,” Oliver laughed. “I would walk directly into the ocean.”Jokes aside, Oliver reminded: “None of this is theoretical. If he loses next month, there is every reason to believe Trump will dispute the results again and Vance has made it clear he’s got no problem with that. And that alone should be disqualifying.“For all the talk this week about his civility at the debate, let’s not forget: deep down [Vance] is the same colossal dipshit who spews rightwing hate with distressing ease and continues to defend the ‘big lie’ that the last election was stolen,” he continued. “It is all tremendously bleak, which is why – to borrow a phrase I heard recently – I’m focused on the future, specifically one in which in four weeks’ time, Trump hopefully loses this fucking election.”In his main segment, Oliver looked into how a routine traffic stop for “non-safety violations” can become a terror, with law enforcement disproportionately targeting people of color. Traffic stops are “the most common law enforcement interaction in America”, with police pulling over an average of 50,000 people in a day in the US.Those interactions can turn deadly: since 2017, armed police have killed at least 813 people in routine traffic stops, the vast majority of them Black. “We’ve all seen the videos of high-profile killings,” said Oliver, referring to the police shootings of Philando Castile, Daunte Wright and others, recorded by bystanders or police body-cams. “The horror of those videos should be seared into our collective consciouses by now.”Because of this pattern, for Black motorists, “driving comes with a constant undercurrent of fear”, said Oliver.He noted that there are legitimate safety reasons to pull over some drivers – someone driving too fast or recklessly, for instance, but no driver should worry about a traffic stop and “also have to worry about being harassed or potentially killed”.Such risks are not the product of a few bad apples in law enforcement, said Oliver; it’s “the inevitable result of deliberate decisions that have turned traffic stops into a systemic issue”.Oliver ticked through documentation of how police departments incentivize traffic stops as a means of funding, and encourage officers to apply deeply subjective criteria to pulling people over. Such “pretextual stops” basically equate to “shaking people down to see what crimes fall out”, he said.As an aside, he played an old PSA featuring characters from the musical Cats encouraging people to drive safely, lest their children become nothing but “memories”. “Let me just say this,” said Oliver. “That musical is an abomination. If there is ever a day that Andrew Lloyd Webber has no haters, that means that I am dead and so, by the way, is Patti LuPone.”On a more serious note, Oliver encouraged a full-stop end to pretextual stops and eliminating non-safety-related traffic stops. Such measures have already been adopted at the local level in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Philadelphia – where, after eight months, traffic stops were cut in half, meaning 12,000 fewer Black drivers were pulled over. He also advocated for decriminalizing minor traffic offenses (such as broken tail lights) and making data on traffic stops public, including the race of those pulled over – “frankly fucking incredible that it’s not already happening”, he noted.While some of these measures may be politically difficult, when it comes to non-safety-related traffic stops, “doing fewer of them for bullshit reasons should be a pretty easy sell”. More

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      ‘Every day is a new conspiracy’: behind Trump’s ironclad grip on rightwing media

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      In the last few months, Donald Trump has done interviews with rightwing Twitch streamer Adin Ross and a host of podcasters, including Dr Phil, comedian Theo Von, computer scientist Lex Fridman, and YouTuber Logan Paul – part of what the Atlantic has dubbed Trump’s “red-pill podcast tour”.He’s posted incessantly on his own social media platform, Truth Social. He did a live space on Twitter/X with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk. He talked with Fox’s Laura Ingraham and called into Fox & Friends and spoke to other Fox hosts and personalities.His media strategy aligns with the current state of the rightwing media landscape: Fox is still a dominant source, but for the most Maga-adherent, it’s not Trumpy enough, despite some of its hosts embracing election denialism around the 2020 US election. Instead, there’s increasing fragmentation thanks to influencers and lesser-known outlets built around Trumpism.This is the first election since Tucker Carlson, once Fox’s loudest voice in a primetime spot, was reportedly fired by the network, and his solo ventures so far haven’t taken on the prominence he had on TV. It’s also the first election since longtime Republican heavyweight Rush Limbaugh died. These big changes have left holes in rightwing media, which were filled by an increasing cadre of influencers, content creators and smaller outlets.Adrianna Munoz, a 58-year-old from Queens, New York, who attended a Trump rally earlier this year in the Bronx, told the Guardian that she mostly gets news from YouTube, X and conservative commentators she follows, such as Tim Pool and Benny Johnson.“I used to watch TV news every morning – network news and the local news channel in New York,” she said. “Now I don’t. They sold out. They don’t tell you the truth. I don’t want to hear that rubbish.”Trump’s grip on rightwing media is ironclad, said Julie Millican, the vice-president of Media Matters, a progressive center that tracks conservative media. In the past, the Republican party and its candidates would follow what rightwing media did and align its policies that way – but now, the media follows Trump, she said.“If you don’t capitulate to what Trump and his enablers and his supporters are looking for, then they’ll shut you out,” Millican said. Since his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his influence has only increased, and “now he has a stronger control over the entire media ecosystem than he did previously”, she added.As rightwing outlets rise, the stories they cover differ more from what’s on mainstream news, furthering the bubbles a divided United States lives within. While in years past, you’d find different takes on the day’s news in left- and right-leaning outlets, you’ll now find stories that exist solely on rightwing media, Millican said.“It’s like every day is a new conspiracy or a new attack, and it’s just hard to even keep up on it anymore,” she said. “Half the time, when you listen to somebody who consumes nothing but rightwing media, you have no idea what they’re talking about.”TV news and rightwing websitesTraffic to news websites, including rightwing sites, is down compared with 2020. Howard Polskin, who tracks conservative media on his site The Righting, said a few factors play into the decrease. Facebook and other Meta social media de-emphasize news content now, sending less traffic to news outlets. And 2020 had several major news events colliding: a pandemic that kept people online more, nationwide protests over racial justice and a hotly contested election.Polskin tracks monthly visits to rightwing sites and produces traffic reports. The top 10 for August 2024: Fox, Outkick (a sports and commentary site owned by Fox), Newsmax, Epoch Times, National Review, Washington Times, Daily Wire, TheBlaze, Washington Examiner and Daily Caller. Gateway Pundit is not far behind, and InfoWars, the once-maligned site headed by bankrupted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, is in the top 20.View image in fullscreenNo single star has taken the place that Carlson or Limbaugh once held. Some conservatives told the Guardian they stopped watching Fox as often after Carlson left or because the network isn’t Maga enough. Fox agreed to pay $787m to settle a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems over defamation claims for spreading lies about the voting machine company’s role the 2020 election. Carlson abruptly left the network shortly after the settlement, and he has claimed his firing came as a result of the settlement. Fox denies that his removal had anything to do with the Dominion case.Frank Lipsett, a 63-year-old from the south Bronx who works as a residential housing superintendent, said he watches Fox because it’s “the most honest and most informative outlet, though I’m not saying they are perfect”.Like many on the right, he has stopped reading mainstream newspapers because “they are not telling the truth.” He said he sometimes reads the New York Post, a rightwing tabloid paper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the same owner as Fox.Another paper, Epoch Times, a far-right and anti-China outlet associated with the Falun Gong religion, continues to rank highly among conservative news outlets despite a justice department lawsuit that alleges it operates as a money laundering and cryptocurrency scam. Its stories are often shared by rightwing politicians or influencers. “Their cultural impact and political impact seems much smaller than the distribution,” Polskin said.Carlene, a 58-year-old from the Upper East Side who attended the Trump rally in the Bronx, said she gets news from the Epoch Times, Daily Wire and X and sometimes tunes into CNN and MSNBC to get the other side.“I watch less Fox News now after they got rid of Tucker Carlson,” she said. “It made me think Fox was just like everyone else.”For the less online Republican, talk radio shows, especially those that run the airwaves in rural areas, play a strong role in setting the conservative message. As newspapers in rural areas have shuttered, creating a crisis in local news, these radio shows are “reaching voters that aren’t tapped into the same media spaces that we often see in these large metropolises on either coast”, Tripodi said.To fill Fox’s void on TV, some conservatives have turned to Newsmax or One American News Network, which are farther to the right than Fox.“One American News Network and Newsmax did a very good job at establishing themselves as a place that would verify whatever Trump was saying,” Tripodi said.David Fiedler, a 67-year-old retiree from Rock county, Wisconsin, told the Guardian at the Republican National Committee’s Protect the Vote tour in September that he and his wife don’t watch Fox or local news, but they stream podcasts by the Daily Wire or watch Rumble, the rightwing video platform.“Our biggest news thing we watch is Newsmax,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPodcasts and influencersBeyond television and news sites, a rightwing news consumer will find a growing landscape of podcasts, YouTube channels, Substack newsletters, documentary film-makers and social media influencers all trying to build a following.“For every laid-off journalist, another Substack is born,” Polskin said. “And that just … fractionalizes the news audience even more.”The top of the podcast charts on Spotify and Apple shows a host of conservatives: Shawn Ryan, Candace Owens, Carlson, Megyn Kelly.Ben Shapiro, the conservative commentator, has his own podcast, and his network, the Daily Wire, hosts some of the biggest rightwing pundits. “In terms of just influence and power in the media landscape, to me, he would be someone that’s at the top of that space,” Millican said. Polskin called Shapiro the “800lb gorilla of rightwing podcasts”.Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, is also a major player. His organization is focused on turning college-age people conservative, and he’s been on a tour around the country to college campuses in recent months, in addition to his podcast and social media presence.“He’s almost become like an establishment media figure in his own right, except you would never actually see him on Fox News – his audience tends to be pretty old,” Millican said.While he doesn’t grab a huge share of the podcast market and he’s currently in prison for defying a congressional subpoena related to the January 6 investigation, Steve Bannon has an outsize influence on the right with his War Room show. He gets big-name rightwing politicians as guests and still has Trump’s ear, but he’s never cracked the top 20 in Polskin’s ratings.“Because of him, Project 2025 got on our radar last year because he was one of the early backers in hosting people who were involved with writing it, promoting the key tenants in it,” Millican said. “Small audience, but still influential audience.”Then there are also conspiracy-based websites and social media accounts from unnamed creators, such as End Wokeness, that spread rightwing attack lines that can filter up to the mainstream.David Jansen, who attended a Trump town hall event in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in August, said he watches FrankSpeech, a platform founded by pillow salesperson and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, which streams conservative content, often centered on election denialism.Social mediaAlongside the rise in rightwing influencers and outlets, social media platforms have loosened their content moderation and made changes to how they manage political content. Republican elected officials and outside legal groups have attacked platforms, government employees who interact with them and misinformation researchers, claiming a broad censorship plan is at work to limit conservative voices online.Some organizing on the right happens on closed-off apps such as Telegram, where public figures from the conservative mainstream and the far-right fringes have channels to share news and commentary.The underbelly of Telegram skews darker than other social media: the New York Times called it a “global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement”. Neo-Nazis have used the platform to coordinate their activities and have been scrambling after the app’s founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France for facilitating criminal activity on the app, Frontline reported.But rightwing organizing isn’t happening solely in far-flung corners of the internet. There is increased rumor-making and amplification on Musk’s X, including by Musk himself, who has shared a wide variety of election-related falsehoods. Trump returned to the platform last year after he was kicked off after the insurrection, but he still posts mostly on Truth Social, where he often rants in all-caps, shares clips from his rallies or reposts content from rightwing media who boost his campaign.Munoz, one of the Bronx Trump rally attendees, uses Telegram and Truth Social. Munoz loves Musk and his changes to X because “you can talk freely now”, he said. “I left Facebook and Instagram because they don’t let you talk.”Ed Pilkington and Alice Herman contributed reporting to this story More

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      Harris talks abortion rights on Call Her Daddy podcast while bashing Trump’s ‘protector’ of women claim – live

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      Alex Cooper and Kamala Harris discussed JD Vance’s age-old sexist ‘childless cat ladies’ trope, but Harris was asked what she would do as president to help generations who feel that the economy hinders them from having children.“Housing is too expensive and we need to increase the housing supply,” Harris said. “Part of my plan is to work with home builders in the private sector to create tax incentives to build by the end of my first term, 3,000,000 more housing units.”“Part of my plan is to give 100 million more people who basically are middle class working people, tax cuts, including for young parents, a $6000 tax cut for the first year of their child’s life, which helps them buy a crib or a car seat or clothing and just get through that first year,’” she added.During an episode of the podcast Call Her Daddy, Kamala Harris condemned Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders after Sanders said that the presidential candidate “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble” because she doesn’t have children.“I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble,” Harris said during the podcast.The vice-president discussed her relationship with her stepchildren, Cole and Ella Emhoff, who are the biological children from her husband’s, Doug Emhoff, first marriage.“We have our family by blood and then we have our family by love. And I have both,” Harris said.Kamala Harris was asked by Alex Cooper if she could think about any law that “gives the government the power to make a decision about a man’s body”.Harris laughed and said: “We are a work in progress.”“Part of the strength of our country and our evolution as a country has been through the fight for the expansion of rights. Not the restriction of rights,” she added.Alex Cooper asked Kamala Harris to clarify a claim former president Donald Trump made during last month’s presidential debate, where he falsely claimed that Democrats support abortions “after birth” and “executing” babies.“That is not happening anywhere in the United States,” Harris said. “It is not happening and it’s a lie.”She also labeled as “insulting” his claim that women in their ninth month of pregnancy are electing to have an abortion.Kamala Harris and Alex Cooper continued to discuss abortion rights and reproductive healthcare during a Call Her Daddy episode aired on Sunday.“You don’t have to abandon your faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government shouldn’t be telling her what to do,” Harris said in the podcast.Harris added: “What’s so outrageous about it is a bunch of these guys up in these state capitals are writing these decisions because they somehow have decided that they’re in a better position to tell you what’s in your best interest than you are to know what’s in your own best interest.”Kamala Harris condemned former president Donald Trump for calling himself the “protector” of women at a rally in Pennsylvania.“This is the same guy who said that women should be punished for having abortions,” Harris said on Alex Cooper’s podcast Call Her Daddy.Harris went on to talk about the state of abortion access currently in the country.“The majority of women who receive abortion care are mothers,” Harris said. “Every state in the South except for Virginia has an abortion ban.”Kamala Harris responded to questions from Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper, elaborating on why she decided to become a prosecutor, the guidelines for reporting sexual assault, and the need to talk about the issue more.In her interview with Kamala Harris, Alex Cooper asked the vice-president about the lessons she learned from her mother regarding mental health, the ways she has taken accountability during her vice-presidency, and what she thinks her mother would say if she became the next president of the United States.Later on, Cooper referenced some of the harsh descriptions former president Donald Trump has used against Harris during the race, including questioning her mental health. She asked Harris how this affected her.Harris said:
      I think it’s really important not to let other people define you, and usually those people who will attempt to do it don’t know you.
      Donald Trump finished his remarks in Juneau, Wisconsin, which ran for about two hours.During her interview with Kamala Harris, Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper quickly touched on a soft spot for the Harris campaign, which is the vice-president’s lack of interviews with the media. She asked Harris why she decided to come on the podcast.“I think you and your listeners have really got this thing, right, which is one of the best ways to communicate with people is to be real, you know, and to talk about the things that people really care about,” Harris said.“What I love about what you do is that your voice in your show is really about your listeners,” she added. “And I think especially now, this is a moment in the country and in life where people really want to know they’re seen and heard and that they’re part of a community, that they’re not out there alone.”The host of the comedy and advice podcast Call Her Daddy, Alex Cooper, said at the start of her episode with Kamala Harris that she invited former president Donald Trump to come on the show.“If he also wants to have a meaningful, in-depth conversation about women’s rights in this country, then he is welcome on Call Her Daddy anytime,” Cooper said. More

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      Harris embarks on media blitz and tries to edge out Trump in key swing states

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      Kamala Harris has embarked on a week-long media blitz, hurtling from TV studios and late-night shows to podcast interviews as she seeks to gain an edge over Donald Trump in the US election’s key battleground states that remain nail-bitingly close.The vice-president’s decision to face a raft of largely friendly media outlets came as the campaigns entered the final 30 days. More than 1.4 million Americans have already cast their ballots in early voting across 30 states.The Democratic nominee’s whirlwind media tour has been carefully crafted for maximum reach and minimum risk. Harris has talked to the CBS News show 60 Minutes, along with the popular podcast Call Her Daddy.On Tuesday she hits the media capital, New York, for appearances on ABC News’s daytime behemoth The View and the Howard Stern Show, followed by a recording with late-night host Stephen Colbert.The first of a flurry of comments from Harris was put out by 60 Minutes on Sunday before a full broadcast on Monday. Harris will appear alone, after Trump declined to be interviewed by the election special which has been a staple of US election coverage for more than half a century.In a short clip released by 60 Minutes, Harris was asked whether the Biden-Harris administration had any sway over the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu, the hardline prime minister of Israel who appears not to listen to Washington. Asked whether the US had a “real close ally” in Netanyahu, she replied: “With all due respect, the better question is: do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people? And the answer to that question is yes.”Since Harris’s meteoric propulsion as Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden stepped aside, her relative avoidance of press or TV interviews has become a point of contention on the campaign trail. Republican leaders and pundits on Fox News routinely accuse her of being media-shy.This week’s blitz is designed to counter that impression, while reaching large audiences focused on demographic groups which will be central to Harris’s chances of winning in November. Call Her Daddy is Spotify’s most-listened to podcast among women, while The View is the number one ranked daytime talk show with 2.5 million average viewers, again heavily weighted towards women.Meanwhile Colbert’s show on CBS is the highest rated late-night talk show attracting large numbers of younger viewers aged 18 to 49 – another critical demographic on Harris’s target list.Harris’s running mate, the Democratic governor of Minnesota Tim Walz, is also making his own media scramble which began on Sunday, with him entering less comfortable territory on Fox News Sunday. He was questioned about the pro-abortion law that he signed in his state, and also asked to clarify the occasions on which he has misrepresented his record.That included a comment that he had carried weapons in war when he had not, and his classifying the treatment that he and his wife received to have a child as IVF when it was in fact a different type of fertility treatment.At last week’s vice-presidential debate Walz recognised his missteps, calling himself a “knucklehead”.Walz told Fox News Sunday: “To be honest with you, I don’t think American people care whether I used IUI or IVF, what they understand is that Donald Trump would resist these things. I speak passionately … I will own up when I misspeak and when I make a mistake.”As the contest enters its final month, the Guardian’s latest tracker of opinion polls shows Harris up on Trump by three percentage points nationally. In the more telling test of the seven battleground states that will decide the outcome, though Harris is ahead in five of them, the margin remains essentially too close to call.Both candidates and their running mates are speeding up their frantic dash around the seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Harris and Walz will be in Arizona this weeks, where early voting begins on Wednesday.On Thursday, the Democratic ticket will gain extra ballast when former president and campaigning superstar Barack Obama kicks off a round of stump appearances in the all-important swing state, Pennsylvania. He will begin in Pittsburgh, and will then travel across the country on Harris’s behalf, campaign aides have said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump was scheduled to hold a rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, on Sunday afternoon, a day after he made a pointed return to the fairgrounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he came close to being assassinated on 13 July. Trump and his younger son Eric used the occasion to spread the baseless claim that the Democrats had been behind the attempt on his life.“They tried to kill him, it’s because the Democratic party can’t do anything right,” Eric Trump said. Billionaire Elon Musk also appeared on stage.On Sunday, Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the US House, was asked by ABC News’s This Week whether such comments were responsible amid mounting fears of political violence in the build up to the 5 November election. Johnson sidestepped the question, saying he had not heard the full speeches.The speaker also notably refused to answer whether Trump had lost the 2020 election, in the wake of Trump’s ongoing lies that he was the actual victor. “This is the game that is always played by the media with leading Republicans, it’s a gotcha game, and I’m not going to engage in it,” Johnson said.The former president’s wife, Melania Trump, sat down for an interview with the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. She was asked given how close her husband had come to being shot in Butler whether she trusted the top officials of the FBI, CIA and other federal agencies who “appeared to be against President Trump and yourself from day one”.Melania Trump replied: “It’s hard to say who you really trust. You want to, but it’s always a question mark.”Melania Trump, who is promoting her book, Melania, also spoke about her pro-abortion stance which she revealed in the volume. She said her husband had always known her convictions.“He knew my position and my beliefs since the day we met, and I believe in individual freedom. I want to decide what I want to do with my body. I don’t want government in my personal business,” she said. More