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      Uncommitted movement declines to endorse Harris – but warns against Trump presidency

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      The Uncommitted National Movement announced that it will not endorse Kamala Harris for president, saying on Thursday she failed to respond to the movement’s requests that she meet with Palestinian families in Michigan and to discuss a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza by 15 September.“Vice-President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her,” Abbas Alawieh, an Uncommitted leader and delegate from Michigan, said during a press conference on Thursday.After the Democratic national convention last month, Uncommitted leaders sent a letter to Harris and her senior advisers voicing their dissatisfaction with the DNC’s refusal to allow a Palestinian American to speak, as well as reiterating their demands for a ceasefire and engagement with people who have been affected by Israel’s war on Gaza. In a response to movement leaders on Sunday, Harris’s team said “they don’t have particular engagements that they can point us to, but they can keep us updated as things develop”, Alawieh said. Harris’s campaign added that it would continue to be open to opportunities to engage with communities on vital issues.However, the movement’s leaders who helped mobilize more than 700,000 Americans to vote “uncommitted” or its equivalent in Democratic party primaries throughout the nation also acknowledged the danger of Donald Trump winning the election.“At this time, our movement opposes a Donald Trump presidency whose agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing,” said Alawieh. “And our movement is not recommending a third-party vote in the presidential election, especially as third-party votes in key swing states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency, given our country’s broken electoral college system.”For months, the movement had urged Harris to demonstrate a shift in her policy on Gaza, where more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October, to no avail, said the Uncommitted leader and Palestinian American Lexis Zeidan.“We urge uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot. Our focus remains on building this anti-war coalition, both inside and outside the Democratic party,” said Layla Elabed, a leader of the Uncommitted National Movement and a Palestinian American.In a statement, a Harris campaign spokesperson said: “[T]he Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans. She will continue working to bring the war in Gaza to an end in a way where Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”The uncommitted movement originated in Michigan, where more than 100,000 people cast “uncommitted” ballots to signal to Biden their dissatisfaction with his Gaza policy, before spreading to Democratic primaries throughout the nation. A June CBS poll showed that a majority of Americans believe that the US should not send weapons to Israel, including 77% of Democrats.Arab American voters in Michigan and other swing states will play a critical role in the presidential election. Joe Biden won Michigan, where 278,000 Arab Americans live, by just 154,000 votes in 2020. Four years earlier, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes.Several Arab and Muslim American leaders have endorsed Harris in recent months, including the Black Muslim Leadership Council Fund and the US representative Ilhan Omar. Muslim Women for Harris-Walz, which disbanded after the Democratic national convention because of its denial of a Palestinian American speaker, reaffirmed their support for Harris a week later.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe uncommitted leaders who spoke on Thursday were split on their voting plans for the top of the ticket. Alawieh said that he plans to vote for Harris so that he can continue with his anti-war efforts, despite her lack of alignment with his values on the issue. “But I am concerned with Donald Trump’s very specific plans to suppress pro Palestinian human rights organizing,” he said.As a Palestinian American with family in the occupied West Bank, Elabed said, whenever she’s questioned on her voting choice, she feels like she’s “being asked that question at a funeral”. While she said that she won’t vote for Harris, Trump or a third-party candidate for president, she continued: “I will be going out to vote and ensuring that I’m voting up and down the ballot for candidates that I have a shared value with.”Zeidan said that she also plans to abstain from voting at the top of the ticket. “Still, I’m open to having that very perspective change as it relates to what VP Harris and the administration and her campaign plan to do between now and November,” she said.Until the November election, the Uncommitted National Movement plans to continue applying pressure on the Biden administration to adopt an arms embargo on Israel and support a permanent ceasefire, as well as to block a Trump presidency. Over the next few months, Zeidan said, the movement will produce content “that is cutting through the noise and building coalitions that are going to continue to challenge both Trump’s extremism and also Harris’s status quo”. They will also continue to educate voters on the risk of a Trump presidency and will continue pushing Harris to stop sending arms to Israel.“The Democratic party, pro-war forces like [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] want to drive us out of the Democratic party, but we won’t concede,” said Elabed. “We’re here to stay.” More

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      Confusing language on gerrymandering proposal will stay on Ohio’s ballot

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      Ohio voters will see misleading language when they go to vote on an anti-gerrymandering proposal this fall after the state supreme court greenlit the deceptive wording written by Republicans.The Republican-controlled Ohio ballot board approved the language on Wednesday in a 3-2 party-line vote, two days after the Republican-led state supreme court voted 4-3 to correct various defects the justices found in what the board had already passed. The court’s ruling, however, did not require the ballot board to rewrite some of the most significant portions of the amendment.If enacted, the proposal – Issue 1 – would strip lawmakers of their power to draw the boundaries for state legislative and congressional districts and hand it to a 15-person bipartisan independent commission composed of regular citizens. The panel would be constitutionally prohibited from distorting district lines to give one party an unfair advantage, a practice known as gerrymandering.But the language the Ohio ballot board approved for the ballot says that the panel would be “required to gerrymander”. Citizens Not Politicians, the group behind the 5 November amendment, sued last month, asserting the language “may be the most biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional” the state has ever seen.In an unsigned opinion, the state supreme court said the language was acceptable. Because the panel would be required to draw districts that roughly represented the partisan results in recent statewide Ohio elections, it was not misleading to say that the panel would be required to gerrymander, the court majority said. “They mandate the new commission draw district boundaries that give a political advantage to an identifiable group – Republicans in some districts and Democrats in others,” the court said.The high court ordered two of eight disputed sections of the ballot description to be rewritten while upholding the other six the issue’s backers had contested. The court’s three Democratic justices dissented. “What the ballot board has done here is tantamount to performing a virtual chewing of food before the voters can taste it for themselves to decide whether they like it or not,” Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote for the dissent.Republicans, who currently control the mapmaking process, drew districts that gave them a distorted advantage and repeatedly ignored prior rulings from the state supreme court to redraw the lines.State senator Paula Hicks-Hudson, one of the two Democrats who sit on the ballot board, told reporters after it met: “This was done and it was created for the main purpose of hoodwinking voters.” The Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, who chairs the board, did not take questions from the press after the vote.In Monday’s opinion, the high court’s majority noted that it can only invalidate language approved by the ballot board if it finds the wording would “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters”. The majority found most of the language included in the approved summary and title did not do that but merely described the extensive amendment in detail.The two sections that justices said were mischaracterized involve when a lawsuit would be able to be filed challenging the new commission’s redistricting plan and the ability of the public to provide input on the mapmaking process.The exact language of the constitutional amendment will be posted at polling locations. More

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      JD Vance is factually challenged – and morally deficient | Margaret Sullivan

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      There was a moment when JD Vance could have turned back from the story.After the vice-presidential candidate posted on social media about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets – based on the flimsiest of supposed evidence – a Vance staffer checked it out.“His staff member asked Springfield’s city manager if the claim was true,” according to new Wall Street Journal reporting. The city manager responded clearly: “I told him no … I told him these claims were baseless.”Then and there, Vance could have deleted the post, which had already done damage. He could have disavowed it and tried to limit the harm.Nothing doing. He left the post up and Donald Trump immediately took it from there. As nearly 70 million people watched, the former president blasted the lie out to the world at the presidential debate.We know what followed: not just viral memes and hip-hop songs that feature the words: “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”It was far worse. Bomb threats plagued Springfield’s hospitals, and officials closed schools. Racist rhetoric circulated, harming the lives of Vance’s own constituents – he is, after all, an Ohio senator.Innocent people were portrayed as villains. Despite all the Trump campaign’s trashing of “illegals”, the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are largely there legally, through a temporary protected status, as the Guardian recently reported. Local business owners say they have been a welcome addition to the city’s workforce.But Vance is fine – more than fine – with having turned rumors into real damage.He told CNN that he is willing “to create stories” to focus the media’s attention on his and Trump’s relentless, though often false, message about the harm that immigrants are doing to American society – and of course to blame Trump’s Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, at every turn.Vance’s rejection of the chance to take down his original post speaks volumes about how he and Trump operate. And his doubling down by asserting that making up lies is acceptable should be a red-alarm warning – yet another – about a second Trump term. There are so many.The ugly episode reminds me of Trump aide Kellyanne Conway’s remark to NBC News’s Chuck Todd soon after the 2016 election. As Trump spread ego-driven nonsense about the unprecedented size of his inaugural crowd – and insisted that his press secretary Sean Spicer do the same – Conway offered a blithe defense.Spicer, she said, was merely providing “alternative facts”.“Look, alternative facts are not facts,” Todd pointed out. “They’re falsehoods.” Or, as the mainstream media has finally brought itself to say: they are lies.Nearly eight years later, the Trump team is even bolder about lying, expressing that practice not just as defensible but a necessity. It spreads hatred so efficiently.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis chapter is sad – even tragic – for many reasons. The continual rejection of truth by some of the most prominent people in public life does real damage, not only to innocent people’s lives and to a community’s safety, but more broadly to our society and democracy.One bit of heartening news emerged amid all this ugliness. As the Wall Street Journal reporters explored the original rumor about pets in Springfield, a Vance spokesperson came up with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by her Haitian neighbors.But when a reporter checked it out by going to Anna Kilgore’s house, she told him that her cat, Miss Sassy, had returned a few days after having gone missing.Imagine that: not stolen, not eaten, Miss Sassy was found safe – in Kilgore’s own basement.Afterwards, with the help of a translation app, Kilgore did the right thing: she apologized to her Haitian neighbor. That apology was a touch of human decency amid the ugliness.Don’t look for any such thing from Vance or Trump. They have no regrets, and – on the contrary – take all of this as proof that their methods are working very well indeed.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Nebraska may change its electoral system at the last second to help Trump win | Stephen Marche

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      American democracy is in a fragile place. If you haven’t figured that out by this point, you haven’t been paying attention. The dangers are coming from all sides. Donald Trump has just survived his second apparent assassination attempt. The governor of Ohio has had to call in the state police to monitor a spate of bomb threats to local schools after falsehoods about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in the area began circulating. That’s aside from all the usual mass shootings, Proud Boy marches and the rest of it. But inside this fomenting turmoil, the most dangerous spot in the whole country, the rock on which the American state may well founder, is the quiet congressional district of Omaha, Nebraska, the very heart of the American heartland.Omaha is dangerous, not in itself, but due to the entirely weird position it inhabits inside the electoral college. In one of those strange freaks of American politics, Nebraska has a split electoral college vote, and for the past few elections the city of Omaha has reliably voted Democrat. The other two electoral districts vote solidly Republican. Ordinarily, this little hiccup in the system wouldn’t matter much. But 2024 represents a uniquely precarious moment.As it stands, once you remove the settled Democrat and Republican states, the most direct path to a Kamala Harris victory is by way of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. With those three states, she would receive exactly 270 electoral college seats, the number she needs to win. In that case, she would win if, and only if, she holds that one electoral college vote in the congressional district of Omaha, Nebraska.The Omaha congressional district hasn’t mattered much due to a kind of bipartisan detente, a balance of power. Nebraska is not the only state that splits its electoral system by district. So does Maine. And Maine, while mostly Democratic, has a similarly reliable Republican constituency, which will almost certainly give its electoral college seat to Trump. If Nebraska changes its system to give Trump an advantage, Maine has said it will reciprocate in order to cancel out any attempt to shift the balance of power.Largely for this reason, the inclination to change the law has been muted in Nebraska, even though Republicans control the statehouse. Having a contested electoral college seat also makes Nebraska slightly more worthy of attention from both national parties, meaning the current division is, to some small degree, in the interests of Nebraskans on the whole.Yet that state of detente may be set to unravel. The Maine legislature has now gone out of session, and last Friday, Jim Pillen, the governor of Nebraska, made a public statement: “I strongly support statewide unity and joining 48 other states by awarding all five of our electoral college votes to the presidential candidate who wins the majority of Nebraskans’ votes,” he said. “As I have also made clear, I am willing to convene the Legislature for a special session to fix this 30-year-old problem before the 2024 election. However, I must receive clear and public indication that 33 senators are willing to vote in such a session to restore winner-take-all.”Pillen is effectively deflecting the electoral college question onto the state senators, but he is also opening the door to the possibility of the switch, which could alter the course of the election.Republicans would not even need to switch the electoral college seat to win. They only need to muddy the waters. If, for example, the Nebraska legislature ensured that their electoral college votes were in dispute, and the courts had not decided the matter by 6 January, and no one had reached the threshold of 270, that state of affairs would automatically trigger a contingent election. In a contingent election, another abstruse mechanism of the US electoral system, each state delegation, whether it’s California or Wyoming, gets a single vote, which means that the Republicans would always win. (This possibility is the subject of a book I wrote with Andrew Yang, The Last Election.)The sheer boredom of what I’m describing here, the banal technicalities of the complex legal structures in place, may, on the surface, seem less frightening than assassination attempts and bomb threats and cooked pets and armed militias. But don’t misunderstand: this is the real danger America faces. The complexity is the trap. The complexity makes it easy for people to believe that somehow they haven’t been tricked, that a functioning democratic system, however bizarre, is still in place, even when it clearly isn’t anymore.It goes without saying that the nightmare I’ve described here – which could absolutely happen – is only one of several glitches in the electoral system which could undo the United States. (Georgia is a whole other nightmare.) The Republicans have set themselves up to maximize incoherence, exactly because they are aware of the vulnerability of the system.Needless to say, incoherence of outcome is precisely the opposite of what the founders intended when they established the electoral college 240 years ago. They were living in a different world, though. The electoral college was the product of an 18th-century agrarian society whose Capitol sat a hundred miles from virgin forest. At this point in history, it is little more than a legitimacy crisis in progress.The founders built their system to avoid exactly the kind of situation that the erasure of the district Omaha, Nebraska, would represent: the possibility of democracy in bad faith and by name only.

      Stephen Marche is a Canadian essayist and novelist. He is the author of The Next Civil War and How Shakespeare Changed Everything More

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      With their lies about Haitian immigrants, Trump and Vance have reached a new low | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      During his debate with Kamala Harris on 10 September, Donald Trump proffered the outrageous lie that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating residents’ pets. He wasn’t alone in promoting this little bigoted nugget, either. Earlier that day on X, formerly known as Twitter, JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, had already pushed the idea that Springfield’s residents “have had their pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants”.Vance subsequently tripled down on the falsehood, even later admitting to CNN: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”Behold, the political lie. We’re not talking about spin, which bends the truth to something usable. We’re dealing with an outright fabrication. None of what Trump and Vance are saying about the Haitian community is true. Not a single bit of it. The Haitian community of Springfield is there because its members have been granted temporary protected status, a US government program that allows them to live and work legally in the United States for a defined period of time. And none of them have been known to eat your pets.But there is something almost refreshing in Vance’s moment of honesty about his own dishonesty. In an era where cynicism prevails, it feels almost naive to believe in something, and Vance and Trump are showing us they do believe! But what they believe in is the power of spreading the most shocking, contemptible and brazen lies possible to secure their political victory.What’s a little lie, after all, if it helps their cause? Or, as Vance put it on X: “don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.”The luxury of the political lie, however, is that the tellers of the lie never have to live directly with the consequences of their actions. But others do.On 12 September, Springfield’s city hall was forced to close because of a bomb threat, and all Clark county buildings, including the offices of the department of job and family services, the common pleas court, and the board of elections, were similarly closed “out of an abundance of caution”.By Friday, four other schools had been evacuated due to bomb threats, which similarly emptied the bureau of motor vehicles and the Ohio Southside license bureau. Then, on Saturday, two hospitals, the Springfield regional medical center and the Kettering Health Springfield medical center, were also forced into lockdown. By Sunday, Springfield’s Clark State College received emailed threats of violence and subsequently moved all its classes online for a week due. The local Wittenberg University was also threatened with a mass shooting, forcing it to cancel all its events on Sunday and move classes online for Monday.When Monday rolled around, two more of Springfield’s elementary schools, the Simon Kenton elementary school and Kenwood elementary school, also had to be evacuated “based on information received from the Springfield Police Division”, the Springfield city school district announced. The city of Springfield also axed its CultureFest, the city’s annual celebration of diversity. At a press conference, Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, announced that he is deploying the Ohio state highway patrol to schools in Springfield after they received nearly three dozen bomb threats since late last week.Fox News and Trump’s partisans on the media responded to this harrowing turn of events by emphasizing something that DeWine said during his press conference. The bomb threats had thus far (thankfully) been hoaxes, and many of them seemed to originate abroad. “We have people, unfortunately, overseas who are taking these actions,” the governor said.What Trump’s supporters fail to mention is that Trump and Vance created the conditions for these hoaxes to happen in the first place. But, true to form, it seems they would rather blame shadowy foreigners instead.You can’t blame foreigners for the arrival of armed neo-Nazi members of the Blood Tribe, an extremist North American white supremacist group that marched through Springfield in August while carrying swastika-emblazoned flags. You can’t blame foreigners for a member of the Blood Tribe addressing a Springfield city commission meeting days later, telling Rob Rue, Springfield’s mayor: “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.” You can’t blame folks overseas for the fact that Springfield’s Haitian church has been vandalized twice in one month. You can’t blame foreigners for the increased racism that many Haitians are reporting.Springfield’s already vulnerable Haitian community (particularly after a tragic traffic accident in August that left an 11-year-old boy dead) is now living on a razor’s edge. Fleeing Haiti for their lives, members of his community currently live as if their “temporary protected status” has been summarily taken away from them while they live in the United States, where they are supposed to be safe.Meanwhile, the work they perform sustains the Springfield’s businesses and can be felt far beyond. Springfield’s Haitians are legally employed in local microchip manufacturing and Amazon fulfillment centers. Your Toyota may have an axle fabricated at the hands of a member of this community, and that salad you’re eating may have been packaged by them at a Dole Fresh Vegetables in Springfield.Springfield has seen a substantial increase in Haitian immigration in recent years. A city of 58,000 is hosting 12,000 to 15,000 newcomers. That puts pressure on city services while also adding to the city’s tax revenue. Time and proper planning can pave a path of prosperity forward for everyone.On the other hand, a new Black population moving into a largely white town is a huge temptation to those who want to stoke division. It looks like a windfall. Spin a lie about immigrants and their barbarism and you get to hate on Democrats, the media and immigrants, simultaneously.But at the heart of it is a lie, a cowardly invention that you knowingly want others to promote. That basic fact ought to reveal the salient truth of today’s political lie. If Trump and Vance can’t take responsibility for their actions now, why would anyone think they could take responsibility for the country later?

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      With bombast and defiance, Trump stages first rally since apparent assassination attempt

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      Donald Trump on Wednesday night staged his first rally since he became the target of a second attempted assassination in as many months, telling his supporters in a sports venue outside New York City that what he called “these encounters with death” had only hardened him.“God has now spared my life. It must have been God, not once, but twice,” Trump said to loud cheers from the ecstatic crowd.The former president took his usual ragbag of lies, hyperbole, and dark and racist invective to the Nassau Coliseum in the suburbs of Long Island, just seven miles from the borders of New York City. It was an audacious choice of location, given that there are just 48 days til the election and New York is on neither main party’s list of priorities.The state is reliably Democratic, having last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1984 with Ronald Reagan’s re-election. Even Nassau county, where the arena is situated, voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by 54% to Trump’s 45%, while the latest New York state polls show Kamala Harris comfortably ahead of him by double digits.Yet Trump clearly saw method in his madness. Long Island, the leafy suburbs that stretch east from the city, has shifted towards the right in recent years, becoming something of an incubator for the Make America Great Again (Maga) upheaval.A large crowd descended on the Coliseum, packing the arena full after hours of waiting in line. Supporters appeared to vie with each other for the most provocative Maga clothing.Men wore “Women for Trump” T-shirts. Several supporters wore “Fight, Fight, Fight” slogans, which shot to popularity after an assassination attempt against the former president in Butler county, Pennsylvania in July.One man sported a black T-shirt with a golden bullet etched on it, and the words: “Just the tip, I promise”. Flyers were handed out by a group calling itself “Japan for Trump”, proclaiming that “God chose Trump” and insisting that the former president was immortal and had been George Washington in a past life.View image in fullscreenSecurity was tight, with helicopters buzzing overhead as Trump arrived, police dogs patrolling wooded areas, and the entire perimeter swept – a lesson learned from the drubbing the US secret service has received in the wake of the Butler county and last Sunday’s Palm Beach, Florida shooting incidents.Despite the violent shocks of recent weeks, Trump took to the Coliseum stage with trademark braggadocio. The arena that once hosted Elvis Presley, Elton John and The Beach Boys now had a new star to accommodate.“We are going to win New York!”, he boasted to a packed arena, disregarding the polls which suggest otherwise.Trump returned to the vexed topic of Springfield, the town in Ohio which was the subject of his racist dog-eating remarks at last week’s presidential debate. He repeated his denigration of Haitian immigrants there as “illegal aliens”, when in fact most are legally resident on temporary protected status.Then he derided the local mayor for offering Haitian children English lessons and interpretation in local schools.“What the hell is wrong with our country,” Trump spluttered, vowing to pour yet more fuel on the fire by visiting Springfield personally within the next two weeks. A long diatribe about the heinous acts of “migrant criminals” followed.Other dystopian stories and falsehoods featured in the 90-minute speech. If Harris wins in November, he claimed, New York state “will be like a third-world country, if it isn’t already”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump also got back on his election-denial hobby horse, lying that the 2020 election had been “rigged and stolen”. He called the battle against climate change a “green scam”, claiming that the planet was getting cooler, when in fact this summer was the hottest on record in the northern hemisphere.As he returned to a favoured theme – – bashing the “fake news media” – what was notable was how the crowd met him, and raised him.“Fuck you media!” a man shouted within earshot of the Guardian.“We’ll get you later!”, said another.“Enemy of the people!”The last time Trump had the gall to enter New York territory for a rally was May in the South Bronx. The event was designed to highlight Trump’s support among Black and Latino voters – a theme he returned to on Wednesday, claiming that his standing among both groups was “way off the charts, and they don’t know what to do about it”.What he didn’t say was that recent opinion polls suggest that his support among these critical communities might be slipping following Harris’s entry into the race.So much bombast. So much adoration. Trump was back in the state he used to call home – at least the Maga part of it – and he was loving it.“I can save New York in three months,” he bragged. “November 5 will be your liberation.” More

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      Teamsters decline to endorse election candidate – but claim majority backs Trump

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      The Teamsters International, which represents over 1.3 million workers, declined to endorse a candidate ahead of November’s presidential election – but released data suggesting most of its members backed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.The union’s decision to not make an election endorsement, for the first time in almost three decades, comes in the wake of scrutiny of its president, Sean O’Brien, becoming the first Teamsters leader to address the the Republican national convention in July. John Palmer, vice-president at large at the Teamsters, called the decision to appear at the convention, “unconscionable” given Trump’s record opposing labor unions.Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, met with the Teamsters this week for a roundtable discussion prior to the decision. Trump and Joe Biden attended roundtable with the union earlier this year.“Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before big business,” O’Brien said in a statement on Wednesday. “We sought commitments from both Trump and Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries – and to honor our members’ right to strike – but were unable to secure those pledges.”Polling data released by the union ahead of the announcement showed that its members supported Biden over Trump, though more recent surveys conduct by the union revealed membership supported Trump over Harris.The Teamsters National Black Caucus endorsed Harris last month.In response to the non-endorsement, Teamsters against Trump, a grassroots group of Teamster members and retirees, announced they will expand campaigning efforts to elect Vice President Kamala Harris.The California Teamsters also came out on 18 September to endorse Harris in response to the Teamsters International’s lack of endorsement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When it comes to my vote for President, as a proud Teamster there’s no contest. Donald Trump doesn’t give a damn about the working class. As President, Trump didn’t lift a finger to help Teamsters whose pensions were in danger. Instead, he installed his billionaire friends in the White House and did everything he could to stop workers from organizing into unions,” said James Larkin, a member of Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit, Michigan and member of the group, in a statement. More