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      Election outcome may depend on whether Harris or Trump can rebrand themselves as ‘new’

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      When Kamala Harris sat down for her first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee, she praised Joe Biden for his intelligence, commitment, judgment and disposition. But twice she used the phrase “turn the page”. And twice she used the phrase “a new way forward”.This was no accident. US voters are yearning for a shift in direction, with two in three saying the next president should represent a major change from Joe Biden, according to a national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College. Yet in November they face a choice between two known quantities: Harris, the sitting vice-president, and Donald Trump, a former president with an inescapable four-year record.Just 25% of voters think Harris signifies a major change, the poll found, while 56% believe she represents “more of the same”. When it comes to Trump, 51% think he would offer major change, whereas 35% consider him more of the same. Victory in the race for the White House might be decided by which of these quasi-incumbents can rebrand themselves as a breath of fresh air for a weary, divided nation.Despite the polling, Democrats are convinced that Harris has the momentum. “The American people are looking for not just new faces but a new message,” said Donna Brazile, a former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee. “They’re looking for somebody who can heal our divisions and close our partisan divides. To the extent she’s running on a message of bringing the American people together, it helps her become a change agent.”Since 1836, just one sitting vice-president, George HW Bush in 1988, has been elected to the White House. Those who tried and failed include Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000. Gore’s decision to distance himself from his popular but scandal-plagued boss, Bill Clinton, may have proved costly in his narrow defeat by George W Bush.Harris, a former senator, California attorney general and local prosecutor, became the first woman and person of colour to serve as vice-president after Biden selected her as his running mate in the 2020 election. Like most vice-presidents, she gained relatively little public attention for three and a half years.And when she did, some of the headlines were negative, for example those regarding her role in tackling the root causes of immigration and apparent discontent in her office. Axios reports that of the 47 Harris staff publicly disclosed to the Senate in 2021, only five still worked for her as of this spring.But after the president’s feeble debate performance against Trump on 27 June, everything changed. Biden bowed to pressure, dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris. The Democratic party quickly rallied around her with a combination of relief and energy bordering on ecstasy.Speakers at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago dutifully paid tribute to Biden’s service but then pivoted to looking forward to a new era under Harris. Her acceptance speech, and a biographical video, did not dwell on her vice-presidency but rather introduced her life story as if for the first time.Brazile, a Democratic strategist, said: “People see don’t see her as vice-president in large part because they rarely see the vice-president as leading the country. But she’s campaigning on a platform that includes bringing people together, ensuring that most Americans can make ends meet.“Donald Trump is a prisoner of the past. She’s a pioneer of a future. That’s the message that brings people in line with her values versus what he campaigns on every day, which is all about attacks, insults and derogatory statements.”On the campaign trail, Harris has been walking a political tightrope, embracing her boss’s achievements while keeping his unpopular baggage at arm’s length. Whereas Biden touted jobs and growth numbers, Harris has acknowledged the rising cost of living and proposed a federal ban on grocery price-gouging.Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “She wants it both ways. She wants to take credit for the improvement in the economy, the number of jobs, the successes of bringing inflation down. But she doesn’t want to be blamed for voters’ continuing frustration that they’ve been hurt because of inflation.He added: “She’s been trying to run as the change candidate, which is very strange because the change motif is for the challenger, not the incumbent party.”The switch from Biden, 81, to 59-year-old Harris instantly removed the Democrats’ biggest vulnerability – age – and weaponised it against Trump who, at 78, is the oldest major party nominee in US history.At the first debate in June, he came over as more engaged and vital than Biden, who stumbled over answers and stared into the distance with mouth agape. At the next debate on Tuesday, it is Trump whose age will be thrown into sharp relief by a rival nearly two decades younger – who would become the first female president in the country’s 248-year history if she wins.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “We went from a generic where we had two candidates who were pushing 80, so anytime that you add in a new element and someone who is generationally younger, that’s a change without even having to say a word. The fact that we are going from two old white men to a woman of colour – that screams change. It creates the tangible illustration of past versus future.”Trump has been wrongfooted by the Democrats’ abrupt change of nominee and still complains bitterly about it. Nicknames such as “Crooked Joe” and “Sleepy Joe”, as well as criticism of alleged Biden family corruption, now ring hollow. He has continued to repeat his false claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election as he makes his third bid for the White House. Still promising to “Make America great again”, he has lost the mantle of a disrupter taking on the status quo.Bardella, a former spokesperson and senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee, added: “Any time that you’re the candidate whose slogan uses the word ‘again’, that doesn’t scream change. That screams going backwards. Clearly voters want something that’s more forward-facing and, frankly, more optimistic as well. I don’t think we can overestimate the tone difference.“One campaign is saying, it’s a disaster, everything is terrible, America will be destroyed if Kamala Harris is president. The other campaign is saying we can do better, we can be better, our best days lie ahead. It’s much more optimistic and for voters coming out of Covid, January 6, the sense of weariness they have with both Biden and with Trump, that idea of turning the page and having a fresh start is a very appealing sentiment.”The Trump campaign has unleashed countless attacks tying Harris to Biden’s record on immigration, inflation and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan but with little tangible effect, at least so far. Instead, Harris continues to wear her vice-presidency lightly and cast herself as the candidate of the future.Whit Ayres, a political consultant and pollster, said: “She’s not pulling it off because of particular policy positions, but her race and gender create an image of change without ever stressing it or mentioning it.“The idea that a Black, Asian American woman could be president of the United States says change all by itself. That’s how she has created this impression that she is the change candidate in a change election, even though she’s the incumbent vice-president.”Trump would be wise to contrast his White House record with that of the Biden-Harris administration, Ayres argues. “Emphasising the economy and immigration is an obvious place for him to go. And then painting Harris as a San Francisco liberal – and there are plenty of issue positions that she has taken, in the past at any rate, that allow him to do that. If he could actually focus on that rather than using schoolyard bullying name-calling, he could win the thing.”Trump represented the shock of the new in 2016, running as an anti-establishment outsider, rattling the foundations of the Republican party and defeating the Democratic stalwart Hillary Clinton. But eight years, four criminal cases and two impeachments later, many Americans say the act has gone stale and the novelty has worn off.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “He feels diminished to me. He feels smaller, less relevant, he’s not breaking through. In part it’s because she’s rising above and talking about where she wants to take the country; she’s not engaging him. He’s using this old formula of creating chaos and fighting with his opponents and she’s not playing, and it’s hurting him.”He added: “There’s only one Trump. This Trump isn’t working the way it used to and they don’t have a plan B, and the Trump campaign’s in trouble. He’s singing the same songs and they’re not connecting the way they used to. It’s a real problem for him.”But the latest New York Times and Siena College poll – in which Trump is up by one percentage point at 48% to Harris’s 47% – makes Republicans sceptical of the notion that she has become synonymous with change in the minds of the electorate.Lanhee Chen, who was the policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, said: “There’s no question that if you look at the media narrative, that’s how she’s been framed. But with voters it could be a very different picture. As we get a little bit more data, we’ll be able to get a firmer sense of whether this framing is one that’s taken hold or if it’s just an inside-the-Beltway creation. Hard to say at this point.” More

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      ‘The chilling effect’: behind GOP-led states’ efforts to purge some voters from the rolls

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      Earlier this week, Texas governor Greg Abbott sent out a press release with an eye-popping headline: his state had removed more than 1 million people from its voter rolls since 2021. Among them were 6,500 non-citizens. A little under a third of those non-citizens had some sort of voting history in Texas, where there were nearly 18 million registered voters as of March, and were referred to the attorney general for further investigation.Two days later, the governor’s office quietly revised the statement posted online. Instead of saying 6,500 non-citizens had been removed, the updated version said 6,500 potential non-citizens had been removed. Renae Eze, an Abbott spokesperson, said that the statement sent out to an email list of reporters on Monday contained the phrasing “potential non-citizens”. She did not respond to a query on why the version that was publicly posted initially omitted the word “potential”.The statement was the latest example of how Republican-led states are touting aggressive efforts to remove people with early voting, scheduled to begin in weeks and less than 70 days until election day. Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Ohio have all made similar announcements recently.Voting rights groups are concerned these announcements are misleading, and that the efforts to purge are putting naturalized citizens – eligible voters – at risk for being removed. There is also concern that these efforts are running afoul of a federal law that prohibits systematic removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.Looking closer at the Texas announcement, there were other questions. The vast majority of people removed had been cancelled for routine reasons – they had either died or moved. The number of voters cancelled for these reasons is similar to totals from past years, according to a New York Times analysis.“Releasing these numbers without context is a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate voters of color and naturalized citizens from exercising their rights to vote, which is particularly concerning given the upcoming election,” said Savannah Kumar, a voting rights attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.“With the state having invented the fabricated issue of widespread illegal voting as a tactic to intimidate people of color from exercising their right to vote, we’re seeing now that the state has to resort to spinning otherwise ordinary data to make it look like it’s addressing this invented problem.”In Tennessee, state election officials sent out notices to more than 14,000 suspected non-citizens on the eve of early voting in June, warning them of the criminal penalty they could face for voting illegally. The effort immediately drew scrutiny because Tennessee was looking to see whether someone reported being a non-citizen at the DMV to flag them as a non-citizen. That kind of comparison has been shown to be unreliable in the past, because people may get a driver’s license and become naturalized citizens before they have to renew it.The state sent out 14,375 notices, and at least 3,200 people – around 22% – responded saying they were in fact citizens. Election officials eventually admitted that those who didn’t respond would not be removed from the rolls, even if they didn’t respond.In Alabama, the state’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, announced that his office had identified 3,251 people on the voter rolls who had received a non-citizen identification number at one point from the Department of Homeland Security. While he acknowledged that some of those people may have since become naturalized citizens and eligible voters, he nonetheless designated all of them inactive voters and requested that they prove their citizenship. All 3,251 were also referred to the Alabama attorney general’s office for further investigation.A coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter to Allen on 19 August warning him that his actions violated the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 federal law that sets guardrails on how states can remove people from the voter rolls. Among other things it says that any systematic efforts to remove people must be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory”. The state also can’t complete any mass removal program within 90 days.“We’re extremely concerned about the chilling effect this has on registered voters generally speaking, and particularly newly naturalized citizens,” said Kate Huddleston, a lawyer at Campaign Legal Center, one of several groups that signed on to the letter warning Alabama that it may be running afoul of federal law.The Alabama secretary of state’s office did not say how many people had responded indicating they were citizens. In Jefferson county, one of the largest in the state, 557 were flagged as potential non-citizens, according to Barry Stephenson, the county’s registrar. Three people have responded to notices that went out so far, Stephenson said. Two people said they did not know how they had become registered voters. The third said they were a citizen.One Alabama voter, a Huntsville man named James Stroop, told the local news outlet WAFF 48 that he had been wrongly flagged. The Alabama department of labor had incorrectly noted he was a non-citizen on a form years ago. Even though he had corrected the issue with the department of labor, he was still marked as a non-citizen when the agency sent data to the Alabama secretary of state.“Imagine if Alabama’s DMV had different information about a different group of voters and they knew that some vanishingly small percentage of people with green eyes were ineligible to vote for some reason,” she added. “And then they pulled everyone with green eyes off the rolls. I think the problem would be obvious to everyone that you can’t just deregister voters because some vanishingly small percentage of them may be ineligible to vote.”In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, issued an executive order noting that his administration had removed 6,303 non-citizens from the rolls since taking office. That represents an incredibly small fraction of the more than 6.3 million people registered to vote in the state as of 1 July.Like Tennessee and Alabama, Virginia is flagging non-citizens on its rolls using both data from its DMV and the Department of Homeland Security to identify potential non-citizens. Anyone removed is given 14 days to indicate they are in fact citizens. It’s unclear how many of the people removed were actually non-citizens and how many simply didn’t respond.“We take seriously the potential for errors in database matching, the consequences for voters and the public at large of any erroneous removal of eligible voters from the voter registration rolls, and Virginia’s recent history of mistakes and errors with data sharing protocols in particular,” a group of civil rights groups wrote to Youngkin and Susan Beals, who runs the state’s department of elections.Ohio’s secretary of state Frank LaRose has promoted his office’s efforts to remove 137 suspected non-citizens from the voter rolls using DMV data. Several naturalized citizens have come forward to say they were wrongly flagged, including one man who said his voter registration was challenged months after he was naturalized.“We know that the number of non-citizens who vote is a vanishingly small number based on all available evidence,” Huddleston said. “By inflating the issue and sweeping in very predictably naturalized citizens, the Alabama secretary of state and others are preventing naturalized citizens from being able to vote and creating this chilling effect.” More

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      Kamala Harris defends policy stances and shares plan for office in first major interview

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      Kamala Harris sat for her first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee with CNN’s Dana Bash alongside her running mate, Tim Walz, on Thursday, and defended her shifts on certain policy issues over the years and her support for Joe Biden.In the interview, which was taped from Savannah, Georgia, earlier Thursday, the vice-president said her highest priority upon taking office would be to “support and strengthen the middle class” through policies including increasing the child tax credit, curtailing price gouging on everyday goods and increasing access to affordable housing – all policies that she has announced since she started campaigning for the presidency.Harris also shared how the president shared with her his decision not to continue running for re-election, a first public retelling of that moment. She said she was making breakfast with her family, including her nieces, and was just sitting down to do a puzzle when the phone rang, she said.“I asked him, are you sure? And he said yes. And that’s how I learned about it.” As far as whether she asked for his endorsement or he offered it, she said: “He was very clear that he was going to support me.”“My first thought was not about me, to be honest with you, my first thought was about him,” she said, adding that history will remember Biden’s presidency as transformative.Harris defended Biden, saying she had no regrets about supporting his re-election before his decision to leave the race, despite concerns over his age and acuity. She said serving as Biden’s vice-president has been “one of the greatest honors” of her career and that Biden has the “intelligence, commitment, judgement and disposition that the American people deserve in their president”, adding that the former president, Donald Trump, “has none of that”.She also touted the Biden administration’s work to restore the economy after the pandemic, pointing to capped insulin costs, the current inflation rate of under 3% and increases in US manufacturing jobs. “I’ll say that that’s good work,” she said. “There’s more to do, but that’s good work.”Harris explained her changes in positions on issues such as fracking and immigration by saying her “values had not changed”. On fracking, she said she made clear in the 2020 debate that she no longer supports a ban, and that as president she would not ban fracking. She added that she takes the climate crisis seriously but believes: “We can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”On immigration, Bash pointed to a moment when Harris raised her hand to indicate she believed the border should be decriminalized, asking if she still believes that. Harris said she thinks laws should be followed and enforced on immigration and noted that she is the only candidate in the race who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations.She also said she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet if she wins, though she didn’t have a specific Republican or position in mind.“I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion,” she said. “I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my cabinet who was a Republican.”She quickly cast off a question about Trump’s comments that she “happened to turn Black” in recent years: “Same old, tired playbook,” she said. “Next question, please.”The interview narrowly met a self-imposed timeline Harris set for a sit-down interview, which she promised would happen by the end of August. It comes less than two weeks before the first scheduled debate between Harris and Trump, planned for 10 September on ABC.Harris and Walz conducted the interview while on a bus tour around the Savannah, Georgia area as part of a whirlwind tour of the US since they took over the Democratic ticket.Harris has gotten criticism from across the political spectrum for not doing an on-the-record interview with the media since she started running for president. After the CNN interview was set, Republicans also criticized the joint interview with Walz and that the interview was pre-recorded and not live.Before the interview, Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance posted on Twitter/X: “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview” alongside a clip from the 2007 Miss Teen America pageant where a contestant garbled an answer about Americans not knowing geography, rambling about “like such as South Africa -and the Iraq, everywhere like such as”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWalz answered a few questions during the joint interview, though Harris largely led the campaign’s responses.Walz has faced scrutiny over misstatements and exaggerations he has made about his time in the national guard and about the specific fertility treatments his wife used. He didn’t explain in depth why he made these comments, instead saying that he speaks candidly and passionately. In one comment, he claimed he carried weapons of war in war, which he did not (he was not deployed to a war zone). He said that comment came after a school shooting and his grammar wasn’t correct. “I think people know me. They know who I am. They know where my heart is,” he said.“If it’s not this, it’s an attack on my children for showing love for me, or it’s an attack on my dog,” he said, referring to recent Republican attacks on him. “The one thing I’ll never do is I’ll never demean another service member in any way. I never have and I never will.”Bash brought up two key moments from the Democratic convention: Walz’s teenage son, Gus, crying and saying “that’s my dad” as his dad took the stage, and an image of one of Harris’s grand-nieces looking on as Harris gave her acceptance speech.Walz said his son’s reaction was “such a visceral emotional moment” that he was grateful to experience.Harris, who has not spoken much about how her win could break glass ceilings, said she was “deeply touched” by the photo and found it “very humbling” while saying: “I am running because I believe I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.”It’s unclear if Harris will start doing more media interviews as she continues on the campaign trail. As some commentators on CNN noted before the interview aired Thursday, increasing the frequency of interviews makes it less likely that each one becomes the topic of intense scrutiny and fixation like the CNN event became.Trump reacted to the interview on Truth Social, saying simply: “BORING!!!” More

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      Harris backed by major Latino voter group: ‘She understands immigrants’

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      The immigrant rights group Make the Road Action is backing Kamala Harris in its first-ever general election presidential endorsement.The 15-year-old organisation dedicated to Latino voter engagement in key swing states including Nevada and Pennsylvania, had previously supported Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential primaries but has otherwise avoided endorsing any presidential candidates. The voter mobilization group’s endorsement on Thursday, provided first to the Guardian, comes amid a rush of enthusiasm for Harris’s nascent campaign.“Harris taking on the nomination has added a new kind of energy,” said Theo Oshiro, executive director at Make the Road New York. “Our members are excited. Harris is a woman of colour, and a person who comes from an immigrant family. So they see their children or themselves in this candidate. They feel that she is someone who at least understands where we are coming from.”The decision to make this first-ever general election endorsement came after two meetings with more than 250 members, who debated the stakes of the election before ultimately agreeing to publicly support Harris.The group is concerned about issues including housing affordability, the climate crisis and the US government’s role in Israel’s war on Gaza. But immigration rights were the main focus of deliberations.Painful memories from the Trump administration’s immigration policies, as well as his amped-up anti-immigrant rhetoric and his legally dubious plans for mass deportations and vast detention camps for migrants had upped the pressure. “We are hungry, and ready to fight back,” Oshiro said. “This was one of those moments in history where we had to come together to beat Donald Trump.”Harris will need to shore up support from Latinx communities in swing states, including Pennsylvania and Nevada where Make the Road has a presence, to secure a victory in November. The organisation is on track to knock about 1m doors this election cycle – including half a million in Pennsylvania, and 330,000 in Nevada.Members agreed that Harris has a complicated record on immigration, starting with her warning during her first foreign trip as vice-president to would-be Guatemalan immigrants: “Do not come” across the US-Mexico border. Harris will also have to answer for the Biden administration’s decision to severely restrict asylum at the US southern border.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Harris has also shown that she is someone who is willing to work with immigrant rights activists and push for much-needed reforms, Oshiro said. Shortly after the Biden administration announced his asylum restrictions, infuriating many Democrats and Latino leaders who likened them to Trump-era policies, the administration also unveiled a new plan to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented spouses of US citizens.“We talked about this deeply, because the Biden administration, and by extension, Kamala Harris as Biden’s vice-president, have not been perfect on immigration,” Oshiro said. “When we’re doing endorsements, we’re not picking a saviour. We’re picking someone we think we can move and push to the right direction.” More

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      Can Kamala Harris win over disenchanted Latino voters?

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      The abrupt substitution of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden as the Democratic party’s presidential nominee has energized two of the party’s bedrock bases of support – pro-choice women and African Americans – along with millions of young voters who felt dismay at the Hobson’s choice posed by two old white guys in the presidential contest.But the country’s estimated 36 million eligible Latino voters could be another story.Their importance in presidential races has been steadily growing over the past 50 years, and Latinos are projected to represent nearly 15% of eligible voters nationwide by November.Historically, Latinos have ranked among the Democratic party’s most reliable sources of votes, in about the same league as Black and Jewish voters. But the party’s once commanding advantage has been shrinking. Hillary Clinton trounced Donald Trump among Latinos nationwide in 2016 by a factor of 81% to 16%, yet four years later the former president upped his share to one out of every four votes cast by Latinos.A slew of prominent Latino politicians and trade unionists have endorsed the vice-president since the president’s withdrawal from the race on 21 July. They include some progressive Democrats who had condemned the terse message Harris had for would-be Latin American immigrants to the United States during a 2021 press conference in Guatemala City: “Do not come.”But it remains unclear whether Latino voters overall will give Harris a big boost in her bid to defeat Trump. For starters, they are diverse in national origin as well as the circumstances and histories of their communities’ immigration.Most southern California Chicanos reflect their state’s liberal tendencies and have little in common ideologically with the majority of Miami’s right-leaning Cuban Americans. Phoenix-based pollster Mike Noble notes that Latino voters whose roots go back to Colombia, Venezuela and other South American countries have been gravitating towards the Republican party over the past four years.Latinos are not yet digging deep into their pockets to support Harris. Two Zoom fundraising calls with Black women and men held on consecutive nights right after Biden bowed out brought in a total of $2.8m. Similar Zoom calls with Latinas and Latinos for Kamala on 24 and 31 July, respectively, posted a combined net haul of $188,000.Axios Latino has been tracking US Latinos’ views of Harris in conjunction with Noticias Telemundo and the Ipsos market research and public opinion firm since the first year of the Biden administration. By the end of 2021, Axios Latino found that 48% of Latinos had a favorable opinion of Harris – but that figure had slumped to 39% by last March. A different survey of Latinos in 10 states found that sentiment persisted in Arizona and Nevada even days after Biden’s fateful debate performance in late June.But a more recent survey of 800 Latino voters living in seven swing states brought Harris and the Democrats some very welcome news. Carried out by the pollster Gary Segura on behalf of the Washington-based Somos Political Action Committee in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s bombshell announcement, the survey gave Harris an impressive 18-percentage-point lead over Trump and surprisingly high favorability ratings among Latino voters in Arizona and Nevada, which have the highest percentage of eligible Latino voters among those swing states.In a separate poll by Equis Research released Wednesday, Harris is still a few points short of Biden’s support from Latino voters in the 2020 election, but is still leading Trump by 19 points among registered Latino voters in the seven most competitive states.Harris and her newly selected running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, addressed rallies in Phoenix and Las Vegas late last week, and a new 30-second TV spot aimed at Latino voters has started airing in both English and Spanish.“Throughout her career, she’s always worked to earn the support of Latino voters and has made core issues like healthcare, childcare and fighting gun violence her focus,” said the campaign’s Hispanic media director, Maca Casado. “Vice-President Harris’s campaign knows Latinos’ political power, and we won’t take their votes for granted.”In Harris’s performance at the polls among Latinos in her native California, she garnered a majority of the Latino vote in both of her successful campaigns for the office of state attorney general, in 2010 and 2014.But Latinos are not expected to play a decisive role in the Golden state or any of the other three states where they are most numerous. Both California and New York are widely considered to be a lock for Democrats, and the same is true of Texas and Florida for Republicans.That leaves Arizona and Nevada, and the outlook for Democrats remains cloudy.CNN exit polling in November 2020 showed Biden beating Trump handily among Arizona Latino voters by a 27-percentage-point margin, thanks in part to folks like Matthew Sotelo. The 37-year-old leader of a non-profit community organization in Phoenix is a registered Democrat who thinks that Biden has done a “solid” job as president. But Sotelo senses a welcome change in the political climate since Harris became the party’s standard bearer.“The energy is different, and despite what the polls say about Harris being in a dead heat with Trump, the momentum is swinging to her side,” says the Arizona-born Mexican American.During Harris’s abortive run for the presidency in 2019, Sotelo did have some reservations about her track record as a prosecutor in San Francisco who sought prison terms for people arrested for possession of small amounts of controlled substances. But he sees her as an open-minded politician.“Do I think she has done a perfect job [on the border]? Absolutely not,” says Sotelo. “But I understand there has been an opportunity for Harris to grow as a leader, and she’ll continue to learn and grow.”One seasoned Latino pollster warns that Republicans have made major inroads in Arizona. “The Democrats have been losing ground there, and a lot of it has to do with the border,” says Eduardo Gamarra, a Florida International University professor of political science who oversaw last month’s poll of Latino voters in 10 states.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFelix Garcia concurs. Born in the Mexican state of Sonora and a resident of Phoenix since 2000, the 42-year-old business consultant has spent his entire life on either side of the US-Mexican border.“We have so many people from different countries on the border every day, and Kamala has never tried to fix the situation on the border,” says the registered Republican, who describes himself as a moderate in the mold of the late Arizona senator John McCain.Garcia’s issues with Harris do not end with immigration. “We have so many problems with the Biden administration – inflation, Ukraine, Russia, Israel – and she is part of this administration,” he says.During a campaign rally in Arizona last Friday, Harris drew attention to the years she served as California’s attorney general. “I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and human traffickers,” she declared. “I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.”Mike Noble, a former consultant and manager of Republican legislative campaigns in Arizona, found that many Latino voters in Arizona and Nevada are focused on pocketbook issues like inflation and housing affordability. Those anxieties are not likely to favor Harris.“She’s done a little better in places like the midwest and Pennsylvania, but in the sun belt, Harris is basically starting off in the same position as Biden was,” he says.The ascent of Harris has left David Navarro unmoved. The 27-year-old native of Las Vegas is a registered Democrat who supported Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids in 2016 and 2020 and voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election. But he says he is done with both major political parties and will vote for Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein in the fall.“I don’t support their views or any of their policies towards Israel and Gaza, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are doing anything to address the causes of inflation, which are corporations and their price increases,” says the systems engineer whose father immigrated from El Salvador. “They don’t value us as Americans, and I don’t want a presidential candidate who is run by the major donors who are billionaires and the corporations.”A scholar from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) cautions that many Latinos in that state, like millions of Americans across the country regardless of their race or ethnicity, do not know all that much about Harris at this juncture beyond her name and current job title.“People know Biden and Trump, but when it comes to Harris, she has a lot more opportunity to shape the narrative, introduce herself and recalibrate things,” says Rebecca Gill, UNLV associate professor of political science. “She has the potential to move her numbers more than Trump or Biden.”In a volatile election cycle already punctuated by an assassination attempt, a debate debacle of historic dimensions, and the nomination of the first Black female presidential candidate of a major political party, Latino voters could spring surprises of their own even in swing states with relatively small Latino populations.“The Hispanic vote is large enough in virtually every state in the US that it could make the difference between winning and losing, including Pennsylvania and Georgia,” notes Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic pollster who specializes in tracking voting trends in the Latino community.“It’s the very reason why so many people are hyper-focused on the Hispanic vote.” More

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      This Texas border city is tired of being a ‘pawn’ in Trump’s ‘political games’

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      Just a few blocks from a riverbank park in Eagle Pass that’s been turned into a no-go militarized zone by Texas troops, local pastor Javier Leyva was attempting a normal Sunday.He was cultivating fellowship with congregants of his First United Methodist church and other residents downtown, on the US-Mexico border. But, as so often, events were to intrude. A fringe, rightwing group was headed to town.His small city is under unwanted global scrutiny because of people migrating here and the forces that want to stop them.People sporadically cross the Rio Grande from Mexico after being denied legal entry into the US because of tight government restrictions. Sometimes there are tragic consequences, sometimes migrants are detained by US federal agents, other times they run afoul of the $11bn Texas border security plan known as Operation Lone Star, designed to deter migration.Leyva is tired of the heavy-handed and expensive law enforcement presence, that has transformed the picturesque riverbank and not only skews perceptions of Eagle Pass but is costly, while he sees local services suffer.“It’s all a political show and they’re using Eagle Pass as a pawn for their political games,” Leyva said. “I’m for border security, but if they would use that money for the infrastructure here, we’d be in hog heaven,” he said.About 23% of Eagle Pass residents are estimated to live below the federal poverty line, more than double the national rate, according to the US Census Bureau.Colonias, a Spanish word to describe low-income neighborhoods, are found along the border and often have street drainage issues or lack running water and sewer connections.Leyva says more infrastructure investments in the colonias are one of the ways the community would greatly benefit from taxpayer funds being spent by the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, on Operation Lone Star, which has blighted Eagle Pass and caused a clash with the federal government.The border town with a population of 28,000 has experienced many ups and downs in the spotlight of immigration issues.View image in fullscreenMigrants seek asylum sometimes in large numbers, but recently in very low numbers. At times, dozens of journalists descend upon the remote town 140 miles south-west of San Antonio. Year round, hundreds of military and law enforcement officers are deployed to the city from in-state and around the US.And within the last year, far-right groups have homed in on Eagle Pass as a destination for aggressive demonstrations against immigration and in favor of Donald Trump.While Leyva was delivering his sermon at church last weekend, a so-called Take Our Border Back Convoy was en route from Dripping Springs, Texas, to Eagle Pass, roughly a 200-mile (322km) drive, aiming to protest on both sides of the border.In response, the local police, Texas department of public safety (DPS) troopers and national guard soldiers deployed by Texas were on high alert and prominent in the quiet streets of Eagle Pass.A previous convoy by the same group in February rolled dozens of trucks and hundreds of outsiders into town, many armed, and led to a border patrol facility being evacuated after extremist threats.Last weekend, police once again set up roadblocks leading to Shelby Park, the municipal park on the Rio Grande that has been taken over by Operation Lone Star and militarized. And the city braced as several police and trooper units were called in to stake out different parts of downtown or to patrol, in a city that is already policed out of proportion to the local population.But, in the event, fewer than 10 vehicles arrived, with US flags flying and Trump bumper stickers, and stopped in a pawn shop parking lot.One participant told the Guardian they had come “to pray on both sides of the border”. In fact, the small group of about 20 people walked across the international bridge on to the Mexican side and used a megaphone to shout in the general direction of Mexico: “We don’t want the illegals coming across our border destroying America,” and: “We declare these borders closed in the name of Jesus Christ.”View image in fullscreenThe group’s flyer features a picture of retired army officer Michael Flynn. But there was no sign of him in Eagle Pass last Sunday. He was then president Trump’s first national security adviser, who was disgraced and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with a Russian official. Trump pardoned him and Flynn said Trump should deploy the military to “re-run the 2020 election” in the swing states Joe Biden won.Despite the small turnout this time the uninvited visitors heightened the sense for ordinary residents that their city has become a battleground and that Christian faith is being usurped.“The convoy has been deceived,” Leyva said. “God didn’t send you here, you sent yourself using God as justification.”He added: “They think they’re trying to do the right thing, the patriotic thing. But they’re taking the law into their own hands and that’s not how this country runs.”Locals typically spend weekends shopping with family, dining at restaurants, and attending church services. Residents from the Mexican sister city, Piedras Negras, regularly cross the international bridge to shop downtown. People talk of experiencing peace in border living – a reality that the wider world doesn’t see or hear much about.Several blocks away from the Methodist church is immigration attorney Cesar Lozano’s law office where he specializes in cases dealing with asylum and deportation. Lozano is an immigrant himself and came to the US with his family from Durango, Mexico, as a child. He recalled the natural anxiety and nervousness that immigrating to a new country brings and is something he relates to among clients.With Eagle Pass in the spotlight, he said: “One side says it’s attention for us and there’s a lot of people that have benefited from the economic activity” – brought by multiple law enforcement agencies basing themselves in the area.“On the other side, it’s sad to see that we are on the map for the wrong reasons. We are used as props, no one used to care about us until now, we continue to be a venue for marches and convoys,” he said.Safety is the ultimate concern for residents whenever anti-immigrant groups or hostile individuals target the region, Lozano said, rather than when migrants arrive.A Tennessee man affiliated with a militia was arrested earlier this year by the FBI for plotting to travel to Eagle Pass while aspiring to kill both migrants and federal agents.During the February convoy, a friend of Lozano’s who works for the Mexican consulate in Eagle Pass was told to go home early because the authorities didn’t know what to expect from all of the people descending upon the region.Trump and his supporters talk of “open borders” and migration as spreading crime. Meanwhile, gaining entry to the US is difficult on many levels, whether people are undocumented or not.View image in fullscreen“The borders are not open and this is just political rhetoric,” Lozano said. “That’s ridiculous and insulting because my clients are going through a system where they’re vetted, must have a sponsor, have to go through background checks, and all the info submitted on applications is verified.”He questioned Operation Lone Star’s legality, as immigration enforcement is the exclusive responsibility of the federal government, which is in a long legal battle with the state.Meanwhile, downtown, Yocelyn Riojas is leading a group exhibition in Eagle Pass of more than 40 artists who have created works on the theme of “The Border is Beautiful.”“It’s meant to connect us with different perspectives of what our lives are like at the border,” Riojas said. “A lot of the artwork is nostalgic of earlier days, before this militarization.”Riojas said locals dislike the city’s lack of willingness to openly discuss political issues concerning things like the controversial buoys placed by Texas in the river and the mayor in effect signing away Shelby Park to the state.And she added: “If you don’t live here, then you have no understanding of what’s going on. Before anybody speaks for the community, they need to come learn and educate themselves on what is actually happening and how locals actually feel about the issues.” More

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      Republicans want to grill Harris for her immigration record – but what is it?

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      This week, the House passed a Republican-led resolution condemning Kamala Harris for her role in the Biden administration’s handling of immigration, part of a ramped-up effort to portray the presumptive Democratic nominee as dangerously lax on border security.Following Joe Biden’s decision to bow out of the presidential race, Donald Trump has also unleashed a barrage of fresh attacks on the US vice-president’s record on immigration, a politically volatile issue expected to play a central role in the November presidential election.“She was the border czar, but she never went to the border,” Trump said, repeating two falsehoods in a single attack line during a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday.As vice-president, Harris was handed a daunting mission at the onset of her term: to address the “root causes” of migration from the northern-triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. But at no point was she put in charge of border policy. That is the responsibility of the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was with Harris when she visited the border in June 2021, three months after she was given the assignment.Instead, Harris’s mandate, as laid out by the president, was to meet with government officials and private-sector partners to tackle enduring problems in the region, such as poverty, violence and a lack of economic opportunity, that drive people to migrate from their home countries to the United States, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a senior adviser of immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.“It was a diplomatic and development focus,” she said, “not a border focus.”The distinction has not stopped Republicans from misleadingly branding Harris as the nation’s “border czar” and blaming her for the sharp upticks in migration under the Biden administration. In a statement on Thursday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, accused the vice-president of having done “nothing to address the worsening crisis at the border”.“The result of her inaction has been record high illegal crossings, overwhelmed communities and an evisceration of the rule of law,” he said.Republicans are pouring tens of millions of dollars into ads hammering that connection while highlighting past comments in which Harris had expressed an openness to certain progressive-leaning proposals, such as reimagining Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and decriminalizing border crossings.Democrats’ tolerance for such immigration policies, however, has receded greatly since then, as migration levels climbed and it became a top issue for voters. For the first time in decades, a majority of Americans say there should be less immigration, according to a Gallup survey.As encounters at the border reached record levels last year, Harris endorsed a bipartisan border security package opposed by many immigration rights advocates that would have dramatically limited the number of people allowed to claim asylum at the US-Mexico border while bolstering funding for asylum and border patrol officials and for combatting fentanyl smuggling. But congressional Republicans abandoned the proposal after Trump urged them not to hand Biden an election-year political victory.With Congress refusing to act, Biden issued an executive order in June that temporarily suspended asylum between ports of entry.While the number of border crossings between legal ports of entry had already fallen from a record high of 250,000 in December, due in part to increased enforcement by Mexico, it plunged further in the months since Biden’s clampdown took effect.In June, border patrol made 83,536 arrests, the lowest tally since Biden took office in January 2021.Early on in her career, as the district attorney of San Francisco, Harris quickly established herself as a vocal supporter of immigrant rights, publicly denouncing legislation that would have criminalized providing assistance to undocumented immigrants.But in 2008, she broke with immigrant rights advocates and supported a policy proposed by then mayor Gavin Newsom to notify federal immigration authorities if an undocumented juvenile was arrested in suspicion of a felony, regardless of whether they were actually convicted of a crime, according to the Sacramento Bee. (Later, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris’s campaign told CNN that the policy “could have been applied more fairly”.)As California’s attorney general, Harris also worked to ensure state agencies assisted undocumented immigrants applying for U visas, a form of immigration relief designated for victims of certain crimes.In the Senate, after Harris was elected in 2016, she became a leading advocate for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, and an outspoken critic of Trump-era border policies. In her maiden speech as a US senator, Harris assailed Trump’s policies targeting immigrants. “I know what a crime looks like, and I will tell you: an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal,” she said, a refrain Republicans have resurfaced to use against her.Many immigration advocates recall her sharp questioning of Trump officials during a senate hearing on the administration’s policy of separating children from their parents as a form of immigration deterrence.As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris unveiled a plan to shield millions of undocumented people from deportation through the use of deferred actions programs and to make it easier for Dreamers to apply for green cards. The Biden administration recently announced a series of similar executive moves.But as the administration’s chief liaison to the three northern-triangle countries, progress can be hard to measure, analysts say.“She was given something that is not a quick fix and it’s arguable whether or not you can make substantial change in only one presidential term,” said Cardinal Brown, citing the endemic nature of some of the issues.Harris’s efforts to improve economic opportunity in the region have generated $5.2bn in private-sector commitments since May 2021, the White House said. Apprehensions of people from those countries crossing the US-Mexico border fell considerably between the 2021 and 2023 fiscal years, even as migration from across the hemisphere surged.At the same time, the narrow strategy, focusing solely on Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, was not reactive to the “paradigm shift” taking place at the southern border, Cardinal Brown said. Now people are fleeing crises all over the world, with a growing number of arrivals coming from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti.Harris also struggled to overcome early stumbles. During her first trip to Guatemala, the vice-president delivered a speech in which she memorably told people considering migrating north: “Do not come. Do not come.” The statement, which was instantly turned into a meme, was widely panned by immigration advocates who saw it as dismissive of the harsh conditions that cause people to flee – the very issues she was tasked with improving.While in Guatemala, Harris sat for an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, who pressed her on why she hadn’t yet visited the US-Mexico border.“I’ve never been to Europe,” a frustrated Harris responded. “I don’t understand the point you’re making.”Republicans again seized on the exchange to accuse her of ignoring an issue that is front-of-mind for many Americans. Harris visited the border shortly after, but her approval ratings sank and didn’t recover.Yet despite conservatives’ yearslong effort to tie the vice-president to the Biden administration’s challenges at the border, new public opinion research found that immigration was not one of the top issues voters associated with Harris – at least not yet.“Republicans are really enthusiastically trying to tie her to that, but the voters don’t,” said Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster for the Democratic research group Blueprint, which conducted the survey.While immigration was a clear potential vulnerability for Harris, as it is for most Democratic candidates, Roth Smith said she came to the issue with considerably less baggage than Biden had.“We’re not at some catastrophic level of doubt around her record on immigration,” he said. “Trump just has a trust advantage because he hasn’t shut up about immigration for eight years.”Many immigration advocates, meanwhile, see hope in Harris, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, who was elected to public office in a border state with a large undocumented population.Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, called Harris a “champion for Dreamers” and other undocumented people living in the United States.Cárdenas was confident Harris will draw a sharp contrast with Trump, who has pledged to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history”, removing “millions of illegal migrants”. But she urged the vice-president to go further by articulating a vision to expand legal pathways to citizenship – policies Harris has advocated for throughout her political career.“Falling back into an enforcement-only focus would actually be detrimental to her and would impact people that are enthusiastic about her now,” Cárdenas said, adding: “I don’t think she can avoid this issue. She’s going to have to outline it, and my hope is that because she knows it well that she’s going to be a forceful voice and advocate for positive change.” More

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      ‘A dystopian plot’: how will Trump’s Project 2025 affect California?

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      Donald Trump has not been shy about attacking California on the presidential campaign trail, telling fellow conservatives that “the place is failing” under Democratic party leadership. And all signs suggest that a second Trump administration would not hesitate to take a sledgehammer to principles and policy priorities that the Golden state and other progressive bastions hold dear.The Project 2025 policy document, a blueprint for a second Trump presidency drawn up by former Trump administration officials and sympathetic thinktank analysts, takes specific aim at California on abortion rights, fuel emissions standards and the transition to electric vehicles.The document also raises the possibility of a large-scale crackdown on immigration and an intense focus on border security – a cornerstone of the Trump campaign that could upend the lives of millions of immigrants living in California as well as parts of the state economy, especially agriculture, that depend heavily on immigrant labor.That is not to mention the other ways Project 2025 envisions overhauling the US government, with implications for California as much as the rest of the country: enhancing the power of the presidency and eroding the independence of the justice department, dismantling what it calls “the administrative state”, abandoning efforts to combat the climate crisis and curbing the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans.“Project 2025 is more than an idea,” the California congressman Jared Huffman has warned, “it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.”What remains to be seen, though, is how much of the wishlist laid out in Project 2025’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” is actually achievable. Trump himself has sought to distance himself from the document, as Democrats like Huffman have started using it as a cudgel with which to attack his campaign. And a number of policy experts at one remove from the heat and hyperbole of the election campaign believe that any dystopian plot might quickly give way to a lot of lawsuits likely to slow or halt parts of the Trump agenda for months or years.“I don’t think they are capable of pulling off a lot of the things they want to pull off,” said Christopher Thornberg of the Los Angeles-based research and consulting firm Beacon Economics. While an immigration crackdown similar to the one in Trump’s first term seems inevitable, mass expulsions of millions of people as promised by the former president would be dizzyingly expensive and near-impossible to pull off, he argued.As for California’s more ambitious environmental targets that Project 2025 wants to disrupt, some – getting rid of gas-powered cars by 2035, for example – are probably unfeasible.On many other issues, California can draw on its experience of the first Trump presidency to throw up roadblocks or pass its own state legislation. The Project 2025 document may be a sign that Trump and his allies are more ready to govern this time, but – as the political consultant and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project Mike Madrid argues – California and other blue states are better prepared, too.“Whatever the federal government decides to do, California can compensate,” Madrid said. In the event of a second Trump presidency, he expected the state to start filing lawsuits almost immediately, as it did more than a hundred times during the 2017-21 presidency, and find administrative or legislative solutions to many of the problems a new Trump administration might try to create.“This state is good at finding ways around the policies,” he said. “The size of the economy makes it easier to do that.”In one instance – a proposal in the Project 2025 document to end a legal waiver that has enabled California to set its own fuel efficiency standards for the past half-century – the courts have already heard a suit brought by several Republican-run states and ruled in California’s favor.None of that diminishes the threats that Trump and his supporters have been directing at California’s political leadership, or the nastiness of some of their language. In speeches over the past year, Trump has mischaracterized California as a place with so little water that even rich people in Beverly Hills can’t take proper showers, a place where shoplifting and other crimes are so rampant the only solution is to shoot criminals on sight, a place where undocumented immigrants are, implausibly, offered pension funds and mansions on arrival and can vote illegally multiple times over. “The world is being dumped into California,” he told state Republicans last September. “Prisoners. Terrorists. Mental patients.”Project 2025’s approach has been less fanciful and much more focused on policy detail. It rails, for example, against what it calls “abortion tourism” in California and other states and proposes a number of administrative remedies to track women who travel there because of abortion bans in their states, and to withhold Medicaid and other federal funding if California continues to insist that insurance companies make abortion part of their health coverage.None of this, though, is as frightening to abortion rights activists in California as the part that is left unsaid: the desire of many on the political right to institute an outright national abortion ban. Asked whether she believed Trump when he said he would not support such a ban, Jodi Hicks of the Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California responded with a flat “No.”To her, the fight in California is not about the fine print of the Hyde amendment or the Weldon amendement – tools invoked by Project 2025 that Republicans have used in the past to try to restrict abortion around the country – but rather about control of Congress to avert even the possibility of a national ban.Hicks has identified eight swing districts in California that she believes can determine control of the House of Representatives and her organization is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the Democratic candidates there. “The road to reproductive freedom runs through California,” she said. “We know what the intention is – they want to take away abortion rights all across the country, including California. What we need is a Congress that can push back and protect us.”The best way to thwart the Republicans’ plans, in other words, is to vote against them. California, as a solid-blue state, will do its part to keep Trump out of the White House. What the rest of the country does remains to be seen. More