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      How a rightwing machine stopped Arkansas’s ballot to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans

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      Theresa Lee was 22 weeks pregnant last year when her doctor confirmed the news: she had no amniotic fluid and the baby she was expecting, who she had named Cielle, was not growing.In many states across the US, Lee would have been advised that terminating the doomed pregnancy was an option, and possibly the safest course to protect her own life.But in the state of Arkansas, Lee was told she had just one choice: wait it out.A doctor who had confirmed the diagnosis was apologetic but insistent: the state’s laws meant he could be fined or jailed if he performed an abortion. In the wake of the US supreme court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, Arkansas activated a so-called trigger law that made all abortion illegal except if a woman was in an acute medical emergency and facing death. There are no other exceptions: not for rape victims, minors or fatal fetal anomalies.For the next five weeks, on a weekly basis, doctors knew Lee – already a mother to one-year-old Camille at the time – was at risk because she had placenta previa, which could cause bleeding and death. But she returned regularly to her OB-GYN’s office to be scanned, waiting to hear if Cielle’s fetal heartbeat had stopped.“I was having to prepare for if I passed. Me and my husband had to have a lot of really tough conversations about all the outcomes, just to prepare in case I wasn’t going to be there for my husband and my daughter,” she said.Lee never seriously considered leaving the state to get an abortion because the cost seemed exorbitant, childcare would be an issue, and she was uncertain about whether she could face criminal charges once she came home. None of her doctors ever suggested it, either.“I would have had an abortion, 100%. I am very much a realist. I knew she was going to pass. Having to carry her week after week and knowing she was going to pass, it was a horrific waiting game,” she said.Once Cielle stopped moving, and no fetal heartbeat was detected, she traveled three hours to the UAMS hospital in Little Rock from her home in Fort Smith because doctors thought delivering at the larger hospital would be safer in case of complications.There, she was induced and delivered a stillbirth. Luckily, the labor proceeded without any incident.“When I came in they had blood ready just in case. I remember seeing it out of the corner of my eye,” Lee said.The delivery room seemed prepared especially for women like Lee. She saw signs on the wall that said her baby was in heaven.When she was told the cost of transferring Cielle’s remains back home would be more than $1,000, she opted to take her in her car by herself. She held the casket in her arms the whole way.A chance for changeVoters in 10 states will cast ballots next week to expand their state’s abortion protections or maintain the status quo. Arkansans won’t be among them.But for seven weeks this summer, it looked like Arkansas voters would have an opportunity to change the state’s constitution to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans in the country.There are few places in the US where it is more dangerous to be a pregnant woman than in Arkansas. The state had the worst maternal mortality rate in the country, according to data collected by the CDC from 2018-2021. It showed that about 44 mothers die for every 100,000 live births. An Arkansas maternal mortality review board, which reviews such data, found that 95% of pregnancy-related deaths in that period were considered preventable. The Guardian’s reporting has not identified specific cases in which the state’s ban on abortion has led directly to a death, but abortion rights advocates believe the risks are high.In July, a dedicated network of about 800 grassroots organizers in Arkansas had collected the necessary signatures to get a measure on the 5 November ballot that – if passed – would have changed Arkansas’s constitution to protect the right to abortion for any reason up to 18 weeks of pregnancy. It also would have legalized exceptions for abortion after 18 weeks, including in cases involving rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies, and life and health of the mother.It would have saved a woman like Lee from facing potentially fatal outcomes, and emotional and financial distress.View image in fullscreenThe measure did not provide the same rights that existed under Roe – which protected abortion until viability, or around 24 weeks – a fact that organizers said kept national organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU from getting involved in the effort. But organizers believed that it was a measure that even conservative voters would support. After all, voters in neighboring Kansas, another Republican stronghold, overwhelmingly voted to protect abortion rights when its ballot was put to voters in a referendum in 2022.To the dismay and shock of the grassroots organizers, however, the Arkansas initiative was ultimately quashed before it ever reached voters. A paperwork error by organizers prompted a legal challenge by Arkansas’s secretary of state, John Thurston, who rejected the abortion amendment. On 22 August, the Arkansas supreme court upheld his decision.For Arkansas women, there is no end in sight.A Guardian investigation into the ballot’s demise tells a more complicated story than just a bureaucratic screw-up, revealing a confluence of rightwing actors working in parallel to ensure it never got to voters: a reclusive donor who has helped shape the anti-abortion movement across the US; the inner circle of the Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has proclaimed Arkansas “the most pro-life state in the country”; and judges who are supposed to be non-partisan but are deeply aligned with the state’s Republican party.“Everyone knew there was going to be a pretty organized and well-funded effort to keep it off the ballot, said Ashley Hudson, a rising Democratic star who represents west Little Rock in the Arkansas state legislature. “Is it collusion, directly? I don’t know. But I think there are a lot of people with aligned interests.”Changing the rulesThe atmosphere was euphoric on 5 July 2024 when grassroots organizers and activists marched into the domed capitol building in Little Rock armed with dozens of boxes of signed petitions. They had accomplished the seemingly impossible: collecting more than 100,000 signatures across 50 counties in Arkansas in support of getting the abortion rights measure on November’s ballot.For grassroots organizers like Kristin Stuart, the effort had been all consuming. Stuart had previously worked as an escort at Little Rock’s only surgical abortion clinic, helping patients get through the throng of protesters who were usually assembled outside. The clinic no longer performs abortions but is used as resource center for women looking for financial support or information about how to get abortion pills from out of state.She was motivated to try to change the state’s constitution because she believed the ban was deeply unjust. Stuart was particularly incensed by circumstances that are especially dire for poor women and children in Arkansas, like the fact that it remains the only state in the nation that has not expanded postpartum Medicaid coverage to give poor women health insurance for a year after they give birth.“There was a small group of us that worked it like it was a full time job,” she said. The campaign, led by Arkansans for Limited Government (AFLG), divided the state into 50 clusters. There were cluster leaders and county leaders. Volunteers were trained three times a week. For a signature to be valid, they needed a person’s name, address, birth date, the date they signed and city. They also had to make sure the signer was a registered voter.“We knew we had to be perfect. We knew we had to do everything correctly, because they would be looking for anything to disqualify it,” Stuart said.They sometimes faced harassment, including protesters who could be “loud and mean and scary” who tried to stop people from signing, Stuart said. There were moles in chat and message groups where hundreds of volunteers were communicating. Sometimes the locations where canvassers were planning to collect signatures would be published ahead of time by Arkansas Right to Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion group. Organizers had to adjust the ways they communicated to adapt.But what volunteers discovered, said Lauren Cowles, was that there were “blue dots” in even the reddest counties of the state.View image in fullscreen“We found people who were desperate to connect. There are a lot of people out there who believe women should have the right to choose,” Cowles said. Voters were also being educated. Many did not understand that the total ban did not include any exceptions, including for rape.“There were many months when I did not believe we could get enough signatures. The last few weeks before the deadline, we saw such a surge of urgency,” Stuart said.Hudson, the Democratic legislator, believes the Republican effort to stop the measure from succeeding began in 2023, when Republicans first proposed an amendment to the Arkansas constitution that would make it significantly more difficult to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot. Instead of calling for signatures to be collected from at least 15 counties, as is stated in the Arkansas constitution, Republicans wanted to increase the number to 50 counties. Voters rejected the proposal in a referendum. But the Republican legislature passed a law to that effect anyway.“That was done in anticipation of a ballot like this,” says Hudson. It was a difficult challenge but organizers got the signatures they needed. In a move that would later prove to be a fatal flaw, leaders hired paid canvassers in the final weeks of the campaign to help get the petitions over the line.The chicken tycoonRonnie Cameron, a poultry billionaire from Arkansas, is one of the most important rightwing power players you’ve never heard of. While Republican megadonors like Harlan Crow, Charles Koch and Dick Uihlein have become well known as big conservative donors, Cameron, a conservative evangelical Christian, has shied away from the spotlight, even as he has donated tens of millions of dollars to anti-abortion causes nationwide.According to public records, Cameron was the largest single donor in the fight against the abortion amendment, giving about $465,000 to groups that fought the initiative. This included $250,000 to a group called Stronger Arkansas, which was formed to fight the petition as well as a separate ballot initiative that would have increased rights to medical marijuana.Stronger Arkansas was run by Chris Caldwell, a consultant who is Sanders’s closest political adviser and served as her campaign manager in 2022. Two other officials with close ties to Sanders served as vice-chair and treasurer of the group.View image in fullscreenCameron, the chairman of the chicken company Mountaire Farms, also donated about $215,000 to Family Council Action Committee 2024, a group formed by Jerry Cox, the conservative head of the Arkansas Family Council, which is staunchly anti-abortion. The conservative advocacy group was accused in June 2024 of using intimidation tactics when it published a list of names of paid canvassers who were working on the abortion petition. The names were obtained after the Family Council obtained them via a freedom of information request.AFLG said in a statement at the time that the publication of canvassers’ names put its team at great risk for harassment, stalking and other dangers.“The Family Council’s tactics are ugly, transparently menacing, and unworthy of Arkansas. We won’t be intimidated,” it said.In a 2020 New Yorker report by the investigative journalist Jane Mayer, Cameron was described as a reclusive businessman who had donated $3m to organizations supporting Trump’s candidacy in 2016. The report found that Trump had weakened federal oversight of the poultry industry even as he accepted millions of dollars in donations from Cameron and other industry figures. Cameron, whose grandfather founded Mountaire, also served on Trump’s advisory board on the pandemic’s economic impact.Cameron and his wife, Nina, reportedly attend Fellowship Bible church, which the New Yorker called a hub of social conservatism that lists condemnation of homosexuality as a key belief. Cameron also founded the Jesus Fund, and is a funder of both that private group and another called the Jesus Fund Foundation. According to public records, the Jesus Fund has donated $159m over the last decade to the National Christian Foundation, a highly influential multibillion-dollar charity that is considered the largest single funder of the anti-abortion movement.View image in fullscreenAccording to Opensecrets, Cameron and his wife are considered the 28th largest contributors to outside spending groups in this election cycle. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the couple’s donations is the Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton, who has called for fetuses to be given constitutional rights. Cameron also donated $1m to the pro-Trump Super Pac Make America Great Again Inc in July.Nina Cameron was reached by the Guardian at her home but she declined to answer questions about her political activity.A spokesperson for Mountaire did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the Family Council did not respond to a request for comment.A staple and a photocopyFive days after grassroots activists celebrated their milestone on 5 July, reality hit.Thurston, Arkansas’s secretary of state, who had participated in the state’s March for Life, an anti-abortion rally on state grounds, and had won the endorsement of Arkansas Right to Life in 2022, challenged the legality of the petition. In a claim that would be hotly contested, Thurston said AFLG had not submitted the documents that were required to name the paid canvassers and confirm they had been properly trained. He rendered 14,143 signatures they had collected in the final stretch invalid, leaving the final count at 88,000. They were a few thousand short of the 90,704 they needed under Arkansas’s legal requirements. Thurston offered no “cure period” for organizers to fix the issue. Abortion was off the ballot.Thurston seemed to be quibbling over a staple and a photocopy: AFLG had already submitted the required paperwork related to training a week earlier, but it should have stapled a copy of it to the petition it submitted on the due date.Privately, some grassroots organizers seethed at what they saw as an unforgivable mistake by AFLG leaders following a grueling campaign. Others say that even if the paperwork had been perfect, Thurston would have found another issue to challenge.In legal briefs and statements, AFLG argued that the 2016 secretary of state had counted signatures for other ballot measures even after those organizers failed to submit some paperwork. Thurston’s personal views on abortion, they said, meant he was discriminating against them. They also claimed that they had been verbally assured by Thurston’s assistant director of elections, Josh Bridges, that their paperwork was in order.Sarah Huckabee Sanders seized on the decision. In a post on X, the governor posted a photograph of Thurston’s letter and wrote “the far left pro-abortion crowd in Arkansas showed they are both immoral and incompetent”.Then the matter went to court.The judgesJudges in Arkansas are supposed to be non-partisan. But when Sanders announced in June 2023 that Cody Hiland, a former US attorney who served as the head of the Arkansas Republican party, would be appointed to the state’s supreme court following a vacancy, she boasted that her pick would give Arkansas a “conservative majority” for the first time.“I know it will have the same effect on our state as it has had on our country,” she said at the time, in a reference to the US supreme court.View image in fullscreenHiland would become one of four justices to strike down the abortion amendment on 22 August. The majority decision, written by the justice Rhonda Wood – who counts Ron Cameron’s Mountaire as one of the largest individual donors to her election campaign and had months earlier been endorsed by Arkansas’s state Republican party – found that Thurston had “correctly refused” to count the signatures by paid canvassers because the organizers had failed to file the necessary training certificate.The August ruling faced strong criticism, including from an unlikely source: a Washington DC lawyer named Adam Unikowsky, a parter in the supreme court practice at Jenner & Block, and former law clerk to the late conservative supreme court justice Antonin Scalia.“The Arkansas Supreme Court’s decision is wrong,” Unikowsky wrote in a lengthy post on his legal newsletter. The majority’s decision, Unikowsky wrote, said that the allegedly missing paperwork had to be stapled to the organizers petition. Except, he said, Arkansas law does not say that.The three dissenting judges made the point in their dissent, saying Thurston had “made up out of whole cloth” that such a requirement existed. The dissenting judges said the majority’s endorsement of Thurston’s rationale was inexplicable.View image in fullscreenWhen AFLG argued that it had relied on Thurston’s office’s alleged verbal assurance that their paperwork was in order, the court rejected the argument in their majority opinion saying his comments did not change the law.Unikowsky also argued that Arkansas law made it clear that AFLG should have been offered time to correct its mistake. “Taking a step back, I have to dwell on the injustice of it all. Arkansans are being disenfranchised,” he wrote. He also noted that conservative groups who had made similar errors in their own ballot initiatives had not faced pushback.Sanders celebrated the supreme court’s ruling. “Proud I helped build the first conservative supreme court majority in the history of Arkansas and today that court upheld the rule of law, and with it, the right to life,” she said.The governor has long made touting the state’s so-called “pro-life” stance a priority. In March 2023 she signed a bill to create a “monument to the unborn” near the Arkansas state capitol.Shortly after the judges’ made their decision, the Pike county Republican committee issued a flyer for a political event in October. It featured a picture of Wood, the justice, alongside Thurston. They were both scheduled to appear at the Republican event. Wood reportedly “panicked” over the flyer and had the Republicans remove her picture but still planned to attend.Organizers say they will probably try again in 2026. Sanders will also be up for re-election that year.‘There is no way we can stay here’Looking back, Danielle – an Arkansas resident – realized she had eloped and closed on a house in Little Rock in June 2022, in the same week that Roe fell. A native of Philadelphia, Danielle (who asked the Guardian not to use her last name) and her husband, a doctor, moved to Arkansas so that he could work in underserved communities.They tried to conceive for months before turning to IVF. Danielle quit her job and commuted back and forth to Texas to receive treatment – her options were limited in Arkansas – and ultimately got pregnant. She was 18 weeks pregnant when a routine scan revealed that there was no fluid around the fetus, which also had no kidneys and no stomach. The pregnancy was not viable, even though the fetus had a heartbeat.When she was told by her doctor in Arkansas that her only option after the Dobbs decision was carrying the pregnancy to term, she and her husband knew they needed to find another solution. Even her IVF doctor in Texas urgently advised her to terminate the pregnancy. If she ended up needing a C-section during labor, it would take a long time before she would be physically ready to try again, he said.View image in fullscreen“My husband and I scrambled and got the earliest appointment in the closest place we could, which was in Illinois,” Danielle says. It was a six-and-a-half-hour drive and a two-day medical procedure. They stayed in a hotel for two nights.Danielle knows she was relatively fortunate to have the means to leave the state, unlike many women in Arkansas who lack resources. She and her husband also understood her life was at risk, even though it was never made explicitly clear. Her local hospital had only offered “palliative care” for the fetus, which meant scans every two-three weeks to check on its fetal heartbeat – not the kind of care Danielle knew she would need to avoid the risk of becoming sick and septic.After terminating her pregnancy in April 2024 and returning to Arkansas, Danielle got involved in the grassroots effort to collect signatures for the abortion ballot initiative. She remembers how one protester called her a “murderer” for collecting signatures. The person doing the shouting was an anesthesiologist she recognized who had attended one of her husband’s lectures and worked at the UAMS hospital in Little Rock.She went to the statehouse when the signatures were turned in, full of hope. She was photographed by a friend that day holding a sign that read: “I deserved better.”“We felt so accomplished when we turned those in. I was so excited. I felt very triumphant. We did this in a state where it’s really hard to do,” she said.When the supreme court of Arkansas ruled against them, Danielle knew she would have to leave. Then she became pregnant again with the one IVF-created embryo she had left.View image in fullscreen“I said there is no way we can stay here and my husband agreed. It’s not a safe place for me to be,” she told the Guardian. “We cannot raise a daughter here.”There were things about life in Arkansas – like their nice home – that she loved. But now they are moving back to Philadelphia.“I think I was naive moving from a big city where I never would have thought twice about what I could do with my own body. It’s a shame. It’s so sad.”Theresa Lee, the woman who was forced to deliver a stillbirth, echoed Danielle’s disappointment. “You want to believe that we as citizens have a chance at voting for what we believe in, but with the precedent set by the supreme court in the state of Arkansas, it’s clear we don’t,” she said.“I do not desire to have another pregnancy in Arkansas. I don’t feel safe and I don’t feel cared for as a woman in our state. What happened to me can happen to any woman and it has. Arkansas is a dangerous place to be pregnant.” More

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      ‘I’ve lost friends’: in bitterly divided Georgia, can Democrats score another win?

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      Mary Holewinski lives in Carrollton, Georgia, home turf for the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. But Holewinski is a Kamala Harris supporter and has a sign in her yard. It draws some nasty looks, she said. “I’ve lost neighbor friends.”It helps that Carrollton is a college town, and discussing politics is possible – to an extent. “I feel like the people I live around, you can sit down and have a conversation with them, and they are willing to listen … but not everybody. There are some people who don’t want to hear your side of it.”These tensions are ratcheting up, because for voters in Georgia, it can feel like the entire US election is on the line. The state went for Biden in 2020 by 11,779 votes, out of 5m ballots cast – the first time since 1992 that the state turned blue. Its 16 electoral college votes were a bulwark – psychological as well as practical – for Democrats, illustrating the nation’s rejection of Donald Trump, however slim.Georgia has personal significance for Trump, and his war on the 2020 election results. The former president still faces charges in an election interference case in Atlanta’s Fulton county, after he made what he described as a “perfect phone call” to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find” another 11,800 votes. A Georgia win would represent belated validation for the former president.Now the question is which Georgia will turn out in greater force this year: the Democratic-leaning Georgia represented by the burgeoning Atlanta suburbs, or the Georgia where conservatism holds sway in its smaller towns and rural regions. Polling suggests that Trump has a lead of one to two points, well within the margin of error.The election is already under way. About 7 million Georgians are registered to vote and about 3 million voters – more than 40% of the electorate – have already gone to the polls, setting early voting records each day.Both Harris and Trump may as well have leased apartments in Buckhead, an upscale part of Atlanta, for all the time they are spending in Georgia in the last-minute election push. Earlier this month, Trump rallied at a sports arena in the northern Atlanta suburb of Duluth, in the middle of one of the most diverse areas of the state. Harris appeared on Thursday with Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen.View image in fullscreenSuburban moderates in the Atlanta region turned on Trump in 2020, and he appears to have done little in the years since to win their favor. Much has been made of Republican hopes of targeting Black men – about 1 million of Georgia’s 7 million registered voters – as a potential swing bloc for votes. The difference between a Democrat winning 80% and 90% of their votes will probably be larger than the overall margin of victory.But Georgia is no longer a state defined by Black and white voters. Asian and Latino population growth has changed the political landscape in suburban Atlanta, which helped drive the Biden victory there in 2020. Turnout in that voting demographic has been a challenge for both parties.The politics of Georgia are a delicate dance of cooperation between Atlanta, which tends Democratic, and the rest of the state. More than half the state’s population lives in the metro area of Atlanta. Music by Atlanta’s hip-hop artists has long dominated the charts. Marvel films its movies on Atlanta’s streets. Dozens of Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in the Atlanta area, from Home Depot, UPS and Southern Company to mainstays Coca-Cola and Delta.

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      Outside Atlanta, Savannah and pockets of Black voters in south Georgia’s historic Black belt, Georgia is solidly conservative. The Republican governor, Brian Kemp, remains the most popular political figure in the state. Moderate liberals approve of how he handled Trump’s election interference claims. Even Maga Republicans grudgingly acknowledge that his resistance to pandemic closures and libertarian gun position matched their interests.Rural, conservative Georgia is more likely to be religiously fundamentalist, less diverse and occasionally reactionary. Georgia has a six-week abortion ban because even the business wing of the Republican party in Georgia, which is solidly in charge of the state’s government, crosses evangelicals on that issue at its peril.The party’s challenges are exemplified by Rabun county, in Georgia’s picturesque, tourist-friendly mountains on the border of North Carolina. Here, and elsewhere, it is attempting to heal the standing conflict between conventional conservative Republicans and the Maga insurgency on the right.Rabun county Republicans have hosted a range of events, from a traditional low-country boil to a firearm raffle and screenings of a Reagan biography at the last remaining drive-in, said Ed Henderson, secretary of the Rabun county Republican party. Local Republicans have established a detente between the Maga wing and traditional conservatives, he said.“We’re not imposing purity tests on candidates,” Henderson said. They also don’t view Democrats as an existential threat. “They’re not demons with horns on their head, or Satan worshippers. They’re the opposition.”People from traditionally Democratic areas began moving into Rabun county during the pandemic, attracted by its lower cost of living and extraordinary natural beauty. The area historically favors Republicans by about four to one.But in a close race, chipping away at that margin may make the difference, said Don Martin, chair of the Rabun county Democrats. “If we can get Republicans down to 70% here, we will win the state.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBoth parties now see early voting as key. Trump has reversed his skepticism of early voting and absentee ballots, a posture that may have made the difference between winning and losing in 2020. His repeated refrain on the road in Atlanta is for turnout to be “too big to rig”, falsely suggesting that Democrats stole the 2020 election and intend to steal this one.View image in fullscreenHistorically in Georgia, Democrats have been more likely to vote early than Republicans. But Trump has pointedly instructed his supporters to vote early in person in Georgia, and many appear to be doing just that. So far this year, there’s little difference in turnout between metro Atlanta counties with large Democratic voting majorities and Republican-heavy rural counties.Ralph Reed, director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a venerable figure on the Christian political right, made a point of telling conservative voters to vote early at a recent faith town hall in Zebulon, about 90 minutes south of Atlanta.“We cannot and must not wait until election day to vote,” he said. “If you let them dominate the early vote for two or three weeks and run up a million- or a million-and-a-half-vote margin, then we are like a football team trying to score three touchdowns in the fourth quarter … If you want the texts and calls to stop, you need to vote, and you need to vote early.”And early concerns about Hurricane Helene disrupting the election appear to be unfounded so far. Turnout in areas affected by the devastating September storm is only slightly below that of the rest of the state.Gwendolyn Jordan lives in Grovestown, two and a half hours east of Atlanta and in the damage zone of Hurricane Helene. Two weeks ago, as early voting started, some residents were still without power, she said.Yet early turnout in her county is very slightly above the state average. Though Columbia county went almost two to one for Trump in 2020, Jordan is a Harris supporter. The role of the federal government and the competence of a presidential administration is no abstraction in the wake of a hurricane, she said.“I believe there’s going to be a big difference, because Kamala Harris is more for the people under the $400,000 income range, the people that really need the help,” Jordan said. “You know that’s who is struggling right now. We just had a hurricane that did a lot of damage to people.”In 2020, it took two weeks for Biden’s victory in Georgia to be confirmed. This year there was the prospect of other delays, after an effort by the Trump-aligned state board of elections to allow local elections officers the right to withhold certifications, to conduct open-ended investigations into poll irregularities and to mandate hand-counts of ballots on election night.But two superior court judges ruled the changes unconstitutional and the state’s superior court let the rulings stand pending appeal, which will not be heard until after the election.Georgia’s wounds from the fight over the election results in 2020 haven’t completely healed. And people are preparing themselves for a fresh round after voting concludes in November.“I could care less about whether you like [Trump] or not. It’s not a popularity contest,” said Justin Thompson, a retired air force engineer from Macon. “It’s what you got done. And he did get things done before the pandemic hit. And the only reason why he didn’t get re-elected was because the pandemic hit.” More

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      Kamala Harris to urge voters to ‘turn the page’ on era of Trump

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      With the presidential race deadlocked a week before election day, Kamala Harris will call on voters to “turn the page” on the Trump era, in remarks delivered from a park near the White House where the former president spoke before a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in a last effort to overturn his 2020 loss.The Harris campaign has described the remarks as a major address that will underline the vice-president’s closing message, in a location she hopes will remind voters precisely why the electorate denied Trump a second term four years ago. She is expected to cast Trump as a divisive figure who will spend his term consumed by vengeance, leveraging the power of the presidency against his political enemies rather than in service of the American people.“Tomorrow, I will speak to Americans about the choice we face in this election—and all that is at stake for the future of this country that we love,” she wrote on X.Although the vice-president frames the stakes of the 2024 election as nothing less than the preservation of American democracy, her speech is anticipated to strike an optimistic and hopeful tone, standing in stark contrast to the dark, racist themes that animated Trump’s grievance-fueled rally at Madison Square Garden.In New York on Sunday, Trump repeated there that the gravest threat facing the US was the “enemy within”. In recent days, Harris has amplified warnings of her opponent’s lurch toward authoritarianism and open xenophobia. Her campaign is running ads highlighting John Kelly, a marine general and Trump’s former chief of staff, saying that the former president met the definition of a fascist. Harris has said she agrees.“Just imagine the Oval Office in three months,” Harris said, previewing her message at a rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday. “It is either Donald Trump in there stewing over his enemies’ list, or me, working for you, checking off my to-do list.”

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      In her remarks, Harris will attempt to balance the existential and the economic – focusing on the threat Trump poses to American institutions while weaving in the Democrat’s plans to bring down costs and build up the middle class. She is expected to cast Trump as a tool of the billionaire class who would eliminate what is left of abortion access and stand in the way of bipartisan compromise when it does not suit him politically.Polls consistently show the economy and the cost of living are the issues most important to voters this election. Protecting democracy tends to be a higher priority for Democrats and voters planning to support Harris.In the final stretch of the campaign, Harris has emphasized the breadth of her coalition, especially her endorsements from a slew of former Trump administration officials and conservative Republicans such as Liz Cheney and her father, the former vice-president, Dick Cheney.Trump has sought to rewrite the history of 6 January, the culmination of his attempt to cling to power that resulted in the first occupation of the US Capitol since British forces set it on fire during the war of 1812. Trump recently declared the attack a “day of love” and said he would pardon the 6 January rioters – whom he has called “patriots” and “hostages” – if he is elected president.Hundreds of supporters have been convicted and imprisoned for their conduct at the Capitol, while federal prosecutors have accused Trump of coordinating an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. Trump maintains that he played no role in stoking the violence that unfolded, and still claims baselessly that the 2020 election was stolen from him.Harris’s campaign has sought to lay out the monumental stakes of the election while also harnessing the joy that powered the vice-president’s unexpected ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket.In an abbreviated 100-day campaign that Harris inherited from Biden after he stepped aside in July, the Democratic nominee has unified her party, raised more than a billion dollars, blanketed the airwaves and blitzed the battleground states. And yet the race remains a dead heat nationally and in the seven swing states that will determine who serves as the 47th president of the United States.After her speech, Harris will return to the campaign trail, where she will keep a frenetic pace until election day. More

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      Top 10 US fears include corrupt government, terrorism, world war

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      With the spooky season nearing its climax, Americans are as scared as ever – and they are generally afraid of more things, too, according to a new survey.Those findings are contained in the latest edition of the Survey of American Fears that California’s Chapman University has been publishing annually around Halloween.Corrupt government officials, the US becoming involved in a third world war, and terrorism (cyber or otherwise) are all among the top 10 fears flagged by the study released in the waning stages of the 5 November presidential election – and as Russia and Israel continue warring with Ukraine and Hamas, respectively.More than half of the US is afraid of those particular global-level concerns – as they are more personal hardships such as seeing loved ones die or become ill and having enough money for the future, which are also in the study’s top 10.But many of the 85 fears that the survey’s 1,008 respondents were asked about – including spiders, ghosts and public speaking – had high percentage shares. For instance, nearly half of Americans – about 48% – fear the climate crisis that is primarily being driven by the burning of fossil fuels and has supercharged destructive hurricanes like Helene and Milton, which recently devastated swaths of the south-east US.It wasn’t always that way, according to the study’s authors. Only Americans’ top fear – a corrupt government – was shared by more than 50% of the public in the US when the survey debuted in 2019, said a statement from Ed Day, an associate professor of sociology at Chapman who contributed to the research. Now all of the survey’s top 10 fears are shared by more than half of respondents.“This tells me Americans are becoming more afraid in general, about everything,” said a separate statement from Chapman sociology professor and department chairperson Christopher Bader.Bader said the way people get their information about the world around them is almost certainly playing a role in making them more fearful, whether of the government, nuclear or biological warfare, or deadly illnesses coming for them or those they love.“Social media and websites target people by showing them things that they are afraid of,” his statement said. “Through algorithms, people are being fed their fears, and we believe that’s increasing people’s overall level of fear.”The survey contains bad news for people afraid of flying, needles or blood. Fewer than 15% of the public shares those same phobias, according to the Chapman researchers’ findings, which were released a little more than a week in advance of Halloween’s arrival on Thursday.Meanwhile, despite warnings of a spike in Islamophobia amid Israel’s war in Gaza, only 8.7% of the Chapman survey’s respondents reported being fearful of Muslims – making that the lowest of the 85 concerns asked about.Hardly any of the survey’s respondents reported being afraid of immigrants (12.2%) or of American whites no longer being the US’s racial majority (16.2%) despite the racist rhetoric surrounding both topics that has seeped its way into mainstream rightwing politics.Chapman said the market research company SSRS conducted its nationally representative survey, which utilized a probability-based method. The survey’s margin of error is +/-4%, said Chapman officials, who added that they conduct the research to understand what makes Americans of all creeds afraid – and the consequences that stem from that.The survey’s researchers also made it a point to say that people’s fears often do not align with reality. For instance, large numbers of Americans report being murdered or raped by strangers – 33.3% and 29.5%, respectively. But, according to the Pew Research Center, violence in the US has been declining in recent years.Such misperceptions can translate into real-world effects, such as by convincing officials to prioritize neutralizing serial killers rather than domestic abusers, who are much more common. “We are so focused on stranger danger that it leads us to spend resources in the wrong way,” Bader said in a statement. More

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      Pennsylvania: anger among Puerto Ricans in key swing state after racist remarks

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      On Sunday evening, the Philadelphia council member Quetcy Lozada was attending a campaign event with Vice-President Kamala Harris at a local restaurant, as the Democratic presidential candidate unveiled a new economic proposal for Puerto Rico.Lozada is of Puerto Rican descent and represents the seventh city council district in Philadelphia, made up of over 50% Latino, predominantly Puerto Rican, residents.As Lozada left the campaign event, her phone began blowing up. Contacts began sending her texts with the video of racist remarks by a comedian, during a Trump rally in New York.“I got in the car, I looked at the video, and I had to play it multiple times in order to make sure that I was hearing what I was actually hearing,” Lozada said in an interview. “I was absolutely frustrated, I was angry – but I was not surprised.”As the Harris campaign was announcing her policy proposals for Puerto Rico, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe was opening for a Trump campaign rally in New York. Hinchcliffe, during his introduction, made racist and disparaging remarks about Puerto Ricans.“There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” said Hinchcliffe, a comedian and host of the popular podcast and stand up comedy show Kill Tony.The racist comments spread like wildfire, leading to anger and indignation in Pennsylvania, one of the most important battleground states in the US election which many experts think is crucial to any attempt to win the White House. There are over 472,000 Puerto Ricans in the state of Pennsylvania, according to the US census bureau.A Puerto Rican voter, Yemele Ayala, who was also at the Harris campaign event in Philadelphia, found Hinchcliffe’s comments disturbing.“We should take this at face value – people’s behavior does tell the truth about themselves,” Ayala said. “And this is not the first time that our Puerto Rican community feels disrespected.”As Ayala, a Harris supporter, watched the video of the racist remarks, her first thoughts were: “We still have more work to do.”The backlash against the racist comments has led to Democratic party leaders to denounce the Trump campaign, seizing the opportunity to mobilize voters among Latino communities. On Monday morning, Lozada joined the Harris campaign in a press conference, denouncing the racist comments.The Guardian spoke with Puerto Rican community leaders and voters, who have expressed anger at the racism and who hope will motivate people to vote for Harris in the crucial state.Lozada said the racist comments were representative of the Trump campaign’s outlook on immigrant communities “Today, the Puerto Ricans are the topic of conversation. Not long ago, it was Venezuelans, it was Mexicans – it’s immigrants in general.”View image in fullscreenDuring the Trump rally, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez live-streamed their reaction to the racist comments.“Who is that jackwad?” Walz asked, then adding: “There are hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans across, in battleground states, that we need to send them a message: you’ve gotta vote.”In response, the comedian, Hinchcliffe, published a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying that the Democratic party has “no sense of humor”.“I love Puerto Rico and vacation there,” the comedian added. “I made fun of everyone … watch the whole set. I’m a comedian Tim … might be time to change your tampon.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump campaign, on their end, attempted to distance itself from Hinchcliffe’s comments. “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” a Trump campaign adviser said in a statement to Fox News. Other Republicans also attempted to distance themselves from racist remarks, including the Florida senator Rick Scott.Puerto Ricans on the island, despite being US citizens, are not eligible to vote. However, those based in US states are able to vote.After the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico became a US territory. In 1917, Puerto Ricans became US citizens. But because of the island’s status, Puerto Ricans on the island do not pay federal income tax and do not have political representation in Congress, aside from a non-voting representative.In 2006, a major recession hit the island. The Puerto Rican government borrowed so much money to combat the economic problems that it led to a tremendous debt crisis. In 2016, Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, which established a financial oversight board known as “La Junta”, in order to manage the island’s budget to pay back Puerto Rico’s creditors. The financial oversight board has put in place austerity and privatization programs to incentivize investors to flock to Puerto Rico.On Sunday, the Harris campaign announced a new economic plan for Puerto Rico. If elected, Harris promised, will push forward an “Opportunity Economy” for the island.“Working with the private sector, the Puerto Rican government, municipalities, and other stakeholders, they will fight to strengthen the energy grid, make Puerto Rico a hub for industries of the future, and uplift the island’s role as a vibrant economic and cultural center,” the Harris campaign said in a fact sheet published on the campaign’s website.During the Trump administration, events in Puerto Rico placed the island in further turmoil. In 2017, a catastrophic hurricane struck the island, leading to deaths and tremendous devastation in Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria, Trump considered the idea of selling Puerto Rico. Later, a report found that the Trump administration delayed over $20bn in hurricane relief aid to the island following the hurricane. And during a visit to Puerto Rico, Trump faced backlash when he tossed paper towels at a crowd in need of supplies.“Giving this person an opportunity to lead our country could be disastrous,” Lozada said. “At the end of the day, they have just helped us – they have helped the Democratic party for where we will be on Nov 5, with this last incident.”Ayala, the Puerto Rican voter , agreed. The racist remarks from Sunday night, Ayala said, underestimated “the power we have, in numbers, in this country.“America and the current state of this country has been built on the sweat, blood and shoulders of our community,” Ayala added. “We’re not taking that lightly.” More

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      Tuesday briefing: Some Democrats are grimly convinced that Trump is going to win. What does the evidence show?

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      Good morning. With a week to go until America votes, the polls consistently show Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in a statistical dead heat.The nerds who simulate the race hundreds of times to model the likelihood of each result are consistently finding extraordinarily even chances between the two. And nothing that happens – not assassination attempts, Kamalamentum, convention speeches, running mate selections, celebrity endorsements, multi-million-dollar political ads, the debate, erratic rally performances, or plausible accusations of fascist tendencies – seems to change anything for more than a minute. The election, in summary, looks too close to call.All of which prompts the question: why are some Democrats so gloomily sure that Trump is going to win? Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, David Smith, is about what we actually know, what Democrats should be worrying about, and what can be written off as a terrible case of the jitters. Here are the headlines.Five big stories

      Budget | The government is expected to announce an increase of about 4% to NHS funding, an increase that could translate to about £7bn for the health budget in England. Chancellor Rachel Reeves said that the money would deliver more surgical hubs and radiotherapy machines in a drive to add 40,000 appointments each week.

      Middle East | Israel’s parliament has voted to ban the UN relief and works agency (Unrwa) from the country within 90 days. Alongside a decision to declare Unrwa a terror group, the move is expected to lead to the closure of Unrwa’s East Jerusalem headquarters and would effectively block the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza via Rafah.

      Crime | The far-right activist Tommy Robinson has been jailed for 18 months for contempt of court for repeating false allegations against a Syrian refugee, in breach of an injunction. Robinson had repeated his false claim that Jamal Hijazi, who had been filmed being attacked at a school in West Yorkshire, “violently attacks young English girls” despite losing a libel case.

      Justice | Prisoners serving controversial indeterminate sentences were given minimum terms of less than six months but have remained in jail for at least 16 years, newly released data shows.

      Wildlife | Hedgehogs are now listed as “near threatened” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list, after a decline in numbers of at least 30% over the past decade across much of their range.
      In depth: Democrats are afraid of underestimating Trump – againView image in fullscreenWhatever the polls say, some Democrats will not be swayed. They can feel it in their waters, and sniff it on the air: Trump is closing in on a second term in the Oval Office.We might hazily date this phenomenon to early October, when betting markets got ahead of the electoral models in their assessment of the odds of a Trump victory. Meanwhile, the leads Harris established after replacing Biden started to disappear.“After the incredible sugar high of Harris’ introduction, she inevitably was going to come down to earth a bit,” David Smith said. “And compounding that is the fact that Democrats are serial ‘bed-wetters’, as they’re sometimes known, often prone to panicking about things going wrong.”For many of the bed-wetters, it may come down to a set of intangible observations: Trump has been underestimated before. This matters so much – a classic confusion of stakes and odds. And we live in an era where, when an OK thing and a bad thing are in competition, there only ever seems to be one winner.One way to deal with all this is with an “emotional hedge”: work on the assumption that Trump is going to win, to soften the blow if it comes. The other is with information. I totally understand if you’re not in the mood for that, but here it is anyway.What do the national polls say?The headline national polling averages show an extraordinarily close race, with Harris ahead by 49% to 48%, by 47% to 46%, or by 48% to 47%, depending on who’s counting. Those results are within the margin of error, meaning they are not inconsistent with a victory for either candidate.The national polls have changed astonishingly little in historical terms: “This race is remarkable for its closeness but also the insane stability of polls here in the closing weeks,” Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, told NBC News. “This race just doesn’t seem to budge.”That is in line with what David is told by pundits and analysts studying the numbers. “The thing I keep hearing is that it could go either way. Anyone who says with certainty that either Harris or Trump is going to win is either foolish or has godlike powers.”What about the battleground states?Because of the electoral college system, the popular vote is of secondary importance in deciding the final result (a majority voted against Trump in 2016, after all, but he still ended up in the White House). But in the seven states that will probably decide the outcome, there isn’t a lot more to hold on to: polling averages in each are either tied or within a couple of points.There is some evidence for the bed-wetters to point to here. A piece (£) by the election data expert Nate Silver (quoted in this piece by law) on Sunday looked at what his modelling shows in these seven states, and found that Trump is a strong favourite (with a 64% chance of victory or better) in three of them; Harris’ strongest shot is in Michigan, where she has a 56% chance, and the others are virtual ties.You can see why this would make the Harris campaign nervous, but the reality is that these remain knife-edge numbers, David said. “It’s still hard to say that one candidate or another is winning in the swing states. In Pennsylvania, for example, it was half a percentage point in 2020, and there’s every reason to believe it’s going to be just as close, or even closer, this time.”Are the polls reliable?One point often cited by those betting on a Trump win is that his support was significantly underestimated in key states in 2016 and 2020. Why wouldn’t the same thing happen this time?It’s perfectly possible, but pollsters have tried to correct for the errors that have led them down the wrong path in the past – namely, weighting their results to account for more voters without a college degree, which appears to have been the problem in 2016. The 2020 error has been harder to pinpoint, but many experts blame “nonresponse bias” – the theory that Trump supporters don’t trust pollsters and are therefore less likely to tell them what they think. Pollsters have attempted to address that problem in different ways.As the New York Times’ chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, explains, what it may come down to in the end is whether the less engaged voters who support Trump show up in greater numbers than the pollsters anticipate – and that’s certainly possible. On the other hand, it is also possible that pollsters have overcorrected in a way that means Harris is underestimated. The unsatisfying but sensible solution is to wait a week and see what happens.What are the vibes like?Oh, the vibes are frantic. Broadly speaking, Republicans are rubbing their hands and Democrats are wringing theirs. This piece on Axios from Friday, with the headline “Dems fear they’re blowing it”, gives you a flavour: they’re worrying about early voting trends in Nevada, agonising over whether calling Trump a fascist is helpful, and reflecting grimly on the hand Harris inherited from Joe Biden. “She is who she is,” is the best one strategist can muster. “Let’s hope it’s enough.”There is a long history of Democrats taking an Eeyorish view when the stakes are high. Still, it’s not a totally insane position. It’s unscientific, but it feels like most reporters visiting swing states – like Chris McGreal in Michigan – are finding voters edging towards Trump. There is plenty of polling suggesting that Trump has made inroads with Black men and Hispanic voters.High inflation has worked against incumbent governments all over the world this year; Trump seems to be immune from criticism for behaviour that would disqualify any other candidate. And many voters blame Harris for irregular immigration across the US’s southern border.Could the vibes be wrong?Absolutely. There are counterpoints to all of this, including evidence of Harris’s success with suburban white women, and recent polling that shows her improving among Hispanic and Black voters. There is evidence that a majority of voters see her as embodying “change” more genuinely than Trump does. And there is a sense that much of it is psychological anyway: Democrats got carried away by “Kamalamentum”, and so the return of the race to a more balanced state has had a disproportionate impact on their mood.As one source close to the Harris campaign suggested to ABC News: “Democrats … were hoping that she was going to pull away and are coming to the realisation that this race is much closer than they hoped.” They added: “The bed-wetting to me makes sense based on the stakes, but not so much based on the odds.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis dynamic may even be helpful to the Harris campaign, which has constantly reminded its supporters that they should avoid the complacency which some believe helped Trump beat Hillary Clinton. “The language you hear from Harris and the Democrats is, quite sensibly, ‘we are the underdog’,” David said. “That’s a big difference from 2016. The knowledge that Trump can win is part of motivating people to really knuckle down. Will it be enough? I have absolutely no idea.”In other words: Harris’s hopes are, still, more or less a coin toss. That is more than enough to worry about without insisting that her defeat is a done deal.What else we’ve been readingView image in fullscreen

      Cecilia Nowell’s dispatch from an abortion clinic in Phoenix – operating at the fringes of Arizona’s restrictive abortion laws – highlights the high stakes faced by healthcare providers in states with limited access to abortion care. Nimo

      Reporting from Gaza is always incredibly difficult – but the tightening Israeli siege in the north of the territory has been subjected to an almost complete blackout, and five reporters were killed in Israeli airstrikes over the weekend. Bethan McKernan and Malak A Tantesh, who is in Gaza, do a superb job of piecing together the chilling details available. Archie

      Technically, Microsoft Excel is a millennial. As the software celebrates its 40th birthday, Dan Milmo reflects on the fallout of some of the biggest blunders made by spreadsheet users. Nimo

      Things you never knew: there are 16 polar bears living in the UK. Patrick Barkham’s piece, and Joshua Bright’s photos, tell the remarkable story – and ask whether it really makes sense that they should be here. Archie

      “Games invite us to break free from the tyranny of efficiency. Play matters precisely because it’s unnecessary,” writes Tim Clare, who urges us to stop justifying our gaming time and simply enjoy it. Nimo
      SportView image in fullscreenFootball | Manchester United were closing in on Rúben Amorim (above) as the club’s new manager on Monday night after Erik ten Hag was sacked earlier in the day. Ten Had finally lost his job after the club continued one of its worst starts to a Premier League season with a 2-1 defeat at West Ham on Sunday.Football | Rodri and Aitana Bonmatí have been named winners of the 2024 Ballon d’Or at football’s annual awards ceremony in Paris. Real Madrid boycotted the ceremony after learning that Vinícius Júnior had been beaten to the men’s prize.Rugby | Tom Curry is poised to start his first Test at Twickenham in almost two years as England gear up for their showdown against New Zealand on Saturday. The flanker is back after a serious hip injury which threatened to end his career.The front pagesView image in fullscreenThe lead story today in the Guardian is “Budget vow to rebuild ‘broken not beaten’ NHS”. “Billions in budget still won’t cure NHS, admits Streeting” – that’s the Mail, and it’s on the front of the Times as well: “Tax rises won’t cure the NHS, Labour concedes”. The Telegraph takes it a bit further: “NHS will need more tax rises, signals Reeves”, while the Mirror has “Labour’s war on waiting lists” under the strapline “Hope for the health service”. “Budget NI hike will damage core services, charities warn” says the i. And the Daily Express says “Chancellor told ‘it’s not too late’ for U-turn on winter fuel”.The Financial Times goes offshore for its splash: “Volkswagen’s plan to axe 3 German factories sets up battle with unions”. Top story in the Metro is “Deepfake photo paedo – Geek jailed for turning child photos into AI pornographic images”. The Sun leads on a claim that Erik Ten Hag will receive a £15m payoff as he leaves Manchester United: “Erik Ten Swag”.Today in FocusView image in fullscreenThe Trump supporters who took over Georgia’s election boardWhat happens when an election board in a crucial swing state is infiltrated by supporters of Donald Trump? Justin Glawe reportsCartoon of the day | Ben JenningsView image in fullscreenThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badView image in fullscreenSchool attendance rates in England and Wales declined during the pandemic and have as yet failed to recover. Last year, 150,000 students in England were classified as severely absent. Many teachers are trying innovative tactics to get pupils back into class, including offering therapy dogs, prize vouchers, wellness sessions and even taxi rides. Mary Immaculate high school near Cardiff in Wales went further by opening a £1.7m wellness centre, and its attendance rates are now above the national average.“We know it’s working,” says Nadia Yassien, head of a pastoral support programme at the school. “Students with low attendance are coming in regularly, on time, and happy – and that’s key, because they won’t learn if they hate the place.”Bored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

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