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Kamala Harris has accepted an invitation from CNN to participate in another debate with Donald Trump, on 23 October, her campaign said on Saturday.“Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate. It is the same format and setup as the CNN debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised CNN’s moderators, rules and ratings,” the Harris campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement.“I will gladly accept a second presidential debate on October 23,” Harris later posted on X. “I hope Donald Trump will join me.”Trump debated Joe Biden in June when the US president was still running for re-election. Biden performed so badly that he ended up dropping out of the race in July, and Harris, his vice-president, ascended to the nomination.Asked about Harris’s acceptance of the CNN invitation, a Trump spokesperson pointed to the former president’s prior statements that there would be no more debates.Shortly afterwards, Trump spoke at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, and said that Harris only wants a rematch because she is losing.“She’s done one debate, I’ve done two. It’s too late to do another, I’d love to in many ways but it’s too late, the voting is cast, the voters are out there, immediately – is everybody voting, please? Get out and vote,” Trump said.The first in-person voting began in Minnesota, Virginia and South Dakota on Friday and some postal ballots were sent out a few days earlier.Harris and Trump held their first presidential debate in Philadelphia on 10 September, with Harris, the Democratic nominee for the White House, widely deemed to have won – a judgment rejected by Trump.The lead-up to that event was touch-and-go, scheduled originally when Biden had been at the top of the Democratic ticket, but Trump eventually acquiesced to appear, while the Harris campaign eventually agreed to the original rules of muted microphones when it was not the candidate’s turn to speak.Two days after the debate, when Trump had said he wouldn’t do another, he cited Harris’s invitation for a rematch then as proof he’d won the first.“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,’” he wrote.This prompted the Harris campaign to taunt Trump as a chicken, and Saturday’s ostentatious acceptance of another debate invitation also seemed designed to needle her opponent.The vice-presidential debate is on 1 October between Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate and the governor of Minnesota, and JD Vance, a US senator for Ohio.Debate scheduling and platforming have become almost as contentious as the election campaign itself. The Harris and Trump campaigns repeatedly clashed over where, on what TV network, with which moderators and in what format they should debate, such as with muted or unmuted microphones, or whether with an audience or not.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter the debate hosted by ABC News earlier this month, Trump criticized the network’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for what he claimed was a biased approach.“They are the most dishonest, in my opinion, the most dishonest news organization,” he grumbled on Fox News.But a post-debate YouGov poll found that registered voters who responded said, by double digits, that the moderators had been “fair and unbiased”.While 43% said they had been fair, 29% said they had been biased in Harris’s favor and 4% said they had been biased in Trump’s favor. There was a big partisan split, with 55% of Republicans saying the moderators had been biased in Harris’s favor.But Trump praised, in comparative terms, the debate he’d had with Biden in June, saying the cable network was “more honorable” than ABC.CNN moderators did not live-fact-check the candidates, while ABC’s moderators did, including, most memorably, David Muir debunking as baseless the racist rightwing conspiracy theory repeated by Trump that the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, had been eating other residents’ pets.Reuters contributed reporting More
The rightwing activist Nate Hochman, who was fired last year by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, for employing neo-Nazi imagery in a campaign video, is now the face of a Marco Rubio-linked thinktank’s efforts to spread anti-immigrant panic from Ohio to Pennsylvania.Videos featuring Hochman recorded in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, have been boosted on X by a range of rightwing figures including the platform’s owner, the tech billionaire Elon Musk.In recent days Hochman, 26, has recorded several videos on location in Charleroi for America 2100, a rightwing thinktank where he is an adviser, according to his biographies on X and at websites where he has published articles. Hochman is also a staff writer and podcaster at the rightwing website the American Spectator, where his recent output has mostly consisted of anti-immigrant messaging.Like Springfield in Ohio, Charleroi has attracted a community of Haitian migrants.The borough manager, Jim Manning, told CBS News on Wednesday that immigrants including Haitians “have been a benefit to the town”.He added: “They come here. They buy property. They open businesses. They work here. They pay taxes. So for us, at the end of the day, it has been a benefit.”At the time of reporting, Hochman had only published interviews with older white residents of the town, who have variously complained that the newcomers do not speak English and that migrants have taken “American jobs”.One interviewee appears to concede that the Haitians are in Charleroi legally but dismisses the importance of that fact.“The perception is that it’s not legal,” the interviewee says at one point. “Now, you get a lot of people saying they’re illegals and everyone wants to fight about that term, but it doesn’t really matter.”In an email sent after publication, Mike Needham, America 2100’s founder and president, pointed to an interview with a Black resident that had been published on the organization’s X account on Friday afternoon.Needham added in the same email: “Nate also recorded interviews with multiple Haitian workers in the course of his week-long investigation.” As of noon on Saturday, no interviews with Haitian immigrants had been published on the X account.Most have not been shared extensively, although one of the videos was reposted by far-right account End Wokeness, and reposted in turn by Musk to his nearly 200 million followers along with a nugget of political analysis. “Pennsylvania is a swing state,” Musk wrote. His repost was shared in turn by the America 2100 account.America 2100 is ostensibly a thinktank, launched by Needham, Rubio’s one-time chief of staff, in June 2023. Rubio is a Republican senator from Florida. Coverage of the launch presented it as a project with Rubio’s blessing, whose mission was to “begin the work of codifying and institutionalizing the ideas Rubio helped pioneer”.In July, however, Needham was also appointed as chairman of another thinktank, American Compass, which is led by a former Mitt Romney aide, Oren Cass.Cass and American Compass have drawn attention by promoting interventionist economic policies. Those policy ideas overlap with those of JD Vance: in reporting on the Needham hire, Politico called American Compass a “Vance-aligned think tank”, and Vance “an ally whose own staff has deep ties to the organization”.American Compass’s policy director, Chris Griswold, meanwhile, is another former Rubio staffer.After being dubbed “Little Marco” by Trump in a 2016 primary in which he, in turn, mocked the size of Trump’s hands, Rubio moved closer to Trump politically over the succeeding eight years, and in May even refused to commit to accepting the results of the upcoming election.At that time, Rubio was under consideration as Trump’s running mate but was eventually passed over for JD Vance.Although there was reporting on America 2100 at launch, there is little information on the site about its current personnel or the nature of the entity underlying its activities.America 2100 was registered as a non-stock corporation in Virginia in June 2023.Officers listed in filings include Needham and another former Rubio staffer, Albert Martinez, along with Lisa Lisker, a lawyer who was reportedly previously involved in an organization that spread misinformation about solar power in 12 states, and was also secretary for JD Vance’s campaign committee during his run for Senate in the 2022 election.The Guardian emailed America 2100 for comment via an email address designated for “press”, and emailed Needham and Lisker. The Guardian also contacted Rubio’s office.Only Needham responded, writing that: “I know this article will be bad-faith political hit job.”Needham added: “Nate did a great job reporting on the tragic story playing out in Charleroi.”In mid-2022, Hochman appeared poised for a high-profile career in conservative media, having been rewarded with blue ribbon fellowships and a staff job at the home of mainstream conservative opinion, National Review.His status as a representative of the emerging, harder-edged “national conservative” movement made him “the leftwing media’s go-to voice for insight into this crowd”, according to a story on rising rightwing influencers published at that time by the Dispatch, a “never Trump” conservative website.Hochman’s appearance in that story, however, was the start of his undoing.The Dispatch reported on a recording of Hochman in a Twitter spaces conversation with the white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes.In that conversation, Hochman reportedly disagreed with Fuentes on some topics, but also appeared to compliment the “America First” far-right activist, telling Fuentes: “You’ve gotten a lot of kids based, and we respect that for sure,” and “I think Nick’s probably a better influence than [the conservative commentator] Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservatives.”Amid the furore that followed, Hochman was stripped of his fellowships. In March 2023 he left the National Review to work for DeSantis’s abortive presidential campaign. He was fired by the campaign that July, however, after he retweeted a meme-drenched pro-DeSantis video on his personal account that embraced the aesthetics of the online far right.As the Guardian reported at the time, the video portrayed “a ‘Wojak” meme, a sad-looking man popular on the right, against headlines about Trump policy failures before showing the meme cheering up to headlines about DeSantis and images of the governor at work”, all to the tune of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill.Then finally it superimposed DeSantis on to ranks of marching soldiers and a Sonnenrad – a Norse symbol frequently appropriated by neo-Nazis.As Hochman departed the campaign, Axios reported that Hochman had made the video, but endeavored to make it “appear as if it was produced externally”.Since then, Hochman has more fully embraced the more extreme actors of the so-called “new right”.A week ago, he published an essay at the far-right magazine IM–1776, which appeared to embed conspiratorial claims about the media in a jeremiad against democracy.Hochman claims at one point in the piece: “The US constitution was conceived to thwart tyranny; but it did so, in part, by limiting mass democracy. Once those limits were removed, power was no longer dispersed across a system of checks and balances, but centralized in the hands of whoever controlled the machinery of opinion formation.”Another recent essay published at IM–1776 characterized critics of Darryl Cooper – the “Holocaust revisionist” who recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s webcast – as adherents of “Hitlerian Satanism”.IM–1776 also gave space for the alt-right influencer Douglass Mackey to characterize his prosecution under Klan-era election laws as the government “prosecuting people [for] posting election jokes”.The Guardian previously reported on IM–1776’s close links to the rightwing activist Christopher Rufo, who has spent much of the last week trying in vain to substantiate Donald Trump’s false claims that Haitian immigrants are eating “dogs” “cats” and “pets”.In his essay, Hochman praises Rufo, saying that he “has won an impressive string of culture war victories by actively crafting news cycles rather than responding to them”.In May, in the American Mind, Hochman began a glowing review of The Unprotected Class, a book by the Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl that claims America is racked by anti-white racism, with the line: “Ethnic discrimination is as old as human civilization itself,” and goes on to argue: “Racial revenge is the germ of the sustained campaign to defame, attack, and disenfranchise white Americans on behalf of their country’s most powerful institutions.” More
One year ago, Benjamin Netanyahu came to the UN with a vision of a “new Middle East” anchored by Israel’s growing ties with its Arab partners in the region. Now he is on the brink of launching a major escalation against Hezbollah, ignoring calls for restraint from his allies over the Gaza war and defying criticism that he is prevaricating in negotiations over a temporary ceasefire.The Israeli PM remains scheduled to speak on Friday at the UN general assembly in an appearance that is sure to lead to walkouts and protests on the streets of midtown Manhattan.He has delayed his arrival in the US by at least a day as tensions rise with Lebanon, after an elaborate operation to detonate thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah that may signal the beginning of a broader war in the region.The trip to New York may offer him a chance to evaluate support for an escalation in Lebanon, or to let Joe Biden and other allies know that he had made his decision and would not be talked down from a broader war.Netanyahu’s trip to the UN comes after a year of bloodshed in Gaza that has left more than 41,000 people dead and led the international criminal court (ICC) to consider issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. The ICC judges are regularly rumoured to be close to approving a warrant that could accuse Netanyahu of war crimes.Among those killed during the Gaza conflict have been 200 UN humanitarian aid workers. Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces have made claims that staff from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) had taken part in the 7 October Hamas-led attacks, and nine members of the organisation had their contracts terminated after an internal UN review.António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has said that he and Netanyahu have not spoken since the beginning of the war, but that he was ready to meet him on the sidelines of the summit if the Israeli PM asked.“I have not talked to him because he didn’t pick up my phone calls, but I have no reason not to speak with him,” Guterres said. He blasted the “lack of accountability” for the deaths of the humanitarian aid workers, most of whom have been killed in strikes that the UN has slammed as indiscriminate.Asked earlier this month if Netanyahu would meet Guterres, Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, said that the Israeli PM’s schedule had not been finalised yet.Netanyahu’s most recent trip to the US came in July, when he addressed a raucous joint session Congress, promising “total victory” in his war against Hamas and mocking demonstrators against his appearance in the US Capitol as “idiots”. On the streets outside near Union Station, protesters clashed with police and defaced marble statues with paint.It remains to be seen whether Netanyahu is ready to take a step further towards the abyss. Following an airstrike in Beirut on Friday that killed a senior Hezbollah commander and at least 13 others in Beirut’s Dahiyeh area, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said that “even in Dahiyeh in Beirut – we will continue to pursue our enemy in order to protect our citizens”.The new “series of operations in the new phase of the war will continue until we achieve our goal: ensuring the safe return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes,” he said.Guterres had said that he viewed the booby-trapped pager attack against Hezbollah as a potential prelude to a military escalation by Israel in Lebanon and warned that the region was on the “brink of catastrophe”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhether Netanyahu is ready to escalate, including by launching a ground operation, remains unclear, and both Hezbollah and its benefactor Iran have promised retribution for recent strikes. But Netanyahu’s office on Friday announced that he would delay his arrival by a day due to the situation, and Danon later told reporters that Netanyahu’s arrival date would depend on events in Israel.Netanyahu addressed the UN last year riding high on the recently concluded Abraham accords. The landmark agreement normalised relations between Israel and two Arab states, Bahrain and UAE, with expectations that Saudi Arabia may soon sign the accords as well.“When the Palestinians see that most of the Arab world has reconciled itself to the Jewish state, they too will be more likely to abandon the fantasy of destroying Israel and finally embrace a path of genuine peace with it,” Netanyahu said, holding a crude map with the words “The New Middle East”.But the bloodletting in Gaza following the attacks by Hamas have sent tensions soaring, and most recently Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said his country would not recognise Israel without a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.And, if the ICC panel of judges makes a surprise decision this week to accuse Netanyahu of war crimes in Gaza, it will mark a further embarrassment as he goes from pariah to international fugitive. More
Kamala Harris’s presidential election campaign raised more than triple the funds that Donald Trump’s did in August, according to the latest figures released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).The US vice-president and the Democratic National Committee saw $257m (£193m) flow into their coffers, compared with $85m (£64m) raised by the former president and the Republican National Committee, continuing a towering financial fundraising advantage that has been leveraged since Joe Biden stepped away from his re-election bid in July and Harris became the party’s nominee for the White House.The FEC’s release on Friday showed that the Democratic campaign of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, and the Democratic National Committee have $286m (£215m) to play with in the final two months before the election on 5 November, compared with Trump’s $214m (£161m).Harris’s cash advantage translated into significantly more spending: FEC disclosures show spending on the Harris-Walz campaign reached $174m (£131m) last month, almost three times as much as the Trump campaign outlays of $61m (£47m).Campaign and national committee combined spending shows a less extreme split. Harris and the Democrats splurged with $258m (£194m) last month into her sprint for the presidency, with Trump and the Republicans dropping $121m (£91m) on campaign advertising and costs, $36m (£27m) more than they raised that month.Meanwhile, tech mogul Elon Musk also made his largest federal political contribution to date, giving a total of $289,100 (£217,090) to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), a committee dedicated to supporting Republican candidates in the US House of Representatives. The party narrowly controls the lower chamber of Congress, while Democrats have a wafer-thin majority in the US Senate and both parties are battling fiercely for control.Despite the Harris campaign cash advantage, allowing her to blanket the airwaves with ads, opinion polls both nationally and in swing states show an extremely tight race. Both campaigns have said most of their spending was on ads, with smaller sums paying for rallies, travel and campaign staff salaries.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Harris campaign spent more than $135m (£101m) on media buys and ad production in August, FEC records showed; more than $6m (£4.5m) on air travel; about $4.9m (£3.7m) on payroll and related taxes; and $4.5m (£3.4m) on text messaging. Harris’s campaign has assembled at least 2,000 aides and 312 campaign field offices across the battleground states.The Trump campaign has not disclosed comparative details about the size of its operation. In August, it spent more than $47m (£35m) on ads, alongside $10.2m (£7.7m) on direct mail to potential voters and about $670,000 (£503,000) on air travel.The financial disclosures come as an intriguing interpretation of how each candidate might get to the winning threshold of 270 electoral college votes has emerged: if Harris wins the northern swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and North Carolina, but loses the Sun belt swing states of Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, then the 2024 election could come down to Nebraska, where five electoral college votes are assigned proportionally but there is a push by Republicans to change that to a winner-take-all system. More
Like many professional scribblers, I sometimes have to write not in a hushed study or library, but in noisy environments. So years ago I bought a set of Apple AirPods Pro, neat little gadgets that have a limited degree of noise-cancelling ability. They’re not as effective as the clunky (and pricey) headphones that seasoned transcontinental airline passengers need, but they’re much lighter and less obtrusive. And they have a button that enables you to switch off the noise cancellation and hear what’s going on around you.I remember wondering once if a version of them could also function as hearing aids, given the right software. But then dismissed the thought: after all, hearing aids are expensive, specialised devices that are often prescribed by audiologists – and also signal to the world at large that you are hard of hearing.But guess what? On 12 September, I open my laptop, click on the Verge website and find the headline: “Apple gets FDA authorisation to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids.” The new generation of the headphones will be able to serve as clinical-grade hearing aids later this autumn. More importantly, they can be bought over the counter (OTC in the lingo of the healthcare industry) and they will sell for $249 in the US (and £229 in the UK). Compare that with the prices of hearing aids sold by, say, Specsavers, which start at £495 and go all the way to £2,995 for the Phonak Infinio Sphere 90.Now of course price comparisons can be misleading. Vendors of conventional hearing aids will stress that customers get the undivided attention of an audiologist etc. And for customers with severe hearing difficulties, that’s fine. But for people with “mild to moderate hearing impairment”, even the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has concluded that the customisation software provided by Apple will be adequate.It works like this. You take an on-demand hearing test on your iPhone’s health app, which causes the earbuds to ping each ear with different frequencies at varying volumes. You tap the phone screen if you hear the sound. After a few minutes, the app will generate an audiogram that graphs your hearing deficits and this audiogram can then be used to program the AirPods Pro as hearing aids. Alternatively, you can upload an existing audiogram if you’ve had one generated by an audiologist.Neat, eh? And also a nice example of engineering ingenuity. But, as with most things, the technology is only part of the story. The healthcare industry in the US is tightly controlled by the FDA, which insisted for years that any device that goes into a human ear needs a prescription. As Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert and campaigner, points out, since 1993, campaigners have been calling for the FDA to loosen its stance on these devices and the calls got louder over the years. In 2015, the president’s council of advisers on science and technology issued a report seeking to make these devices more widely available. The next year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued a similar report.But eventually, in 2017, Congress passed the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act, proposed by senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Grassley and requiring the FDA to allow hearing aids without a prescription – and Donald Trump signed it! The act imposed a deadline of 2020 on the FDA, but the agency continually prevaricated until 2022, after the Biden administration compelled it to act with an executive order. Only then did the dam that had been building up since 1993 break.The moral of this story, in Stoller’s words, is simple: “How we deploy technology is not a function of engineering and science as much as it is how those interplay with law, in this case a law that fostered a hearing aid cartel and then a different law that broke it apart. So it’s not outlandish to say that Joe Biden designed Apple’s new hearing aid AirPods, with an assist from Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Grassley and Donald Trump. It’s just what happened.”This is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but it captures an essential truth that Silicon Valley would prefer to ignore: technology does not exist in a vacuum, and the ways it is deployed and developed are shaped by social and political forces. Social media companies escape liability because of a 26-word clause in a 1996 law, for example. And millions of people in the US suffering from hearing impairment could have had hearing aids at affordable prices at least a decade ago. The problem was not that the technology didn’t exist, but that it wasn’t in the interest of the healthcare-regulatory establishment to make it available.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat I’ve been readingBad pressJeff Jarvis, the veteran journalist and City University of New York emeritus professor, has an insightful analysis on his blog titled What’s become of The Times & Co? about why US mainstream media has gone wrong.Top MarxThe Enduring Influence of Marx’s Masterpiece is a marvellous introduction by Wendy Brown to a new translation of Das Kapital.Head case A lovely essay by Erik J Larson is The Left Brain Delusion, which argues that we’re too governed by one side of our grey matter. More
The marine band struck up a familiar theme. The door of the Oval Office swung open. Out strode the president and first lady to address an expectant crowd – that is, the real first lady, Jill Biden, and the president that fans of the TV show The West Wing used to secretly crave: Jed Bartlet, alias actor Martin Sheen.After a decade in which US politics has often felt like the work of a hyper-imaginative screenwriter, with ever more unlikely plot twists including the election of a reality TV star, it felt strangely natural to see Sheen stepping into the shoes of Joe Biden as his show’s theme music filled the Rose Garden.“We just came from the Oval,” said Jill Biden. “But even though Joe is away hosting leaders of Australia and India and Japan in Delaware, he wanted to make sure that President Bartlet and his staff had a chance to see the Oval Office again.”Sheen and fellow cast members had come to the White House to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first episode of The West Wing, the seven-season drama about an idealist liberal president and his fast-talking staff.On Friday, in warm sunshine, there were references to “big blocks of cheese” – a tradition on the show of requiring presidential staffers to meet with eccentric or offbeat constituents – and the walk-and-talk dialogues in which characters moved through the halls at high speed. Waiters passed out bourbon-and-ginger ale cocktails called the Jackal, a reference to press secretary CJ Cregg’s dance and lip-sync routine in one episode.Sheen – who has said his character was a conglomeration of Democrats John F Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton – rolled back the years. In classic Bartlet mode, he exhorted the crowd to find something worth fighting for, “something deeply personal and uncompromising, something that can unite the will of the spirit with the work of the flesh”.View image in fullscreenThen Aaron Sorkin, the show’s creator, declared: “Our cast will live on as one of the best in the history of television,” and recognised those in attendance. Among them were Richard Schiff, who played communications director Toby Ziegler; Janel Moloney, who played assistant Donna Moss; and Dulé Hill, who played the president’s body man, Charlie Young.Sorkin also noted the absence of a few high-profile actors – Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford and Rob Lowe, better known to fans as Cregg, Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn – who he said were on set elsewhere. “The rest of us are apparently unemployed,” he joked.After the crowd laughed, a voice chimed in from Sorkin’s right. “Not yet!” Jill Biden said. It was a nod to the fact that her husband still has four months left in office – and a quick retort worthy of Bartlet’s exchanges with wife Abbey Bartlet, played by Stockard Channing.The West Wing remains a favourite of many who now work in Washington. Among those spotted in the Rose Garden were the House foreign affairs chair, Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas, and Joe Walsh, once a Tea Party-aligned Illinois representative who is now a fierce critic of former president Donald Trump.Sorkin reflected: “We had no political agenda. We were trying to do a good show every week. But the greatest delivery system ever invented for an idea is a story and, once in a while, we’ll hear from someone who was inspired to go into public service because of our show. And that’s something that 25 years ago this week, none of us could have foreseen or even dared to hope for.”Born in the last year of the 20th century, the show illustrates that there is nothing so remote as the recent past. Its run coincided with the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was off the air by the time Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were elected and long gone when the Covid-19 pandemic and January 6 insurrection unfolded.Sorkin continued: “The show was idealistic, aspirational and romantic. Over the years, I’ve noticed that during times of peak political tension, pundits will warn us not to expect ‘a West Wing moment’.View image in fullscreen“They mean not to expect a selfless act of statesmanship. Not to expect anyone to put country first. Don’t expect anyone to swing for the fences or reach for the stars. But the fact is, West Wing moments do happen and Dr Biden, we saw proof of that on the morning of July 21.”That was the day Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election after a disastrous debate performance and growing concerns over the 81-year-old’s mental and physical condition. For months, however, Biden had been in denial. If anyone wants to look for an on-screen parallel, it might be Bartlet hiding a multiple sclerosis diagnosis while running for president.The final season of The West Wing saw Bartlet passing on the torch to fellow Democrat Matthew Santos, played by Jimmy Smits. He becomes America’s first Latino president after defeating Senator Arnold Vinick of California, portrayed by Alan Alda as the kind of old school Republican who is now an endangered species in the Trump era.Nothing, perhaps, dates The West Wing more than that. More
A local law says that residents of Saginaw Township in Michigan cannot publicly display political signs in support of a presidential candidate until 30 days before the US election, even on their own front lawns.But you wouldn’t know it while driving through this neat midwestern township that borders a town of the same name – simply, Saginaw – in the most closely contested county, also called Saginaw, of a battleground state that Donald Trump won in 2016 when he took the White House and then lost in 2020 when Joe Biden wrested it from his control.With more than six weeks until what many Americans regard as the most consequential US presidential election in decades, some Saginaw Township residents have defied the ban to declare their loyalties to their neighbors. Trump campaign signs outnumber those for Kamala Harris, but scattered among them are posters proclaiming that the former US president is a convicted felon who belongs in prison and not the Oval Office.One Saginaw Township resident interpreted the newfound unwillingness of local officials to enforce their own ban on political signs as a desire to avoid confrontation in these politically charged times.For Saginaw Township’s population, there is the added weight that not all votes are equal in the US thanks to the vagaries of the electoral college system and that theirs count for more than most. The county is crucial to who wins Michigan and the state looks likely to be pivotal in deciding the next occupant of the White House.In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Saginaw county by just 1.1% of the ballot as he took Michigan by less than 11,000 votes. Four years later, Biden won back the county for the Democrats by only 303 votes as he once again returned the state into the Democratic column.View image in fullscreenThis year, the Harris campaign sees Michigan as a key part of its clearest path to victory alongside two other Rust belt states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Saginaw county will be a litmus test of whether the Democratic nominee can pull that off and keep Trump from returning for a second term that many observers fear will risk authoritarianism in the USA.So Saginaw is an ideal place from which to observe this epic US presidential election, the third in a row with Trump on the ballot – and not just because the vote has been so close in the past. The state of this county mirrors many of the issues faced by other places that will decide this contest.Saginaw has a once-booming industrial base in long decline but which is still important. Widespread poverty exists alongside prosperous suburbs in a city with one of the highest crime rates in the country. There are changing racial demographics and, for many, a sense of drift with no clear plan for the future.In the US’s Democratic-dominated big urban centers – such as New York, Los Angeles and Seattle – it is not uncommon to hear Americans wonder how it is that this year’s election is even close given Trump’s political and criminal record. Many seem to be still grappling with the same questions that surfaced eight years ago when he stunned the nation by defeating Hillary Clinton. At times, it feels as if they regard places like Saginaw county as a distant, foreign landscape.Seen from Saginaw, however, the election can look very different.View image in fullscreenThe Guardian asked people who live in the county to tell us where we should go, who we should talk to and what we should look at in order to understand the area and its place in the election.Among those who replied was Geordie Wilson, a former teacher, who wrote: “Saginaw is possibly the most economically and racially divided area in the country. It is the epicenter of our national divide.”Several people mentioned their fears about the future of American democracy if Trump returns to the White House, including Jamie Forbes, who is recently married and works for the local public transport system. Forbes also spoke about the economy, a common theme nationally and locally. He said he wants to see “wealthy people and corporations paying their fair share in taxes”.“Saginaw issues: Continuing attempts for our economy to recover from automakers pulling jobs, attraction and diversification of new industry, crime, small business success,” he wrote.Valerie Silvernaile, a medical procedure scheduler, said it was important to protect workers’ rights in the industries that remain.“Unions are important here. We need a candidate who isn’t a union buster,” she said.One middle-aged man said he has never voted but will this year, for Trump: “Food prices, safety and jobs. Trump has addressed all of this for me between listening to him and his website.”Michael Colucci, a chemical engineer who has lived in Saginaw Township for 40 years, wrote that “you can visit all of America in a 20-mile stretch along M-46”, the Michigan highway running east to west through the county.View image in fullscreen“Most Americans live in communities where most people think like them. Saginaw is small enough that everyone has the occasion to interact with everyone else,” he said.Colucci, who lives in an electoral precinct where Trump and Hillary Clinton each won 49.5% of the vote in 2016, took the Guardian on a drive to show what he meant. It began in the city of Saginaw, which Colucci calls a “mini Detroit” for its abandoned factories and housing.In 1968, Saginaw was one of 10 communities across the US awarded the title of “All-America City” by the National Civic League. Those were the boom times.Since then, the population of the city has dropped by more than half to fewer than 45,000 people, as jobs disappeared and residents decamped. That also drove a change in Saginaw’s demographics. Twenty-five years ago, Saginaw city was about evenly divided between white and Black residents in addition to a Latino minority. The white population has dropped sharply, to less than 35%.Colucci pointed out mansions built by the lumber barons whose sawmills drove the city’s 19th-century development when demand for timber from Michigan’s pine forests surged as the US colonised lands to the west. But more often, there were just grass-covered patches of ground where auto factories and shopping malls once stood.Some of the first cars built in America were assembled in Saginaw. Over decades, factories drew in workers from across the country to manufacture gear boxes and steering assemblies fitted into vehicles in Detroit. Saginaw city and its environs were home to a dozen General Motors plants.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy the 1980s, the industry was in rapid retreat from Saginaw. The last GM plant, today called Saginaw Metal Casting Operations, employed 7,000 people in 1970. Now it provides work to fewer than 350.The factories stood abandoned for years, symbols of a lost prosperity, until the Biden administration provided funds to tear them down. When the jobs went, shops and hotels closed. In the heart of downtown, department stores have given way to public services including an employment office, a college and a healthcare centre for lower-income families.View image in fullscreenA brand-new school opened on the riverbank this month. But it, too, is a testament to decline after attendance at the city’s two main high schools, once sharp sporting rivals, fell so low that they were closed and combined.Simon & Garfunkel’s iconic 1960s song America was written in the city and includes a line about taking “four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw”. Fifteen years ago, an artists collective, Paint Saginaw, daubed lyrics from the song on dozens of abandoned factories, bridges and empty buildings, including the line: “All gone to look for America,” as a lament to people moving out. But the population had not so much gone to look for America as shuffled a few miles down the road.As Colucci drives west, he crosses from the city, passes the sprawling golf course of Saginaw Country Club, and heads into the suburbs of Saginaw Township.In 1980, the city was nearly four times as large as the township. Now, they are about the same size after many residents of one bled into the other. But the township has nearly twice the median income and is 89% white.Crossing from one to the other, the quality of housing changes fast. So do the voting patterns.Saginaw city overwhelmingly voted against Trump in both the presidential elections he contested. Clinton won 76% of the ballot in 2016 and Biden pulled in similar support four years later.Saginaw Township was a different story. Trump beat Clinton there by three points in 2016. Four years later, he lost by a similar margin to Biden.In other words, it wasn’t the poorest part of Saginaw that once delivered for Trump but one of the most prosperous. Colucci has an explanation.“Trump promises them that he’s going to stop the world from changing,” he said.Then he scoffs: “He promised to stop coal disappearing and it literally disappeared while he was president.”The outcome of this election is likely to hang on turnout. Trump’s vote in Michigan went up in 2020 but he was beaten because many of those Democrats who stayed home four years earlier came out to remove him from the White House.View image in fullscreenColucci volunteered for Clinton’s campaign but lamented that her organisers placed too much confidence in data, didn’t listen to local advice and failed miserably to mobilise Democratic voters on election day. It is an often bitterly expressed complaint heard repeatedly over the years across Rust belt states that Clinton should have won.Biden’s campaign evidently did better and there are clear signs that Harris has learned the lessons. But the challenge remains.Nearly 75% of registered voters in Saginaw Township cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election. Fewer than 50% of Saginaw city turned out.In other Trump strongholds such as Frankenmuth, a small city in the south-east of the county known as Little Bavaria, turnout was 82%. Frankenmuth, which celebrates its German heritage in its architecture and its own Oktoberfest this weekend, twice voted overwhelmingly for Trump and his anti-immigrant agenda.Still, nothing is a given.Among those who contacted the Guardian was Mark Paredes, a former US diplomat and lifelong conservative who said he would never vote for Trump and is therefore supporting Harris.“If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be doing this, I would have been quite amused,” he wrote. More
