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      ‘Good for Joe’: Scranton residents back Biden’s decision to quit race

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      The Central Scranton Expressway, the road which leads into Scranton from the I-81 highway, was renamed in 2021 as the President Joseph R Biden Jr Expressway.The road drops down into the center of Scranton, the Pennsylvania city where the president was born, where it meets up with Biden Street – renamed in the same 2021 city council vote.There is no indication yet that Scranton, a former coal and manufacturing hub home to about 80,000 people, intends to change its name to Bidenton, but the message here is clear: this is Joe Biden country.“​​Let me start off with: we’re very proud of Joe Biden. We love Joe Biden. The fact that he’s a local guy, and all that,” said James Ferguson, 81.Ferguson was sitting with his brother, John Ferguson, 77, on a bench on Biden Street on Thursday afternoon. It was a blow for both when the president, who moved to Delaware from Scranton aged seven but who speaks often of his Scranton upbringing, decided to drop out of the race in mid-July, but the fondness for Biden remains.“I think Joe Biden showed the character that he is. He is a very good man, and he put the country first. It’s not how good he is, or whether he is smart or not. It was perception. The perception was bad for Joe, and he knew it and he dropped out. Good for Joe,” the elder Ferguson said.But with Trump leading Biden in the polls and posing an existential threat to the US, there is an acceptance that Biden had to go.“We can’t afford to lose this election, I think. So yeah, we were disappointed. We voted for him, we would vote for him again. But I think this is better for the party, better for the country,” John Ferguson said.“He’s a realist. I think he finally was convinced that he couldn’t take the risk. We’ve got to stop Trump from winning. We can’t let Trump get in. That is a terrible man. He’s an insult to the human race, that man.”Biden dropped out on Sunday, bringing to an end a painful, weeks-long pressure campaign that began with a dreadful debate performance and saw an ever-increasing number of Democratic politicians call for him to resign.Behind the scenes senior party figures, including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, had also made the case to Biden that he couldn’t win, despite the president comfortably – albeit in the face of very little opposition – clinching the Democratic primary earlier this year.“His age was a concern for a lot of voters and he was slipping in the polls. And I was very worried about that. So I mean, I’m thankful of all he’s done, I think he’s done good work, and I think he did the honorable thing that really should be valued,” said Angela Miller, a civil engineer.“I never wanted him to run again. He never said he was going to, do you know what I mean? From the beginning he said he was going to be a transitional president. I felt like he kind of went back on that.”Biden narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2020, defeating Trump by 80,000 votes. He comfortably won Lackawanna county, the north-east Pennsylvania district where Scranton is based, but not everyone in the city is an admirer.View image in fullscreen“He wasn’t really on the ball I don’t think. It was kind of like having the senile grandpa in the White House office,” said Phil Fleming, 61, as he watching his friend unpack a guitar at a bandshell in downtown Scranton.Fleming had the opposite geographic journey to Biden. He grew up in Delaware, where Biden moved with his family aged 10, and then moved to the Scranton area later in life. But Fleming has no particular affection for the president.“I always said Joe would do for the country what he did for Delaware: nothing,” he said.Biden endorsed Kamala Harris for president within minutes of pulling out of the race on Sunday. Harris has since all but secured the Democratic nomination, and if she wins in November she would become the country’s first woman president.“I’m excited about it. I think it would be awesome to have a female run the country, to see what she could bring and try to unite the country a little bit more,” said Kelly, 34.Kelly, who asked not to use her last name, was walking her dog through the Green Ridge area of Scranton, where Biden’s three-storey childhood home is now marked by a small plaque.“It’s definitely a cool thing to say that the President of the United States grew up in your neighborhood, you can’t really say that too often. So it’s a little fun fact that we have here,” she said.Few cities can claim to have a president on their books – Quincy, in Massachusetts, can lay claim to two: father and son duo John Adams and John Quincy Adams. For Scranton, Biden may no longer be in the race, but he will remain a presence.“I think he really put all his heart and soul into this country, and I just feel like maybe now it’s time to step out, and let the next generation come in and serve the same way he did,” Kelly said. More

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      Voters to choose between two starkly different candidates in US ‘Armageddon election’

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      A man convicted of dozens of felonies versus a criminal prosecutor. An architect of abortion bans versus a champion of reproductive freedom. An elderly white man fixated on the past versus a mixed-race daughter of immigrants leaning into the future.One hundred days from the US presidential election, the choice for voters has never been so clear cut. Kamala Harris, 59, the de facto Democratic nominee after the dramatic withdrawal of Joe Biden, is a progressive person of colour bidding to become the first female president in America’s 248-year history.Donald Trump, at 78 the oldest nominee in history, is a populist-nationalist who has demonised immigrants, gained backing from far-right extremists and tapped into white Christian nostalgia by promising to “make America great again”.“In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation, one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” Harris told members of the historically Black sorority Zeta Phi Beta in Indianapolis on Wednesday. “And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”Biden has previously spoken of a “battle for the soul of the nation” and Trump has described this election as “the final battle”. But the nomination of Harris will be clarifying about the culmination of a tumultuous decade and a collision of two Americas: one liberal, diverse and optimistic, the other conservative, nativist and, in Trump’s telling, driven by grievance and vengeance.Halifu Osumare, professor emerita in the department of African American and African studies at the University of California, Davis, said: “The difference between the candidates couldn’t be any starker. To me it represents this country and its schizophrenia. This country is both racist to its core yet the leader of the world in the rights of the individual and democracy.“This election is going to play out that schizophrenia because you’ve got a good deal of the nation who wants to take us back to those days where white supremacy was absolutely dominant, and those who want us to evolve as a human species. We need somebody who has humanity at her core in order to do that.”The road that led here began with the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, in 2008. For millions of Americans, Obama represented hope; for millions of other Americans, he represented fear that the country they grew up in was disappearing. Whereas white Christians made up 54% of the US population in 2008, they have now slipped into the minority and make up only 44%.Racially motivated backlash against Obama was evident in the stirrings of the populist Tea Party movement. Then came Trump’s entry into politics as a “birther”, questioning whether Obama had in fact been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible for the presidency.Again, Trump offered hope to one America and fear to the other. He embodied a rage against change, political correctness and liberal elites, gaining traction in small towns and rural areas that felt left behind. He scapegoated immigrants as the source of blame, creating an us-versus-them dynamic, and promised to build a border wall to keep them out.The country faced a clear choice in 2016 and handed Trump victory over Hillary Clinton in the electoral college, though there were complicating variables such as her status as a former first lady and the FBI reopening an investigation into her handling of classified information.Four years and one global pandemic later, Trump, a white man who was the oldest president ever, was defeated by Joe Biden, a white man who was even older and a moderate who won back white working-class votes that Clinton had lost in the rust belt. In 2024, the world was braced, somewhat wearily, for a rematch.Moe Vela, a former senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, said: “When it was Biden and Trump, you had two septuagenarians that created a battle of senior citizens. Now you have not only gender, not only the past versus the future, not only a difference in heritage – you have also the stark contrast in hope versus hate.”In the past month, American politics has moved at incredible speed, upending all certainties. Biden flopped at a presidential debate in Atlanta, Trump survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and, as a chorus of Democrats questioned his age and mental acuity, Biden became the first incumbent since 1968 to announce he would not seek re-election.The party quickly rallied around Harris, a former US senator, prosecutor and California attorney general, with an avalanche of endorsements, fundraising and memes. She hit the campaign trail with electrifying speeches and Beyoncé tracks, providing a shot of adrenaline that flipped Democrats from doom and gloom to giddy optimism. Opinion polls show Harris outperforming Biden among Black, Latino and young voters, and running more or less even with Trump.Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, said: “There’s a hundred days to go to the election and, in a year where everything has pretty much happened, it’s hard to tell how this all plays out. But I don’t think there’s any question that the Democrats are very much back in this race and are looking a hell of a lot better than they did a few weeks ago.”Panetta, who served in various capacities under nine US presidents, has witnessed growing polarisation and a coarsening of political discourse. “It’s obvious that America in these last number of years has become more divided, more partisan, and our democracy in many ways has become much more dysfunctional as a result of those divisions,” he added. “Kamala Harris presents a message that we could have a better America in the future, and we need that message of hope.“The message of Trump, whether he wanted to change it or not, still gets trapped by his own sense of retribution, vengeance and going after people. That’s not what Kamala Harris is about and so the American people are going to have a real choice here in November to decide what kind of direction we want for our country. The more defined that difference is, the better the chances are that the Democrats can win.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBorn in Oakland, California, to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Harris is the anti-Trump in myriad ways. She is 19 years younger, instantly neutralising the age argument and turning it against her opponent, whose ramblings and name confusions will be under special scrutiny.She has been the face of the Biden campaign on the issue of abortion as reproductive rights became an animating issue after the supreme court in 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision. She is expected to stick largely to Biden’s foreign policy playbook on Ukraine, China and Iran but could strike a tougher tone with Israel over the war in Gaza.Her sudden ascent punctured Republican balloons after a successful party convention in Milwaukee, where Trump was almost deified after his defiant response – “Fight! Fight! Fight” – to a near-death experience. His entrance to the sound of It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, and speeches by the likes of wrestler Hulk Hogan, underlined an image of old-school machismo.The Trump campaign, which relished a contest with the ailing Biden, is now having to rapidly adapt to the new challenge of Harris. It has begun casting her as a leftwing radical from California who was the “co-pilot” of what they say are the Biden administration’s failed policies on immigration and inflation.Trump told a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, this week: “For three and a half years, Lyin’ Kamala Harris has been the ultra-liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe … As border czar, Kamala threw open our borders and allowed 20 million illegal aliens to stampede into our country from all over the world.”Republican representative and rightwing media have mispronounced her name, mocked her laugh (“Cackling Kamala”), and invoked diversity, equity and inclusion programmes to brand her potentially the “first DEI president”. Commentators predict a torrent of bigotry, racism and misogyny reminiscent of the playbooks deployed against Obama and Clinton. The tone of the two campaigns could not be more different.Tara Setmayer, co-founder and chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led Super Pac, said: “That’s the decision. It’s between democracy versus autocracy, and progression versus regression. Usually a future-forward vision wins out. But we’ll see. It’s going to be a hell of a battle. When you think we were battling for the soul of America in 2020, this is the battle for the soul of America on steroids.”The clarity of the choice raises the temperature in an already febrile atmosphere. The attempt on Trump’s life came after years of political violence that included the shooting of representative Steve Scalise, a hammer attack on former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.Both parties now head into an “Armageddon election” in which they say the American way of life is on the line. Winning will signify total vindication; losing will signify total catastrophe. How would Trump’s fervent base react to defeat by a Black woman? At a rally for Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, in Middletown, Ohio, this week, state senator George Lang warned: “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved.”Differences personified by Harris and Trump appear irreconcilable. David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University, said: “It’s about crushing the other side. There’s no bipartisanship about this election except for the ‘never Trumpers’ [traditional Republicans who oppose Trump], who have seen a light and don’t want to live in a country with that kind of authoritarianism.“We’re on the brink of something here.” More

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      Kamala Harris switch scrambles Republicans as Trump resorts to insults

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      Donald Trump capped a tough week in which his Democratic opponents turned the tables, replacing aging Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as their top choice for president, by resorting to insults and extremism on the campaign trail.A week ago, Trump was riding high on the iconic moment when he rose bloodied and with a defiantly raised fist from an assassination attempt, pulling away in the polls. Biden, meanwhile, was struggling to recover from his dire late June debate against the Republican nominee and an unconvincing performance in the days since.Now, with the former president suddenly facing a vibrant, younger rival in Harris, who hit the ground running after Biden quit his re-election campaign last Sunday and quickly endorsed her for the top of the ticket, Trump called her “a bum” and said he “couldn’t care less” if he mispronounced her name.At a rally in Florida on Friday night organized by the far-right Christian advocacy group Turning Point Action, Trump not only went personal against the US vice-president, but once again appeared to threaten American democracy.“Christians, get out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it anymore. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” he said at the event in West Palm Beach, not far from his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence.Trump has been adopted by much of the US evangelical Christian right as a flawed champion, besmirched by losing in sexual misconduct and business fraud civil cases and convicted on criminal counts for election-related fraud in a case involving an adult film actor who alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him. With other criminal cases ongoing, he is nevertheless the one-term president who tilted the US supreme court against abortion, gun control, government experts, voting rights and diversity efforts in higher education, delighting his white, ultra-conservative base.At Friday’s rally, he also lit into Harris. She won the support not only of Biden but of the Obamas, the Clintons and the Democratic leaders in Congress last week, and if she is officially anointed at the party’s convention next month, she will be the first Black female nominee, the first south Asian nominee, and, if she beats Trump in November, America’s first female president.On Friday, Trump called her “the most incompetent, unpopular and far-left vice-president in American history”. And in a seeming nod to how the campaign has been upended, he said: “She was a bum three weeks ago.”He also pronounced her name Ka-MAH-la Harris, whereas the vice-president pronounces her name KAHM-a-la.He insisted that he had been told there are numerous ways to say her name and added: “I said: ‘Don’t worry about it, doesn’t matter what I say, I couldn’t care less if I mispronounce it or not.’ Some people think I mispronounce it on purpose but actually I’ve heard it said about seven different ways.”He has variously called Harris “crazy”, “nuts” and “dumb as a rock”. Some Republicans in Congress disparage her as a “diversity hire”, even though in her career before she became the first female US vice-president she had been elected as the district attorney of San Francisco, the attorney general of California and a US senator. Rightwing activists and trolls have smeared her online with racist, sexist and sexualized barbs, Reuters reported.But opinion polls show that in just a few days, Harris, 59, has closed to within a point or two of Trump, whereas Biden had fallen around six points behind and was losing support in vital swing states.Trump, 78, is now the oldest nominee to run for president. Earlier in the week, Trump also said Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people” after she did not attend Benjamin Netanyahu’s in-person visit and address to a joint session of Congress in Washington where the Israeli prime minister defended Israel’s war in Gaza. Harris spoke out strongly against the suffering of Palestinian civilians.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis despite her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, being Jewish and being involved in an antisemitism taskforce for the White House.In the last week, Trump also experienced another wobble in his trajectory. After introducing his choice of running mate at the Republican national convention as young gun and US senator for Ohio JD Vance to great fanfare, some within Republican circles began to lament Vance as a liability rather than a boon to the Trump ticket, following awkward performances on the campaign trail.Then, Jennifer Aniston went viral criticizing Vance’s past comments disparaging the likes of Harris, who is a stepmother but has not given birth, as unhappy “childless cat ladies”..And on Saturday, the New York Times published excerpts from communications between Vance and a peer from Yale Law School who said their close friendship broke down in 2021 when Vance supported a ban by Arkansas on gender-affirming care for transgender minors. It was the first such ban in the country – later struck down in court.Former friend Sofia Nelson is transgender and told the publication that the public should know what Vance has said, including more about his pivot from being a Trump opponent to an acolyte. This included Vance writing “I hate the police” after white officers killed a Black 18-year-old, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and calling Trump a demagogue, a disaster and “morally reprehensible” while saying the greater his appeal to the white electorate, the worse it would be for Black voters. The Vance campaign called Nelson’s decision to disclose private conversations unfortunate.On Saturday night, Trump and Vance are due to appear at a rally in Minnesota, hoping to get their campaign off the back foot. More

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      Kamala Harris ‘listening’ to young people on Gaza, says fellow Democrat

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      Progressive US representative Pramila Jayapal has said Kamala Harris is “listening” to young people’s concerns about Israel’s war in Gaza as the newly elevated presumptive Democratic nominee rides an “undeniable” wave of momentum.In the days since Joe Biden ended his presidential re-election campaign and endorsed the vice-president for November’s race against Republican nominee Donald Trump, gen Z supporters have flooded social media with coconut tree video cuts and “brat summer” memes – a reflection of the way her campaign has jolted a presidential race many Democrats were afraid was slipping away.Jayapal, chair of the Progressive caucus, which was divided over the question of whether Biden should step aside, said the level of enthusiasm she has seen for Harris in the last six days – especially among young people – was unparalleled.“I have not seen anything like this,” Jayapal, who represents Seattle in the US House, said on the sidelines of a two-day youth voter summit in Atlanta on Friday night. “The closest was probably Barack Obama.”However, citing the Harris campaign’s record fundraising and a surge of early support, the representative said: “This is even more than that – just the amount of money that’s been raised. The fact that it’s come from grassroots donors, the fact that it’s first-time donors, the volunteers, the voter registration, it has really been palpable.”Jayapal said Harris, who is poised to become the first woman of color to lead a major-party presidential ticket, had a unique opportunity to excite young people as well as Black and brown voters. Harris was also a strong messenger on issues that matter to young people, especially abortion rights, she said.“On every level, including the fact that she is a prosecutor and she will prosecute the case against a convicted felon, I think this is going to be a candidate that can take us to victory,” Jayapal said.Doug Jones, a former Alabama senator and a close ally of Biden, said Democrats were desperate to unite after a painful few weeks.“It has moved not just with lightning speed, but with an enthusiasm that I’ve never seen,” he said in an interview at the conference. “It is extraordinary.”Many young people have expressed hope that Harris will distance herself from Biden’s approach to Israel’s war in Gaza.During a meeting on Thursday, the vice-president said she implored Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal that would pause the fighting in Gaza and release hostages. In comments afterward, Harris emphasized Palestinian suffering while also recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself.“We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies,” Harris said this week. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”Jayapal, who was among the roughly 100 House Democrats who boycotted the Israeli prime minister’s address to Congress this week, said it would be “complicated” for Harris to chart her own course while still serving as vice-president.“I know that she feels a deep empathy for Palestinians,” said Jayapal, who said she had spoken recently to Harris about the issue. Pointing to Harris’s remarks after meeting with Netanyahu this week, the Seattle Democrat said: “I think she was trying to signal that she wants to take a different course – that she wants to perhaps consider things that President Biden hadn’t considered or had decided not to do.”Jayapal noted that it wasn’t just young people and Arab and Muslim Americans who were pushing the administration to change its approach. Black faith leaders and labor groups have also joined calls for the US to stop sending offensive military aid to Israel.“I believe she is listening to all of that,” Jayapal said. “How she actually moves, we’re going to have to see.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJayapal also weighed in on Harris’s search for a running mate. Her preference is Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, a strong supporter of labor who Jayapal believes would help Democrats hold the midwest. Walz is one of more than a half-dozen candidates viewed as potential running mates.Young voters are crucial to Democrats’ prospects in November. Recent polling has shown Republicans making gains with voters under 35 amid widespread disillusionment with the state of American politics, its institutions and its leaders.Youth-led groups that have been calling on Democrats to do more to invest in young people are hopeful Harris can harness this new energy around her campaign. Already, her campaign has leaned in, embracing an excitement they have branded the “Kamalove”.“The thing that’s creating the energy here is Vice-President Harris and the hope that she’s been giving young people and the vision that she wants to accomplish for us,” said Marianna Pecora, the communications director for Voters of Tomorrow, which is hosting the Atlanta Year of Youth summit. “Young people are excited and they’re energized and they’re finding politics to be a joyful thing, something that they want to pay attention to for the first time in a long time, and I don’t think that’s momentum that can die with a meme.”Harris was due to virtually address the conference in Atlanta on Saturday.A handful of new polls this week showed Democrats, with Harris at the top of the ticket, gaining a few points against Trump, with the national race against the former president now neck-and-neck.Voters of Tomorrow, a liberal gen Z-led organization, recently joined with a coalition of 17 youth groups to unite behind Harris. The newly formed alliance aims to boost Harris in the final 100-day stretch before election day.On 21 July, after Biden endorsed Harris, Voters of Tomorrow recorded its best fundraising day, raising nearly $125,000. It has also been flooded with new applications and requests to start new chapters.In remarks at the summit, Jayapal cast Harris as a champion of the middle class who, as a prosecutor, took on the “big banks, big oil, big pharma”.“She will lift up and inspire our next-generation leaders across the country, and give us all a place to see ourselves in her,” Jayapal said. More

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      From rising star to potential liability: how JD Vance’s fortunes have turned

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      He was supposed to be his master’s mini-me, his elevation as Republican vice-presidential nominee hailed as a virile celebration of Donald Trump’s near-total conquest of the GOP.Now – days after receiving a rapturous response at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee – JD Vance is being lamented within party circles as a potentially fatal liability in Trump’s quest to recapture the White House.Affirming the maxim – coined by the late British Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson – that a week is a long time in politics, Vance’s poll ratings have been dragged to record lows by a combination of his own past statements resurfacing on social media and embarrassingly awkward performances on the campaign trail.The danger that Vance’s baggage will drag Trump down with him may already be giving the former president buyer’s remorse, commentators believe.Far from being a yin-and-yang pick chosen to counter-balance the senior candidate’s weaknesses, Vance – the first-term senator for Ohio, a state already firmly in the Republican camp – was selected because he faithfully reflected the ideological gut instincts of Trump, despite having previously called him “America’s Hitler” and “cultural opioid”.But there is ample reason to believe the choice was driven by a euphoric belief on Trump’s part that November’s election against an ageing, ailing and unpopular Joe Biden would be a shoo-in.With Biden’s withdrawal – and almost certain replacement as Democratic nominee by the vice-president, Kamala Harris – a very different electoral landscape looms. And Vance, with his hardline anti-abortion stance and sneering contempt for childless women, may be entirely the wrong partner to help Trump traverse it.“Most striking thing I heard from Trump allies yesterday was the second-guessing of JD Vance – a selection, they acknowledged, that was borne of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter,” wrote Tim Alberta, a journalist with the Atlantic who has covered the Trump campaign, the day after Biden’s withdrawal last Sunday.  Putting Vance on the ticket defies the basic laws of vice-presidential picks, experienced pollsters say.“The first rule of choosing a running mate is to do no harm, because there’s very little gain that you will get from a running mate, but there’s a lot of harm that can be done,” said Patrick Murray, director of the polling institute at Monmouth University. “In effect, the JD Vance pick may be shaping up to possibly be that kind of harmful pick.“He helps to focus much more on the negative aspects of Trump that turned voters off.“One of the things that gets overstated by journalists is the appeal of a running mate to a bloc of voters – that you think, for example, of the JD Vance idea that he’s going to appeal to white working-class voters outside of his home state of Ohio. That never happens … because voters are looking at the top of the ticket for that kind of message. What it does say is what kind of balance you’re going to bring to your office, what kind of strengths you’re looking for.”What those might be have been scrutinised by a nascent Harris campaign eager to turn the spotlight on the very issues Trump wants to neutralise – namely, abortion and women’s rights, and the threat to general freedoms believed to be represented by Project 2025, a radical blueprint drawn up by the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing thinktank.Exhibit A on Vance is a 2021 interview with then Fox News host Tucker Carlson in which he derided women without children as “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives” – a designation he accorded to Harris and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary. Their supposedly childless status means they have a lesser stake in America’s wellbeing, he added.In fact, Harris is mother to two stepchildren, while Buttigieg, who is gay and married, has two adopted children.Critics say the comments betray a retrograde misogyny and a zealous intent to pursue an abortion ban, which Vance and other rightwing Republicans favour, despite Trump’s insistence that it should be left to the states.Perhaps equally significant for the celebrity-sensitive Trump is a rare political rebuke the comments drew from the actor Jennifer Aniston, who is childless but has publicised her unsuccessful attempts to become pregnant through in vitro fertilisation (IVF), a procedure Vance opposed in a recent Senate vote.Also inconvenient for Trump is Vance’s link to Project 2025, the controversial conservative governing model the former president has lately tried to disavow as he seeks to build electoral support. That attempt has been undermined by Vance having written a foreword for an upcoming book by the project’s author, Kevin Roberts.On the campaign trail, the Yale-educated Vance – despite being heralded, partly thanks to his acclaimed 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, for a supposedly umbilical connection to white working-classes voters – has proven to be no rabble-rousing orator of the Trump school.An incident at a rally in Ohio last Sunday resembled an excruciating study in social gaucheness, when Vance suggested Democrats might think drinking Diet Mountain Dew, a popular soft drink, was racist, before laughing at his own lame joke; as the audience remained largely silent, Vance laughed awkwardly, saying: “I love you guys.”In another sign that his assent to running-mate status is going less than smoothly, Vance has been beset by bizarre rumours that he once had sex with a couch in his youth, an outlandish suggestion that even prompted an Associated Press fact-check.The unverified claim may pale in comparison with evidence – accepted as fact in court – that Trump had sex with an adult porn actor, leading to his conviction on 34 felony charges of document falsification to cover up hush-money payments. But its very presence illustrates and adds to the difficulty Vance is having gaining traction as a positive addition to the Republican ticket.Exposure to the spotlight seems to be damaging Vance’s poll ratings.“JD Vance is making history as the least liked VP nominee (non-incumbent) since 1980 following his/her party’s convention,” posted CNN polling expert Harry Enten, noting that the candidate had recorded a favourability rating of -6 within a week of his nomination.Vance’s tanking numbers were no real surprise, Enten told the network. “There’s this idea that JD Vance is going to help out in Ohio, those rust belt battleground states,” he said. “He was the worst-performing candidate among Republicans in 2022 up and down the ballot in Ohio. He adds nothing there … JD Vance makes no sense from a statistical polling perspective.”A reckoning may come whenever Trump, facing a resurgent Democrat opposition, reaches the same conclusion. More

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      Autocracy, Inc review – fears for liberalism and democracy

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      “There is no liberal world order any more, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real,” Anne Applebaum writes in her new book, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.In the eyes of many, US failure in Iraq coupled with the great recession discredited rules-based democracy. Parents of privilege shielded their children from war and economic downturn. The rest were not so lucky. The world’s current crop of rising strongmen are not operating on a blank slate.Russian belligerence and the rise of China play out against this roiling landscape, so too the challenges of Iran and North Korea. The emergence of a reinvigorated Brics bloc is another reminder of western unsteadiness. Indeed the west itself – from Hungary to Paris to Washington – is far from immune to the trend.“Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying upon kleptocratic financial structures,” Applebaum argues. She is a Pulitzer-winning historian, a staff writer at the Atlantic and married to Poland’s foreign minister.Looking back, Applebaum got it wrong on the Iraq war (she had advocated regime change), nailed it on Vladimir Putin (“personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people”) and came close to the mark on Ukraine (“Russia must acknowledge Ukraine as an independent country with the right to exist”).The strength of Autocracy, Inc lies in its description of how autocrats bend and distort opinion, and find allies across national boundaries.In retrospect, the west was too eager to treat China as just another trading partner, not as a rival. The Tiananmen Square massacre signaled what might come next. Xi Jinping is a product of a system.In such systems, Applebaum writes, elites operate “not like a bloc but like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power”.No single caricature-like figure calls the plays alone. Rather, ad hoc collectives are driven by cash and power.“The members of these networks are connected not only one to another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too.”Such elites have lawyers in New York and London, bank accounts and holdings strewn across the world. Applebaum notes that Marc Kasowitz, who counseled Donald Trump during the Mueller investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, also represented alleged US conduits for a Ukrainian oligarch. As it happens, David Friedman, Kasowitz’s former law partner, was Trump’s ambassador to Israel.As Applebaum writes, “the globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.”Putin is estimated to be worth between $70bn and $200bn, wealth to rival that of Elon Musk. Xi and his family clock-in north of $1bn.Applebaum examines gas pipeline deals between the then Soviet Union and what was West Germany. The US was rightly concerned.Richard Nixon saw the danger that such transactions would “detach Germany from Nato”. Jimmy Carter imposed sanctions on the sale of US pipeline technology, on account of Soviet human rights violations. Decades later, the Nord Stream pipeline emerged as a battleground between Moscow, Kyiv, Berlin and Washington.Applebaum turns her gaze to Gerhard Schröder, German chancellor between 1998 and 2005. Since then, he has worked for Nord Stream, Rosneft and Gazprom – all Russian. Now 80, he has chaired the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, reportedly earning around $270,000 a year. He also led the supervisory board of Nord Stream 2, now shuttered.He is unapologetic. In February 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, he told the New York Times: “I don’t do mea culpa, it’s not my thing.”Applebaum also discusses so-called “hybrid states”, which she characterizes as countries that are a “legitimate part of the international financial system” and possess many of the trappings of democracy but that are “also willing to launder or accept criminal or stolen wealth or to assist people and companies that have been sanctioned”.She points to the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. “Russian property purchases in the Emirates rose 100% after the invasion of Ukraine,” she writes.Not surprisingly, Applebaum lauds patriotism but fears nationalism and isolationism. By such metrics, Brexit was a bust.“Did the removal of Britain from the European Union give the British more power to shape the world?” Applebaum asks.The answer is self-evident.“Did it prevent foreign money from shaping UK politics?”Want a hint? Evgeny Lebedev, son of Alexander Lebedev, a Russian oligarch and ex-KGB agent, is now Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia, neatly ensconced in parliament.“Did it stop refugees from moving from the war zones of the Middle East to Britain? It did not.”Nigel Farage’s dream has left the UK worse for wear. Farage’s admiration for Putin is a feature, not a bug.“I said I disliked him as a person,” Farage recently said of the Russian president, while campaigning for election as an MP. “But I admired him as a political operator because he’s managed to take control of running Russia.”Applebaum hopes liberalism and democracy are sustainable but is uncertain of their fate.“Nobody’s democracy is safe,” she writes. Still, “there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do.”For autocrats, liberty and autonomy are inconveniences. Conformity is king. There is little surprise that Putin portrays himself as the defender of faith and traditional values.American democrats – as well as Democrats – have reason to be concerned. During the 2016 election, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. A lot has happened since then. Come November, LePage just may get his wish.

      Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      ‘I’m rocking with Kamala’: Black men defy faulty polling by showing up for Harris campaign

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      On Monday night, more than 53,000 Black men joined a virtual conference, Win With Black Men, to rally behind the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. During the four-hour call, organizers said the group raised more than $1.3m for the Harris campaign and grassroots voter organizations focused on Black men.The success of the call, which was inspired by the Win With Black Women call the night before, runs counter to the narrative shaped by recent election polling indicating that 30% of Black men are planning on voting for Donald Trump. “Don’t let anybody slow us down asking the question: ‘Can a Black woman be elected president of the United States?’” Raphael Warnock, who represents Georgia in the US Senate, said on the call. “Kamala Harris can win. We just have to show up. History is watching us, and the future is waiting on us.”Black voters have consistently been a key voting bloc for Democrats, but experts say inaccurate polling about Black men in particular could be creating false narratives about their leanings this election cycle, mainly the idea that there is a mass shift of Black voters to the Republican party. Win With Black Men, which was hosted by the journalist Roland Martin, said it’s working to dispel stereotypical notions about changes in Black male voting habits, their refusal to support a woman candidate and their unwillingness to mobilize politically.“People are making a lot of conjectures without actually talking to a large enough sample of Black people to be able to say things with the precision that they’re making it,” Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University, said. “You’re not going to be able to detect what is likely to be no more [than] a one- to three-point swing in favor of Donald Trump based on changes in surveys where you’re talking to 200 Black people at a time. I can’t say with any statistical certainty that that three-point shift is real or not.”Unrepresentative polls can also have an adverse effect on voter habits. People tend to vote if they perceive that an election is close, Gillespie said. So polls that suggest that Trump is going to win easily and that even Black people will vote in droves for him may distort people’s understanding of reality. Ensuring that the public is aware of potential polling inaccuracies is key.“These narratives are also used to kind of confuse Black voters themselves, which can in turn depress Black vote and drive down turnout,” said Christopher Towler, founder of the Black Voter Project (BVP), a national polling initiative. “It can be used as a mechanism of voter deterrence, knowing that Black voters will play a key role in this election.”View image in fullscreenThough Gillespie said it will take a few days for new polling that specifically examines how Harris is performing with Black voters, recent mobilization around Harris suggests that narratives about a would-be exodus of this bloc from the Democratic party might have been premature.The problem comes down to sample size. In surveys of 1,000 to 1,500 voters, sub-sample sizes of Black voters may be anywhere from 150 to 300. In some cases, all people of color are amalgamated into one demographic group. Surveys with such a small sample size create large margins of error.“The issue is the level of precision with which we can make certain types of pronouncements when you’re talking to that few people,” Gillespie said. “The number that comes out in the survey is the midpoint of a range of possible numbers that we think is in the real population because of statistical analysis.”If the sub-sample size is less than 100, she said, the margin of error is plus or minus 10. So if a survey says that 20% of Black voters are going for Trump, the real number based on the sub-sample is between 10% and 30%.Towler, of the Black Voter Project, said that he began noticing the issue of unrepresentative polling years ago. He started BVP to “counteract the industry standard of taping on a couple hundred Black responses to a general survey” and using that small sample size as a full picture.“It’s really unscientific,” Towler said. “So I’ve worked for years now to try and create data that is reliable, accurate and actually representative of the Black community.”This year, BVP released a large, multiwave, national public opinion survey focused on collecting representative data of Black Americans. Fielded from 29 March to 18 April, with 2,004 Black Americans interviewed, the survey collected a nationally representative sample of respondents from all 50 states. The BVP study found that 15% of respondents would vote for Trump if the election had been held at the time of the survey, a figure much lower than reported by other polls with smaller sample sizes. A survey on the BVP scale is important to garner an idea of what the Black population and Black voting population of the US actually looks like, Gillespie said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut mainstream beltway polling companies typically lack Black leadership, so accurate polling of Black communities is not a priority, said Towler. What’s more, some pollsters do not see the value in spending more money to survey a population that they estimate will already vote staunchly Democratic.Black and brown communities exist on the margins in American politics, said Emmitt Riley, president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Mainstream political scientists’ biases result in pollsters who are not adequately capturing the political behaviors and views of excluded groups.“Many people who study race aren’t considered to be mainstream political scholars,” he said. “This has profound consequences for the kind of reporting that’s happening, the kind of news stories that are coming out, how you describe what’s happening in these communities.”Towler said that pollsters should create surveys that are culturally competent and that ask questions in ways that don’t manufacture misleading opinions. “It’s important when looking at polling of Black people to, one, not only make sure you have polls designed to accurately measure Black opinion, but to also have pollsters who study and understand the Black community,” he said.While polls continue to try to parse out where Black men will place their political support, groups like Win With Black Men and Black Men for Harris are making their loyalties clear.“Let’s protect Kamala. Let’s be with her like she was there for us,” Bakari Sellers, the former South Carolina representative, said on the call. “We are going to disagree a lot. But let’s put the petty bickering aside. Let’s stand up and be the Black men who change this country. We built this country. I’m rocking with Kamala.” More

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

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