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      Harris’s likely nomination invigorates US Black women and spurs donations

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      Following Joe Biden’s decision on Sunday to end his re-election campaign and endorse Kamala Harris, Win With Black Women, a political collective, held its regular call to discuss that week’s agenda: the upcoming election. Only this time, the call swelled to include more than 44,000 people – forcing Zoom to lift capacity limitations – with an additional 30,000 joining in on a Clubhouse stream, and an unknown number of others connecting to unauthorized livestreams, organizers said. Even as late as 1am, people continued trying to join the call.“We were so elated and pleased to see [Biden] fully endorse Vice-President Kamala Harris, and so we all got on that Zoom, united around our joy, united around our desire to be together in history,” Jotaka Eaddy, Win With Black Women’s founder, said. “But [we] also united around our support of Vice-President Harris and our commitment to do the work to make sure that she’s the next president of the United States and that we beat Donald Trump and the Maga agenda.”The group first convened four years ago “around our collective outrage to the racism, the sexism that was taking place in the presidential process”.While Sunday’s number of call attendees was unexpected, Win With Black Women was able to accommodate and mobilize them because of the extensive framework the organization has built.“It is important to recognize Jotaka Eaddy, Holli Holliday, Chrisina Cue, Chantel Mullen, Edwina Ward, Hollye Weekes,” Sesha Joi Moon, who was present on the call, said. “These are the women that were responsible for 71,000 registrants, 44,000 and counting logging on … then helped to raise $1.5m in three hours [for] the first potential Black woman president in the United States of America.”Moon was formerly the chief diversity officer for the US House of Representatives for the 117th and 118th Congresses. After her position was eliminated a few months ago, she recalls saying that it was “a very sad day for America”. Sunday night gave her a renewed sense of hope.“Regardless of your race, your gender, your religion, your sexual orientation, your immigrant status, your military service status, your geographic location, your educational level, your ability status as it relates to being disabled – we said we want a country where everyone belongs,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSunday’s Win With Black Women call featured prominent Black women including representatives Maxine Waters, Joyce Beatty and Jasmine Crockett; Danette Antony Reed, president of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority; actor Jenifer Lewis; and LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter. The Zoom call included an intergenerational representation of Black women and girls along with Latino, AAPI and male allies.“It was one of the best feelings ever,” Sophia Casey, who joined the Zoom call from Washington DC, said. “The sisterhood, I was just sharing with another colleague who didn’t get to make the call, that the sisterhood was just delicious.”Tiffany Crutcher received an invitation to join from Debra Watts, with whom Crutcher has done social justice organizing, then used her own networks to invite hundreds of additional women, she said.“We’ve carried this Democratic party for decades – we’re the margin of victory. This is our time, and that’s the energy I felt on that call,” Crutcher said. “All of the energy and the organizing that we’re doing on the ground … We’re gonna use that energy all the way into November.”Eaddy said that “there is a fire in the country right now of excitement”. The Monday-night call had more than 5,000 women who were interested in joining, and following the Win With Black Women call, a coalition of several groups organized another under the banner of Win With Black Men.In 2016 and 2020, 94% and 90% of Black women, respectively, supported the Democratic nominee. If Harris is successful in clinching her party’s nomination, for the first time, Black female voters will have the opportunity to vote for a Black woman representing a major political party for president.“To see the breadth of Black women in joy, but also committed to the work that is ahead of us, it’s a feeling that I will never, ever lose,” Eaddy said. “I will take it with me for the rest of my life.” More

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      ‘Kamala IS brat’: Harris campaign goes lime-green to embrace the meme of the summer

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      After Kamala Harris announced her bid for president, she reportedly raised a record-breaking $81m donations in just a day – but her most culturally powerful endorsement may have come from a single tweet.As nearly all Democrats rallied behind the vice-president offering support in tweets and TV interviews, a perhaps unlikely voice weighed in: the British pop singer Charli xcx, who tweeted, “kamala IS brat.”That’s high praise from the musician, who released her album, also titled Brat, last month. Brat is not just a name, but a lifestyle, one inspired by noughties excess and rave culture.The archetypical brat, Charli explained on TikTok, is “just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it”.Brat summer essentials, again according to Charli, are “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, a strappy white top with no bra”.Perhaps most importantly, Charli chose a neon lime backdrop for her album cover, one that’s sickeningly sweet, representing both the highs of a long night out and the impending crash of a hangover.Canonical brats include the actor and model Julia Fox, who appeared in the music video for Charli’s 360 alongside a cast of fellow proclaimed it girls such as Chloë Sevigny, Hari Nef, and Emma Chamberlain. Now, Harris joins their ranks.Soon after receiving Charli’s apparent approval, the Harris campaign’s official Twitter page (@kamalahq) changed its backdrop to brat green. Charli’s song 365, an ode to “bumpin’ that” – meaning beats, and club drugs – soundtracks one of the team’s TikTok videos.Politicians have long used celebrities to court the youth vote, walking a fine line between speaking their language and grasping for relevancy. Millennials considered Hillary Clinton’s infamous “Pokémon go to the polls” line from 2016 peak cringe. Last year, Taylor Swift urged fans to vote in primaries – she didn’t say who for – driving a surge in voter registrations.Gevin Reynolds, a former speechwriter for Harris, said he believes it’s “extremely smart for her to lean into the meme”.“It shows a recognition of how critical young voters are to winning in November, and a commitment to meeting them where they are.”So far, there’s been little Brat back-lash, though pundits over the age of 35 seem confused by the topic. CNN’s Jake Tapper dedicated a roundtable to the topic, concluding that he “will aspire to be brat”. Stephen Colbert took up a Brat-themed TikTok dance during The Late Show.David Hogg, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and gun control activist, wrote on X that “The amount [Charli’s] single tweet may have just done for the youth vote is not insignificant.” He later confirmed that “Nancy Pelosi has been informed of the meaning of Brat”.Memes alone do not win elections, but Charli’s tweet livened up a race that Harris’s bid had already revived. But there is more to be done. Kelley Heyer, the TikTok creator who choreographed a popular dance to Charli’s song Apple, said: “If Kamala wants to be brat, then she needs to promise to legalize and protect abortion at a federal level. And also wear apple green.” More

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      Biden’s trajectory is a Shakespearean tragedy. Clooney can play the president | Sidney Blumenthal

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      George Clooney can now play Joe Biden in the movie. After he urged the president to quit the race, the penultimate scene became greater than any Hollywood ending. The actor, while the King of Hollywood, has not yet won an Oscar for a leading role. This part, though, drawing on a range of classic genres, moving from pathos to tragedy to triumph, will challenge his dramatic skills as never before.The curtain rises on Biden as Richard II, beleaguered and beset, facing his overthrow from within.
      What must the king do now? Must he submit?
      The king shall do it: must he be deposed?
      The king shall be contented: must he lose
      The name of king? o’ God’s name, let it go
      The Shakespearean inevitability seems overwhelming, tragedy heaped upon tragedy with a comic thread: the plotting against him from Julius Caesar, his rages against fate from King Lear, and reality suspended with a touch of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Then in a thunderclap the drama turns romantic through Byron’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte.
      Tis done – but yesterday a King
      And arm’d with Kings to strive –
      And now thou art a nameless thing
      So abject – yet alive!
      In 2011, Clooney wrote the screenplay for a film called The Ides of March in which he played an idealistic Pennsylvania governor and Democratic presidential candidate reacting to cynical plots and subplots. The New York Times called it “less an allegory of the American political process than a busy, foggy, mildly entertaining antidote to it”. Clooney did receive an Oscar nomination for his writer’s credit but no more.Now he can play in something other than a belabored story of the supposed price idealism pays to ambition. Now he can sink his teeth into a far more complicated starring role, following a far richer storyline.The film begins with a bright young star of the post-JFK generation from a middle-class background with an unusual common touch yet stricken by unspeakable tragedy and trauma. His wife and daughter are killed in a car accident, and his two sons are critically injured. Though just elected to the Senate at the age of 29, one of the youngest ever, he devotes himself to his sons. He travels daily on the train from Washington to his home in Delaware to watch over them, while still establishing himself as a peer among his fellow senators despite his youthful age.In the second arc, Biden launches a campaign for his party’s presidential nomination but wrecks his chance by borrowing the identities of various political figures put into his mouth by overheated media consultants. His earnest ambition is undone by trivial mendacity, his promise upended by careless overreaching.Then he is the chair of the US Senate judiciary committee, seeking respect, comity and bipartisan cooperation, presiding over the nomination of a US supreme court nominee who perjures himself about his sexual harassment of an employee. In the interest of misguided fairness, the senator suppresses the evidence of two corroborating witnesses.Again, he runs for his party’s nomination, now the even more powerful and knowledgeable chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, but he wins less than 1% of the vote in the Iowa caucus and glumly drops out. A charismatic up-and-comer who had served hardly any time in the Senate emerges victorious, then lifts the loser from the depth of his political despair to make him his perfectly complementary running mate.Biden emerges as a substantive vice-president, the consummate negotiator with Congress to help enact the signature achievement of the administration, the long-held dream of national health insurance. But, again, personal tragedy strikes. His beloved son, Beau, rising in politics after a military career, whom his father had pinned for a trajectory to the White House, attaining what he could not, contracts brain cancer and dies. As Biden copes with his grief, the president passes over him as his chosen successor to anoint another, who narrowly loses to a vile grifter posing as a man of the people.Again, Biden appears to stumble out of the gate yet in another run, but regains his footing. He is the only one who can bridge the whole of the party. As hundreds of thousands die during a plague-like pandemic, the economy withers. He stands as a figure of empathy and solidity against the malignant narcissist in the Oval Office. At last, when Biden wins the prize, Donald Trump stages an insurrection to prevent the certification of the election and departs in disgrace.Despite razor-thin margins in the Congress, he passes the most far-ranging legislation since the Great Society, manages the economy through its complex hazards, expands the western alliance in the teeth of Vladimir’s Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, and gets little credit. He is healing the world, but the toxicity lingers. He is blamed for his extraordinary but incomplete success. Trump rises from his ruins to be acclaimed through willfully blind nostalgia.Once too young for his responsibility, Biden is assailed as too old to hold it. There is a bit of The Last Hurrah about his last campaign, also played by Spencer Tracy in the film based on the Edwin O’Connor novel of an old Irish-American Boston mayor who, on his deathbed, responding to the talk around him that he would have done it all differently if he could live his life over, says as his last words: “Like hell I would.”Against the tide of criticism for months, Biden knows he is not suffering from cognitive decline that affects his judgment as president. He is handling the crises around the globe with skill and experience, the master of foreign policy. He has defeated the menace of Trump before. But he has occasional lapses from natural aging. He tires; he forgets a name or place. His childhood stutter seems to have made a partial return as he pauses to form and explain his thoughts. He has taken cognitive tests, previously unknown to the public, that demonstrate he has no underlying condition. But he assumed the burden of running again out of a sense of duty that he is best able to meet the troubled times.He stubbornly resists and takes umbrage at the chorus of criticism at his obvious aging, his halting and slow gait from a broken foot early in his presidency he didn’t properly treat and his sometimes broken sentences. In his mind, he’s saving the country.He offers an early debate to dispel what he considers the smears of his disability. He and his staff are certain he can repeat his adroit State of the Union appearance. But he falters and loses his place and looks painfully old. He makes subsequent public appearances to put the lie to his collapse as just “a bad night”. After a successful Nato summit, at a press conference he displays his intricate knowledge and management of foreign policy. Yet the press is not quelled. Pundits describe him as clinging to power as a selfish old man, his refusal to leave proving he’s as bad as Trump.Nancy Pelosi, now the speaker emerita, as she calls herself, still the regnant monarch of the Congress, recognizes his flaw as fatal political decline. She orchestrates a slow process of persuasion, of regretful statements from a trickle of members urging him to withdraw, which threatens to become a torrent.Barack Obama, muffled behind the curtain, lends his assent, if not by silence, to the critics. His multitude of former aides, spread throughout the media as kibitzers, have raised their voices as a chorus of Biden naysayers. Obama does not wave off Clooney, the actor casting himself the party broker. Biden feels betrayed. He is given to bouts of self-pitying, defiant and angry cries, but these do not hold off the ranks from further dividing or the walls from closing in.On 13 July, an assassin nicks Trump at a rally. The terrible event gives him the unprecedented possibility at the Republican convention to appear as a transformed figure. He could use his narrow escape to reveal an inner conversion. But after his entrance to the lights flashing his name, like the old Elvis in Las Vegas, after describing what happened to him when the bullet went by his head, he reverted to the fossilized Trump. For a droning hour and a half, he fell into his lounge act of canned jokes and insults. Since then, he has declined further into his decadent routine. At his first rally since Butler, he went on about Nancy Pelosi as a “dog” and “crazy as a bedbug”, Kamala Harris as “crazy”, and Biden as “stupid”. His encounter with death could not alter his character. With each slur and slight, Trump shrinks himself.Biden catches Covid-19. He retreats to his home in Delaware. He contemplates his mortality in the scale of his duty. He can read the polls. He comes to the epiphany that he could achieve his aims only by relinquishing his pride. He rose to the figure in Byron’s Ode:
      Where may the wearied eye repose
      When gazing on the Great;
      Where neither guilty glory glows,
      Nor despicable state?
      Yes – one – the first – the last – the best –
      The Cincinnatus of the West,
      Whom envy dared not hate,
      Bequeath’d the name of Washington,
      To make man blush there was but one!
      When George III learned that George Washington would resign after his term, voluntarily give up the office of the presidency to establish the principle of a peaceable transfer of power and preserve the American Republic, the King remarked: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Kamala Harris’s home town cheers historic White House run: ‘She’s going to do it’

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      As Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic frontrunner to replace Joe Biden, residents of her home town of Berkeley, California, greeted the news of her potentially history-making White House run with enthusiasm – and some trepidation.Those who once knew her as a little girl living above a daycare on Bancroft Avenue were proud of their home town hero and – like many Democratic supporters in the US – hopeful she has a better chance than Joe Biden of beating Donald Trump.“This was where her story began,” said Carole Porter, 60, standing on a corner where she and Harris waited for the school bus starting as first-graders, both participating in a city campaign to desegregate local schools. “For people of color and for women, once she breaks that glass ceiling – and I’m sure she’s going to do it – there’s no going back.”Days after Biden’s historic decision to exit the US presidential race, Democrats have largely coalesced around the vice-president – raising a record $81m in 24 hours for her campaign and gaining the support of top party members including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi and Biden himself.Born in Oakland, Harris moved to the neighboring city of Berkeley where she lived until she was 12 with her single mother, Shyamala, and sister, Maya. She later served as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, before becoming the state’s junior senator.The East Bay neighborhood where Harris and Porter rode bikes as children is steeped in political and cultural history. Across the street is the former home of the first Black mayor of Berkeley, and several blocks away sits a school where the radical Black Panthers organization first organized free breakfasts for children. Its founder, Huey P Newton, frequented the area.Harris joined that legacy in 2020, when she became the first woman in US history and the first Black woman and woman of south Asian descent to be elected as vice-president. Now she stands poised to make history once again as the first woman of color to lead a presidential ticket and – if she wins – the first female president of the United States.Porter said coming from this area, historically a red-lined district primarily inhabited by Black and immigrant families, gives her “a broad perspective”.View image in fullscreen“I think because we were in such an accepting environment of all people, that is where her baseline is,” Porter said. “She has no obstacles, no judgment and no thinking that she has to do or be anything different than who she is.”Biden’s decision to step aside came as a relief to many, following weeks of concern among Democratic party members and voters that the president was not fit to run for re-election. Still, some voters in Harris’ former stomping grounds are wary of her chances in November.Tina, a 60-year-old voter who requested not to be quoted by last name, said she was “thrilled” to hear Harris is being considered as the top candidate, but questioned whether she will be able to win. “She’s got a lot stacked against her,” she said. “I mean, we weren’t even able to vote a white woman into the White House before.”Other voters echoed those concerns. “I worry about the misogyny vote,” said Pat Roberto, a woman strolling down Solano Avenue, a street adjacent to Thousand Oaks elementary school, which Harris attended as a child. “She wouldn’t have been my ideal, but she is better than Trump, and that’s what we need – to get him out.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough Trump is expected to attack Harris as being further left than Biden on many issues, voters in her blue home state have often criticized the former prosecutor for being too centrist or even conservative on some issues.View image in fullscreen“I have never been a big supporter of her, because she is a prosecutor and I am kind of on the other end of the spectrum,” said Paula Dodd, a 69-year-old voter who has lived in the Bay Area her whole life and was enjoying lunch near Harris’s former elementary school. “She’s definitely not a traditional Californian in that regard – she’s not super progressive.”Brian Dodd, lunching at the same table, said that could be seen as a strength for Harris. “That’s what gives me hope, that she can appeal to more people,” he said.Polling has shown Harris’s favorability ratings are similar to those of Trump and Biden. A June AP-Norc poll found about four in 10 Americans have a favorable opinion of her, though the share of those who have unfavorable opinion was slightly lower than for Trump and Biden.Despite misgivings, there was an air of excitement in the neighborhood on Monday. “We figure they’ll be renaming the school after she gets elected,” Brian Dodd said. More

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      Unions who think Republicans are warming to labor rights are getting played | Steven Greenhouse

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      When Teamsters president Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican national convention on opening night, it seemed to hint that the Republican party – long a lapdog for corporate interests – was turning an important page and would stop being so hostile toward labor unions.But when Donald Trump gave his hugely divisive acceptance speech three days later, he seemed to forget he was supposed to act lovey-dovey toward labor unions. The former president essentially kicked the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the teeth, and the UAW fired back by calling Trump the “mascot and lapdog” of billionaires.During the unscripted, let-it-rip part of his speech, Trump lashed out at the UAW, seeming to suggest that the UAW was responsible for automakers building plants in Mexico. That seemed rather unhinged because the UAW wishes that it – and not profit-maximizing corporations – had the power to decide where plants are built. Even more bizarrely, Trump said the UAW “ought to be ashamed” about Chinese automakers’ plans to build plants in Mexico. (Trump offered no explanation why the UAW was responsible for any of this.)Trump then directed his fire at the UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, saying he “should be fired immediately”, even though Fain’s stature and popularity have soared across the US because he led last fall’s victorious strike against Detroit’s automakers.Fain struck back the next day, saying: “Last night, Donald Trump once again attacked our union on a national stage.” He said Trump “stands for everything we stand against”. Fain asked why, when General Motors closed its huge plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in 2019, “when Trump was president and our members were on strike for 40 days, he said nothing and did nothing”.Fain didn’t stop there, saying: “Trump doesn’t want to protect American auto workers. He wants to pad the pockets of the ludicrously wealthy auto executives. He wants autoworkers to shut up and take scraps, not stand up and fight for more.”Fain no doubt remembers Trump’s nasty history of insulting and attacking labor leaders. In 2018, the then president tweeted out an attack against Richard Trumka, the late, highly regarded secretary-general of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation. Trump, whose administration took a myriad of anti-worker actions, suggested that Trumka was sabotaging US workers. Trump even once blamed Dave Green, the president of the UAW local in Lordstown, for the closure of the huge Lordstown plant that Green fought so hard to save.“America’s autoworkers aren’t the problem. Our union isn’t the problem,” Fain said on Friday. “Corporate greed and the billionaires’ hero, mascot and lapdog, Donald Trump, are the problem. Don’t get played by this scab billionaire.”Trump’s rant against the UAW indicated that O’Brien’s maneuver was failing. O’Brien had hoped that by speaking at the convention and giving Republicans some pro-labor credibility, the Republicans and Trump would return the favor by making nice to unions.But then Trump proceeded to attack the UAW, partly out of pique that it hasn’t endorsed him. During the UAW’s big strike last September, Trump spoke to some workers and supporters in Michigan and said the UAW’s “leadership should endorse me, and I will not say a bad thing about them again”. In other words, endorse me, or I’ll slam you and slime you.In his acceptance speech, Trump said: “Every single auto worker, union and non-union, should be voting for Donald Trump because we’re going to bring back car manufacturing.” Unfortunately for Trump, many auto workers remember that in 2017, Trump bemoaned Ohio’s loss of manufacturing jobs and assured a crowd in Youngstown: “They’re all coming back … We’re going to get those jobs coming back.” But Trump’s promise was empty; those jobs didn’t come back under his administration.Unlike the Teamsters, most major labor unions endorsed Joe Biden before he withdrew from the race, with many unions saying he was the most pro-union president in history. In a CNN interview after his speech, O’Brien agreed, saying: “Biden is definitely the most pro-labor president we’ve ever had.”O’Brien was trying to both court and bring a big shift in a party that has long been extremely hostile toward unions. O’Brien praised several Republicans who had taken some baby steps to show support of unions; he noted that Missouri senator Josh Hawley had walked a Teamster picket line.O’Brien failed to mention that Biden was the first sitting US president ever to join a picket line. He also failed to mention that Hawley scored 0% in 2023 on the AFL-CIO’s legislative scorecard or that Senator JD Vance, Trump’s supposedly pro-worker running mate, also scored zero.O’Brien’s gamble backfired. Many labor leaders condemned him for undermining the Democrats and helping Trump. John Palmer, a Teamsters vice-president, was so angry at O’Brien for playing footsie with Trump that he announced he would run against O’Brien for the Teamsters’ presidency in 2026.The Teamsters hierarchy defended O’Brien’s appearance by insisting he wanted both major parties to hear pro-union, pro-worker messages and shouldn’t be beholden to one party. To be sure, O’Brien hoped to move Trump toward labor, but he seemed to forget that Trump is dyed-in-the-wool anti-union. Last year, in a “message to America’s auto workers”, Trump said: “You should not pay your dues” and the UAW “was selling you to hell”. Trump once undercut unions by suggesting that midwestern automakers move their plants to the south to lower their wages. Trump’s appointees to the US supreme court and National Labor Relations Board issued one anti-worker, anti-union decision after another.Many workers, indeed many union members, have embraced Trump because he tells them he that feels their resentments, hears their grievances. Trump has responded to those grievances by bashing immigrants, China and elites. But such bashing has done next to nothing to truly help workers.The US’s workers need leaders who push to lift their wages, increase worker safety, make childcare more affordable and fight to make unions stronger. Trump is in no way such a leader. As president, he did nothing to raise the minimum wage or make childcare more affordable. He weakened safety protections for many workers. His administration moved in dozens of ways to weaken labor unions.It’s time that US workers get wise to the fact Trump is not their friend.

      Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer More

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      Kamala Harris to visit Wisconsin in first rally since launching presidential campaign – live

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      Kamala Harris is travelling to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, today where she will hold her first campaign rally since she launched her presidential campaign on Sunday with Joe Biden’s endorsement. Biden won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes in the 2020 election, and recent polling had suggested a tight race between Biden and Donald Trump in the battleground state again.Tuesday’s visit was scheduled before Biden ended his campaign, but took on new resonance as Harris prepared to take up the mantle of her party against Trump, who is scrambling to pivot his campaign against the vice-president.According to Wisconsin Democratic party chair Ben Wikler, 89 of Wisconsin’s 95 delegates, including senator Tammy Baldwin and governor Tony Evers, had already pledged their support for Harris as of yesterday afternoon.After confirming the state Democratic Party had officially backed Harris for the nomination, Wikler was quoted by Wisconsin Public Radio as saying:
      And in hearing from elected officials across the state of Wisconsin, hearing from Democratic Party activists, hearing from donors, there is a surge of focus, of enthusiasm – a kind of flowering of the kind of unity that we’re going to need to defeat Donald Trump.
      During her visit to Wisconsin today (see post at 10.14), Kamala Harris is to be joined by major elected officials in the state, including governor Tony Evers, senator Tammy Baldwin, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, attorney general Josh Kaul, secretary of state Sarah Godlewski and Wisconsin Democratic party chair Ben Wikler, as well as state labor leaders.House Democrats and Republicans will meet separately today for the first time since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on 13 July and Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race on Sunday, Chad Pergram, the senior congressional correspondent for Fox News, has posted on X. He said there will be a House hearing today on the shooting at Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.Kamala Harris is travelling to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, today where she will hold her first campaign rally since she launched her presidential campaign on Sunday with Joe Biden’s endorsement. Biden won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes in the 2020 election, and recent polling had suggested a tight race between Biden and Donald Trump in the battleground state again.Tuesday’s visit was scheduled before Biden ended his campaign, but took on new resonance as Harris prepared to take up the mantle of her party against Trump, who is scrambling to pivot his campaign against the vice-president.According to Wisconsin Democratic party chair Ben Wikler, 89 of Wisconsin’s 95 delegates, including senator Tammy Baldwin and governor Tony Evers, had already pledged their support for Harris as of yesterday afternoon.After confirming the state Democratic Party had officially backed Harris for the nomination, Wikler was quoted by Wisconsin Public Radio as saying:
      And in hearing from elected officials across the state of Wisconsin, hearing from Democratic Party activists, hearing from donors, there is a surge of focus, of enthusiasm – a kind of flowering of the kind of unity that we’re going to need to defeat Donald Trump.
      As we have already reported, Kamala Harris has earned enough delegates to become the likely Democratic party nominee, after California delegates voted unanimously to endorse her.Several state delegations met on Monday evening to confirm their support for the vice president, including Texas and her home state of California. By Monday night, Harris had the support of more than the 1,976 delegates she needs to win on a first ballot, according to a tally by the Associated Press. No other candidate was named by a delegate contacted by the AP.California state Democratic chairman, Rusty Hicks, said 75% to 80% of the state’s delegation were on a call on Tuesday, all supporting Harris.“I’ve not heard anyone mentioning or calling for any other candidate,” Hicks said, adding “tonight’s vote was a momentous one”.Hicks had urged delegates to quickly line up behind Harris and had circulated an online form to submit endorsements.Daniel Boffey is the Guardian’s chief reporterThe spectacle of the Olympic Games opening ceremony could be overshadowed by the human drama in the White House after it was confirmed that Jill Biden will attend the event on the Seine.It will be a first appearance on the world stage for the president’s wife since her husband withdrew from his re-election campaign over concerns about his deteriorating health.Rumours had swirled in Paris that the first lady could pull out of the games at the last minute with some suggesting that she might even be replaced by vice president Kamala Harris whose husband, Douglas Emhoff, is leading the delegation at the closing ceremony.The White House, however, confirmed on Monday evening that Jill Biden would lead a delegation of seven other senior US figures at the opening ceremony, including the US ambassador to France, Denise Campbell Bauer, senators Chris Coons and Alex Padilla, and the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass.Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race on Sunday sets the stage to end a nearly five-decade run when either a Bush, Clinton or Biden was on the ballot for president or vice-president.USA today reports:
      Members of the Bush and Clinton families, along with Joe Biden, have been on every presidential election ticket since 1980, when Ronald Reagan and running mate George HW Bush won.
      Reagan and Bush easily won reelection in 1984 before Bush won the presidency himself in 1988.
      The next four elections would feature either a Bush or Clinton on the ballot, with Bill Clinton defeating George HW Bush in 1992, before defeating Bob Dole in 1996, and George W. Bush winning elections in 2000 and 2004.
      The following four elections (2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020) all had Biden or Hillary Clinton on the ballot, with Barack Obama and Joe Biden winning election in the first two contests, Hillary Clinton losing to Donald Trump in 2016 and Biden defeating Trump in 2020.
      Ed Pilkington is chief reporter for Guardian USWhen Joe Biden finally ends his self-imposed seclusion at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, this week he will emerge into a very different world than the one from which he isolated when diagnosed with Covid last Wednesday.He will still be president of the United States, and as such the most powerful person on Earth. But it may not feel like that to him. His hopes of carrying on in that office died at 1.46pm ET on Sunday when he announced that he was standing down from the 2024 race.Very little is known about Biden’s specific plans for the next six months. Given the speed at which the final demise of his campaign happened, he may not know much himself.What we do know is that attempts by Donald Trump and his inner circle to force him out of the Oval Office now, on grounds that “if he can’t run for office, he can’t run our country”, are as half-hearted as they sound. Barring surprises, Biden will remain in the White House until noon on 20 January 2025.You can read the full analysis piece here:Donald Trump is due to appear on professional golfer Bryson DeChambeau’s YouTube show on Tuesday for a “special episode”.In a post on X, DeChambeau said the Republican presidential nominee will appear on his Break 50 show.The golfer’s show will be donating $10,000 to the Wounded Warrior Project for every stroke they score under par, according to the X post.DeChambeau said Tuesday’s episode “is about golf and giving back to our nation’s veterans, not politics”.The post added:
      A few weeks ago I reached out to both parties’ presidential campaigns and @realDonaldTrump was down for the challenge. It is an incredible honor to be able to enjoy a round of golf with any sitting or former president, and all have an open invitation to join me for a round of Break 50 anytime.
      A new CBS News/YouGov poll found that 83% of Democratic registered voters surveyed approved of the US president, Joe Biden, withdrawing from the race while just 17% disapproved.Four in ten registered Democrats said Biden exiting makes them more motivated to vote now he is out of the race, with 79% thinking the party should nominate the US vice president, Kamala Harris, as a replacement, according to the poll.45% of those surveyed believe the party’s chances of beating Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, in November have improved since Biden’s announcement, though 10% say the electoral prospects have got worse for the Democrats, while 28% say it depends on who the nominee is and 17% say a change in candidate won’t make a difference.Democratic voters have long had doubts about Biden’s reelection bid. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in January, while the party’s nomination contest was still under way, 49% of Democrats said the 81-year-old should not run again in 2024.Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has told families of the estimated 116 hostages still held in Gaza that a deal that would secure their loved ones’ release could be nearing, his office has said.“The conditions are undoubtedly ripening. This is a good sign,” Netanyahu told the families on Monday in Washington, where he is expected to meet Joe Biden later this week after making an address to Congress.It will be Biden’s first meeting with a foreign leader since he opted not to run for reelection and endorsed vice president Kamala Harris as his successor as the Democratic presidential nominee. Harris is to meet Netanyahu, who is under increasing pressure from much of the Israeli public to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, this week separate from Biden’s meeting.Efforts to reach a Gaza ceasefire deal, outlined by Biden in May and mediated by Egypt and Qatar, have gained momentum over the past month.Israeli protesters are calling for a deal with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, which would free the hostages in exchange for a pause in fighting. Negotiators from Israel’s the Mossad intelligence service are expected in Qatar later this week, continuing talks that have dragged since early this year.Democrats are urging Kamala Harris to consider choosing her potential running mate from the so-called battleground states, which this year are: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.“That is the first presidential decision that vice president Harris has, so she’s got a lot of good choices ahead of her,” senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told reporters at the Capitol, according to the Hill.He listed a number of Democratic governors as possible choices – Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Roy Cooper of North Carolina, alongside transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg (who has deep ties in Michigan) and senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. Here is a useful explainer on who else could be Harris’ running mate for the November election:Andrew Roth is in Washington for the Guardian, and has this analysis on how Kamala Harris will tread a careful path on Israel and Gaza while Benjamin Netanyahu is in the US:For much of Monday, no meetings between Benjamin Netanyahu and either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris had been confirmed, even though the Israeli PM had already departed for the US and was scheduled on Wednesday to address a joint session of Congress at the request of the House leader, Mike Johnson.Harris appears likely to skip that session, where she would have sat directly behind Netanyahu as the president of the Senate. She will be out of Washington for a public event at a college sorority in Indiana.Late on Monday, an aide to Harris said that both she and Biden would sit down with Netanyahu in separate meetings at the White House and denied that her travel to Indianapolis indicated any change in her position towards Israel.Harris backers and insiders say that she is more likely to engage in public criticism of Netanyahu than Biden and to focus attention on the civilian toll among Palestinians from the war in Gaza – even if she would maintain US military aid and other support for Israel that has been a mainstay of Biden’s foreign policy.“The generational difference between Biden and Harris is a meaningful difference in how one looks at these issues,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel lobbying group that has endorsed Harris’s presidential bid.Read more of Andrew Roth’s analysis here: As Netanyahu arrives in Washington, Kamala Harris treads a careful path on Israel and GazaThat’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. My colleague Yohannes Lowe will take it from here. More

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      Running Kamala Harris may actually be a political masterstroke for the Democrats | Steve Phillips

      by

      Kamala Harris will likely be the next president of the United States – and that’s overall good news if you care about democracy, justice and equality. Joe Biden’s decision on Sunday to bow out of the presidential race clears the path for the country to elect its first woman and first woman of color as president.Even though the electoral fundamentals for this year’s election have always favored the Democrats – despite what numerous misleading polls have been showing (and with most of the news media reacting purely off those polls) – Harris’s selection will largely shore up the weaknesses that were dragging down Biden’s poll numbers.All of the drama and dissatisfaction over Biden’s June debate performance completely obscured the underlying factors that made it more likely than not that the Democrats, even with Biden as nominee, were in a strong position to win in November. Here are the facts.First, most people in this country typically choose the Democratic nominee for president over the Republican nominee time and time again. With the sole exception of 2004, in every presidential election since 1992, the Democratic nominee has won the popular vote (Biden bested Donald Trump by 7m votes in 2020).Those trends have only continued during the four years since the 2020 election. Since 2020, 16 million young people have become eligible to vote, and 12 million people, most of them older, have died. Biden beat Trump by 30 points among young people, according to the exit polls, and he lost among the oldest voters (52% for Trump, 47% for Biden). So the fundamental composition of our nation’s electorate is more progressive, more diverse and more favorable to Democrats right now than it was in 2020.Second, although far too many in the media proceed from the premise that large swaths of the electorate are up for grabs each election cycle and susceptible to switching their political allegiances from one party to the other, the actual data starkly contradicts that belief.The gold standard measure of voter behavior is the American National Election Studies (Anes), “a joint collaboration between the University of Michigan and Stanford University” that analyzes voter behavior over several decades. The Anes has found a clear and undeniable trend of swing voters virtually disappearing from the populace. In 2020, just 5.6% of voters fell into that category – down from 13% in 2008.Lastly, a reality that historians will certainly puzzle over in future years when they try to understand why Biden was forced out less than three and a half months before election day is that the economy is actually going like gangbusters. Fifteen million jobs have been created under the Biden administration and the stock market is at an all-time high, swelling 401k retirement coffers by an average of $10,000 according to Fidelity investments.Despite all that, Biden’s position as nominee became untenable when support within his own party crumbled as people worried about his poor debate performance and weak polling numbers. Looking under the hood at those polls, however, we see that Harris should be able to quickly consolidate the support that was slow to coalesce around Biden. The instructive and completely overlooked data point in the latest polls is that Biden was doing just fine with white voters (that is, the percentage he needed in order to win), and the softness in his numbers mostly stemmed from tepid support among some people of color.An 18 July CBS poll showed Trump leading Biden by 51% to 47%. Breaking down the numbers reveals that Biden was backed by 42% of white voters – a higher percentage than he received in 2020 when he defeated Trump. The top line weakness came from the results for voters of color, which showed just 52% of Latinos and 73% percent of African Americans currently supporting the president (with drop-off primarily among men from these groups).First of all, those figures are so historically aberrant that they call into question the polling methodology. Biden received 65% of the Latino vote in 2020, and 87% of the Black vote (no Democratic nominee has ever received less than 83% of the Black vote since the advent of race-specific exit polling in 1976). Either there has been a cataclysmic decline of support for Biden among voters of color, or the pollsters just aren’t that good at surveying people of color, or people of color are expressing their current lack of enthusiasm, which is a very different thing than how they will ultimately vote in November.If, in fact, support for Democrats among people of color is the principal problem, then putting Harris at the top of the ticket is a master stroke. The enthusiasm for electing the first woman of color as president will likely be a thunderclap across the country that consolidates the support of voters of color, and, equally important, motivates them to turn out in large numbers at the polls, much as they did for Barack Obama in 2008.The challenge the party will face in November is holding the support of Democratic-leaning and other “gettable” whites, especially given the electorate’s tortured history in embracing supremely qualified female candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams. (The primary difference between Abrams, who lost in Georgia, and Senator Raphael Warnock, who won, is gender.) Sexism, misogyny and sexist attitudes about who should be the leader of the free world are real and Democrats will have to work hard to address that challenge.One critical step to solidifying the Democratic base is for all political leaders to quickly and forcefully endorse and embrace Harris’s candidacy.Mathematically, it is likely – and certainly possible, if massive investments are made in getting out the vote of people of color and young people as soon as possible – that the gains for Democrats will offset any losses among whites worried about a woman (and one of color, no less) occupying the Oval Office and becoming our nation’s commander in chief.All of this adds up to the likelihood that the 47th president of the United States will be Kamala Devi Harris.

      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color, and author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good More