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      A Democratic ex-mayor is running for Senate in one of the most Republican US states. Does he have a chance?

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      The man in the blue shirt leveled his gaze at Glenn Elliott, who had just walked into his yard in the quiet, conservative town of Moundsville and introduced himself as a candidate to represent West Virginia in the US Senate.“It would take a lot to make me like any politician right now,” the man replied.It wasn’t an unfamiliar sentiment for Elliott, a former city mayor running as a Democrat to represent a state that has become one of the most Republican places in the country in recent years. Voter disenchantment is inevitable in West Virginia, which ranks at or near the bottom in most quality of life measures, from childhood poverty rates to overdose deaths. But Elliott has his ways of keeping the conversation going.“Well, I’m running against Jim Justice,” he replied. The man’s interest was piqued, and when he agreed to accept a flyer from Elliott, the tall, silver-haired 52-year-old exclaimed, “So, you’re saying there’s a chance!”View image in fullscreenJustice is the state’s Republican governor, who, because of West Virginia’s strongly conservative tilt, is viewed as a shoo-in for the seat being vacated by Joe Manchin, a one-time Democrat who is leaving the Senate after acting as a thorn in the side of Joe Biden during the first two years of his presidency.Democrats are scrambling to maintain their 51-seat majority in Congress’s upper chamber, a task made harder by Manchin’s decision last year not to run again, and by the fact that their best pathway to another two years in the majority requires the re-election of Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, and Montana’s Jon Tester, two senators representing red states.Recent polls have shown the latter coming up short against his Republican challenger, and the party is now hoping for perhaps even more unlikely victories by candidates in Florida and Texas. Should those efforts fail and Republicans take the Senate as Trump returns to the White House, they could confirm his rightwing picks for supreme court, cabinet and powerful federal regulatory agencies. Even if Harris wins, a Republican-controlled Senate could block her choices for the same positions.West Virginia was for decades a Democratic stronghold, but after giving Trump two of his biggest victories of any state in 2016 and 2020, the party’s leaders have essentially written off its Senate seat. The party’s decline was confirmed earlier this year, when Manchin switched his registration to independent, meaning there are no longer any Democrats in statewide office.Elliott is on a mission to change that, and prove Justice wrong. He argues that Justice, whose businesses are enveloped in a legal storm of lawsuits and unpaid bills, is not as popular as he appears, and is pressing on with his campaign despite little support from national Democratic power brokers.There are few polls of the race in West Virginia, but those that exist show Elliott, who Manchin has endorsed, badly trailing. Justice was up 62% to Elliott’s 28% in an August survey by MetroNews West Virginia, and another poll, commissioned by the Democrat’s campaign that same month, showed him doing only slightly better, with Justice’s lead at 58%.“I’ve never thought it was a high probability race, but I’ve always known there’s a chance,” Elliott said during an interview in his storefront campaign headquarters in downtown Wheeling, the city in West Virginia’s northern panhandle he led from 2016 until June. “Perhaps I’m naive, but I do believe that West Virginia voters can see the contrast in me and Governor Justice just in the way we’ve run this campaign.”Elliott may be on to something, though there are no indications it amounts to enough to win the race. In an interview with the Guardian, the man with the blue shirt, who did not want to give his name but said he was a registered independent and Donald Trump supporter, made clear he loathed politicians – Justice included.“Jim Justice is for those who are against us,” he said. Holding Elliott’s flyer, he said he would think about voting for him.View image in fullscreenTrump’s strength in West Virginia has political forecasters predicting no surprises in November. GOP candidates are expected to sweep the governor’s mansion and federal offices up for grabs, and party fundraisers and campaign organizations have sent little money to Elliott or any other candidate.“I think it absolutely was an error,” said Shawn Fluharty, a West Virginia house delegate who has managed to hang on to his seat representing Wheeling for the past 10 years, even as the state has grown more Republican.“I think that Jim Justice is not as well liked as he was probably two years ago when they started polling that race. And I believe there was an opportunity. If Glenn had the full backing of the DNC, this race would be a hell of a lot closer than what the polls currently show.”A businessman with interests in coal and agriculture, Justice was a Democrat as recently as 2017 then changed parties to become a reliable Trump ally, signing an abortion ban and a law banning transgender athletes from participating in public school female sports.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut West Virginians have also grown used to hearing stories of his companies being sued or not paying their bills. Last year, the justice department sued the governor, alleging his family companies owed more than $7.5m in unpaid penalties, and this year, a helicopter owned by one of his businesses was auctioned off to satisfy a judgment that resulted from a lawsuit involving a Russian mining firm.“I knew that there’s some vulnerability there, and frankly, thought that I could outwork him and work hard to overcome what would be a pretty built-in advantage for him as the incumbent governor with an R next to his name,” said Elliott.Polls of the Senate race found solid majorities of voters did not know much about Elliott, who has put issues such as healthcare, abortion rights and support for organized labor at the center of his campaign. In an effort to change that, he has visited every county in the state since winning his primary in May, knowing full well that to win, he would need to convince West Virginians who were sure to vote for Trump to also vote for him.“The former president definitely has the attention of a lot of voters who feel like they’re being ignored,” he said. “I’m not running against him, I’m running against Jim Justice.”

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      On a sunny Wednesday afternoon, he followed the highway that curves south along the Ohio river from Wheeling to go door knocking in Moundsville, arriving at the door of 86-year-old retired coalminer Bob Parsons. When Parsons learned that Elliott was a Democrat, he asked the former mayor to name one good thing Biden and Harris had done.Elliott mentioned that the president’s policies had helped pay for new sewage infrastructure in Wheeling. “They definitely missed opportunities and they screwed up the border,” he added.Though Parsons was a devout Trump supporter – he kept a sticker reading “It’s not my fault, I voted for Trump” on the back of his pickup truck’s camper shell – he also split his ticket between the parties, and was not impressed with Justice.“I just don’t see Jim going to DC much,” he said.Further down the street, Elliott encountered Melody Vucelick, a Democrat whose faith in the party was waning. Biden had disappointed her with his handling of immigration, and Vucelick said she was “totally against” Harris.“I really want Trump to get in there to close that border,” the 71-year-old retiree said in an interview. “Small towns like this, I feel for my own safety, being alone.”But in this one instance, Elliott need not worry. Vucelick said she still planned to support Democrats for every other spot on the ballot, and he will have her vote. More

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      Kamala Harris urged to flesh out climate plan amid warnings about Trump

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      As the US south-east struggles to rebuild after two deadly and climate-fueled hurricanes, some environmental advocates are demanding Kamala Harris flesh out a strong climate plan.Since Hurricanes Helene and Milton ravaged parts of the country, the vice-president has slammed Donald Trump’s climate record by airing a new campaign ad showing the oft-criticized moment the former president redrew a hurricane’s path with a marker, and taking aim at Trump’s spread of climate misinformation and history of withholding disaster aid.Harris has also raised the alarm about Trump’s plans to slash environmental regulations. Yet she has not said much about her plans to deal with the climate crisis, instead pledging not to ban gas-powered cars in a Michigan speech and touting “record energy production” from the oil and gas industries during her vice-presidency on her website.The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, said that Harris had failed to build upon the strongest moments during her TV debate with Trump when she referenced the mounting costs of climate-driven disasters and their toll upon Americans’ ability to get home insurance.Since then, he said, the campaign had been “understating the depth of the danger”.“The American public need to know there are storm clouds ahead,” said Whitehouse, who chairs the Senate budget committee. “We will have to see if Harris and Walz are elected how they will move forward on policy but at the moment most Americans are not well informed of how serious this is going to get.”The lack of a climate focus from the campaign has been “frustrating” but was probably a calculation that there is little political benefit to bringing up such a glaringly obvious divide with Trump, according to Paul Bledsoe, who was an adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House on climate.“That might be the right political decision,” he said.But others are skeptical that Harris’s climate approach will deliver electorally. Though polls show that voters place more importance on other issues, such as the economy and immigration, they also indicate that a strong majority of US voters would prefer to vote for a candidate who supports climate action. Many surveys indicate there is broad support for renewable energy even in fossil fuel-heavy areas.“Pundits say she can’t risk losing any potential voters in Pennsylvania,” said Edward Maibach, the director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. “Taking a strong pro-climate action stance would almost certainly not cost her votes in [Pennsylvania] because more than half of voters in the state want to see the president take more, not less, climate action.Many national climate policies – from job training for fossil fuel workers to full fossil fuel phaseout by 2050 – also enjoy majority support.“I’m not convinced it’s good electoral strategy, because climate is an issue where voters trust Democrats more than Republicans so it actually would be a good issue to lean into to highlight the difference,” said Michael Greenberg, founder of the controversial activist group Climate Defiance, which endorsed Harris last month after meeting with her top climate aide.A major hurdle for Harris’s campaign, polls show, is that undecided voters feel they don’t know what she stands for, said Collin Rees, campaign manager at advocacy group Oil Change US.“It’s actively electorally harming her to not be more detailed,” he said.If Harris wins the election, Bledsoe said, “she will need to level with the American people about how emissions reductions need to happen or these storms, heatwaves and floods will get far worse”.But Rees said her approach has left space open for Trump to convince voters that climate policies are harmful, and that he is skeptical that Harris would make such a shift if elected.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I don’t know that there’s ever been an issue in history where somebody didn’t talk about it on the campaign trail … but then turned around and prioritized it after they were elected,” Rees said.Further irking advocates have been Harris’s attempts to appeal to conservatives. Last week, she pledged to create a bipartisan council of advisers if elected. The same day, she boasted her endorsements from former vice-president Dick Cheney and George W Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who helped craft a legal case justifying torture.“We’re talking about courting neocons who support endless war when the military is one of the largest triggers of the climate crisis,” said Rees. “She’s courting members of a party that we know is not serious on climate even though we are all around us seeing the climate emergency.”Other Harris allies are sanguine about the absence of climate from her campaigning, pointing to her record as a prosecutor in taking on big oil and their expectation that she will push for aggressive climate action if she claims the White House.“She needs to talk about what will win this election, there’s only so much time for subjects and people have a limited bandwidth,” said Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington and a prominent climate advocate. “I’m not critical of the way she’s run her campaign, they’ve made decisions on how to use limited communication time and I’m confident when she’s in the White House she’ll be an effective leader on clean energy.”But the issue is not only one of messaging, but also of substance, said Rees.“I don’t think climate has to be the only issue or the top issue, but right now she’s denigrating climate policy, boasting about oil and gas exports, playing to the right,” he said. “But the terrible disasters of Helene and Milton provide an opening to show how climate is very closely connected to people’s lives and economic struggles. I don’t think it’s too late.”The youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement, which also endorsed Harris, is also demanding she “change course”, noting Trump is gaining ground in swing states.“In 2020, Joe Biden won because he ran on bold climate action and economic justice, showing that you can both win swing voters and the Bernie Sanders base,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, the group’s communication director. “In the last 20 days, we’re giving everything we’ve got to contact millions of people and turn out young voters to elect Harris. What we’re asking is that the Harris campaign help us do that.” More

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      A third of Americans agree with Trump that immigrants ‘poison the blood’ of US

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      A new poll has revealed that more than one-third of Americans agree with Donald Trump’s warning that undocumented immigrants in the US are “poisoning the blood” of America.A significant 34% of the respondents to the poll, conducted by the Brookings Institution and Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), agreed with the statement previously made on the election campaign trail by the former US president and Republican party nominee for the White House, Donald Trump.“One-third of Americans (34%) say that immigrants entering the country illegally today are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’, including six in 10 Republicans (61%), 30% of independents, and only 13% of Democrats,” a summary of the annual poll stated, which surveyed more than 5,000 individuals from 16 August to 4 September.“This is a truly alarming situation to find this kind of rhetoric, find this kind of support from one of our two major political parties,” said Robert Jones, president and founder of the PRRI, during a presentation of the poll’s findings. “That language is straight out of Mein Kampf. This kind of poisoning the blood, it’s Nazi rhetoric.”Trump told supporters during a rally in New Hampshire in December 2023 that immigrants coming into the US are “poisoning the blood of our country”.“They let – I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump told the crowd. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”He repeated the phrase in a social media post after the rally and had previously used it in a September 2023 interview.“Blood poisoning” was a term used by Adolf Hitler in his Mein Kampf manifesto. Trump’s comments incited a strong rebuke from the Biden campaign at the time.The former Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie responded to Trump’s comments by stating: “He’s disgusting.”The television presenter Geraldo Rivera recently cited the comments made by Trump in an interview with NewsNation, explaining why he would not vote for the former president. “I don’t know how any Latino person of any self-esteem, any self-respect, would be in favor of the ranting, the poisoning the blood of the country.”The poll also found nearly one in four Trump supporters, 23%, believe if he loses the election that he should declare the results invalid and do whatever it takes to assume office. More

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      Judge slaps down Florida effort to ban abortion ad: ‘It’s the first amendment, stupid’

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      Florida’s health department can’t block a TV advertisement in support of a ballot measure that would protect abortion rights, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, after the department sent letters to local TV stations commanding them to stop airing the ad or risk criminal consequences.“The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is ‘false’,” US district judge Mark E Walker wrote in his ruling. “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”Florida is one of 10 states set to vote on abortion-related ballot measures in November. If enacted, Florida’s measure would enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution and roll back the state’s six-week ban on the procedure, which took effect in May.Earlier this month, Florida’s health department sent cease-and-desist letters to TV stations running an ad by Floridians Protecting Freedom, the campaign behind the measure. In the ad, a woman named Caroline speaks about being diagnosed with cancer while pregnant.“The doctors knew if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life and my daughter would lose her mom,” Caroline says in the ad. “Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine.”The letters said the claim that women can’t get life-saving abortions in Florida was “categorically false”, since Florida’s ban permits abortions in medical emergencies. “The fact is these ads are unequivocally false and detrimental to public health in Florida,” Jae Williams, the Florida department of health communications director, said in an email late on Thursday.However, doctors across the country have said abortion bans are worded so vaguely as to force them to deny people medically necessary abortions. A New York doctor recently said that she had treated a woman with an ectopic pregnancy – which is nonviable and potentially life-threatening if left untreated – who had been turned away from a Florida hospital.In response to the letters, Floridians Protecting Freedom sued the Florida surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, and John Wilson, the former general counsel for the state health department. At least one TV station stopped airing the ad, the coalition’s lawsuit alleged.On Thursday, Walker granted a temporary restraining order blocking Ladapo from taking any further action against broadcasters or other media outlets that might air ads by Floridians Protecting Freedom.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Of course, the surgeon general of Florida has the right to advocate for his own position on a ballot measure,” Walker wrote. “But it would subvert the rule of law to permit the state to transform its own advocacy into the direct suppression of protected political speech.”Over the last several weeks, Florida’s government, run by Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor, has sent law enforcement officials to investigate people who signed a petition to get the measure on the ballot, set up a webpage urging people not to vote for it, and issued a report suggesting the measure got on the ballot due to “a large number of forged signatures or fraudulent petitions”. Floridians Protecting Freedom has denied wrongdoing.Anti-abortion activists have since filed a lawsuit to remove the measure from the ballot or nullify votes cast for it. More

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      ‘The law is clear’: US states signal willingness to prosecute election crimes

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      Some US states are sending strong signals to county and local officials who might be tempted to intervene illegally in the 5 November election or refuse to certify results: fail to do your duty and risk criminal charges or hefty financial penalties.In at least five of the seven battleground states that could determine whether the next US president is Democrat Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump, top election and law enforcement officials have investigated, indicted and even jailed officials who tried to interfere with the vote or delay certification of results, a necessary but largely ceremonial step.County officials have also been warned that failing to certify results on time could force their local governments to foot the bill for unnecessary audits or recounts.The increased oversight of local election officials is aimed at preventing unfounded claims of fraud from slowing the certification of election results, which in turn could interfere with Congress’s certification of the presidential election results in a highly charged partisan atmosphere.Four years after Trump tried to overturn his 2020 defeat, officials in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as in solidly Democratic Colorado, said they have become far more adept at handling those who overstep their authority, even with Trump still repeating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that he will lose in November only through fraud.States that fail to certify results by certain deadlines could be left out of the state-by-state electoral college process that formally determines the winners of US presidential elections.“The law is clear and we won’t tolerate anyone not following it for any reason,” Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said in an interview. “There are times and places for challenging election results. The certification process is not one of them.”In this high-stakes election, the biggest of the swing states, Pennsylvania, has already overruled a county official, the Luzerne county manager, Romilda Crocamo, who tried to prevent the use in her district of drop boxes, where early voters can deposit their mail-in ballots.

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      The state attorney general, Michelle Henry, a former Republican appointed to her role last year by the state’s Democratic governor, said in an interview that her office would enforce election laws.“Should anyone not comply with the statutes, we will investigate that and there will be consequences … There’s both criminal and civil actions that could be taken to maintain the integrity of the process.”In Wisconsin, the criminal division of the state justice department is investigating Wausau’s mayor, Doug Diny, for removing a locked, empty drop box from outside city hall in September. Diny, a non-partisan conservative backed by Republicans, told reporters at the time that he did not feel the box was secure where the city clerk had placed it.The Wisconsin attorney general, Josh Kaul, a Democrat, also said his office would enforce election laws.“It’s our expectation that election officials will follow the law,” Kaul said in an interview. “But if we receive concerns that that won’t be the case, we’re prepared to act.”In Michigan’s Macomb county, where Republicans unsuccessfully sued to overturn the 2020 election results, three assistant clerks in the city of St Clair Shores face felony charges for allegedly allowing four residents to vote twice in the state’s 6 August congressional and state primary election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMichigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, filed charges punishable by up to five years in prison against all seven.“Despite common talking points by those who seek to instill doubt in our election process, double voting in Michigan is extremely rare,” Nessel said in a statement. “Nevertheless, the fact that four incidents occurred in a municipality of this size raised significant concerns.“Michigan election laws were tightened in the aftermath of the 2020 vote.Delta county canvass board members Bonnie Hakkola and LeeAnne Oman, both Republicans, voted against certification of a local recall election on 14 May, after seeing nearly identical voting margins in three different races.State authorities responded two days later, with a stern letter. The two individuals ultimately resigned. The results were certified.Meanwhile, two Republican officials from Arizona’s Cochise county face felony election interference charges, alleging they delayed the canvass of votes in the 2022 elections.And in Nevada, the secretary of state, attorney general and a district attorney intervened recently to swiftly resolve an impasse over a county’s certification of a primary election’s results.In Colorado, in one of the starkest examples, a Republican former Mesa county clerk, Tina Peters, was sentenced to nine years in prison this month, after being convicted of illegally tampering with voting machines in 2020. More

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      Two rulings restore calm to Georgia elections rules – for now

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      Two court rulings in Georgia over the last week have beaten back efforts by Republican activists to empower political challenges to November’s election results, though the expected legal fight over the election is far from concluded.Robert McBurney, a Fulton county superior court judge, ruled on Tuesday that elections officials had a legal obligation to certify an election, leaving disputes over results and allegations of misconduct to investigation by local district attorneys’ offices. The ruling rejected the assertion of Trump-aligned attorneys working with Julie Adams, a Republican appointee to the Fulton election board, that board members could exercise their discretion in certification.A day later, another Fulton county superior court judge, Thomas Cox, issued a stern order after a short hearing, invalidating seven rules made by Georgia’s state election board this year. One of the invalidated rules required ballots to be hand-counted on election night. A second allowed elections officials to conduct a poorly defined “reasonable inquiry” into discrepancies before issuing a certification. And a third would have required elections officials to turn over volumes of documents to board members for review before certification.The rules, passed by a three-person bloc of Trump-aligned members on the five-person board, were “unsupported by Georgia’s Election Code and are in fact contrary to the Election Code”, according to the ruling, which added that the state election board lacked the authority to create rules that go beyond state law. The ruling sharply limits the power of the state election board to make further rules.The Georgia Republican party said it would appeal the ruling, while voting rights groups hailed the victory.“Striking down the state election board’s hand-count and other rules is a major win for voters, election integrity and democracy as a whole,” Nichola Hines, president of the League of Women Voters of Georgia, a plaintiff in the suit challenging the state election board, said in a statement. “These rules were introduced with bad intentions and aimed at causing chaos in Georgia’s secure elections process. The League remains committed to standing up for Georgia voters every step of the way.”

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      The state election board’s rule-making put it at odds with many county elections directors, voting rights advocates and the attorney general’s office, which advised the board that the rules it was considering would probably be found unconstitutional.Janelle King, one of the three board members Trump praised as being “pit bulls for honesty, transparency and victory” at an Atlanta rally earlier this year, defended the board’s actions in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on its Politically Georgia podcast on Thursday.“I feel like the benefit in all of this is that, I hope people see that has never been and isn’t a partisan issue,” she said. “A Republican brought this case against us,” she added, referring to Scot Turner, a retired Georgia state representative who was a plaintiff suing the board.With regard to the hand-counting of ballots, King said that the board’s rule-making was meant to ensure an accurate vote count.“This is not saying anything sinister is going on,” King said. “We keep talking about human error. If we know there’s going to be human error, then it’s important for us to create rules that are surrounded by laws that allow us to plug that hole. That’s what I thought I was doing and what I will continue to do.”Voting rights organizations disagree with her characterization of the board’s rule-making.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The 11th-hour rules adopted by the state election board only serve to cause disruption to the electoral process and confusion for voters,” Campaign Legal Center’s voting advocacy and partnerships director, Jonathan Diaz, said. “We are glad one state court has agreed that the hand-count rule cannot go into effect for the upcoming election and we encourage other courts to follow suit.”The board itself is under fire by Democratic lawmakers, who see its members as partisan in ways that may violate the law. A suit by the Georgia state senator Nabilah Islam-Parkes, former Fulton elections board chair Cathy Woolard and state senator-elect Randall Mangham sought to force Governor Brian Kemp to investigate the board for conflicts of interest and potentially remove some of its members.Judge Ural Glanville dismissed the suit earlier this month, ruling that the Democrats could not simply label their accusations “formal charges” and compel the governor to act.The three have appealed the ruling, Mangham said.“Look, these people clearly have conflicts of interest and ethical violations and are intentionally violating the law,” Mangham said. He referred to comments by one state board member, Rick Jeffares, who suggested his interest in becoming a regional Environmental Protection Agency director to a former Trump campaign aide. “This atmosphere is coming from a rogue elections board. Just a few rogue people. These people who are lining up for a job in the new administration … It’s like an umpire is lobbying for a job on the team and can then go and call a play fairly. And then you don’t want to investigate it?”The last-minute rule changes struck down by Georgia judges would never have happened under the provisions of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the US supreme court, Mangham said. “The preclearance requirement would keep all of this from coming.” More

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      First he urged women to put family first. Now Harrison Butker’s the latest angry rich guy with a Pac | Arwa Mahdawi

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      In a segment last week, Laura Ingraham could barely contain her glee when she announced that Harrison Butker had decided to venture into politics: a “move sure to drive the liberals crazy”.Butker, for those who aren’t aware, is a kicker with the Kansas City Chiefs – who are famous in non-sporty circles for being the team that Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, plays for. As well as being the highest-paid kicker in the NFL and the owner of a very impressive beard, Butker is what a polite person might call “traditional” and a more direct person might call “Taliban-adjacent”. He essentially thinks women should stay at home making sandwiches for their husbands and looking after their kids. In May, the athlete caused a stir when gave a commencement speech at Benedictine College, a Catholic private liberal arts school, espousing these views. In the same speech, Butker also denounced “dangerous gender ideologies”, called Pride month a “deadly sin”, and rattled off various other conservative talking points.Butker’s Benedictine speech caused enormous backlash but, predictably, it also made him a hero on the right. No longer was he just a guy who got paid millions of dollars to play ball, he was a fighter, valiantly opening up a new front in the never-ending culture war. Sales of his jersey surged.Now it seems Butker plans on riding his newfound notoriety all the way to the White House. Don’t worry, he hasn’t announced a campaign for president yet – though one imagines the thought has crossed his mind – but he has decided to dip his toes into the murky world of political financing.Over the weekend, the kicker established a political action committee called Upright Pac, aimed at getting more Christians to vote. “We’re seeing our values under attack every day. In our schools, in the media, and even from our own government,” the website explains. “But we have a chance to fight back and reclaim the traditional values that have made this country great. That’s why UPRIGHT PAC was founded.”Butker announced the Pac shortly after he officially endorsed the far-right Missouri senator Josh Hawley for re-election. Hawley is the guy who raised a fist in solidarity to protesters during January 6 and was then filmed fleeing from those protesters when they violently breached the Capitol building. He also can’t stop talking about the “collapse of American manhood” and the supposed crisis of men retreating “into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games”.While the Upright Pac website doesn’t explicitly mention Donald Trump, Butker told Ingraham on Thursday that he would be supporting the former president because of his stance on abortion. “I think Donald Trump is the most pro-life president,” Butker said. Which might make things awkward at Kansas City Chiefs socials since Swift endorsed Kamala Harris.With only weeks to go until the election, Butker’s new Pac is not going to make much difference when it comes to getting Trump elected. But who knows what it might achieve in the future. His decision to mobilize Christian voters via a Pac speaks to a broader issue: the oversized influence of special interest groups and influential individuals in shaping US politics.Back in 2010, the US supreme court’s controversial Citizens United ruling loosened restrictions on campaign finance law and enabled corporations and special interest groups to spend unlimited money on elections as long as there was no direct coordination with political candidates or parties. This paved the way for Super Pac funding vehicles: basically fancy legal frameworks which enable big (and frequently dark) money to be funnelled into campaigns. Jimmy Carter has called it legalised “bribery”.Pacs have played an important role in this election cycle. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), for example, has spent more than $100m on federal elections so far this cycle and may have played a large part in unseating Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush – two of Congress’s most vocal critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. It also seems to have helped to sustain support for the war: a Guardian analysis published in January found that the members of Congress who were the most supportive of Israel’s campaign in Gaza during the first six weeks of the war were politicians who had benefited from donations from pro-Israel groups like Aipac.And Aipac is far from the only group toppling politicians. It’s possible Fairshake Pac, a Super Pac backed by the cryptocurrency industry, may have had a role in preventing Katie Porter from advancing in her run for US Senate in California earlier this year. Fairshake, backed by cryptocurrency industry leaders, spent millions in the primary on ads urging cryptocurrency enthusiasts to vote against Porter. Elon Musk, meanwhile, has donated roughly $75m over the last three months to his pro-Trump America Pac.In short: Butker is in crowded company. Everyone with a chip on their shoulder and some money in their pocket has a Pac these days. If you want to buy friends and influence elections, they’re a must-have.And while it’s still early days for Butker’s Pac, he certainly seems to have a lot of support. The owner of the Kansas City Chiefs said on Wednesday that he had no issue with his player’s foray into politics. Which is interesting because, when they lean to the left, athletes are often criticized for getting political. Indeed, the very same Laura Ingraham who is so thrilled about Butker’s move into politics memorably told the basketball star LeBron James to keep his political comments to himself and “shut up and dribble” back in 2018. Ingraham had taken umbrage at James discussing the challenges of being Black and a public figure in the US during an ESPN interview. “It’s always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball,” she snarked.Butker, meanwhile, gets paid $6.4m a year to play with a football. And I haven’t heard a single person on the right tell him to keep quiet and kick. More

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      Elon Musk is Trump’s biggest cheerleader. How could he affect election results?

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      Less than a month before the presidential election, Elon Musk has made himself a near-constant presence in the race. At a rally for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, Musk jumps with glee wearing a custom black Maga hat. On social media, he posts AI-generated images attacking Kamala Harris. Behind the scenes, he bankrolls one of the largest pro-Trump political action committees.The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has emerged as a unique influence on the campaign in ways that set him apart from even the most politically active billionaires and tech elite. He is all at once a vocal Trump surrogate, campaign mega-donor, informal policy adviser, media influencer and prolific source of online disinformation. At the same time, he is the world’s richest man and the owner of one of the United States’ most influential social networks, while also operating as a government defense contractor and wielding power over critical satellite communications infrastructure.On Tuesday, Federal Election Commission filings showed that Musk donated $75m in the last three months to his pro-Trump America Pac. The group has become a major ground game operative in battleground states, and Musk is its only donor.Although the ultra-wealthy have always tried to influence politics, few people in US history have possessed the mix of immense resources and intent to use them to sway an election that Musk does. He has become symbolic of the outsize power over democracy held by the ultra-wealthy and is relishing the spotlight that his unique position has awarded him, said Larry Noble, former FEC general counsel.“He clearly likes attention,” Noble said. “Unlike a lot of very wealthy people who get involved in politics who want to be in the background and want to work through dark money groups so their name isn’t attached to certain things, he’s out there. He wants his name out there. I think he wants to be adored.”Musk’s X becomes a megaphone for TrumpTrump and Musk have a contentious past: Musk called Trump “too old” to seek re-election in a series of tweets in 2022 and Trump referred to Musk as a “bullshit artist”. But the two men have become extremely intertwined during the 2024 presidential race. Musk announced his full support for Trump in July following months of telegraphing his opposition to Joe Biden and the Democratic party. In the months since, Musk has fervently committed his money and influence to the Trump campaign. The tech mogul is fond of saying this will be “the last election” if Trump doesn’t win.Musk’s most visible Trump support takes place on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought for $44bn in 2022. Musk’s account has more than 200 million followers, and he has directed the company’s engineers to improve visibility of his tweets – the algorithm now boosts Musk’s own tweets beyond that of other users so that more people have to see them. It was Musk who made the decision to restore Trump to the social network in late 2022.As election day nears, Musk’s feed has become a constant stream of praise for Trump and vitriol against Harris. A large percentage of his tweets amplify false or misleading information, and the people who Musk interacts with on the platform are often far-right accounts with a history of spreading misinformation. Musk’s AI image generator, Grok, has also become one of the most prominent sources of political deepfakes that have permeated the election.Musk has used X to help the Trump campaign, not only by echoing its talking points or amplifying the president, but by preventing the spread of material that could be harmful. Reporter Ken Klippenstein published a dossier of background information on vice-presidential candidate JD Vance in early October that was obtained through a hack of the Trump campaign allegedly by Iran. The New York Times reported last week that the campaign asked X to prevent links to the published dossier from spreading there, which X followed through on, blocking links to it and suspending Klippenstein’s account.The move stands in contrast to Musk’s frequent proclamations about being a “free speech absolutist”, and to the incessant attacks by Republicans on content moderation decisions made by social media platforms that they claim are akin to censorship. Suffocating the Vance dossier also ran contrary to his own stated reasons for buying Twitter. Musk had tweeted that he would ensure something like Twitter’s suppression of links to the initial New York Post story of Hunter Biden’s laptop would never happen again.“People like Musk, they’re the ones using their money and lawfare to try and suppress real work that’s just trying to contribute to the public discussion,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Musk sued CCDH after it published research that showed hate speech and extremism had risen under Musk’s ownership. He lost the case but has appealed.Musk the mega-donorWhile Musk has rallied online for Trump, he has committed large amounts of money to financing on-the-ground operations and media campaigns for the former president. His spending is an escalation of a yearslong, quiet funding of Republican groups that has turned him into one of the country’s largest rightwing donors.Musk’s America Pac, which was founded earlier this year, is currently doing get-out-the-vote work on the ground in battleground states. Musk has in effect moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania to support the effort, according to the New York Times, and he is planning a series of events in the state following his appearance at a Trump rally there earlier this month.“That is what will decide this election, especially in Pennsylvania,” Musk said at the rally in Butler. “And honestly, you want to just be a pest. Just be a pest to everyone you know, people on the street, everywhere. Vote, vote, vote. Fight, fight, fight. Vote, vote, vote.”The money is not only flowing to get-out-the-vote initiatives, though. Musk has donated to the conservative group Building America’s Future, which has set up cash awards for people who bring the group evidence of election fraud. Building America’s Future has also funneled money to a Super Pac that HuffPost reported has run targeted ads calling Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, “America’s pro-Israel power couple” in areas of Michigan with large numbers of Arab and Muslim voters. The Pac is simultaneously running ads aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania that accuse Harris of being too pro-Palestinian.

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      Musk is different from other wealthy donors in recent decades who have divided their political engagement into two styles, according to Benjamin Soskis, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute who is an expert in the history of philanthropy. One is to craft a non-partisan identity and work with people in both parties, for either strategic or personal reasons. The best example of that: Bill Gates. The other is to engage directly with partisan politics, but with a level of discretion, like the Koch brothers or George Soros.Musk falls into his own category, working in a highly partisan fashion but with virtually no discretion. He’s displaying “a kind of gleeful embrace of partisanship”, Soskis said, embodying a style of politics that feels similar to Trump.“That feels unusual for the wealthiest individuals – the complete eschewal of discretion as a mode of political engagement,” Soskis said. “That seems new.”A plan to gut regulatorsIf Trump and Musk occasionally seem like an odd pair on paper – Trump has threatened to remove an electric vehicle tax credit, while Musk is CEO of perhaps the world’s most famous EV company – one point of alignment is a vehement dislike for regulators. Musk’s longstanding battles with government offices like the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Aviation Administration could shift in his favor under a Trump administration that is likely to drastically cut their resources and weaken their authority.“I suspect on some level that this is just a pocketbook issue for him, that he also wants lower taxes,” Noble, the former FEC counsel, said. “He wants to have his companies freed from safety regulations.”Over the past several years Musk has faced investigations, fines and delays over public safety concerns on a range of his projects. The FAA alleged last month that Musk’s SpaceX broke launch safety protocols, and over the years has grounded the company multiple times for violating regulations. California officials last week cited Musk’s politics and falsehoods as they voted against a SpaceX plan to conduct launches in the state. Musk sued in response. The EPA has also launched investigations into SpaceX for complaints that it is dumping unsafe amounts of wastewater into the ecosystem, while the FDA has cited Musk’s Neuralink brain implant company for animal welfare issues.Tesla’s attempts at developing fully autonomous cars have also come under scrutiny, presenting complications for a company that has staked its future on the ability to produce a self-driving robotaxi. Tesla is facing additional investigations from federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission over its self-driving car claims, and earlier this year came under investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration related to a recall of its autopilot function.These constant fights with the full alphabet of regulatory agencies has coincided with Musk making numerous public statements in favor of deregulation, as well as calling for a full-scale audit of the federal government. That idea has found purchase with Trump, who announced in September that he would launch a Musk-led government efficiency commission that would audit federal agencies for places to cut. Musk wants to call it the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, invoking one of his favorite memes, an expressive shiba inu.Although the plan is vague on details and fails to address the obvious conflict of interest in Musk auditing the regulators that oversee his companies, both Trump and Musk have repeatedly brought up the idea of Musk holding some role in a potential Trump administration. During an appearance on Fox News earlier this week, Trump said he would create a new position called “secretary of cost-cutting” and appoint Musk.“He’s dying to do this,” Trump said.Musk’s Maga support goes beyond businessMusk’s public rightward shift is an extension of years of allying himself with rightwing leaders around the world. In recent years, Musk has cozied up to nationalist and nativist politicians including Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and India’s Narendra Modi.Some of these relationships have appeared to be in service of Musk’s business interests. He has forged a friendship with Argentina’s anti-regulation, far-right president, Javier Milei, who he brought on a personal tour of Tesla’s Texas headquarters and repeatedly endorsed on X. Argentina, meanwhile, has some of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a key mineral used in electric vehicle batteries and one that Musk has previously demanded be processed in increasing quantities.Musk’s business empire is at risk when his relationships with governments sour, as evidenced during his recent conflict with Brazilian authorities that resulted in a judge banning access to X in the country. Musk ultimately capitulated to comply with local laws.But Musk’s promotion of far-right beliefs and support for Trump have also taken on a personal dimension that goes beyond business calculations. Musk’s rhetoric on X has fixated on conservative grievances and he has amplified racist and antisemitic narratives through his tweets. Anti-immigration and anti-trans views have become a frequent talking point.One of his 12 children is a trans woman, and Musk claims he was “tricked into” signing off on her medical treatment and that he “lost” his child in the process. He has since vowed to defeat what he calls the “woke mind virus”.This increasingly overt radicalization of Musk’s social and political views appears unlikely to abate following the campaign, leaving questions of how he may influence the country’s politics when the election ends regardless of its outcome.After the January 6 insurrection, Twitter, under its previous ownership, permanently suspended Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”. Under Musk, the tweets that got Trump banned seem quaint – and Trump is now back on the platform, as are a host of frequent superspreaders of election lies.A big test awaits Musk if Trump loses, something he joked would land him in either legal or bodily trouble with Democrats. Will he accept a loss? Or would he use X to keep spreading conspiracies he’s already promoted – that mail ballots are “too risky” or that non-citizens are swaying US elections, two of Trump’s pet election issues.X, under Musk, “is building now, as we speak, another fresh stolen election narrative, and we all know what the consequences could be”, Hood said. More