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      Jimmy Carter has voted in presidential election, representatives confirm

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      Jimmy Carter, the centenarian former Democratic president, has voted in the 2024 presidential election, his representatives confirmed on Wednesday.A statement from the Carter Center did not reveal who he voted for, but it is assumed the 100-year-old, who is in hospice care, cast his ballot for the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.“He’s never voted Republican in his life,” his son, Chip, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, after revealing in August that Carter’s greatest wish, more than reaching his 100th birthday, was to live long enough to support her.“I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” he said at the time.At the Democratic national convention in August, just weeks before Carter’s 1 October birthday, his grandson Jason, the Carter Center chair, told delegates that the former president believed Harris “carries my grandfather’s legacy”.The statement issued on Wednesday at lunchtime was brief: “The Carter Center can confirm that former US President Jimmy Carter voted by mail today, Oct 16, 2024. We do not have any further details to share at this time.”Some media outlets earlier reported falsely that Carter, whose single term of office was 1977 to 1981, had already voted on Tuesday’s first day of early voting in Georgia.

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      The Journal Constitution, confirming the correct details on Wednesday, said Carter filled out his ballot and it was placed in a drop box at the Sumter county courthouse near his hometown of Plains this morning.Carter has been “an especially reliable voter” over the years, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. The newspaper said he had routinely cast ballots in general elections as well as primary runoffs and special elections. For more than a decade, he has voted exclusively by mail in elections tracked by the state, it said.According to Jason Carter, his grandfather, the 39th US president, was in August “more alert and interested in politics and the war in Gaza”. He has been in hospice care since February 2023, nine months before the death of his wife, the former first lady Rosalynn Carter.The move was widely believed to be an indication that Carter was nearing the end of his life, a perception reinforced by his decision to ask Joe Biden to deliver his eulogy the following month.Biden then suggested he might have provided that information unintentionally, telling reporters: “Excuse me, I shouldn’t say that,” before adding Carter’s medical team had “found a way to keep him going for a lot longer than they anticipated”.The ultimate elder statesman of US politics, Carter became the first president in history to reach 100 years old, a milestone celebrated a couple of weeks before his birthday at a star-studded party in Atlanta.“Not everyone gets 100 years. But when someone does and uses that time to good, it’s worth celebrating,” Jason Carter, the 2014 Democratic nominee for Georgia governor, said.After losing to the Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election and leaving the White House, Carter dedicated himself to diplomacy, and was regularly provided counsel to subsequent presidents dealing with international crises.He was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2002 “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”.He founded the Carter Center in 1982 with the intention it become a leading advocate for advancing human rights globally and alleviating famine, poverty and suffering. More

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      in US Politics

      Why are people leaving Trump rallies early? We asked them

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      The line to get into the Donald Trump rally snaked about a quarter-mile around the venue in Marietta, Georgia, on Tuesday, an hour before the event started.The hall, which seats 2,700 people, had already started filling up with supporters, the first of whom arrived around 1pm for the 7.30pm event. Not everyone was getting in.There’s no shortage of political enthusiasm in Georgia. Early voting opened on Tuesday, with 310,980 people casting a ballot in person according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office. The previous record was about 130,000. Few of Trump’s supporters sported “I voted” stickers.Though the energy before the rally was high, many have noted in recent months – including Kamala Harris during the presidential debate last month – that crowds at Trump rallies dwindle as his speeches turn into multi-hour rambles.“I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said during the debate. “You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”The Guardian tested that proposition on Tuesday.About three out of 10 people attending the rally left before Trump finished speaking at 10.14pm. In their defense, Trump was an hour and a half late.Seven minutes into Trump’s address, as he recited a litany of grievances about inflation, schools, the quality of cars, cities, immigration and the prospect of a third world war, a dozen people had already walked out.Twenty minutes in, as Trump was describing how “murderers” immigrating illegally posed a bigger threat to America than inflation, Ryan Taylor, a podcaster, headed to her car.“I live an hour away, and my son is waiting in the car,” she said. “He didn’t want to come in. He’s a teenager.” He’s 15, she said.View image in fullscreenHaley Lummus, of Jasper, Georgia, left at 9.22pm, just as Trump was describing Harris as the “taxing queen” and complaining about how his attacks on San Francisco depreciate the value of the property he owns there.“We had to wait a while, like to get him on stage,” she said. “Everyone was doing the wave, and there was a lot of people very excited to see him cheering.” Why was she leaving early? “I worked and I’m tired.”Perhaps 50 people had left by then.A group of five young men wearing brand-new red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps walked out just before 9.30, as Trump was claiming that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza would not have happened if he had been president. The five looked mildly bewildered and very slightly out of place, even there.“We’re from Denmark, and we don’t really care about American politics at all, but we wanted to experience American politics firsthand,” said Gustave. He and his friends were staying about 15 minutes away, heard about Trump’s appearance and said why not. They described the event as a “fever dream” and “something like The Bachelor” before heading off to beat traffic.Another 50 or so left over the next 10 minutes. Four of them were thrown out.“Some of us went in with flags to scream, ‘Free Palestine’.” said one young man who wouldn’t identify himself. Trump was talking about ending taxes on tips. “The flags got snatched from us. We got booed. We got kicked. I still support Trump though.” They complained that the burly security guard in front of them roughed them up, taunting him as they ambled on the periphery of the hall. A few minutes later, Secret Service agents arrested one of them.By 9.50, as Trump was talking about how the “migrant invasion” was “stealing American jobs”, a consistent stream of people hit the exits. Most said they had to work the next day, or had a babysitter to relieve. Marietta is a metro Atlanta city, while Trump’s base of support often lives in more rural communities a distance away.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenSeason Poole, once an army diesel mechanic, lives in Social Circle, Georgia. This was her second rally; she attended one in North Carolina two weeks ago, she said. As Trump described “alien gang members and migrant criminals from prison”, Poole contemplated schoolwork and an hour drive.At least 500 people had left by then. Voni Miller would have stayed if she could.

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      “He made me cry,” Miller said. “I cried when he was speaking about making changes. You know, closing the border, making changes. If Kamala wins we’re so screwed, because she can’t make up her mind about anything. It just made me cry because he’s giving up so much. He doesn’t have to do this for us. Like, you know what I mean. He has all the money, but he is still getting shot at, and people saying horrible things about him. But he’s doing it because he wants to make changes for America, and it was just so emotional.”So. Why leave?“I’m actually leaving early because my phone is dying and I have a Tesla so I can’t get in. It’s really upsetting, because it meant a lot to be here, and I just can’t get in my car.”By 10.05, as Trump was talking about how important it was for police officers to be shielded from civil suits in misconduct cases for “doing something good”, Trump had lost about a third of his audience.Stephen Rosenbaum was walking back to his car with his son at that point. “I think I get more out of these rallies than anything else, and I hope that other people do,” he said. “He shows the human side. You know, we watched the Butler rally live on television when it happened. It was terrible,” he said about the first assassination attempt on Trump. “But, you know, right before all those events took place, he said, Listen, we just want to make the country a better place.”Rosenbaum has been to several rallies, he said.“We wanted to see that, see it in real life. We want to see it live,” he said. But, you’re not staying for the whole thing? “He’s got to go to school tomorrow. And he’s gotten to the part now where, I mean, we’ve seen enough of these. We kind of know how it’s going to finish. We just wanted to see it live. You know?” More

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      in Elections

      Inside the Republican legal blitz to sow election doubt: ‘The claims are garbage’

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      Nearly four years after waging an aggressive legal effort to overturn the 2020 elections, Republicans have filed a slew of lawsuits that appear to be aimed at seeding doubt about the outcome of the 2024 race in the event of a Donald Trump loss.From 2023 until September of this year, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and local affiliates have filed or are involved in at least 72 cases, according to an analysis by Democracy Docket, a left-leaning voting rights news platform founded by the Democratic lawyer Marc Elias. At the same point during the 2022 midterm election, Republicans had filed 41 lawsuits.There’s nothing unusual about an explosion of litigation over election rules ahead of a presidential election. But experts say what stands out this year isn’t the volume of the cases but their subject matter.Many of the lawsuits are based on a theory that states are not adequately maintaining their voter rolls and that there could be scores of ineligible voters, including non-citizens, on them. They make weak legal claims, election experts say, and instead appear to be more of a public relations effort to motivate Republican voters and echo Trump’s falsehoods about voting.“The underlying claims in the suits are based on totally unreliable data, shoddy methodology, and basically the claims are garbage,” said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit group Protect Democracy. “They are also, in this case, brought by election deniers, in an attempt to spread a false narrative to mislead the public and undermine confidence in elections.”“If the fraud theme of 2020 was ‘Covid is allowing ineligible people to vote or ballots to be manipulated’, the 2024 theme seems to be ‘illegals are voting’, and that fits in very much with the kind of nativist anti-immigrant language coming from the top of the Republican ticket,” said Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California Los Angeles.In Nevada, a swing state, Republicans claimed in a suit filed in September there were nearly 4,000 non-citizens on the rolls who appear to have voted.It was a claim that the Nevada secretary of state, at the time a Republican, already investigated and debunked (she said that those people were probably naturalized citizens). Republicans claim the state should have investigated more and also cited data from the cooperative congressional elections survey to suggest that there may be even more non-citizens on the rolls, but the authors of the study have long warned against using its data to try to claim there are non-citizens on the rolls.In North Carolina, another battleground this year, the RNC also filed two misleading lawsuits designed to give the impression that the state was not properly vetting its voters. In late August, the RNC accused election officials of not following a new law that requires them to use juror information to verify citizenship information. The state board of elections said the claim was flatly untrue.The RNC separately sued to potentially invalidate the registrations of 225,000 people for lacking information that’s required under federal law. A 2002 statute, the Help America Vote Act, requires voters to provide either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their social security number when they register.In North Carolina 225,000 people don’t have that information recorded in the state’s voter registration database, but experts have noted that doesn’t necessarily mean that they lack that information. Voters may have registered before the law went into effect, or the absence may reflect clerical errors. Experts say such minor errors shouldn’t lead to wide swaths of voters getting disenfranchised.“If they’re talking about 225,000 people disenfranchised for a clerical error that was not their fault, I think that would be a wild overreaction,” Sam Oliker-Friedland, the executive director of the Institute for Responsive Government, a watchdog group, told the Raleigh News and Observer. “It would just simply mean that people can’t vote because of paperwork, and that’s not a fair outcome.”Asked for comment for this story, the Republican National Committee provided a statement from Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, that contained a number of falsehoods about voting.“Kamala’s open border is flooding illegal migrants into our country at the most dangerous rate we’ve ever seen. As this invasion escalates, Democrats are pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country,” the statement said. While a handful of localities allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.“While radical Democrats have allowed non-citizen voting in California and DC, states such as Walz’s Minnesota have no system to keep non-citizens off the rolls, resulting in an open door to illegal voting,” she added. Incidents of non-citizen voting are extremely rare. “This is no coincidence, and Democrats aren’t even trying to hide their election interference schemes. President Trump will secure the border and secure our elections so that every American vote is protected.”The Harris-Walz campaign described the 2024 election as “the most litigious presidential election in American history, even more than 2020”, and said it had hundreds of lawyers in courts across the country “winning case after case”. It noted that Republicans had lost several of the cases they have filed in at least the trial court, including challenges to mail-in ballot rules in Nevada (the RNC is appealing some of the rulings).“For four years, Donald Trump and his Maga allies have been scheming to sow distrust in our elections and undermine our democracy so they can cry foul when they lose. But also for four years, Democrats have been preparing for this moment, and we are ready for anything,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris-Walz campaign chair, said in a statement.For Trump, lawsuits have crafted a misleading imprimatur of legitimacy around his false claims about elections. In 2020, nearly every lawsuit that he and allies filed after the election was thrown out. Nonetheless, the claims and affidavits from poll-watchers that were included – all filed with legal formatting, signatures from lawyers, and court stamps – helped shape the impression that there was legitimate evidence something had gone amiss.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLawsuits also can be a particularly powerful forum for spreading misleading information. Public officials sometimes won’t speak publicly about pending legal matters, leaving facts in an initial complaint or petition to go unchallenged in public discourse. It can be weeks before a response is filed or a hearing is held, long after a flood of initial headlines repeating the allegations in the suit. By the time a case gets thrown out, it may not get as much attention as the initial filing.Even though none of Trump’s cases attempting to throw out the 2020 election succeeded, the false claims in them – that suitcases of ballots were pulled out from under tables in Atlanta, that machines were flipping votes – live on today.“A lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, has said.“A lot of it is sort of projecting to your audience that you’re actively pursuing problems and trying to resolve them and also just kind of creating energy on your base to get involved or stay vigilant,” said Rebecca Green, co-director of the election law program at William & Mary Law School.Hasen said some of the lawsuits may be “placeholders” that Republicans and Trump allies could point to after the election to argue they hadn’t waited too long to bring legal claims. Berwick called these suits “zombie cases”.“They’re dead on arrival, but will be resurrected after the election,” he said. “I am virtually certain that election deniers will focus on these narratives in the post-election period, both to discredit results they don’t like and as the basis for post-election legal challenges to try and throw out certain ballots, or even interfere with certification of results.”Aside from the public relations lawsuits, the RNC has waged an aggressive effort over rules for counting mail-in ballots, including a closely watched suit at the US Court of Appeals 5th circuit that could prohibit states from accepting mail-in ballots that arrive after election day. Eighteen states, including battleground Nevada, allow ballots to count if they are postmarked before election day but arrive afterwards and this rule could impact an election where the result could come down to just a few thousands votes in any given swing state.Republicans have also backed mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania that are missing a date or wrongly dated, even if the ballot is returned on time and the voter is eligible. They have also sought to limit counties from offering practices for voters to cure errors with their absentee ballots so they can be counted.Experts have also raised questions about the timing of some lawsuits. Federal law prohibits states from systematically removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election. Yet some of the RNC’s lawsuits challenging how states maintain their voter rolls were filed within that 90-day period.Republicans recently have also challenged the legality of ballots from overseas and military voters, filing lawsuits in North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania (the RNC is the plaintiff in North Carolina and Michigan, and Republican members of Congress are the plaintiffs in Pennsylvania). The federal law that governs the practice of dealing with absentee ballots has been in place for decades, and states have long had their own policies in place.“The timing of these claims is laughable – the processes they challenge have been public for years, and they could have filed these lawsuits months ago, at least,” Oliker-Friedland said in an email. “Instead, they’re choosing to waste election administrators’ time with litigation that, even if successful, won’t practically change anything.” More

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      in US Politics

      Many won’t vote Trump or Harris. The size of that group will decide the election | Michael Podhorzer

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      We are mere weeks away from perhaps the most consequential election in American history. The good news, at least for your blood pressure, is that you can ignore the endless parade of horse-race polls. We already know everything we need to know about what will happen.First, we can be confident that, for the third time in a row, a majority of Americans will reject Donald Trump and the Maga agenda. Last month, I used high-quality voter file data to explain why it’s almost certain that Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, will win the national vote.Thanks to our wildly undemocratic electoral college system, however, we also know that we could see a different result that doesn’t reflect what most Americans want. Shockingly, if that happens, it will be for the second time in the last three elections, and for the third time in the last eight elections. If that is the case in this election, as well, it will be in large part because typically disengaged voters who voted for Biden in 2020 feel less alarmed today about the threat of Trump and Maga than they did four years ago.As I wrote in July, “the winner in November will be determined by what, to most voters, the election seems to be ‘about’ by the time voting starts.” In what I call the Maga Era (post-2016), the best predictor of how – and whether – someone will vote in the future is how – and whether – they have voted in the past.Unfortunately, most political coverage focuses nearly all its attention on for whom people will vote (that is, for Harris or Trump), and almost none on whether people will vote. Indeed, Biden would have lost the electoral college in 2020 without the support of those voters who stayed home.The difference between Democrats’ losses in 2016 and subsequent victories has been the unprecedented participation of new voters who believe that if the Maga agenda wins they will lose the freedoms they now take for granted. This turnout surge from new voters is how Democrats have won 23 out of 27 statewide races in the battlegrounds since 2016. Today, there are about 91 million Americans who have voted for Biden and House Democrats since 2016, and about 83 million who have voted for Trump or House Republicans.While the threat of a second Trump administration should be alarming, especially given the extremist Republican policy goals and planning on display in the conservative manifesto called Project 2025, survey data suggests that voters are less attuned to that threat lately.There’s no question that Harris has done an amazing job of consolidating and energizing the Democratic coalition since Biden dropped out. But not all anti-Maga voters are necessarily pro-Democrat. Too many of those who hadn’t been regular voters before 2016 and still don’t have favorable views of Democrats – but came out to vote against Trump or Maga in 2018, 2020 and 2022 – seem disengaged. In particular, young voters, Latinos and non-college voters are disproportionately likely to have said that they haven’t heard Trump say something offensive “recently”, or that they “know nothing at all” about Project 2025.When we imagine a stereotypical “midwest swing voter”, we might think of a burly guy sitting in a Wisconsin diner who thinks Democrats are too liberal or too “elite”. But this image ignores the “whether” voters who are much more key to Democrats’ success – like Charlene, the pro-choice woman pouring coffee for the burly guy, or Jimmy, Jenny and Amber, the contingently employed twentysomethings in the other booth who feel the whole system is rigged against them. All of them decided to turn out in at least one of the last three elections – not because they thought Democrats could make their lives better, but because they understood that Trump and Maga would make their lives worse.Trump’s best chance is for these voters to shrug off the very real threat he poses. The US supreme court’s conservative majority, including three justices Trump himself put on the court, have contributed to that by shielding the former president this year from legal accountability for his crimes. Even though a New York court found him guilty of 34 felonies, the actions of the six Republican justices have ensured that he won’t be sentenced for those crimes, or tried for his conduct related to January 6 crimes before the election.The good news is that any election within the margin of error is within the margin of effort. We know that voters come out against the Maga agenda when they realize what is at stake. The future of American democracy depends on the efforts of all of us – not just Democratic campaign operatives, but members of civil society, the media and ordinary Americans – to make sure the stakes are clear to all.

      Michael Podhorzer, the former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, the chair of the Analyst Institute, the Research Collaborative and the Defend Democracy Project and writes the Substack Weekend Reading More

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      in US Politics

      Young men on being Republican in New York: ‘It caused all types of consternation among my friends’

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      In New York City, Republicans are something of a rarity. Only 10% of New Yorkers are Republicans, according to 2021 voter registration data, and the state is polling bright blue for Kamala Harris. But the Republican party has not called it quits.“You live in a blue city, but it’s going red very, very quickly,” Donald Trump claimed at a Bronx rally in May. Step into the suburbs, and Republican candidates have enough momentum to turn multiple House elections – and ultimately, control of the House – into nail-biters.It’s an interesting time for the New York Young Republicans Club (NYYRC). The club brings together conservative New Yorkers 40 and under to socialize, campaign and discuss policy; recent events have included debate watch parties and a self-defense course in light of “illegal military-age male immigrants flooding our country, the threat of World War III, and New York’s insistence on stripping our Second Amendment rights”. It’s using this momentum in New York to branch out to other Republican youth organizations around the country.This year, the photographer Paola Chapdelaine spent time with four male members of NYYRC and one male member of the nearby Connecticut Young Republicans, who represent a nationwide trend of young men increasingly embracing the right. Here, they explain how they found their way to the Republican party as young men in a liberal city and what they think of political polarization in America.Frank Filocomo, 27: ‘Community cannot be politically monolithic’View image in fullscreenWhen I was an undergrad, I saw a woman on the train with a button on her backpack that said “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”. I remember completely disagreeing with that. This move towards dissolving the family, or saying that we don’t need each other and we could just be these totally individualized, autonomous beings with no connection to family, with no connection to our history, I reject that idea. I think we’re all connected to something greater. I guess that’s what makes me a conservative.Recently, I thought I had a great rapport with a date – lots of laughter, great chemistry. Then, the morning of the second date, she [texted]: “Hey, I did some thinking, and never mind. I would not like to go on a date with you.” I immediately knew that she Googled me. I’m not a rightwing vigilante, but I write for conservative publications.If I start immediately in a relationship by saying: “Hi, I’m Frank, I’m a conservative,” then I’m setting myself up for failure. I say: “Hi, I’m Frank, I have a cat that I love. These are my hobbies. I play guitar.” That’s not to say you should be deceptive about your beliefs, but it is to say that you should be cognizant of the political polarization in this country. I think it was Muhammad Ali who said that he judges people based on how they treat waiters at restaurants. Similarly, how do you treat animals? I think squabbling over the tax code, or the right number of immigrants we should have per year, or how you feel about foreign policy ultimately mean nothing to me in a relationship. What I care about is how you treat me and how you treat others.I sound like a hippy, but I also totally believe in this idea of community, and that community cannot be politically monolithic. It has to have Democrats in it, has to have liberals. The second we go to the “me versus them” or “us versus them” mentality, we’re doomed.Born, raised and currently living in Brooklyn, Filocomo is program manager at the conservative non-profit National Review Institute. He serves as policy chairman of NYYRCJude Somefun, 41: ‘My politics caused all types of consternation among my friends’View image in fullscreenIt was 2008 and I was a political free agent. This was when everybody was like, “Obama, Obama, Obama.” He was the hope and change guy. But he was saying stuff like: “These billionaires and millionaires have made too much on American people. It’s time for them to spread the wealth” – like socialists. And I was like: “I can’t vote for this guy.”That’s when I leaned on biblical faith and started researching the political parties. Growing up in New York, most Black people are implicit Democrats or explicit Democrats. My friend Ben, who was a socialist, illustrated to me what it takes to be courageous and not fall into the trend, to express your opinion. I don’t necessarily agree with socialism, I just felt like he was very courageous.I felt like the Republican party was more in alignment with freedom, more in alignment with business, more in alignment with marriage, more in alignment with life in the womb. I was like, “OK, I could get down with that.” It caused all types of consternation amongst my friends, my girlfriend at the time. People were having interventions. My dad kind of renounced me as a son. It was very, very tough.In this election, I believe we should promote the interests of America first. A lot of people are hurting now economically. I don’t see the benefit in sending money over to Ukraine, a bunch of foreign aid, a border that’s open, when we have to take care of our citizens.Somefun is philanthropy chairman of NYYRC. He was born and raised in Harlem and currently lives there. He is a life insurance agentMatthew Carrier, 22: ‘From the outside, I’m a raging conservative, but biodiversity concerns me’View image in fullscreenI got started with the College Republicans my sophomore year. There were four of us, so, like, something had to change. So we made it a very conversation-centric group. Our first topic was the Afghanistan pullout, because that was timely. Veganism was a recent [topic] we did, but the conversation was very good. We had a transgenderism and athletics meeting that was probably our most contentious.The club is College Republicans, there’s no hiding from that, and still, we’ve gotten a very dynamic group of people that are willing to have conversations. We have respect for ourselves. We have respect for the campus, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. It’s something I see where other college Republican groups falter.From the outside, I’m a raging conservative, but biodiversity concerns me [as a farmer]. Still, I don’t share the same concerns [as environmental activists] with GMOs and stuff, because I see there’s a need when you have a world of 8 billion people to feed. I try not to criticize farmers that are at a much larger scale than me by saying: “Just let there be more ladybugs and your crops will be fine.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

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      Republicans are very much a party of clean air, clean water. When you want to talk about global warming and such, that’s where you lose us. I’m much more appreciative of the climate change conversation if folks I’m talking to are willing to rank their issues. That’s a hard thing to do, and maybe a very cold way of thinking. But what’s the biggest issue, carbon in the atmosphere or plastic on the ground? Biodiversity? I think there’s a lot of benefits to nuclear [power], but no one wants to be the guy that stakes a claim to nuclear out of concern that things go bad.Carrier is the former president of College Republicans at University of Rochester and current statewide chairman of the Connecticut Young Republicans, as well as a political consultant and small scale farmer and beekeeper. He is from Enfield, ConnecticutLucian Wintrich, 36: ‘We’re in an economically terrifying situation’View image in fullscreenSo many younger people in New York are conservative, but they’re scared to actually come out and say that they’re conservative. [There’s also] a quarter of the party, and it tends to be these younger, reactionary kids, who will regurgitate whatever certain conservative influencers say, rather than reading and thinking for themselves.I was the only gay guy and the only pro-Bush guy in fourth grade. To me, conservatism is about actual individuality and autonomy and the understanding that the only real authority that we should appreciate and look towards is God, versus the government and elected officials. I mean, I fully believe in community. Most public schools, before the [federal government] took over and established the failing Department of Education, were run by communities. The more you involve the [federal government], the less control communities have, individuals have, and the worse off we are.[In 2024], I think we need to stop funneling all this money to Israel and Ukraine and honestly, every other country that we’re funneling money to. Actually, Israel is a little trickier than Ukraine. I do think it’s a stabilizing country [in the Middle East], but still we’re hemorrhaging money while our debt is going up. We’re in an economically terrifying situation right now.Wintrich lives in New York’s East Village. He is a media strategist and PR consultant and serves as press chairman of NYYRCKwasi Baryeh, 24: ‘It seems like political violence is becoming normalized’View image in fullscreenOne of the biggest problems I see with New York and other cities that lean liberal is that there’s a degradation of property rights. There’s potential for squatters. Tenants have the right to not pay and stay within the property. It’s also landlords abusing their position by not following their legal responsibilities. When people don’t pay rent or don’t abide by their contracts, that’s probably a gateway to people refusing to obey laws, refusing to follow established norms and conventions. It prevents people from living as moral people.I support the party. I support Trump. Trump did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. A couple months ago, I filed my tax return, and I saw I got a little extra money from that. He also [signed a bipartisan bill] funding HBCUs, which my mother, who’s a college professor, was really grateful for. He met with Kanye to see what could be done to remedy the injustice of more Black people being in prison – reducing the incarceration problem. The First Step Act, allowing the formerly incarcerated to re-enter society, was bipartisan, and it was passed. But with the [current] political environment, it doesn’t seem feasible that anyone is going to get much done.[I’m also concerned about the] two recent assassination attempts on Trump. It seems like political violence is becoming more normalized in our society, which makes things much more unstable as things get close to election day.Baryeh is a financial analyst. He lives in the Bronx and is a board member of the NYYRC Catholic caucus

      These interviews have been edited for clarity More

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      in US Politics

      US election briefing: Georgia shatters early voting record as more than 300,000 cast ballots

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      The first day of early voting in the battleground state of Georgia saw a record turnout, with 328,000 people casting a vote in person or by mail – more than doubling the previous record of 136,000 in 2020. In that year, Joe Biden became the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to win the state – after scraping through with fewer than 12,000 votes.Winning the state and its 16 electoral college votes gives either candidate a high chance of winning the election overall, according to polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight. The Guardian’s poll tracker as of 10 October has Trump ahead in the state by a point.The record turnout came as a judge temporarily halted a new rule that requires Election Day ballots to be counted by hand after the close of voting. The hand-count rule was passed by a pro-Trump conservative majority of Georgia’s election board, who said they were attempting to make the election more secure and transparent. Democrats had said the change would sow chaos and delay results.Here’s what else happened on Tuesday:

      Donald Trump held a campaign event in Atlanta where, after arriving 90 minutes late, he repeatedly mentioned Elon Musk’s support and the products made by his companies including Space X and Tesla. Elon Musk gave around $75m to his pro-Donald Trump spending group in the span of three months, federal disclosures showed on Tuesday, underscoring how the billionaire has become crucial to the Republican candidate’s efforts to win the election.

      Trump defended his protectionist trade policies and other fiscal proposals, dismissing suggestions that they could drive up the federal debt, antagonise allies and harm the US economy in an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago. “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariffs’,” Trump said in an often-combative conversation with John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News.

      Kamala Harris defended her record as a prosecutor, pledged to decriminalise marijuana and push for police reform as she aimed to shore up support among Black men in an interview with radio host Charlamagne tha God on Tuesday.

      The Harris Victory Fund, the Democratic candidate’s ‘big-dollar fundraising committee’, raised $633m in the three months from 1 July to 30 September, over a third higher than the amount raised by Biden in the same period in 2020, the New York Times reported

      Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, on Tuesday unveiled his ticket’s plans to improve the lives of rural voters, as the Harris campaign looked to cut into Trump’s support. The Harris-Walz plan includes a focus on improving rural health care, such as plans to recruit 10,000 new health care professionals in rural and tribal areas through scholarships, loan forgiveness and new grant programs, as well as economic and agricultural policy priorities.

      Robert F Kennedy Jr has suggested he will have significant influence on American agriculture policy if Trump is elected president, the latest in a series of roles he has envisioned for himself in a second Trump administration.

      A judge has rejected a request to require Arizona’s 15 counties to verify the citizenship of 42,000 voters registered only to vote in federal elections in the presidential battleground state, concluding those who sought the checks made their request too close to the election and didn’t have legal standing.

      President Joe Biden said Harris would “cut her own path” once she wins the 2024 election, as he hit the campaign trail to help win over sceptical voters three weeks before Election Day. “Kamala will take the country in her own direction, and that’s one of the most important differences in this election,” he said. “Kamala’s perspective on our problems will be fresh and new. Donald Trump’s perspective old and failed and quite frankly, thoroughly totally dishonest.”

      Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Democratic Representative Colin Allred met for their only debate, trading attacks over abortion and immigration in a closely watched race that could help determine which party wins control of the US Senate. Allred addressed the 6 January storming of the Capitol, at which he was present, saying “when that mob came” Cruz, who had said he would object to the certification of the results, “was hiding in a supply closet.”

      The estate of Leonard Cohen issued a cease and desist order to Trump, after a recording of Rufus Wainwright singing Cohen’s song Hallelujah was played at a bizarre campaign event. Wainwright also condemned Trump’s use of the song at the town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania. The song was one of a number Trump played during a Q&A session, in which numerous audience members needed medical attention amid high temperatures. More

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      Elon Musk gives $75m to pro-Trump group, putting him among the largest Republican donors

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      Elon Musk gave around $75m to his pro-Donald Trump spending group in the span of three months, federal disclosures show, underscoring how the billionaire has become crucial to the Republican candidate’s efforts to win the US presidential election.America PAC, which is focused on turning out voters in the closely contested states battleground states that could decide the election, spent around $72m of that in the July-September period, according to disclosures filed to the Federal Election Commission.That is more than any other pro-Trump Super Pac focused on turning out voters. The Trump campaign is broadly reliant on outside groups for canvassing voters, meaning the Super Pac founded by Musk – the world’s richest man – plays an outsized role in the razor-thin election between Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris.Musk, the CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla, was the sole donor to the group in that period.On Wednesday, he said in a post on X that he will be “giving a series of talks” throughout Pennsylvania, less than two weeks after his appearance with Trump in the state. Musk said people needed to sign a petition on his America PAC website to attend his talks from “tomorrow night through Monday.”Pennsylvania is considered a crucial state for both Trump and Harris in the race for the White House.Musk, who has said he has voted for Democratic presidential candidates in the past, has taken a sharp turn to the right this election. He endorsed Trump in July and appeared with him at a rally in Pennsylvania earlier this month.Musk’s donations to America PAC propel him into the exclusive club of Republican mega donors, a list that also includes banking heir Timothy Mellon and casino billionaire Miriam Adelson.However, it was reported earlier this month that Musk has secretly funded a conservative political group for years, well before his public embrace of Trump.America PAC declined to comment on the Musk donations. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.America PAC is focused on encouraging Americans who like Trump but don’t always vote to cast ballots this cycle, a high-risk, labor-intensive strategy by the Trump campaign.The group, which started its work later in the election than other Pacs, has encountered some problems with hiring and its contractors. Since July, it has fired two major contractors it has hired to knock on doors.It has also struggled to hire door knockers in several battleground states in part because by the time the Pac became operational many other canvassing groups had already staffed up, a half-dozen sources briefed on the issues told Reuters.The group had about $4m left on hand by the end of September, the filings show.Separate filings earlier on Tuesday showed that Miriam Adelson, the casino magnate, donated $95m to another pro-Trump Super Pac, Preserve America PAC, in the same period. More

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      If Kamala Harris is trying to show she can meet the needs of Black America, she has gaps to fill | Shamira Ibrahim

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      As we enter the final 21 days of the 2024 presidential election, the euphoric sheen from the summer’s “Kamala is Brat” phenomenon, which resonated with large swaths of gen Z voters, has waned. The Harris campaign is scrambling to communicate its case for selection at the polls, with the vice-president hurriedly pushing out platforms that address lingering skepticism amongst various demographic groups. On Tuesday night, during a broadcast conversation with the radio host Charlamagne tha God, Harris turned her attention to Black men.Harris’s concern is not completely unfounded – several notable Black male celebrities, such as the rapper 50 Cent and the sports personality Stephen A Smith, have expressed their receptiveness to the Trump campaign. On the aggregate, there has been a dip in support: a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely Black voters reported that 78% of all Black voters expressed an interest in voting for Harris, which would be a significantly smaller turnout than the 90% of Black people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. The most pronounced drop comes from Black men, 85% of whom turned out for the US president in the last election and just 70% of whom now say they would vote for Harris.In the hour-long interview, Charlamagne, whose daily morning show The Breakfast Club reaches a predominantly Black audience of 8 million listeners monthly, prodded Harris on topics spanning reparations, criminal justice reform, economic inequality and the fearmongering of the Trump campaign. Harris homed in on her consistent talking points about the necessity of voter participation, a proposed influx of capital for the middle class and misinformation, responses that felt stale and limited. But at other times, her replies landed with impact: when asked about issues specific to Black people that she would prioritize, Harris stressed initiatives around Black maternal mortality and the child tax credit as long neglected needs.In a few cases, Harris’s answers felt like fitting a square peg into a round hole. When asked by a caller how she intends to address the homelessness crisis in the US when the current administration seems to overemphasize foreign interests such as the Israel-Gaza war, the Democratic nominee deflected, punting back to her well-tread lines on home ownership and small business loans.The full exchange, which aired on iHeartRadio’s podcast platform and was simulcast on CNN, both reflected Harris’s best assets and underscored her biggest flaws as a candidate. She remains unflappable on her key points – including the idea that Trump is an existential threat to democracy and Black advancement – and she’s deft at articulating the possibilities and limitations of the government.But her inability to veer away from her entrenched positions or to adequately explain how they could substantively apply to the poor and working class, where Black communities are disproportionately represented, leaves much to be desired. If Harris’s aim is to squash the nagging perspective that she will be unable to meet the needs of Black America, then she still has a gap to fill. Her insistence that “we can do it all” is undercut by the reality that a large part of the Black working class is struggling with unemployment, homelessness, and other critical issues that prevent successful class migration.Yesterday, Harris’s campaign released the Opportunity Agenda for Black Men, a five-point platform focused on Black entrepreneurship, mentorship, marijuana legislation, and cryptocurrency. The platform came on the heels of a contentious lecture from Barack Obama to Black men in Pittsburgh, where the former president alleged that they “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that”.Whether misogyny is a factor in Harris’s current polling numbers or it isn’t, the emphasis on Black men feels overstated. The Black population accounts for barely 13% of the country, with high distribution in metropolitan areas that skew predominantly Democratic, while white and non-Black populations have voted for Trump at significantly higher rates.Despite this disconnect, the Harris campaign has responded with an aggressive media blitz of interviews and campaign stops directly targeted at Black communities. As a result many Black voters are ultimately left with the idea of voting as a means of harm reduction and not one of enthusiasm. For all of Harris’s insistence that the Trump campaign thrives on driving fear, the most animating influence on her campaign’s push to get Black voters to the polls seems to be fear as well. More