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      Walz’s Pennsylvania Campaign Swing Underscores Challenges in the Battleground

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      Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Thursday capped two days of crisscrossing Pennsylvania, talking up Vice President Kamala Harris’s experience, taking shots at former President Donald J. Trump and making his now familiar pleas to voters that they fight for freedom with optimism.“Look, it would be easier if we didn’t have to do this. It would be easier if these guys wouldn’t undermine our system, if they wouldn’t lie about elections, if they wouldn’t put women’s health at risk. But they are, so it’s a privilege for us to do the fight,” he said in Erie, Pa., where he stumped from a stage at the edge of Presque Isle Bay before hundreds of cheering supporters waving “Coach” and “Kamala” signs.The appearance was one of several events that Mr. Walz used to blitz the local media airwaves and fire up Democratic volunteers with the Midwestern dad charm that his party is banking on to help draw white working-class voters. Mr. Walz, and his daughter, Hope, hit several cities in counties that went for Mr. Trump in 2016 — stung by fading American manufacturing and a difficult economy.The shooting this week at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., added urgency to his message at the Erie rally and at local Democratic offices, where he stressed it was in voters’ power to elect leaders willing to pass gun-safety laws, tackle climate change and ensure freedom in health decisions.“I say it as a gun owner; I say it as a veteran; I say it as a hunter: none of the things we’re proposing infringes on your Second Amendment right. But what does infringe upon this is our children going to school and being killed,” he said at a Harris-Walz field office in Erie. “It is unacceptable, and it doesn’t have to be this way. So we end that with our votes. We end it with a vision of a better America.”Onstage later, he recalled sitting with the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut when he was still a member of Congress and a cardholder of the National Rifle Association. “I think about it — today, my son, this week, started his senior year of high school,” Mr. Walz said. “And it’s bittersweet for me because those killed at Sandy Hook would have been entering their senior year, too.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cómo el TLCAN arruinó la política de EE. UU.

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      [Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]En mayo del año pasado, Marcus Carli, director de la fábrica Master Lock de Milwaukee, Wisconsin, convocó por sorpresa una reunión con la junta directiva del sindicato local 469 de United Auto Workers (UAW, por su sigla en inglés). Varios directivos del sindicato, que representa a los trabajadores de la planta, se reunieron con Carli y un ejecutivo de la empresa matriz de Master Lock en una pequeña sala de conferencias. Carli llevó a un guardia de seguridad. “Está aquí para protegerme”, les dijo Carli a los representantes sindicales. Cuando el guardia se sentó, Yolanda Nathan, la nueva presidenta del sindicato, se fijó en su pistola. “En ese momento pensé: ‘Ah, vamos a perder nuestro trabajo’”, dice. De inmediato, Carli confirmó sus peores temores. “La planta va a cerrar”, anunció. “Me dejó sin aliento”, dijo Nathan. “Nos quitó el aliento a todos”.Media hora más tarde, los trabajadores del primer turno de la planta fueron convocados a una reunión en la antigua cafetería. Una hilera de mesas separaba a los funcionarios de los trabajadores. “La planta va a cerrar”, repitió Carli. Se negó a aceptar preguntas. “Solo nos lanzaron la bomba”, dijo Jeremiah Hayes, quien trabajaba en la planta de tratamiento de aguas residuales de la empresa. Sobre todo, le molestó la barrera improvisada: “Era insultante. Nos sentíamos como animales”.Mike Bink, que empezó a trabajar en Master Lock en 1979, estaba desolado pero no sorprendido. Meses antes, un compañero cuyo trabajo consistía en fabricar placas de acero que se introducían en una máquina para fabricar un cuerpo de cerradura le dijo a Bink que ahora las placas se enviaban a la planta de Master Lock en Nogales, México. Esa fábrica se construyó en la década de 1990, no mucho después de que el presidente Bill Clinton promulgara el Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte, y la empresa eliminó más de 1000 de los casi 1300 puestos sindicales de Milwaukee. “La gente salió corriendo por la puerta”, dice Bink, que entonces era presidente del Local 469. “Pensaban que la planta estaba acabada”. Bink aguantó, pero el TLCAN cambió de manera radical el equilibrio de poder entre Master Lock y sus trabajadores. “Un supervisor de la planta decía cosas como: ‘Pónganse a trabajar o la empresa cerrará todos los puestos’”, recuerda Bink. “Tras la reducción de plantilla, el sindicato perdió su influencia”.En marzo, el cierre de las instalaciones donde se fabricaron cerraduras emblemáticas durante generaciones, representó la etapa final de la larga decadencia de Milwaukee como potencia industrial, parte de un fenómeno mayor, impulsado por el TLCAN, que se ha producido en todo el país, especialmente en los estados del Cinturón del Óxido. El TLCAN eliminó los aranceles sobre el comercio entre los signatarios del tratado —Canadá, México y Estados Unidos— y permitió la libre circulación de capitales e inversiones extranjeras. Marcó el comienzo de una era de acuerdos de libre comercio que llevaron productos baratos a los consumidores y generaron una gran riqueza para los inversionistas y el sector financiero, pero también aumentó la desigualdad de ingresos, debilitó a los sindicatos y aceleró el vaciamiento de la base industrial de Estados Unidos.Mike Bink, expresidente de Local 469, que representaba a los trabajadores sindicales de Master Lock, trabajó en la planta durante 44 años. Lyndon French para The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Assessing JD Vance’s Appeals to the Middle Class on the Campaign Trail

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      The Republican vice-presidential nominee has assailed Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies and positions with inaccurate claims.JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who rose to fame detailing his Appalachian roots in a best-selling memoir, has made appeals to working-class and middle-class voters a core tenet of his campaign messaging.In rallies and interviews, Mr. Vance has sought to portray the Republican ticket as a champion of everyday people, first-time home buyers and autoworkers by misleadingly describing Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies and positions on housing, trade and manufacturing.Here’s a fact check of some of his claims.What Was Said“Kamala Harris let in 20 million illegal aliens to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”— in a local news interview in AugustThis is exaggerated. Economists and real estate experts say that while migration, including illegal immigration, has contributed to population growth and thus demand for housing, it is not a main driver of the country’s housing affordability crisis. A lack of supply is the primary culprit, they said.Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at the online real estate brokerage Redfin, said Mr. Vance’s claim “ignores the root causes of the housing shortage, which is that we just stopped building homes, especially in places where people want to live the most, and don’t really need to talk about immigration to talk about that problem.”After the Great Recession, the number of new homes built annually plummeted and never really recovered in the two decades that followed. As a result, researchers and real estate firms now estimate a nationwide shortage of 1.5 million to seven million housing units.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Miss Teen USA Contestant Rebukes Vance for Using Her Flub to Attack Harris

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      Caite Upton wrote on social media that “online bullying needs to stop,” after JD Vance posted a clip of her mangled answer from the 2007 Miss Teen USA pageant to mock Kamala Harris.Senator JD Vance of Ohio, who since becoming former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate in July has been criticized on several occasions for comments demeaning women, found himself again embroiled in controversy this week when he used a viral clip of a beauty pageant contestant’s meltdown to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.On Thursday, Mr. Vance shared a video clip from the 2007 Miss Teen USA competition in which Caite Upton, who was representing South Carolina, gave a mangled answer to a question about why many Americans could not locate the United States on a map.“BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview,” Mr. Vance wrote on X.That evening, CNN was set to broadcast the first major interview with Ms. Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee. Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. quickly reposted Mr. Vance’s post, writing: “This is total Fake News from JD. We all know that Kamala isn’t that articulate.”In a social media post on Friday, Ms. Upton objected to Mr. Vance’s dredging up the 17-year-old clip of her pageant struggles, remarks that were reported by The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., and later deleted, after she appeared to have deactivated her account on X.“Regardless of political beliefs, one thing I do know is that social media and online bullying needs to stop,” she wrote, according to the newspaper.A representative for Ms. Upton, who competed in the pageant under the name Lauren Caitlin Upton, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.In 2015, Ms. Upton told New York magazine that the embarrassment she felt over the viral video had led to depression and thoughts of suicide.When Mr. Vance was asked whether he had been aware of Ms. Upton’s mental health challenges during an appearance on CNN on Friday, he said that he had not at the time he posted the clip.“My heart goes out to her, and I hope that she’s doing well,” he said.When asked whether he wanted to apologize, Mr. Vance said that he did not have regrets.“Politics has gotten way too lame,” he said, adding, “I’m not going to apologize for posting a joke, but I wish the best for Caitlin.” More

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      Criticizing Trump, Harris Says Arlington Is ‘Not a Place for Politics’

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      Donald J. Trump’s campaign filmed him at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, which led to a confrontation between one of his political aides and a cemetery official. Vice President Kamala Harris excoriated former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday for his visit on Monday to Arlington National Cemetery, where his campaign’s filming of him in a heavily restricted area caused a confrontation between one of his political aides and a cemetery official. In her first public comments on the situation, Ms. Harris said that Mr. Trump had desecrated a solemn place that should be free of politics when he appeared there for a wreath-laying ceremony for 13 service members who were killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan during the withdrawal of U.S. troops three years ago. “Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt,” Ms. Harris wrote on X. Ms. Harris wrote that she had visited Arlington National Cemetery several times as vice president and that she would never attempt to use that setting for activities related to the campaign. “It’s not a place for politics,” she wrote. Mr. Trump, in recent days, has hit back hard at critics of his visit to the cemetery, saying that families of some of the fallen service members had asked him to take photos with them there. Soldiers at the Tomb of the Unknowns during former President Donald J. Trump’s visit, on Monday in Arlington, Va.Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepresentatives for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday, but his allies rushed to his defense, including his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio.“President Trump was there at the invitation of families whose loved ones died because of your incompetence,” Mr. Vance wrote on X, responding directly to Ms. Harris. “Why don’t you get off social media and go launch an investigation into their unnecessary deaths?”The Trump campaign has repeatedly criticized the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in 2021 during the Biden-Harris administration, which the former president has sought to cast as weak and dysfunctional. President Biden made the final decision to end America’s nearly 20-year military occupation in Afghanistan. But it was Mr. Trump who clinched a deal with the Afghan Taliban, setting a timeline for the U.S. exit.At a campaign event on Thursday in Potterville, Mich., Mr. Trump said that he was honored to take photos with the family members of some of the fallen service members at the cemetery and that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris had “killed their children” with their “incompetence.” More

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      Trump’s Attacks on Harris Invoke Ancient Roman Misogyny

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      Anastasia KraynyukThe meddler, the schemer, the veiled power behind the throne, the poisoner, the witch. The image of sinister female power hiding in the dark permeates our cultural consciousness. It is a trope that stretches back to the ancient world, when women were excluded from politics and men sought ways to prove that their participation would be unnatural and dangerous. As ancient texts became part of the Western canon, such suspicion became ingrained into our patterns of thought, surviving long after the conditions that created them.About an hour after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in July, a Trump-aligned super PAC released an attack ad. “Kamala was in on it,” a narrator says. She “knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it.” Mr. Trump picked up the theme soon after. Ms. Harris had, he argued, long concealed Mr. Biden’s incapacity, to ensure her own nomination. As focus on the handover itself fades, this idea has come to underpin one of the Trump campaign’s key lines of attack: Ms. Harris has been the power behind the throne all along, and Mr. Biden simply a front. In an early August interview, JD Vance argued that Ms. Harris must have “been the one calling the shots” all along. Mr. Trump has insisted that “Day 1 for Kamala was three and a half years ago.”The accusation that Ms. Harris covered up the state of Mr. Biden’s health is not dependent on her gender. It’s doubtless that Mr. Trump would have deployed the same argument, in one form or another, against a male opponent. But leveled against Ms. Harris, it hits upon the ancient seam of rhetoric that associates women with the clandestine exercise of power, giving it a degree of consequence it would never have carried against a man.The Romans loved a conspiracy theory, and rumors of women-led cover-ups pepper their history. This motif took hold most robustly in the peculiar conditions of the early Roman Empire, as the male aristocrats who’d once ruled the Roman Republic became concerned that women were co-opting power that was rightfully male. It was said that after Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, died, his wife, Livia, continued to issue positive news about his health until she had secured the succession of her son Tiberius. A century later, people whispered that Pompeia Plotina, wife of the emperor Trajan, had concealed her husband’s death for some days, signing his letters to the Senate and forcing through the adoption of her favorite, Hadrian, as his successor.When they talk about women in politics, Roman historians paint us a world of plots designed to circumvent the will of the emperor and the Roman people — and the Trump campaign suggests something similar in its vision of Ms. Harris’s “undemocratic” nomination. It is hard to find a woman of the imperial family who is not accused of using poison — the most covert means of assassination — in pursuit of her goals, and women’s intrigues were often set under cover of night. Messalina, for example, supposedly used a series of fake nightmares to dupe her husband, Claudius, into executing one of her enemies.The rhetoric had elements of truth: The public sphere was all but exclusively accessible to men, and the strongest weapon available to women was influence exerted privately on male rulers. But it was exaggerated beyond all historical reality. The women of the imperial family were well-educated veterans of the political game, with huge public profiles. Petitioners frequently addressed missives to empresses, and some women were granted semiofficial titles that, like the vice presidency, carried the potential for (but no guarantee of) great power. Secrecy was stressed not because it reflected the truth, but because it made a point: Female power was destabilizing and the women who held it were not to be trusted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republicans Are Right: One Party is ‘Anti-Family and Anti-Kid’

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      In attacking Democrats and Kamala Harris, Republicans have been making a legitimate point: One of our major political parties has worked to undermine America’s families.The problem? While neither party has done enough to support families and children, the one that is failing most egregiously is — not surprisingly — the one led by the thrice-married tycoon who tangled with a porn star, boasted about grabbing women by the genitals and was found by a jury to have committed sexual assault.You’d think that would make it awkward for the Republican Party to preach family values. But with the same chutzpah with which Donald Trump reportedly marched into a dressing room where teenage girls were half-naked, the G.O.P. claims that it’s the Democrats who betray family values.“The rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” JD Vance said in 2021. Pressed on those remarks last month, he went further in a conversation with Megyn Kelly, saying that Democrats “have become anti-family and anti-kid.”This is gibberish. Children are more likely to be poor, to die young and to drop out of high school in red states than in blue states. The states with the highest divorce rates are mostly Republican, and with some exceptions like Utah, it’s in red states that babies are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers (partly because of lack of access to reliable contraception).One of President Biden’s greatest achievements was to cut the child poverty rate by almost half, largely with the refundable child tax credit. Then Republicans killed the program, sending child poverty soaring again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance’s ‘Never Trump Guy’ Comment Becomes a Viral TikTok Remix

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      A mash-up of years-old comments by the Ohio senator with a hip-hop track is finding a broad audience. It’s part of a new genre of videos on the app.One of the hottest tracks on TikTok this summer is, unexpectedly, a 22-second Petey Pablo hip-hop beat remixed with a years-old audio clip of JD Vance — now former President Donald J. Trump’s vice-presidential pick — declaring, before his loyalties changed, that he was “a never Trump guy.”The song has been used in more than 8,500 TikTok videos since two independent music producers created it in July. Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris have seized on it, wagging their fingers and swinging their arms to it, some hoping to create its official dance. It was also reposted by @KamalaHQ, the campaign’s official TikTok account. Videos with the sound have racked up more than 40 million views overall, according to Zelf, a social video analytics company focused on TikTok.It’s a marquee example of a new genre of political memes finding an audience on the short-form video app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.Politically minded Americans are increasingly embracing TikTok to make videos and trends out of snippets of songs and speeches in this election cycle. The app — a pandemic-fueled curiosity during the last presidential election — has since exploded its user base to 170 million Americans. About half of users under 30 say they use TikTok to help them keep up with politics and political issues, according to new data from the Pew Research Center.“People are still doing dances to random songs, but now people are doing dances to remixes of rap with Kamala Harris speeches over it,” said Emma Mont, a digital creator and administrator of @OrganizerMemes, a liberal meme account.

      @casadimusic Replying to @casadimusic JD Vance is a Never Trump Guy. Kamala Harris for President #nevertrumpguy #kamalaharris #Democrat #kamalahq ♬ Never Trump Guy JD Vance House of Evo Remix – CasaDi We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More