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      Virginia senator Tim Kaine condemns Biden’s arms transfer to Israel

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      Virginia senator Tim Kaine has added his voice to a rising chorus within the Democratic party questioning the Biden administration’s legislatively unconstrained transfer of US munitions to Israel.In a news release on Saturday, the Democratic senator – a member of the Senate armed services committee – said weapons transfers must come under congressional oversight.“Just as Congress has a crucial role to play in all matters of war and peace, Congress should have full visibility over the weapons we transfer to any other nation. Unnecessarily bypassing Congress means keeping the American people in the dark,” Kaine wrote.“We need a public explanation of the rationale behind this decision – the second such decision this month,” he added.On Friday, the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency said the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, had approved the sale of 155mm projectiles and related equipment valued at $147.5m, an increase from an earlier approved order for tens of thousands of rounds of the heavy artillery munitions.It said that Blinken had “determined and provided detailed justification to Congress that an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale to the Government of Israel” and that the sale was “in the national security interests of the United States” and thereby exempt from congressional review under arms-export control laws.“The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to US national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self defense capability,” the statement added.Kaine said in his statement that he “strongly condemned” Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israeli civilians, which killed about 1,200 people, and had been vocal about the need to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.At least 21,672 people have been killed in Gaza and 56,165 wounded since the war began, according to the most recent numbers from the Gaza health ministry.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKaine’s statement added to administration concerns that its policy of military transfers to Israel, including a $14.3bn package announced in November that Biden called “an unprecedented support package for Israel’s defense”, is out of step with US domestic and international public opinion.On Friday, South Africa called on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to find that Israel’s war in Gaza is a violation of the Genocide Convention of 1948. The filing accused Israel of engaging “in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza”.Separately, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said that soldiers with the IDF fired on a UN aid convoy returning from a delivery in northern Gaza, an incident the UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths condemned as “unlawful”. More

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      Judge temporarily bars removal of Confederate memorial in Virginia

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      A Confederate memorial was blocked on Monday from being removed from Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia, with a court order setting back the push to remove symbols that commemorate the Confederacy from military-related facilities.A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary restraining order barring removal of a memorial to Confederate soldiers at the nation’s foremost military cemetery. A group called Defend Arlington, affiliated with a group called Save Southern Heritage Florida, filed a lawsuit Sunday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, seeking the restraining order. A hearing has been scheduled for Wednesday.The decision also follows a recent demand from more than 40 Republican congressmen that the Pentagon suspend efforts to dismantle and remove the monument from Arlington cemetery.Work to remove the memorial had begun Monday before the restraining order was issued, and the memorial remains in place on cemetery grounds.A cemetery spokesperson said Monday that Arlington is complying with the restraining order, but referred all other questions to the US justice department.Safety fencing has been installed around the memorial, and officials had expected to complete the removal by this upcoming Friday 22 December, the Arlington National Cemetery had previously said in an email.Virginia’s governor, Glenn Youngkin, had previously disagreed with the removal decision.In 2022, an independent commission recommended that the memorial be taken down as part of its final report to Congress on renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.The statue, unveiled in 1914, features a bronze woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32ft pedestal, and was designed to represent the American south. According to Arlington, the woman holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a biblical inscription at her feet that says: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”The installation includes a Black woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer as well as an enslaved man following his owner to war.In a recent letter to the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, more than 40 House Republicans had said the commission overstepped its authority when it recommended that the monument be removed. The congressmen contended that the monument “does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy; the memorial commemorates reconciliation and national unity.“The Department of Defense must respect Congress’s clear legislative intentions regarding the naming commission’s legislative authority,” the letter said.Earlier this year, Fort Bragg shed its Confederate name to become Fort Liberty, part of the broad Department of Defense initiative, motivated by the 2020 George Floyd protests, to rename military installations that had been named after Confederate soldiers.The Black Lives Matter demonstrations that erupted nationwide after Floyd’s killing by a white police officer, coupled with ongoing efforts to remove Confederate monuments, turned the spotlight on the army installations. The naming commission created by Congress visited the bases and met with members of the surrounding communities for input.
      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      ‘People who are just like me will not be able to vote. That’s nuts’: Virginia to see first Black speaker of the house

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      Five years ago, while working on a high-profile case, the trial lawyer Don L Scott Jr received a call from a reporter. “Hey, is it true that you had gone to prison?” Scott remembers them asking. “I said, ‘It is, and if you want the entire story, before you print it, I hope that you will sit down and talk to me.’”On 10 January 2024, Scott will be sworn in as Virginia’s first Black speaker of the house in the commonwealth’s 400-year-plus history. His rise to the position started in 2018, when that reporter called him. Scott said that although he hadn’t hidden his past before, “it’s not something you put on your résumé either”. That call was a pivotal moment for him, empowering him to share his story widely, and helping him realize that he had the potential to be a politician.After the story was published in the Virginian-Pilot, everyone knew his past, and Scott said he was then able to discuss it more freely, even as an attorney. He thinks the impetus behind the piece might have come from a politician who was concerned Scott would run against him, or from the opposing attorneys on the case, but at this point it doesn’t matter.“They were thinking they were going to drop it on me to hurt me, but what they really did was free me up,” he said. “I got such positive feedback from my community and other folks that I knew that I said, ‘Heck, I’m free now. If I decide I want to run, I can run.’”Eventually, Scott, who’s 58, did run for election to the Virginia house of delegates – and won. Then he won again and again. In his new role as speaker of the house, Scott plans to help lead Virginia Democrats in following through on their campaign promises: namely, codifying Roe v Wade, banning assault weapons and increasing teacher pay.‘There are people who are just like me’On 30 July 1619, Virginia’s house of burgesses, the colonial predecessor to the commonwealth’s current general assembly, met for the first time. About one month later, enslaved Africans were brought to the Virginia colony, marking what is considered to be the start of chattel slavery in the colonial US. In several interviews since his election as speaker, Scott has referenced the historic importance of his nomination: “I know I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors who built that capitol.”Scott was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in a small town by a single mother who hid the family’s poverty so well that Scott didn’t realize how much she struggled until he was an adult. He grew up with five siblings, including his elder sister, Jeta Lenoir, who taught him to read.After his graduation from Texas A&M University, Scott enlisted in the US navy and served a few years before he was honorably discharged. He went on to obtain a law degree from Louisiana State University Law School, but in 1994, shortly after graduating, Scott was arrested on federal drug charges. He served seven years in prison. (Scott has said previously that he made a “bad decision”, but denies having ever handled any drugs.)In Virginia, citizens’ voting rights are not immediately restored after their release from prison – that decision depends on the governor. For almost a decade after rejoining society, Scott was unable to vote. Once his rights were restored in 2013, he was able to finally sit for the bar exam and become a trial lawyer.During his time as a partner at the Breit Biniazan law firm, Scott joined various civic organizations, including his state’s chapter of the NAACP. He started paying closer attention to the difference between what people around him were experiencing and what he saw and heard in courtrooms as a lawyer. As a result, his first campaign for the house of delegates in 2019 focused on criminal justice reform and alleviating poverty.“I came in saying that there are some things that are wrong, that are unfair in our criminal justice system and need to be fixed,” Scott said. “I think people have a misconception about Black communities that are sometimes having tough times and issues with crime. They don’t want to talk about poverty. They don’t want to talk about all the causes of crime. They don’t want to talk about mental health. They just want to say ‘crime’ and look at the outcome.”Scott’s lived experiences continue to inform how he sees the world. He intimately knows what it means to serve time and still be penalized after leaving prison. “I had a nonviolent drug offense that I was sentenced to 10 years [in prison] for,” he said. “There are people who are just like me who are not voting and can’t vote and are smarter than I am. [They] can’t vote because they’re waiting on somebody like Governor [Glenn] Youngkin to restore their rights. I will be speaker with a felony, while other people who are just like me … will not be able to vote. That’s nuts.”As speaker, Scott plans to help mitigate voter disenfranchisement by taking away the governor’s right to determine whether formerly incarcerated people can vote again. He wants to change the state’s constitution so that people have an automatic restoration of rights after completing their sentences. Earlier this year, in a separate voter-rights issue, about 3,000 Virginians were purged from voter rolls “in error”, according to Youngkin’s administration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Personally, this is important to me, that we take the restoration of rights away from the governor,” Scott said. Of the purged voters, he continued: Youngkin “abused that privilege that he has, that privilege that the people have bestowed on him. He used it arbitrarily and capriciously to deny the franchise – that sacred franchise – from people that he deemed unworthy to vote.”‘You have to deliver’Scott understands the historic nature of his impending leadership position. He also knows that his community and Virginians at large are expecting more than him to just be a face in power.Recently, Scott said, he attended a breakfast meeting with a former governor who was energized by his nomination, but who told him that it was time for the real work to begin. “He said, ‘Now you have to go and be great. You have to be competent. You have to deliver.’ And that’s what our community is looking for. They’re not looking for symbolic wins any more,” Scott recalled. “I’m the first Black speaker, but I’m also a speaker who happens to be Black.”Democrats gained control of Virginia’s state legislature this year, as voters opposed Youngkin’s attempt to pass a strict abortion ban. In addition to codifying Roe v Wade, many of the Democrats who ran and won promised to raise the minimum wage, to ban assault weapons, to pass a responsible gun act and to raise teacher pay.“These are the promises that we made … These are not extreme ideas. I think everybody can agree that we need to do these things, and I think we will,” Scott said.But for the moment, he is taking time to soak it all in.“I’m excited,” he said. “It’s the dream of a lifetime. I feel embarrassed of how much I’ve been blessed. I went to jail in ’94; 2004 is 30 years and I’ll be standing taking my oath. That’s a powerful testament to the power of faith, and the power of resilience.” More

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      He’s correctly predicting the US’s most critical elections. He’s still in college

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      In the days after Democrats won control of Virginia’s state legislature, Charles “Chaz” Nuttycombe was focused on the results in house of delegates districts 41 and 82, both of which you’ve probably never heard of.Neither of the competitive races would determine which party controlled the Virginia legislature, but it was one of a handful where votes were still being counted and the results too close to call. In the lead-up to election day, Nuttycombe, a 24-year-old senior at Virginia Tech, had predicted that the Republican candidates would win both. But his final forecast in Virginia gave Democrats a 61% chance of winning control of the house of delegates and a 71% chance of holding control in the state senate.When he spoke with the Guardian the day after the election, he had already correctly predicted 100% of the results in every other Virginia state legislative race – 98 other house of delegates seats and 40 in the state senate. Eventually, both races were called for Nuttycombe, giving him a perfect forecast.It was an astonishing feat that underscored the niche Nuttycombe has carved out predicting races at the state legislative level.Nuttycombe runs the forecasting site cnalysis.com, and these little-known legislative races are his expertise. While the science of forecasting presidential, gubernatorial, congressional and senatorial races has exploded in recent years, Nuttycombe is one of the only forecasters focused on the 7,383 state legislative districts across the country.His focus underscores the rising awareness of the importance of state legislatures in US politics. Long overlooked by parties and reporters, there has been a much greater understanding of the consequential power state legislatures have to set policies on issues like abortion, gun rights, education and voting. Just a handful of races in a single chamber can determine which party has control.“Your state legislature is going to affect your day-to-day life a lot more than Congress is,” Nuttycombe said. “State legislative elections are a million times more important than congressional elections, but I’m obviously biased on that front.”The effort can be much more difficult than forecasting a congressional race. Many of the candidates who run for the seats have no national profile. Polling, if it exists at all, is sparse. The site’s GIS team also breaks down data to figure out how state legislative districts voted in prior elections. Tracking down data from states can be a nightmare, since every state formats their information differently and some charge for it (the site also relies on precinct-level election data collected by the non-profit Voting and Election Science Team at the University of Florida).“It’s a monster endeavor to cover legislative races in multiple states, so most analysts don’t even attempt it,” said Dave Wasserman, a well-respected forecaster and election analyst at the Cook Political Report. “Big credit to Chaz Nuttycombe for having his finger on the pulse of every race in Virginia on Tuesday. He’s a rising star in our field.”Nuttycombe’s interest in state legislatures started in 2017, when he was starting his senior year in high school. He saw both professionals and amateurs posting their predictions on Twitter. He began offering his own, just for fun, and began doing some volunteer work with Decision Desk HQ, an online election forecasting website.He immediately caught the attention of J Miles Coleman, who was working for the site and is now a forecaster for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia. Going into the election that year, Republicans held a 66-34 advantage in the house of delegates, and the conventional wisdom was that Democrats could pick up 10 or so seats on a good night. Nuttycombe was much more bullish on their prospects and thought they had a chance to get a majority, and he was right. Republicans came away from the election with a 51-49 majority in the legislature, only winning the 51st seat after a tied race was determined by picking the winner from a hat.“He must have been like 17 or 18. I tell you, he was into every race, he knew all the candidates. And just had this kind of hustle to him that was hard to find,” Coleman said. “Basically Chaz will spend his weekend going through campaign finance reports for legislative races. I don’t know anyone else who does that to that extent.”Nuttycombe decided to turn his predictions into a full-blown website in 2019. He reached out to other people who were analyzing nitty-gritty election data to forecast results in an online community called #electiontwitter.“There are some of us sickos who stay up all night talking about poll numbers or precincts. I think that’s probably been good for him too,” Coleman said.In 2021, at a chance hangout watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, he met Aidan Howard, then a rising junior studying geographic systems at Virginia Tech. Afterwards, Nuttycombe asked him if he would be interested in joining the site and working on political maps though Howard had no political experience. He sent Nuttycombe samples of his work – fire prevention and flood maps – and joined the site.Some of the people on the cnalysis team – there are nine in total – have never met in person. They coordinate over Twitter, Slack and Discord. Nuttycombe relies on donations, Substack subscriptions, a small amount of ad revenue and some work for clients to pay a few a modest hourly wage (he declined to share the hourly rate, but said it was above the minimum wage anywhere in the country).Another member of the cnalysis team – someone who goes by the X handle @cinyc9 – helped Nuttycombe understand how to break down electoral data to the most granular level possible, and then reallocate it to current precinct boundaries.“Work-wise it’s cool that I assisted in it. But to me its a bigger win on a personal level because Charles is a good friend and knowing that I got to help him do something that’s been his dream for years … it means a lot to me knowing that I helped my friend achieve something he really wanted to achieve,” said Howard, who is now the site’s GIS technician.One of the people Nuttycombe got in touch with was Jack Kersting, then a college student at the University of Alabama, who had been making his own maps focused on congressional, presidential and Senate maps.Kersting, 22, is now the site’s chief oddsmaker, and builds the model that forecasts the chances of legislative control in each chamber. This year he built a live model for the forecast that ingested results from Virginia’s department of elections and provided real-time updates on election odds. He spent 50 to 60 hours on it over the last month.“This was the first thing I’ve ever done like this. It was very satisfying in the end,” said Kersting, who is now getting a masters in finance.Nuttycombe bases his predictions on a combination of previous election results in a district, campaign finance reports and internal campaign and party data he gets “through the grapevine”. He uses that information to assign each race a rating – toss-up, tilt, lean, likely, very likely and solid. The team at cnalysis feeds that information into a model that does 35,000 simulated election outcomes to predict a chamber’s outcome.There have been learning moments since he began forecasting. In 2018, he overestimated Democrats in rural areas and underestimated them in the suburbs, he wrote in a blogpost on Tuesday titled “The 2023 Virginia election was easy to predict.” In 2020, he said he paid too much attention to campaign finance data and polling.In 2022, Nuttycombe and cnalysis made forecasts in 83 of the 88 chambers. He made predictions in 3,380 races and was wrong in just 190 of them, a nearly 95% accuracy rate, according to his tally. His error rate, he said, was in part because he didn’t give his team enough time to analyze election data for new state legislative districts. He keeps a spreadsheet tracking the biggest missed prediction with an explanation of why the forecast was off.Nuttycombe said he usually works on the site in the evenings, after classes, the gym and dinner, and balances it with a full course load (he’s taking 18 credits both this semester and next as he finishes his degree in political science).The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which focuses on state legislative races, is aware of Nuttycombe and was following his work this year. The group relies on its own in-house data for forecasts, but they were watching Nuttycombe’s as well and could see it was consistent with internal projections.“It’s hard to not take him seriously when what we were tracking internally was very similar to what he was tracking with his analysis,” said Abhi Rahman, a DLCC spokesman. “He’s definitely a very talented forecaster.”Nuttycombe hasn’t been shy about his success, but acknowledges that he’s learned a lot since he began forecasting.“There will be races in even-numbered years where I’m dead wrong. Maybe upwards of 10 races where I’m dead wrong. It’s just a resource thing. I maybe missed a scandal or some sort of development. Or a candidate does really, really well,” Nuttycombe said.He’s also learned how to factor things into his forecast that can be difficult to quantify. In Virginia, for example, a Democrat in a competitive race this year had a scandal involving allegations she and her husband livestreamed sex acts. After the Washington Post broke the story on 11 September, Nuttycombe moved the state from a “toss up” to “tilt R”. In October, he moved the seat even more safely in the Republican column. The Republican candidate wound up winning by two points.Nuttycombe plans to work on the site full-time after he graduates in the spring and is already planning out ways to grow his effort. While most of the country will be focused on the high-stakes presidential race next year, there will be thousands of state legislative races to analyze and predict.“I’ll do this until they put dirt over me,” he said. More

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      Abigail Spanberger Announces 2024 Run for Virginia Governor

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      The centrist Democrat helped deliver her party the House majority in 2018, and her decision to seek higher office could make it more difficult for Democrats to reclaim control in 2024.Representative Abigail Spanberger, a prominent Virginia Democrat who was repeatedly able to win in a conservative-leaning district, announced on Monday that she would run for governor in 2024, leaving open a competitive seat that could be crucial to her party’s efforts to win back control of the House next year.Ms. Spanberger, 44, is seen as among the strongest Democratic contenders to succeed Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who is term-limited. Her decision not to seek re-election to Congress leaves House Democrats scrambling to hold a seat that is regularly in play for both parties.“Virginia is where I grew up, where I am raising my own family and where I intend to build a stronger future for the next generation of Virginians,” Ms. Spanberger said in a statement.Ms. Spanberger is the first candidate to announce a run for Virginia governor. Her early announcement is intended to allow a successor to build a campaign for the 2024 House race, which Democrats believe would provide a more favorable electorate than a special election.But House Republicans said their odds of claiming the seat improved substantially with Ms. Spanberger’s planned exit, pointing to it as the latest example of a Democrat in a competitive seat choosing to run for higher office rather than remain in the House.Other examples include Representatives Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Katie Porter of California, both of whom are pursuing Senate seats.“Swing district House Democrats are scrambling for the exits and creating @NRCC pickup opportunities from coast to coast,” Jack Pandol, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We are in prime position to pick up this seat.”Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer, won election in 2018 as part of a wave of centrist women — many of them with national security experience — who said they were running to counter President Donald J. Trump and whose victories propelled Democrats to the House majority. She developed a reputation in Congress as a Democrat willing to buck her party, refusing to vote for Representative Nancy Pelosi of California to be speaker and pushing to bar members of Congress from trading stocks.Even so, Ms. Spanberger was recently elected as a member of Democratic leadership to represent the interests of members from battleground districts.Ms. Spanberger currently holds the central and Northern Virginia seat formerly occupied by Representative Eric Cantor, a Republican and former House majority leader. He was defeated in a primary in 2014 by a Tea Party-aligned Republican, Dave Brat, who then lost to Ms. Spanberger in 2018.She won two close re-election campaigns, though the seat was redrawn ahead of the 2022 race, making it slightly more favorable to Democrats. More

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      Elections 2023: Republicans lose big on issue of abortion – podcast

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      Tuesday was a big night for the Democrats, with big wins in some unexpected places: Ohio, Virginia and Kentucky. Abortion rights advocates were celebrating, their hopes lifted ahead of next year’s presidential election, despite some gloomy polls for Joe Biden. Republicans, meanwhile, like the presidential candidates who took to the debate stage on Wednesday, are reeling.
      So what do the results mean for 2024? Should Republicans rethink their message on abortion? And why is it that despite Donald Trump spending the week in court on trial for fraud, it’s Joe Biden who’s suffering in the polls?
      Jonathan Freedland is joined by Tara Setmayer and Simon Rosenberg to discuss it all.

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Democrats Dominated Suburbs on Election Night, a Potential Preview of 2024

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      Republicans had hope after 2022 that the nation’s residential redoubts were coming back to the G.O.P. But aside from New York, the suburbs on Tuesday swung back to the Democrats.From Northern Virginia to Northern Kentucky, the American suburbs rejected Republican candidates on Tuesday, sending a message that leafy residential communities where elections were once won and lost increasingly side with the Democratic Party — especially on abortion rights.Only in the New York suburbs of eastern Long Island did the Republican message on crime and “open borders” seem to resonate. Democrats took a drubbing in Suffolk County, where suburbanites may be recoiling at the migrant crisis plaguing the metropolis to the west.Elsewhere, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Louisville, Ky., and Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio, voters rejected Republican messages on abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. issues and crime, sending a signal that while they may fret over President Biden’s age and capabilities, they may worry more about Republican positions in the era of Donald J. Trump.“Suburban America left the G.O.P. in 2016 when they didn’t like Trump’s behavior,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and message adviser. “They began to come back in 2022 when they rejected Joe Biden’s economic policies, but they will leave again if the conversation is about abortion and social policy.”Abortion was dominant; suburban voters outside Ohio’s biggest cities voted overwhelmingly to establish the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. Kentucky’s incumbent Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, who ran hard on abortion rights and kitchen-table issues like infrastructure spending, won not only Jefferson County, home to Louisville, and Fayette County, home to Lexington. He also beat his Republican challenger, Daniel Cameron, in Kenton and Campbell Counties, once reliably Republican redoubts across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.Two years ago, Glenn Youngkin’s victorious Republican campaign for governor in Virginia had some Democrats worried that their lock on the suburban sprawl outside the nation’s capital wasn’t as tight as they had thought. Those same suburbs on Tuesday made Danica Roem, a Democrat, the first transgender state senator in the South, while helping Democrats seize a majority in the Virginia General Assembly and hold control of the State Senate.“We let the Democrats drive the message and make it all about abortion,” said John Whitbeck, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia who lives in Loudoun County, a Washington exurb. “The Republican Party has to modernize its message on this issue if we’re going to convince Democrats and independents to cross over and vote Republican. The reality is Virginia has some districts that vote blue. In a year where Roe v. Wade is driving intensity, there’s no way for us to win those districts.”In retrospect, Mr. Youngkin’s victory may have been a hangover from the coronavirus pandemic, when suburban parents worried about school closures and responded to his singular focus on education, said Heather Williams, interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to state legislatures.This time, she said, some of the same parents recoiled from Republican efforts to ban books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes from libraries and more generally inject socially conservative views into the school system.“The issue of fundamental freedoms still really resonates,” she said.In the highly contested school board races around Cedar Rapids, Iowa, voters soundly rejected every candidate endorsed by the right-wing group Moms for Liberty, which had been leading efforts to excise L.G.B.T.Q. books from libraries and exert more conservative control over curriculums.In 2021, with the pandemic still hanging over the schools, the group claimed victory in 33 school board seats in the swing Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County, Pa. On Tuesday, Moms for Liberty candidates lost five school board races in central Bucks County.“They just got crushed,” said Jefrey Pollock, a Democratic pollster who worked with candidates in Pennsylvania. “Voters are looking for common-sense middle-of-the-road candidates, and that includes how they’ll view Donald Trump a year from now.”Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and former school board member from Indian River County, Fla., expressed no regret, saying that across the country, about 90 school board candidates endorsed by her group did win, out of 202 total that it backed. The “win rate” of Moms for Liberty did slip, from better than 50 percent in 2022 to 43 percent on Tuesday, she said. But, she said, the group will be back in 2024 with 139 candidates, better training for candidates, more money and more professional political partnerships.“We’re just getting started,” she said.The one Republican bright spot was significant: New York. In an otherwise disappointing midterm election in 2022, Republican victories in the suburbs of the nation’s largest city secured the party its narrow control of the House. Democrats are banking on a comeback to help retake the House.But the signal sent on Tuesday was that where voters are seeing the huge upswell of migrants from the southern border, the Republican message on crime and border security is working. In these areas, voters were not asked to litigate the abortion issue.Ed Romaine easily flipped the Suffolk County executive’s office from Democrat to Republican. A Republican, Kristy Marmorato, won a City Council seat in the Bronx for the first time in more than 50 years.Of course, the threat of an abortion ban did not hang over those races — because reproductive rights are already secure in New York.Reid J. Epstein More

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      White House decries ‘nasty personal smears’ after House Republicans subpoena Biden family – US politics live

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      The Republican-led House oversight committee today sent subpoenas to the president’s son Hunter Biden, his brother James Biden and family associate Rob Walker, prompting a furious response for the White House.The subpoenas, which compel the three men to appear for depositions, come as House Republicans press forward with an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden that centers on unproven allegations that he benefited from corrupt business dealings by his family members.“The House Oversight Committee has followed the money and built a record of evidence revealing how Joe Biden knew, was involved, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes. Now, the House Oversight Committee is going to bring in members of the Biden family and their associates to question them on this record of evidence,” the committee’s chair James Comer said in a statement.In addition to the three subpoenas, Comer requested that five other members of the Biden family and their associates appear for interviews.In a statement, White House spokesman Ian Sams condemned the GOP for dragging the president’s relatives into their long-running investigations:Joe Biden will meet this evening with a groups of Democratic and Republican senators who just returned from a trip to the Middle East, Punchbowl News reports, as his administration navigates the ongoing fallout from Israel’s invasion of Gaza following Hamas’s terrorist attack last month:Biden traveled to Israel shortly after the 7 October terrorist attack, and his secretary of state Antony Blinken in recent days visited the country, including the West Bank, as well as Iraq. However the president’s policy has attracted criticism from some Democrats as well as many Arab American voters, who see Biden as enabling the thousands of civilian deaths reported in Gaza since Israel’s counterattack against Hamas began.It’s a big news day in New York City, where Ivanka Trump just departed the witness stand in the ongoing civil fraud trial against Donald Trump and his family.The former president’s daughter kept her testimony in line with her two brothers, who already testified, while repeatedly saying she did not recall details of correspondences about loans – a plank of the case against the family, which centers on a judge’s finding that the Trump Organization for years inflated the value of its assets to secure better loan terms and other benefits.We have a separate live blog that will tell you all about Ivanka’s time on the witness stand today, and you can read it here:The Republican-led House oversight committee today sent subpoenas to the president’s son Hunter Biden, his brother James Biden and family associate Rob Walker, prompting a furious response for the White House.The subpoenas, which compel the three men to appear for depositions, come as House Republicans press forward with an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden that centers on unproven allegations that he benefited from corrupt business dealings by his family members.“The House Oversight Committee has followed the money and built a record of evidence revealing how Joe Biden knew, was involved, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes. Now, the House Oversight Committee is going to bring in members of the Biden family and their associates to question them on this record of evidence,” the committee’s chair James Comer said in a statement.In addition to the three subpoenas, Comer requested that five other members of the Biden family and their associates appear for interviews.In a statement, White House spokesman Ian Sams condemned the GOP for dragging the president’s relatives into their long-running investigations:Indeed, what to make of yesterday’s off-year election victories by Democrats and their causes, particularly if you are somebody worried about Joe Biden’s poll numbers?Tuesday’s election came just days after the New York Times and Siena College released a survey that found Biden was trailing the Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump in five of the six swing states expected to decide the winner. Democrats’ strong electoral performance yesterday seems to contradict that grim conclusion, but, in an analysis, the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics says the result is actually not as surprising as it appears.“Off-year elections feature smaller electorates and don’t feature presidential candidates at the top of the ballot,” the center writes.All signs point to next year’s race being a close contest between Biden and Trump. Here’s more from the Center for Politics’s piece:
      Last night’s results have given Democrats a shot in the arm and have confounded the recent narrative about Democrats being in deep trouble next year. But it’s also true that these races in many respects differ from the election coming up next year. It may be the case that President Biden is in fact uniquely vulnerable, and that even former President Trump – himself dragged down by plenty of vulnerabilities that likely are not getting the kind of attention now that they will if he is renominated – could beat Biden. It may also be the case that polling a year out from an election is not predictive (and it often is not). Maybe the Democrats do just have an advantage now in smaller turnout, off-year elections as their base has absorbed many higher-turnout, college-educated voters while shedding lower-turnout voters who don’t have a four-year degree. Maybe the presidential year turnout will bring out more Trump voters and give the Republicans a clearer shot. About all we feel comfortable saying is that we should continue to expect the presidential race to be close and competitive – a boring statement, we know, but probably true.
      Kentucky has not supported a Democratic president in more than 25 years, but last night, voters in the Bluegrass State decided to give Democratic governor Andy Beshear a second term.In an interview with CNN, Beshear was asked if his victory in the strongly Republican state offered any lessons for beleaguered Democrats elsewhere. Here’s what he had to say:Speaking at the White House, Kamala Harris told reporters yesterday was a “good night” after voters in Ohio and Virginia handed victories to advocates of reproductive rights:The bigger question that is undoubtedly on her mind – and, of course, on Joe Biden’s – is whether the momentum Democrats have seen at the state-level since Roe v Wade was overturned will remain in a year, when the presidential elections are held.The Council on American-Islamic Relations has denounced the Republican-led House of Representatives’ decision to censure Rashida Tlaib over her criticisms of Israel.In a statement released on Wednesday, CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad said:
      The American Muslim community stands against this hypocritical and racist targeting of representative Rashida Tlaib, whose voice is indispensable in representing the concerns of millions of Americans who are horrified by the war crimes our government supports against the Palestinian people. She should wear this cowardly censure as a badge of honor. We will not be cowed by those attempting to muzzle our voices.
      Both Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives who orchestrated the suppression and censure of the only Muslim Palestinian voice in Congress under the cover of darkness while ignoring the openly racist, bigoted and violent remarks that members of Congress have made about Muslims and Palestinians, should be deeply ashamed of their actions. They are on the wrong side of history.
      Speaking to reporters, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called last night’s Democratic victories across the country an “important night for the American people.”
      “They rejected these extreme, extreme policies that we’re seeing from the Republican party and they also lifted up the president’s agenda, the president’s values.”
      In response to a follow-up question on Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, Jean-Pierre said:
      “You have to take these polls with a grain of salt… I talked about 2020…what we saw is a president that was able to bring an incredibly strong, diverse coalition to win in 2020. We saw the same thing in 2022…we kept on hearing about a ‘Red Wave’ that didn’t materialize…
      We don’t put much stock in polls. The president’s going to focus on delivering for the American people. He has an agenda that is incredibly popular and that matters.”
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said “we strongly disagree” with Democratic representative Rashida Tlaib’s support for the controversial pro-Palestinian phrase “from the river to the sea”, for which the sole Palestinian congresswoman was censured by the Republican-controlled House on Tuesday night.“We strongly disagree with using that phrase – it’s been said by many people at the White House. I do not have any conversations to read out to you with the congresswomen,” Jean-Pierre said after being asked if Joe Biden has spoken to Tlaib about the matter.But Jean-Pierre added: “We have been very, very clear how it is important to be mindful about the language that we use at this time, and we will continue to speak out on that.”Tlaib, who is the only Palestinian American in the US Congress, on Tuesday defended her criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and urged US lawmakers to join in calling for a ceasefire.Tlaib has long criticized Joe Biden’s support of Israel, but received intense backlash after her defense of the slogan “from the river to the sea”.In a social media post on Friday, Tlaib defended the phrase as “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate”.The full slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, references the land that sits between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. While many recognize the slogan as a call for Palestinian liberation, others argue that the term has been used to call for the destruction of Israel and the persecution of Jewish people.White House national security spokesman John Kirby was just asked at the daily press briefing how long is a humanitarian pause – in the sense of something being characterized as such.Is, for example, a 72 hour humanitarian pause different from a ceasefire, Kirby was asked by one of the gathered journalists.Kirby said a humanitarian pause was “as long as it needed to be”, eg to get aid in to Gaza or people out of the Palestinian territory, and was something different from “a general ceasefire” that stands as a “cessation of hostilities” between both sides as they seek to negotiate towards an end game in a war, he said.“We do not support that at this time,” Kirby said. He said the White House regarded at ceasefire as currently being to the benefit of Hamas, as opposed to Israel, in military and propaganda terms.A humanitarian pause, in contrast, is something “temporary, localized and for specific purposes,” Kirby said.White House national security spokesman John Kirby adds, at the press briefing now ongoing in the west wing, that it could take “more than one pause” in the fighting in Gaza to get all hostages out of the territory.That is not to say there is any sign today that an opportunity has yet been created for them to be released.Israel’s military is currently reiterating that there will be no ceasefire in Gaza – but the military will allow for “humanitarian pauses,” Reuters notes.The White House reckons such pauses could “last hours or days.”Kirby says the US continues to urge Israel to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza, especially putting people who are currently trying to flee to the south of the territory or out of it altogether “in harm’s way”.He acknowledged that “most Palestinians don’t want to leave” and there are around a million people internally displaced within Gaza right now.The White House is holding its press briefing and national security spokesman John Kirby is reiterating a point he made yesterday, that the notion of Israel occupying Gaza is “not a long term solution to post-conflict governance.”This follows Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration earlier this week that Israel would take control of security in Gaza for an indefinite period, adding to the sense of uncertainty over the future of the Palestinian territory even as it is currently gripped by war and humanitarian crisis.Kirby said, meanwhile, that there are still between 500 and 600 Americans that the US is trying to get out of Gaza. And, asked by journalists about what the militant group Hamas, that controls Gaza, is demanding to release the more than 200 hostages that its fighters snatched when they attacked southern Israel on October 7 and killed at least 1,400 people, Kirby would not give details. The hostages include Americans.“We have a way to communicate with Hamas, we are using that way. We are doing everything we can to get those folks back with their families,” he said.Bernie Sanders has also hit back at the Republican-led House’s decision to censure Rashida Tlaib over her criticisms of Israel amid its deadly bombing campaign that has killed over 10,000 Palestinians, saying:
      “The House should pass desperately needed aid for Gaza, work to stop the conflict in the Middle East, and address the pressing needs of the American people.
      Instead they voted to censure my friend Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress. Pathetic and shameful!” the Independent Vermont senator said.
      MPower Change, a Muslim-led grassroots organization, has thrown its support behind Rashida Tlaib following her censure by the Republican-led House of Representatives.In a post on Instagram, the group said:
      “Shame on those who voted to silence the only Palestinian voice in Congress. Rep. Rashida Tlaib has been censured for defending the rights of Palestinians to live free of Israeli occupation and siege and for demanding an end to the bloodshed in Gaza.
      Rashida has always been on the side of humanity and she will continue to do that regardless of those who try to stop her.”
      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has spoken out against the House’s censure of Rashida Tlaib over her criticisms of Israel amid its deadly bombing campaign across Gaza that has killed over 10,000 Palestinians in reponse to the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.
      “It is not lost on anyone how many offensive, violent, and racist things people regularly hear members of Congress say, yet virtually the only one that gets censured for her political speech also happens to be the only Palestinian American.
      It does not reflect well. At all,” the New York Democratic representative said.
      The Republican-led House of Representatives has voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, Michigan’s Democratic representative and Congress’s only Palestinian-American.The Guardian’s Chris Stein reports:The 234-188 tally came after enough Democrats joined with Republicans to censure Tlaib, a punishment one step below expulsion from the House. The three-term congresswoman has long been a target of criticism for her views on the decades-long conflict in the Middle East.The debate on the censure resolution on Tuesday afternoon was emotional and intense. The Republican representative Rich McCormick of Georgia pushed the censure measure in response to what he called Tlaib’s promotion of antisemitic rhetoric. He said she had “levied unbelievable falsehoods about our greatest ally, Israel, and the attack on October 7”.Tlaib provoked criticism last week by defending the controversial slogan “from the river to the sea”.In remarks on the House floor, Tlaib defended her criticism of the country and urged lawmakers to join in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.“I will not be silenced and I will not let you distort my words,” Tlaib said. “No government is beyond criticism. The idea that criticizing the government of Israel is antisemitic sets a very dangerous precedent, and it’s been used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation.”She also said she had condemned the Hamas attacks on Israeli citizens several times.For further details, click here:Following a series of Democratic wins across the country, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said that “it’s time to recognize Maga extremism is the wrong answer.”In an address on Wednesday, the New York senator said:
      “There is no possible takeaway from last night other than this: Americans fiercely opposed Maga extremism, fiercely opposed total abortion bans and want bipartisan leaders who can put America’s needs first.
      After last night’s results, I have a message to my Republican colleagues:
      When the Maga agenda can’t win in deep-red Kentucky or in Ohio or help you in Virginia, it’s time to recognize Maga extremism is the wrong answer, not just for the country but even for the GOP.”
      Here is more from the Guardian’s staff and agencies on Yusef Salaam, one of the exonerated ‘“Central Park Five” members who won a New York City council seat following yesterday’s election:Salaam, a Democrat, will represent a central Harlem district on the city council, having run unopposed for the seat in one of many local elections playing out across New York state on Tuesday. He won his primary election in a landslide.The victory comes more than two decades after DNA evidence was used to overturn the convictions of Salaam and four other Black and Latino men in the 1989 rape and beating of a white jogger in Central Park. Salaam was imprisoned for almost seven years.“For me, this means that we can really become our ancestors’ wildest dreams,” Salaam said in an interview before the election.Elsewhere in New York City, voters were deciding whether to re-elect the Queens district attorney and cast ballots in other city council races. The council, which passes legislation and has some oversight powers over city agencies, has long been dominated by Democrats and the party is certain to retain firm control after the election.Local elections on Long Island could offer clues about how the city’s suburbs could vote in next year’s congressional elections.For the full story, click here: More