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    As College Students Protest, Harris Keeps Her Focus on Abortion

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    Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigning on Monday in Wisconsin, again took sharp swipes at former President Donald J. Trump for his actions on abortion, a hot topic across the country. But she stayed silent on the war in Gaza, another issue erupting elsewhere among the critical bloc of young voters she has been courting.The split screen captured the advantages and challenges for Democrats as they head into the presidential election in November. Even as the party is looking to galvanize voters over the wave of abortion restrictions in numerous states since Roe v. Wade was overturned, it is facing internal divisions among key parts of its coalition.On Monday, as demonstrations gripped college campuses on the East Coast, Ms. Harris kept her attention squarely focused on Mr. Trump and what she described as his attacks on women. She cast the 2024 election as a choice over the preservation of freedom, which she called “fundamental to the promise of America.”“This is a moment where we must stand up for foundational, fundamental values and principles,” she told roughly 100 people at a community center in La Crosse, in the western part of the state. “When we think about what is at stake, it is absolutely about freedom.”Abortion rights have become a focus of President Biden’s re-election bid, and Ms. Harris has had a leading role.Her La Crosse event was part of daylong trip to the battleground state that was focused on official and campaign duties centered on health care and reproductive rights. Earlier in the day, Ms. Harris met for a round-table discussion with health care workers and leaders and unveiled two Biden administration rule changes meant to benefit hundreds of thousands of health care workers.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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      Lawsuit Puts Fresh Focus on Eric Hovde’s Comments About Older Voters

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      Pressed on his claims of 2020 election irregularities, the Republican candidate for Senate in Wisconsin has questioned the mental capacity of nursing home residents to vote.Eric Hovde, the Republican banking executive challenging Senator Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, may be developing a problem with older voters.The bank he leads, Utah-based Sunwest, last month was named as a co-defendant in a California lawsuit that accuses a senior living facility partly owned by the bank of elder abuse, negligence and wrongful death.Mr. Hovde’s campaign called the suit meritless and said it was farcical to hold the chairman and chief executive of a bank responsible for the actions of a business that it seized in a foreclosure in 2021. Whatever its merits, the suit might have been largely irrelevant to Mr. Hovde’s political campaign had he himself not boasted recently of having gained expertise in the nursing home industry as a lender to such residences.In comments this month in which he suggested there had been irregularities in the 2020 election, Mr. Hovde drew on that experience to say that residents of nursing homes “have a five-, six-month life expectancy” and that “almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote.” Those remarks were quickly condemned by Democrats in Wisconsin and by the former Milwaukee Bucks star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.The recent pileup of problems is an inauspicious start to a campaign that Republicans hope will help wrest control of the Senate from Democrats. Mr. Hovde is one of four affluent Republicans who are running to unseat Democratic incumbents, in Ohio, Montana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Each of those states either leans heavily Republican in the upcoming presidential contest or is rated a tossup, and the loss of any one of those seats could cost Democrats control of the Senate. The deep pockets of candidates like Mr. Hovde will ease the G.O.P.’s heavy fund-raising burden as the party confronts Democrats’ early financial advantage.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 in swing state Wisconsin unenthused by Trump: ‘A bad candidate’

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      Terri Burl has come full circle.The local Republican party official was a founding member of Women for Trump in her corner of rural Wisconsin eight years ago when the then New York businessman’s run for president was little more than a joke to political pundits.Burl twice campaigned enthusiastically for Donald Trump’s election but, after he lost the presidency to Joe Biden in 2020, she feared the chaos of his years in power had made him unelectable. The former social worker and substitute teacher switched her support to Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and then Trump’s former UN ambassador Nikki Haley.But now Burl is back campaigning for Trump in Oneida county.“I don’t feel excited. But I have a bunch of ‘Never Trump’ friends and this is my argument to them: I say, you better vote for Trump or you get Biden,” she said.“Not only that. If you don’t vote for Trump, and then he doesn’t win, he’s going to come back in four years. The boogeyman will be back. He’ll be 82 years old. Is that what you want? Just let him have his four years and then you won’t have to put up with him anymore.”That lack of a ringing endorsement is heard among many Republicans who once voted enthusiastically for Trump, a reflection not only of doubts about the man himself after his first term in the White House but of a discernible lack of enthusiasm for a rematch of the last election.To win, Trump is probably going to need to take Wisconsin, one of the closest swing states of recent elections. In 2016, he won the state by less than 1% of the vote and then lost it four years later by an even narrower margin.Trump’s vote tally rose in 2020 but he was defeated by a jump in turnout, most of which went to Biden. Voters who stayed home in 2016, mostly because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton, came out four years later later because they wanted Trump out of the White House.Seven months out from this year’s presidential election, opinion polls say Wisconsin is still a toss-up and turnout again looks to be key. If Democrats vote in large numbers again, Trump is going to need his support to hold up in Oneida and other rural counties in the upper reaches of the state.At a rally in the Wisconsin city of Green Bay on Tuesday, Trump once again railed against his defeat four years ago and repeatedly claimed he was robbed by ballot fraud. But he also recognised the danger of ambivalence among some Republican voters if it leads them to stay home on election day in November.“If you want to save America, then get everyone you know registered as Republican, as soon as possible, volunteer for our campaign and get out and vote in record numbers,” the former president urged the crowd.Some Republican activists on the ground in Wisconsin doubt that Trump’s four years out of office have been enough for memories of the chaos and confrontation of his presidency to fade sufficiently. They fear that the looming criminal trials and election campaign will bring it all screaming back to again drive voters to the polls in support of Biden.One Republican county chair, who did not wish to be named for fear of alienating Trump supporters, said the former president was a “bad candidate at this time”.“In 2016 he was the man to break the mould. In 2020 he had the advantage of the presidency. I fear this time will be more difficult than the polling says right now. We can count on the hardcore Trump supporters, and lots of voters don’t feel good about Biden’s age. Immigration is playing very badly for the Democrats. But Trump lost in Wisconsin four years ago because he alienated so many Americans they were motivated to vote against him,” he said.“I don’t think many Democrats are excited by Biden but my fear is that in the coming months Trump will remind them why they voted against him last time and now they have new reasons, like the supreme court ruing on abortion.”Burl had wanted to avoid this. She was a fervent Trump supporter from the moment he came onto the political scene. In 2016, Burl lived in a neighboring county where she was chair of the local Republican party and led the charge for Trump. She fell out with the party vice-chair, a close friend, who was so appalled by Trump that she voted for Clinton.Two years ago, Burl told the Guardian that she would back whoever the Republican nominee was this time but that “I hope it’s not Trump” because she doubted he was electable. She backed DeSantis for her party’s nomination but said she recognised that once Trump was in the 2024 Republican primary he was unstoppable.“As soon as Trump said he was going to come back in, DeSantis should have stayed out. DeSantis should have been smart. If he would have been on Trump’s side, he’s a young man, he could have run in four years. Maybe Trump would have made him vice-president. DeSantis was greedy. He ruined it for himself. He ruined it for us,” she said.One reading of Tuesday’s primary results in Wisconsin holds a warning for Trump. He won the Republican ballot, as expected. But 20% of the vote went to Haley, DeSantis and others who have dropped out of the race in what amounted to a show of dissent among voters the former president desperately needs.Biden faced his own protest vote in favour of “uninstructed” in the Democratic primary over his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. But the president’s camp in Wisconsin will take heart from the fact that he won nearly 89% of the Democratic vote to Trump’s 79% of Republicans in his primary race.Ambivalence was evident among some primary voters at Rhinelander’s polling station. A woman who gave her name only as Mari said she voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden four years ago. She can’t decide which way she will go this year.“I don’t care for Trump as a person. I like a lot of his policies but I don’t think he sets a good example for our country,” she said.But she has just as many doubts about Biden, who she describes as “past his prime”.Mari said that she thinks Biden will probably win in November but she is not alone in being frustrated at facing a rerun of the 2020 election.Jim Schuh, a bread company manager, feels obliged to vote for Trump as a Republican but is not enthusiastic about it after the former president’s first term in office.“I’m not a big fan of Trump but I think he wins because people are just so frustrated with Biden,” he said.Schuh, like many Republicans, singled out the immigration crisis, played up heavily in conservative news media, as a major issue that will defeat Biden in Wisconsin, even though the state is far from the US-Mexico border and few migrants make it the 1,500 miles to Rhinelander.“Trump is good on the border. He’ll build the wall,” he said.Burl now manages social media for the Oneida county Republican party and is gearing up to campaign hard for Trump whatever the challenges. But she said it will not be made any easier by the state of Republican politics.“I’m kind of mad at the Republicans about abortion. I don’t think the supreme court should have been involved. The minute they got involved, the Democrats can use that as fodder about Republicans. If you vote for Republicans you’re not going to get control of your own body. It motivates Democrats to go vote,” she said.“I can’t stand abortion but you can’t just totally ban it. There were Republicans who wanted a compromise.”Burl also thinks the antics of hard-right Republican members of Congress such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene are undermining Trump’s campaign.“She’s such a wackadoodle. What do these people want? These are Republicans. I can’t even deal with these people. I can’t take them seriously. They’re ruining it for us because then everybody’s looking at them and saying, ‘Is this who you want to lead?’ They are damaging to the party,” she said.But Burl thinks that some of the issues Democrats hope will play in Biden’s favour are actually going to help Trump.The former president faces a string of criminal trials for charges ranging from inciting the January 6 riot at the Capitol to illegally handling classified documents and for financial fraud in New York.Democrats may calculate that if any of the cases come to trial before the election, they will remind voters of Trump’s failings. Burl suspects that in her part of the world the prosecutions will reinforce his claims to be a victim of an establishment conspiracy.Still she recognises that Trump has potentially fatal flaws, not least his belligerence and vindictiveness.“I’m still a Trumper but I still feel the same way about how he behaves, like on his Easter message. Instead of getting all angry and full rage, he could have said, ‘Let’s love our neighbours.’ He could have even been humble. He could have admitted he made made mistakes in how he treated people and said, ‘I do want to be better for the people of this nation.’ I would have loved something like that,” she said.Biden v Trump: What’s in store for the US and the world?On Thursday 2 May, 3-4.15pm ET, join Tania Branigan, David Smith, Mehdi Hasan and Tara Setmayer for the inside track on the people, the ideas and the events that might shape the US election campaign. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live More

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      Wisconsin Republicans allege anti-GOP bias in latest election challenge

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      Wisconsin Republicans have hit the state election commission with complaints alleging that officials in the state’s two largest cities illegally rejected Republican applicants for poll worker positions for the primary election.The complaints, filed by the Milwaukee county Republican party and Dane county Republican party, claim officials in Milwaukee and Madison violated state law by not contacting eligible Republicans nominated by their party to work the polls. The move furthers the GOP strategy of questioning election processes in key battleground states.“This is the kind of misconduct that drives down faith in elections,” the Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman, Michael Whatley, said in a statement on Wednesday. “The Republican Party is filing these complaints to compel election officials to follow the law and guarantee bipartisan access to important election administration positions in the Badger state.”State law requires clerks to choose poll workers, also called election inspectors, from lists submitted by the Republican and Democratic parties. If there aren’t enough party-nominated applicants to staff the polls, municipalities turn to non-party-affiliated applicants.Officials in Madison and Milwaukee have rejected the claim that they unfairly rejected Republican applicants.In an email, the executive director of the Milwaukee election commission, Claire Woodall, said that her office “has remained in frequent contact with Republican leadership both at the state and local level regarding the status of all nominated inspectors”. Charles Hanna, who claims in the Milwaukee complaint that he was unfairly rejected, failed to complete a mandatory online application, Woodall said.Woodall sent the Guardian a screenshot of an internal log showing how municipal workers emailed Hanna five times regarding his application between 30 January and 25 March.Michael Haas, the Madison city attorney, also disputed the characterization of the complaint filed against Madison officials, saying in an email that it “contains significant misstatements of the facts” and that “many individuals nominated by the Republican Party did not complete required paperwork to be hired or respond to communications from the Clerk’s Office regarding their availability.”After the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies spread the false claim that Democrats and election officials colluded to rig the election for Joe Biden. The claims took hold among many of Trump’s supporters, prompting party activists to aim their focus on election administration, including training poll workers to challenge ballots and submit legal complaints in real time.Since March, when the RNC co-chairs Lara Trump and Whatley took over the leadership of the party, the RNC stripped dozens of senior staff of their positions in a step towards stocking its ranks with Trump loyalists. Amid the overhaul, RNC leaders have hired prominent lawyers who promoted Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen – and have promised to double down on election litigation ahead of the 2024 presidential election. The RNC has already filed multiple lawsuits questioning states’ voter rolls – including one in Michigan, which the state’s top election official, Jocelyn Benson, denounced as “a meritless lawsuit filled with baseless accusations”.The Republican party of Dane county and the Republican party of Milwaukee county did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      Trump rails against ‘migrant crime’ and ‘rigged’ 2020 election at Wisconsin rally

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      On Wisconsin’s presidential primary election day, Donald Trump made his first campaign stop in the state, where he railed against so-called “migrant crime” and doubled down on false election claims.“We won in 2016 – we did much better in 2020, hate to say it, we did a hell of a lot better,” the former president told the roaring crowd, nodding to the disproven and unfounded “rigging” numerous times during his speech.“We will throw out the sick political class that hates us,” he continued later. “We will route the fake news media, we will drain the swamp and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all.”Hours earlier, the rainy weather in Green Bay had turned sludgy, icy and painful as gusts of wind blew the precipitation sideways. It did not stop thousands of Trump supporters from thronging there for hours, forming a parade that snaked up and away from the venue and over the bridge crossing the Fox River two blocks away.Trump is, according to most polling, fighting for his life in Wisconsin, a state he lost to Joe Biden four years ago. But one would never know that in the KI Convention Center, where his red and white and sequined supporters gathered to him speak for the first time this campaign season.“I personally like that he’s unashamed,” said Ethan Nielsen, an 18-year-old who attended the rally with his father as he waited in line. “He believes what he believes and he doesn’t go back on what he says.”Committed attendees, who had waited for hours in hypothermic weather, packed into rows of seats. The rest of the crowd milled around patiently, the lull punctuated a few times by MyPillow founder and elections conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, who engaged the audience from his perch at the heart of the television news gaggle.Before Trump’s speech, senator Ron Johnson, a loyal ally of Trump and a vocal promoter of the elections and vaccine misinformation that animates his base, gave brief but impassioned remarks. It was up to Wisconsin, he said, to help deliver Trump a big red wave in November.View image in fullscreenTo do that, Republicans would need to embrace absentee voting.“Today is the perfect example why,” said Johnson, to muted applause. “We can’t afford to have a miserable election day in November and not have our vote already banked – so embrace early voting, we have to do that.”His plea reflects a contradiction within the Republican party, whose star has spent the last four years inveighing against absentee voting and falsely claiming the method facilitated widespread fraud during the 2020 election. Trump’s claims about voter fraud have even propelled a movement at the fringes of the GOP to do away with ballot tabulators entirely and revert to hand-counting – an unreliable method that would be nearly impossible to carry out in large municipalities.In Wisconsin, where a small local campaign to do away with voting machines has taken hold, absentee ballots are at the center of election conspiracy theories.That’s just one of many fractures that have torn the GOP since Trump left office, spilling out publicly in the House of Representatives, engulfing the Michigan Republican party in chaos and taking hold in Wisconsin, where Trump’s most fervent grassroots supporters have launched an apparently endless campaign to take down the Republican state speaker of the assembly, Robin Vos.Even the idea of another Trump candidacy has sparked controversy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The party is fairly solid on immigration, and where we stand in the world,” Andy Williams, an attorney and prominent party activist from Brown county, told me as he waited outside the convention center before the rally. “The thing that kind of drives them apart, [is] whether or not Trump should be the candidate or somebody else.”Republicans gave a show of unity at Trump’s Green Bay appearance where he took a moment to endorse Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who is running to unseat Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin, before continuing his tirade.View image in fullscreenIn his speech, Trump focused on his favored bogeyman – undocumented immigrants. He peppered the crowd with anecdotal examples of crimes committed by migrants, eliciting jeers from his audience.“This is an invasion of our country,” said Trump. Earlier on Tuesday, the Republican National Committee, which Trump’s team has overhauled and staffed with loyalists, created a new website dedicated to, in their words, “Biden’s border bloodbath”, attempting to twist Trump’s violent rhetoric around.As his speech drew to a close, Trump turned back to the topic of elections, remembering that he would still need people to vote for him.“So if you want to save America, then get everyone you know registered as Republican, as soon as possible, volunteer for our campaign and get out and vote in record numbers,” said Trump. “We want record numbers – even tonight, it’s important to get out.”Outside, the streets were slick with slushy rain that had turned to snow as attendees left the rally. There were still two more hours left to vote. More

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      in Elections

      Wisconsin Voters Approve Bans on Private Aid for Election Offices

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      Voters in Wisconsin approved adding language to the State Constitution on Tuesday that will forbid officials from accepting donations of money or staffing to help run elections, The Associated Press said.The questions were placed on the state’s primary ballot by the Republican-controlled Legislature. They were rooted in complaints raised about the 2020 election, including objections to donations that a group supported by the billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, his wife, made to local election offices, as well as assistance given to election administrators by nonprofit groups. The donations could be used to defray any of a wide variety of costs, like polling-place rental fees, drive-through voting sites or training for poll workers.Mr. Zuckerberg has said he no longer planned to award grants to election offices.President Biden narrowly won Wisconsin in 2020, a result that some Republicans tried and failed to overturn afterward. Voters in the state, which Donald J. Trump carried in 2016, tend to split about evenly between the two major parties, and the state could be decisive in this year’s presidential race. Republicans have argued that funding for running elections should be provided solely by the government and should be allocated equitably to all jurisdictions.Opponents of the ballot question concerning outside staffing for election offices said Wisconsin law already made clear who could or could not work as an election official, and that passing the amendment could have unintended consequences.By opting for a statewide vote on the proposed election limits, Wisconsin Republicans were able to maneuver around Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who vetoed a bill in 2021 that would have banned private grants for elections.“Regardless of the source of additional funding for election administration, election administrators must always run elections according to state and federal law,” Mr. Evers said in his veto message.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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      Biden and Trump sweep four primaries including battleground state Wisconsin

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      Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump won primary elections in four states, including the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin.Hundreds of delegates were up for grabs in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin on Tuesday, and Biden and Trump have already amassed enough delegates to win their respective nominations. But the turnout could provide more clues about the general election in November.Voters also had a chance to register their discontent with the nominees. Connecticut and Rhode Island gave voters the opportunity to vote “uncommitted” in the primary, while Wisconsin offered a similar option of “uninstructed delegation”. Wisconsin Democrats will be closely watching the turnout for “uninstructed delegation” after progressive activists launched a campaign encouraging voters to withhold support from the US president to protest his handling of the war in Gaza.The Listen to Wisconsin campaign, based on similar efforts in states like Michigan and Minnesota, has attracted support from some rank-and-file union members as well as an influential group of low-wage and immigrant workers in the state.Those voters represent key constituencies whose support Biden will need to win in November, and even a small erosion in support could spell trouble for him in Wisconsin, where he defeated Trump by just 0.6 points in 2020. In 2016, the former president defeated Hillary Clinton by roughly 0.8 points in Wisconsin, and he hopes to repeat that performance this fall.Polls closed at 8pm ET in Connecticut and Rhode Island and at 9pm ET in New York and Wisconsin, with results coming in shortly afterwards, and Biden will soon have a better sense of his standing in the battleground state.With the presidential nominees already decided, Wisconsin Republicans are more closely focused on two ballot measures related to election management in the state. The first measure raises the question of abolishing the use of private funds in election administration, and the second asks whether “only election officials designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections, and referendums”.Republicans have encouraged supporters to vote “yes” on both measures, after their legislative efforts to change election rules were repeatedly blocked by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers. Republican leaders have expressed pointed criticism of the grant money that Wisconsin election officials received from the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life in 2020 to address the challenges of navigating the coronavirus pandemic.Those leaders have derided the grant money as “Zuckerbucks”, a reference to the $350m that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave to the non-profit to help election offices across the country in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublicans argue that such funding must be abolished to ensure voters’ trust in election results, but Democrats warn that the approval of such a measure could drain resources from government offices already stretched too thin from budget cuts. On the second ballot question, Democrats have criticized its wording as vague and accused Republicans of attempting to intimidate nonpartisan voting rights groups from their usual registration and turnout efforts in the state.“Rather than work to make sure our clerks have the resources they need to run elections, Republicans are pushing a nonsense amendment to satisfy Donald Trump,” Ben Wickler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said in a statement last month.“Thanks to long-standing Wisconsin law and the dedicated service of thousands of elections officials in municipalities across the state, our elections are safe and secure. Donald Trump’s lies about his 2020 loss shouldn’t dictate what’s written in our state constitution.” More

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      Wisconsin, New York, Rhode Island and Connecticut primaries: follow live results

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      View image in fullscreenVoters in Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island and Wisconsin cast ballots in the presidential primaries on Tuesday. Much attention will be paid to Wisconsin, where voters will signal strength and weaknesses in the critical swing state for Joe Biden and Donald Trump.There are also options in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Wisconsin for voters to choose “uncommitted” in a show of protest against Biden’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza.Here are the results.Republican delegatesDemocratic delegatesRepublican resultsDemocratic resultsWho’s runningView image in fullscreenDonald TrumpThe former US president’s campaign to retake the White House and once again grab his party’s nomination got off to a slow start that was widely mocked. But after decisive wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, his campaign has steadily moved into a position of dominance.Trump declined to attend any of the Republican debates, has used his court appearances and many legal woes as a rallying cry to mobilize his base, and has run a surprisingly well-organized campaign. His extremist rhetoric, especially around his plans for a second term and the targeting of his political enemies, has sparked widespread fears over the threat to American democracy that his candidacy represents.His political style during the campaign has not shifted from his previous runs in 2016 and 2020 and, if anything, has become more extreme. Many see this as a result of his political and legal fates becoming entwined, with a return to the Oval Office seen as Trump’s best chance of nixing his legal problems.View image in fullscreenJoe BidenBiden is the likely Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election. He announced his campaign for re-election on 25 April 2023, exactly four years after he announced his previous, successful presidential campaign. While approval for the president remains low, hovering just above 40%, political experts say he is the most likely candidate to defeat Trump. Biden has served in politics for more than five decades and is running on a platform that includes abortion rights, gun reform and healthcare. At 81, he is the oldest president in US history.View image in fullscreenMarianne WilliamsonThe failed 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson dropped out of the race in February before then resurrecting her long-shot campaign after the Michigan primary. Williamson, an author of self-help books, launched her bid with campaign promises to address the climate crisis and student loan debt. She previously worked as “spiritual leader” of a Michigan Unity church.View image in fullscreenJason PalmerJason Palmer is a Democratic candidate who was only on the ballot in American Samoa and some other US territories. He won the primary in America Samoa after donating $500,000 to his own campaign. Palmer is a Baltimore resident who has worked for various businesses and non-profits, often on issues involving technology and education. More

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      Biden faces test in Wisconsin as Gaza supporters call for ‘uninstructed’ vote

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      Voters in Wisconsin cast their ballots today in an election that will test voter enthusiasm for Joe Biden and Donald Trump – and potentially enshrine two amendments in the state constitution affecting election administration across the state.The president and former president are already the presumptive nominees and will almost certainly face off in the general election in November, and it seems that the threat of prosecution, general unpopularity and advanced age can’t stop them.But while the primary will not offer alternative candidates, a group of activists in Wisconsin see it as an opportunity to push Biden on his policy toward Israel’s war on Gaza. The organizers, inspired by Michigan’s “uncommitted” campaign, which garnered more than 100,000 votes there, are calling on voters to choose “uninstructed” instead of Biden.“The margins of our elections are so incredibly close – less than 1% in the last two presidential election cycles – so I think it would behoove the administration to pay attention,” said Reema Ahmad, the lead organizer of the Listen to Wisconsin campaign.Organizers with the campaign aim to turn out as many voters for “uninstructed” as Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 to demonstrate their critical role in November, Ahmad said. The campaign has relied on the support of a broad network of progressive organizations, including the state’s largest network of Latino voters, Voces de la Frontera Action and Black Leaders Organizing Communities (Bloc), groups that helped propel Biden to his narrow 2020 victory.Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York also hold presidential primaries today, and voters in Arkansas and Mississippi will participate in primary runoffs. Voters in Rhode Island and Connecticut will also have an “uncommitted” option on the ballot, and in New York, pro-Palestine activists are encouraging voters to leave their presidential primary options blank in protest.The Trump campaign faces no similar challenge within the party, making Republican discontent with him harder to gauge. On 6 March, the former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, whose campaign gave anti-Trump Republicans a means to show their frustration with him, dropped out, and Trump snapped up enough delegates to secure the GOP nomination less than a week later. Haley and four other Republicans will still appear on the Wisconsin ballot alongside Trump.Brandon Scholz, a retired Wisconsin GOP strategist, said primary turnout could lend some insight into how both candidates will fare in November. In 2020, Biden clawed back parts of the country that Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016 – especially in the suburbs, and especially suburban women. Biden also benefited from strong support from Black and Latino voters – groups that recent polls show could be slipping away from him.“You want to do what you can to turn your base – your hardcore Dems and your hardcore Republicans, you want to be able to get them to the polls, because the last thing you want to do is come out looking like you didn’t do anything,” Scholz said.Whether or not the Trump campaign will mobilize voters outside the Maga movement is another question.“Observers will look to see what sort of participation traditional Republicans will have in this primary,” said Scholz. “And then finally, for both campaigns what are the ‘double haters’ going to do?”Also on the ballot in Wisconsin are two constitutional amendments that voting rights and government watchdog groups warn could have a negative impact on elections administration in the state.The first proposed amendment, which would ban elections offices from accepting private grant money to fund their operations, comes amid GOP anxieties – and election-denying conspiracy theories – about the role of funding from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s Center for Tech and Civic Life. During the 2020 election, the Facebook co-founder and his wife used funding from their organization to help mitigate the spread of Covid-19 in polling places and send voters information during the 2020 election.The donations from Center for Tech and Civic Life became a key focus of Republicans, many of them activists who questioned the results of the 2020 election. “Zuckerbucks”, they argue, unfairly benefited Democratic strongholds – although there is no evidence that the grants, which reached small and large municipalities across the state, played a role in Biden’s victory.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe second proposed amendment would enshrine in the state constitution a provision that already exists in Wisconsin statute, mandating that “only election officials designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections, and referendums”.Both proposals were passed by the GOP-controlled state legislature, which sent them to voters after the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, vetoed them. And both, worries Debra Cronmiller, the executive director of Wisconsin’s League of Women Voters, could hurt voters.“There’s no guarantee that the election will be funded fully in the absence of outside money,” said Cronmiller, of the proposal to ban elections offices from accessing private grants. Without sufficient funding – and the state legislature has not proposed additional resources to elections offices – she argued towns and counties are forced to hire fewer poll workers and host fewer polling locations, causing longer lines and a slower tally of the votes and disproportionately impacting poorer and smaller towns.“They might not have the opportunities that a bigger municipality, that has deeper pockets, might have in order to serve their citizens,” she said.The second proposed amendment, Cronmiller and other elections experts and voter advocates say, could prevent non-profits and other third-party groups from assisting voters in critical ways during elections. Groups that assist in driving voters to the polls, provide residents with information about voter registration, or help in the recruitment of poll workers, for example, could find themselves facing legal challenges for their work.“We’re all scratching our heads and wondering: is this allowed? If this passes, and if we don’t do those things, how do voters get to the polls?” said Cronmiller.“Is this a way to suppress the vote?” More