Wisconsin

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Georgia’s ours to lose’: Trump and Harris camps zero in on swing states

      by

      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump brace themselves for what promises to be an ugly and bruising sprint to the finishing line in November, both presidential candidates’ campaigns are turning their sights back on the handful of desperately close swing states where the battle is likely to be decided.Georgia is coming into view as a critical battleground for both leaders as they struggle to gain voters’ attention in an epochal election. On Wednesday, the vice-president will travel from the White House to southern Georgia to hold her first campaign event in the state with her recently anointed running mate and former high school football coach, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.The duo will go on a bus tour of the region, attempting to reach out to diverse voting groups including rural areas where the former president is strong, as well as suburban and urban districts in Albany and Valdosta, where large Black communities are among their target demographics. On Thursday night, Harris is scheduled to cap the tour with a rally in Savannah, where she will talk to Georgians about the stakes of this election.The intense focus on Georgia by the Democratic campaign underlines that they are not resting on their laurels after what most commentators have agreed was a pitch-perfect convention in Chicago last week. Despite the pronounced bounce in popularity that Harris has enjoyed since she dramatically switched with Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket five weeks ago, the race remains essentially neck and neck.The latest poll tracker by 538 for Georgia puts Trump 0.6% ahead of Harris in Georgia, with Harris on 46.0% and Trump on 46.6%. That is bang in the middle of the margin of error – and suggests that the state is open territory for the two candidates.In Sunday’s political talkshows, Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is one of Trump’s closest surrogates, underlined the importance of Georgia to Trump’s re-election hopes. “If we don’t win Georgia, I don’t see how we get to 270,” he told CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.Graham added that he would be accompanying Trump to what he called a “unity event” in Georgia soon. He predicted that if Trump played the right game in the state he would win.“I do believe Georgia’s ours to lose. It’s really hard for Harris to tell Georgians that we’re on the right track – they don’t believe it,” Graham said.The problem for Graham and other top Republican advisers is that Trump frequently blatantly ignores their guidance. In his most recent trip to Georgia, Trump ranted about the state’s Republican governor Brian Kemp, whom he still blames for failing to back him in his attempt to subvert the 2020 election – and whose support he now needs to prevail in November.Graham implicitly admitted to CNN the trouble that the attack on Kemp had caused but insisted: “We repaired the damage, I think, between Governor Kemp and President Trump.“He’s going to put his ground game behind President Trump and all other Republicans in Georgia.”Three days after the Democratic convention, which went off in a blaze of red, white and blue balloons and an ecstatic response from delegates, the Harris-Walz campaign is now laser-focused on that same ground game. The key is to turn the palpable surge in energy that exploded from the Chicago convention into hard work making calls and knocking on doors in Georgia and the other six battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The chairperson of the campaign, Jen O’Malley Dillon, released new data on Sunday which she said demonstrated the positive impact of the convention throughout the battleground states. Chicago marked the biggest week so far in Harris’s nascent pitch for the White House, she said, with volunteers signing up for almost 200,000 shifts during the week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMoney also continues to pour in, with the campaign raising $540m in five weeks – a record in US presidential campaign history. About $82m of that was received during convention week.O’Malley Dillon said that it was all a sign of Harris building on her momentum: “We are taking no voters for granted and communicating relentlessly with battleground voters every single day between now and election day – all the while Trump is focused on very little beyond online tantrums.”A leading Harris surrogate, the Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis, appeared on Fox News Sunday to try to convince right-leaning voters and undecided independents that they could safely back Harris. “She’s come to the middle,” Polis said, when asked about some of the more progressive policies Harris previously espoused but has since dropped – including a ban on fracking and Medicare for all.Polis added: “She’s pragmatic. She’s a tough leader. She’s the leader for the future.“She’s going to be a president for all the American people.”As the euphoria of the convention fades, Harris has already begun to face tougher questions, notably when will she expose herself to tougher questions by facing an interviewer. The Democratic candidate has so far studiously avoided a sit-down with any major news outlet.Quizzed himself about Harris’s resistance to being questioned, Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, told CNN: “As this campaign goes on, she’ll be sitting for more interviews”.“She’ll be engaging in debates,” Booker said. “I think she wants to do more.”With the battleground states all still essentially anyone’s to win, there are growing fears that Trump might be tempted to unleash another conspiracy to overturn the result should he narrowly lose in November. There are numerous indications that Trump and his Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters may be laying down the foundations of a challenge.At a rally last week in Asheboro, North Carolina, Trump said: “Our primary focus is not to get out the vote – it’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we have all the votes you need.”Trump’s running mate, the US senator from Ohio, JD Vance, was asked by NBC News’s Meet the Press whether he believed the election would be free and fair. “I do think it’s going to be free and fair,” he replied.Then he added: “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that happens. We’re going to pursue every pathway to make sure legal ballots get counted.” More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Harley-Davidson drops DEI initiatives amid pressure from ‘anti-woke’ activists

      by

      Motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson has become the latest manufacturer to drop diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives amid sustained pressure from anti-DEI activist Robby Starbuck.In a statement Monday, the Milwaukee-based company said it has not operated a corporate DEI function since April, no longer has minority-owned supplier goals and plans to exit socially motivated training for employees.Harley-Davidson’s statement, posted on X, said that it sees “every leader’s role to ensure we have an employee base that reflects our customers and the geographies in which we operate” – and the company would limit training to legal requirements.“We are saddened by the negativity on social media over the last few weeks, designed to divide the Harley-Davidson community,” the statement said. “As a company, we take this issue very seriously, and it is our responsibility to respond with clarity, action and facts.”The company said in the statement that it will also reorganize employee resource groups to focus on business development, mentoring and training. Having a “broad customer base is good for business”, it added.Harley-Davidson has been in the cross-hairs of anti-DEI activists who earlier this summer won similar concessions from retailer Tractor Supply and farming equipment maker John Deere & Co. The tractor maker said in a statement in July it would no longer participate in “cultural awareness parades”.The motorcycle maker said in an email to staff that it began a review of its “stakeholder and outreach activities” earlier this year. Harley-Davidson had been under attack from anti-DEI activist Starbuck, who accused it of adopting “the woke agenda of the very far left”.More broadly, the issue of DEI has become a political lightning rod that reflects US political divisions, with American businesses anticipating an even broader roll-back of such initiatives if Donald Trump wins a second presidency in November.“It’s time to get rid of these policies and bring back a sense of neutrality and sanity in corporate America,” Starbuck said in an interview with Bloomberg, pointing to activism on social media by Harley-Davidson influencers for the company’s move. He reportedly added: “We kind of reached critical mass.”Harley-Davidson’s shares are up 5% since Starbuck started his campaign in July, according to the outlet.Earlier this year, a Washington Post-Ipsos poll found 61% of adults think DEI programs in the workplace are “a good thing”. But another survey from Bentley University and Gallop found that fewer than four in 10 US adults (38%) believe businesses should take public stances, a decline of 10% since 2022.Harley-Davidson became a focus of Trump’s attention in 2018 after it responded to his administration’s tariffs by moving some production overseas. The former president subsequently encouraged people to boycott the company.The company has also grappled with falling demand from younger buyers for its old-school touring bikes – or “hogs” – according to one analyst who has said “an experience for them is not about hitting the open road”.Harley-Davidson’s decision to drop DEI training received pushback on Tuesday from Eric Bloem, the Human Rights Campaign president, who criticized the company’s decision as “impulsive”.“With nearly 30% of gen Z identifying as LGBTQ+ and the community wielding $1.4tn in spending power, retreating from these principles undermines both consumer trust and employee success,” Bloem said in a statement.There had been a national shift in favor of DEI initiatives after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, who was Black, by a white police officer in Minneapolis. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘He has a proven track record’: behind Tim Walz’s appeal to workers

      by

      Vice-presidential picks have little effect on who wins a presidential election, many political scientists say. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s choice as her running mate, could prove the exception to that rule. Not least because of his track record of successfully appealing to working people.Angela Ferritto, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, voiced confidence that Walz will help the vice-president win in three pivotal states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin: “I strongly believe that Governor Walz will help the ticket. He has a proven track record of accomplishing things for working people.”Ferritto noted that as Minnesota’s governor, Walz enacted paid sick days, guaranteed more protection to construction workers against wage theft, and gave teachers greater negotiating power “over class sizes so they can give students the attention they need”.Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster, said Walz had an underappreciated strength that is political gold. “He gets policies out of the left-right divide and gets people to agree that this is the right thing to do,” she said. “Who’s for large class size? Who’s for poorly paid teachers? Who’s not for letting Mom and Dad have time with their new baby? He has a way of taking ideology out of policies and making them seem like things we can get together on.”Steve Rosenthal, a political strategist and former political director of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation, said Walz had another important trait – he is the type of candidate blue-collar workers would be happy to have a beer with. Walz likes to hunt and fish, he was long a union member while a teacher, and his financial disclosure forms show he owns no stocks or bonds.“What the two parties’ vice-presidential picks say is that both sides recognize the critical nature of winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,” Rosenthal said. “I think Walz is a huge addition in those states.”He explained that people normally focus on who is at the top of the ticket, but “to the extent Harris has someone who can represent her in those three states, he can be a big help. He can camp out in those states. He can walk a picket line and go to union halls. He can be a huge plus.”While history shows that vice-presidents don’t often move voters to the polls, with Walz things “could be a little different”, said Lake, noting that Harris’s selection of Walz was getting huge attention partly because it was the biggest, early decision of her presidential campaign. “I think Walz definitely helps in terms of the blue wall strategy [of winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin]. It’s great to have someone from the midwest on the ticket. His story is great and complements hers.”On paper, political experts say, Walz should be an alluringly strong running mate because he served in the army national guard for 24 years, was a high school teacher for two decades and coached his football team to a state championship. Moreover, Walz, a 60-year-old father of two, grew up on a farm in a Nebraska town of just 300 people.Ever since Walz’s selection was announced, he and Harris have trumpeted his rural roots and decades of public service, while Donald Trump and his campaign have rushed to portray Walz as “dangerously liberal” and in other unflattering ways. In recent days, the Harris and Trump campaigns have been rushing to put forward clashing definitions of Walz, and which side prevails in defining him to the nation could have a major effect on how much Walz boosts the Democratic ticket.“A handful of national polls show that 60% and up of voters say they don’t know enough about Walz to have an opinion,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Milwaukee-based Marquette Law School Poll. “The Republicans are pushing hard to paint him in a negative way. Things are wide open as to whether he will be defined as a Minnesota dad or the socialist governor of Minnesota.”The Trump campaign’s attacks “are really exploding on him”, Franklin said, adding, “If Walz deals with them effectively, more power to him. If he ends up being swiftboated, just like John Kerry was, that’s not so good.”JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has accused Walz of leaving the military early to avoid serving in Iraq, but Walz says he retired from the national guard in 2005 to run for Congress, months before his artillery unit received orders to deploy to Iraq.Many Democrats voice confidence that Walz will beat back the Trump-Vance attacks and be a boon to the ticket. They point to his superb communications skills – he’s down to earth, clever and humorous, and he came up with the term “weird” to describe and deride Trump and Vance. Many Democrats applaud the policies he ushered in as Minnesota governor, including 12 weeks’ paid family and medical leave, free breakfasts and lunches for public school students, strong protections for reproductive freedom, and free college tuition at public universities for students from families making less than $80,000 a year.Even though studies have shown that vice-presidential picks usually affect election results by only a small margin, Walz’s addition to the ticket – and his midwestern, pro-worker bona fides – could make a crucial difference in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won each of those states by less than 1% in 2016.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn June, Emerson College Polling and the Hill did a poll in Minnesota that found that Walz was plus 12 with women, minus nine with men, and plus 11 with 18-to-29-year-olds. Spencer Kimball, director of Boston-based Emerson College Polling said Walz could certainly help Harris attract and motivate younger voters. “Younger voters had moved away from Biden, not necessarily to Trump, maybe to a third party,” Kimball said. “What we’ve seen recently is the youth vote moving toward Harris, and I think Walz helps double down on that. The youth vote is one of the Democratic party’s bases. To get young people excited about the race is a potential gamechanger and can help reset the election map.”With regard to the three key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Ken Kollman, director of the University of Michigan’s center for political studies, said that there was “a big mother lode” of votes in Detroit and that voter turnout in Philadelphia and Milwaukee was hugely important. “The national election may very well hinge on turnout in those areas,” he said, adding that he didn’t think Walz would make much difference in those three cities.Walz could prove important, however, Kollman said, in making overtures to Democrats and blue-collar voters who have gravitated to Trump. “There is a group of Trump supporters who are pretty liberal on issues, which is one of the paradoxes of Trump’s appeal – people who actually rely on or believe in government support and active government intervention in their lives, their industry or their company.”Kollman said that Walz, because of his rural background and pro-worker record, “might be able to get some of them to break away from Trump. That remains a big question.”Lake, the pollster, agreed that Walz “can provide an opening” to voters leaning toward Trump, but said that Walz’s personal appeal alone could not win over many Trump-leaning voters. Lake said the “whole ticket has to improve” its efforts to reach them and persuade them.Ferritto of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO voiced optimism about Walz’s ability to win over Trump voters. “He flipped a congressional district that borders Iowa from red to blue,” she said. “He wouldn’t have been able to accomplish that unless he appealed to blue-collar voters.”Some, perhaps many, blue-collar Trump supporters will never hear Walz’s or Harris’s message, Ferritto acknowledged, because they are inundated from one side. “But I believe there are blue-collar voters who are willing to listen,” she said. “They want to hear facts. They want to hear about achieving real results. I do believe that Walz can reach those voters.” More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states

      by

      A major new poll puts Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in three key swing states, signaling a dramatic reversal in momentum for the Democratic party with three months to go until the election.The vice-president leads the ex-president by four percentage points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, 50% to 46%, among almost 2,000 likely voters across the three states, according to new surveys by the New York Times and Siena College.The polls were conducted between 5 and 9 August, in the week Harris named midwesterner Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and a former high-school teacher, as her running mate on November’s Democratic ticket.It provides the clearest indication from crucial battleground states since Joe Biden pulled out of the race and endorsed Harris amid mounting concerns about the 81-year-old’s cognitive wellbeing and fitness to govern for a second term. The results come after months of polling that showed Biden either tied with or slightly behind Trump.Harris is viewed as more intelligent, more honest and more temperamentally fit to run the country than Trump, according to the registered voters polled.The findings, published on Saturday by the New York Times, will boost the Democrats, as Harris and Walz continue crisscrossing the country on their first week on the campaign trail together, holding a slew of events in swing states that are likely to decide the outcome of the election.On Saturday, the candidates held a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, a state the Biden-Harris ticket won by more than two points in 2020.While only a snapshot, Democrats will probably be heartened to see that 60% of the surveyed independent voters, who always play a major role in deciding the outcome of the race, said they are satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates, compared with 45% in May.The swing appears to be largely driven by evolving voter perceptions of Harris, who has been praised for her positivity and future-focused stump speeches on the campaign trail. In Pennsylvania, where Biden beat Trump by just more than 80,000 votes four years ago, her favorability rating has surged by 10 points since last month among registered voters, according to Times/Siena polling.Harris will need to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – crucial battleground states that Biden clinched in 2020 – if the Democrats are to retain the White House.The latest polls will probably further anger Trump, whose few recent campaign events have largely been dominated by ire – and apparent disbelief – at the rapid shift in momentum since naming JD Vance, the Ohio senator and former venture capitalist, as his running mate amid a celebratory atmosphere at the Republican national convention less than a month ago.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance, who has been derided as “weird” by the Democrats as he doubles down on 2021 comments about the US being run by “childless cat ladies”, is broadly viewed unfavorably or unenthusiastically by the majority of independents, Democrats and registered Republicans, the new poll found.But Democrats still have work to do to communicate Harris’s vision for the country. The poll found that 60% of registered voters think Trump has a clear vision of the country, compared with only 53% when asked about Harris.Crucially, Trump is also still leading when it comes to confidence over handling the economy and immigration – two of the three key issues for voters, according to polls.Still, Harris has a 24-point advantage over Trump when it comes to abortion, an issue which Democrats hope will help get out the vote in key swing states such as Arizona and Wisconsin. Harris is also viewed significantly more favorably when it comes to democracy than Trump, who continues to face charges related to his alleged role in subverting the 2020 election results and the 6 January insurrection in Washington.In a statement to the Times, Tony Fabrizio, the Trump campaign’s chief pollster, said the new polls “dramatically understated President Trump’s support”, citing surveys conducted in the days before the 2020 election that overestimated the margin of Biden’s victory. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris and Tim Walz inspire enthusiasm at Wisconsin rally: ‘I’m elated’

      by

      Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, continued their swing-state tour with a rally in rural Wisconsin on Wednesday.The rally, which followed a raucous event in Philadelphia, served as an opportunity for Harris to continue to introduce Walz, a formerly low-profile midwest governor, to Democrats in the critical swing state. Held in Eau Claire, a north-western Wisconsin city less than two hours from Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota, the rally drew attendees from both states.Walz spoke first, focusing on his midwestern background and noting he had family in the crowd. “Being a midwesterner, I know something about commitment to the people,” he said.He also spoke at length about his experience coaching football, teaching social studies and serving in the Minnesota National Guard, underscoring his role as a kind of ambassador to rural and working-class Americans for the Democratic party.And he directly took on Trump. “Don’t believe him when he plays dumb. He knows exactly what he’s talking about. He knows exactly what Project 2025 will do in restricting and taking our freedoms. He knows that it rigs the economy for the super rich if he gets a chance to go back to the White House. It will be far worse than it was four years ago.”Walz also revisited his support for and personal experience with IVF, the fertility treatment, which has become a contentious issue for Republicans after an Alabama court ruled that frozen embryos have personhood.The rally highlighted Harris’s focus on Wisconsin, where she held her first rally after Joe Biden announced the end of his bid for re-election. In 2016, Donald Trump won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes, and Biden won the state in 2020 by a similar margin.Harris’s speech was similar to those at other recent campaign stops, with a focus on the future and Trump’s threat to democratic norms.“Donald Trump has openly vowed, if re-elected, he will be a dictator on day one, that he would weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies, that he would round up peaceful protesters and throw them out of our country, and even, quote, ‘terminate the United States constitution’,” she said.“Let us be clear, someone who suggests we should terminate the constitution of the United States should never again have a chance to stand behind the seal of the president of the United States.”Rallygoers were enthusiastic at seeing the duo at the event.“I’m elated,” said Lori Schlecht, a teacher from Minnesota who said she is excited about Walz given his background in public education – Walz was a public school teacher before he was elected to the US House of Representatives in 2006. “Minnesota is blessed to have him, and I’m glad to see him at the national level. He is authentic and real – he’ll get shit done.”Many Minnesota residents in attendance pointed to Walz’s down-to-earth manner as an asset for the Democratic party ticket.“Walz is my homeboy,” said Colin Mgam, who is 65 and retired and drove from St Paul for the rally. “He brings straight talk, and he’s going to do well,” Mgam added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe indie folk band Bon Iver, whose lead singer is from Eau Claire and previously supported Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, opened for Harris at the Wednesday event.Walz, who was not initially an obvious contender for Harris’s vice-presidential pick, garnered widespread attention within the party after giving a candid and upbeat interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in which he boosted Harris and wrote off Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance as “weird”.The “weird” moment went viral, and Democratic party officials and politicians quickly seized on the term to dismiss the Republican presidential ticket as reactionary and out-of-touch with everyday Americans.Walz’s comments – and subsequent references to the “weirdness” of the Maga movement, including at the Wednesday rally – marked the beginning of a rhetorical shift for Democrats, with Harris reframing the election in more positive terms than the Biden campaign, which leaned heavily on grave warnings about Trump’s autocratic tendencies. Since ascending to the top of the ticket, Harris has instead emphasized a policy agenda with issues that are popular among Democratic voters, such as abortion rights, labor unions and the cost of childcare.Donald Trump has been quick to paint Walz, who has worked with progressive lawmakers in Minnesota to pass a raft of progressive laws – codifying the right to abortion, expanding protections for workers and establishing landmark voting rights legislation – as a member of the “radical left”, a line of attack that the former president will likely continue to push.But Walz pushed back against Trump on Wednesday. “This election is all about asking that question, which direction will this country go in? Donald Trump knows the direction he wants to take it. He wants to take us back.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Ina Jaffe, Dogged and Award-Winning NPR Reporter, Dies at 75

      by

      Ms. Jaffe spent decades covering politics and aging in America, and she was the first editor of the NPR program “Weekend Edition Saturday.”Ina Jaffe, an NPR correspondent for roughly 40 years who was known for her unflinching approach to journalism and was the first editor of the network’s initial iteration of the weekly national news show “Weekend Edition Saturday,” died on Thursday. She was 75.Ms. Jaffe, who had been living with metastatic breast cancer for several years, died at a nursing home in Los Angeles, said her husband, Lenny Kleinfeld.Often described by her colleagues at NPR as a “reporter’s reporter,” Ms. Jaffe had a keen sense of the line separating the equitable and the unjust. The breadth of her journalistic expertise grew over the decades, beginning with the politics beat and evolving in later years to analyses that chronicled what it means to grow older in America.In addition to “Weekend Edition,” she contributed stories for the daily afternoon news program “All Things Considered.”In 2012, Ms. Jaffe reported on the Department of Veterans Affairs in Los Angeles leasing large areas of its campus that had been intended to house homeless veterans to unrelated businesses. In part because of a series of stories that she reported, the administration slated more land to be developed to provide housing for homeless veterans. In 2018, two men involved in the lease deals were sentenced on fraud charges.The series won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists and a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media.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

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We have to be voting biblically’: the Courage Tour rallies Christians to get Trump in office

      by

      By 9am on Monday, hundreds of worshipers who had gathered under a tent in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, were already on their feet. Praiseful music bumped from enormous speakers. The temperature was pushing 90F (32C).The congregants had gathered in north-western Wisconsin for the Courage Tour, a travelling tent revival featuring a lineup of charismatic preachers and self-styled prophets promising healing, and delivering a political message: register to vote. Watch, or work, the polls. And help deliver the 2024 election to Donald Trump.Serving as a voter registration drive and hub for recruiting poll workers, it was no mistake that the Courage Tour came to Wisconsin just three months ahead of the presidential election in November. The tour had already visited three other swing states: Georgia, Michigan and Arizona.Heavy-hitting Maga organizations – including America First Policy Institute, TPUSA Faith and America First Works – had a presence outside the tent. Inside, headlining the event was Lance Wallnau, a prominent figure in the New Apostolic Reformation – a movement on the right that embraces modern-day apostles, aims to establish Christian dominion over society and politics and has grown in influence since Trump was elected president in 2016.“‘Pray for your rulers,’ that’s about as far as we got in the Bible,” said Wallnau, setting the tone for the day, which would feature a series of sermons focused on the ideal role of Christians in government and society. “I think what’s happened is over time, we began to realize you cannot trust that government like you thought you could trust, and you can’t trust the media to tell you what’s really happening,” he exclaimed.What followed in Wallnau’s morning sermon were a series of greatest hits of the Maga right: January 6 (not an insurrection), the 2020 election (marred by fraud) and Covid-19 (a Chinese bioweapon).Many of the attendees had learned of the event from Eau Claire’s Oasis church – a Pentecostal church whose congregants were already familiar with the movement’s goal to turn believers into activists with a religious mission.“This is wonderful,” said Cyndi Lund, an Oasis churchgoer who attended the four-day event. “I teach a class on biblical citizenship – the Lord put in my heart that we have to be voting biblically, and if nothing else, we have a duty in America to vote.”According to the preachers who sermonized on Monday, the correct biblical worldview is a deeply conservative one. The speakers repeatedly stated their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion, ideas that were elaborated on in pamphlets passed around the crowd and on three large screens facing the audience. (“Tolerance IS NOT A commandment,” read one poster, propped up in front of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA stall outside the tent.)After Wallnau spoke, Bill Federer, an evangelist who has written more than thirty books weighing in on US history from an anti-communist and rightwing perspective, offered a brief and often intensely inaccurate, intellectual history of the US and Europe. During his talk, Federer dropped references to the villains of his historiography – among them Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, the German philosopher Hegel and, “a little closer to home”, the political theorist of the New Left, Saul Alinsky. The crowd, apparently already versed in Federer’s intellectual universe, groaned and booed when Federer mentioned Alinsky.Federer also railed on “globalists”, tapping into the longstanding antisemitic idea of a shadowy cabal led by wealthy Jewish people who dictate world events.“Globalists,” Federer said, “are giving money to LGBTQ activists to get involved with politics.”It would be up to God-fearing Christians with a biblical worldview to push back against “wokeism”, by influencing what New Apostolic Reformers refer to as the “seven mountains” of society: religion, family, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and, most important at the Courage Tour, government.The stakes, emphasized many of the speakers, couldn’t be overstated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What we’re up against aren’t people,” said Mercedes Sparks, speaking on the topic of the secularization of US life. “These are spirits.” Sparks made clear her explicit goal – shared by the other speakers on the tour – of bringing Christianity into politics and government. But despite invoking an intense form of Christian nationalism, the speakers at the Courage Tour repeatedly decried the label as a smear.“This whole idea of Christian nationalism, it’s kind of interesting, right?” said Sparks, who claimed the term amounts to a form of persecution against Christian Americans. “This term that’s being thrown around, that I really think is designed to shame Christians into not voting and not being engaged like any other group that makes up America.”By the end of the day, the speakers had warmed up the crowd for the afternoon’s natural conclusion: a call to get involved.Joshua Caleb, a speaker at the event who described himself as a former Republican opposition researcher, called on attendees to join his organization, The Lion of Judah – a group which, according to its website, aims to unleash “the ROAR of Christian Voters across America” and urges members to “fight the fraud” by becoming election workers. Event organizers handed out flyers provided by the Trump-aligned America First Works and the evangelical group Faith and Freedom, urging pastors to help their congregants get registered to vote before the November election.Not all attendees were prepared for the speakers’ political, and often dire, message.“It’s too intense for me,” said Kahmara Kelly, who is 20 years old and recently joined the Oasis church. “My body just doesn’t like the tension that could come with it, and the conflict, so I just try avoiding politics.” At times, Kelly left the tent for a breath of air.“Not gonna lie, I was ready to just walk away,” Kelly added. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Oh thank God’: Democratic swing state voters feel relief after Biden drops out

      by

      For many Democratic swing state voters, Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential election came as a relief.“Oh thank God,” said Cathy Gramze, a retired nurse who lives in the suburbs of Detroit. “My diagnosis has for a long time been that he cannot run again and I am not entirely sure that he should finish his term in office.”Gramze had worried about Biden’s fitness long before the debate. His 27 June performance merely confirmed what she had long feared. “A lot of the time he is the president we need, but some of the time he isn’t.”Kamala Harris, who Biden endorsed on Sunday and who has earned the endorsement of most prominent Democratic elected officials, “needs to be the presidential nominee”, Gramze said.For more than a year, voters across the political spectrum have been saying they feel Biden, who is 81 years old, is too old to run for re-election. Those anxieties crescendoed in the wake of his first debate with Donald Trump, in which Trump lied repeatedly about a range of issues and Biden struggled to push back or even answer questions coherently. Following the debate, more than 30 Democrats in Congress called on Biden to end his presidential campaign, with the powerful former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly ratcheting up the pressure on Biden to drop out of the race last week.In the last few weeks, polling has increasingly shown Biden lagging in critical swing states, with large majorities of Democratic party voters indicating they believe he should not renew his campaign. Recent national polls also show Trump losing to the vice-president, whose path to victory, like Biden’s, will involve winning the critical states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.Not only Democrats welcomed the announcement. Dan Rose, who has long supported Trump, said he was glad Biden pulled out of the race.“He doesn’t have the caliber we need in a president,” said Rose, who said he worries about the economy. Rose, who is from De Pere, Wisconsin, said he will still support Trump but felt Biden had made the right choice in ending his campaign. “The Democrats might be in a pickle now,” he added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf the Democrats are in a pickle, few grassroots party members expressed concern following Biden’s announcement.“How courageous and brave of him to do that,” said Chris Fleming, who is retired and volunteers for a group organizing rural Democratic voters in Wisconsin. This year, Fleming’s husband had $15,000 in student debt cancelled by the Biden administration – which she said left her feeling grateful for Biden. “I have nothing but respect for him,” she said.Jake Knashishu, an attorney from Decatur, Georgia, said Biden’s departure from the race “relieved, for the most part, concerns about him being able to really present himself as an effective alternative to Trump”. Biden’s withdrawal gives Democrats a better shot at Georgia, Knanishu said.He had spoken with a neighbor on Sunday who “saw Joe Biden as kind of Ruth Bader Ginsburg 2.0 – holding on and refusing to pass the torch and maintain stability”, said Knashishu. “She just feels relieved, because she knows that at least we’re not going to have that happen again.” More