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      Trudeau meets rivals as he seeks united front in face of Trump tariff threat

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      Canada’s federal government has redoubled its efforts to ward off potentially disastrous tariffs from its closest ally, but provincial leaders have hinted at divergent strategies in response to the protectionist threat from president-elect Donald Trump.Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, convened a rare, in-person meeting with his political rivals on Tuesday to brief them on a surprise meeting with Trump at his Florida resort over the weekend.The gathering in Ottawa was attended by Trudeau’s one-time ally Jagmeet Singh of the New Democratic party and Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader and Trudeau antagonist vying to become prime minister in the coming months.Last week, Trump threatened in a social media post to apply devastating levies of 25% on all goods and services from both Mexico and Canada, vowing to keep them in place until “such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country!”Most of Canada’s provinces share a land border with the United States and roughly 75% of the country’s exports are bound for American markets.That figure varies wildly when it comes to provincial economies. The Atlantic provinces send as little as 20% down to their southern counterparts. Alberta, on the other hand, sends nearly 90% of its exports to the US, the vast majority of which are oil.If Ontario were a country, it would be the US’s third-largest trading partner.The province’s premier, Doug Ford, has appealed to a shared history with his American neighbours – and nearly C$500bn of annual trade – in a 60-second ad which will run in the US market including on Fox News and during National Football League games with millions of viewers.Ford also repeated warnings that the measure would rebound on US consumers, telling local media: “1,000% it’s gonna hurt the US. Nine thousand Americans wake up every single morning to build products and parts for Ontario, and customers in Ontario … My message to [Trump] is: Why? Why attack your closest friend, your closest ally?”As much as 85% of Ontario’s exports are sent south, with the vast majority related to the automotive industry.But in British Columbia, where less of its economy is tied to the US, the premier, David Eby, has pledged to search out other export markets.Roughly half of the province’s exports, including softwood lumber and metallurgical coal, from BC is bound to the US, according to provincial trade figures.“We’re going to continue to do our work to expand those trading opportunities,” Eby told reporters, a nod to the growing lure of overseas markets for a province on the Pacific Ocean.Given Trump’s previous follow-through on tariff threats, his latest warning prompted a scramble in Ottawa, with Trudeau securing a meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, becoming the first G7 leader to meet the president-elect since the US election.The meeting, attended by key advisers from both camps, was described as a “very productive meeting” by Trump. Trudeau, who flew to Florida with the aim of dissuading the president from imposing tariffs, described the meeting as “excellent conversation” – but left without any assurances.Without that promise, experts say Canada will need a unified voice to lobby elected officials in the US.“Coordinating Canadian leaders to conduct extensive outreach in the US – which worked well during Trump’s first term – will be harder this time, because an election is looming in Canada, because Trudeau is behind in the polls,” said Roland Paris, a former foreign policy adviser to Trudeau and director of the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.“Discord at home makes this advocacy campaign tougher, but that’s the situation that we face now. It’s a different moment in the political life cycle of this government.Poilievre has spent the last week suggesting the prime minister was caught off-guard by Trump’s win in November, despite assurances from federal officials that contingency plans for a Trump or Kamala Harris win were in place.The Conservative leader also criticized Trudeau’s emergency meeting with provincial premiers last week. “Justin Trudeau’s plan to save the economy? A Zoom call!” he posted on social media.Paris cautioned too much against playing domestic politics with a sensitive trade relationship.“Party leader leaders in Canada are going to have to be careful, because if they’re perceived to be working against the national interest in pursuit of their partisan objectives, then that could blow up in their faces too.” More

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      Can we keep the Elon Musks of the world out of British politics? Only if we act now | Oliver Bullough

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      It is an inevitable consequence of the inequality inherent to the “special relationship” that, as soon as someone wins the election in the US, the British government has to swallow its objections to anything they do. Donald Trump may have been “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” six years ago, but it’s 2024 now and the once and future president has become “a very gracious host” with a soft spot for the royal family. Tech billionaire Elon Musk might compare Keir Starmer’s Britain to Stalin’s Russia but, as long as he’s Trump’s new best friend, “he’s far too important to ignore”.This kind of toadying must be as embarrassing for the politicians doing it as it is for those of us watching it, but it is at least understandable. Being friends with the US is not just the foundation of our national security policy, it’s pretty much the whole thing.What is not understandable is successive governments’ failure to learn from the US experience, and to act to prevent our own democracy from being drowned in dark money. British politicians will no doubt say that overhauling regulations around political donations isn’t a priority, that they’re focused on delivering policies that will improve ordinary people’s lives instead.But reports now suggest Musk is considering giving $100m to Reform UK as what has been described as a “f*** you Starmer payment” that would in effect install Nigel Farage as leader of the opposition. The Guardian reported on Monday that Labour might consider closing some of the loopholes that make such a wild suggestion possible – but only in the second half of this parliament, which can only mean the government has failed to understand how urgent this is.For any US billionaire, let alone the richest man in the world, spending on British politics would be like the owner of a Premier League club deciding to invest at the bottom end of the football pyramid: he could buy not only an awful lot of players, but in short order he’d probably own the whole competition.Total spending on the US presidential and congressional elections this year topped $15bn. In Pennsylvania alone, the two main parties spent almost $600m on advertising, so Musk’s $100m wouldn’t make much difference. In Britain, on the other hand, it would be transformational. The Electoral Commission is yet to publish its report on 2024’s general election, but it is unlikely that any of our parties spent much more than that – on central costs, candidate costs and staff costs – in the whole country over the whole year.A pressing need, therefore, is to limit how much political parties can spend. We do already have restrictions, which were introduced after the 1990s “cash for questions” scandal. But, under Boris Johnson, the Tories increased the limits by almost half to a combined total of about £75.9m on the central party and its candidates. The increase was transparently intended to help the Conservative party since, in the 2019 election, no other party came close to raising enough money to reach the previous threshold.The government must reduce the limit back to its old level. As with a football league, healthy competition and financial propriety suffer when one or two participants can vastly outspend the others, and the stakes are far higher in democracy than they are in sport.If politicians are constantly battling to raise more money than each other, then they will be focused on raising funds for themselves rather than on solving the problems of everyone else. They will also, inevitably, be tempted to offer their donors concessions in exchange for that money. It is in the interests of everyone – apart, of course, from the big donors – to stop that from happening.We also need to reduce the amount that any individual can give. If one man can give £5m to a political party, it inevitably undermines trust. Wealthy people may be different, but few ordinary voters would give away that kind of cash without expecting something in return. In an excellent analysis of the past two decades of political giving published this week, Transparency International suggests a yearly donation cap to any one party of £10,000, while the Labour-aligned thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research apparently intends to recommend a higher limit ofAlthough these changes might stop Musk from throwing his $100m molotov cocktail into the House of Commons, it would not stop him – or other ill-intentioned foreign billionaires – from giving money at all, and this is where I think we need to be radical.The US culture of massive electoral spending has deep roots, but the problem was super-sized in 2010 when the supreme court ruled that corporations have the right to free speech, that spending is a form of speech, and therefore that stopping companies from making donations was unconstitutional. The result was a huge increase in donations to groups supposedly independent of political candidates, but in practice closely aligned with them.In the UK, only individuals registered to vote can donate money to political parties, but this restriction (along with others) can be avoided by making donations via a British-registered company, partnership or “unincorporated association”, an obscure kind of structure that can allow you to disguise who you are.Many observers have proposed complicated arrangements to plug these loopholes, but rich people have lawyers to circumvent complicated arrangements, so I would just ban corporate giving altogether. Companies are not people. They can’t vote, and I see no reason why they should be able to fund political campaigns either. Our democracy belongs to the voters, to no one else, and we need to keep it that way.The final step to plutocrat-proof our political system would be to re-empower the Electoral Commission, which was defanged – again, by Boris Johnson – in 2022. It needs to have its independence from government restored, and to be able to impose the kind of fines that would make even a US billionaire think before seeking to undermine the integrity of our elections. We also need to toughen the law to impose serious criminal penalties for anyone who breaks the law anyway.Democracy is in retreat everywhere, and we cannot be complacent that Britain’s version will survive today’s challenges just because it has in the past. But if we use Trump’s election as the impetus to finally build defences for our political system against dark money and its owners, then at least some good will have come out of it.

      Oliver Bullough is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals, and Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back More

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      How anti-woke spin hit home for Donald Trump | Letters

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      While Nesrine Malik is right in stating that woke talking points weren’t a key part of Kamala Harris’s campaign, she is incorrect in concluding that progressive stances on social issues were in no way responsible for Donald Trump’s election victory (‘Woke’ didn’t lose the US election: the patrician class who hijacked identity politics did, 25 November). Like Malik, I see structural issues as the primary determining factor, my focus as a Democratic activist being on an economy touted as thriving but in fact failing to benefit a populace struggling with obscenely high grocery prices. But having heard Harris equivocate rather than reject controversial statements that were catnip to Trump, I can assure you that there was palpable cultural antagonism too.Those ads of Trump packed a punch, not least “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”, which capitalised on Harris’s failure to clarify her 2019 support (based on a reading of constitutional law) for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners. But just as Harris failed in this regard in 2024, the Democratic leadership has mangled election messaging over many years – opening itself to charges of cultural (certainly not economic) extremism.I find it interesting that Malik has to define “defund the police” after claiming that “even a cursory glance shows” it “is not to abolish policing”. No, a cursory glance at this ludicrous slogan implies, however unintentionally, just that. And to refuse to believe that anti-woke propaganda, sometimes false but often made possible by Democrats’ own missteps, played a part in the disastrous 2024 election results is to refuse the obvious.Karen Thatcher-SmithSonoma, California, US Nesrine Malik argues that a “cursory glance” would show that “defunding the police” was never about abolishing the police but rather a call to invest in preventive measures. This rather begs the question: why on earth did progressives campaign with such a slogan? It is hard to imagine populist agent provocateurs coming up with a more effective means of separating well‑meaning progressives from the public at large.Alex CampbellBrighton, East Sussex Nesrine Malik is right that the “common enemy is the way in which society itself is designed”. The economic moguls ruling the patrician class successfully sold to many a self-fulfilling investment in a fearful characterisation of wokeness as an absurd and impertinent intrusion in our lives. It is a compelling, too-easy answer when an underlying fear of loss of privilege or self‑challenging the pain of false beliefs around our rightful place in the social order is at stake. Inertia rules – for the moment.Genuine, universal change is hard. It’s hard for the privileged to give up their luxuries and for the oppressed to imagine deserving and enjoying a better life in a truly egalitarian society.Wokeness itself is not the problem. There is no such thing as woke, there is only waking. It is a never-ending process. It is a journey that we must all undertake – towards a society that fully values and expresses the spirituality, democracy, caring, sharing, learning and joy inherent in a naturally evolving life, and no one must be left behind.Daniel O’SullivanMcLeans Ridges, New South Wales, Australia More

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      ‘He loves to divide and conquer’: Canada and Mexico brace for second Trump term

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      Stone-faced as he stared into a gaggle of cameras on Tuesday, the leader of Canada’s largest province laid bare how it feels to be America’s northern neighbour and closest ally this week.“It’s like a family member stabbing you right in the heart,” said Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford. A day before, president-elect Donald Trump had pledged hefty tariffs on Mexico and Canada, the US’s two largest trading partners. “It’s the biggest threat we’ve ever seen … It’s unfortunate. It’s very, very hurtful.”For both Mexico and Canada, whose economic successes are enmeshed in their multibillion-dollar trade relationships with the United States, the forecasted chaos and disruption of a second Trump term has arrived. And the first salvo from Trump has already forced leaders from Mexico and Canada to revisit their relationship with the US – and with each other.Both have maxims to describe living in the shadow of the world’s largest economic and military superpower, which sees nearly $2tn worth of goods and services pass through its two land borders.“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau told then US president Richard Nixon. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”For Mexicans, it is the words of the 19th-century dictator Porfirio Díaz: “Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States.”The vagaries of the relationship were tested again this week when Trump threatened in a social media post to apply devastating levies of 25% on all goods and services from both countries, and to keep them in place until “such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country!”Although in 2018 the US, Canada and Mexico renegotiated the Nafta trade pact that Trump had long blamed for gutting US manufacturing, the three countries still have deeply intertwined supply chains – especially an automotive industry that spans the continent – making a levy of that magnitude potentially devastating to all.In Canada, Trump’s demands have left the government scrambling to make sense of the threat – and how seriously to take it.“‘Good-faith negotiator’ is not usually a descriptor of Donald Trump. He loves to disrupt it. He loves to divide and conquer,” said Colin Robertson, a former senior Canadian diplomat who has had numerous postings in the US. “Trump is determined to truly make his mark. Last time he was disorganized. This time, he’s certainly started off demonstrating a high degree of organization.”Even before Trump’s announcement, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and a handful of provincial premiers had mused openly about cutting Mexico out of future trade talks, instead pivoting towards a Canada-US trade pact – a move that Mexico’s lead negotiator called a “betrayal”.On Wednesday, Trudeau held an emergency meeting with all 10 premiers to push a “Team Canada” approach to the confrontation, pledging hours later to invest more in border security – a nod to Trump’s criticism of Canada’s patrolling of its border.A challenge for Canada is a need to approach Trump with skepticism, but also to take the threats seriously, says Robertson, adding that Canada’s trade relationship with the US is immensely lopsided. “The reality is, we need them. They’re big, we’re small.”Still, Trump’s demands “are perverse, but unfortunately predictable”, says Roland Paris, director of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and former foreign affairs adviser to Trudeau.He notes that only a sliver of the fentanyl entering the US comes from Canada, a figure so small the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) does not even mention Canada in a report from 2020. As for migrants entering the US, Canada’s federal minister says yearly interceptions are similar to a “significant weekend” at the Mexico border.“This is [Trump’s] modus operandi,” said Paris. “He’s not wasting any time throwing America’s principal trading partners off balance, before he even enters office.”Ottawa’s efforts to smooth things over with Trump are also hampered by domestic politics. Trudeau remains immensely unpopular in polls, and the rival Conservatives have cast the prime minister as weak and ill-equipped to both preserve what Nixon called Canada’s “special relationship” with the US and to face off against a mercurial president.Paris imagines the prime minister’s cabinet, especially veterans of bruising negotiations with Trump during his first term, as “determined” to manage relations with a country that for decades has remained a staunch ally. He says years of close work has produced a significant overlap in policy goals for the two nations, including skepticism of China and a need to secure critical mineral and energy supply chains.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Canada is going to need resolve, patience and the most far-reaching advocacy campaign this country has ever conducted in the United States,” he said. “But everybody knows that Trump is so unpredictable that there’s no saying what he might do this time.”For Mexico, which has long borne the brunt of Trump’s ire, Monday’s tariff threat comes amid already tense relations, including a reform to elect almost all judges by popular vote that has drawn sharp criticism from the US. At the same time, the arrest in July of two top Sinaloa cartel bosses in Texas, a move that surprised Mexican officials, has triggered a bloody gang war that the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, blames on the US.On Wednesday, Sheinbaum spoke with Trump, a conversation which the US president-elect characterised as “wonderful” after he claimed the Mexican president pledged to “stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border”. Sheinbaum later gently clarified that she wouldn’t close the border, but that the call was “very kind” and had convinced her that no tariffs would happen.Martha Bárcena, a former Mexican ambassador to the US, said Trump’s tariff suggestion has kicked off “panic” in the Mexican community living in the US. “How can you hit your partners in a free trade agreement with tariffs 25% higher than what you put on the rest of the world? It’s crazy,” she said.“What was his ceiling is now his floor,” she said of his previous negotiating position on trade. “The lesson? Never yield to a bully.”Alejandro Celorio Alcántara, a Mexican diplomat who oversaw migration when Trump first came to power, says the bombast of the next US president can be easier to work with than more traditional allies.“The Biden administration is a little more diplomatic, but this can actually make the discussion more complicated, because you don’t know what the terms of negotiation are,” he said. “Maybe it’s just my style of negotiation. It’s simpler when it’s more open. They put the cards on the table: ‘This is what we want.’ Then you can respond.”Both Mexico and Canada have scores of diplomats already experienced with Trump, but both sides also expressed concern that many of the key figures in Trump’s first term, who acted as a “check” on the president’s whim-based policy decisions, will be absent from the second administration, replaced by loyalists and idealogues who will do whatever he says.Still, for Mexican officials, there is a glimmer of hope that those in positions of power are more reasonable when they’re not in the media spotlight. Alcántara noted that “border czar” Tom Homan, who recently pledged to carry out a “mass deportation’, is known for his controversial positions, “but if you take the facts to him and explain them, he understands. He has a certain discourse in the media that’s very aggressive, but when you sit down together, you can talk.”For Mexico and Canada, a recognition that their fates remain tied to the US has forced them to redouble their efforts, not to reconsider their relationship.“In the end, we need to bet on a strong North America,” said Alcántara. It’s simple: make North America great again. As a region, not just the United States.” More

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      Abandoning Ukraine means ‘infinitely higher’ long-term security costs, MI6 chief says

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      Abandoning Ukraine would jeopardise British, European and American security and lead to “infinitely higher” costs in the long term, the head of MI6 has warned in a speech that amounted to a plea to Donald Trump to continue supporting Kyiv.Richard Moore, giving a rare speech, said he believed Vladimir Putin “would not stop” at Ukraine if he was allowed to subjugate it in any peace talks involving the incoming US Republican administration.“If Putin is allowed to succeed in reducing Ukraine to a vassal state, he will not stop there. Our security – British, French, European and transatlantic – will be jeopardised,” Moore said during an address given in Paris alongside his French counterpart.The spy chief was touted earlier this week as a possible surprise appointment as the UK’s ambassador to the US, though he is not thought to be pressing for the job. The former Labour minister Peter Mandelson is considered the frontrunner for a critical role at a delicate time in transatlantic relations.Moore has served as the head of MI6 for four years in what is normally considered a five-year job. At the start of his tenure he overlapped with the Trump adviser Richard Grenell, who was the acting director of national intelligence.Trump has complained about the expense of supporting Kyiv and said repeatedly that he wants to end the war, claiming he could do so “within 24 hours”. JD Vance, the vice-president-elect, has suggested freezing the conflict on the current frontlines, and denying Ukraine Nato membership for an extended period.“The cost of supporting Ukraine is well known,” said Moore. “But the cost of not doing so would be infinitely higher. If Putin succeeds, China would weigh the implications, North Korea would be emboldened and Iran would become still more dangerous.”A key British argument to the incoming Trump administration is to try to link the war in Ukraine with US concerns about the rising military might of China, emphasising that the arrival of North Korean troops is bringing authoritarianism from Asia into what was previously a European conflict.Moore emphasised the UK’s history of intelligence cooperation with France in a speech to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, but he was also careful to emphasise that he expected UK-US intelligence cooperation to be unchanged regardless of any political tensions.“For decades the US-UK intelligence alliance has made our societies safer; I worked successfully with the first Trump administration to advance our shared security and look forward to doing so again,” Moore told his audience at the UK embassy, a short walk from the Élysée Palace, the official home of the French president.The spy chief’s public presence in the French capital reflects a wider political rapprochement between the British prime minister and the French president. After Trump’s victory, Keir Starmer met Emmanuel Macron in France where the two discussed Ukraine amid reports that the Republicans would like European soldiers to act as peacekeepers if a ceasefire was agreed.Moore said Putin’s goal was to “challenge western resolve” and that western spy agencies had “recently uncovered a staggeringly reckless campaign of Russian sabotage in Europe” – a reference to a mixture of arson, assassination and kidnap plots, which included a fire at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham caused by an incendiary device hidden in a package sent at the behest of Russia.Moscow has said its demands regarding Ukraine remain unchanged. Earlier this month, the Kremlin said its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the “direct result” of a Nato policy that aimed at “creating a staging ground against Russia on Ukrainian soil”.Russia continues to demand “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, and in previous peace negotiations said Kyiv’s military should be reduced to 50,000. It also claims the territory of four eastern and southern Ukrainian provinces, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk, of which only the fourth is fully occupied. More

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      Trump victory not a mandate for radical change, top election forecaster says

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      Despite Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the presidential election, a political scientist who developed a model that correctly predicted his sweep of battleground states warns that voters have not necessarily given the president-elect a mandate to make radical changes.In a paper released with little fanfare three weeks before the vote, Cornell University professor of government Peter Enns and his co-authors accurately forecast that Trump would win all seven swing states, based on a model they built that uses state-level presidential approval ratings and indicators of economic health.In an interview with the Guardian, Enns said his model’s conclusions suggest voters chose Trump not because they want to see his divisive policies implemented, but rather because they were frustrated with the state of the economy during Joe Biden’s presidency, an obstacle Kamala Harris was not popular enough to overcome.“If this election can be explained by what voters thought of Biden and Harris and economic conditions, it really goes against the notion of a mandate for major change from Trump,” said Enns.“If Trump was looking to maximize support, being cautious about changes that are massive changes would be what the model suggests is the optimal strategy.”On the campaign trail, Trump promised norm-shattering measures to accomplish his objectives, ranging from deploying the military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants to levying trade tariffs against allies that do not cooperate with his administration.On 5 November, voters responded by giving Trump an overwhelming victory in the electoral college, and also by making him the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years.Both outcomes were predicted in the paper released on 15 October by Enns, Jonathan Colner of New York University, Anusha Kumar of Yale University School of Medicine and Julius Lagodny of German media firm El Pato. At the time, polls of the seven swing states showed Trump and Harris tied, usually within their margin of error, signaling that the election was either’s to win.Rather than focusing on the candidates’ support nationwide or in the swing states, Enns and his co-authors built a model that combines two types of data: presidential approval ratings from all 50 states using data from Verasight, the survey firm he co-founded, among others, and a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia index measuring state-level real income, manufacturing and labor market conditions. Both sets of data were compiled more than 100 days before the vote.Enns first deployed the model in the 2020 presidential election, where it correctly predicted the outcome in 49 states, with the exception of Georgia. This year, Enns and his co-authors wrote that Harris, who took over as the Democratic nominee for Biden in late July, was on track to lose both the popular vote and the electoral college, including battleground states Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Georgia.“If Harris wins the election, we will not know exactly why, but we will know her victory surmounted conditions so disadvantageous to the Democratic party that the incumbent president dropped out of the race. She will have added major momentum to the Democratic campaign and/or Trump and the Republican party will have squandered a sizable advantage,” Enns and his co-authors wrote.The forecast wound up being accurate, though, with ballot counting continuing in a few states, Trump seems set for a plurality victory in the popular vote, not the 50.3% majority they predicted.Then there’s the question of whether Biden would have done better if he had stayed in the race. The 82-year-old president has been unpopular through most of his term as Americans weathered the highest inflation rate since the 1980s, even as the labor market recovered strongly from the Covid pandemic. Biden was also dogged by concerns about his age and fitness for office, which culminated in a terrible debate performance against Trump in June that led him to drop out of the race weeks later.“Given Biden’s low approval ratings and economic conditions, our model forecasted less than a one in 10 chance of a Biden victory if he had stayed in the race. Even after accounting for Harris’s approval ratings, which are notably higher than Biden’s, the Democrats face an uphill battle,” the authors wrote.If Harris had a chance to overcome the disadvantages she entered the race with, Enns said it would have required convincing voters she would be a very different president than her boss – which it appears she failed to do.“There’s some economic headwinds, there’s the Biden incumbency headwinds. And what I think that suggests is, given these headwinds that Harris faced, the optimal strategy would have been to differentiate herself more from Biden,” Enns said.But the vice-president’s fate may have been sealed in the years that preceded her bid for the White House, when she failed to build the sort of public profile that would have pushed her approval ratings up to the level that she needed them to be.“If she had been more popular, you can think about what could have happened to make our forecast wrong. So the fact that 100 days out, our forecast was so accurate, that really enhanced the campaign, had minimal effect on the outcome,” Enns said.“The task at hand was to outperform the forecast, and her campaign wasn’t able to do that.” More

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      Democrat Derek Tran ousts Republican rival in key California House seat

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      Democrat Derek Tran ousted Republican Michelle Steel in a southern California House district Wednesday that was specifically drawn to give Asian Americans a stronger voice on Capitol Hill.Steel said in a statement: “Like all journeys, this one is ending for a new one to begin.” When she captured the seat in 2020, Steel joined Washington state Democrat Marilyn Strickland and California Republican Young Kim as the first Korean American women elected to Congress.Tran, a lawyer and worker rights advocate and the son of Vietnamese refugees, declared victory earlier this week. He said his win “is a testament to the spirit and resilience of our community. As the son of Vietnamese refugees, I understand firsthand the journey and sacrifices many families in our district have made for a better life.”The contest is one of the last to be decided this year, with Republicans now holding 220 seats in the House, with Democrats at 214. The Associated Press has not declared a winner in California’s 13th district, where Democrat Adam Gray was leading Republican John Duarte by a couple of hundred votes.Steel held an early edge after election day, but late-counted ballots pushed Tran over the top.Steel filed a statement of candidacy on Monday with federal regulators, which would allow her to continue raising funds. It wasn’t immediately clear if she planned to seek a return to Congress.In the campaign, Tran warned of Republican threats to abortion rights. Steel opposes abortion with exceptions for rape, incest or to save the life of the pregnant woman, while not going so far as to support a federal ban. Tran also warned that Donald Trump’s return to the White House would put democracy at risk.On Capitol Hill, Steel has been outspoken in resisting tax increases and says she stands strongly with Israel in its war with Hamas. “As our greatest ally in the Middle East, the United States must always stand with Israel,” she said. She advocates for more police funding and has spotlighted her efforts on domestic violence and sexual abuse.The largest demographic in the district, which is anchored in Orange county, south-east of Los Angeles, is Asian Americans, and it includes the nation’s biggest Vietnamese community. Democrats hold a four-point registration edge.Incomplete returns showed that Steel was winning in Orange county, the bulk of the district. Tran’s winning margin came from a small slice of the district in Los Angeles county, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly two to one. More

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      The Guardian view on the Lebanon ceasefire: a lasting regional peace must go through Gaza | Editorial

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      Unsurprisingly, Joe Biden struck an upbeat, optimistic note on Tuesday as he announced a US-brokered ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah. “It reminds us that peace is possible,” said Mr Biden, as the deal brought to an end the 14-month conflict, during which close to 4,000 people lost their lives and hundreds of thousands were displaced.For the outgoing American president, who has signally failed to restrain Israel’s excesses after the heinous Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023, the agreement amounts to a valedictory breakthrough after months of weak and ineffective diplomacy. More importantly, it affords the suffering people of Lebanon some respite, after a bombing campaign and ground invasion that paid scant regard to the appalling impact on civilian lives. For the 60,000 citizens of Israel forced to flee the country’s northern border region by Hezbollah rockets, there is the prospect of a return home after spending more than a year in displacement camps.Peace on Israel’s northern front will inevitably spark hopes of wider progress, as the disgraceful, savage destruction of Gaza continues to the south, and hope dwindles for surviving Israeli hostages held captive there. But it would be unwise to overstate the catalytic potential of an agreement that was made on the terms of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and to suit his interests.Crucially, Hezbollah’s weakness meant that Israel was able to decouple the Lebanon and Gaza wars, reaching a ceasefire that leaves it with a free hand in the latter. Based on a UN security council resolution that ended the 2006 Lebanon war but was never fully implemented, the deal will oblige Israeli forces to depart and Hezbollah to pull back north of the Litani River in southern Lebanon. This time the buffer zone created is more likely to stick. Hezbollah is currently in a state of disarray, denuded of leaders, infrastructure and military hardware.With the live threat of a powerful Iranian proxy on Israel’s doorstep removed, Mr Netanyahu is free to double down on his bellicose objectives elsewhere – notably in relation to Tehran. In Gaza, meanwhile, he has shown no willingness to engage in peace talks brokered by Qatar, which suspended its mediating role this month in exasperation. The unconscionable death toll there now stands at more than 44,000 – the vast majority women and children.In a region on the brink, any lasting settlement must go through Gaza and involve the creation of realistic conditions for a viable Palestinian state. As Óscar Romero, the martyred Salvadoran bishop, once wrote, “Peace is not the silence of cemeteries / Peace is not the silent result of violent repression” – a warning that resonates starkly in Gaza’s ongoing tragedy. But Mr Netanyahu has no desire to be a peacemaker, as he attempts to dodge a corruption trial, and an election that would empower the anger of voters following 7 October. His interest lies rather in perpetuating a sense of national emergency; and in indulging far-right members of his cabinet who could bring him down, and who dream of new settlements in a broken, ethnically cleansed Gaza.As Donald Trump prepares to replace Joe Biden in the White House, the world must hope that his appetite for imposing immediate solutions opens up new possibilities. For now, welcome developments in the north offer little comfort to the desperate inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. More