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      Democrats use AI in effort to stay ahead with Latino and Black voters

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      Latino and Black-led Democratic and progressive organizations are mobilizing to come up with novel uses of AI to reach voters of color.On Discord, a social messaging app that connects gamers, it’s taking the form of a smiling chatbot powered by artificial intelligence that evokes Pixar’s animated robot Wall-E. When you click, a conversation opens up that says: “This is the very beginning of your legendary conversation with Vote-E.”You can ask election related questions such as “How do I register to vote?” or when North Carolina’s voter registration deadline is – and the answers are almost instantaneous.Vote-E is an experiment in how to crack one of the toughest problems for Democrats – reaching voters of color, especially younger ones, using platforms where they actually spend time, and persuading them to vote for Democrats. And it comes at a transformative, but uncertain time for the party, with Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, who must use existing infrastructure to beat Donald Trump.NextGen America, which built Vote-E and is one of the nation’s largest youth voter organizations, says it allows young men to access the bot from Discord chats and Twitch streams of Latino and Black gaming influencers.“We’re seeing voter turnout gaps between Black men and women and Latino men and women,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, NextGen America’s president, noting that while there’s a focus on connecting with young people on college campuses, not everyone is there. The chatbot is active in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina.It’s just one example of progressive groups of color experimenting with artificial intelligence which wasn’t on their radar four years ago: AI chatbots are now also recruiting Latino voters from WhatsApp and Black voters from Facebook Messenger; they’re using natural language processing to record voter interactions with canvassers and identify shared concerns; and even using it to index and identify friendly Spanish-language sites to place an ad touting Democrats’ clean energy plan.With the election mere months away, the challenge facing Democrats remains how to galvanize younger voters and voters of color.While more Latinos turned out in 2020 than ever before, Hispanics still lag behind white, Black, and Asian and Pacific Islander voters as a proportion of their population of eligible voters, according to Catalist, a progressive data hub, which noted this is true across communities of color, “where non-voting rates are substantially higher”.Héctor Sánchez Barba, the president and chief executive of Mi Familia Vota, told companies he was less interested in their diversity dollars than in their budgets and expertise in the realm of data, research, and innovation. It’s why he recruited Denise Cook, a Cuban American former enterprise software architect who spent 16 years at IBM to join MFV as its chief data and innovation officer. She leads an all-Latina team, which created its own chatbot and uses AI to have human-sounding, bilingual conversations with Latino voters on platforms like WhatsApp.Canvassers with the group ask for permission to record conversations with voters on their mobile phones or tablets. Those interactions are then turned into data using natural language processing, a type of AI. This way, MFV is able to quickly summarize voter priorities and figure out if it is speaking about the economy, reproductive rights or climate optimally to voters.“We need this kind of brainpower when we’re fighting the biggest enemy our community has ever had,” Sánchez Barba said of Trump. “This is about using the most important technological advancements, including artificial intelligence, for good and to save our democracy.”Many leaders of color said they are mindful of pitfalls around AI but open to harnessing its power and testing possible strategies. Larry Huynh, the president of the American Association of Political Consultants and the founder of Trilogy Interactive, is so interested in incorporating AI into political campaigns that he followed leaders in other industries by creating an internal taskforce at his company.He believes campaigns should follow the lead of brands, which use AI voiceovers of celebrities and public figures, to have their natural mouth movements seamlessly disseminate campaign messages. Huynh’s research has found AI voices tailored to their target audience – young male speaker, young male voter, say – appear to be more persuasive.One example he gave is of an allied group creating a video of the candidate – now Harris – speaking perfect Spanish in her own voice aimed at Arizona or Nevada voters.“If it’s well-delivered and it doesn’t seem odd or off, some voters could appreciate that communication in their predominant language,” he said.Putting out a wholly AI-made Harris, however, would be highly scrutinized both from within the party and by Republicans. Harris is already a target of deepfakes that put words in her mouth as well as ones meant to sexualize and demean her. Yet another deepfake of her, even a positive one, could strike the wrong chord. A Trump has said she used AI to fake a huge rally crowd. The photo of her campaign stop was real, though. Concerns over disinformation have only been heightened by the spread of AI-generated images of Trump getting arrested in New York and an AI robocall that mimicked Biden’s voice telling New Hampshire voters not to cast a ballot.Still, progressive groups are charging forward. Poder Latinx, an advocacy group committed to building Latino political power, created an ad touting the clean energy plan from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. It was timed to coincide with the popular Copa América soccer tournament last month. Partnering with Mundial Media, the group was able to serve the ad to US Latinos reading Spanish-language news sites in places like Arizona. Mundial Media’s Cadmus AI engine crawled the sites and indexed their keywords to make sure the soccer-themed clean energy ad would fit in with the content on the pages.Yadira Sanchez, the co-founder of Poder Latinx, was happy with how the campaign reached voters, over-delivering impressions and click-thru rates from Latinos, including finding a 64% Hispanic male audience.“We know that the best connection is voter to voter contact. This technology is complementing the on-the-ground canvassing we are already using,” she said. “Technology, AI in particular, is great to reach younger, more online voters.“But AI may not be viewed as safe enough for initiatives that require serious resources to scale up in time for November. And there are concerns it could freak out voters in the wrong context.In focus groups in Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia this year, Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPac, found “hesitation” from Black voters around AI.“There’s a concern people have with what they’re seeing and where it’s coming from exactly,” she said, noting voters “don’t know what to trust and are suspicious and skeptical of everything.”Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a group that advocates for Black Americans and has a $25m program for 2024, has met with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, alongside senior staff at Meta, Google and OpenAI, to call for commitments on how AI will be used around election tools, which he says aren’t ready for primetime.“Imagine if there were no regulations for cars and it was all about who could get their new vehicle to market fastest?” he said, citing Musk’s Tesla, which has recalled its latest model four times. “It’s Tesla on steroids. At least cars get recalled, but there is no infrastructure or body that recalls tech.”Quentin James, founder and president of The Collective Pac, a group that works to elect Black Democrats and is using the Facebook Messenger chatbot to get registration information from voters, stressed that deepfakes or ads where one campaign is using the likeness of their opponent to mislead voters should be shut down immediately.Still, he said, Democrats must be willing to use the tools at their disposal to beat Trump, because the other side will be looking at them as well.“I don’t know if FEC law can catch up to this in a few months, so we should use it to our advantage,” he said. “There’s no way we can control what happens with technology in this short time period.” More

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      Biden to give possible swan song at Democratic convention amid Gaza protests

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      Joe Biden will take centre stage for perhaps the last time on Monday night when he addresses the Democratic national convention in Chicago – as the US president faces a backlash over one of his most complex legacies.Tens of thousands of protesters are expected to converge in the host city to demand that the US end military aid to Israel for its ongoing war in Gaza. Activists have branded Biden “Genocide Joe” and called for the vice-president, Kamala Harris, to change course.Just over a month ago Biden had been expecting to give Thursday’s closing speech as he accepted the Democratic nomination for 2024. But his withdrawal from the race last month, and the party’s consolidation around Harris, means that Biden will speak on opening night and then set off on a holiday.The president has been reportedly working on his address with his long-time adviser Mike Donilon and chief speechwriter, Vinay Reddy. He is expected to return to a familiar theme – the defence of democracy against Donald Trump – and tout Harris as the ideal presidential candidate.Biden is likely to receive a far more electrifying welcome as an outgoing president than he ever did as a candidate. The convention will honour his half-century career in politics as senator, vice-president and president, with the first lady, Jill Biden, among those paying tribute. Harris is likely to join Biden on stage.It will be a bittersweet moment for the 81-year-old, who is still reportedly irked by the role that the senior Democratic figures Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer played in pressuring him to step aside amid questions about his mental fitness.Still, the mood among Democrats is buoyant as opinion polls show Harris leading or tied with Trump in crucial swing states. The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, told CNN’s State of the Union programme that the convention would be “like a rock concert”. A-list stars are likely to inject further energy.Wiley Nickel, a congressman from North Carolina who was with Harris in Raleigh last Friday when she unveiled her economic policy agenda, said in a phone interview: “The feeling is like it was back in 2008 when I worked for President Obama. People are incredibly excited. They’re focused on the issues instead of Joe Biden’s age. When we have a campaign focused on the issues we’re going to win.”But the party is eager to avoid any repeat of their Chicago convention in 1968, when anti-Vietnam war protests and a police riot led to scenes of chaos that stunned the nation and contributed to the party’s defeat in November.The death toll in Gaza has exceeded 40,000, according to the health ministry there. The biggest protest group the Coalition to March on the DNC has planned demonstrations on Monday and Thursday to coincide with Biden and Harris’s speeches. Organisers say they expect at least 20,000 activists to demonstrate, including students who protested against the war on college campuses.The switch at the top of the ticket has given some activists pause but others contend that Harris is part of the Biden administration and so complicit. Her speech on Thursday will be watched closely for signs that she is willing to take a harder line against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.Peter Beinart, a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York, argues that Harris can distinguish herself simply be enforcing an existing law that bars the US from assisting any unit of a foreign security force that commits “gross violations” of human rights.“The premise of the Leahy law is that all lives, including those of Palestinians, are equally precious,” Beinart wrote in the New York Times. “Kamala Harris can show, finally, that a major-party nominee for president agrees.”On Sunday, there was march along Michigan Avenue against the war in Gaza and for abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. The march began in late afternoon and stretched into the night. Police lined the march route and there were no signs of major conflict. At one point, anti-abortion activists staged a small counter-protest.The convention will draw an estimated 50,000 people to America’s third-biggest city including delegates, activists and journalists. Security will be tight, with street closures around the convention centre, while police have undergone de-escalation training.On the eve of the convention, Democrats released their party platform, a document of more than 90 pages presenting their policy priorities. The platform was voted on by the convention’s platform committee before Biden’s exit and repeatedly refers to his “second term”.On Monday, the convention will focus on the Biden administration’s policy accomplishments and feature former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton; Tuesday will contrast Trump’s and Harris’s visions for America; Wednesday will emphasise the importance of protecting individual freedoms; Thursday is entitled “For Our Future”, underlined by Harris’s speech.Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, will spend the week counter-programming the Democratic convention with a tour of battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia. More

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      Iranian group used ChatGPT to try to influence US election, OpenAI says

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      OpenAI said on Friday it had taken down accounts of an Iranian group for using its ChatGPT chatbot to generate content meant for influencing the US presidential election and other issues.The operation, identified as Storm-2035, used ChatGPT to generate content focused on topics such as commentary on the candidates on both sides in the US elections, the conflict in Gaza and Israel’s presence at the Olympic Games and then shared it via social media accounts and websites, Open AI said.Investigation by the Microsoft-backed AI company showed ChatGPT was used for generating long-form articles and shorter social media comments.OpenAI said the operation did not appear to have achieved meaningful audience engagement.The majority of the identified social media posts received few or no likes, shares or comments and the company did not see indications of web articles being shared across social media.The accounts have been banned from using OpenAI’s services and the company continues to monitor activities for any further attempts to violate policies, it said.Earlier in August, a Microsoft threat-intelligence report said the Iranian network Storm-2035, comprising four websites masquerading as news outlets, was actively engaging US voter groups on opposing ends of the political spectrum.The engagement was being built with “polarizing messaging on issues such as the US presidential candidates, LGBTQ rights, and the Israel-Hamas conflict”, the report stated.The Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, and her Republican rival, Donald Trump, are locked in a tight race, ahead of the presidential election on 5 November.The AI firm said in May it had disrupted five covert influence operations that sought to use its models for “deceptive activity” across the internet. More

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      Trump reportedly considers endorsing expanded child tax credit after Harris unveils economic plan – live

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      Trump is considering endorsing an expanded $5,000 child tax credit for parents of all income levels, an official at his campaign told Semafor.“President Trump will consider a significant expansion of the child tax credit that applies to American families,” a Trump campaign official told Semafor. “President Trump respects and listens to his running mate Senator Vance.”The news comes just hours after Harris announced her own plan for a $6,000 child tax credit, and days after Vance proposed a $5,000 child tax credit during a CBS News interview.Cornel West will not appear on Michigan’s presidential ballot this fall, election officials told the Washington Post today. The independent presidential candidate’s ballot access was denied over notary issues, the state’s director of elections said in a letter.“The charges regarding procedural errors in our filings, such as notarization specifics, are trivial technicalities being weaponized to distract from substantive policy debates,” West’s adviser Edwin DeJesus said in a statement to the Post. “We are confident that these accusations will be seen for what they are – frivolous and unfounded attempts to stifle opposition and debate.”West’s campaign says it will appeal the decision, but must do so in five days as it did not previously respond to a notification from election officials in July.Engaging with young voters. Very mindful. Very demure. Very cutesy. Just hours after VP hopeful Tim Walz joined TikTok, the White House is joining in on attempts to connect with gen-Z voters by playing along with the latest meme sweeping social platforms.For more on the origins of the meme, read Alaina Demopoulos’s postmortem of brat summer:The White House has released a new statement from Joe Biden on the Middle East.In it, Biden states: “Earlier today, I received an update from my negotiating team on the ground in Doha and directed them to put forward the comprehensive bridging proposal presented today, which offers the basis for coming to a final agreement on a ceasefire and hostage release deal. I spoke separately with Amir Sheikh Tamim and President Sisi to review the significant progress made in Doha over the past two days of talks, and they expressed the strong support of Qatar and Egypt for the US proposal as co-mediators in this process. Our teams will remain on the ground to continue technical work over the coming days, and senior officials will convene again in Cairo before the end of the week. They will report to me regularly. I am sending Secretary Blinken to Israel to reaffirm my iron-clad support for Israel’s security, continue our intensive efforts to conclude this agreement and to underscore that with the comprehensive ceasefire and hostage release deal now in sight, no one in the region should take actions to undermine this process.”For more on the status of ceasefire negotiations, read Jason Burke’s and Bethan McKernan’s reporting:For those following along, JD Vance has landed in Cincinnati after an earlier midair emergency forced his plane to return to the Milwaukee airport.According to the New York Times, which had a reporter onboard the flight, the plane sat on the Milwaukee tarmac for about an hour before continuing on its way to Cincinnati.In an apparent response to Kamala Harris’s speech in North Carolina today, Trump has taken to Truth Social.The former president writes: “Kamala Harris wants to raise your taxes and make you pay for free healthcare and free housing in luxury hotels for her millions of illegal aliens. Meanwhile, our Veterans are sleeping on the streets and Kamala’s running mate, Weirdo Tim Walz, voted against my VA Mission Act that made healthcare more affordable and accessible for our Nation’s Heroes! Kamala and Walz will put Criminals, Terrorists, and Illegal Aliens FIRST. I will always put law-abiding, hardworking, patriotic AMERICANS First!”For more on the steps Harris proposed to fight child poverty, housing instability and inflation, check out George Chidi’s report:In lighter news, you may have seen the author Malcolm Harris’s tweet earlier this week that he accidentally acquired a Project 2025 swag bag.The Washington Post caught up with the Marxist journalist, who apparently was visited by police after posting on X:After seeing Harris’s tweets, a woman who describes herself on LinkedIn as a Project 2025 staffer called the police and filed a complaint for theft, according to a police report obtained by the Post.The cliff notes? Harris ultimately returned the duffle bag to the Heritage Foundation himself.Tim Walz has joined TikTok, or as he prefers to say, “TimTok”. The Minnesota governor’s first post features his dog Scout at a dog park along the banks of the Mississippi.In under a month, the Harris-Walz campagin has reignited gen-Z enthusiasm for the 2024 election, largely through memes and videos shared on TikTok, Instagram and other social platforms. Scout featured prominently in one post that began circulating in gen Z and millennial circles as Harris considered VP candidates earlier this month:Although Joe Biden signed a bill that would ban TikTok, or force its Chinese owners to sell it, Democrats have flocked to the app in recent months to drum up support from younger voters.Trump is considering endorsing an expanded $5,000 child tax credit for parents of all income levels, an official at his campaign told Semafor.“President Trump will consider a significant expansion of the child tax credit that applies to American families,” a Trump campaign official told Semafor. “President Trump respects and listens to his running mate Senator Vance.”The news comes just hours after Harris announced her own plan for a $6,000 child tax credit, and days after Vance proposed a $5,000 child tax credit during a CBS News interview.Another plank of Kamala Harris’s economic platform was a promise to lower housing costs by expanding the housing supply.Here’s the moment where she announced it, in her just-concluded speech in Raleigh, North Carolina:Joe Biden had sought to increase the supply of affordable housing with his ill-fated Build Back Better plan, but that did not make it through Congress.Last month, shortly before he dropped out of the presidential race, the president proposed capping annual rent increases for some landlords at 5%. But, as is the case with much of his agenda, Congress would need to pass a new law to make that happen, and the Republicans controlling the House have shown no interest in doing so.A charter plane carrying JD Vance, dubbed Trump Force Two, made an emergency landing in Milwaukee after a malfunction with its door, CNN reports. Then plane then took back off and continued its flight:Vance earlier in the day held a campaign event at a police union office in the city.The GOP is teeing up their counterattack to Kamala Harris’s economic proposals.Earlier this afternoon, Donald Trump’s campaign announced that JD Vance will deliver remarks on the economy on Monday in Philadelphia, where he’ll undoubtedly criticize the vice-president. And on X this afternoon, Republican congressman Mike Collins accused Harris of, essentially, trying to “buy votes”:As she wrapped up her speech, Kamala Harris debuted a proposal to bring back a tax credit that was credited with dramatically reducing child poverty in the single year it was in effect, and expanding it further.The expanded child tax credit cut poverty for children by about half in 2021, but expired the following year, when negotiations over renewing it broke down. Harris told voters that she would bring back the credit, and make it even more generous:
      As President, I’ll not only restore that tax cut, but expand it. We will provide $6,000 in tax relief to families during the first year of a child’s life. Now, think what that means. Think what that means. That is a vital, vital year of critical development of a child, and the cost can really add up, especially for young parents who need to buy diapers and clothes and a car seat and so much else.
      She argued that she could reduce the federal budget deficit while implementing this plan, though did not quite say how, instead hitting Donald Trump over his policies towards lowering taxes:
      And we will do this while reducing the deficit. Compare my plan with what Donald Trump intends to do, he plans to give billionaires massive tax cuts year after year, and he plans to cut corporate taxes by over a trillion dollars, even as they pull in record profits. And that’s on top of the $2tn tax cut he already signed into law when he was president, which, by the way, overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly went to the wealthiest Americans and corporations and exploded the national deficit.
      You know, I think that if you want to know who someone cares about, look who they fight for.
      And then Harris came at Donald Trump with a tried-and-true attack used by Democrats everywhere, by warning that he would repeal the Affordable Care Act.There’s lots to say about the law, which polling from health policy research firm KFF indicates is generally popular, but which most Republicans continue to oppose. But here’s one thing to keep in mind: it was first passed in 2010, which means there are lots of voters out there who never experienced what the American health insurance system was like before its changes took effect.Harris warned the crowd that repealing the law “would take us back to a time when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions”, she said, adding that 45 million Americans rely on the law for health coverage.At that point, the crowd began chanting, “We’re not going back!”Donald Trump has made levying new tariffs on foreign imports a key part of his platform, but Kamala Harris is warning the crowd in North Carolina that the idea amounts to “a national sales tax” on everyday goods.“He wants to impose what is, in effect, a national sales tax on everyday products and basic necessities that we import from other countries. That will devastate Americans. It will mean higher prices on just about every one of your daily needs. A Trump tax on gas, a Trump tax on food, a Trump tax on clothing, a Trump tax on over-the-counter medication. And, you know, economists have done the math. Donald Trump’s plan would cost a typical family $3,900 a year,” the vice-president said.“At this moment when everyday prices are too high, he will make them even higher.” More

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      Kamala Harris has made a dream start. But it’s too early to count out Donald Trump | Jonathan Freedland

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      Everything is going right for her and wrong for him. Kamala Harris has the encouraging poll numbers and, more precious still, the momentum. Donald Trump has the serial errors, the maudlin introspection and wobbling campaign team. In less than three weeks, the Democrats have pulled off one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in US political history, replacing a candidate who was shuffling towards near-certain defeat with one apparently soaring towards possible victory. And yet, even as Harris speaks of bringing the joy, contained within is a lurking danger – a peril that should be all too familiar.The sources of joy are not mysterious. Democrats are heading to Chicago for a convention that will feel like a party but was set to be a wake. Before 21 July, they were tied to Joe Biden, a man whose presidency has proved far more consequential than most predicted but who was on course to lose and lose badly in November. His passing of the baton to his number two has gone better than anyone had any right to expect.All but seamlessly, the campaign has switched over – equivalent to rebuilding a plane in mid-air, say seasoned election hands – and the candidate herself has taken to the task with unexpected ease. Twenty years younger and a whole lot more vigorous than her opponent, she has turned what had been Trump’s most potent weapon against Biden – age – against Trump himself. He is now the candidate of the past, she the face of the future. Never mind that Harris is a senior member of the present administration, she has shaken off the burden of incumbency – currently a negative in most democracies across the world – and cast herself as the turn-the-page option, aided by a powerful slogan: “We’re not going back.”The evidence that it’s working is in the headline poll numbers, which show her edging ahead in the very battleground states where Biden had been trailing. Almost overnight, she is winning back the voters who propelled Biden to victory in 2020 but were drifting away from him in 2024: young, Black and Hispanic Americans. Drawing big crowds, inspiring a thousand social-media memes, she is generating something Democrats have not seen since the first Barack Obama campaign of 2008: excitement.All this is having an equal and opposite effect on Trump. The better her numbers or crowds get, the more gloomy and rattled he becomes, consoling himself with the delusion that photos of Harris’s massive audiences are AI fakes. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser depicts Trump as bereft, missing Biden as he pines for the return of the man he knew how to run against. That contest was simple: it was strong v weak, with Biden’s age doing the work.But now Trump faces Harris, and he can’t quite work out how to take her on. He can’t fix on a nickname, he can’t settle on a target. His team wants him to run on immigration and inflation – both Democratic vulnerabilities – but he keeps returning to the terrain he knows best: culture wars and race baiting. Just as he once falsely claimed that Obama was not born in the US, Trump initially offered his theory that only late in life did Harris happen “to turn Black”. He also regularly describes the vice-president as a “low IQ individual”, a phrase he has long applied to Black female politicians. His base may like this talk, but it repels everyone else.An illustration of the unsettling effect Harris is having on Trump came in the mutual back-scratch he conducted with X magnate Elon Musk this week. “She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live,” Trump said about a drawing of Harris on the cover of Time magazine. “She looked very much like our great first lady, Melania,” he added, referring to his wife. Along with any listener to that exchange, Trump doesn’t know where to put himself.Because he is knocked off balance, he keeps stumbling. The Musk encounter was a case in point. After the embarrassment of a tech breakdown that led to a start delayed by 40-plus minutes, Trump rambled for two hours, straying into baffling tangents and frankly weird claims. One example: “global warming” is no threat, because rising sea levels mean “more oceanfront property”. (The real danger, he said, is the warmth of nuclear weapons.) What’s more, Trump seemed to speak with a heavy lisp throughout. None of this might matter much in itself, but it shows that Trump is beginning to get some of the same scrutiny of his cognitive and physical capacities that drove Biden to step aside. Put simply, age is now his problem.So this race is going exactly the way Harris would want it to go. Trump is lashing out at allies and, always a sign of a troubled campaign, shaking up his team. He is saddled with a running mate whose back catalogue would make a Gilead commander blush, while he paints an ever-darkening picture of a US in decline, a nation riddled with crime and overrun by scary invaders. All the while, she is beaming about a brighter tomorrow. As the Republican sage Mike Murphy puts it, “He’s doing Voldemort and she’s doing Ted Lasso.”Where, then, is the danger? First, the polling is not quite as rosy as Democrats want it to be. Dig further into the numbers and you see that, despite everything, Donald Trump is more popular now than he was at this same, mid-August point in either 2020 or 2016. His approval rating currently stands at 44%. In August 2016, a paltry 33% of Americans had a positive view of him – but he went on to win.What’s more, in each of the three crucial battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, Harris is ahead by only four points, according to the latest survey. That’s welcome progress, to be sure, but it’s not enough when you recall that Trump put on nine points between August and November in those states in 2016 and closed the gap to a photo-finish in 2020.Harris may be more charismatic than either of the Democratic standard-bearers in those earlier contests, but she has vulnerabilities of her own. She is clearly a figure of the “coastal elites”: a wealthy Californian, she has no equivalent of the Scranton Joe persona available to Biden. Both she and her running mate, the Minnesota governor Tim Walz, have a history of progressive positions that anyone with a memory knows Republicans can twist into a caricature of leftwing radicalism. True, Walz’s vibe is cuddly midwestern dad – and there’s good evidence that, these days, a politician’s vibe matters more than their record – but there’s still a job to do. It’s almost a universal truth of contemporary politics that any party not of the right has to go much further than it would like to reassure voters in the centre. (Just ask Keir Starmer.) By that measure, the Democratic nominee may still have some distance to travel.Above all, and paradoxically, it’s Harris’s astonishing early success that contains risk. It has encouraged Democrats to believe that, in ditching Biden, the hard work has already been done, that the menace of a second Trump presidency has been averted. But this remains a perilously close contest in a sharply divided nation. As we have seen twice in recent years, Republicans enjoy a structural advantage in the electoral college that means that a Democrat can win the popular vote by a resounding margin – and still lose.So, yes, Harris has made a dream start. Trump is flailing. But it is far, far too early to celebrate. In the autumn, Americans will take their traditional second look at the two candidates. There will be TV debates and the hard yards of getting voters not to share memes on TikTok but off the couch and to the polling booth. This race is far from over – and if the last, turbulent decade has taught us anything, it’s that it is always too soon to count out Donald Trump.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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      Ceasefire talks are on their last legs, and Benjamin Netanyahu is to blame | Mohamad Bazzi

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      Joe Biden is making a last-ditch effort to salvage the Gaza ceasefire agreement he has been pushing for months. The US president, along with the leaders of Egypt and Qatar, have called on Israeli and Hamas negotiators to resume indirect talks on Thursday to hammer out an agreement. But Biden and his administration won’t name and shame the biggest obstacle to reaching a deal: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. For months, Netanyahu has tried to block an agreement by backtracking and adding new conditions, prompting Israeli security officials to accuse him of sabotaging the negotiations to stay in power.Since a week-long truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed on 1 December, Biden has invested nearly all of his administration’s efforts into resurrecting a ceasefire. But Biden refuses to impose any cost on Netanyahu for his obstinacy and prolonging the conflict. Since Israel launched its brutal war on Gaza 10 months ago, Biden has failed to use the two most effective levers of power at his disposal: withholding billions of dollars in US weapons shipments, and denying Israel political cover at the United Nations security council and other international bodies.Even as US officials privately leak that Biden is angry at Netanyahu for lying to him about wanting to secure a ceasefire, the Biden administration continues to send massive new transfers of weapons to Israel. On Tuesday, the state department approved $20bn in new arms sales, which include dozens of F-15 fighter jets, tactical vehicles and missiles, as well as tens of thousands of explosive mortar and tank cartridges.This is one of the largest weapons transfers to Israel in US history – and it will be mostly funded by American taxpayers. The biggest part of the deal is nearly $19bn for up to 50 new warplanes, which won’t be delivered for at least five years. But the thousands of rounds of ordnance could be shipped sooner. Washington is, by far, the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, providing $3.8bn in military aid a year. In April, after intense lobbying by Biden, Congress approved an additional $14bn in military assistance to Israel, which will fund the latest purchases approved this week.With this level of Israeli dependence on US military aid, Biden should have significant leverage over Netanyahu. Instead, Biden is clinging to a failed policy of trying to exert behind-the-scenes influence on the Israeli prime minister and his extremist allies. Netanyahu has consistently defied and humiliated Biden – and yet the US president won’t call out Netanyahu for obstructing a ceasefire agreement that would lead to the release of more than 100 hostages still being held by Hamas after its 7 October attacks on Israel.Biden outlined the parameters of a deal in late May, when he spoke at the White House to publicly endorse a three-phase Israeli plan to end the war. By essentially adopting Israel’s proposal, Biden hoped to break a months-long deadlock in negotiations that were mediated by the US, Egypt and Qatar. For months, the Biden administration blamed Hamas for refusing to accept a truce – and rarely mentioned Netanyahu’s intransigence. In early July, the Biden administration called Hamas’s response to the US proposal a “breakthrough”, raising hopes that a deal was imminent.But as talks dragged on, Netanyahu ordered Israeli negotiators to add five new conditions to the outlines of a proposal that Israel had accepted in late May and which formed the basis for Biden’s plan. In a letter sent to mediators in late July, Israel demanded that it maintain military control of Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, an area known as the Philadelphi Corridor, which had been a major point of contention during earlier rounds of negotiations.Netanyahu’s attempts at blocking the ceasefire agreement infuriated members of Israel’s security establishment, and they began leaking details of recent high-level security meetings to show the prime minister’s obstinacy and his lack of interest in the fate of the remaining hostages. On 2 August, Israel’s Channel 12 reported on a tense meeting between Netanyahu and his security chiefs days earlier, which devolved into a shouting match as multiple officials accused the premier of torpedoing any ceasefire deal with his latest demands. Netanyahu reportedly accused his top security officials of being “soft” and poor negotiators.The prime minister is trying to prolong the Gaza war to avoid early elections, which his Likud party is likely to lose, and multiple investigations into his government’s security failures leading up to the October attacks. If he’s forced out of power, Netanyahu would also face a long-delayed corruption and bribery trial stemming from an earlier stint as premier. Despite Netanyahu’s interest in clinging to power and criticism of his negotiating tactics by Israeli security officials, the Biden administration has gone out of its way to avoid blaming Netanyahu for obstructing a ceasefire.Israel has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and brought hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation, as the Israeli military continues to block aid deliveries. Researchers fear the death toll could eventually reach 186,000 – due to “indirect casualties” of war, such as food shortages, a widespread cholera epidemic and the destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure.With the US and other western allies continuing to provide the weapons that sustain Israel’s war machine, Netanyahu has had little incentive to stop the bloodshed. Instead, he has escalated the conflict in recent weeks, risking a wider regional war that could involve Israel and the US against Iran and its network of allied militias in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.Late last month, two assassinations in Beirut and Tehran revived fears that the Gaza war could spiral into a regional conflagration. On 30 July, an Israeli airstrike on southern Beirut killed a senior commander in Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia supported by Iran that has been fighting a low-level conflict with Israel since October. The next day, an explosion in Tehran killed the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh. While Israel did not claim responsibility for that assassination, it’s widely assumed to be behind the attack that humiliated the Iranian leadership, which was hosting Haniyeh and dozens of other foreign officials for the inauguration of Iran’s new president. Iran vowed to retaliate for Haniyeh’s killing on its soil, and US and western officials have been scrambling to avoid an escalating series of attacks and reprisals.A ceasefire is the only way to stop the bloodshed in Gaza and to ensure that the conflict won’t expand into a regional war that could entangle Iran and the US. But since Netanyahu has not faced the loss of US support or other consequences for his belligerence, he has little incentive to agree to a truce or to refrain from attacks that destabilize the region.Already, there are signs that Biden’s ceasefire summit on Thursday will end in yet another deadlock: Hamas has not committed to participating in the talks, while a member of Israel’s negotiating team told Israeli media that there was no point in traveling to the summit unless Netanyahu expands the team’s mandate. In other words, Netanyahu can continue to obstruct the negotiations – and pay no price for it.So far, the Israeli prime minister has gotten everything he’s wanted by prolonging the war and escaping blame from the Biden administration for stalling a ceasefire deal. After the administration approved $20bn in new arms deals this week, Biden is signaling that he will continue sending weapons to Israel no matter what Netanyahu does.It doesn’t have to be this way: since Biden dropped out of the US presidential race last month, he no longer risks paying a political cost for restraining Netanyahu and Israel. The president can finally stand up to Netanyahu – and salvage a ceasefire plan that ends 10 months of American complicity.

      Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor at New York University. He is also a non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) More

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      Donald Trump is in full meltdown mode. Could he destroy his own campaign? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      What do you think Donald Trump does for stress relief? Massages, maybe? Or perhaps he binge-drinks Diet Coke while bed rotting. Maybe he writes down his grievances on pieces of paper and then flushes them down the toilet. It’s also possible he lets off steam by smashing gold trinkets with his golf clubs and throwing paper towels at Puerto Ricans. That feels very on-brand.Whatever Trump does to manage his stress, I imagine he’s doing a lot of it right now. The convicted felon has had a terrible three weeks. Ever since Joe Biden dropped out of the race, things have been going rapidly downhill for Trump. His campaign had been built around bashing Biden, whose frailty and questionable mental acuity made him an easy target. With the far more energetic and coherent Kamala Harris as his opponent, Trump clearly doesn’t know what to do. His campaign now seems to consist of nothing but racism, the revival of old grudges, conspiracy theories and insults.This strategy isn’t exactly working out for him. A New York Times/Siena College poll published on Saturday found Harris four points ahead in the crucial battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. This is a big deal: when Biden was the nominee, Trump was either always slightly ahead in those states or the two men were neck and neck. It’s not just the polls that have shifted, media coverage has, too. A month ago, every headline seemed to be questioning Biden’s mental competence; now, headlines are focused on Trump’s unhinged rambling.While Harris’s campaign has huge momentum and exudes competence, Trump is embroiled in chaos. One of the latest debacles? He was hacked. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed the hack was “by the Iranian Government” and added: “Never a nice thing to do!” No – but it provides a good opportunity to remind everyone that Trump’s Twitter (now X) account was compromised in 2020 by Victor Gevers who successfully guessed the password was “maga2020!” This was after the ethical hacker hacked Trump’s Twitter in 2016 by guessing the password was “yourefired”, the catchphrase from The Apprentice. The man who wants voters to think he can manage national security can’t even manage his own passwords.Even an interview on Monday night with his pal Elon Musk was a rambling, grievance-filled disaster. It was also beset by serious technical issues, leading a Harris spokesman to quip that Trump’s campaign is in service of “self-obsessed rich guys who … cannot run a livestream in the year 2024”.Trump isn’t dealing with his stream of setbacks very well; according to Republican sources quoted in a recent Axios report, he “is struggling to get past his anger”. The New York Times has similarly reported that a seething Trump repeatedly called Harris a “bitch” in private – claims that Trump has denied, despite the fact that he’s happily called the vice-president all manner of names in public. Essentially, he’s in full meltdown mode.So, too, are Trump’s allies, who are desperately begging their candidate to get a grip and start focusing on actual issues, rather than personal attacks. Instead of heeding this advice, however, Trump seems intent on alienating the people who can help him win. At a campaign rally in Atlanta earlier this month, Trump picked a fight with Brian Kemp, Georgia’s popular Republican governor, whom he termed “little Brian” and accused of having turned Georgia into a “laughing stock”. Georgia is an important state to win and, before Biden dropped out, it seemed as though it was in the bag for Trump. Now he’s polling the same as Harris. Making an enemy of Kemp is a terrible strategy.While it’s highly satisfying to think of a furious Trump setting his own campaign on fire, it’s important not to be complacent. As we know, things change quickly. Harris may be on the up now, but she hasn’t won this election yet. It’s also important not to underestimate the dangers a desperate Trump poses. There’s a chance he might implode, yes. But there’s also a chance he might explode, leaving a hell of a lot of collateral damage in his wake. In an interview this weekend, Biden said that, if Trump loses, he’s “not confident at all” there would be a peaceful transfer of power. Nor am I.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn case you were wondering, by the way, there is a real answer to the question about how Trump manages his stress. During a 2004 interview with Larry King, he said: “I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters … That’s how I handle stress.” I wish I could give that technique a go myself. The problem is, if you’re keen on things such as bodily autonomy and democracy, then this election really does matter. More

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      Familiar vitriol, and Musk the enabler: key takeaways from Trump’s X interview

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      Donald Trump returned to the social media platform that skyrocketed his career for a live discussion with Elon Musk. The former president unleashed familiar rambling, vitriolic talking points to a sympathetic Musk.Here are key takeaways from the event.1. A terribly slow startThe event started about 45 minutes later than scheduled, with listeners struggling to join the live stream. The issues echoed the meltdown that took place during Ron DeSantis’s campaign launch on X last year, which experts at the time attributed to infrastructure issues on the platform after Musk laid off much of its workforce and shut down multiple data centers.On Monday, Musk attributed the delay to a cyberattack, namely, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in which bad actors deliberately flood a website with traffic to overwhelm its servers. That claim could not independently be verified, and it can be difficult to distinguish between a deliberate DDoS attack and a routine outage caused by an influx of legitimate traffic to a site.Trump, meanwhile, attributed the glitches to regular traffic, congratulating Musk for “[breaking] every record in the book with so many millions of people” on the live interview.2. The greatest hits Once the conversation got going, Trump rehashed the greatest hits, and biggest lies, from his rallies – absurdly claiming he oversaw the “greatest economy in the world”, lying about his own record, about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s records, and spreading conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic, his criminal cases and election security.His most dangerous lies were about immigration and climate change. He baselessly claimed that migrants arriving at the US southern border were dangerous, calling them “murderers” as well as “non-productive” people. Trump, who built his political career on promises to “build the wall” at the southern border, has ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric lately, and promised a dystopian vision for mass deportations and migrant labor camps if he is reelected.He also dismissed climate change as a threat, saying that rising sea levels would at best create more “oceanfront properties”. That latter point, which he has made before, is, of course, wrong – rising sea levels are more likely to destroy beachfront property, devastating coastal communities. Sea level rise is, however, an actual driver of global migration – as it creates climate refugees. 3. Trump derides HarrisTrump also seemed to sharpen his critiques of Kamala Harris, who he has struggled to attack as her nascent campaign gains momentum. The former president attempted to paint Harris as a “radical” leftist, falsely suggesting that she wanted to ban fracking and defund the police. He also came at her with classic sexism, insisting on calling her by her first name, rather than by her title or surname, as he does for Joe Biden. He also lingered on her looks, saying that she was a “beautiful woman” who looked like Melania Trump, his wife.And for a measure of intersectionality, he also repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s south Asian first name.  4. Musk the enablerThroughout the conversation, the two men lavished praise and admiration on each other. Trump, who has been a critic of electric vehicles, called Musk’s Teslas “incredible”. Musk, meanwhile, nodded along and agreed as Trump that it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry. At the beginning of the event, the tech billionaire had noted his belief that “no one is themselves in an adversarial interview” and that the conversation was “aimed at kind of open-minded independent voters who are just trying to make up their mind”.But in the end, the softball format seemed like it was aimed more at those who had already bought into Trump and Musk’s rightwing politics. At the end, Musk told Trump he was “on the right path”. More