politics

The reason Kamala Harris keeps visiting North Carolina is made evident in an eye-popping pattern her campaign volunteers have noticed while knocking on doors.

What they see are signs of a state growing so rapidly that Asheville's airport is a giant construction site and almost six per cent of the city's residents have moved here from another state in just one year.

Campaign volunteer Susan Thomas only got here two months ago, and she's already canvassing on behalf of the Democratic presidential candidate.

She hears a familiar story: one person, after another, after another, tells her they've just moved from somewhere else.

In the span of just a few minutes last Sunday, Thomas encountered South Carolina Democrats who moved here this year for cooler weather and bluer politics, beside another family of South Carolina Democrats who just moved in next door. She then came across a block party hosted by recently arrived California Democrats, where a Democrat from New Orleans was standing beside the host.

Unlike the MAGA movement, which is led by a candidate who is defiantly amoral, post-liberalism is steeped in a revolutionary religiosity.

Most Americans haven’t heard of the post-liberal right, the small but influential group of conservative, mostly Catholic men who have declared that liberal democracy, the animating principle of America’s founding, has failed and want to bring about a new social order where there is no separation of church and state and men and a hyperconservative Catholicism reign supreme. They are disdainful of secularism and individual liberty. Just like Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump illustrated during Tuesday night’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, these men idolize the authoritarian Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary.

They’re also nostalgic for Spain as it was run by the dictator Franco and see Orbán’s government and Franco’s as potential models for the kind of regime they wish to install in the United States. The group’s political priorities — which include restricting access to contraception and divorce and banning marriage equality and pornography — are wildly unpopular. And yet the Republican nominee for vice president, my former friend JD Vance, is a prominent voice of this fringe movement, as so many of his regrettable podcast interviews have demonstrated.

Of all the schisms that cleave contemporary America, few are more stark than the divide between those who consider themselves to be victims of US history and those who fear they will be casualties of its future.

The threats, which already closed government offices and caused school evacuations, come as Trump pushes racist lie

Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) and Congressman Don Beyer (VA-08) renewed their efforts to bring ranked choice voting to U.S. congressional elections, reintroducing their *Ranked Choice Voting Act *. Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) is introducing companion legislation in the Senate. 

The legislation would require ranked choice voting (RCV) in all congressional primary and general elections starting in 2028, allowing voters to express support for multiple candidates for public office, with the candidate receiving the most votes declared the winner.

Trump’s gambit is bad, but Vance’s is even worse. He’s one of Ohio’s senators; these are his constituents. How can he endanger them like this?

Sanewashing.

It’s pretty rare for the Columbia Journalism Review and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to be dishing on the same topic. But media critics touched a nerve this week with accusations that the political press suffers from a “coherence bias,” particularly as it relates to Donald Trump: the tendency of reporters and editors to take his verbal diarrhea and transform it, through the magic of elision and omission, into statesmanship. TNR contributor Parker Molloy has an even better word for this practice: “sanewashing.”

Singer’s backing could sway undecided voters in key states, but Tay Tay should beware – political endorsement can backfire

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240914175116/https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/debate-kamala-trump-mass-deportation-immigration-springfield/

"With 102 deniers on election boards in the swing states, the potential for creating chaos is enormous."

More than 100 election officials across eight swing states in the U.S. presidential race have engaged in partisan election denial in recent years, raising fears they could try to turn the November result in favor of Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to a report released Friday. 

The 88-page report, produced by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), details the election denial history of 102 county and state election officials in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The authors found that election deniers have majority control of 15 county election boards in those states and of the statewide board in Georgia. 

"What was striking to us about our research is how much election denialism and the voter fraud lie have infiltrated and taken over the Republican apparatus in each of these critical states," Arn Pearson, CMD's executive director, told The Guardian.

Trump allies in Congress have warned that the former president’s close ties to the far-right provocateur so close to the election could backfire, writes Kelly Rissman

A bomb threat in Springfield, Ohio, came after Trump repeated baseless rumor about immigrants ‘eating pets’

Joe Biden on Friday said the hostile attacks on Haitian immigrants in the US “[have] to stop” after Donald Trump repeated a false and derogatory claim about a Haitian community in Ohio.

“It is simply wrong that the proud Haitian community is under attack right now in this country,” Biden said. “There’s no place in America. This has to stop – what he’s doing. It has to stop,” the US president said at a White House event marking Black excellence.

The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, earlier on Friday said that the bomb threat made on Thursday that forced the evacuation of the city hall, two schools and other buildings was explicitly anti-immigrant and hostile to the city’s Haitian community, following Donald Trump’s stoking of a rightwing conspiracy theory that some residents’ pets are being eaten.

Rob Rue, the mayor, accused national Republicans who are amplifying wild rumors from a far-right provocateur that Haitian immigrants in Springfield are hunting and eating other people’s pets of “hurting our city”.