Donald Trump’s political rivals have denounced him as an “unhinged madman” and a “dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual” after he directed a string of expletives at the Iranian regime. “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell!” the US president said on his Truth Social platform .

But Trump is far from the only potty-mouthed politician, and trends suggest that swearing in politics is increasingly going from taboo to mainstream.

‘Profanity seal’

Woodrow Wilson “broke the profanity seal” in 1919, when the then president recalled a time he made a “conspicuous ass of himself”, said Joseph Phillips, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University. “Since then, presidents, their seconds-in-command, and presidential hopefuls have used profanity at least 692 times” – but the vast majority of curse words, 87%, occurred in the last 10 years.

We’ve “come a long way from our shock” at John Major, not knowing he was being recorded, using the word “bastards” while prime minister in 1993, said Robert Crampton in The Times. Although “tough talk is nothing new in politics”, leaders “long avoided flaunting it”, said The Independent. But now, public vulgarity is “in vogue”. During a political rally in 2025, Trump “used profanity at least four times”. J.D. Vance has also sworn publicly, and former vice president Kamala Harris “earned a roar of approval from her audience” last October when she said of the Trump administration that “these mother******* are crazy”.

Members of Congress and the Senate have also sworn as a “volley of vulgarities underscores an ever-coarsening political environment” on social media. Posts that “evoke the strongest emotions are rewarded with the most engagement”.

‘Anti-intellectualism’

There’s a “misguided belief” that “profanity is more ‘honest’ or ‘authentic’ than polite speech”, said Solomon D. Stevens in the Illinois paper the Journal-Courier. This suggests that politicians who swear are “telling it like it is” or “being real”, while those who don’t must be “holding back and not telling the truth”. But “politicians who swear are just politicians who swear. They can lie just as easily as those who don’t swear.”

There’s also “an anti-intellectualism at work”, as politicians who swear imply that those who don’t are “putting on airs”. While some intellectuals can “certainly be pretentious”, “refraining from coarse language” is not in itself a sign of that.

Trump’s “disinhibited language” sounded like a “tantrum”, said Melanie Phillips in The Times. It “suggested that he’d lost self-control because Iran wouldn’t do what he wanted”. Swearing points to an “emotional release and thus a loss of reason”.

The president’s recent profanity also distracted from “the message itself”, said the Deseret News. A “rousing and well-crafted argument” could have “built a compelling case for ousting the country’s ruling regime”, because “when it comes to war, calm self-assurance speaks louder than ranting expletives”.

Politicians aren’t “bawling swear words because they can’t contain their outrage”, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. They do it because, “like preteen boys trying to sound tough”, they believe “the odd public expletive enhances their authenticity” and gives them “an air of pugnacity apropos to the moment”. But they are mistaken. “Most Americans still prefer their leaders to talk like grown-ups.”

Nevertheless, Democrats are pushing back against the right, using bad language themselves and embracing more confrontational and crass tactics. They see it as a way to beat Maga at its own game, attempting to “step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing”, said The New York Times.

There is generally no right or wrong way to be a failed presidential nominee. While some past candidates have gone on to have a second act in public service, others have receded from the public eye. Former Vice President Kamala Harris spent the first few months of the Trump administration hewing to the latter — until this week. Delivering her first major speech since President Donald Trump assumed office on Wednesday, Harris reemerged into the political spotlight, raising speculation about her future.

A 'calculated return'

Although Harris has made several lower-profile appearances since losing the 2024 presidential election, this speech (delivered at a fundraiser for Emerge, an organization focused on Democrats recruiting and electing women) was her "most pointed to date," said the Los Angeles Times. It also marked the "first time since leaving office that she's publicly mentioned Trump by name."

Harris used the address to encourage supporters to "speak out and fight back" against what she framed as the White House's "efforts to roll back decades of progress," said The Washington Post. Her return to public life comes at a "moment of deep anger and frustration" within the party, with some Democrats "ready to turn the page on the Biden era and a disappointing 2024 election." Harris conveyed a "very negative, often angry-sounding message," said Fox News, accusing Trump of the "wholesale abandonment" of American ideals.

The remarks were part of a "calculated return," said The New York Times, in which the former vice president "acknowledged her monthslong departure from public life" while "not once" mentioning her future plans. The speech retained the "cautious approach" that has long defined Harris' "political brand."

'Ramping up' her public presence

Harris' speech and the interest it has generated come as she is "set to possibly re-enter politics in the coming months," said ABC News. Her "shadow" has "shaped the early months" of the upcoming California gubernatorial race, into which she would "probably vault to the top of the field" should she decide to run, said the Post. It is "no longer certain," however, that her candidacy would "clear the field" of high-profile Democrats vying to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Her speech was attended by "several prominent Democrats already vying for governor in 2026" who sat in the front row, Politico said. While she didn't raise any "explicitly state-related issues or political fights" in her remarks, she might be "saving her powder until she's made a decision."

By "ramping up her public presence" while Democrats "search for a path forward after November's election," Harris is leaning into the fact that she "retains unique influence and would reshape any future race she chooses to enter," said The Associated Press. She has "not discouraged speculation" about joining future elections — including another potential run for the White House — and "continues to fundraise, using a joint committee that includes Harris for President, the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties."

Ending her speech on Wednesday, Harris struck a tone of cautious optimism, telling attendees that "things are probably going to get worse before they get better." But, she said, "we are ready for it."

Booked-out diaries, assassination fears and an assault in a hotel lift: Donald Trump impersonators have had quite a ride since the Maga original returned to the White House.

With "appearances at parades, golf tournaments and even kids' parties" the Trump lookalike industry is booming, said The Independent.

And there's serious cash to be made from being a Donald doppelganger: on Gig Salad, a platform used to book performers, prices for a personal appearance range from $100 (£77) to $20,000 (£15,500).

'Bulletproof vest'

Business had been good even before Trump entered the White House for the second time, Florida-based Trump impersonator Thomas Mundy told The Independent. After Trump lost the election in 2020, "people were so p***ed, my bookings doubled". And when Trump got indicted, "my business quadrupled".

Since Trump's re-election in November, Mundy's business has been "insane". He was even approached by a woman to appear at her five-year-old's birthday party. His act is "pretty raunchy", Mundy said, so he and the mother are still "in negotiations".

There is also money to be made on this side of the Atlantic. A Trump impersonator from Southampton, whose income has already increased by 40% since Trump was re-elected, told The Guardian he is expecting an "unstoppable" four years of business. Mike Osman, also known as "Donald Trumped", says the secret to mimicking the US president's skin tone is to "slap on the matt foundation with a brush and then use a lighter colour around the eyes".

But the rewards of imitating such a polarising political figure are not without risk. John Di Domenico, "the world's most famous Trump impersonator", said he has been urged by friends to wear a bulletproof vest after he was attacked "by a livid liberal" in a Las Vegas lift last summer, said The Sun. Di Domenico told the paper that feelings about Trump run so high, he now "requires security staff for gigs".

Fortunes and fate

It's been a different story for the comedians who "lampooned" Kamala Harris and Joe Biden: they're finding out the hard way that impersonators' fortunes "rise and fall based on the fates of the people they portray", said The New York Times.

Allison Reese "found fame online" with her impression of former US vice-president Kamala Harris, earning hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok, interviews on national news programmes and even a movie role. But since Harris ran for president and lost to Trump, Reese has "had some professional mourning to do", as interest and demand for her impersonations quickly dried up.

Still, there's always room for a pivot. John Morgan once made "over a million dollars" impersonating former US president George W. Bush but, he told The Independent, he has now "transitioned onto the Trump scene".

One reason Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election: Democratic voters simply didn't go to the polls.

Voters in traditional "liberal strongholds" failed to show up for Vice President Kamala Harris, said The New York Times. Those strongholds — cities and suburbs, along with traditionally blue states like New Jersey — gave Harris nearly 2 million fewer votes than Joe Biden won four years earlier, while Republican-dominated areas gave Donald Trump an additional 1.2 million votes over 2020. Turnout was also down among traditional Democratic constituencies like Black Christians and Jewish voters. "Many Democrats sat this election out," said the Times.

Harris "tried to build it, but they didn't come," said The Wall Street Journal. It wasn't just Democrats: Overall voter turnout was down from four years ago, but the Democratic losses were "especially sharp." Harris actually did better in the battleground states than in the rest of the country where "turnout plummeted," said the Journal. "What really happened," political science professor John Aughenbaugh told WTOP News, was a "whole bunch of previous Democratic voters were upset with the Democratic Party."

What did the commentators say?

The election was dominated by "fury from the middle class over how much it costs to get by in today's America," Will Bunch said at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Democrats embraced "big money" instead, highlighting billionaires like Mark Cuban and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the latter of whom taunted Trump at the Democratic National Convention by referring to himself as an "actual billionaire." That's not a winning message for a party that built itself in the 20th century "by turning out the working class," Bunch said. It's time to return to those roots and find candidates who "will reject all billionaire and corporate contributions."

"Not nearly enough people turned out to vote for what the Democratic Party was selling nationally," said MSNBC's Jen Psaki, who previously served as President Joe Biden's press secretary. The party's messaging in the campaign's final days — that Trump represented a fascist turn away from democracy — was "geared too much" toward college-educated white voters. "Clearly that message just didn't connect with enough people," Psaki said. Trump, meanwhile, increased his support among every demographic group, including men, women, young people and Latinos. "If that's not a hard truth," Psaki said, "I don't know what is."

What next?

How bad did the election get for Democrats? More self-identified independents went to the polls than Democrats, said Reuters. Independents piled up 34% of the vote — same as the GOP share — while registered Democrats came in at 32% of the electorate. The independent share was up 8 points from 2020, when independents were a "distant third" to both Democrats and Republicans.

The sharp drop in Democratic turnout has fed some conspiracy theories on the left, suggesting that Harris was robbed of rightful votes, said PolitiFact. That's simply not true. "There is no evidence that any votes disappeared," said Ishan Mehta, director of media and democracy at Common Cause. Turnout simply "ebbs and flows" from election to election. If Democratic voters didn't turn out, that just means they "made a decision not to cast a ballot, either not turn out at all, or not check the top contest," said Paul Gronke, a political science professor. "That's the end of the story."

Donald Trump has been elected the 47th president of the United States, and will take office on Jan. 20, 2025, following an unexpectedly dominant victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. Before that, though, he will have to complete a process that has been undertaken by all of his predecessors: the transition to the presidency.

Trump's second go-around as commander-in-chief will see him work to implement his official platform, known as Agenda 47. This comes amid continuing controversy over the conservative brainchild Project 2025; Trump claims to have no affiliation with the project, though it overlaps heavily with his official agenda. The transition will also involve assembling a Cabinet and working to implement other agenda items.

What are the main parts of the presidential transition?

To implement a transition to the White House, the winning candidate will look to their transition teams, which are "responsible for organizing the personnel vetting, policy planning and management agendas to turn campaign promises into governing," according to the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition (CPT).

Both major candidates typically begin planning for a presidential transition in the months leading up to the election. However, the transition can't move ahead without the General Services Administration (GSA). This little-known government agency "provides support to eligible candidates, inter-agency transition teams, the presidential inauguration effort, and the outgoing president and vice president," according to the GSA website.

Meanwhile, the presidential transition teams work to help the president-elect with a variety of tasks. This includes selecting "more than 4,000 presidential appointees, including more than 1,200 who require Senate confirmation" and creating a "set of legislative, executive and agency proposals based on the campaign platform," said the CPT.

What happens when transitions get complicated?

The 2020 election showed that there were cracks in the transition process, particularly when it came to the GSA. At that time, Trump's "refusal to concede froze the ability of President Joe Biden's transition team to gain access to federal funding and information for several weeks," said Politico. The GSA eventually ascertained Biden's victory amid unsuccessful lawsuits from Trump challenging the election.

After that, Congress "passed a law in 2022 allowing multiple leading presidential candidates to get transition resources before a winner is determined in a contested election," said Politico. The law, the Presidential Transition Improvement Act, states that the GSA must begin the transition within five days of the election — and must do so for both candidates if neither has conceded. This means in future elections, a candidate's "campaign staff could still have access to key operations of government, including sensitive information, while courts and lawmakers battle over the final results," said The Washington Post.

The law "effectively mandates federal support and cooperation for both candidates to begin a transition," and "states that such support should continue until 'significant legal challenges' that could alter electoral outcomes have been 'substantially resolved,'" said The Associated Press. But in an election where one candidate launches a barrage of legal challenges, this means the "government potentially bestowing enough backing that both sides can prepare an administration until mid-December — only about a month before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20." This is unlikely to occur in 2025 given Trump's large-margin victory, but it raises questions about future elections.

In the past, it was "neither candidate gets the funding" until a winner was declared, but "now it's both," Derek Muller, a University of Notre Dame law professor, said to the AP. The dueling transitions "can last into mid-December. There's no question that's a risk. But I think it's a risk that they want to take."

The topic of education has been mostly absent from this year's presidential campaigns. But the future of American schools and universities could hinge on the choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

There are "very sharp differences" between the two candidates when it comes to education, Amna Nawaz said on PBS NewsHour. America faces "this drop in the ability of fourth graders and eighth graders to do basic math and to read at a grade level," said her colleague William Brangham. Trump's ideas are "contradictory," Brangham added — he wants to eliminate the Department of Education, but also pay "very granular attention" to school curricula to snuff out so-called "woke" topics like critical race theory and gender issues. Harris and Democrats, meanwhile, have called for universal free preschool for American kids.

The two candidates have "distinct track records," American University's Robert Shand said at The Conversation. Trump's platform calls for "universal school choice and more parental control over schools," while Harris served in a Biden administration that tried to expand funding for "full-service community schools" that work to address non-classroom factors, "such as access to health care and healthy food," that can affect student performance. Succinctly, Shand said, Harris wants a "broader role" for the federal government, while Trump wants to push much of the issue to "states, localities and parents."

Trump: 'Chopping block' for federal ed programs?

Trump tried — and failed — to "tear down the U.S. Department of Education" during his first term in office, said Education Week. Expect a new attempt if he gets a second term. "I think he's going to come into office full steam ahead and get things done," said Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's conservative superintendent of education. But the former president has "never been specific" about the fate of programs — like Title I funding for low-income schools — the department administers. As in his first term, it's likely Trump would attempt to put federal K-12 funding on "the chopping block," Education Week said.

While K-12 programs get the most attention, "by far the Department of Education's biggest expenditure is on higher education," said The New York Times. The bulk of its $224 million budget goes to the federal student aid program. Disbanding the agency would have to go through Congress, which is a "highly unlikely proposition," said the Times. That doesn't mean a shift is impossible. Derrell Bradford — the president of 50CAN, a pro-school-choice nonprofit outfit — said both Democrats and Republicans like "the idea that local entities should be in control of education at the local level."

Harris: A focus on pre-K education

Harris and her allies have talked about pre-K federal policies "as much, if not more" than K-12 policies, said NPR. In addition to universal preschool, Democrats have also proposed expanding the Child Tax Credit to give a boost to families with young learners. For older students, Harris supported the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness efforts, as well as proposals to make community college free to students. During her first presidential bid in 2019, Harris also proposed boosting teacher pay. "God knows we don't pay you enough," she said to teachers union members.

Harris' most notable statement on education might have been her selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former teacher, as her running mate. As governor he signed an anti-book-banning bill to stop school and university libraries from removing a book "based solely on its viewpoint or the messages, ideas, or opinions it conveys," said School Library Journal. "Public education," Walz said at the signing, is a force for good in this country."

Influence can come in many forms but in US politics it most often comes in the form of money. Never has that been more true than today, said The Washington Post. “In an era defined by major political divisions and massive wealth accumulation for the richest Americans, billionaires are spending unprecedented amounts.”

In 2024, 100 billionaire families donated $2.6 billion to candidates across state, congressional, senate and presidential elections – more than two-and-a-half times the amount spent in 2020, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.

The “eye-popping amounts speak to the shifts in political power granted to the affluent and corporations” since “unlimited campaign donations” were permitted in 2010, said The Guardian. The landmark Citizens United ruling effectively classed campaign donations as constitutionally protected speech and extended personhood rights to corporations. It unleashed a 28-fold increase in election spending and, as a result, US politicians are “more dependent on the largesse of the billionaire class than ever before, giving one-four-hundredth of 1% of Americans extraordinary influence over which politicians and policies succeed”, said The Washington Post.

Nor are donations the only path to power for the ultra-wealthy; according to the Post, at least 44 of the 902 US billionaires on Forbes magazine’s 2025 list were either elected or appointed to state or federal office in the past 10 years or are married to spouses who were.

While the majority of mega-donors back the Republicans and Donald Trump, some of the richest Americans have risked the administration’s ire by throwing their support behind the Democrats.

Larry & David Ellison: Republicans

Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder who briefly became the world’s richest person in September, has been a friend of Trump and a Republican donor for decades. It had been thought the 81-year-old was close to calling it a day in public life, but his profile has “taken on a new dimension” since Trump returned to the White House, said the BBC. He, along with his son David, has pursued a series of deals “that would give them control over some of the biggest media companies on the planet”.

In August, David Ellison’s Skydance Media secured an $8 billion deal to purchase Paramount and its subsidiaries, including the influential CBS News network. Since then, the company “has been accused of bowing to Trump”, said CNN, paying the president millions of dollars over a “60 Minutes” edit of its interview of former vice president Kamala Harris, and cancelling Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show”, “one of the most bitingly critical-of-Trump shows on TV”.

Now Ellison has turned his attention to Warner Bros. Discovery, the media conglomerate behind brands like HBO, TBS and CNN. Last week, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said he was looking forward to Paramount’s ownership of the influential news network, “amplifying fears” that CNN, which has long been a target of the president, “will shift coverage to appease the Trump administration”, said the Los Angeles Times.

This emerging empire straddling tech, media and politics has sparked alarm on the left, with US media watchdog Fair warning that “the Ellison duo taking over both CBS and CNN, as well as controlling a major social media network like TikTok, would be dangerous for democracy. And given their closeness to the Trump regime, that seems to be the point.”

Elon Musk: Republicans

The Tesla, X and SpaceX boss emerged as one of the most vocal Trump supporters – and prominent donors – during the 2024 election campaign. He spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars backing Trump and other Republican candidates, according to Federal Election Commission filings reported by CBS News. While this made him the largest donor in the 2024 election cycle to either party, it represented just a fraction of his estimated $658 billion fortune. Aside from financial support, Musk’s ownership of X (formerly Twitter) provided a crucial platform to support the Maga message before – and after – election day.

Musk went on to become one of Trump’s closest advisers, earning him the nickname “First Buddy”. Efforts to “reshape” the federal government through the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) made him “perhaps the most important figure in the new administration”, said The New York Times.

While Musk’s relationship with Trump “went up in flames” last summer, with the pair engaging in a tit-for-tat spat on social media that at one point threatened to overwhelm the president, it has since “been rebuilt”, said Politico. The world’s richest person has predicted that the US is at the start of a “great 12-year span” composed of the second Trump administration followed by two consecutive J.D. Vance terms.

Though he has “taken a step back from politics, the tech mogul – and his dramatically outsized political spending – would be a powerful booster for Vance if he runs in 2028 and Musk chooses to be involved”.

Jeff Bezos: Republicans

In 2016, the founder of Amazon, and the world’s fourth-richest man, warned Trump could “erode” American democracy. Once derided as a “woke” capitalist, over the years Bezos has “changed his tune” when it comes to dealing with Trump, said The Seattle Times.

In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election he blocked his newspaper, The Washington Post, from endorsing a candidate for the first time in decades, sparking an “uproar”, including a quarter of a million cancelled subscriptions and concerns about conflicts with Bezos’ financial interests, said the paper.

Since then, under Bezos’ supervision the Post has undergone a “political realignment” that saw an “exodus of top talent”, said Vanity Fair. The Amazon founder has faced further backlash for recently cutting a third of staff at the storied newspaper, which Trump “has long regarded as an adversary”, said the Daily Beast, while at the same time splashing out tens of millions of dollars on a documentary of the first lady, Melania.

All this may have won him few friends on the left, but it appears to have paid dividends for Bezos, with his Blue Origin space company winning a $2.3 billion contract from Nasa. Amazon is also among a number of tech giants, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Meta, that have contributed funds to the ever-spiralling costs of Trump’s multimillion-dollar White House ballroom project.

Mark Zuckerberg: Republicans

The relationship between the Facebook founder and Trump has not always been easy – the president has in the past threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison for life – but the tech titan and world’s fifth-richest person has tried to ingratiate himself with Trump since he returned to the White House.

Over the past year, Zuckerberg has “appeared to go out of his way both publicly and financially to please the 79-year-old Trump”, said Bloomberg. He’s also “pushed through key corporate and product changes Trump favours – like eliminating hate speech rules and dismantling diversity and outside fact-checking efforts”.

For now, their “interests are aligned”, said the Financial Times. Zuckerberg has pledged to invest at least $600 billion in the US up to 2028, “allowing Trump to tout his administration’s success in cementing US corporate supremacy over China”. As for Zuckerberg, his newfound “responsiveness to Trump has been good for business”.

Bill Gates: Democrats

One billionaire who “isn’t in on the boys’ club throwing money and support behind the president” is Bill Gates, said Fortune.

The Microsoft co-founder privately donated $50 million to a non-profit organisation supporting the Kamala Harris campaign, The New York Times reported.

“I have a long history of working with leaders across the political spectrum, but this election is different, with unprecedented significance for Americans and the most vulnerable people around the world,” he said in a statement.

The philanthropist, who has given away much of his fortune over the past two decades, has criticised Trump’s decision to cut US foreign aid disbursements, and has voiced surprise at “a significant right-of-centre group” of tech billionaires in Silicon Valley who support the Republicans, said The New York Times.

Yet his stance towards the Trump administration has become more nuanced in recent months. He has attended several events with the president and was accused of pandering to the Maga base when he publicly argued for pushing the climate crisis down the international agenda, in favour of more focus on health issues.

“It may be that he is really worried that Trump will bully him the way he has bullied other ultra-wealthy business people,” former vice president and climate activist Al Gore said. “It looks like it may be possible that he’s scared of Trump.”

Michael Bloomberg: Democrats

The founder of Bloomberg and former Republican New York mayor has been one of the most high-profile critics of Trump over the years. A major Democrat donor, his “total financial commitment toward Democratic causes” reportedly neared $100 million during the 2024 election, said Forbes.

He warned during the campaign that “Trump is not fit for high office”, said Bloomberg, and his huge personal fortune – not to mention international media organisation – may prove hugely influential in taking the fight to the Republicans over the coming years.

In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s second inauguration, Bloomberg stepped in to “provide funding to help cover the US contribution to the UN climate body's budget” after the president pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, said Reuters. In April, it was reported that Bloomberg’s gun control group, Everytown for Gun Safety, was planning to spend $10 million to help elect Democratic attorneys general in 2025 and 2026, “an investment it says is meant to help protect the rule of law and democracy while President Trump holds the White House”, The New York Times said.

Warren Buffett: Democrats

A long-time Democratic supporter, the legendary investor – known as the “Sage of Omaha” – appeared on stage with Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.

Since then, the world’s 11th-richest person, who stepped down from his role as Berkshire Hathaway CEO at the end of last year, has “avoided donating to federal political candidates as he aimed to spare his companies and employees from any potential backlash”, said Bloomberg.

But in a rare interview with CBS News last year, the 95-year-old attacked Trump’s plans to introduce trade tariffs on foreign goods, a move he called an “act of war”. The warning to Wall Street was all the more “deafening”, said Yahoo! Finance, “when you consider that Buffett typically tries to stay out of politics”.

George Soros: Democrats

The Hungarian-born financier is a major backer of the Democrats and the bête noire of right-wing populists and conspiracy theorists.

In 2022, Soros was the US’ single largest donor, personally giving $170 million during the midterm election cycle to help Democratic campaigns and political action committees. In 2024, a nonprofit founded and funded by Soros donated $60 million to the left-wing Democracy PAC, according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission.

In August last year, Trump said the 95-year-old and his son Alex, who has taken over the running of his Open Society Foundations (OSF) nonprofit, should face criminal charges for supporting violent riots in the US, “a baseless claim that the president has pushed before”, said Al Jazeera.

Trump followed up this threat in September by claiming Soros was “a likely candidate” for prosecution, and that the OSF could face investigation by the US government.

Mass shootings, a depressingly common occurrence in the United States, have generally led to greater support for more restrictive gun laws. Twice this century — after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, and the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting — there have been dramatic shifts in polling that have led to a seemingly permanent increase in the share of Americans who say they support stricter gun laws. Yet the political coalition to pursue sweeping reform has never materialized. Still, Democrats have long supported a suite of what they call "common sense" gun reforms that stop well short of a wholesale revision of gun ownership rights in the United States, and Kamala Harris is no exception.

A gun owner's modest reform platform

Harris stunned many liberals during her Sept. 10 debate with Republican nominee Donald Trump when she said that she was a gun owner. "This business about taking everybody's guns away — Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. So stop the continuous lying," she said in response to Trump claiming that she wants to confiscate guns. She owns a gun "for probably the reason a lot of people do: for personal safety. I was a career prosecutor," Harris said during her unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019. Many prosecutors and judges around the country worry that they will be subject to retaliation for their role in proceedings against those accused of crimes. During that campaign, Harris also supported mandatory assault weapons buyback programs, which would require owners of such weapons to turn them in for cash compensation in the event that Congress passes a renewed ban similar to the one that was in place from 1994 to 2004. Harris now says she no longer supports buybacks

As a U.S. senator from California, Harris co-sponsored bills that would impose a new assault weapons ban on certain kinds of rifles and require universal background checks for potential gun buyers. As vice president, she has backed the administration's efforts to prod states into passing "red flag laws." Such laws create a "civil proceeding that allows people — usually police officers and family members — to petition a judge for an emergency order that would temporarily remove firearms from a person found to be at risk of harming themselves or someone else," said The Guardian. Advocates say that such laws would have prevented many suicides and mass shootings had they been in place, while critics say they infringe on individuals' Second Amendment rights.

The 2022 bipartisan gun safety bill signed into law by President Joe Biden created a national office to implement red flag laws. It also included background checks for gun buyers between the ages of 18 and 21, and strengthened laws to prevent domestic abusers from obtaining a firearm. Because of her past stances on the issue as well as the Biden-Harris administration's efforts and accomplishments, Harris has been endorsed by all of the major gun reform advocacy groups, including Everytown For Gun Safety. "Her positions represent a direct attack on the Second Amendment and will destroy your Constitutional right to bear arms," said the National Rifle Association, which has endorsed Trump.

All quiet on the gun front

Her official campaign page has nothing to say about guns, and Harris has not unveiled any new proposals related to firearm legislation during the campaign. In public appearances, however, she has reiterated her support for a new assault weapons ban. Assault weapons like the AR-15 used in so many American mass shootings "are literally tools of war," Harris said in a Sept. 13 interview with Philadelphia's ABC News affiliate. She also expressed her support for universal background checks, another intervention that advocates believe will help keep guns out of the hands of mass shooters and criminals.

While she supported more restrictive measures on handguns as San Francisco District Attorney, including a ban on manufacturing, owning or selling handguns, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that such measures violate the Second Amendment, and Harris insists that she does not support legislation that would target handguns.

For 75 years, America has served as NATO's backbone. And NATO has backstopped Ukraine in its war against Russia. Kamala Harris says that commitment would remain if she becomes president.

Harris would be "steady on NATO," said Reuters. That stands in "sharp contrast" to Donald Trump's efforts to remake America's relationship with the military alliance. But Harris steadiness on NATO would continue the Biden administration's "staunch support" for the organization, Reuters said. And Harris has vowed to stand by Ukraine against Russia, which she has said is waging "barbaric and inhumane" war with its neighbor.

That support may only go so far. Harris has shied away from saying whether she would back Ukraine's bid to become a member of NATO, Bloomberg said. That's a question for the future, she told CBS' "60 Minutes." "Right now, we are supporting Ukraine's ability to defend itself against Russia's unprovoked aggression," she told the program. An anonymous aide later said Harris believes "Ukraine's future is in NATO," Bloomberg said.

NATO: Quiet continuity

"Europe can expect continuity from Kamala Harris," Jen Kirby said at Internationale Politik Quarterly. If Harris becomes president, America would "remain a strong supporter of NATO" — and remain committed to the organization's Article 5 requirement that an attack on one member be treated as an attack on all. (That provision is mostly seen as an American commitment to Europe's defense, though it was invoked after 9/11 to bring European countries into the fight against al-Qaida.) It is unclear, tbough, if voters care. "Foreign policy has not factored" into the campaign, Kirby said.

"Europe is far from the center of attention for the U.S. foreign policy set," said Politico. Neither Harris nor Tim Walz, her running mate, have talked much about NATO or Europe on the campaign trail. Europeans are anticipating changes, even if Harris wins, simply because U.S. leaders seem ready to pivot to China as a main focus. Europeans, said Lithuania's foreign minister, should "realize that America is and will be focused on [the] Indo-Pacific."

Ukraine: No surrender

Harris has also been steadfast in backing Ukraine. She has "slammed" proposals that Ukraine trade territory to Russia in exchange for peace, said The Associated Press. "They are proposals for surrender," she said at a September appearance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She warned that America's enemies would be emboldened if the country abandoned Ukraine and allowed Russian leader Vladimir Putin to win the war. "The United States supports Ukraine not out of charity but because it's in our strategic interest," she said.

"Events on the ground in Russia and Ukraine will also shape the future president's decisions," Angela Stent said for The Brookings Institution. While it appears that Harris' Ukraine policy would "represent continuity" with the Biden administration, it is likely that she would ask advisers to review that policy once in office. President Joe Biden has been reluctant to let Ukraine have some offensive weapon systems; Harris might be "more forward-looking" on the issue. One question about Ukraine must still be answered by American policymakers, Stent said: "No one in the White House has defined what winning or prevailing might mean."

Never in modern history has a US presidential race been so tight so close to Election Day.

With just a week left, Kamala Harris will deliver her presidential election campaign's closing argument in Washington tonight, with the vice president leaning on the symbolic location to paint her rival as a threat to democracy. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has planned rallies this weekend in New Mexico and Virginia, two Democratic states where the former president is trailing.

"After $2.8 billion spent on campaigning, two assassination attempts, the withdrawal of a president from his re-election bid, two highly consequential debates and endorsements ranging from Taylor Swift to Hulk Hogan, Americans are still evenly split over who their next leader should be," said the Financial Times.

What are the polls currently saying?

Most polls put Harris and Trump nearly neck and neck, with Harris' slight edge narrowing in Trump's favour recently – but as the winner is decided in the Electoral College, most analysts believe the election will come down to results in just a few crucial swing states. Polling averages show razor-thin margins in all seven battleground states, within a tiny margin of error.

The Republican campaign has been "buoyed by polling showing Trump in a better closing position" than this time in 2016 and 2020, said Semafor. However, "after what happened in 2020, and the 'red wave' that didn't materialise in 2022, there are more sceptics than there are optimists," said one campaign insider.

But Harris campaign aides are also "growing cautiously optimistic", said The New York Times, believing the race is "shifting in her favour". Strategists believe the campaign's emphasis on Trump as a fascist, an "expansive battleground-state operation" and "strength among female voters" over abortion rights will carry Harris to a "narrow triumph".

Internal polling puts Harris "slightly ahead" in the three northern states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump's aides believe he can win at least one; they are "particularly hopeful about Pennsylvania". Harris campaign officials believe she "remains competitive" in the four Sun Belt battleground states: Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.

Who has already voted?

The majority of voters will go to the polls on Election Day, but many have already cast their vote using the postal voting system or early voting. As of today, more than 43 million ballots have been cast across 47 states and the District of Columbia, according to CNN.

Pre-election voting is "down significantly" from record levels during the pandemic in 2020. Generally, Democrats prefer to cast their ballots in advance while Republicans "strongly prefer to vote on Election Day". But in a "major shift" from 2020, when the Trump campaign warned against pre-election voting, the Republicans are trying to encourage it.

When might we know the final result?

Generally, Americans can expect "relatively quick race calls for elections", said The Hill. In the past few decades all have been "called" by the morning after the election, except for 2000 (delayed for weeks because of a recount in Florida).

The 2020 election marked a "sharp difference" from the norm; the public had to wait almost five days before "most major news outlets" could call a result, due largely to delays processing the "historic increase" in postal voting caused by the pandemic.

Since then, almost all states have changed their policies to allow envelopes for postal votes to be processed ahead of Election Day, and about half allow machines to scan the ballot papers as long as the results aren't aggregated, according to a recent report by the Center for Election Innovation & Research. Fewer postal votes this year should "speed the process up", said The Hill.

If the election comes down to Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (neither of which allow envelope processing until Election Day), a "quick race call might be impossible". Ultimately, just how close the race is may decide "how long the country is holding its breath".

Most voters think Trump will not concede the election even if he loses, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS of 1,704 registered voters across the US. A "sizeable minority of his backers" say that losing candidates "have no obligation to do so".

In 2017, just weeks into Donald Trump's first term in office, The Washington Post officially announced a new slogan for the storied and celebrated journalistic institution: "Democracy Dies in Darkness," allegedly a favorite phrase of iconic reporter Bob Woodward. While the paper's executives insisted they had "come up with a slogan nearly a year ago, long before Trump was the Republican presidential nominee," the mantra was quickly — and understandably — taken by many as a rallying cry, not just for the Post, but for the media at large during the already-evident tumult of the Trump administration.

Seven years later, as Trump approaches Election Day with promises of retribution and violence, the Post's slogan is once again in the spotlight — this time in light of the paper's sudden and unexpected decision to nix a planned presidential endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, allegedly "made by owner, Jeff Bezos," the Post's union said on X.

Although the impact of the Post's decision not to endorse a candidate may, at this stage of the 2024 campaign, be electorally minimal (the same as if it had endorsed someone), the implications of such a move may be more concerning.

"This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty," former Post editor Marty Baron said to NPR. "Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate the Post's owner" and other media owners.

What did the commentators say?

The Post's decision to cancel its planned endorsement of Harris — coupled with a similar decision by the Los Angeles Times not to endorse a candidate this year after having endorsed Democrats for the previous four elections — is an example of "anticipatory obedience," the Columbia Journalism Review said. Owners like Bezos and the Times' publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong are preemptively acting out of fear that "if Trump wins he could take vengeance on companies that cross him." What's the use of having a net worth of over $200 billion if Bezos can't buy "fearlessness in the face of a carnival-barking, would-be authoritarian who is basically a coin toss away from being, yet again, president of the United States?" asked Brian McGrory at The Boston Globe.

In the wake of the nonendorsement announcement, the "#BoycottWaPo hashtag spawned dozens of anti-Post comments, as well as remarks from notable public figures and influencers about canceled subscriptions," the Post itself said in an article on reactions to the decision. The nonendorsement "already seemed to be impacting subscriptions," said Semafor, with some 2,000 people canceling within the first 24 hours after the announcement — "an unusually high number," according to one Post employee. By midday Monday, 200,000 people had canceled their subscriptions, said NPR.

Not everyone agrees with how best to respond, however. Cancellations "do Donald Trump's work for him," Baron said to The New Yorker. "He would like to actually weaken these institutions and eliminate them."

"Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don't want oversight," said CNN's Jake Tapper on X. Doing so "does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers," and ultimately "will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account."

Although newspaper cancellations are a "reasonable impulse" for average people with "few ways of combatting forces bigger than them, forces such as the threat of authoritarianism," The Atlantic said, doing so only hurts journalism as a whole. Subscribers should instead be "canceling their Amazon Prime subscriptions," which are ultimately the engine of Bezos' fortune.

What next?

Under Bezos, the Post "surely did more at the margins to help Harris by spiking the editorial — by outraging her supporters — than if it had been published on Sunday," said Politico's John Harris. Still, by dint of his own role in the power structure the paper is meant to hold to task, Bezos should either sell the paper outright or "somehow put it in the hands of a truly independent nonprofit entity."

More broadly, the episode is an "argument against billionaires buying newspapers," said MSNBC's Jarvis DeBerry. While there may have been hell to pay if the Post and the Times had endorsed Harris, and then Trump won, that hell "will be visited on more vulnerable people to a much greater degree." It is "unforgivable," then, that these owners are "more concerned with their own interests than the interests of the readers they serve."

The Democrats are beginning to panic, said Alex Shephard in The New Republic – and who can blame them? It appears Kamala Harris is incapable of establishing a meaningful lead in this election, no matter what her rival says or does.

Donald Trump is running "an explicitly authoritarian, if not outright fascist, campaign". His speeches have become ever more rambling, and his behaviour downright odd. After one of his meetings was interrupted last week by a medical emergency in the crowd, he abruptly abandoned the question-and-answer format and spent half-an-hour swaying on stage to a playlist of his favourite songs, including "Y.M.C.A." and "Nothing Compares 2 U". Yet despite all this, he's still level-pegging with Harris. On three occasions in this campaign, she has had a boost: when she first became the nominee; when she picked Tim Walz as her running mate; and when she bested Trump in the TV debate. Yet each time the momentum has dissipated. Harris just can't close the deal.

If Harris is failing to cut through, it's partly down to the way the media is covering this race, said Jill Filipovic on Slate. We've heard lots about how Harris isn't doing enough interviews or proposing detailed enough policies. Yet reporters have become so inured to Trump's outrages and garbled syntax that these barely receive any attention. Earlier this month, Trump launched into a "eugenicist rant" on a TV show, claiming that many migrants have "murdered far more than one person" and that being a murderer is in people's genes – "we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now". Although this received some coverage, you'd never have guessed from the headlines that he had said something so shocking. However habituated media commentators have become to Trump's behaviour, they need to tell people "exactly what the man who wants to be president is saying".

There's method to Trump's apparent madness, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. By amping up his rhetoric, he's seeking to win over undecided voters. This might seem counterintuitive, as such voters are usually thought of as moderates who dislike extremist politics. But those swing voters are relatively few in number. The undecided voters Trump is after are the far larger group who are firmly Republican but might not bother going to the polls. Policy details won't sway them, but "apocalyptic" rhetoric might. Even in 2020, America's "highest-turnout national election in more than a century, a third of eligible voters – about 80 million people – stayed home". If Trump can enlist even a fraction of these people to vote for him, it could win him the White House.

The data experts reckon it will come down to each party's ability to get out the vote, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. The Democrats are believed to have the edge with the ground game. But Harris could do more to help her cause. Having at last started to do more interviews, she now needs to start offering more concessions to conservatives in order to secure the centrist votes she needs to win.

A bit more urgency wouldn't go amiss either, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. You still don't get a sense that Harris really knows why she wants to be president. Asked recently whether she would have done anything differently from Joe Biden, she replied that "there is not a thing that comes to mind". This from a supposed change candidate. Why doesn't she just admit that the border policy was "bollixed up" and that Biden wasn't tough enough with Israel's PM, Benjamin Netanyahu? For Harris to win, "we need less mulling and more action in a do-or-die moment".

The United States experienced a temporary, violent crime wave during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to official data, many violent crimes are currently on track to be at or near historic lows since the FBI began tracking data. Even though the worst of that post-pandemic crime wave has passed, public concern about crime remains high. A September 2024 Pew survey found that violent crime was fifth on voters' list of priorities this year. That means that both major party campaigns are trying to reassure voters that their policies will address the problem.

From reformer to hardliner

Vice President Kamala Harris promised to "fundamentally transform how we approach public safety" as a candidate for president during the summer and fall of 2019. Harris – then a U.S. Senator from California – released a criminal justice reform platform in September 2019 that promised to end mass incarceration, abolish private prisons, abandon the war on drugs and establish a new national commission to study the criminal justice system and recommend reforms. She also sought to reform the juvenile justice system. The proposal promised to "end life sentences of children and offer opportunities for sentence reduction to young people convicted of crimes."

During the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, after she dropped out of the 2020 presidential race but before she was selected as Joe Biden's running mate, Harris appeared to endorse aspects of the "defund the police" movement, arguing that funding police departments to the exclusion of social priorities was misguided. The Biden-Harris ticket that year then promised significant reforms to the criminal justice system.

Yet the pandemic crime wave put the brakes on Harris' criminal justice reform platform almost immediately, as the newly-inaugurated administration realized that the public appetite for reform had been eclipsed by fears of a violent crime wave. Leading Democrats have yet to return to their previous messaging about tackling police violence and addressing systemic racism in the criminal justice system despite the drop in crime rates. "The change reflects a broader shift in thinking among Democrats and their nonpartisan allies who work in violence reduction, criminal justice and police reform," said Marin Cogan in Vox.

A promise to legalize marijuana

Since becoming the Democratic Party nominee in August after President Biden withdrew from the race, Harris has had very little to say about crime or criminal justice. One exception is federal marijuana policy. Despite the increasing number of states that have fully legalized recreational marijuana, more than 200,000 people were arrested on marijuana charges in 2023. As a senator, Harris cosponsored a bill in 2019 to decriminalize marijuana.

The Biden-Harris administration announced in April 2024 that it would ask the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to change its appraisal of marijuana to classify it as a less harmful substance that has medical uses but stopped short of recommending outright legalization or decriminalization. And then on October 14, Harris said that as president she would support legalization of marijuana, a stance that goes much further than the official policy of President Biden. In 2023, 70% of respondents said that they supported legalizing the drug, a record high in Gallup's long-running poll of the issue.

Harris has made few concrete promises about either criminal justice reform, violent crime or policing. There is no section on crime or law enforcement in her campaign's 82-page policy booklet that was released in September. In her convention speech, she did not address crime directly but said that as a prosecutor she worked on behalf of victims and that "everyone has a right to safety, to dignity and to justice." She has instead positioned herself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor who supports law enforcement.

Harris is "embracing her identity as a prosecutor in a way that would have been unimaginable four years ago," said Shaila Dewan in The New York Times. That posture may also be an effort to portray former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump – who was convicted on 34 felony counts by a New York jury in May – as a criminal. How well that plays with voters remains to be seen.

The days of "just say no" are over. Now candidates across the political spectrum are embracing legal pot.

Marijuana reform is "the rare bipartisan issue" in this year's presidential election, said The Wall Street Journal. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have offered support for easing restrictions — Trump has said he'll vote for legal weed in Florida's upcoming referendum on the issue, while Harris has vowed to legalize the drug — putting cannabis "on surer footing than ever." More than two dozen states and the District of Columbia have legalized adult marijuana use. But the industry says more reforms are needed. "Democrats want this, Republicans want this — both sides should be able to come together and have something reasonable happen," said one executive.

Advocates and opponents now cross party lines. In Florida, Bradford County Sheriff Gordon Smith — a Republican — made an ad backing that state's referendum, said Florida Politics. Legalization will "let us focus on serious crime, making our streets and neighborhoods safer," Smith said. But Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is fighting the proposal, said NBC News. The one-time GOP presidential candidate is campaigning against the referendum, one observer said, "as if it's his own name on the ballot."

What did the commentators say?

It's "good politics" for Harris to back pot legalization, and it's "good for the country, too," Robert Gebelhoff said at The Washington Post. Two-thirds of voters — including more than half of Republicans — favor federal legalization. Now Democrats can argue against the government "micromanaging people's personal consumption habits" while promoting new regulations that rein in newer versions of weed that have 20 times the levels of THC than the drug did 40 years ago. Anybody who misses the old days of prohibition? "Good luck with that."

Florida's weed referendum makes it easy to buy a "socially harmful substance," Charles Fain Lehman said at The Wall Street Journal. "That breeds the kind of disorder Mr. Trump is known for standing against." There is a difference between decriminalization — not sending people to jail for possessing small amounts of marijuana — and "commercial legalization, which allows businesses to sell marijuana directly to consumers." That removes "all checks" on pot consumption: The likely result is "disorder and dysfunction."

What next?

Support for legal weed isn't unanimous: Florida's Catholic bishops have urged a no vote on the referendum. They increasingly stand alone. An "overwhelming" number of Americans — 88% — say marijuana "should be legal for medical or recreational use," said Pew Research Center. There are some partisan differences. Republicans are likelier than Democrats to "cite downsides" of legal recreational weed. Even then, just 17% of Republicans say marijuana should be completely illegal.

"The U.S. is divided when it comes to state and federal marijuana policy," said The Associated Press. While some states have legalized the drug, it still technically remains illegal under federal law. The overwhelming voter consensus means that the divide could be "coming to an end," said AP. In the meantime, state efforts roll on: Along with Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota all have ballot initiatives this fall allowing some sort of marijuana legalization.

Kamala Harris is depending on one big issue to help her win the 2024 presidential race: abortion.

Abortion is the "key issue" in Harris' campaign, said CNN. One poll found that 54% of likely voters trust her more than Donald Trump to do a better job on abortion rights. (He pulled in 41% of respondents.) Her advantage is even bigger among young people, Black and Latino voters. That is why Harris has adopted a "rapid-response mentality" on the topic, CNN said. She is quick to highlight developments like ProPublica's reporting on two Georgia women who died because of delayed care related to that state's abortion ban.

Harris has been a "leading voice" on abortion rights, said The Washington Post. Her key position: She wants legislation to restore the national abortion rights that were eliminated when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. That change created a "horrific, heartbreaking reality" for women in states where abortion bans have passed, she has said. And Harris has vowed to protect access to the abortion drug mifepristone — her office in March called the drug "essential medication."

'Threw her weight' into abortion cases

Harris "has a long record of supporting abortion rights in California," said CalMatters. "As long as I have known her, this has always been a core issue," said San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu. As California's attorney general, she "threw her weight" behind cases involving abortion, including investigating allegations that Planned Parenthood was selling fetal remains and advocating regulation of anti-abortion pregnancy centers. That gives her "credibility" among reproductive rights groups, CalMatters said.

It also earns the ire of anti-abortion activists. Harris has "passionately" advocated a "pro-abortion agenda," Richard Doerflinger, a fellow with the National Catholic Bioethics Center, said at National Review. In 2020, Harris "taunted" then-candidate Joe Biden for supporting the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortions. Harris, Doerflinger said, could be expected to rescind the band. The vice president has, he said, been "singularly obsessed" with abortion.

But some progressives think Harris doesn't go far enough. She "has not said whether she supports Roe's restrictions," said Politico. Under the old precedent, states could limit abortions during the third trimester. That is frustrating for some abortion-rights supporters who believe "government has no role in regulating abortions even after fetal viability."

Eliminating the filibuster

One sign of Harris' seriousness on abortion: She supports ending the Senate filibuster so the chamber can pass pro-choice legislation with 51 votes, NPR said. (Under the filibuster, most controversial legislation requires 60 votes to pass.) "I've been very clear, I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe," she said in a public radio interview.

Will the issue swing the election? Arizona progressives, for example, are worried a state-level ballot measure to protect abortion rights is not helping aid Democratic candidates at the polls, Politico said. Voters are "prioritizing other issues," said one abortion rights activist. We don't expect the ballot initiatives to deliver these states for us," said a Harris campaign adviser. In a close race, the adviser said, abortion is a "motivating issue that could bring more people to Harris' side."

Back-to-back hurricanes have wreaked havoc across America's southeastern states in the past month, said Rex Huppke in USA Today. And as if officials didn't have enough on their plate, they're also having to contend with a mass of lies and misinformation.

The primary source of this stuff is Donald Trump. Among his recent false claims is that Democratic officials had gone "out of their way to not help people in Republican areas"; that Kamala Harris had spent all the federal relief funds on housing illegal migrants; and that President Biden hadn't been in touch with governors in affected states. Trump's lies have been amplified by his "minions": Elon Musk tweeted that federal officials had been "ferrying illegals" into the country, instead of "saving American lives"; the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that the government can control the weather, and was deliberately directing hurricanes towards Trump country.

If anyone has sought to exploit this crisis, it's Harris, said Kirsten Fleming in the New York Post. She interrupted the storm clear-up last week by accusing Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, of refusing to take her call, saying it was "irresponsible" and "selfish". He insisted that he didn't know she had called, pointing out that he had been rather busy. Harris is right that a natural disaster is a time to work together and not to play politics. Shame she didn't take her own advice.

There's a difference between playing politics and deliberately propagating lies, said Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has had to set up a dedicated webpage for debunking the rumours spread by Trump and his allies. It doesn't augur well for the 5 November election. Given the closeness of the race, the result could remain unresolved for a few days, creating ripe conditions for a similar campaign of misinformation. Instead of hurricane-related conspiracy theories, there'll be claims of "secret bins full of uncounted ballots". Instead of being blamed for hogging relief funds, undocumented migrants will be accused of illegally voting en masse. "The Maga loyalists in Congress and the pro-Trump media ecosystem will amplify these claims." Musk will helpfully fan the flames on X/Twitter. It has been a bad hurricane season, but in a little over a fortnight, America could be engulfed in "a storm of a different kind".

Technology has always transformed presidential elections. John F. Kennedy benefitted from the rise of television. Donald Trump won his first race with the help of Twitter. This year, podcasting may be the breakthrough medium.

Kamala Harris could soon sit down with popular podcaster Joe Rogan as she "works to shore up support with male voters," Reuters said. It's potentially a huge audience for Harris: Spotify says Rogan has 14.5 million followers on the platform, in addition to millions more who see podcast clips on Instagram and YouTube. If the interview happens, it will be the latest salvo in the "all-important Bro-Podcast War of 2024," Matt Stieb said at New York magazine.

Podcasts are "transforming the presidential election," Brady Brickner-Wood said at The New Yorker. Harris has already appeared on the "Call Her Daddy" podcast to discuss women's issues, while Trump has appeared on just about every male-oriented podcast imaginable, including those hosted by Theo Von and Lex Fridman. Why the newfound podcast popularity? Traditional interviews — like Harris' visit to "60 Minutes" — can feel "especially rigid." Podcasts offer candidates an "affable, jovial hang." And they reach voters.

What did the commentators say?

Some mainstream reporters are dismayed that Harris has "dispensed with legacy media as gatekeepers," Jennifer Rubin said at The Washington Post. In addition to the "Call Her Daddy" podcast, the vice president has also appeared on the NBA-oriented "All The Smoke" podcast and shows with radio hosts Howard Stern and Charlamagne Tha God. That's because "traditional news audiences are shrinking" while podcasts and other alternative formats offer "vastly more voters and potential voters" to candidates. Harris' media strategy is "exactly the right thing."

Harris' "Call Her Daddy" appearance "wasn't a hard-hitting accountability interview," Helen Lewis said at The Atlantic. But it did contain a "substantive policy discussion" about abortion rights, housing costs and other issues. Most Americans who do follow "hard news" have already decided how they'll vote. "Nailing down undecided voters — including those who don't currently plan to cast a ballot — is vital." Trump has already been on the podcast trail for months. Harris' decision to do the same is a "smart tactic."

What next?

The podcast presidential campaign reflects the Internet-era "scattering of audiences" that has left legacy outlets less powerful than they once were, Axios said. Hit podcasts, meanwhile, "over-index with audiences public figures want to reach." They also offer a different look at the candidates — Trump, for example, "showed a rarely seen softer side" while discussing his late brother's alcoholism during one podcast interview.

"The campaigns are still holding to some traditional tactics," said The Boston Globe. Together, Harris and Trump are expected to spend $2.1 billion on TV, radio, digital, and other media advertising during 2024, making this year's race the "most expensive election cycle in history." But podcasts are steering the conversation as never before, said media columnist Margaret Sullivan. "As journalists," she said, "we have to realize we are not the gatekeepers of information as we once were."

Climate change has long been a core priority for Democrats in national elections, with the party's voters much more likely than Republicans to believe that climate change is real and caused by human activities. U.S. climate policy has oscillated wildly between partisan administrations this century, with former President Trump pulling the country out of the Paris Climate Accords and President Biden rejoining them. While it has so far not been a top issue in the 2024 election, vice president and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has climate plans that differ significantly from those of her Republican rival for office, former President Donald Trump.

What is Harris' climate history?

When Harris was California's junior senator from 2017 to 2021, she co-sponsored legislation that became known as the Green New Deal, outlining a series of goals designed to kickstart green energy production and make the U.S. gradually less dependent on fossil fuels. The text of the bill called for "eliminating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as much as technologically feasible," but stopped short of a ban on fossil fuel consumption or production. It set a goal of "meeting 100% of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources." As a candidate for president in 2019, Harris backed the Green New Deal and endorsed a ban on hydraulic fracking, a controversial method of natural gas extraction that is prevalent in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

As vice president, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which contained a variety of measures to boost clean energy production and expanded a clean vehicle tax credit to incentivize car buyers to choose electric vehicles. IRA also created new incentives for homeowners to adopt clean energy appliances and energy sources.

What is Harris' climate future?

There are no specific proposals related to clean energy or the climate crisis in the 82-page economic plan that the Harris-Walz campaign released in September. Climate change did not figure prominently in Harris' acceptance speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention either. She said only that she believes in "the freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis."

Harris stands by the provisions in the IRA but has since backed away from her previous stance on fracking. Her campaign does not use the language of the Green New Deal, and in his debate with Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, Harris' running mate Tim Walz appeared to disavow the idea. Speaking about farmers in Minnesota who are getting battered by climate change, Walz said, "these are not folks that are Green New Deal folks," suggesting that the campaign regards the phrase as too extreme. Harris has pointed to the fact that the IRA also grants new leases for natural gas drilling as proof that she has consistently backed domestic fossil fuel production as vice president, and Walz similarly highlighted, in his debate, the fact that natural gas and oil production in the United States has increased under the Biden-Harris administration.

Why is Harris choosing not to emphasize her climate policy?

The Harris campaign has so far not released a detailed climate plan. The campaign website says only that she would work to "unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis," and mentions issue-areas like disaster resilience without outlining any specific proposals. This may be because polling shows climate change is not a top issue for voters in the 2024 election, and negative perceptions of the economy are making voters unwilling to entertain the idea of further sacrifices for the sake of the environment. In Gallup polling, the share of respondents who say that "protection of the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth" has fallen from a high of 65% in 2019 to 52% in 2024. The Democratic Party Platform's section on climate change largely restates the policies in the Inflation Reduction Act and adds little in the way of new promises.

What happened

Vice President Kamala Harris held a rally in Pennsylvania Wednesday with more than 100 Republican former officeholders and officials who are backing her over Donald Trump, then sat down for a combative interview with Bret Baier on Fox News. Trump appeared in a Fox News town hall, taped Tuesday in Georgia, with a friendly audience of women, then recorded a Univision town hall in Florida with more skeptical Latino voters.

Who said what

Harris and Trump may have "appeared on the same network," but the dueling Fox News events showcased "their divergent media and electoral strategies," The Wall Street Journal said. Trump "has largely been sticking to conservative media," working to "boost voter turnout among people who support him already," while Harris is doing "more challenging interviews" to expand her coalition. Harris' Fox News debut — essentially "going into the lion's den" — was a play to "reach millions of voters, especially conservative-leaning women, who have probably not heard much of her message," The New York Times said. The half-hour interview was "contentious from the start and stayed that way throughout," Kierra Frazier said at Politico. Baier "recycled Republican talking points into accusations and frequently interrupted the vice president," while Harris highlighted Trump's "threats in recent appearances to use the military to go after his critics" and accused Baier of whitewashing those threats.

What next?

Harris "deserves credit for doing the interview," RealClearPolitics president Tom Bevan said on X, but "I don't think it helped her change any minds. Critics think it was a disaster, supporters think she did great." Most people, "especially swing voters," will only "see clips and get a general sense" of how the interview went, and "by that standard," Harris "did just fine," Jonathan Alter said at the Times. She "should have been better prepared" for "certain predictable questions," but the "sound bite that lingers" will be her line: "My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden's presidency."

Kamala Harris is walking a delicate line as she campaigns for the presidency: She is committed to Israel's right to defend itself after last year's Oct. 7 attack by Hamas — but also wants Israel to curb the violence it has inflicted on Gaza's civilians in the year since.

"Let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself," she said in an October speech, according to NPR. But, she added, the "scale of suffering" in Gaza is "heartbreaking." Along with President Joe Biden, Harris has pushed for Israel to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas that brings the remaining hostages home. But she has also been more vocal than Biden about the challenges and devastation Gazans have faced. The fighting must end, she said, so Palestinians can obtain "dignity, security, freedom and self determination."

Asked during a CBS News interview if she considers Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu a "real close ally," Harris hedged. "I think, with all due respect, the better question is, do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people," Harris said. "And the answer to that question is yes."

A 'critical role' in the Middle East

Some observers believe that the U.S. has "lost influence" in its efforts to restrain Israel, Bloomberg said. And the Biden-Harris administration has come in for criticism from Arab-American voters who have "vocally opposed U.S. support for Israel" during the war. (Many of those voters are located in the critical swing state of Michigan.) But Harris says America still has a "critical role" in the Middle East, Bloomberg said, including in helping bring the war to an end. "And we're not going to stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and in the region, including Arab leaders," she said to CBS News.

It's not clear that American Arab voters are comfortable with that stance, Josephine Riesman and S.I. Rosenbaum said at Slate. The question is whether Harris would backtrack from Biden's "unwavering support" for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). "We need action, which means an arms embargo," said Natalia Latif, of the pro-Palestinian Uncommitted movement. But Harris has "little room to maneuver," Riesman and Rosenbaum said, given that a "huge part" of the Democratic Party base is "still deeply attached to Israel."

Seeking a two-state solution

Harris said she remains committed to a "two-state solution" that ultimately offers Palestinians their own state alongside Israel, PBS NewsHour said. "In that solution there must be security for the Israeli people and Israel and in equal measure for the Palestinians," she said during the September debate with Donald Trump. But a plan to actually achieve the two-state solution, long favored by policymakers, has proven elusive for decades.

There are still many unknowns. It is believed that Harris "might be somewhat to Biden's left on Gaza," Nicole Narea said at Vox. But it is an "open question" what that would actually look like, policy-wise. It seems unlikely that Harris would "substantially deviate" from Biden's policies. The trick for her is to try to keep both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian voters in the Democratic tent. That, Narea said, leaves Harris "with a difficult political tightrope to walk."

On paper, Kamala Harris is a solid choice, arguably better qualified than any incoming president since George H.W. Bush. 

She has been both attorney general and senator of the nation's most populous state, California; she has served on the Senate Intelligence Committee and Judiciary Committee. As vice-president, she has presided over the Senate for four years, shepherding though major laws such as the Inflation Reduction Act, and she has met more than 150 world leaders. 

Harris is, though, the first Democratic presidential nominee in 50 years to have been selected outside the usual system of primary elections, because of Joe Biden's abrupt decision to drop out. And, of course, if she wins the election on 5 November, she will be the first woman, the first black woman and the first Asian American to be the US president – as she has been in so many of her previous roles.

Where did she grow up?

Harris was born in Oakland, California, in October 1964. Her Indian-born mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a breast cancer researcher at Berkeley, University of California; her father, Donald Harris, is a distinguished Marxist economist from Jamaica. Both were civil rights activists: they met at Oakland's influential AfroAmerican Association, and took Kamala to protests from a young age. 

They separated when she was five, and she was largely raised by her mother, who immersed her and her sister in Oakland's black culture, taking them to a Baptist church as well as a Hindu temple. Harris was bussed from her largely black neighbourhood to a majority white school in a rich part of Berkeley, as part of a controversial desegregation plan. 

After high school, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington DC, one of the bastions of black American political and cultural life. She majored in political science and economics before attending law school in California.

What did she achieve in her legal career?

In 1990, Harris took a job at the Alameda County district attorney's office; she specialised in prosecuting sex crimes. In 2003, at 39, she was elected as San Francisco's district attorney. Eight years later, she became attorney general of California. 

Serving as a prosecutor was controversial in her milieu, because the criminal justice system was seen as oppressive to African Americans. Harris says in her memoir, "The Truths We Hold", that she thinks the system is "broken", but wanted to be "on the other side" to effect change. 

She was a "progressive" prosecutor who opposed the death penalty and launched rehabilitation initiatives to cut reoffending, but she was also not afraid to be "tough on crime". As California's attorney general, she tripled the number of felony offenders sent to state prison.

What explains her political rise?

Harris is said to be an excellent networker, and she has many influential allies. She was an early backer of Barack Obama, and is good friends with Gavin Newsom, California's governor. She's also a formidable campaigner: she beat Loretta Sanchez, a congresswoman of 20 years' standing, to the Democratic Senate nomination in 2016; she won the seat on the night that Donald Trump won the presidency. 

On the Senate Judiciary Committee, she became known for her grillings of Trump officials and Supreme Court nominees: "Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?" she asked the conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh, to his clear discomfort. Her performances cemented her status as a rising star of the Democratic Party; before long she was being touted as a possible presidential candidate to take on Trump in 2020.

Why did her first presidential bid fail?

It started well, with a rally 20,000 strong in Oakland in January 2019, and she outshone Joe Biden in the first candidates' debate in June. But she failed to capitalise on her early momentum, quitting the race in December, before the primary votes began. Pundits agreed that she'd failed to articulate a clear narrative and that, by trying to appeal to both moderates and progressives in her party, she had pleased neither. 

Yet she was chosen by Biden in August 2020 to be his presidential running mate; Republican critics often scornfully describe her as a "diversity hire", because the decision came at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.

How has she fared as VP?

She got off to a rough start. Biden handed her the thorny portfolio of addressing the "root causes" of illegal immigration to the US from Central America – a vague brief which left her indelibly linked with the administration's failure to curb the flow of migrants across the Mexican border. At her lowest point, fully 55% of voters had an unfavourable opinion of her; there was even speculation that Biden would drop her from the ticket to improve his re-election chances. 

But her standing improved after the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion in 2022: she became the White House's leading voice in defending reproductive rights, and on gun control. That endeared her to the Democratic base, helping her cruise to the nomination this year.

What does she believe in?

Harris is still seen as something of a political chameleon (not helped by her penchant for rather convoluted "word salad" public statements). Her positions on healthcare funding and immigration have notably hardened in recent years: she now supports a hardline bipartisan border security package put forward by Biden. But on reproductive rights and gay marriage she retains clear liberal positions. 

On foreign policy, she has vowed to support Ukraine against Russia "for as long as it takes". On Israel, she has been a long-term supporter of a two-state solution, and she was one of the first members of the Biden administration to call for an "immediate ceasefire" in Gaza.

Momala: the co-parent

Harris first stepped into the public eye in 1994, when Clint Eastwood spilt champagne on her at the 60th birthday party of Willie Brown, then the speaker of the California State Assembly, whom Harris was dating at the time. San Francisco Chronicle gossip columnist Herb Caen described Harris, then a 30-year-old deputy district attorney, as "something new in Willie's love life. She's a woman, not a girl." They split after two years.

In 2013, she met Doug Emhoff, an LA-based entertainment lawyer, now her husband. They were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend. "It felt like we had known each other for ever," Emhoff remembered, but Harris warned him that she was a busy woman. "I didn't want it to end," he said. "And so the next morning, I pulled the move of emailing her with my availabilities for the next four months, including long weekends." 

A year later, when Harris was 49, they were married. Harris became a stepmother (or "Momala") to his son Cole, 30, and daughter Ella, 25. When J.D. Vance, Trump's running mate, complained that the Democrats were led by "a bunch of childless cat ladies", Emhoff's first wife, Kerstin, retorted that Harris was an excellent "co-parent" to her children: "loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present".

The 2024 presidential election might be decided by the undecided. In an era of hyperpolarization, the idea that there are still "undecided voters" might seem unbelievable. But they exist — and they could choose who wins in November.

"There are different strains of 'undecided,'" Philip Bump said at The Washington Post. Many of those Americans aren't so much divided between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris — instead, they're "undecided" on whether or not to vote. Others have "complex" calculations to make about how the candidates align with their own values. And others simply aren't paying much attention. There have always been Americans who are "loosely attached" to politics, Bump said. "This isn't new."

Campaigns sort undecideds into two groups: "Persuadable" and "irregular." "Persuadable voters get the most attention from the media," Ronald Brownstein said at The Atlantic. But the irregulars — folks who don't always go to the polls — "can loom much larger in the outcome." Why? Because they're much more likely to turn out in a presidential election. "There are more humans who are non-habitual voters than there are voters who swing back and forth," said one Democratic strategist.

Views 'all over the place'

Undecideds are often seen as voters who sit "squarely in the middle of today's polarized politics," Jay Kaspian Kang said at The New Yorker. In reality, their views are "all over the place." The press has hyperfixated on these people, though, because presidential elections now come down to a "small number of voters in swing states." Despite the relentless effort to understand undecideds and what makes them tick, it seems we're no closer to answer. "We know the undecided voter will decide our destiny," Kang said, "but we cannot conjure up their face."

But they will matter. Harris' polling lead is "within the margin of error," said PBS NewsHour. "The band of undecided voters is getting narrower and narrower by the day," said a Republican strategist. Eight in 10 voters say their minds are "completely decided." But a few still want to learn more about Harris, who entered the race at a relatively late stage. "The fact that they're unsure is a better place to be than they're against you," said Faiz Shakir, a Democratic operative.

Shifting with the 'political winds'

"The firm line we've drawn between the 'decided' and the 'undecided' may not exist," Vinay Mehra said at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Most voters are "swaying" in response to the national mood, recent events and other factors. Undecideds are "simply those most visibly affected by this swing." They don't sit in the middle of the political spectrum — instead, they're most likely to move from one side to the other "when the political winds shift." That means the way undecided voters move is "just a reflection of the swings happening across the electorate."

Or perhaps the winds simply blow ill. The existence of undecided voters might be a sign that the existing candidates and parties "don't merit public confidence," Ross Douthat said at The New York Times. If voters are given two bad options, he said, "they will often choose the one you are sure is worse."

Polls suggest voters trust Donald Trump more than Kamala Harris on immigration. Harris is trying to make up the difference with a hawkish platform on the topic.

Harris has "called for further tightening of asylum restrictions," said The Associated Press after the Democratic candidate visited the U.S. border with Mexico. Among her plans: "More serious criminal charges" for migrants who repeatedly cross the border illegally, as well as a new requirement that asylum claims be made only at official U.S. ports of entry. "I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane," she said during the border visit.

Most Democratic presidential candidates have usually framed immigration as a "matter of legalizing undocumented immigrants," Jennifer Rubin said at The Washington Post. Harris, though, treats the matter as a "law enforcement issue at the border." Border security is the first priority — after that, Rubin said, Democrats can turn to issues "ranging from temporary agricultural workers to dreamers to high-skill workers brought in under H-1B visas."

Hawk, or 'faux border hawk?' 

At her campaign website, Harris highlights her support for the bipartisan border security bill that Trump helped kill earlier this year. The bill would have provided new funding for 1,500 new border agents, as well as funding for "more detection technology to intercept fentanyl." (The legislation would also have "given the president greater authority to shut down the border when crossings are high" and closed some asylum loopholes, said The Washington Post.) Harris said she would revive that bill — part of an approach that includes both "strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship" for migrants, her website said. 

Conservatives are skeptical. Harris is a "faux border hawk," Rich Lowry said at National Review. The Biden-Harris administration "tore up a border system that was working" and only turned back toward enforcement after realizing the resulting tide of migrants was a "political gift" for Trump. Harris can't erase that she "spoke out forcefully against immigration enforcement just a few years ago," Lowry said. As senator, she even sponsored bills to loosen enforcement. On immigration, "she wants to be something she's not."

'Shift that mirrors the far right'

There are also skeptics on the left. Harris "isn't fighting Trump on immigration policy," Anna Lekas Miller said at The Progressive. "She's echoing him." Her emphasis on border enforcement "symbolizes a significant shift that mirrors the far right" and leaves migrants and their advocates without a "meaningful alternative." The scuttled border bill that Harris favors did not include any "meaningful path to citizenship" for undocumented migrants, Miller said. Harris is "playing politics and shoving immigrants under the bus." 

Harris' tough-on-migration message on immigration reflects a "changing national mood," Sahil Kapur said at NBC News. Tougher border controls will be a priority "regardless of which party wins the 2024 elections." That may be working for Democrats: A January poll showed Trump with a 35-point lead over President Joe Biden on the issue. As of late September, that lead — now against Kamala Harris — had narrowed to 21 points.

Kamala Harris entered the race against Donald Trump with one big disadvantage: Voters trust him more on economic issues. Now she is putting forward an economic plan aimed at narrowing the gap.

Harris is promising a "focus on manufacturing and middle-class opportunities," said The Wall Street Journal. The centerpiece: A package of tax credits, totaling $100 million over 10 years, with the intent of "revitalizing factory towns and retooling existing factories" as well as raising wages and encouraging "union partnerships." That's a departure from "traditional free-market views," said the Journal, in favor of a government-led "industrial policy" to compete with China.

Factories aren't the only focus. Harris has a goal of "25 million new small business applications in the first two years" of her White House term, said Forbes. Start-up small businesses currently get an initial $5,000 tax credit — Harris' plan would increase that to $50,000. Tax credits are at the heart of many Harris economic proposals: She is also seeking to expand credits for developers who build affordable housing and to restore the $3,600-a-year pandemic-era child tax credit for parents of young children.

'Practical solutions to problems'

Polls show voters are concerned that Harris is "too liberal," said Politico. The candidate says she is "pragmatic" on economic issues. "I believe we shouldn't be constrained by ideology, and instead, should seek practical solutions to problems," she said in a Pittsburgh campaign speech on the economy. To that end, she also promised to end degree requirements for some federal jobs and reform permitting processes to make it easier for developers to build. But the details of how she'd implement those promises are "still light on specifics," Politico said.

To a great degree, Harris and Trump "have many of the same stated goals for the economy," said The New York Times. Both want to slash regulations and middle class taxes, as well as encourage domestic manufacturing. It's their methods that "diverge sharply." Trump would use the stick of tariffs and import bans to achieve his goals, while Harris would emphasize the carrot of tax breaks. And with moderate stances on issues like capital-gains taxes and cryptocurrency, Harris is trying to "signal that she would be a responsible, pro-growth steward of the economy," said the Times.

How to fix a 'mixed bag' economy?

If this plan is so good, "why hasn't the Biden-Harris administration been following it for the past four years?" Nicole Russell said at USA Today. The economy under that administration is a "mixed bag" — stocks are high and unemployment low, but "tens of millions of Americans say they're struggling" to pay their bills. Harris' economic proposals are "like fixing a flat to plug holes in an economy that desperately needs major repairs," Russell said. She has had four years to make the fixes, but "she hasn't done it."

Trump's advantage over Harris on the economy "has dropped dramatically in recent weeks," said The Washington Post. Early polls showed him with a double-digit lead on the topic — that has now dropped to a six-point edge. "Voters are beginning to give [Harris] the benefit of the doubt," said Frank Luntz, a longtime GOP pollster, "and that's really significant."

Last night's "showdown" between vice-presidential candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance may have been the last significant campaign event before the US election, said Politico. 

Polls currently put Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in a "neck-and-neck race" for the White House in November. With no other debates scheduled, this was the last chance for "both men to pitch themselves and their party's vision for the next four years". The Republicans' Vance, in particular, needed to shake off a month of bad headlines and "make up for Trump's poor performance" debating Vice-President Harris last month. 

The stakes in vice-presidential debates are "typically low", said the BBC. But in a race that could be decided by "tens of thousands of votes", any opportunity for "positive attention and political momentum is precious".

What did the commentators say?

If there was "any conventional wisdom" beforehand, it was that both candidates would be "fiery and combative", said Ed Kilgore for New York Magazine's Intelligencer. But the debate was "strangely civil", filled with "small gestures of courtesy and agreement". In Walz's words, "I think there was a lot of commonality here." "Me too, man," agreed Vance.

Walz "wasn't as slick", but bested Vance on several topics – most notably reproductive rights, a crucial weakness for the GOP. But Vance was not "the base-pleasing demagogue" we've come to expect. You do have to wonder if the "temperamental difference" between this newly civil Vance and Trump will "reflect poorly on the latter" among undecided voters. 

Indeed, Walz and Vance spent most of the night "defending their running mates' records", said Politico's Myah Ward and Adam Cancryn. "They were less successful promoting their bosses' plans for the future", which afforded "little opportunity to make a fresh and forceful case to undecided voters".

The "leitmotif " was essentially "two diametrically opposed candidates" that agree on a lot, wrote The Guardian US columnist Moustafa Bayoumi. But the debate "will be forgotten by next week, if only because the world is currently a powder keg". 

It's already been forgotten, "obscured" by the "far more dramatic news" of Iran's strikes on Israel, said The Spectator's deputy editor Freddy Gray. Walz "fumbled" on the big story, saying "Iran" when he meant "Israel", twice, "which hardly suggested a mastery of international affairs". Vance sounded "authoritative, composed, more professional", with a "tight grasp of details".

But Walz also performed "entirely adequately, reinforcing his steady, nice-guy image", said Emma Shortis on The Conversation. The "standout moment", near the end, came when Walz asked Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance "refused" to offer the "clear right answer", said Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. "Tim, I'm focussed on the future," he fudged. It was, as Walz said, "a damning non-answer". 

This was "the only truly important moment of the night" and the fact that there was "no clear winner" likely won't move the dial. 

What next?

The vice-presidential debate might not shift the needle, but the role of vice-president very much does. Soon either Vance or Walz will preside over the Senate and be "empowered to break ties, as Harris has done a record 33 times", said The Associated Press. It's also the VP's job to preside over the certification of electoral results and to take over if something happens to the president. 

If Trump wins, he will be the oldest president in history, and the two recent assassination attempts against him also raise "the saliency of succession", said vice presidential historian Joel K. Goldstein. Voters may not typically see vice-presidential candidates as potential presidents – but "this year could be different".

The debate could also affect the next election, too, said Freddie Hayward in The New Statesman. Political parties "remember past debates when choosing candidates". Vance got the space he needed to "push back against the perception that he's an angry, online poster who talks about women like a creepy anthropologist". His superior performance will "shore up his position" within the GOP, and even makes the prospect of him running for the party's nomination in 2028 more likely.

If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election in November, one of her major tasks will be assembling a Cabinet for the potential Harris-Walz administration. With the election just over a month away, speculation is already stirring about what names might occupy these seats.

Harris has previously said she would nominate a Republican to her Cabinet if the situation was right. Despite the current era of extreme partisanship in the United States, this wouldn't be completely unheard of, as prior presidents have had Cabinet members from the opposite party before. However, given that Harris is the Democratic nominee, it can be safely assumed that the vast majority of her Cabinet would be Democrats. But who could fill these seats?

What did the commentators say?

The secretary of state, secretary of defense and treasury secretary are typically considered the most key Cabinet positions. When it comes to the secretary of state, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has "been mentioned as a contender," said The Wall Street Journal. Harris and Murphy have had a long working relationship, and they "aligned on many issues during their mutual time in the Senate, particularly on ending the Saudi-led war on Yemen." Murphy is currently the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Middle East panel, and the Journal reported that the pair continue to speak regularly.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a longtime friend of President Joe Biden, was "seen as a leading contender for secretary of state, but it is unclear if Harris would tap him for the job," said the Journal. Selecting CIA Director William J. Burns for the role could also be a "move that would give Harris some connective tissue from the Biden administration."

In terms of secretary of defense, one name that keeps coming up is Michèle Flournoy, which would "make history with the first female defense secretary," said Alex Gangitano and Laura Kelly at The Hill. Flournoy was the undersecretary of defense for policy during the Obama administration, making her the "highest-ranking woman in the history of the department." If Harris "wants to break new ground, [the Defense Department] is a place that there's never been a woman," a Democratic consultant said to The Hill. Other top contenders include Biden's former Undersecretary of Defense Colin Kahl and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities Mara Karlin, said Gangitano and Kelly.

To lead the treasury, current "Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is popular with business and would be considered," said Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei at Axios. Wally Adeyemo, the current deputy treasury secretary, is "one of the Biden officials most likely to get promoted in a Harris administration," and he would be the first Black treasury secretary. Blair Effron, an "investment banking partner who's very active in D.C. and New York," is also a potential candidate.

Beyond these top three positions, the other Cabinet-level job typically seen as the most important is the attorney general. On that front, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper is "viewed as the top contender," said Gangitano and Kelly, as he was "North Carolina's attorney general for almost two decades." Harris "will likely look to appoint former attorneys general like Cooper because Harris has stayed close with others who formerly served in the role." Another name being floated is attorney and former Democratic Alabama Sen. Doug Jones.

What next?

If Harris wins, she will "have to decide whether or not to use her Cabinet to differentiate herself from the Biden administration," said Newsweek. One strategy "might be to signal some measure of continuity to any voters who have heartburn over the process that led to Biden stepping aside," Southeast Missouri State University political professor Jeremy Walling said to the outlet. This could mean that there is "value in retaining some members of Biden's Cabinet," such as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in different, more consequential roles.

And as "Cabinet positions are executive appointments that must be confirmed by the Senate, nominees will also have to be confirmable," Professor Rosalyn Cooperman of the University of Mary Washington said to Newsweek. The "calculus of who is confirmable will change slightly" depending on whether Democrats maintain control of the Senate or if Harris administration nominees "will be considered by a Republican-majority Senate."

An important new question for presidential candidates: Where do you stand on cryptocurrencies? Donald Trump has already made friendly gestures to the crypto sector. Now Kamala Harris appears to be joining in.

In an "overture to young men," Axios said, Harris has signaled her "friendliness to cryptocurrency." The signal came at a recent Wall Street fundraiser. "We will encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets, while protecting investors and consumers," she told attendees. Why now? Election-year outreach. Younger men are "more likely than any other voter group to own cryptocurrencies," said Axios, and they're also trending toward Donald Trump and the GOP at a rate that is "alarming" to Democrats.

"Welcome to the crypto election," Claire Williams said at American Banker. The industry has become one of the "most visible and vocal" business sectors trying to influence the 2024 presidential and congressional elections — with a campaign "war chest" that already exceeds the banking industry's contributions. That's an "enormous" amount of power for a "fledgling industry," said Williams. The aim? To see more "industry-friendly regulators and legislation come 2025."

Looking for a 'breakout year'

Cryptocurrency was "once on the fringe of finance" but now stands ready for a "breakout year" after the November election, Laurent Belsie said at The Christian Science Monitor. But the industry has also attracted the attention of regulators — including Democrats and Republicans in Congress — who see both "potential and pitfalls" in digital currencies. Trump has indicated his own warmth to crypto, backing his sons' World Liberty Financial project and speaking at the Bitcoin conference. But some in the industry have kept an eye on Harris."You don't win statewide elections on several occasions in California without being tech-forward," said a speaker at last month's Crypto4Harris fundraiser.

The election could "define the future of crypto," said the BBC. The Biden administration has led a "sweeping crackdown" on crypto firms — prosecuting FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for fraud and Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao for allowing criminals to launder money on his platform. Those prosecutions might be why the number of Americans using cryptocurrencies dropped to 7% last year. A tight presidential race, though, could give the industry some leverage with both candidates. "Every vote is going to count," said one executive, and "crypto votes are no exception."

A 'dialogue' between campaign, crypto industry

Money may be a bigger factor than votes. The industry has already spent $119 million on this year's elections, "magnitudes more" than in previous cycles, Whizy Kim said at Vox. Crypto can muster that financial power even though the product itself has "struggled to gain any real traction with the public." Digital currencies have been around since 2009, but crypto "still hasn't penetrated" as a mainstream payment method. Instead, it is mostly used as a "vehicle for speculative investment." That might be why companies "redoubled their efforts to help elect pro-crypto politicians."

Harris' fundraiser comments were "deliberately broad," Jesse Hamilton said at CoinDesk. But she is unlikely to offer a "deep dive" into potential crypto policies before the November election. Her campaign has kept "dialogue running with a narrow group of industry executives and insiders." That's "progress" one executive told Hamilton. "All we want are sensible rules," said Coinbase's Paul Grewal, "and we'll follow them."

In a September 12 post on his social media website Truth Social, former President and GOP nominee Donald Trump announced that he would not participate in any more general election debates with Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. If no further televised debates are held, it will be the fewest between the two major party nominees since 1972, when there were none. There are likely a number of reasons why the former president doesn't want to have another debate with Harris, who has said she wants more. 

A debate system in transition

Claiming consistent bias against Republican candidates, the Republican National Committee (RNC) withdrew in 2022 from the longstanding Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a non-partisan organization which arranged three presidential debates per election between 1988 and 2022. Nevertheless, In May 2024, Republican nominee Donald Trump and then–Democratic nominee President Joe Biden agreed to two debates, one on June 27th and one on September 10th. Biden's performance in the June debate was so poor that it eventually pushed him from the race, and his replacement, Vice President Harris, agreed to go forward with the September 10th debate.

After what was widely regarded as a weak performance in his debate against Harris, Trump's campaign is refusing to agree to another match-up. Trump and other Republicans insist that the moderators of ABC's September 10th debate were biased. Moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis repeatedly fact-checked Trump during the debate, while neither moderator fact-checked Harris, which conservatives say is a double standard. "This is not a debate, this is a public show trial where the judge, jury, and executioner is ABC News," said Charlie Kirk, a commentator and key Trump supporter, on X. "To be honest they are a news organization, they have to be licensed," Trump said on Fox and Friends. "They ought to take away their license for the way they did that." 

Why the Trump campaign is really bowing out 

Beyond the claims and counter-claims, Trump's decision to hold off on further debates with Harris is likely a strategic calculation. Reputable post-debate snap polls showed that Harris was regarded as the winner of the debate by a considerable margin, and her national lead ticked up slightly in the week that followed, according to polling aggregators like those maintained by FiveThirtyEight and The Silver Bulletin. Media coverage of Trump's performance, especially his widely debunked claim that immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, has likely contributed to that movement. 

Political scientists generally believe that the effects of debates on general election outcomes are limited, particularly given that the U.S. electorate is polarized with a relatively small share of undecided voters. But there is no question that the June debate between Trump and Biden resulted in a significant decline in Biden's standing in polls, especially as the media narrative about his performance set in. Now, Trump might not want to take the chance of making his position even worse. "The former president might be right to mitigate the risk," said Stephen Collinson at CNN, especially given that despite his performance in the debate with Harris, the race remains a "dead heat." 

Why Harris might not object

Harris might also have incentives not to push for another debate. Another decisive debate victory for her is not guaranteed, and as the polling leader, her campaign may have decided debates constitute an unnecessary risk. After all, Trump's poor performance was largely his own doing, as he repeatedly went off on tangents that seemed to be inspired by his allies in far-right media, like conspiracy theorist and conservative activist Laura Loomer. In addition to the controversy over immigrants, Trump stumbled over other questions, including those about health care. The moderators asked whether he had a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, and Trump replied that he had only "concepts of a plan." Trump "certainly couldn't get any worse" in a second debate, said Syracuse University political scientist Grant Davis Reeher to Newsweek. 

Still, with six weeks left until the election, there is plenty of time for Trump to change his mind and agree to another debate. 

'The real question Harris and Trump should answer about marijuana'

Leana S. Wen at The Washington Post

The "question Kamala Harris and Donald Trump should answer is not whether marijuana should be legal, but what comes next," says Leana S. Wen. How would they "help people afflicted with wide-ranging consequences of cannabis use?" Laws "already protect Americans from inhaling secondhand tobacco. When will leaders propose — and enforce — similar laws for marijuana?" We should "see presidential candidates acknowledging these negative health effects as they lay out a national educational campaign."

Read more

'I was a Secret Service agent. Protecting presidents is not like in the movies.'

Bill Gage at The Hill

Many people "criticizing the Secret Service have no professional experience in conducting complex protective operations at the presidential level," says Bill Gage. But "U.S. Secret Service protective operations do not just happen. Most take weeks of planning and involve multiple components." The Secret Service's "budget should be increased so that it can hire more special agents," but "even with these improvements it still won't be like the movies." The agency "cannot keep tabs on everyone."

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'Apple CEO Tim Cook is right. The US manufacturing workforce is in crisis.'

Allison Danielsen at the Chicago Tribune

There has "never been a time when the need to match job seekers with the nation's most needed jobs has been as critical," says Allison Danielsen. There is a "gap between supply and demand for engineering," and the "skill sets that those engineers will require are sorely lacking, creating the possibility that nearly a third of all engineering roles will remain unfulfilled." It is "critical that we create a robust pipeline for young people" to "explore and build career paths."

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'Microsoft's Three Mile Island deal is great news'

Bloomberg editorial board

Microsoft's deal reopening Three Mile Island "could prove highly consequential," said the Bloomberg editorial board. Meeting "global climate goals by 2030 will require some $1.2 trillion in added clean-energy investment each year," and a "nuclear splurge — especially in the U.S., where generation has stagnated for decades — is long overdue." Microsoft's deal is a "welcome vote of confidence that nuclear is not only essential to fighting climate change and powering new technologies, but it's also exceedingly safe."

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For three decades, The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has been a reliable partner among the various stakeholders that make up the Democratic party's coalition of allies. The Teamsters Union, as it is more commonly known, has endorsed the Democratic nominee for president every election year since 1996, encouraging its 1.3 million members to vote for the major political party understood as being the more labor-friendly of the two.

That streak ended this month when the union announced it would not be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris or Donald Trump for president. In a press release the group explained that they had been "left with few commitments on top Teamsters issues" from the candidates and found "no definitive support among members for either party's nominee."

It is a break from tradition which, while shocking, was not wholly unforeseen. Two months earlier, union president Sean O'Brien made history as the first Teamster leader ever to address the Republican National Convention this past July. Predictably, O'Brien's speech proved immediately polarizing within his own organization, presaging the backlash O'Brien faces now for the group's non-endorsement — a backlash which has manifested in large part in the form of vocal endorsements for the Harris campaign from multiple local teamster chapters eschewing their national leadership.

How did one of the most powerful labor unions in the country get to this point? And with just a few weeks to go before election day, where do they go from here?

What does the non-endorsement mean for the election(s)?

Although the national governing body may have declined to endorse a candidate this year, "a wave of local and regional Teamsters union branches in battleground states rushed to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris" in the immediate wake of the group's decision to abstain, The Washington Post said. Perhaps counterintuitively, "the outpouring of local endorsements for Harris could be more important in influencing how Teamsters turn out to vote than the national union's decision to abstain," since the most effective union mobilization efforts take place on the local level.

Whether done in good faith or not, O'Brien's rightward overtures and the decision not to endorse a candidate this year has "pissed off the Democratic Party. He has pissed off the Harris campaign. He has pissed off the rest of the labor movement and his union allies. He has pissed off the most politically astute segment of his own membership," In These Times said. As a result, he "looks weak, since his own locals staged a backlash against him." All this comes just weeks after O'Brien "ignited an internal rebellion" for his RNC speech, Rolling Stone said. At the tip of that rebellion is Teamsters Vice President-At-Large John Palmer's newly created campaign to oust O'Brien for having "promised a more engaged leadership and a more militant union" while delivering instead a "PR blast furnace of misinformation and betrayal."

Former Teamster boss and General President Emeritus Jim Hoffa, son of famed union figure Jimmy Hoffa, has been similarly critical of his successor's "failure of leadership," issuing his own endorsement of Harris in a statement last week.

Where do the Teamsters — and both political parties — go from here?

Should Democrats win in November, O'Brien will have to "try to rebuild all of these bridges that have been burned" both within and beyond the Teamsters union itself, In These Times said. And if the Republicans win," being Trump's buddy is not going to save you from the end of the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] and a return to pre-New Deal hostility to all forms of union power." The non-endorsement is "plainly shocking and a lose-lose" situation for the union, said Slate. "As the only union out of the nation's 10 largest unions not to endorse Harris, the Teamsters made the mistake of taking the Democrats for granted."

The Teamsters' national non-endorsement, as well as local chapter support for Harris is "unlikely to affect the election, at least not by itself," said Georgetown University Professor Hans Noel to U.S. News and World Report. "More likely, it could have contributed to the sense people have of who the candidates are and who appeals to them."

Ultimately, the Democrats should be "taking a step back and saying something's wrong" for having missed an endorsement opportunity, O'Brien said to The Boston Globe. Conversely, for a GOP that brags about being the "party for workers of America, this is an opportunity to not just talk about it but to prove it."

Just minutes after Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had finished their first presidential debate on Tuesday, pop star Taylor Swift confirmed her endorsement of the Democratic nominee to her 283m followers on Instagram.

While celebrity endorsements can largely pass by with little impact on the trajectory of a candidate, Swift's has the potential to be one of the "most important celebrity endorsement we've ever seen of a presidential campaign" given her level of reach and influence, said Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC.

What's more, the race for the White House continues to look like a "tight one", said Euronews, and Swift's backing "could very well boost enthusiasm from younger voters".

Elections in the US have "long drawn the influence of star power" but the effect can only be "squishy at best", said History, and often it is the celebrity who has the most to gain from endorsements.

Which are the most notable endorsements?

Presidential celebrity endorsements stretch back to 1920, when Warren G. Harding became the "first celebrity-endorsed president" after movie stars Mary Pickford and Al Jolson backed him to become president, said Atlas Obscura.

At that time it was super-effective, with Harding gaining the "largest slice of the popular vote in history" and his "popularity remained sky-high throughout his time in office".

Since then, celebrity endorsements have become a regular feature of presidential campaigns. Singer Frank Sinatra endorsed Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in his final run for office in 1944, as well as John F. Kennedy briefly before the relationship "fell apart", said History. Sinatra later sided with Republicans and endorsed Ronald Reagan in his first run for office.

In more recent times, Oprah Winfrey endorsed Barack Obama in his campaigns from 2008, while Beyonce Knowles later backed Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and now Kamala Harris.

In the UK, the celebrity endorsement is less common, but probably hit its heyday with New Labour's election in 1997, when the likes of Noel Gallagher, Sir Alex Ferguson, and even Ross Kemp publicly endorsed Tony Blair for prime minister.

Why do celebrities endorse political campaigns?

The key reason celebrities endorse politicians is because they believe it can "sway votes", said Trevor Hughes at USA Today. 

In many ways, it would be easier for them not to say anything and "risk alienating fans". Michael Jordan famously refused to endorse a Democratic candidate in his home state of North Carolina in 1990 because "Republicans buy sneakers, too", but was later accused of putting "profit over principles", said The Guardian.

Other celebrities, however, see politics as a "natural extension of their brand" and are therefore more willing to weigh in. That includes Swift, whose songs often contain sentiments around "sexism" and "gender-based double standards" so is likely to back a candidate with policies that align with her public views.

Do they work?

There is a sense that celebrity candidates can create a groundswell of enthusiasm for a candidate, but their effect on the final outcome is "hard to quantify" said The New Yorker.

Oprah's endorsement of Obama is estimated to have had the most effect, with  claims from economists that she may have been "responsible for more than a million of Obama’s votes".

But endorsements can also backfire. Those celebrities who endorsed Obama later endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, and this may have contributed to the "elitist" label that she was given in Donald Trump's "anti-celebrity campaign".

There is certainly evidence that celebrity endorsement draws attention and engagement in politics, even if actual votes are hard to ascertain. Swift's last post about elections in 2023 helped drive a "record of more than 30,000 people" to register to vote, said Hughes, and celebrities can "play an important role in encouraging first-time voters" to understand elections and register, even if they remain away from partisan politics.

What happened

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris squared off last night for their first, maybe only, debate before November's presidential election. The 90-minute debate began with Harris walking up to shake Trump's hand but quickly grew combative, with the vice president frequently putting Trump on the defensive. Minutes after the debate ended, pop megastar Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, saying she had watched and "done my research," and Harris is a "steady-handed, gifted leader" who would lead "by calm and not chaos."

Who said what

"Kamala Harris planted traps," and for much of the debate, "Donald Trump stepped on them," David Weigel said at Semafor. Trump "had a bad night," Fox News analyst Brit Hume said, rising "to the bait repeatedly when she baited him, something I'm sure his advisers begged him not to do." The "attack line that seemed handcrafted by a team of Trumpologists to enrage him" was about crowds "leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom," Matt Flegenheimer said at The New York Times. That was when Trump "seemed to lose his way — the temptation he could not resist."

Yes, "Trump took the bait — over and over again," Politico said, but at a cost for Harris, "leaving her with less time to introduce herself to unfamiliar voters" on her biggest stage. "On paper," the Harris campaign "got exactly what it wanted" and "Trump was terrible," Jim Geraghty said at The National Review. But he has been like this "year after year," so it isn't a given "the poll numbers shift at all." A CNN-SSRS snap poll found that 63% of registered voters who watched the debate thought Harris won.

What next?

Harris campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon said immediately after the debate that "Harris is ready for a second debate," adding, "is Donald Trump?" Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity he would "think about it." Tim Walz and J.D. Vance are scheduled to meet Oct. 1 for a vice-presidential debate on CBS.

'9/11 victims deserve transparency. Not a plea deal with terrorists.'

Troy G. Rosasco at USA Today

The "entire 9/11 community deserves full transparency and to be involved in the conversation regarding any plea deals" for the 9/11 plotters, says Troy G. Rosasco. The "handling of the case behind closed doors is nothing less than a stain on the memory of all the victims and an insult to those suffering today," and "both presidential nominees should state their positions on plea negotiations with the 9/11 terrorists."

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'How Harris roped a dope'

David Frum at The Atlantic

Trump "was pushed into broken-sentence monologues," during the debate, while Harris' "debate prep seemed to have concentrated on psychology as much as on policy," says David Frum. Harris "drove Trump and trapped him and baited him — and it worked every time." The debate "will put an end to the Trump claim that Harris is a witless nonentity unqualified to engage in debate," as Harris "dominated and crushed him, using as her principal tools her self-command and her shrewd insight."

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'Tucker Carlson's history lessons'

The Wall Street Journal editorial board

Holocaust rationalization is "false history, and dangerous to the extent it might influence the young and uneducated to believe it," and "critics of Mr. Carlson's interview are rebutting his nonsense, not canceling him," says The Wall Street Journal editorial board. Carlson "can't spread bad history and expect it to go unchallenged." The "rise of social media has made bad ideas and demagoguery easier to spread, especially when promoted by prominent media or political figures."

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'What Beyoncé's snub at the CMAs says about country music's dangerous hierarchy'

Taylor Crumpton at Time

If "country music is one big happy family, Black women are its bastard daughters," says Taylor Crumpton. Beyoncé not receiving a CMA nomination means the "message is clear: If country music is the music of America, then everyone who is not straight, male, and white isn't legitimate." Whether "country music grants them legitimacy or not, Black women will continue on without it," and they "do not need to seek validation from the institutions that dehumanize them."

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You've probably heard of NIMBYs — the "not in my backyard" folks who turn up at city council meetings across the country to oppose big new housing and industrial and commercial developments. Now there's the backlash: YIMBYs ("yes in my backyard"), a movement to make housing more affordable and available by easing zoning regulations and other barriers to building. And YIMBYs are excited about Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. 

"It's YIMBYs' time to shine," said Business Insider. Harris' affordable housing plan — which pledges to "cut red tape" that blocks new construction — "explicitly echoes" the YIMBY agenda. That agenda especially targets blue states and cities where permitting requirements and environmental reviews "have hamstrung efforts to build more homes." If housing is a supply-and-demand problem, then YIMBYism looks to ensure there is plenty of supply. The best way to solve America's housing shortage "is to make it permissible for people to build as much housing as they can, especially for working people," said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).

"Kamala Harris is a YIMBY," said Armand Domalewski, the co-founder of YIMBYs for Harris, to HuffPost. That might be good politics: "Housing costs are a mainstream political issue," especially in swing states like Arizona and Nevada where "rent and home prices have spiked" in recent years, said HuffPost.

What did the commentators say?

America's housing crisis "has its roots in regulations enacted by innumerable municipalities," Harvard University economist Edward L. Glaeser said at The New York Times. That's why the median-price of a single-family home now clocks in at $422,000. But those NIMBY towns won't back off the building barriers "out of the goodness of their hearts." If Harris truly wants to make a dent in the cost of housing, she'll need to threaten federal funding that goes to states and cities if they don't change course. Otherwise, "it is hard for the federal government to engineer change at the hyperlocal level." 

The YIMBY movement is at a "high-water mark" of political visibility, Matthew Yglesias said at Bloomberg Opinion. President Joe Biden has been YIMBY in a "low-key way," but former President Barack Obama's endorsement of YIMBY principles in his speech at the Democratic Convention was a "thrilling moment." The problem? Restrictive zoning rules don't really explain the entirety of the housing crisis. "Tighter lending standards" adopted after the 2008 financial crisis has also "dried up" the pool of people who can get mortgages to purchase new homes. So they don't get built. "Without any eligible purchasers of cheap starter homes, it doesn't really make sense to build them," said Yglesias.

What next?

Will the 2024 presidential campaign turn on housing and YIMBYism? "To say pro-housing advocates are amped about Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign would be an understatement," Sara Libby said in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Harris and her opponent, Donald Trump, both "speak in broad strokes about cutting red tape." But their approaches are different. Project 2025 — written by former Trump administration officials, though officially disavowed by Trump himself — does call for fewer zoning regulations. It also urges that such decisions be made by local officials who "are typically the source of obstruction." Harris wants "the locals and states to streamline," UC Berkeley's research professor Ben Metcalf said to Libby. "And that is not what Trump seems to be saying."

There's an argument to be made that the defining moment of Donald Trump's presidency, if not the past decade of politics at large, was Jan. 6, 2021, when a violent mob of MAGA protesters stormed the U.S. Capitol building to disrupt Congress' certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. The images from that day — lawmakers cowering behind security forces with their guns drawn, a mock gallows erected outside the Capitol rotunda, a braying "QAnon Shaman" stalking the Senate chambers — have become an indelible reminder that America is just as susceptible to political violence as anywhere else. It is perhaps even more so, given Trump's penchant for actively stoking the flames of resentment and frustration across his already fervent base. 

Now, as the 2024 presidential election kicks into high gear with just three months to go before polls close in November, the specter of violence once again looms large over an electorate still grappling with the legal and political fallout of Jan. 6. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken this spring, more than two-thirds of respondents — Democrats and Republicans alike — said they were "concerned that extremists will resort to violence if they are unhappy with the election outcome." A more recent Deseret News/HarrisX poll saw three-fourths of the country "concerned about more political violence occurring before Election Day." 

It's clear that fears of political violence, to say nothing of its actual likelihood, have a hold on the national psyche. Whether those fears will be realized one way or another remains to be seen. 

What did the commentators say? 

"Almost no one considered the U.S. a serious candidate for post-election violence until recently," political scientist Barbara Walter said at The New Yorker. But in the past decade, it's become "impossible to ignore that America has all the characteristics of a country at risk" including the "exact type of political system — presidential, winner-takes-all — that is most vulnerable." 

"Many of the same sources of instability and grievances that precipitated" the Jan. 6, attack, "along with other challenges to the outcome of the last election, remain present today," agreed The Counsel on Foreign Relations. Even though the most acute threats are largely confined to the right wing, the "possibility of far-left extremist violence cannot be dismissed." The threat — an "urgent national security imperative" — isn't simply domestic, either. The prospect of violence could "undermine the United States' international standing and foreign policy goals, in a year where at least eighty elections will take place around the world."

If Donald Trump wins in November, there are "two components" of potential violence to watch out for, said right-wing extremism expert David Neiwert at The American Prospect. "One is the immigrant front" as has been previously seen in border states, where militia members are "rounding people up and serving them up to the Border Patrol" but on a national scale. The other is "Three Percenters, militias, the Proud Boys, who have all been gearing up" to attack protesters gathering to demonstrate against a Trump electoral victory. Conversely, if Kamala Harris wins, the risk of violence comes when bad actors "show up at ballot-counting centers, as well as at any other sort of body involved in counting and certifying the votes."

If this seems familiar, there's a reason for that. Many of the people involved in previous efforts to delegitimize American elections are the same ones agitating for — or at least anticipating — future violence and think that either "a lot" or a "great deal" of political violence will occur after the 2024 election. A study last month from Johns Hopkins University found more than 30% of conservatives who believe Joe Biden did not legally win the 2020 election "think that either 'a lot' or 'a great deal' of political violence will occur after the 2024 election." Perhaps more alarmingly, 65% of that group also "believe that the United States is 'very likely' or 'somewhat likely' to lapse into a civil war."

What next? 

While a Republican victory in November is "likely to yield a more peaceful transition," the long-term effect means "we'll probably see more violence under a Trump presidency," said Walter at The New Yorker.

With the possibility of violence looming no matter the electoral outcome, "people should be getting ready; they should be talking to local and statewide law enforcement," said Neiwert. Stakeholders in the upcoming election, "including government, the private sector, and civil society," should begin exploring "countermeasures at the motive, means, and opportunity levels" to help diffuse the threat of, and perhaps even mitigate any outbreaks of, political violence, agreed CFR. 

Ford has become the latest major US company to scale back its diversity and inclusion policies, amid a "changing legal and political environment and online pressure from the right", said CNN.

Corporate investment in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives rose sharply in 2020 following the wave of protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd. Management consultancy firm McKinsey estimates that US companies spent an estimated $7.5 billion (£5.7 billion) on DEI-related schemes in that year alone.

Initiatives included pledges to add more minority employees to the workforce, anti-bias training, and the hiring of a record number of chief diversity officers, with some large companies linking executive bonuses to efforts in meeting diversity goals.

Legal minefield

In 2023 the US Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling that ended affirmative action programmes at colleges, finding that factoring racial make-up into admissions amounted to discrimination. 

While the ruling "didn't directly implicate companies" said Bloomberg, it "invigorated" legal activists, who have ramped up the amount of lawsuits targeting corporate hiring practices which they said unfairly favour non-white employees. The Washington Post reported that the decision has "so transformed the legal landscape that some companies are abandoning diversity programmes as a defensive measure even before any litigation is filed".

The debate around diversity has also infiltrated politics, where Republicans have repeatedly labelled Kamala Harris a "DEI" hire, implying she achieved her position as vice president and Democratic presidential nominee solely because of her race and gender.

Enter Robby Starbuck

Leading the charge against DEI programmes is former Hollywood music video director turned conservative activist Robby Starbuck. The 35-year-old's X account boasts more than half a million followers, and his online campaigns have been amplified by prominent right-wing influencers and the likes of Elon Musk.

Starbuck has "channelled energy on the right" to target specific brands "popular with politically conservative customers", such as Harley-Davidson, said CNN. The parent company of Jack Daniel's whiskey, Brown-Forman, also dropped its DEI programmes shortly before Starbuck said he was planning to start a campaign against the brand.

Last month, Starbuck approached US home improvement giant Lowe's, telling the company he planned to spotlight policies such as their employee resource groups and donations to Pride events. The Washington Post reported that the company responded with "preemptive changes", for which Starbuck claimed credit on X.

Then last week, Ford CEO Jim Farley sent an email to employees saying that the company had also changed some of its DEI policies, including ending participation in external culture surveys by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

While Farley said Ford remained committed to creating an "inclusive workspace and building a team that leverages diverse perspectives, backgrounds and thinking styles", he acknowledged the "external and legal environment related to political and social issues continues to evolve".

While Starbuck is undoubtedly an important force in the anti-DEI pressure movement, his success is exposing the "fragility" of corporate backing for inclusion schemes, said Shaun Harper, professor of education and business at the University of Southern California and founder and executive director of its Race and Equity Center, speaking to CNN.

"If one person can take to Twitter and ultimately inflame a campaign to dismantle DEI in large companies, it means those things were not strong to begin with," he said. "Most companies and the people who lead them were not committed to this in the first place."

There's been a "profound change" in the US election race since Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate, Keir Starmer said this week – the latest chapter in the pair's transatlantic love-in.

Ministers have "repeatedly said" that Britain would "work with whoever ended up in the White House", but Labour is "understood to significantly favour a Democrat win" said Geraldine Scott in The Times, and pundits are noting growing similarities between the two leaders.

What did the commentators say?

When Harris said at the Democratic National Convention that "you can always trust me to put country above party", it "struck a familiar note in Britain", where Starmer "used much the same phrase" throughout his "relentless march to power", said Mark Landler in the The New York Times.

Harris and Starmer have both "shaken off or soft-pedalled" some of their earlier positions, both are former public prosecutors who "declare a ringing commitment to the rule of law" and "both are operating in a volatile environment, where law and order is threatened by extremist elements".

Once in office their "similarities continued", said Stefan Boscia for Politico, "as each was accused of tacking to the left" and "plotting to impose a woke, liberal agenda on a sceptical nation".

Yet Harris has in fact "hardened her stance on border policy and reversed her opposition to fracking", said Landler, while Starmer has suspended Labour ministers who "balked" at his refusal to abolish a cap on child welfare payments.

Some of Starmer's most trusted Downing Street aides attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week to speak to members of Harris' campaign team. The collaboration is "one strand in a growing transatlantic network" that is "shaping policy and political messaging in Washington and London".

For the first time in almost a quarter of a century, said Matthew McGregor, the former Labour digital director who also worked as a campaign strategist for Barack Obama, the Democrats now believe they have something to learn from Labour, thanks to Starmer's thundering win at the polls.

But there are "many caveats", said Landler, because Trump is "polling neck and neck" with Harris, while Labour "held a double-digit lead over the incumbent Conservative Party for 18 months before the election", and while Starmer ran "as a challenger against a deeply unpopular government", Harris "represents the Biden administration against a challenger".

Also, noted Boscia, Starmer is a "buttoned-down technocrat", more famous for his "caution and quiet ruthlessness than for his rhetorical skills", while Harris "is becoming known for an energetic campaign style mixing high politics and celebrity".

Another difference is that where Starmer "has the votes to carry out a bold programme but lacks the nerve", wrote Robert Kuttner for The American Prospect, Harris "increasingly has the nerve" but "may or may not have the votes to get her programme through Congress".

We could be facing "one of the most ideologically concerning" US-UK leader pairings "in history", argued Zoe Strimpel in The Telegraph, because their combination, "disguised in the sleek slogans and polished do-goodery", is "very bad indeed", and "the great transatlantic axis on which the whole of the West depends is about to sink under its weight".

What next?

Next month, another milestone on the campaign arrives in the shape of a debate between Harris and Trump, to be held by ABC News. As well as standing up to the bolshie Republican, Harris will "need to prove" that she will "follow in the progressive path Starmer has already beaten", namely "defining the party she now leads with an agenda that appeals to swing voters, working class voters, non-college grad voters", said Lindsay Mark Lewis for Progressive Britain.

It is a "tough task", he added, that she is "capable of achieving".

Democrats have spent nearly a decade gravely warning about the dangers they say Donald Trump poses. Under Kamala Harris, they're trying something new: Mockery. The Harris campaign is using "sneer tactics" to get under the former president's skin, Axios said. When Trump suggested he might back out of the forthcoming ABC presidential debate, Harris' camp "posted sound effects of squawking, whining chickens" to accompany a video of Trump talking. That's part of a "saucier, more ruthless" approach than President Joe Biden took to Trump.

Instead of a "national menace," NBC News said, the Harris campaign is casting Trump as "Dennis the Menace." The idea is to undermine the image of Trump as a fearsome figure and instead depict him as a "bumbling, cartoonish figure" out of touch with ordinary Americans. (Think Barack Obama's suggestive hand gestures during his speech at the Democratic National Convention.) But Trump's advisers say the "blatantly false personal attacks" just show that Harris has no positive agenda to offer Americans.

What did the commentators say?

"Finally, the Democrats have found Trump's Achilles' heel: ridicule him," Michael Tomasky said at The New Republic. It started with now-vice presidential nominee Tim Walz calling Trump "weird" and has snowballed from there. Voters are more likely to remember jokes about Trump's "Hannibal Lecter obsession" than policy-based attacks "about his plans to wreck the Justice Department." Bottom line: "Ridicule makes him weaker." Trump should be feared, yes. "We should also mock him mercilessly because it drives him nuts."

Democrats' "schoolyard taunts" are just evidence of the "party's failure" to improve the lives of ordinary Americans, Bethany Mandel said at the New York Post. Trump's own "penchant for ridiculing his opponents with mocking nicknames" has limited his appeal to mainstream voters who dislike such "bare-knuckle tactics." Now Democrats have apparently decided to embrace their opponent's "caustic, take-no-prisoners attitude." Perhaps that's better than running on Democrats' record of accomplishment. "Better to run on being a childish jerk."

What next?

Harris' team is "increasingly enjoying the chance to troll Trump," said CNN. And it could make a difference in how the campaign plays out: Harris wants the microphones unmuted at the presidential debate, while Trump's team has insisted on muting them when the candidates aren't speaking. Why? Harris believes Trump doesn't have the "self-discipline" to avoid "talking over and openly disrespecting" her while she's speaking. "It was clear that the Harris campaign hoped to give Trump the chance to sabotage himself."

Trump, of course, has his own extensive history of trolling personal attacks. But in 2024, those attacks on Harris and Walz "have fallen universally flat," Jill Filipovic said at Slate. His social media insults are "less on the nose" and "less funny" than they have been during previous campaigns. And it's clear that Trump doesn't like being on the receiving end of the jokes. His spokesman, Steven Cheung, told Axios the mockery shows Harris' campaign is "severely out of touch with reality." The insults won't work, he said: "Acting like whiny schoolchildren is not a political strategy."

What happened

Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance criticized the media yesterday for making a "national news story" out of the Trump campaign's "little disagreement" with Arlington National Cemetery staff earlier this week. Vance also said Vice President Kamala Harris "can go to hell" for criticizing "Donald Trump because he showed up" at the cemetery to commemorate the 2021 terrorist attack in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members as America withdrew from Afghanistan. Harris, campaigning in rural Georgia, had not mentioned the Arlington incident, though Trump faced ire from some veterans for campaigning among gravestones.

Who said what

Trump's team was told beforehand he could visit Section 60 of the cemetery, where Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are buried, in a personal capacity but with no campaign aides, as federal law prohibits election-related activity military cemeteries, The Washington Post said. Trump's team said it would release footage to refute reports that campaign staff pushed aside an Arlington official who tried to enforce the rules. It hasn't done so, the Post said, but the campaign did "post a TikTok of the event on Wednesday — exactly what military officials tried to prevent."

The family of a Green Beret whose gravestone is visible in the campaign video and a photo of a smiling Trump "giving a 'thumbs up'" to the camera "expressed concern" about Trump's lack of decorum at the "sacred site," The New York Times said. Trump released statements from a Gold Star family saying they had invited him to the grave and welcomed the photos. But it's hard to see Trump's visit as "anything but a campaign stop intended to court the military vote" and "clean up the mess he has created" by repeatedly "denigrating" military service, Charles Sykes said at The Atlantic. 

What next?

The unidentified Arlington official involved in the altercation filed an incident report with military authorities but "declined to press charges," the Times said.

What happened

Donald Trump is publicly wavering on whether he will participate in his first and only confirmed debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 10. Trump suggested late Sunday that he might back out, accusing debate host ABC of broadcasting a "so-called Panel of Trump Haters." He said Monday he was still "thinking about" participating.

Who said what

Trump told reporters he wants to debate Harris but on "another network" with less "hostility." The Harris camp wanted to "change the rules" agreed upon earlier, leaving each candidate's microphone on instead of muting it between answers, he said, adding that it "doesn't matter to me, I'd rather have it probably on." Trump's stated preference for live mics "appeared to undercut his campaign's efforts to keep the same rules in place" as during his one debate against President Joe Biden, CNN said.

Microphones have been "unmuted for both candidates for most of televised presidential debate history," until Trump's October 2020 debate against Biden, The Associated Press said. That muted debate was "widely celebrated for being more substantive than the earlier matchup." But Democrats believe Harris "can get Trump to lose his cool and say something impolitic on mic," Politico said. Harris campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler said Trump's endorsement of hot mics "resolved" the issue, "unless Donald Trump allows his handlers to overrule him."

What next?

While Harris has agreed in principle to a second debate after Sept. 10, it's "not clear when or where that would happen," USA Today said. Vice-presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz are scheduled to participate in their own debate on Oct. 1.

The elevation of Kamala Harris has transformed the presidential race, said Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine. As well as re-energising the Democrats, the move has had a secondary effect: sending Donald Trump around the bend. Having survived an assassination attempt and enjoyed a rapturous reception at the Republican National Convention, he was confident of beating Joe Biden – and this kept his more self-destructive traits in check. But Biden's withdrawal from the race, and the surge of momentum behind Harris, have led Trump to "indulge his most deranged instincts". In rambling press conferences and rallies, he has raged against Harris, even claiming that the crowds at her events have been concocted through using artificial intelligence. 

Denied a rematch

Trump has not responded well to being denied his rematch with Biden, said Jeet Heer in The Nation. He has repeatedly referred to Biden in "surprisingly wistful terms", suggesting, without any basis, that the president might yet force his way back onto the Democratic ticket. Trump just can't get over losing to Biden in 2020, agreed Chuck Todd on NBC News.

"He also doesn't seem to respect Harris as an opponent." That's a dangerous attitude for a candidate. Voters pick up on such "disdain", and don't react positively to it – as Trump should know all too well. One of the reasons he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, after all, is because she looked down on him, and referred to his supporters as a "basket of deplorables".

'Trump must do it himself'

"Ugly, personal attacks" on Harris will get Trump nowhere, said Jason L. Riley in The Wall Street Journal. He needs to concentrate on issues, and to draw a contrast between his record and that of the current administration. Harris has taken many unpopular stances in the past. She supported a ban on fracking; said she would "eliminate" private health insurance and impose a state-run system; endorsed slavery reparations; and backed efforts to defund the police. Her campaign is now busily trying to walk back some of these positions. Trump can't count on the mainstream media to take Harris to task over her record – Washington's shamelessly biased journalists are giving her an easy ride. "Trump must do it himself."

To better get his message across, he should consider dispensing with rallies, said Daniel Henninger in the same paper. He loves them, and so do his fans – I met a man recently who said he'd attended more than 70. But the events don't win new converts. Trump should instead hold town hall meetings with uncommitted voters. He's "much better than Ms. Harris in these more intimate settings". 

'Insane claims and random stories'

Trump's handlers are trying to do something like that by holding pared-down speaking events at which, in theory, he restricts himself to one topic, said Edith Olmsted in The New Republic. Last week he held a press conference about inflation, next to a table of groceries. He began reading from notes, but soon veered "off script into an array of insane claims and random stories".

Of course he did, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. Expecting Trump to stick to the script is "like betting Godot will be punctual or Lucy won't yank the football from Charlie Brown". It won't happen, and it wouldn't make much difference anyway. Thanks to the "reality show politics" that Trump helped create, substantive issues no longer count for much in US elections. It's all about personality and "vibes" now – and the reality is that Harris has the edge here because she has a novelty factor. "Trump and his enablers created the vibe petard, and now they're being hoisted on it."

Why are grocery prices so high? Is it corporate greed, or market forces at work? Kamala Harris is betting on greed. The Democratic presidential nominee "has laid the blame for high food prices at the feet of businesses," said The Wall Street Journal, and vows to tackle "price gouging" in the grocery sector if elected. "My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules," she said. The measure is aimed at voters angry about the rising cost of a gallon of milk. 

"Harris hasn't provided much detail" about how the plan would work, Axios said. Her opponent, Donald Trump, charged her with proposing "Soviet-style price controls," and other critics have raised the specter of "black markets and hoarding" in response. But most states already have price-gouging bans that prohibit businesses from jacking up their profits during a crisis like a hurricane or pandemic. If Harris' proposed federal ban is like those state laws, "only triggered by emergencies and targeted to specific firms," her proposal might not affect day-to-day grocery prices all that much.

Stores 'raising prices faster than costs'

"Harris' plan to stop price gouging could create more problems than it solves," Elisabeth Buchwald said at CNN. That's partly because the "jury is still out" on whether price gouging actually raised grocery prices in recent years. The "war in Ukraine, government spending and pandemic-related disruptions" like the supply chain crisis all played a role. Even then, one economist said, markets usually work out the kinks: When prices rise, the "best policy action in response is actually taking no action."

"Harris is right," Michael Hiltzik said at the Los Angeles Times. Financial disclosures showed pretax profit margins at Albertsons nearly tripled during the pandemic, and rose significantly at Kroger as well. That suggests the grocery chains were "raising prices faster than their costs." Was it gouging? A federal investigation said no. But it's clear that "corporate profiteering was unmistakably a significant contributor to inflation" during and after the pandemic. 

'Kamunism?'

Harris' allies say her price-gouging plan has been "misconstrued" by GOP critics, said The Washington Post. There have been some misunderstandings, said one former Treasury official, but "part of it is just malicious attacks from the other side trying to characterize her as a socialist." Campaign surrogates have moved to reassure businesses interests that the aim is not to "impose a sweeping new governmental regulatory regime." 

Still, the pushback has been fierce enough — The New York Post labeled Harris' plan "Kamunism" — that some prominent Democrats have been "hesitant" to specifically defend the price-gouging plan, said Politico. "There are a whole host of proposals that she has put forward," Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker told CNN's Jake Tapper, adding that the "whole panoply of them honestly is good for average everyday working Americans." 

It's unlikely that Harris can bring grocery prices down, said The Associated Press. After all, it's "unclear how much price gouging is going on right now." Year-over-year grocery inflation was just 1.1% in July, about the same as before the pandemic. That means the price of that gallon of milk is rising slowly instead of quickly, which might not satisfy voters. But prices that go up rarely go down again — and usually in "steep, protracted recessions." That's probably not in Harris' plans.

Kamala Harris could well be the first woman president, but she's not making a big deal about it. Instead, "she's letting that fact speak for itself," said Politico. That marks a shift from Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, which emphasized the history-making nature of her presidential bid — and which Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Harris, who is also facing Trump, is betting that voters are ready to vote for a woman "but care far more about her record and platform." 

Harris is "avoiding the sexist traps that snared Hillary Clinton," Susan Milligan said at The New Republic. The electorate has grown more used to women in power over the last decade — there are twice as many female governors now — but "much of it is the candidate herself." Harris has managed to demonstrate authority "without appearing too aggressive." That's a tricky balancing act for female candidates. "You have to show strength," Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said, "and you also have to show compassion, empathy, and kindness."

'Breaking barriers and glass ceilings'

"Voters are looking for electability, not representation," Pamela Paul said at The New York Times. A Pew survey showed that nearly two-thirds of voters — including 57% of women — say electing a female president in their lifetime was "not important or didn't matter." Sexism often is blamed for Clinton's 2016 loss to Donald Trump, but Clinton was a "flawed candidate who ran a terrible campaign." It's best to "stop all the talk of breaking barriers and glass ceilings."

Harris is running an "anti-Hillary plan" to become president, Patricia Murphy said at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her stump speech focuses less on barrier-breaking and more on her resume as a prosecutor, senator and vice president. People who might be inclined to vote against a woman "don't have to be reminded what they're getting if they pick her anyway." It's not like Harris has to work to highlight her gender: "The images say it for her."

Challenges and benefits

Gender will factor into voter judgments no matter what Harris does. "Women have to do more than men to prove they are qualified and are held to a higher standard of likability," pollsters Celinda Lake and Christine Matthews said at USA Today. Research from focus groups also suggests female candidates have to do more to highlight their qualifications and plans to voters. "A majority say America is ready for a woman president." What voters need to see from a female candidate, then, is "her leadership abilities."

The gender of voters may matter more. Harris' surge in the polls is "driven heavily by women and younger voters," said The Washington Post. Indeed, the political divide between men and women — the former tend to vote Republican, the latter Democrat — is an "increasingly stark partisan divider," said Axios. Harris may not be highlighting her gender, but "that doesn't mean the topic is not deeply infused in this race." 

Other Democrats — like vice presidential nominee Tim Walz — will do the highlighting for Harris. She's got at least one notable fan rooting for her. "Together, we've put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling," Hillary Clinton told the Democratic National Convention on Monday. "And tonight so close to breaking through once and for all."

Tim Walz has formally accepted the vice-presidential nomination, telling Democrats that "we'll sleep when we're dead".

Kamala Harris's running mate was "emotional" as he "touted his small-town upbringing" at the Democratic National Convention, said the BBC, but although his party seems "energised" by his place on the ticket, polls still suggest a "very close race" with Donald Trump and his own running mate, JD Vance.

What did the commentators say?

Walz's address in Chicago was a "political speed date" for a man "with limited time to show what he stands for", wrote James Matthews, US correspondent for Sky News. In the "huge" speech, he "won over delegates' hearts and minds", said Ed Pilkington, chief reporter for The Guardian US.  Trump has claimed that vice-presidential running mates make "virtually no impact" on elections, and after Walz's speech, the Republican "better pray he's right".

"At moments", wrote Philip Elliott for Time, it was "plenty clear" that Walz could "make inroads" to moderates and conservative voters who "mightn't be entirely on-board with Harris".

Walz "seems entirely comfortable", if "cornily so", in his "persona as the Dad Next Door" who "never found a cliche he didn't find useful as a proxy for his feelings", and he "also brought sufficient fire" to keep the Democratic base "fired up" without "alienating the centrist core that is this nation".

Allies believe Walz can "broaden" Harris's appeal to "rural and working class voters", wrote Sam Cabral for BBC News. The 60-year-old "brings with him a folksy, plain-spoken and sharp-tongued approach" and political experience, "representing a Republican-leaning district in Congress" and "then later passing left-wing policies as Minnesota's governor", which could have "broad appeal" at a time when US politics is "so polarised".

"In recent years", Bruce Schulman, the William E. Huntington Professor of History at the Boston University College of Arts & Sciences, told BU Today, "the idea of 'balance' has reappeared" in demographic terms. The Democrats have balanced gender on their tickets three times and the Republicans have done it once. "You could consider this a case of both gender and ethnic-racial balance", he added.

Reporting on the first Harris-Walz event, in Philadelphia earlier this month, The Independent's Andrew Feinberg said the arena was "literally packed to the rafters" with an energy that "hasn't been present at any Democratic event in nearly a decade".

The "multiracial, multigenerational" crowd "mirrored the scenes I witnessed during Donald Trump's first campaign for the presidency" and was also "something I hadn't seen since" Barack Obama's campaign for a second term. Harris and Walz may be the underdogs, but Feinberg thinks we could see an "underdog victory on election night".

What next?

With one more day to go, the convention will climax with a speech by Harris this evening, when she'll "face the biggest test of her political life", said Lauren Gambino in The Guardian.

With Walz watching, she is expected to try and "lay out her personal story" as she "bids to become a historic president: the first woman president and the first woman of colour", but she "will also lay out a sharp contrast" between her "positive view of the country's future prospects" and Trump's "almost wholly grim warnings about the state of the nation" and his "focus on immigration and crime".

Trump is "reportedly fretting" over whether Harris's speech will "draw more viewers than his did", said The Independent. The "notoriously ratings-fixated" former president has been asking some media and political allies "what they think the Democratic convention's TV ratings will be like", said Rolling Stone.

This was not the race Kamala Harris — or anyone else — was expecting. For most of the 2024 election, Harris' goal remained the same as it was in 2020: to support Joe Biden as his running mate against Donald Trump.

Then came the first presidential debate, and Biden's decision to step back from his campaign and endorse Harris as his replacement on the top of the Democratic ticket, with just months to go before November 5. Suddenly, what had seemed a rehash of the previous election became something new and unpredictable, with Democrats and Republicans alike scrambling to adjust to a new electoral reality.

Given her truncated timeframe, Harris' bid for the White House has necessarily operated at warp speed, focusing initially on the poetics of campaigning over the prose of policy. But as Election Day has neared, the vice president and her team have made a point of previewing a number of concrete proposals that flesh out — at least in part — what a Harris presidency might look like if she is elected.

What did the commentators say? 

Broadly, Harris is a politician "more practical than ideological," Time said. To that end, her campaign specifics have been "in service to the larger goal of her campaign, which is to present a credible alternative to a second Donald Trump presidency." To date, Harris' campaign speeches have been "long on vibes and short on actual platforms," and — to the extent that they have gotten specific about policies — focused on "proposals originally made by Biden that he and Democrats were unable to get through Congress," NPR said.

In her first major policy speech, Harris focused on the "high costs of housing, groceries, health care and raising kids." Harris has also joined with Donald Trump in standing opposed to taxing tips earned by service workers. She later described her intention to build "what I call an opportunity economy" in a speech in North Carolina. Hers is an "aggressively populist economic agenda," which, while "building on much of Biden's economic agenda" also features her own effort to "continue, if not deepen" the current administration's hands-on engagement in "industrial, labor and antitrust policies," The Washington Post said. To that end, Harris has stressed her plans for budding entrepreneurs, promising to raise the startup deduction for new businesses "from $5,000 to $50,000, creating a standard deduction for small businesses, and incentivizing local governments to ease up red tape," Business Insider said.

Harris would also "likely continue many of Biden's foreign policy objectives" including "strong support for Ukraine's war effort," and a push to "deepen alliances in Asia and the Pacific in the face of China's geopolitical ascendance," Politico said. One area in which there may be differences is in how a Harris administration would handle the ongoing war in Gaza. She has "proven herself to be more attuned to the concerns of Democratic voters" speaking out against the war, Time said. She was also the "first senior administration official to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza," although "rhetorical differences between Harris and Biden don't necessarily presage major policy deviations." Still, Harris is not as "fixed and intransigent" as Biden when it comes to her stance toward Israel, former State Department official Josh Paul said at Politico.

Although staffing her potential administration "hasn't been a central obsession" for Harris' team, a look at some of the names being discussed by her allies and staff "show how Harris and her team will start mapping her prospective administration," Axios said, To that end, "you won't see a bunch of new people you've never heard of," one adviser said to the outlet, which cited familiar names such as Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as potential Cabinet members. Having completed a "stair-step progression to the pinnacle of American power," Harris is likely to "reward officials who similarly have worked their way up and are super-prepared — even over-prepared — for the jobs she gives them."

What next? 

In part, Harris' vagueness on policy specifics is a factor of her necessarily truncated campaign, in which she did not "have the time to draw out the sort of detailed policy proposals" that often take months to develop, The New York Times said. For many of her supporters, Harris' policy-lite campaign is not necessarily a bad thing, either. Some "officials who spend their lives working on policy are reluctant to suggest that she produce any between now and Election Day," the Times said. The focus, instead, should be on "doing whatever it takes to stop Trump from returning to the White House."

It is remarkable how quickly things can change in politics. A month ago Joe Biden, trailing Donald Trump in the polls following a disastrous first TV election debate, bowed out of the presidential race after a coordinated effort by some of his closest political allies.

On Monday night he took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to rapturous applause and a four-minute standing ovation to deliver a "vintage performance that was a reminder of how he earned the White House in the first place", said The Times.

Freed from the burden of having to run a bruising campaign against Trump, CNN said Biden is "enlivened by the opportunity to burnish his legacy" – a process that is likely to be defined by what happens in November's make-or-break election.

What did the commentators say?

One of Biden's major weaknesses as both president and candidate was his "inability to sell his achievements", said The Times. But historians are "likely to be kind and give him more credit than many voters for the post-Covid economic recovery". He managed to successfully navigate a partisan Congress to pass far-reaching infrastructure and investment legislation that will "shape the country for many years to come".

NPR said the president has been "defiant, and at times, outraged, when challenging Trump's descriptions of America under Biden as a nation on the decline, and a laughing stock on the national stage".

Domestically, the Biden administration may feel it has not received recognition from the public for delivering booming year-on-year economic growth but, said Fox News, the Biden-Harris White House has "clobbered middle-class Americans" and he leaves behind a legacy of "dishonesty, inflation, corruption and ineptitude".

Abroad, even his staunchest supporters would agree his record in office has been decidedly mixed. Many point to his approval ratings never recovering after the humiliating exit from Afghanistan in August 2021 – even though he was merely carrying out Trump's withdrawal agreement. The US under Biden has played a pivotal role in supporting Ukraine against Russia but has so far failed to secure a lasting ceasefire in Gaza.

This is where the Biden team plan to focus their remaining energies, with the president spending more time overseas to "cement his foreign policy legacy", said CNN.

This process "won't be complete" until we see how the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East play out, said The Wall Street Journal. But perhaps his biggest failure is that, having campaigned on a promise to "unite the country and be a 'transition' from the Trump era", he has "governed as a divisive progressive".

Whoever wins in November will inherit a country "more divided and dispirited than when Joe Biden was elected. That is the unfortunate legacy of the Biden Presidency."

What next?

Biden's time in office will ultimately be defined by his decision to suspend his re-election campaign and immediately endorse Kamala Harris, saving the party from a protracted succession battle.

According to The New York Times, his team quickly set about constructing a final, 180-day agenda that would "help guide a Harris presidency and in turn shape Biden’s legacy, now tethered to her candidacy".

Biden spent much of the end of his convention speech focusing on his vice-president, in a "tacit acknowledgement that how she fares against Donald Trump in November's vote could make or break how history, and his party, remembers him", said the BBC.

In sharp contrast to just a few weeks ago, delegates and party bigwigs at the convention in Chicago appeared "energised and fond of Joe Biden – but, frankly, relieved by his withdrawal", said The Times.

That perfectly sums up what they hope will be his greatest legacy: that he was the man who defeated Trump in 2020 and passed the torch to a new generation just in time to beat him again in 2024.

As the Democratic party's presumptive presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris currently stands within striking distance of the White House. Accordingly, her tenure as both California's attorney general and senator is sure to come under increased scrutiny by Democrats eager to accentuate the positives of their candidate's record, as well as by Republicans hoping to exploit their opponent's potential weaknesses. With a decade of state-level service under her belt — she served as A.G. from 2011-2017 and as senator from 2017-2021 — Harris' performance as an elected official is fair game for dissection and, perhaps more importantly, prognostication as to what her presidency might look like. 

Here are some of Harris' most noteworthy accomplishments as both A.G. and California's U.S. senator. 

Health care

As a senator, Harris "spent much of her time focusing on mental health, telemedicine and drug pricing," with a particular focus on "maternal health — especially Black maternal health," Roll Call said. Harris was the "first senator to co-sponsor Bernie Sanders' bill, the Medicare for All Act of 2017," which would have "abolished private health insurance for all age groups" and established a "government-run single-payer system to benefit 'every individual who is a resident of the United States,' including undocumented immigrants," Forbes said. Ultimately, much of Harris' health care agenda as a senator "didn't particularly succeed," with many of her bills showing "little chance of passing in the then-Republican-led chamber," Politico said.

Criminal justice and reform

Harris has long been "criticized for her background as a tough-on-crime attorney general back in California," NPR said. As A.G. she "appealed a federal court ruling that would have effectively ended the death penalty in the state," The Marshall Project said. Her office also "fought to release fewer prisoners, even after the US Supreme Court found that overcrowding in California prisons was so bad that it amounted to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment," Vox said. As California's top lawyer, she also pushed for statewide anti-truancy measures in which "some parents were arrested by local law enforcement and faced harsher penalties." She later expressed "regret" for the policy's "unintended consequences" in an interview with Pod Save America. 

Harris' A.G. office also authored a legal brief denying gender affirming care for transgender inmates in state prisons — a position she attributed to having "had clients, and one of them was the California Department of Corrections. It was their policy." After learning of the policy, she "worked behind the scenes" and "got them to change the policy," Harris said. 

As senator, Harris crossed the aisle to introduce a bail reform bill with arch-conservative Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky), promising to "reform a bail system that is discriminatory and wasteful" in a New York Times opinion piece. She was also a "major figure" in a House police reform bill in the summer of 2020, as well as one of the main sponsors of a bill to "make lynching a federal crime," NPR said. 

Committee work

During her short time in the Senate, Harris "shined in hearings with her pointed prosecutorial questioning of witnesses," PBS News said. Her "assertive courtroom style" created some of her "most high-profile moments in the Senate," Roll Call said, citing Harris' questioning of both Attorneys General Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions "to make bigger points."

The environment

As attorney general, Harris "joined local prosecutors to bring criminal charges against operators of a failed oil pipeline that polluted roughly 100 miles of California beaches," Inside Climate News said. Although the case didn't end in any jail time for the perpetrators, "state and local officials collected millions of dollars on behalf of businesses and individuals who were harmed by the spill," said E&E News. She also "co-sponsored the resolution calling for a Green New Deal" and was "to the left of Joe Biden on the Green New Deal in 2019" when both were vying for the Democratic presidential nomination. 

Immigration

As senator during her 2020 run for the White House, Harris "called for a path to citizenship for recipients of Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, best known as DACA," NPR said. She also was among the co-sponsors of a Democratic-led bill to "to expedite the reunification of separated immigrant families and promote humane alternatives for asylum-seeking immigrant families" in response to the Trump administration's hardline immigration policies. She additionally urged her colleagues to "reject President Trump's FY 19 funding request for a costly and ineffective border wall, new Border Patrol agents, and a large increase in U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel and detention beds" in a letter to members of the Senate Appropriations Committee in 2018. 

Politicians have long enjoyed — or at least endured — creative nicknames with little to no obvious bearing on their actual record of public service. Then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson was derided as "Rufus Cornpone" and "Huckleberry Capone" by the Kennedy clan, while Donald Trump allegedly called Education Secretary Betsy DeVos "Ditsy DeVos." Perhaps most (in)famously, former President George W. Bush named his arch-conservative adviser Karl Rove "Turd Blossom" after a Texas flower known to grow in patches of manure. 

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) also had a notable nickname: "Fields of China." The appellation, given to him in 1989 by students at Foshan No.1 High School in Guangdong, China, during the year he spent teaching there after college, was intended to convey that his kindness was "as big as the fields of China," Walz explained to The Hill in 2007. Walz has returned to China around 30 times, even honeymooning there, and with "Educational Travel Adventures," a company he established to facilitate study abroad trips for American high schoolers. After he was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006, Walz served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the government agency tasked with monitoring Chinese human rights and the rule of law. 

Now, as Walz enters the national spotlight as Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris' vice presidential running mate, that longstanding — and often complex — relationship has come under renewed scrutiny. Will Walz's history with Beijing affect his candidacy, and role in a potential Harris administration? 

'Neither a "dragon slayer" nor a "panda hugger"'

Republicans have quickly seized upon Walz's time spent in China as a liability for Democrats. The Make America Great Again PAC associated with Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance's candidacy posted clips of the Minnesota governor disagreeing with the suggestion that "China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship."

Walz's views on China are "way outside of the mainstream consensus," said former Trump administration State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus on X. As vice president, Walz's policy toward China would be the "weakest in generations." China, for one, is "very happy" with Walz on the Democratic ticket, said Richard Grenell, former ambassador to Germany and acting National Intelligence Director under Trump.

During his time in Congress, however, Walz "joined numerous initiatives criticizing Beijing's human-rights abuses," and met with "several of the Chinese Communist Party's top detractors" including the Dalai Lama, the National Review said, even if "these experiences have not made him a hawk." Rather, from his time in Washington and Minnesota's governor's mansion, Walz blends "robust human-rights advocacy with a willingness to emphasize the importance of 'cooperation' with Beijing." For as much as Walz has been "skeptical of the Chinese leadership, he still worked to engage with the Chinese people," The Washington Post said. His is a "nuanced" position in which he has described himself as "neither a 'dragon slayer' nor a 'panda hugger.'"

'Not starting from square one'

While detractors have attempted to capitalize on Walz's China relationship, his deep relations with the country could be an asset in the White House, as well. Several Hong Kong-based activists have "touted Walz" given his "support for the territory’s democratic movement," Semafor said. 

Walz's China experience will ultimately "put a lot of people who care a lot about American foreign policy in this part of the world at ease," National Taiwan University political scientist Lev Nachman said to Voice of America. He is "informed, has spent time in the region, and is not starting from square one when it comes to learning about American foreign policy in East Asia." While his potential influence on relations between the two countries may be structurally limited, said Zhu Junwei, director of the Centre for American Studies, to the South China Morning Post, "it would be better if such a person, with rich experience in exchanges with China, took office rather than having someone who knows nothing about China."

Ultimately, no matter Walz's "past experiences" overseas, America's attitude toward China "still depends on the American perception of their own economic status" Lu Xiang, a specialist in U.S.-China relations at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said to the Morning Post. 

Kamala Harris "would pursue an evolution rather than a revolution" in America's relationships in the world if she becomes president, Josh Rogin said at The Washington Post. Vice presidents don't make foreign policy — they help implement a president's vision. That has been Harris' role under President Joe Biden for the last four years. Now, though, she's preparing to outline a foreign policy agenda that offers "both continuity with the Biden administration and modulation where his policy has fallen short."

Harris has signaled that her candidacy offers a "chance to reset" a Middle East policy that has alienated progressive Democrats, said NBC News. "Israel has a right to defend itself," she said after a meeting last month with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But, Harris added: "We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering" of Palestinians. That's a sign that her foreign policy views differ "more on tone than on substance" from Biden's approach. 

'Stress-tested' on the world stage

"She doesn't really have a background in defense or foreign policy," one former official told Politico. And she certainly doesn't have nearly as much experience as Biden, who has been deeply involved in America's foreign policy as senator, vice president and president over the last 50 years. But she has acted as a "surrogate" for Biden on the world stage — including at a 2022 security summit where she voiced support for Ukraine ahead of Russia's invasion. "Frankly," said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), "she has been stress-tested."

Harris has been "more involved in foreign policy than we realize," Fred Kaplan said at Slate. As vice president, she has visited 21 countries and met with more than 150 leaders. Some of those trips "amounted to rote protocol." There were also substantive accomplishments: Smoothing over relationships with France amidst anger over an American nuclear submarine deal with Australia, and helping bring the Philippines back into America's orbit in the Pacific. "She's not a foreign-policy wonk," said Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer, "but there's no question she has played an active role on a bunch of foreign-policy issues."

Harris and Trump: 'Strategically consistent'

The elephant in the room: China. "Does China prefer Harris or Trump?," asked Wang Jisi, Hu Ran and Zhao Jianwei at Foreign Affairs. Donald Trump's presidency saw "a far more confrontational approach" to Beijing, and Biden's policies have followed along much the same lines, reflecting a bipartisan consensus that China "must now be treated as a major adversary." Trump would probably pursue a "more aggressive trade policy," but he might also be more inclined toward deal-making. A Harris approach to China would probably be "more organized and predictable." From China's perspective, though, the differences are mainly stylistic. Otherwise, on China, Trump and Harris are "strategically consistent."

Harris' "life experience" is one of the best guides to predicting her foreign policy, Anne-Marie Slaughter said at the Financial Times. Her background as a prosecutor gives Harris a "steeliness" toward foes like Russia as well as a "focus on victims as well as perpetrators." This makes her likely to base her foreign policy on a notion of "peace through strength" in which strength flows from American values. "Call it a new mix of might and right."

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he had "lofty aims", said Finn McRedmond in The New Statesman. The billionaire wanted to cultivate a "common digital square"; a platform that "could accommodate wide-ranging beliefs and facilitate debate without violence". 

But "fast forward to England in 2024, and this ideal has totally collapsed", said McRedmond. "High streets are ablaze, and while X is not to blame, it is far from innocent." The platform is "awash with violent rhetoric" that has spilled out from the digital square onto the streets.

'His own personal political bullhorn'

"This was a test for the new Labour administration, and not one it has passed," McRedmond continued. Musk, a man "whose cosmic ambition is matched only by his base puerility", tweeted on Sunday that "civil war is inevitable" in Britain. A Labour spokesperson responded, saying there was "no justification" for Musk's intervention. 

But "like all agitators, Musk was buoyed by the attention". Giving the X owner "any oxygen at all was a mistake: it debased the public conversation and fanned Musk's rhetorical flames". As the unrest subsides, Labour may begin to question, "what can be done about these social media platforms? Should anything be done?"

Musk's behaviour on X mirrors his actions in the US online space, where he has "used the platform as his own personal political bullhorn", said Vittoria Elliott in Wired. In July, Musk posted a deepfake video of presidential candidate Kamala Harris, in which she appears to say that she is the "ultimate DEI [diversity, equality, inclusion] hire" and a "deep-state puppet". 

After endorsing Donald Trump last month, Musk also "boosted baseless conspiracies of a 'coup'" following Biden's withdrawal from the presidential race and insinuated that the Trump assassination attempt "might have been the result of an intentional failure on the part of the Secret Service".

Former Twitter trust and safety employees have said that Musk's "increasingly partisan behaviour around the US elections" and other major events show he is "doing exactly what he accused the company's former leadership of doing: playing politics". 

One former employee labelled Musk's actions as "staggering hypocrisy", adding: "Musk is smart enough to know social media is media, and it's a way to control the narrative." Other former employees expressed concern that Musk represents a "new kind" of political actor, "someone who seeks to actively use a platform to reshape politics in both the US and abroad, and is willing to endure regulatory fines and declining advertising revenue to do so".

Musk the 'greatest challenge' to reining in extremist content 

Musk's "latest flurry of innuendo, half-truths, and lies online is making it increasingly clear that it is the tech mogul – and not just his platform – who poses the greatest challenge to governments struggling to rein in content that can incite extremist violence", said Politico. 

In response, "angry officials are trying to find levers to pull to influence the world's richest man". British MPs have expressed their intent to "haul Musk in" for questioning over his posts amid UK rioting while, in the US, investigations are under way into potential misuse of personal data by a super political action committee created by Musk.

But other countries have already "tried and failed" to hold Musk accountable. When X refused to censor posts of a stabbing attack in Australia, it led to a federal court case that the platform ultimately won. Similarly, in Brazil, a Supreme Court justice ordered an investigation into Musk over his alleged dissemination of fake news.

"Elon is weaponising this in a way it hasn't been weaponised before," said Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko, speaking to Politico, referring to Musk's posts and his hands-off approach to content moderation on X. 

But there are fewer ways to restrict Musk's reach since his takeover of the company, taking it private, the strategist noted. "There's not as many options on the table as there might be, if this was something else, like a publicly traded company."