<....Libertarianism fundamentally rejects the ability of the citizens of a nation to “vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury” by simply banning the spending of such taxes on anything other than an army and police force. With objectivism, author Ayn Rand tried to wrap a similar sentiment in moral terms, saying that “moochers” and “looters” really have no right to lay their hands on the wealth produced by the “producers.”

If one believes that people will always vote to take away from the “job creators” and give to the indigent voters, then there’s a coherent and somewhat circular logic to the entire hypothesis, which makes it particularly seductive to young people born into the upper classes or with considerable privilege.

For this reason, Republicans made the “they must have skin in the game” argument every few years to object to everything from Medicare in the 1960s, to virtually every social welfare program to come out of the Great Society, to the Affordable Care Act in 2009.

For example, Walter E. Williams wrote in the conservative publication Townhall, “A very disturbing and mostly ignored issue is how absence of skin in the game negatively impacts the political arena. It turns out that 45 percent of American households, nearly 78 million individuals, have no federal income tax obligation.” Calling this “a serious political problem,” Williams concluded that “Americans with no federal income tax obligation become natural constituencies for big-spending politicians.”

Williams—one among thousands of conservative writers who express similar sentiments online—wrapped up his op-ed by musing that “[s]ometimes I wonder whether one should be allowed in the game if he doesn’t have any skin in it.”

White supremacists make up the final group of people who don’t think everybody should have a right to vote. To justify this, they make several arguments, but all, at their core, boil down to the notion that white people are the superior race and thus should retain the majority of political power in the nation.

Most white people, particularly those older than 30, grew up exposed to racist cowboys-and-Indians shows, minstrels, and a century of movies that portrayed black people as the bad guys and white people as the winners and saviors. As a result, most white people carry a good dose of unacknowledged and often even denied-but-there-nonetheless belief in the superiority of their own race.

For example, Kali Halloway compiled research that demonstrated rather shocking, but provable, realities that have grown out of this. College professors, for example, are more likely to respond to identical letters requesting mentorship from people with white male names than from people with names associated with nonwhite groups or women.

White people experience less empathy when seeing black people in pain, and emergency room personnel give lower doses of pain medications to people of color; this belief that black people experience pain less acutely than do whites begins, among white people, around the age of seven.

A UCLA study found that white people across the board, including police officers, were more likely to assume criminality when a person was black; and black men, on average, get 20 percent longer prison sentences than white men for identical crimes.

When, in a Stanford study, white people were told that laws like three strikes were more likely to harm black people than white people, their subsequent support for criminal justice reform dropped measurably. And multiple studies have found that light-skinned African Americans are perceived as smarter and more competent than darker-skinned persons.

The problem of this deep cultural (and, perhaps, human) racism that’s built into all of us comes at the level of voting and governance when cynical and exploitative politicians use race as a weapon to divide people from one another, or to justify making it easier for one race to vote than another.

Donald Trump’s “s***hole countries” epithet about black-run countries, and comments to his former attorney Michael Cohen that black people are stupid, are well-known examples of this more modern version of the openly racist public and media language of previous generations.

More subtle were Richard Nixon’s “law and order” and “silent majority” campaigns, designed explicitly to mobilize white voters, a policy that has since become a staple of Republican (and some Democratic) politics.

<Politicians often speak in coded language, using seemingly innocuous terms that hold important, alternative meanings for segments of the electorate. Former President Donald Trump's racist dog whistles, for instance, have been well documented. But one coded word has received less attention—tariffs.

On their face, tariffs don't appear particularly subversive. Countries including the United States have used them for centuries to raise revenue, protect emergent industries, combat unfair foreign subsidies, and compel others to act differently. The legal authorities used to levy tariffs are well understood and have existed for decades.

Trump, however, understands that it is often difficult to distinguish tough talk on tariffs from the issue of who is better at creating jobs or standing up to China. During his first presidential term, his trade wars accomplished next to nothing. But they were popular, because voters felt he was standing up for their interests. To the Trump campaign, then, if his first-term tariffs were politically advantageous, then more must be better this time around—even if it means proposing entirely unworkable ideas. This explains why the former president has made tariffs such a foundational piece of his effort to win back the White House. In the last few months, the Trump campaign has detailed three separate tariff proposals, each more outrageous than the last.

In December 2023, his campaign announced plans to levy a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all imports. In February, Trump himself called for a 60 percent tariff on all goods coming from China. And in June, the former president told a closed-door meeting of his disciples (Republican members of Congress) that the United States should replace the income tax with tariffs—a mathematically impossible proposal and one of most inflationary ideas ever proposed by a major presidential candidate.

The economic impact of Trump's planned tariffs would hit American workers hard. His 10 percent across-the-board tariff, which would tax imports from adversaries and allies alike, would amount to an $1,500 tax increase for the average family, forcing them to pay more for clothing, medicines, and food. If both his first and second proposal were implemented, that figure would increase to $2,500. And still, this is nothing compared to the projected impact of replacing all income taxes with tariffs, which would push millions of Americans into poverty while increasing the annual income of the very richest by 20 percent....>

Yeah, sounds like a wonderful bargain; then again, many of us understand that Hump is, first and foremost, out for himself and his plutocratic cabal.

<....Note that recently, Trump floated a 20 percent across-the-board tariff that the Center for American Progress has estimated could cost the average American family $3,900 annually. And there is no indication that Trump is done yet with his increasingly outlandish tariff ideas. Clearly it is a subject he feels confident going back to again and again.

Focusing only on the economic impact of Trump's tariff plans, however, distracts from his abysmal record on job creation and allows him to benefit from the feeling, however unjustified, that he's somehow a tougher defender of American jobs.

When Trump was president, his tariff-and-tax-cut approach to economic policy failed. His knee-jerk approach to trade policy didn't lower the trade deficit, despite his continued belief that the trade deficit was somehow a proxy for American strength (which it is not). Inflation-adjusted manufacturing construction did not grow and even fell during his last year in office. Manufacturing output began falling as early as 2018, well before its crash during the pandemic. Manufacturing employment was in decline before the pandemic in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin—critical hubs to our country's industrial base. In total, the Trump administration lost 178,000 manufacturing jobs.

Trump is like an irritable chef that promised a gourmet meal only to disappoint badly because he cooked with only two ingredients—tariffs and corporate tax cuts—and neither in any considered proportion. He recently told a group of CEOs that he planned to cut the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, because it was a "round number." Now he claims that if he just used more of the same two ingredients, the result would somehow be different. The fact is a better outcome takes a more thoughtful recipe and leader with the expertise to prudently deploy a range of ingredients.

The Biden-Harris administration has demonstrated that it knows how to use the full suite of tools to boost economic success—including smart, targeted tariffs, trade negotiations with key partners and allies, national investment, tax credits, research and development, procurement, and regulation. The results speak for themselves.

The Biden-Harris administration's comprehensive strategy has generated nearly $900 billion in private sector investment in American manufacturing, and a surge in manufacturing employment that now stands above pre-pandemic levels. In total, over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs have been created since President Joe Biden took office, while inflation-adjusted wages and rates of unionization have also increased. The American industrial base is growing more competitive by the day, as investments in semiconductors, clean energy, electric vehicles and medical technologies start to come online.

In politics, it's rare for the contrast between two records to be so obvious. Trump's big talk on tariffs only works if voters hear "tariffs" and think of jobs and standing up to China. We should know better. Only one team has a proven record of creating jobs and strengthening American competitiveness—and it's the Biden-Harris administration.>

<Officials in a North Texas county debunked claims made by a Fox News host that migrants were registering to vote outside a state drivers [sic] license facility west of Fort Worth — an unsubstantiated claim that appeared to spark an investigation by Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office.

Both the Parker County Republican chair and election administrator said there was no evidence to support the Aug. 18 social media post made by television personality Maria Bartiromo, who previously promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Paxton’s office announced it was opening an investigation into “reports that organizations operating in Texas may be unlawfully registering noncitizens to vote” Wednesday.

In announcing the investigation, the attorney general’s office said investigators confirmed that nonprofits had booths set up outside of license offices to offer voter registration assistance, though it did not state specifically where these offices were located.

The attorney general’s office statement did not say any laws were broken.

The Department of Public Safety, which managed the state’s drivers [sic] license offices, said in an email obtained by The Texas Tribune that voter registration groups would not be allowed to recruit new voters outside those locations — a response to allegations that so far have not been proven true.

Neither the attorney general’s office nor the public safety department responded to questions about the investigation.

There are several ways to register to vote in Texas, including when obtaining or updating a driver’s license or identification card. U.S. citizens and Texas residents may also register with a volunteer deputy voter registrar. Those are individuals who must register with their local county and attend training.

Among the first questions on the state’s voter registration application is whether or not the applicant is a U.S. citizen.

There is no evidence that large numbers of noncitizens vote or are registered to vote. A 2019 attempt by the state to scour voting rolls for noncitizens was abandoned after it jeopardized legitimate voter registrations and prompted three federal lawsuits.

Gabriel Rosales, Texas state director for the League of United Latin American Citizens, said he viewed Paxton’s investigation as an act of intimidation to keep Hispanic voters from voting, adding there was nothing wrong with people providing voter registration assistance outside of drivers license offices.

"I don't think it violates anything by having them out there," Rosales said. Republicans " see the writing on the wall,” he said. “They know that if the Hispanic vote comes out, they lose.”

Bartiromo’s claim first made on social media cited “a friend,” who cited a friend’s wife who said there was a massive line of immigrants obtaining driver’s licenses at a DPS office in Weatherford and said there was a tent outside the office where those immigrants were registering to vote. She later repeated similar claims on her Fox Business television program.

Bartiromo did not respond to questions or a request for an interview....>

<....Bartiromo is no stranger to spreading controversial allegations with little or no proof. She was among the first on Fox News to repeat a baseless conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged its voting machines to take votes away from Donald Trump during the 2020 presidential election.

Those allegations were the basis of a $787 million defamation lawsuit settlement between Dominion and Fox News. As part of the suit, it was revealed that the source of Bartiromo’s Dominion claims was an email from a Minnesota woman who, in addition to what she described as a “ wackadoodle” theory about Dominion, wrote that she was a time-traveler who talks to the wind, and that former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was actually killed as part of a weeklong human hunting expedition.

The woman’s claims were forwarded to Bartiromo by Sidney Powell, a Dallas lawyer and longtime election fraud conspiracy theorist who pleaded guilty last year for her role in an attempt to overturn 2020 election results in Georgia. A day after receiving the email, Bartiromo aired an interview with Powell that echoed many of its claims about Dominion. Text messages made public as part of the Dominion suit show that some of Bartiromo’s producers believed she was susceptible to conspiracy theories, and that GOP activists were using her to advance their agenda.

Parker County Republican Chair Brady Gray refuted Bartiromo’s claims that immigrants were lined up outside the DPS office in Weatherford. He said on social media that his party investigated the claim.

“While we are everyday registering more voters in Parker county [sic], there has been no large submission of registrants consistent with the claim,” he wrote on X. “The DPS office has confirmed that there have been no tents or tables and no one registering voters on their premises, and that if it were the case they would be told to leave, as it is not allowed.”

Parker County Elections Administrator Cricket Miller also denied the incident and said communication between DPS and her office confirmed there weren't even any tables or booths set up outside the DPS office.

Gray, in an interview with The Texas Tribune, reiterated there was no evidence of voter registration fraud in Parker County. However, he said he supports Paxton and others investigating voter fraud.

"I think that if you have a functioning brain and an IQ over about 40, it would be absurd for you to believe that there's no election fraud happening anywhere," Gray said.

He said the online reaction to his post on X debunking the claims was strange with people using this one instance to debunk claims of fraud elsewhere in the state.>

<One of Joe Biden’s many electoral problems before he dropped out of the presidential race was his waning popularity with Latino voters. In 2020, Republicans had made surprising inroads among this large and complex group in some states, and while Democrats had reversed many of those gains in the 2022 midterms, Biden’s unpopularity threatened the fragile status quo. Then came Kamala Harris, whose entry into the race has moved the needle among many voting blocs, but Latinos in particular. To figure out why, I spoke with Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis Research, a data and research firm focusing on the Latino electorate that conducts well-respected polls. Before that, Odio worked at a progressive nonprofit and in the Obama White House. We discussed why Harris has turned the tide, at least for now, among Latino voters, the effect of RFK Jr.’s exit from the race, and how Democrats abandoned “Duolingo politics.”

Equis’s most recent findings showed Kamala Harris dramatically outperforming Joe Biden’s recent results among Latino voters, while still not quite matching his final 2020 numbers. This may be a basic question, but why do you think Harris is doing so well among this bloc suddenly? Is it more that Biden was just so personally unpopular, or that younger people in general across the country are breaking for her? What do you think is the dominant reason?

When you look at who Kamala Harris picked up almost immediately, it was Democratic-leaning Latinos. Almost 60% of them had voted for Biden in 2020, and the rest had not voted in 2020. It was a younger voter: 60% of those she picked up were under the age of 40. And so you’re talking about voters who simply were not happy with the choices in front of them. A third of them were double haters — they disliked both Biden and Trump. They didn’t like the choices in front of them. It felt like a Sophie’s choice.

They had been beleaguered by crisis [sic] over the previous two years, right? You come out of the pandemic, and it’s high prices, it’s school shootings, it’s wars, and it’s a border situation that’s moving into the cities. And so they weren’t happy with the status quo and didn’t feel confident that the president was the person who could lead them out of that crisis. At the same time, they had Trump, who they had major concerns about — still do — but could say, “Well, in comparison, at least I had more money in my pocket when he was president.”

There was real cross-pressure, which meant that many of them were simply on the sidelines. Others were Trump-curious. Some of them moved all the way to Trump. But when you offer option C, which is “Let’s turn the page, let’s have a new generation of leadership,” it is an outlet, right? It is an escape. And one that brings a great relief and excitement for someone who was already more inclined to vote for Democrats.

You’re talking about turning the page, but of course Kamala Harris has been Joe Biden’s vice president for three and a half years and helped preside over many of the issues that you just mentioned that were bugging Latino voters. So I’m trying to figure out if there’s any concrete policy points she’s putting out that are winning over these voters. Or is it more, for lack of a better word, vibes?

Yeah, look, it is vibes, but I don’t demean vibes. I just think that elections are less about values. The dirty secret of democracy is that voters — including swing voters, including swing Latinos — are not sitting down and considering two policy agendas, and then opting for the one that they prefer the most. The reality is that you’re thinking, Who cares more about people like me? Who, when it comes time to make decisions, has me in mind?

Which is something that Biden polled well on in 2020. But by now, he may be seen as too old to care properly.

Anytime you have a crisis, the natural instinct, especially among voters who are not especially partisan, is to punish the incumbent.

If they weren’t doing it to a greater extent, it’s because of concerns about Trump. But that’s a natural instinct. Punish the incumbent. In fact, a lot of what you’re seeing globally has been a movement to punish the incumbent regardless of ideology. And in addition, you had a leader who — it wasn’t just age, it was a sense of a lack of energy or vitality to be able to actually steer us out of the ditch.

He was particularly flagging among certain blocks of voters, younger voters generally, but younger Black and Latino voters especially.

Yeah, I would say it was a kind of voter who was never especially partisan....>

<....Not the core base.

Right. It was people who did not grow up hardcore Democrats. And I think this is a misunderstanding, perhaps, that some have about what a swing Latino is. A swing Latino is someone who, all things being equal, tends to break for Democrats, but who is open to individual Republicans because they don’t have that hardcore allegiance to the party. It’s not central to their identity.

And these voters care most about the issues general voters care most about, like the economy and immigration, I imagine?

100%. The main thing is the economy. Of course, the economy’s never just the economy. The economy is also cultural. The economy is, “Do you understand where me and my family are coming from? Do you fight for people like me?” And so the basic snapshot that this kind of voter who doesn’t pay close attention to politics has is of the Democrats being more caring and welcoming to people like them and Republicans looking out more for the rich and powerful. But of course circumstances can toggle that a little bit.

Is this shift you’re seeing more concentrated in certain states than others, and among people who hail from particular countries more than others? Like more among Mexican Americans than Cuban Americans, for example?

We are foremost evangelists of the idea that Latinos are not a monolith. There are so many different divisions, whether it’s country of origin, whether it’s generation, whether it’s language, that divide the community’s attitudes. But we are still a group.

The Latino identity still carries a lot of weight as you are making decisions in American politics. And the kind of movement we have been seeing in the Trump era cuts across the traditional lines of the traditional divisions. Similarly, the movement for Harris right now has cut across the demographic subgroups. It is not specific to any one place. In fact, we even see it in Florida, which is the one state where the Democratic decline continued after 2020 — whereas it had been halted in the more competitive states of Nevada and Arizona, even Pennsylvania or Georgia. Shifts right now are fairly uniform across states, across country of origin, and so on.

RFK Jr. dropped out of the presidential race on Friday. His fairly strong numbers in places like Nevada and Arizona, at least a few months ago, were one reason why Biden’s numbers in those places were so tepid. He has been declining in polls recently, and the Harris team doesn’t seem very worried about him dropping out. But do you think it’s a problem for them that he has endorsed Trump? Where do you think his support will go?

Kennedy was polling well with Latinos at a certain point at the height of discontent. With Harris, we saw him polling at his lowest numbers this cycle.

Which is still nine percent in your latest poll.

He’s at nine percent, that’s right. At some point, he was as high as 19. Nine percent is his lowest, but still fairly high. And he just added another element of unpredictability. In our latest poll, he was, for the first time, pulling more from Trump than Harris. But overall, if you are Democrats, you are happy to have him off the ticket because you already have enough dynamism. It was adding another element of dynamism that you didn’t quite need. You need people to understand this as a two-way choice.

Is it fair to say his popularity when he was polling at his highest had more to do with people hating the other two candidates than it did about his own appeal?

You’re absolutely right. Kennedy was an option for people who didn’t like the Sophie’s choice, with a name that felt like it was creating a permission structure for someone who is more inclined toward Democrats.

As long as they didn’t Google him.

That’s right. And in fact, once they learned more information about him, it shifted, and what was left behind was a more Trumpian vote....>

<....Democrats have taken a lot of flack for not doing enough to reach Latino voters over the years. What have you made of what you’ve seen so far from the Harris campaign in terms of outreach so far? They’ve created a bilingual WhatsApp channel for Latino voters, I read.

So much of this is not rocket science — so much of this is getting back to basics. Winning voters is about showing up, showing up physically, something that the Harris campaign is able to do because she’s out there on the trail morning to night in a way that her predecessor could not be. She is showing up virtually and meeting people where they’re at in terms of where they get news, where they’re sharing information, whether that’s WhatsApp, whether that’s YouTube — actually, a plurality of Latinos get their news and information from YouTube more than they get it from TV.

So I would say the Harris campaign is off to a very strong start. They’ve also understood that when it comes to Latino voters, Latinos do not assume they’re invited to the party. When you put out a message, Latinos have enough of a history to know that it’s not always addressed to them. So you invite them to the party. But Latinos don’t want to be invited to a separate party, they want to be invited to the same one as everybody else. They want to be included within the larger American story. They want to lean into their Americanness. And I think that’s been one of the strengths of the Harris campaign out of the gate, and even in the speeches you saw in the convention. And even in her first Latino-focused ad, an ad that ran not just in Spanish but in English and never used the word “Latino,” but was clearly an invitation to Latinos while not being othering or exclusionary of others.

It’s not Tim Kaine speaking Spanish at rallies anymore.

Yeah, it’s not Duolingo politics. It’s speaking with cultural fluency.

Harris has been tarred by Republicans for being the “border czar” under Biden. Do you think that could do major damage to her campaign? Views on immigration run the gamut among Latinos, as they do everyone else.

Look, I would’ve said it was one of her greatest liabilities, if not her main liability, and yet Trump handed her a way out. Incumbents across the western world have had to deal with migration crises. It’s part of what swept the conservatives out in the UK. But Trump gave her the gift of shooting down a bipartisan border bill. We heard a lot about that border bill during the convention, because what it allowed Harris to say is that Democrats want solutions at the border. Maybe we always haven’t taken the right steps, but we have shown that we’re willing to reach across the aisle and do things even that anger our base in order to bring order at the border, something that all Americans, including Latinos want. And Donald Trump torpedoed it because he wants chaos at the border because he thinks it benefits him politically.

It’s always hard to figure out how much that Congressional stuff resonates or whether it’s just noise to people.

Yeah, I will say we’ve tested immigration messaging, and you’d be surprised.It is her most effective counter argument to this. Listen, at the end of the day, Democrats don’t want this to be a debate about the border. If it’s a debate simply about the border, it’s a debate about law and order. And that’s not the main conversation Democrats want to be having. But what they do want to do is not just walk away from the issue, but actually punch back, stop the bleeding on it, and be able to pivot to other debates, even within immigration. Part of what Trump has also done, I think, is overreached on this issue by starting to talk about the mass deportation of people who’ve been living and working here for decades. That is incredibly unpopular among Latinos.

And among everyone.

I was going to say — among Latinos and everyone else. If you’re saying “Let’s staunch the bleeding on our current issue, let’s help cities that are currently overwhelmed” — yeah, people have a different tack. But the moment you start saying, “Let’s take someone who’s been in this country working for 15 years, is married to an American, has American children — let’s rip them out of their community and send them out of the country,” there’s very little support for that. Trump is taking things that, in the hands of a more disciplined and capable campaign, might have worked, but because he empowers people like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and the Heritage Foundation, he’s coming out with these wild kinds of extreme out-of-touch ideas that are helping strengthen the Democratic case.....>

<....You said Democrats didn’t want this to be a conversation about law and order, but they leaned into the theme at the convention, which felt like an attempt to neutralize that issue.

Campaigns are about picking the right fights. When the other side punches, you punch back. But then every chance you get, you then try to pivot and pick the fight you want to have, whether that’s on healthcare, abortion, social security, prescription drug prices, what have you.

When’s your next poll coming out?

We’re in the field right now. I’d say what’s interesting for all of the movement, Kamala Harris still is not fully defined.

What makes you say that?

Well, she’s only burst into the scene in the last few weeks in a real way. She’s already captured a lot of the vote, as we’ve said. The voters who are left just simply haven’t heard that much about her. They haven’t got an opportunity, really because they’re not the ones who are going to tune in to 12 hours of a Democratic convention.

But they might see two minutes on YouTube.

They might see clips, especially if shared by those around them. There are voters who overwhelmingly take their cues from people around them because they’re not especially political. This is why Harris’ new social media dominance actually is important, because it helps shape impressions of her.

She’s still lagging behind where Biden was in 2020 among Latino voters, but it seems like there’s an opportunity to match those numbers. She’s got running room.

Oh, she still has running room for sure. And 15% of Latinos are in one of our persuadable categories, right? There’s still a lot of unknowns, like the fact that at least 30% of Latinos who vote in 2024 won’t have voted in 2020. That segment is a hard segment to pin down, especially because many of them are deciding whether to vote at the same time they’re deciding who to vote for — as much as we try to put up this false wall between mobilization and persuasion. And so you don’t know which of them are going to turn out. And they are the swingiest element of the electorate more broadly, are these low propensity irregular voters who don’t have fully formed partisan identities.

And they’re hardest to poll as well.

For sure. So there are lots of unknowns. I think so much of what you’re seeing now from her campaign really is about reassurance, because at the end of the day, voters want to be, especially swing voters at this point want to be on the side of the feel good campaign, of the hopeful campaign, of the joyful campaign, but they need to be reassured that the kind of change they’re voting for is not a bad kind of change. It’s the good kind of change.>

I am a sensible punter, a gambler. As soon as I saw the name Kamal Harris available as a possibility.

I put money on her to win but she was evens. I think her odds will <shorten> a bit.

<The differences between Republicans and Democrats in 2024 are now apparent, thanks to the parties’ national conventions. However, the conventions also revealed something that liberals and conservatives have in common: They both want the national government to play a very active role in the American people’s personal lives.

The November election will be a referendum on government activism, and the question between the lines on the national ballot will not be whether the government should be more involved in our lives, but how.

In the good old days of electoral politics, we could count on the GOP to stand for a limited national government that exists primarily for national defense. It kept its hands off personal choices and freedoms.

That’s not the case in 2024. Donald Trump, the Republicans’ nominee, says he wants to lay waste to the administrative state. The conservatives’ Project 2025 instruction manual says its mission is to “return self-governance to the American people.” Those are smoke screens.

Elsewhere in the manual’s pages and from Trump on the stump, we get a far different picture, of a government that meddles in who people love, the faith they practice, the medical treatment they are allowed to receive, what their children learn in school, what books our libraries can stock, and what energy we use (spoiler alert: fossil fuels). Trump makes clear we should be careful with free speech, lest we criticize him and find the FBI at our door, and careful how we assemble, lest we want a first-hand experience with the world’s most lethal military.

Democratic VP hopeful Tim Walz undoubtedly spoke for many Americans during his convention speech Wednesday when he told the GOP to “mind your own damn business.”

We heard a far different type of government activism from the DNC’s speakers. They provided a long list of proposals to improve the lot of low-income and middle-class Americans. A frequent theme was an American “opportunity economy.” Trump, America’s poet laureate of cheap shots and insulting sobriquets, responded by calling Harris “Comrade Kamala.”

We can expect Trump and his supporters to use “socialism” repeatedly to characterize the Democrats’ proposals for government activism. It has proven in the past to be a very effective rhetorical stun gun that stops progressive proposals in their tracks.

Harris and Democrats should not let that happen this time. Instead, they should lean into the many worthwhile ideas they have proposed to improve the lives of those on the wrong side of the income and wealth gaps. The reason to keep advocating these ideas is simple: The American people are still the nation’s most underutilized natural resource.

What is an “opportunity society?” Former President Obama defined it during his inaugural address in 2013. “We are true to our creed,” he said, “when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

One after another, the distinguished speakers at the DNC, including Harris and Walz, offered living proof that people born into modest means can grow up to be president or achieve other exalted positions in America, just like the old saw says. But the talents and potentials of millions of other Americans are unfulfilled, to society’s loss as well as theirs....>

<....In the New York Times last year, columnist Joseph Stiglitz reported, “The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. … Economic mobility in the United States is lower than in most of Europe and lower than in all of Scandinavia.”

Nearly 38 million Americans, or 11.5 percent of us, live in poverty. More than 13 million children (about one in five) are forced to go hungry. The top 10 percent of earners in America own nearly 70 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent owns only 2.5 percent.

Women at every level of education are paid lower wages than men for the same type of work. About 90 percent of Gen Z students this summer lack the funds to pay for college in the coming year. And bout [sic] 256,000 Americans live in “sacrifice zones” where power plant and industrial pollution significantly increase their risks of cancer.

America’s Founders declared that pursuing happiness is an inalienable God-given right. But the latest World Happiness Report — which weighs each nation’s per capita GDP, social support, healthy life expectancy, interpersonal generosity and freedom to make one’s own choices — placed the U.S. only 23rd among nations, down from 15th in 2023.

Tellingly, all of the 10 happiest countries in the world have some form of universal health insurance, and six provide free college tuition. Conservatives will keep calling it socialism if Democrats take steps to replicate that happiness here, but their put-down could backfire. The Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of Americans say the federal government should ensure health coverage for all, and that 80 percent want Social Security to remain untouched or expanded to provide more benefits to more people. A poll in February found that 78 percent of Americans favor free college tuition.

So, undeterred by cries of socialism, Democrats should lean into their opportunity agenda, build it into a coordinated and ambitious national equal opportunity initiative, and point out that its economic springboards and safety nets will pay for themselves, because more successful Americans mean more tax revenues and greater economic productivity, as well as less need for social safety nets.

After Harris’s meteoric rise and the Democratic Convention in Chicago, anything seems possible. This could become one of the most satisfying elections in a long time, followed by one of the most satisfying new presidencies.

Now, regardless of party affiliation, we must find ways to keep Trump from spoiling all the fun.>

35 years LOL! There was going to be Biden and Trump, both about 80, in November 2024.

There is a reason for that: it's funny. As an example, NADAL at the start of Wimbledon would be given odds of 6/4.

<Democrats sued Georgia state election officials on Monday, alleging new rules that could allow local officials to delay certification of November's presidential results were illegal.

The lawsuit was filed in the Superior Court of Fulton County by local Georgia Democratic politicians, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party of Georgia. It says the rules approved by the Republican-controlled Georgia state election board this month were intended to give individual county election officials the ability to delay or cancel the certification of votes.

The lawsuit says the new rules "introduce substantial uncertainty in the post-election process and - if interpreted as their drafters have suggested - invite chaos by establishing new processes at odds with existing statutory duties."

The Georgia Secretary of State's office, which oversees the board, did not respond to requests for comment.

Last week, the five-member Georgia election board, which includes three conservative members championed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, voted 3-2 to empower county election board members to investigate any discrepancies between the number of cast ballots and the number of voters in each precinct before certification.

Such mismatches are not uncommon and are not typically evidence of fraud, according to voting rights advocates, who say that rule could permit individual board members to intentionally delay approval of the results.

The board has also in recent weeks approved a separate rule that county election boards conduct a "reasonable inquiry" into any irregularities before certifying the results. The rule did not define "reasonable" or set a particular deadline for completing the inquiry.

The Democrats' lawsuit says it is established law that it is the responsibility of the judicial system, not individual county election officials, to resolve allegations of voter fraud.

Trump has falsely claimed for years that the 2020 election was rigged by fraud.

His infamous January 2021 phone call in which he asked Georgia's top election official, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to "find" enough votes to sway the outcome helped lead to Trump's pending indictment on state charges.

Voter fraud in the U.S. is vanishingly rare, research shows.

Trump faces Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, in the Nov. 5 election. Polls show a close race, with Georgia among seven states likely to determine the outcome.>

<Georgia’s governor has asked his attorney general if he can remove state election board members after three right-wing members approved a series of alarming new rules.

Republican Governor Brian Kemp asked Attorney General Christopher Carr for “guidance” on whether he can remove members of the state election board, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

This comes after three right-wing members of the five-person board championed and passed a series of new rules that add extra requirements for county election boards to certify their results.

Under the rules passed this month — less than 100 days before election day on November 5 — county boards must make a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying the election. However, the rules do not define what an inquiry should involve or what “reasonable” means, according to the Journal-Constitution. County election boards are also required to hold a meeting to verify their vote count on the Friday after election day, which is before the ballot return deadline for voters overseas and in the military.

The three right-wing members - Janelle King, Rick Jeffares and Janice Johnston - were recently praised by Donald Trump for championing new rules. The former president called them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”

Trump has beem [sic] charged in Fulton County, Georgia, alongside his former attorney Rudy Giuliani and others with election interference charges. Trump has claimed that he lost Georgia to President Joe Biden due to widespread election fraud - which there is no evidence of.

Representative Lucy McBath, a Democrat, called the board’s new rules a “concerted effort to subvert democracy and move us backward.”

“With passing this new rule, they are creating barriers to counting votes and certifying the elections so Donald Trump can once again attempt to throw our country into chaos,” she said.

The Democratic Party has sued to challenge the rules, arguing that they could delay certification and lead to disputes over the vote. Kamala Harris’s campaign endorsed the lawsuit, according to the Journal-Constitution.

“Certifying an election is not a choice, it’s the law,” Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for the Harris campaign, said. “A few unelected extremists can’t just decide not to count your vote.”

At least 19 election officials across Georgia have refused to verify various election results since 2020. King, one of the three right-wing board members who advocated for the new rules, dismissed criticisms against them.

“I’m going to continue to do what’s right and let the Democrats play the political games,” King told the Atlanta newspaper. “There’s nothing we’re doing that will impact certification. If they have the proper information needed to certify, you won’t see them even attempt to delay certification.”

Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoon also said the rule changes are “common sense rules that ensure election integrity,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“In no way do these rule changes interfere with anyone’s right to vote or cause undue burdens on election workers, but these steps will ensure transparency, accountability, accurate reporting and reconciliation,” McKoon added.

The Independent has contacted King, Jeffares and Johnston for comment.>

<Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, recently unveiled an ambitious plan for US housing that includes cracking down on abusive landlords.

Harris announced she'd back legislation banning landlords from using algorithms that are said to allow them to collude to raise rents in coordination with other property owners. The bill, called the Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act, is designed to regulate companies like the real-estate tech firm RealPage, which is facing lawsuits alleging it's using its price-setting algorithm to overcharge renters.

"Some corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices, often using algorithms and price-fixing software to do it," Harris said in a recent speech on economic policy. "It's anticompetitive, and it drives up costs."

Housing costs have skyrocketed in recent years, largely because of a severe housing shortage. Rents across the US have risen by about 19% since 2019, and more tenants than ever are rent burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. American voters are acutely concerned about it; in a recent survey, 83% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans said they thought a lack of affordable housing was a significant problem.

Companies like RealPage have attracted heavy scrutiny from law enforcement following investigative reports into their practices. RealPage, based in Texas, sells software called YieldStar that recommends apartment rent prices to its clients — landlords and property managers — based on nonpublic information it gathers in a given real-estate market.

The attorneys general of Arizona and Washington, DC, have filed lawsuits against the company, alleging that it illegally colluded with its clients to set rent prices above competitive levels. And on Friday, The New York Times reported that the US Department of Justice had sued RealPage, alleging anticompetitive, collusive behavior.

Kris Mayes, Arizona's attorney general, said landlords who used RealPage "are not charging what the market can bear — they are controlling the market."

She said she found that 70% of rental homes in Phoenix and 50% in Tucson were owned by companies that used RealPage. In DC, the attorney general accused RealPage and its clients of operating a "District-wide housing cartel" that controlled more than 30% of multifamily units in the city.

"They're promising higher prices by a small but significant amount, even though occupancy is going down," Maurice Stucke, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who was formerly a DOJ antitrust-division prosecutor, told Business Insider last year. "Typically, that's the telltale sign of collusion."

A spokesperson for RealPage didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

In addition to targeting landlords using price-setting algorithms, Harris backed a piece of legislation designed to crack down on Wall Street investors who buy homes in bulk. But these efforts would address the housing crisis only on the margins....>

<....While rent-setting algorithms might be driving up prices in some markets, much bigger supply and demand forces are to blame for the broader affordability crisis. But it's politically popular to go after Wall Street investors and landlords engaged in predatory behaviors. Republican lawmakers, including JD Vance, have supported cracking down on investors buying up homes.

"There's sort of a belief that big landlords have more power than they actually do," Jenny Schuetz, an expert on urban economics and housing policy at the Brookings Institution, told Business Insider. But she argued that trying to prevent these practices isn't a bad idea. "The question is what do you do at the end of the investigation, and is there actually action that's going to help consumers?" she added.

There's a risk that regulating landlords, either in how they set rents or in which homes they purchase, could backfire by reducing investment in homes and thus hurting supply.

"If you actually cracked down really hard on private equity, it would be less capital going into this space, less capital going into investing in new homes," Ben Metcalf, the managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, told Business Insider.

Redfin's chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, argued that Harris was prioritizing regulating predatory behavior by landlords as a way to appeal to first-time homebuyers and renters who feel taken advantage of and outcompeted in the market. It can be harder for the average voter to understand how supply and demand affect the cost of their housing, so Harris is targeting a clear adversary in addition to addressing the underlying issue of the housing shortage, she said. A large part of Harris' housing plan focuses on boosting the supply of housing, with a pledge to build 3 million homes in four years.

"Harris is acknowledging the way that everyday people feel the housing market is broken," Fairweather told Business Insider. "She's addressing a lot of the specific concerns of first-time homebuyers who feel like they're being outcompeted by investors and their landlords are jacking up rent.">

<A federal judge in Texas on Monday ordered a temporary pause on the Biden administration's new protections that would allow immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens a path to citizenship.

The administrative stay issued by U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker comes after 16 states, led by Republican attorneys general, challenged the program Friday in a lawsuit that claimed the policy would encourage illegal immigration.

One of the states leading the challenge is Texas, which in the lawsuit claimed the state has had to pay tens of millions of dollars annually from health care to law enforcement because of immigrants living in the state without legal status.

President Joe Biden announced the program in June. The pause comes one week after DHS began accepting applications.

The order puts the program on hold for at least two weeks while the challenge continues.

"The claims are substantial and warrant closer consideration than the court has been able to afford to date," Barker wrote.

The policy offers spouses of U.S. citizens without legal status, who meet certain criteria, a path to citizenship by applying for a green card and staying in the U.S. while undergoing the process. Traditionally, the process could include a years-long wait outside of the U.S., causing what advocates equate to "family separation."

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return an email seeking comment on the order.

Several families were notified of the receipt of their applications, according to attorneys advocating for eligible families who filed a motion to intervene earlier Monday.

“Texas should not be able to decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and their immigrant spouses without confronting their reality,” Karen Tumlin, the founder and director of Justice Action Center, said during the press conference before the order was issued.

The coalition of states accused the administration of bypassing Congress for “blatant political purposes.”

The program has been particularly contentious in an election year where immigration is one of the biggest issues, with many Republicans attacking the policy and contending it is essentially a form of amnesty for people who broke the law.

To be eligible for the program, immigrants must have lived continuously in the U.S. for at least 10 years, not pose a security threat or have a disqualifying criminal history, and have been married to a citizen by June 17 — the day before the program was announced.

They must pay a $580 fee to apply and fill out a lengthy application, including an explanation of why they deserve humanitarian parole and a long list of supporting documents proving how long they have been in the country.

If approved, applicants have three years to seek permanent residency. During that period, they can get work authorization. The administration estimates about 500,000 people could be eligible, plus about 50,000 of their children.

Before this program, it was complicated for people who were in the U.S. illegally to get a green card after marrying an American citizen. They can be required to return to their home country — often for years — and they always face the risk they may not be allowed back in.>

Even in polls, they carry on as though the world will end when they are assessed as behind:

<Arizona Republican Senate hopeful Kari Lake has dismissed an analysis of recent polling in the state carried out by Decision Desk HQ and The Hill, which gave Democratic rival, Representative Ruben Gallego, a near six-point lead, claiming it is based on "absurd partisan polls."

Lake made the comment on Sunday during an interview with NewsNation's Chris Stirewalt where she also said she was ahead of Gallego based on "my internal polling." The Senate seat is currently held by Kyrsten Sinema, who was elected as a Democrat, but now sits as an independent and who has announced she won't be seeking reelection later this year.

There are currently 46 Democratic Senators and another four, including Sinema, who either caucus with the party or align with it for committee purposes giving the Democrats a wafer thin majority in the upper chamber. Republicans are hoping to seize control of the Senate in November, after failing to do so during the November 2022 midterm elections, to achieve which Sinema's old seat in Arizona is a key target.

During her NewsNation interview Lake was asked about a study of recent surveys by Decision Desk HQ and The Hill which on August 22 gave Gallego, who currently represents Arizona's 3rd congressional district in the House, a lead of 5.6 points. The analysis put Gallego on 47.6 percent, ahead of Lake on 42 percent.

Lake replied: "Well, there were a couple of really bad outlier polls that were included in that that were just absolutely absurd, partisan polls. I know what my internal polling looks like.

"I'm ahead of him, but it is a horse race. And I've gotten access to a lot of polls that aren't public.

"We are the third-best chance for a pickup seat in these closely contested races. And I feel we're going to win this one."

Lake went on to describe Gallego as "an absolute dud," adding: "This is somebody who's voted in lockstep 100 percent of the time with [president] Joe Biden and [Vice President] Kamala Harris, the two most disastrous things to ever happen to our country."

Newsweek contacted the Senate campaigns of Lake and Gallego for comment on Monday outside of regular business hours by online press inquiry form and email respectively.

A poll of 677 registered voters in Arizona conducted by Sina College for The New York Times between August 8 and 15 gave Gallego a nine-point lead for the Senate seat. It put the Democrat on 51 percent of the vote against 42 percent for Lake, with the remainder either undecided or refusing to answer.

Lake and Gallego are due to hold a televised debate on October 9, which is being organized by the Arizona Clean Elections Commission. The Republican candidate confirmed she would take part earlier this month after initially refusing to commit.

In November 2022, Lake lost the Arizona gubernational election to Democrat Katie Hobbs by 49.7 percent of the vote against 50.3 percent. Lake claimed the contest had been rigged against her and launched a number of legal challenges against the result, but these were repeatedly rejected in court.>

<The Biden-Harris administration has deployed a little-known hiring mechanism to staff key divisions of the Department of Justice (DOJ) ahead of the 2024 election, according to documents provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation by Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT).

Hundreds of people, primarily lawyers and judges, have been appointed to the Environmental and Natural Resources (ENRD) and Antitrust and Immigration Review divisions of the DOJ using its “Schedule A” hiring authority since President Joe Biden took office, documents shared with the DCNF by PPT show. Schedule A hiring does not require appointments to be made on the basis of merit and appointments do not expire at the end of the current president’s term, meaning these bureaucrats will stick around even if former President Donald Trump takes office in 2025, according to the Office of Budget and Management.

The hiring process is intended to benefit people with “intellectual disabilities, severe physical disabilities or psychiatric disabilities” but it can also be used to staff specialist positions as chaplains, scientists, and attorneys or to fill critical hiring needs, according to federal regulations.

“The Biden-Harris administration and its allies have already signaled their intent to hamstring their successor and prevent a future president from reversing their agenda,” PPT director Michael Chamberlain said in an advance copy of a press release shared with the DCNF. “Exploiting non-competitive hiring authorities to fill career civil service positions could be just another component of this scheme. It’s no wonder that the public’s trust in its government has all but disappeared.”

The DOJ used Schedule A to hire well over 100 immigration judges for its Immigration Review division, per the documents. Immigration judges are responsible for deciding “whether a noncitizen may remain in the United States or must leave the country,” according to the DOJ.

At the end of the 2020 fiscal year, around when Biden took office, immigration courts had a backlog of roughly 1.3 million cases, according to the DOJ. That number had ballooned to 3 million under the Biden-Harris administration, PBS reported in January.

“The administration is also using Schedule A to install immigration judges — again, outside of the normal merit-based system — who will rule on cases of those in a position to benefit from the administration’s immigration policies,” PPT’s press release reads.

The DOJ also used Schedule A to hire a massive glut of trial attorneys for its ENRD division, which is responsible for enforcing environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. The division focuses on climate change, environmental justice and defending the interests of Native American tribes, according to its website.

“The ENRD is a vital office in advancing the Biden-Harris administration’s energy and climate policies, and the placement of Biden-Harris loyalists is a means to defend those policies even if a future Trump (or other) administration seeks to change them,” according to PPT.

The DOJ also took the opportunity to use Schedule A to beef up its antitrust division with an army of trial attorneys, according to the documents. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan has adopted an aggressive stance to antitrust enforcement, bringing action against Amazon, Meta, Kroger, Microsoft and Nvidia, among others.

“Until recently, antitrust enforcement was a relatively technical and non-partisan division,” PPT’s press release reads. “But the Biden-Harris administration’s increasingly aggressive implementation has sparked complaints of politicized enforcement.”

PPT characterizes these DOJ appointments as one pillar in a broader effort to “Trump-proof” the federal government ahead of November’s election.

The Biden-Harris administration has advanced a federal rule that would make it more difficult for the president to fire career bureaucrats. Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency agreed to a new contract in May that will allow them to avoid being fired so long as their work is conducted with “scientific integrity,” Politico reported.

An army of left-of-center civil society organizations, like the American Civil Liberties Union and National Immigration Law Center, are also rapidly drafting litigation to counter actions taken by a possible second Trump administration.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division both denied PPT’s records requests.

The DOJ did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.>

<The uplifting pageantry of the Democratic National Convention is over, leaving a national hangover of possibility. Judging from mainstream media headlines, a sense of relief is spreading, the page is turning — and not just for Democrats.

Ever since a certain indulged heir rode down his golden escalator, the nation’s been in a funk. Encouraged to hate our neighbors, a good chunk of the country did it. Coaxed to see bizarre conspiracies, many of us saw them. Pumped up on political violence, too many of us went there.

It’s been a nearly 10-year slog, an emotionally draining chapter in American history that made many wonder, in earnest, whether our democracy could survive. Maybe Ben Franklin’s wry quip about a “Republic, if you can keep it,’ was more prescience than cynicism.

Last week’s Democratic National Committee rejoinder was that we will not only keep our republic, we’ll eventually fulfill its promise.

Democrats are reclaiming ‘“freedom’” and the American flag

As both Harris and Walz stressed their commitment to all Americans regardless of how they vote, Kamala Cowboys, country music, and football players on center stage proved that the Harris comms team knows the importance of iconography.

Democrats are embracing unabashed flag-waving patriotism once again, after what felt like a forced hiatus. Too many images of Trump weirdly caressing the flag were a turn-off, a revered American symbol cheapened into a prop. Just as Christians refusing to feed the poor screams hypocrisy, waving the flag after Trump’s January 6 mob beat police officers with it just felt wrong.

Not anymore. Harris-Walz are reclaiming flags and “freedom” as the language of patriotism, displayed in giant block letters behind many speakers who talked about how Republicans have bastardized both.

Freedom, as a construct, has been Republicans’ political football, a gaslighting catchphrase to describe the opposite of freedom. The misleadingly named Freedom Caucus, for example, strives to restrict personal rights like voting, gay marriage and abortion, while the Freedom Foundation exists to bust worker organizations and unions. House Speaker Mike Johnson, an anti-gay, anti-science, anti-abortion Christian nationalist, calls his legislative agenda “Individual Freedom.” Trump has gone so far as to appropriate Harris’ authorized campaign use of Beyoncé’s “Freedom” soundtrack, a move that earned the Trump campaign a cease and desist threat.

At last week’s DNC, when he accepted the nomination for vice president, Tim Walz dad-splained the difference:

(W)hen we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions. And yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.

In contrast, Walz said, “When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations [(should be]) free to pollute your air and water. And banks [(are]) free to take advantage of customers.”

About the Minnesota law providing breakfast and lunch every day, Walz said, “So, while other states were banishing books, we were banishing hunger.”

In selecting J.D. Vance as his running mate, Trump signaled that he is doubling down on his culture wars. Instead of expanding the MAGA base to include moderates, Trump remains focused on a relatively narrow swath of the electorate. He says they doesn’t need voter outreach because Harris will “steal” the election anyway. Trump is obviously setting up Stop the Steal 2024 with the same stolen election lies he’s spread since 2020.

Harris and Walz are signaling the opposite. They don’t want to insult or malign MAGA voters. With their decidedly more centrist message, Harris and Walz are offering an olive branch and permission structure to leave a man who has shown in words and deeds that he will harm them.....>

<....The Trump-Vance culture wars, as advanced by Republicans in Congress, are but a ruse, a public relations beard to disguise the GOP’s true raison d'etre: the protection of wealth. Trump punches down on immigrants and vulnerable people with his right hand to distract supporters from what he’s doing with his left: robbing the till. He’s admitted on record that political contributions, as he sees them, are made to secure favors in return. He fulminates hatred — a strong psychological addiction —- so his base won’t notice how he’s enriching his wealthy donors at their expense.

Trump’s top billionaire donors — corporate CEOs, oligarchs and trust fund recipients of inherited wealth — are spending hundreds of millions to elect Trump because he has promised to cut their taxes again and tank federal safety regulations that cost them money. According to Forbes, many dozens of billionaires have already given more than $1 million dollars each to help re-elect Trump.

Fossil fuels, big pharma and predatory corporations know Trump will protect them, but fear (not without reason) that Harris will hold them accountable.

The GOP’s us vs. them selfish political paradigm follows the malignancy of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and lays bare its destructive force of unlimited money in politics: The extremely wealthy aren’t dependent on free supplies of clean water, they can import private tanks and install their own desalination equipment if it comes to that. They don’t worry about climate change, because they can afford to build lux retreats high in the Swiss Alps, complete with vertical farms for growing their own produce.

But the middle class can see floods, droughts, and increasingly extreme weather with their own eyes, and even the most skeptical know now that climate change is no hoax.

The Trump-Vance campaign also keeps telling voters that President Joe Biden caused the price of bread and gas to go up, even though current prices reflect factors beyond any president’s control including the Federal Reserve, foreign wars, and post-pandemic adjustments.

When Biden took office, the Trump economy was in shambles. Under Biden-Harris, the U.S. staged the strongest COVID-era economic Covid comeback among all advanced economies in the world. Spiraling inflation was carefully reined in, prices are still decreasing, and we got the soft landing Biden promised.

The stakes this November are exceedingly high. It’s not hyperbole to say the outcome of this election could forever bend the trajectory of the greatest human experiment ever undertaken. Despite the MAGA base enabling a man who would do them — and us — harm, Harris-Walz are modeling President Barack Obama’s advice on national grace:

(I)f a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognize that the world is moving fast, that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up. Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us.

With 71 days to go, they are spreading joy and a renewed commitment to freedom and the American flag. They are also staying on message that economic policies, in the right hands, can benefit the common man.

Here’s hoping the common man will listen.>