Barron Trump has finally revealed his college choice — New York University — by turning up at the downtown Manhattan campus Wednesday morning for his first day of classes.

The 18-year-old son of Donald and Melania Trump sported a white polo shirt, Adidas sneakers and black Swiss Gear backpack, casually slung over his shoulder, as he was seen heading into the dean’s office building, followed by Secret Service agents, the New York Post reported. The Secret Service agents are there to guard him as his father, the former president, is running to return to the White House.

The sighting of Trump’s 6-foot-7-inch son ends months of speculation about his college choice, according to the Daily Beast, which first reported that NYU was his top choice. Barron is enrolled at NYU’s Stern Undergraduate College.

NYU is No. 35 overall on the U.S. News & World Report ranking of best colleges and No. 5 for its business programs. By choosing NYU, Barron is breaking with Trump family tradition. His father has boasted of his Ivy League education at University of Pennsylvania, which is ranked No. 6 by U.S. News and World Report. His older half-siblings, Don Jr., Ivanka and Tiffany, also graduated from Penn, while Eric Trump graduated from Georgetown University.

But NYU has the advantage of being Barron’s hometown university. NYU is kind of down the road — Fifth Avenue — from where Barron spent his childhood, raised by his mother in his father’s gilded penthouse in Trump Tower. It wasn’t clear, though, Wednesday, whether Barron will live on campus or will live with his mother at Trump Tower.

The fact that Melania Trump was seen arriving at Trump Tower last week fueled speculation that Barron would attend college in New York City. One way that Trump World sources have explained her absence from her husband’s campaign has been by saying that she sees herself as a “hands-on” mother, whose first priority is her son, Page Six previously reported. Some people have taken the “hands-on” mother description to mean that she would reside close to wherever he is attending college.

Donald Trump recently told the Daily Mail that while the family had considered other colleges, but Barron ultimately liked NYU the best.

“It’s a very high quality place. He liked it. He liked the school,” Trump told the Daily Mail. “I went to Wharton, and that was certainly one that we were considering. We didn’t do that … We went for Stern.”

“He’s a very high aptitude child, but he’s no longer a child. He’s just passed into something beyond child-dom.”

By BRIAN SLODYSKO and DAN MERICA The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Italo Medelius was leading a volunteer drive to put Cornel West on North Carolina’s presidential ballot last spring when he received an unexpected call from a man named Paul who said he wanted to help.

Though Medelius, co-chairman of West’s “Justice for All Party,” welcomed the assistance, the offer would complicate his life, provoking threats and drawing him into a state election board investigation of the motivations, backgrounds and suspect tactics of his new allies.

His is not an isolated case.

Across the country, a network of Republican political operatives, lawyers and their allies is trying to shape November’s election in ways that favor former President Donald Trump. Their goal is to prop up third-party candidates such as West who offer liberal voters an alternative that could siphon away support from Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

It is not clear who is paying for the effort, but it could be impactful in states that were decided by miniscule margins in the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden.

This is money West’s campaign does not have, and he has encouraged the effort. Last month the academic told The Associated Press that “American politics is highly gangster-like activity” and he “just wanted to get on that ballot.”

Trump has offered praise for West, calling him “one of my favorite candidates.” Another is Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Trump favors both for the same reason. “I like her very much. You know why? She takes 100% from them. He takes 100%.”

Democrats are exploring ways to lift Randall Terry, an anti-abortion presidential candidate for the Constitution Party, believing he could draw voters from Trump.

But the GOP effort appears to be more far-reaching. After years of Trump accusing Democrats of “rigging” elections, it is his allies who are now mounting a sprawling and at times deceptive campaign to tilt the vote in his favor.

“The fact that either of the two major parties would attempt financially and otherwise to support a third-party spoiler candidate as part of its effort to win is an unfortunate byproduct” of current election laws “that facilitate spoilers,” said Edward B. Foley, a law professor who leads Ohio State University’s election law program. “This phenomenon is equally problematic whichever of the two major party engages in it.”

One key figure in the push is Paul Hamrick, the man on the other end of the call with Medelius in North Carolina.

Hamrick serves as counsel for the Virginia-based nonprofit People Over Party, which has pushed to get West on the ballot in Arizona, Maine, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Virginia, as well as North Carolina, records show.

In an interview, Hamrick declined to say who else besides him was orchestrating the effort and he would not divulge who was funding it. He vigorously disputed any suggestion that he was a Republican, but acknowledged that he was not a Democrat, either.

His history is complex.

Hamrick was chief of staff to former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, a one-term Democrat who was booted from office in 2003 and later was convicted and sentenced to prison on federal bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud charges. Hamrick was charged alongside his former boss in two separate cases. One was dismissed and he was acquitted in the other.

Though he insists he is not a Republican, Hamrick voted in Alabama’s Republican primary in 2002, 2006 and 2010, according to state voting records maintained by the political data firm L2. He was tapped briefly in 2011 to work for the Alabama state Senate’s Republican majority. And since 2015, according to federal campaign finance disclosures, he has contributed only to GOP causes, including $2,500 to the Alabama Republican Party and $3,300 to Georgia Rep. Mike Collins, a Republican who has trafficked in conspiracy theories.

Hamrick denied that he voted in any Republican primaries, suggesting that the voting data was inaccurate.

For years, he was a consultant for Matrix LLC, an Alabama firm known for its hardball approach.

Matrix LLC was part of an effort in Florida to run “ghost candidates” against elected officials who had raised the ire of executives for Florida Power & Light, the state’s largest utility.

Daniella Levine Cava, the current mayor of Miami-Dade County, was a target. As a county commissioner, Levine Cava had fought with FPL. When she ran for reelection in 2018, Matrix covertly financed a third-party candidate they hoped would siphon enough votes to tip her seat to a Republican challenger, The Miami Herald reported in 2022.

Hamrick was deeply involved. A company he created paid the spoiler candidate a $60,000 salary and rented a $2,300-a-month home for him, according to the newspaper and business filings made in Alabama. Hamrick said the candidate worked for him to help recruit business. Hamrick denied having anything to do with the man’s campaign.

Either way, it did not work. Levine Cava was reelected before winning the mayor’s seat in 2020.

Now Hamrick is playing a prominent role to place West’s name on the ballot in competetive states. Hamrick surfaced in Arizona two weeks ago after a woman told the AP that a document was fraudulently submitted in her name to Arizona’s secretary of state in which she purportedly agreed to serve as an elector for West. She said her signature was forged and she never agreed to be an elector.

After the AP published her account, Hamrick said he spoke to the woman’s husband, trying to rectify the situation and “gave some information.” Hamrick declined to say what information was shared. He also tried to persuade another elector who backed out to recommit to West, according to interviews and voicemails.

The next day, with the deadline to qualify for the Arizona ballot just hours away, Brett Johnson, a prominent Republican lawyer, and Amanda Reeve, a former GOP state lawmaker, made house visits to each as they tried to persuade both to sign new paperwork to serve as West electors.

Johnson and Reeve work for Snell & Wilmer, which has done $257,000 worth of business for the Republican National Committee over the past two years, campaign finance disclosures show.

Hamrick declined to comment on the role of Johnson and Reeve. They did not respond to requests for comment.

West did not qualify for the Arizona ballot.

Other Republican-aligned law firms also have been involved in the national push, opposing Democrat-backed challenges to West’s placement on the ballot:

— In Georgia, Bryan Tyson, a partner at the Election Law Group, represented the state Republican Party as it tried to keep West on the ballot. The firm has collected $60,000 in payments from the RNC since April, campaign finance records show. Tyson did not respond to a request for comment.

On Thursday, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger overruled an administrative law judge and placed West, Stein and Party for Socialism and Liberation nominee Claudia De la Cruz on the ballot. Tyson did not respond to a message seeking comment.

— In North Carolina, Phil Strach, a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association, successfully challenged in court a North Carolina State Board of Elections decision to bar West from the ballot. Strach did not respond to a message left for him.

— In Michigan, John Bursch, a senior lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal group that helped overturn Roe v. Wade, successfully fended off a challenge to West’s placement on the ballot. Bursch’s firm, Bursch Law PLLC, was paid $25,000 by Trump’s campaign in November 2020 for “RECOUNT: LEGAL CONSULTING,” according to campaign finance disclosures. Bursch did not respond to a request for comment.

— In Pennsylvania, a lawyer with long-standing ties to Republican candidates and causes, unsuccessfully argued in August for West to stay on the ballot. The attorney, Matt Haverstick, declined to say in an interview who hired him or why. People Over Party, the group Hamrick is affiliated with, had tried to get West on the ballot.

None of these actions was funded by West’s campaign, though he and his “Justice for All” party have coordinated at times with Hamrick’s People Over Party, according to legal filings, a news release and social media posts.

In North Carolina, People Over Party, worked with Blitz Canvassing and Campaign & Petition Management — two firms that routinely work for the GOP — to gather signatures for West. Hamrick later responded in writing on behalf of workers for the two companies after the state election board opened its inquiry.

Jefferson Thomas, a longtime Republican operative from Colorado, submitted petition signatures that his firm, The Synapse Group, gathered on behalf of Stein in New Hampshire, records show. He did not respond to requests for comment.

In Wisconsin, Blair Group Consulting oversaw West’s petition signature drive to qualify for the ballot, as previously reported by USA Today. David Blair, the firm’s president, was a the national director of Youth for Trump during the 2016 campaign and was a spokesman in the Trump administration. Blair declined to comment.

Mark Jacoby, whose signature gathering firm Let the Voters Decide often works for Republicans, was involved in the failed Arizona push to get West on the ballot. The California operative has was convicted in 2009 of voter registration fraud, court records show. Jacoby did not respond to a message left at a phone number listed to him.

Medelius, the North Carolina co-chairman of West’s “Justice for All Party,” said the partisan battles over third-party candidates amounted to a “gang war.”

“If they want to use us for cannon fodder, there’s not much I can do about it,” he said.

___

Associated Press writers Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix, Farnoush Amiri in Chicago and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.

With most states reliably red or blue, the path to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency runs through seven states where the contest is expected to be narrowly decided.

Those are: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. All together, they are home to only 18.3% of the country’s population.

The Associated Press has been tracking the campaign appearances of the Democratic and Republican tickets since March.

Since then, Pennsylvania has been getting the most love from both campaigns, with a total of 21 visits, including one planned this coming weekend. Wisconsin and Michigan are close behind with 17 and 16, respectively.

Most states haven’t been visited at all, and a handful with clusters of wealth, such as California, get attention not for their voters but when the campaigns want to tap the wallets of the rich.

Anna Claire Vollers | (TNS) Stateline.org

Helping a pregnant minor travel to get a legal abortion without parental consent is now a crime in at least two Republican-led states, prompting legal action by abortion-rights advocates and copycat legislation from conservative lawmakers in a handful of other states.

Last year, Idaho became the first state to outlaw “abortion trafficking,” which it defined as “recruiting, harboring or transporting” a pregnant minor to get an abortion or abortion medication without parental permission. In May, Tennessee enacted a similar law. And Republican lawmakers in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma introduced abortion trafficking bills during their most recent legislative sessions, although those bills failed to advance before the sessions ended.

Those five states are among the 14 that enacted strict abortion bans following the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision, which dismantled the federal right to abortion. Now, conservative state lawmakers are pushing additional measures to try to restrict their residents from getting them in states where it remains legal.

“A lot of folks thought Dobbs was the floor and it’s really not,” said Tennessee state Rep. Aftyn Behn, a Nashville Democrat who’s challenging Tennessee’s trafficking law in court. “[Anti-abortion lawmakers] are coming for state travel and the ability to even talk about abortion.”

Abortion-rights advocates have filed lawsuits in Alabama, Idaho and Tennessee, arguing the laws are vague and violate constitutional rights to free speech and travel between states. A federal judge has temporarily blocked Idaho’s law from being enforced while the case is ongoing.

Proponents of the laws argue they’re needed to protect parental rights and to prevent other adults from persuading adolescents to get abortions.

“This is a parental rights piece of legislation,” Idaho Republican state Rep. Barbara Ehardt told Stateline. “We can’t control someone getting an abortion in Oregon. But you cannot take a child to get an abortion without the parent’s knowledge because, at least in the past, we would have called that kidnapping.”

But critics warn that abortion trafficking laws could have grave implications not only for interstate travel, but also for personal speech and communication between friends, or between children and adults they trust.

“If courts go down this road, it could change the scope of the First Amendment,” Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, told Stateline. “It could have an effect on what else qualifies as crime-facilitating speech, and that could limit the kinds of things people can say and do online and in other contexts.”

Opponents also question whether states should be permitted to interfere in the business of other states. Criminalizing travel within an abortion-ban state to reach another state for a legal abortion would “allow prosecutors to project power across state lines,” said Ziegler.

“We haven’t seen states try to interfere in what’s happening in other states in quite the same way in a long time,” she said. “That’s why there is legal uncertainty — because we’re not talking about something where we have a lot of legal precedent.”

‘Parental rights’

Tennessee state Rep. Jason Zachary, a Knoxville Republican, defended Tennessee’s legislation as “a parental rights bill” that “reinforces a parent’s right to do what’s best for their child,” in remarks he made to the Tennessee General Assembly before the bill passed. Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed it into law in May.

The following month, Behn joined with Nashville attorney and longtime abortion access activist Rachel Welty to file a lawsuit challenging the new law.

Behn and Welty sued nearly a dozen district attorneys in Tennessee, alleging they ignored Welty’s requests to define what behavior would be deemed illegal under the new law. The Tennessee law says that abortion trafficking occurs when an adult “intentionally recruits, harbors, or transports” a pregnant minor within the state to get an abortion or an abortion-inducing drug without parental consent, “regardless of where the abortion is to be procured.”

A hearing to determine whether the court will grant a temporary injunction blocking the Tennessee law, which is currently in effect, is scheduled for Aug. 30.

After Idaho passed its law in April 2023, two advocacy groups and an attorney who works with sexual assault victims sued the state attorney general. The plaintiffs claim Idaho’s law is vague and violates the First Amendment right to free speech, as well as the right to travel freely between states. The right to interstate travel isn’t spelled out in the U.S. Constitution but it’s implied, legal experts say. The Idaho law directly applies to travel within the state, but it also notes that defendants are not immune from liability if “the abortion provider or the abortion-inducing drug provider is located in another state.”

Megan Kovacs, a board member with the Northwest Abortion Access Fund, which is a plaintiff in the case along with the Indigenous Idaho Alliance, said it is “so clearly unconstitutional to disallow people from accessing health care from within or outside their state.” Kovacs added that her group also wants to protect its volunteers from legal liability.

Neither the Idaho nor the Tennessee law exempts minors who become pregnant after being raped by a parent.

“If that person had to go to a parent who didn’t believe them or wanted to defend that family member who was the abuser, that only impedes healing even more,” said Kovacs, who has spent a decade working with survivors of domestic and sexual violence.

Ehardt, who sponsored the Idaho bill, said any adult who is told by a child about an incident of incest should call authorities rather than helping the minor obtain an abortion without parental consent.

“You have to call the police and they will be the ones to help protect the child’s safety,” she said.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held a hearing in May in Seattle, and Kovacs said she expects to learn in the next few weeks whether the court will uphold the temporary injunction blocking Idaho’s law while the lawsuit rolls on.

In July 2023, a group of health care providers sued Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall and district attorneys, asking the court to prevent the state from prosecuting people who help Alabamians travel to get abortion care in states where it’s legal.

The providers filed the lawsuit in response to remarks that Marshall made on a radio show in 2022, when he suggested that some people who aid a pregnant person in planning or traveling to get an abortion in another state could be prosecuted under the state’s criminal conspiracy laws. A judge denied Marshall’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit earlier this year, and the case is ongoing.

A coordinated effort

The Tennessee and Idaho laws mirror language in model legislation that was published in 2022 by the National Right to Life Committee, which bills itself as the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots pro-life organization.

“With this model law, we [are] laying out a roadmap for the right-to-life movement so that, in a post-Roe society, we can protect many mothers and their children from the tragedy of abortion,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life Committee, in a June 2022 statement introducing the model anti-abortion law.

Anti-abortion-rights organizations, like other interest groups, have long coordinated strategies to promote their preferred legislation to state and federal lawmakers.

The Idaho and Tennessee laws focus specifically on minors, even though they comprise a small fraction of people who get abortions. Those under 19 accounted for 8.1% of abortions, and those under age 15 accounted for just 0.2% of abortions in 2021, the most recent year for which the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has published data.

Kovacs and Ziegler say the bills zero in on minors’ access to abortion because policies that regulate children and teens tend to be more politically acceptable than broader restrictions that affect adults. Such bills also tend to be more likely to survive legal challenges in court.

A chilling effect

Nobody in Tennessee or Idaho has yet been prosecuted under the abortion trafficking laws, but an Idaho woman and her son were charged with kidnapping last fall for allegedly taking the son’s girlfriend, a minor, out of state to get an abortion.

One main goal of a law such as Tennessee’s, Behn believes, is to create a chilling effect so that average people are scared to help anyone who might need an abortion, for fear of breaking the law.

“These bills create an environment of suspicion, fear and misinformation,” said Behn. “But I do think we will see more aggressive district attorneys start to prosecute these cases. [The law] widens the permission structure to start prosecuting people.”

Laws criminalizing abortion travel and imposing other abortion restrictions may be designed to provoke a legal challenge, Ziegler said. With a 6-3 conservative majority, the U.S. Supreme Court might be inclined to support them.

Abortion-rights advocates argue that restrictive abortion laws end up harming even those people who live in states where abortion is still legal.

Oregon, for example, has some of the strongest abortion protection laws in the nation. And yet the strict abortion ban next door in Idaho has made it more difficult for Oregonians to access care, said Kovacs, who lives in Oregon.

Before Idaho’s ban, many people in Eastern Oregon traveled to Idaho for abortion care, she said, because its clinics were closer than Oregon’s clinics, most of which are concentrated on the western side of the state. Last year, in response to increasing abortion restrictions in other states, Oregon passed a sweeping health care omnibus bill that strengthens protections for abortion providers and explicitly allows minors to seek abortions without parental consent. It was signed into law and took effect in January.

Ziegler said it’s not hard to imagine that if abortion trafficking laws are upheld in abortion-ban states, at some point prosecutors in those states could file charges against providers in “safe” states for providing abortion help, such as mailing abortion pills.

“I think it’s not intended to just stop with the people who are in the ban states,” Ziegler said.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Matt Vasilogambros | (TNS) Stateline.org

PORT AUSTIN, Mich. — Deep in the thumb of Michigan’s mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula, Republican election officials are outcasts in their rural communities.

Michigan cities already were familiar with the consequences of election conspiracy theories. In 2020, Republicans flooded Detroit’s ballot counting center looking for fraud. Democratic and Republican election officials faced an onslaught of threats. And conservative activists attempted to tamper with election equipment.

But the clerks who serve tiny conservative townships around Lake Huron never thought the hatred would be directed toward them.

“I’m telling you — I’ve heard about everything I could hear,” said Theresa Mazure, the clerk for the 700 residents of Hume Township in Huron County. “I just shake my head. And when you try to explain, all I hear is, ‘Well, that’s just the Democrats talking.’ No, it’s the democratic process.”

The misinformation is rampant, she said. Voters mistakenly believe election equipment is connected to the internet, or that voters are receiving multiple ballots in the mail, or that officials are stuffing ballot tabulators with fake ballots at the end of the day.

She knows her voters. They’re her neighbors. But the level of distrust of elections has gotten to a point where they won’t listen to her anymore. The fact that she’s a Republican doesn’t matter — only that she’s the clerk.

Sitting in the Hume Township Hall, about three hours north of Detroit and surrounded by miles of flat cornfields, Mazure leaned on agricultural metaphors to describe the scenario.

“The mistrust was there, the seed was planted, and then it was fertilized and grew,” she said. “I’m very angry about this, because we’re honest people. All we’re trying to do is our job.”

Mazure didn’t feel comfortable talking about politics. But former President Donald Trump, who lost this state four years ago by 154,000 votes, planted the seed of election denialism and helped it grow.

Once again, Michigan is one of the handful of states that could decide who wins the presidency, and the pressure on the people who run elections is enormous. The state’s part-time clerks, who are trained every four years and have limited resources in running elections, are at a breaking point.

“I’m concerned about November,” Mazure said. “People think we’re the enemy. What do we do? How do we combat this?”

‘I was scared’

Irvin Kanaski succeeded his father as Lincoln Township clerk, first serving as a deputy and then winning election to the top job in 1988, after his father had moved into a nursing home.

For much of his tenure as clerk, Kanaski was a full-time farmer, growing corn, beans and wheat. He’s now retired from farming, but still digs graves at the local cemetery. He has served this community of roughly 600 voters for nearly 40 years, but he feels like they’ve turned against him.

“I feel accused of this fraud stuff that’s been thrown around,” said Kanaski, his hands clasped in his lap. “And I just — I take offense to that.”

Throughout the United States, elections are typically administered at the county level, though there are exceptions. In the New England states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, town clerks run elections. And in Michigan and Wisconsin, municipal and county clerks have varying election duties.

Under Michigan’s hyper-decentralized system, more than 1,500 township and city clerks are responsible for election assignments, such as distributing and collecting mail-in ballots, along with non-election tasks, including maintaining township records, compiling meeting minutes and preparing financial statements.

Michigan township populations range from as low as 15 in Pointe Aux Barques Township in Huron County to a little over 100,000 people in Clinton Charter Township in Macomb County, just north of Detroit. Many of the state’s townships, roughly half of which have populations under 2,000, don’t have websites.

For the small townships with hundreds of voters, the clerk job is part time and pays less than $20,000 a year. When a clerk retires or can no longer do the job, the torch gets passed on to a trusted member of the community — a position almost always sealed with an unopposed election. Ballot drop boxes are sometimes stationed at their homes, where clerks usually conduct their duties.

It’s an old system that doesn’t necessarily consider the financial and professional requirements of running elections in the modern age, said Melinda Billingsley, communications manager for Voters Not Politicians, a Lansing, Michigan-based advocacy group that has successfully pushed against gerrymandered maps and more ways to cast a ballot.

“We need to make sure that clerks are being supported so that they can administer elections effectively,” she said.

During the 2020 presidential election, a voter in Lincoln Township used his own pen to mark a ballot. But it was the wrong kind of pen, and the ink caused the ballot-counting device to malfunction. When Kanaski set the machine aside to be cleaned, the voter was so irate that one of the poll workers, who happened to be a retired police officer, had to escort him out.

“I was scared,” Kanaski said. “You don’t know what they’re going to do.”

This will be Kanaski’s last term in office, but he doesn’t know who in the community would replace him. If no one runs for clerk, the township board appoints someone.

Nearly a tenth of township clerk positions that are up for election this year do not have a candidate, according to a recent article by the Michigan Advance, Stateline’s sibling publication within States Newsroom. The story noted that increased demands and abuse are dampening interest in the job.

Taking a job no one wants

Far from the interstate, down gravel roads lined by corn stalks and Trump signs, Robert Vinande runs Flynn Township’s elections out of his Brown City home, 90 minutes north of Detroit. The red, white and blue township ballot drop box sits in front of one of the three buildings on his property, not far from the driveway.

Sitting at his kitchen table, as chickadees, finches and jays ate from a bird feeder just outside a nearby window, Vinande said he has not yet faced the level of vitriol seen by neighboring clerks. He took over the position in 2022, and suspects that his predecessor left her role because of that pressure.

A neighbor once asked him if the election was safe. Vinande didn’t hesitate in saying it was. If voters call him concerned about their absentee ballots or any other election process, he will walk them through it, step by step. He always reminds voters that he has a strong, bipartisan team of veteran poll workers who help run local elections.

“Generally, people say, ‘Well, if you’re comfortable, I’m comfortable,’” he said.

Flynn Township residents mostly suspect voting irregularities occurred down in the Detroit area — a classic rural-urban divide, he said. He never suspected any widespread voter fraud in 2020.

“I don’t buy it, knowing the checks and balances that are in place,” he said.

When he retired as internal auditor for Dow Chemical Company, specializing in data analytics at its Midland, Michigan, headquarters, he and his wife moved here, into their vacation cabin. Local leaders who knew him thought he’d be suited for the clerk role. There was nobody rushing to take the job.

He’s not one to go to Florida in the winter, and he likes to stay busy. He suspects he’ll stay in the role for the foreseeable future. When working in his wood-paneled den, he’s just happy to be surrounded by a plethora of presidential souvenirs he’s collected over the years. And when he’s not doing his part-time gig, he’s able to pursue his blacksmithing hobby.

Vinande — whose father ran the one-room school in his rural town in Michigan — said this is his way of giving back to the community. But to continue to do this job, he’s going to have to tell his voters the truth, he added, even if they disagree.

“I just want to dispel some of the myths,” he said.

‘We hunker down’

Around 5 in the afternoon on the Thursday before Michigan’s August primary, Mazure walked into the Hume Township Hall, where she’s led elections since 2008, closing the door quickly behind her to prevent the stifling summer heat from getting into the air-conditioned room.

Four election workers were breaking down election equipment at the end of a day of early voting. Six voting booths dotted the small room — more booths than the four voters who cast a ballot that day. Along the walls were three old maps of the township and black-and-white photos of local men who fought in the Civil War.

“Rip that sucker like a Band-Aid,” she told one of the poll workers, pointing to the tape that printed out of the ballot tabulator with the day’s vote totals.

Mazure used a small key to open the tabulator, snagging the four ballots and confirming the machine’s accuracy. The two observers — a Democrat and a Republican — signed forms validating the numbers. It’s checks and balances, she said.

Many local voters falsely believe that the tabulators that count ballots are connected to the internet, Mazure said. But when she ran her legally required public testing of equipment prior to the election, no one showed up to see that the machines were running properly and not flipping votes.

“How do you educate someone who doesn’t want to be educated?” she asked. “They only want to believe the unbelievable. They want to believe that somebody should have won, and it didn’t happen. So, therefore, it’s fraud.”

When she’s not running local elections out of her home, she’s in her garden, tending to tomatoes and green beans and canning for the winter. She loves polka dancing, refinishing furniture and sewing — a relief from the stresses of her position.

“I’m supposed to be retired,” she laughed.

Mazure is up for reelection in November. She wanted to find a replacement in the community and train them before retiring. She never got that kind of training when she started, and the job was as difficult to navigate as it is to drive in a snowstorm, she said. But she hasn’t found a replacement and doesn’t think she will.

Though she’s worn down by the abuse she never thought possible in elections, she leans on a steadfast resiliency, familiar to Midwesterners who have braved long winters.

“We hunker down,” she said. “We try to do the best job we can, hoping that at some point this stigma will go away. We don’t know if it will.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

(TNS) KFF Health News 

“We’re losing 300,000 people a year to fentanyl that comes through our border. We had it down to the lowest number and now it’s worse than it’s ever been.”

— Former President Donald Trump at a July 24 campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina

____

Former President Donald Trump claimed at a recent campaign rally that more than 300,000 Americans are dying each year from the synthetic opioid drug fentanyl, and that the number of fentanyl overdoses was the “lowest” during his administration and has skyrocketed since.

“We’re losing 300,000 people a year to fentanyl that comes through our border,” Trump told his supporters at a July 24 campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina. “We had it down to the lowest number and now it’s worse than it’s ever been,” he said.

Trump’s figures appear to have no basis in fact. Government statistics show the number of drug overdose deaths per year is hovering around 100,000 to 110,000, with opioid-related deaths at about 81,000. That’s enough that the government has labeled opioid-related overdoses an “epidemic,” but nowhere close to the number Trump cited.

Moreover, though the number of opioid deaths has risen since Trump left office, it’s incorrect to claim they were the “lowest” while he was president.

Numbers Are High, but Nowhere Near Trump’s Claim

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt wouldn’t comment specifically on the source for Trump’s statistics. She instead sent KFF Health News an email with several bullet points about the opioid crisis under the heading: “DRUGS ARE POURING OVER HARRIS’ OPEN BORDER INTO OUR COMMUNITIES.”

One such bullet noted that there were “112,000 fatal drug overdoses” last year and linked to a story from NPR reporting that fact — directly rebutting Trump’s own claim of 300,000 fentanyl deaths. Additionally, the number NPR reported is an overall figure, not for fentanyl-related deaths only.

More recent government figures estimated that there were 107,543 total drug overdose deaths in 2023, with an estimated 74,702 of those involving fentanyl. Those figures were in line with what experts on the topic told KFF Health News.

“The number of actual deaths is probably significantly higher,” said Andrew Kolodny, medical director for the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, noting that many such overdose deaths go uncounted by government researchers.

“But I don’t know where one would get that number of 300,000,” Kolodny added.

Trump’s claim that fentanyl deaths were the “lowest” during his administration and are now worse than ever is also off the mark.

Overdose deaths — specifically those from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl — started climbing steadily in the 1990s. When Trump took office in January 2017, the number of overdose deaths related to synthetic opioids was about 21,000. By January 2021, when he left the White House, that tally was nearing 60,000, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System shows. Deaths involving synthetic opioids continued to increase after Trump left office.

“There’s some truth to saying that there are more Americans dying [of opioids] than ever before,” Kolodny said. “But again, if you were to look at trends during the Trump administration, deaths just pretty much kept getting worse.”

In the last year, though, statistics show that overdose numbers have plateaued or fallen slightly, though it’s too soon to say whether that trend will hold.

Given that Trump’s claims about fentanyl came when discussing the southern border “invasion,” it’s worth noting that, according to the U.S. government, the vast majority of fentanyl caught being smuggled into the country illegally comes via legal ports of entry. Moreover, nearly 90% of people convicted of fentanyl drug trafficking in 2022 were U.S. citizens, an analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, showed. That year, U.S. citizens received 12 times as many fentanyl trafficking convictions as did immigrants who were in the U.S. without authorization, the analysis showed.

Our Ruling

Trump said, “We’re losing 300,000 people a year to fentanyl that comes through our border. We had it down to the lowest number and now it’s worse than it’s ever been.”

Annual U.S. fentanyl deaths have increased since he left office, but Trump’s claim about 300,000 deaths has no basis in fact and is contradicted by figures his press secretary shared.

Trump is wrong to assert that overdoses were the lowest when he was president. Moreover, Trump continues to link fentanyl trafficking to illegal immigration — a claim statistics do not support.

We rate Trump’s claim Pants on Fire!

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(KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Kevin Hardy | (TNS) Stateline.org

The presidential race gets the hype, but the nearly 6,000 state legislative races across the country in November’s elections could reshape power dynamics in some states.

While Republicans are primed to maintain their national advantage in statehouse control, several legislative chambers could flip, said Ben Williams, associate director of elections and redistricting at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The GOP currently controls 57 legislative chambers, while Democrats control 41 (Nebraska’s unicameral legislature is nonpartisan). But, with narrow majorities in some chambers, Williams is eyeing several where a different party could take over. And divided government in more legislatures could result in more moderate policymaking on a host of controversial issues.

Only one state — Pennsylvania — currently has a split legislature.

“If you are at a historic low for divided government nationwide, it’s a generally pretty safe bet to assume it’s going to go up,” Williams said. He laid out his predictions for the fall elections at the organization’s annual summit earlier this month.

He pointed to 10 competitive chambers to watch: the Arizona House, Arizona Senate, Michigan House, Minnesota House, New Hampshire House, New Hampshire Senate, Pennsylvania House, Pennsylvania Senate, Wisconsin House and the Wisconsin Senate.

Only three governor’s races — in New Hampshire, North Carolina and Washington — are characterized as competitive by the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter that analyzes state and federal races.

Voter concerns

Nationally, the issues of inflation, abortion, immigration and foreign policy are at the forefront for voters, Williams said. But voters often have different concerns in state elections.

“Just because you see these national trends does not mean that that always reflects down to the state level,” he said. “There are local dynamics that are always at play that can make a difference.”

Republicans and Democrats are working to break apart trifectas (when a single party controls both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office) or veto-proof majorities in several states.

That’s true in Kansas, where Republicans hold veto-proof majorities in both chambers.

In the state Senate, Democrats would need to flip three seats to break the supermajority of Republicans, who currently holds 29 of the chamber’s 40 seats. Erasing a veto-proof majority would give more policymaking influence to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, said state Sen. Dinah Sykes, the state Senate minority leader.

If Democrats weren’t facing veto-proof majorities, Sykes said the state’s recent $2 billion tax cut probably would have been more favorable to low-income earners. And breaking supermajorities would give the governor a better shot at getting a vote on Medicaid expansion — a long-standing Democratic priority. Kansas is among the 10 states not to have expanded the safety net program.

“I don’t think by any means it’s going to be super-progressive, but I think we can get kind of more middle of the road, which is what Kansans actually like,” she said.

Divided government

For Republicans, winning one or both chambers in Maine would force more compromise from Democrats, said state Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham, a Republican and the House minority leader.

With a trifecta, Maine Democrats have been able to circumvent GOP lawmakers, Faulkingham said.

Last year, Democrats passed a two-year, nearly $10 billion budget in a legislative maneuver that one Republican described as the “tyranny of the majority.” The move allowed Democrats to pass the budget with a simple majority — rather than the two-thirds majority that is usually required.

Faulkingham said gaining control of even one chamber will result in more moderate policymaking.

“I think that all of a sudden, you would see people actually come to the table and negotiate, which you haven’t seen for the last six years,” he said. “If people are being honest, probably the best form of government is a divided government.”

If the elections turn out to be a red wave, with Republicans making significant gains across the board, NCSL expects the Democratic-controlled House and Senate chambers in Delaware, Maine, Nevada and Oregon to be in play.

Conversely, if Democrats do well nationally, the GOP-controlled chambers in Alaska and Georgia could be competitive.

“These states are not as red as some might believe,” Williams told Stateline in an interview. “In Alaska’s House, the Republicans have a bare majority in each chamber. And in Georgia, Democrats only need to flip around 10 seats. So, it’s not an insurmountable task.”

The Alaska legislature is governed by bipartisan majority coalitions, even though voters send more Republicans to Juneau.

State Sen. Gary Stevens, a Republican who leads the Senate majority, said he doesn’t expect November’s election results to disrupt the majority coalition, even if Democrats or more conservative Republicans pick up seats.

Alaska has the nation’s smallest state Senate, with 20 members. The 17-member Senate majority currently shares power between parties and is largely focused on more moderate issues, Stevens said.

“It means we can’t deal with extreme issues — either far left or far right,” he said. “It simply means that we need to concentrate on those things in the middle that need to be done.”

After years of planning, Minnesota Democrats seized the trifecta in 2022, when they flipped the Senate and maintained control of the House and governorship.

Since then, the legislature has approved bills that guarantee the right to abortion, provide free meals for kids at school, restore voting rights to felons released from prison and make the state a “trans refuge” for children seeking gender-affirming care. Those were all signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz, who is now Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in the presidential election.

Those were hard-won progressive achievements, Democratic state Rep. Leigh Finke said. With only a one-seat advantage in the Senate, policy negotiations were fierce, as the majority worked to get all of their fellow Democrats on board.

“It may seem frustrating at times, but I think it really made our policy better because we knew we were going to have to fight for it,” she said.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By JACQUES BILLEAUD and JOSH KELETY Associated Press

PHOENIX (AP) — A hearing on whether to dismiss charges against Republicans accused of scheming to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential race in Arizona will stretch into a second day Tuesday.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bruce Cohen, who is presiding over the case, is considering requests from at least a dozen defendants who were indicted in April on charges of forgery, fraud and conspiracy.

In all, an Arizona grand jury indicted 18 Republicans. They include 11 people who submitted a document falsely claiming former President Donald Trump won Arizona, two former Trump aides and five lawyers connected to the former president, including Rudy Giuliani.

Those seeking to dismiss their cases have cited an Arizona law that bars using baseless legal actions in a bid to silence critics. The law had long offered protections in civil cases but was amended in 2022 by the Republican-led Legislature to cover people facing most criminal charges.

The defendants appearing in person and virtually in court this week argue Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes tried to use the charges to silence them for their constitutionally protected speech about the 2020 election and actions taken in response to the outcome of the presidential race. President Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes.

They say Mayes campaigned on investigating fake electors and had shown a bias toward Trump and his supporters.

John Eastman, one of the defendants who devised a strategy to try to persuade Congress not to certify the election, said outside of court Monday that Cohen is grappling with difficult issues.

“I think he’s relishing the opportunity to be on the front line in deciding what this statue actually accomplished, and we look forward to his rulings on it,” Eastman said.

Prosecutors say the defendants don’t have evidence to back up their retaliation claim and they crossed the line from protected speech to fraud. Mayes’ office also has said the grand jury that brought the indictment wanted to consider charging Trump but prosecutors urged them not to.

Trump ultimately wasn’t charged. The indictment refers to him as an unindicted coconspirator.

While not a fake elector in Arizona, the indictment alleged Giuliani pressured Maricopa County officials and state legislators to change the outcome of Arizona’s results and encouraged Republican electors in the state to vote for Trump in mid-December 2020. The indictment said Giuliani spread false claims of election fraud in Arizona after the 2020 election and presided over a downtown Phoenix gathering where he claimed officials made no effort to determine the accuracy of presidential election results.

Mark Williams, Giuliani’s attorney, said Monday that the charges against his client should be thrown out because he did nothing criminal. Williams said Giuliani was exercising his rights to free speech and to petition the government.

“How is Mr. Giuliani to know that, oh my gosh, he presided over a meeting in downtown Phoenix,” Williams asked sarcastically. “How is he to know that that’s a crime?”

Dennis Wilenchik, an attorney for defendant James Lamon, who had signed a statement claiming Trump had won Arizona, argued his client signed the document only as a contingency in case a lawsuit would eventually turn the outcome of the presidential race in Trump’s favor in Arizona.

“My client, Jim Lamon, never did anything to overthrow the government,” Wilenchik said.

Prosecutor Nicholas Klingerman said the defendants’ actions don’t back up their claims that they signed the document as a contingency.

One defendant, attorney Christina Bobb, was working with Giuliani to get Congress to accept the fake electors, while another defendant, Anthony Kern, gave a media interview in which he said then-Vice President Mike Pence would decide which of the two slates of electors to choose from, Klingerman said.

“That doesn’t sound like a contingency,” Klingerman said. “That sounds like a plan to cause turmoil to change the outcome of the election.”

So far, two defendants have resolved their cases.

Former Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis, who worked closely with Giuliani, signed a cooperation agreement with prosecutors that led to the dismissal of her charges. Republican activist Loraine Pellegrino also became the first person to be convicted in the Arizona case when she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and was sentenced to probation.

The remaining defendants have pleaded not guilty to the charges. Their trial is scheduled to start Jan. 5, 2026.

Former Trump presidential chief of staff Mark Meadows is trying to move his charges to federal court, where his lawyers say they will seek a dismissal of the charges.

Associated Press writer Sejal Govindarao contributed to this story.

By DAVID BAUDER

NEW YORK (AP) — Fans of politics have another way to keep track of what’s happening in the most competitive states in the country through a new service that collects and streams local newscasts.

Swing State Election News, which began operation Monday, lets streamers choose from among 37 local television stations in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They are primarily local affiliates of CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox.

Those are the states that pollsters have concluded will most likely decide the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The service will allow people to test the maxim of “all politics is local” by closely following how the campaigns are being waged there.

“Nobody knows local politics better than the journalists in the local communities,” said Jack Perry, CEO of Zeam Media.

Viewers can choose between live and archived programming

Swing State Election News is an outgrowth of Zeam, a free streaming service affiliated with Gray Television that began last winter. Zeam caters to people who have given up cable or satellite television subscriptions by offering hundreds of local market broadcasts. The bulk of its users follow their local markets but a significant number check in on other areas where they may have had ties in the past, the service said.

Zeam doesn’t reveal how many people use the service.

Swing State Election News allows users to choose between live programming or archived newscasts. A quick click Monday on a tab, for instance, calls up the morning newscast on WMGT-TV in Macon, Georgia.

As the campaign goes on, Perry said the newscasts will offer a window into rallies and other events held in those states, along with details in local House and Senate races that may impact control of those chambers.

It contrasts with national newscasts, Perry said, because “at the local level, you’re going to get a different feel. It’s the people actually living in these communities.”

You won’t see local political commercials, though

One important indicator of how the campaigns are going will be missing, however. A local newscast in the swing states this fall is expected to be filled with commercials for the presidential candidates, which can illustrate some of the campaign strategies and issues they feel are resonating.

Swing State Election News sells its own advertising, however, and will not show what is being seen in the local advertising breaks, Perry said.

In another effort aimed at boosting election news for swing states, The Associated Press said last month it is offering its campaign coverage to a series of small, independent news organizations that can’t otherwise afford it.

David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder.

Seema Mehta | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

Vice President Kamala Harris has enjoyed a monthlong burst of energy and optimism among Democrats who believe she is the party’s best chance of defeating former President Donald Trump in November. But once the balloons dropped after Harris claimed her party’s nomination on Thursday, the reality set in that there is much work to be done in coming weeks in what is still expected to be a razor-thin contest.

“On Friday, I’m going to give you leave to take a three-hour nap. Eat a damn vegetable. And then sign up for shifts to get people registered to vote, to knock on doors, to hold events, to pull people in and make a seat at the table for people who are so busy they’re not consuming the information like we are,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told California delegates over breakfast. “We can do this. I’m more optimistic than ever. So lace up your Chucks, hit the doors, make room at the table, and let’s get it done.”

Polling shows that while Harris fares better than President Joe Biden against Trump, it’s still an incredibly close race that will come down to a small number of voters in a handful of battleground states.

“She put Democrats back into the game to where it’s kind of a toss-up,” said John Anzalone, Biden’s lead pollster in 2020, at an event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics on Wednesday. “Step 2 is always the most difficult one.”

“We’ve seen it in every presidential campaign, and Step 2 usually happens post-conventions, post-Labor Day, when the bell rings,” he added. “That is like the battle for the slim universe of — you can call them anything you want: persuasion voters, swing voters, independent voters — and it’s pretty small. And that’s where each side [spends] a billion dollars.”

Harris has enjoyed a crush of positive news coverage and Democratic enthusiasm since Biden decided in late July to not seek reelection, her party quickly coalesced around her as their nominee, she named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate and then accepted the nomination in front of thousands of jubilant Democrats at their party’s convention in Chicago.

The Olympics also consumed significant media attention during this period, leading to Trump largely being relegated to the sidelines (aside from when he falsely claimed — in a room full of Black journalists — that Harris recently “happened to turn” Black).

But many Democrats acknowledge that this sunny period can’t continue unchecked until election day.

“At some point the honeymoon phase will be over,” said Democratic strategist Paul Mitchell, an alternate delegate who lives in Sacramento County. “What I think is really shocking is how good of a honeymoon phase that she’s had.”

There were fears among Democrats that their euphoria over the last several weeks could lead to complacency.

“There’s so much momentum,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in an interview. “The task now will be to bottle it up and use it to propel us through the next 10 or 11 weeks, through election day.”

The general election campaign traditionally starts after Labor Day. And there is a presidential debate scheduled on Sept. 10 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Walz and GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, will face off Oct. 1 in New York City.

“I have jokingly said to a couple of people, ‘I sure wish the election were Tuesday,’” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell. “I think we’ve been given our charge. … Don’t wait to be called. Show up.”

Indeed, a common thread among many of the convention’s most prominent speakers was how close the election would be, and the need to keep the foot on the gas pedal through Nov. 5.

“We only have 2½ months, y’all, to get this done. Only 11 weeks to make sure every single person we know is registered and has a voting plan,” former First Lady Michelle Obama told delegates Tuesday. “So we cannot afford for anyone, anyone, anyone, America, to sit on their hands and wait to be called. … You know what you need to do.”

Obama exhorted them to “do something.”

“Because, y’all, this election is gonna be close. In some states, just a handful — listen to me — a handful of votes in every precinct could decide the winner,” she said. “So we need to vote in numbers that erase any doubt. We need to overwhelm any effort to suppress us. Our fate is in our hands.”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote to Trump in 2016, urged delegates to act.

“We need to work harder than we ever have. We need to beat back the dangers that Trump and his allies pose to the rule of law and our way of life,” she said Monday. “Don’t get distracted or complacent. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Volunteer. Be proud champions for the truth and for the country that we all love.”

Clinton’s surprise loss was repeatedly invoked as a warning against being overly confident.

“We learned the hard way in 2016 that you not only have to win the popular vote, you have to win the electoral vote, and you can’t take any of it for granted,” former California Sen. Barbara Boxer told reporters. “So we learned some hard, hard lessons, and we paid the price with Donald Trump for four years, a nightmare.”

Boxer said she has been to every Democratic National Convention except one since the 1980s and said only the 2008 gathering when President Barack Obama was nominated had a similar level of “organic excitement.” But this year is extra-charged by the fear of Trump once again sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

Former President Obama warned Democrats about the stakes.

“Now, the torch has been passed. Now, it is up to all of us to fight for the America we believe in,” he said. “And make no mistake, it will be a fight. For all the incredible energy we’ve been able to generate over the last few weeks, for all the rallies and the memes, this will still be a tight race in a closely divided country.”

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(Times staff writer Noah Bierman in Chicago contributed to this report.)

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©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Aidan Quigley | (TNS) CQ-Roll Call

CHICAGO — Along with a massive pep rally and a chance to hear from pop stars and their presidential nominee, Democrats attending and watching their party’s national convention got a lesson this week in how to approach persuadable swing or conservative voters who may not love Donald Trump, but have reservations about backing Kamala Harris.

The lesson came from Republicans, several of whom were given prime-time speaking slots to hammer the former president for his attempts to hold onto power after losing the 2020 election, and his behavior before and during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by his supporters.

These Republican speeches culminated in former Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s prime time Thursday speech. Kinzinger, who is from Illinois and was one of just two Republicans who served on the House committee that investigated the insurrection, said that our democracy was “frayed” by Jan. 6.

“That day, I stood witness to profound sorrow — the desecration of our sacred tradition of peaceful transfer of power, tarnished by a man too fragile, vain and weak to accept defeat,” Kinzinger said. “How can a party claim to be patriotic if it idolizes a man who tried to overthrow a free and fair election?”

The crowd treated the former congressman to cheers of “USA! USA!” while waving American flags.

Kinzinger’s speech was one of the last of the convention, with only Maya Harris, Vice President Harris’ sister; North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and Harris herself following him. First elected in 2010, Kinzinger served on the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House. He was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021, and did not seek reelection in 2022.

Kinzinger, who had endorsed President Joe Biden in January, said he has differences with Harris, but they pale in comparison to their shared values.

“I know Kamala Harris shares my allegiance to the rule of law, the Constitution and democracy,” Kinzinger said. “And she is dedicated to upholding all three in service to our country.”

The attack on the Capitol was also a central theme of former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham’s appearance on Tuesday. Grisham served as then-first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff before resigning in the aftermath of Jan. 6.

She said on Jan. 6, she asked Melania Trump if she should tweet that there was no place for lawlessness or violence, which Melania Trump refused to do.

Grisham said the former president called his supporters “basement dwellers” and was once upset on a hospital visit that the cameras were not solely focused on him.

“He has no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth,” she said.

Another former administration official, Oliva Troye, who advised Vice President Mike Pence on national security issues, said Trump undermined the intelligence community, military leaders and the democratic process.

“It’s his M.O., to sow doubt and division. That’s what Trump wants, because that’s the only way he wins,” she said. “And that’s what our adversaries want, because it’s the only way they win.”

Troye said her family values as a Latina growing up in Texas where the Fourth of July “was our most sacred holiday” made her a Republican.

“They’re the same values that make me proud to support Kamala Harris, not because we agree on every issue, but because we agree on the most important issue protecting our freedom. So to my fellow Republicans, you aren’t voting for a Democrat, you’re voting for democracy. You aren’t betraying our party, you’re standing up for our country,” Troye said

Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan had a front-row seat to Trump’s efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 election in his home state, and said Wednesday that Trump should not return to office.

“I realized Trump was a direct threat to democracy, and his actions disqualified himself from ever, ever, ever stepping foot into the Oval Office again,” Duncan said.

Harris is a “steady hand and will bring leadership to the White House that Donald Trump could never do,” he said.

“If Republicans are being intellectually honest with ourselves, our party is not civil or conservative,” he said. “It’s chaotic and crazy, and the only thing left to do is dump Trump.”

The Trump campaign’s counter-programming in Chicago has hammered home a message that Democrats are focusing too much on Trump and not enough on the issues that matter to voters.

“The Dems… are focused on Trump rather than inflation, the border, or public safety.” Brian Hughes, Trump campaign senior adviser, said Tuesday. “Obviously their convention is about who they are running against, rather than what they are running for. We’re here to remind folks what Donald Trump is running for.”

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©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Samra Haseeb is still figuring out who to vote for in November.

On paper, Kamala Harris, who is Black and Indian, represents a new world of possibilities for women of color. She’s several firsts: A woman, a Black woman, a woman of South Asian descent and the first to serve as vice president. And if she defeats Republican candidate Donald Trump in November, she’d be the first woman to serve as president of the United States.

In theory, Haseeb said she’s excited about Harris representing her community, but she isn’t sure the vice president has really incorporated her identity in a positive way into her work.

“Representation alone will not save us,” said Haseeb, a 22-year-old Indian-American graduate student at the University of Illinois Chicago. “Unfortunately, I don’t feel like it’s enough for me to vote for her.”

For some young women of color, specifically Black and Indian women who share Harris’ ethnic identity, the presidential ticket is historic and emotional. And while Harris has been clear about her stance on other issues that are important to them, such as reproductive health, the economy and immigration, for others, this pivotal moment challenges the idea of representation. They are at a crossroads with what they say are Harris’ unclear intentions on a cease-fire in Gaza.

“It’s definitely hard to get behind her when she hasn’t done much to stop what’s happening in Gaza for over 10 months,” Haseeb said.

As polls suggest, Haseeb is like many women her age, trying to figure out what this political moment means for her and her generation. According to National Public Radio polls, among voters under 35, 1 in 10 remain undecided about whether to choose Harris or Trump. Still, according to a July Axios/Generation Lab poll, 45% of young people say they have an extremely or somewhat favorable opinion of Harris.

“She could be using this opportunity now that Joe Biden’s not running, to right some of his wrongs and try to win our votes back,” Haseeb added. “It wouldn’t be an excited vote, but it would be better late than never.”

Deyona Burton, a recent graduate of Florida State University and the director of programs for College Democrats of America, is balancing the joy of being represented in a presidential nominee as she works to get Harris elected and being sensitive to the issues her generation cares about.

“I’m from Florida — reproductive rights are on the ballot, the Supreme Court is on the ballot, Gaza is on the ballot — my humanity is on the ballot,” Burton said. “It was said in a speech — to love this country is to fight for this country and to fight for this country is to fight for all people — literally everybody.”

While many South Asian and Black women believe Harris is more likely than Joe Biden to hear their concerns, a lot of young voters want stronger, more equitable policies on Gaza before they cast their votes.

A survey done by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding earlier this year found that over 60% of the general public ages 18 to 29 favor a cease-fire in Gaza.

“We typically are more left or more progressive, I think that happens every generation, but for this generation specifically it has been a turning point,” Burton said.

“Gaza, for one, has been at the forefront of every conversation. And a lot of people go back and forth on whether or not you should care about it, whether or not you should speak on it, but I think my peers and my generation have set the precedent that if we do not speak out about horrendous acts, horrible things that are happening, what’s stopping it from happening to us?”

Though not a protester, Haseeb echoed the sentiments shared by pro-Palestinian protests that popped up during the Democratic National Convention.

“I feel like people are getting caught up in ‘oh she’s young, she’s different. But it feels very much like she’s going to be a continuation of Joe Biden and that’s not a win for women of color,” Haseeb said.

Burton, 21, acknowledged the divide on Harris, but is holding the historic nature of her candidacy closer.

This is Burton’s first convention. She was visibly excited Wednesday to be in Chicago working at the DNC as a staffer. “Seeing Black people in these spaces is amazing — I mean, how can we even begin to describe that experience?” she said as she ushered her boss, Pennsylvania’s Speaker of the House Joanna McClinton, into the Black Caucus council on Wednesday at McCormick Place.

“I genuinely believe that seeing Kamala Harris in office could start to dismantle the tangible effects of racism,” Burton said. “Little black girls everywhere will know you can be anything — you could be a teacher, a lawyer. You can be in the military. You could be a doctor, you could be a professor. You could be the president of the United States. I think that it means a lot.”

Working alongside her peers and politicians, Burton said she understands why young people are hesitant to cast their votes. However, with Biden out of the presidential race, Burton thinks they should allow Harris to separate herself and not write her off prematurely.

“I think there’s a certain level of grace that needs to be allocated because (Harris) has the right to determine what her stance is on (Gaza), and not as the vice president,” Burton said. “She’s already called for a cease-fire and I understand that words are just words, but for me, that’s a win — that’s a step in the right direction. I don’t want it to be a red stain on her, because I believe that she should … be afforded the opportunity to do something about it.”

Even those not yet of voting age are passionate about Harris’ prospects, such as  Laila Fierce, 15, who flew into Chicago on Saturday from Nashville with high hopes of attending the convention at the United Center. Laila and her mom, Naima Walker Fierce, secured credentials in time for one of the biggest draws of the convention: Barack and Michelle Obama.

While Fierce couldn’t stay for Harris’ acceptance speech at the United Center because of school, she said the experience would have been momentous. “It’s about time,” Fierce said about Harris as the Democratic nominee. “It’s about time,” Fierce said about Harris as the Democratic nominee. “As a country that’s as diverse as America, it makes no sense for the three branches of government to be mostly white.”

Fierce said that, as a woman of color, Harris understands the struggles of marginalized communities more than other politicians in D.C. “The tide is definitely shifting,” Fierce said. “She’s gaining momentum online. People can see Kamala is more authentic, and more people can relate to her.”

By the time she’s eligible to vote, Laila said she wants to see “major reforms.” Many Americans are looking to Harris to make that happen when it comes to issues like “discrimination ingrained deep into the government and society, systemic racism, mass incarceration, drug use and violence,” she said.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday afternoon, at McCormick Place, 15-year-old Aisha Khan, who is Indian-American and attends Niles West High School in Skokie, was walking around the DNC as part of the Illinois Youth Press Corps.

Khan said she is hopeful she will witness history in November.

“It excites me to see someone that looks like me as both a woman and as a half-Indian woman,” she said. “While I don’t agree with her on many things, I’m just so excited to see someone be able to break so many barriers to become president.”

Aisha said she doesn’t think it’s necessary to agree with a candidate to vote for them and wonders if more people with the “power to vote” should use their votes as a strategic choice instead.

“It’s a choice we make to ensure that our voices are heard,” Aisha said. “Many people in my age group are paying attention to the war (in Gaza) right now and I feel like they’re holding politicians accountable — so while we may support voting for Kamala, that doesn’t mean we support all of her policies and (since we) can vote next time, we’ll make sure she earns it.”

Robert Farley, Eugene Kiely, Jessica McDonald, Lori Robertson, D’Angelo Gore, Alan Jaffe and Kate Yandell | (TNS) CQ-Roll Call

CHICAGO — The Democratic convention wrapped up with Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech accepting the party’s nomination for president. She made some misleading or unsupported claims about her opponent, including several FactCheck.org has heard this week.

• Harris claimed former President Donald Trump “intends to enact what in effect is a national sales tax” that would “raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year.” That’s a speculative estimate from a liberal think tank based on the upper-end of a Trump-proposed tariff on imported goods. And it ignores other Trump proposals that might lower middle-income taxes.
• Harris misleadingly claimed that Trump will give billionaires “another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5 trillion to the national debt.” That’s the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups.
• In warning about the dangers of a Trump presidency, Harris said the U.S. Supreme Court “ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution.” The ruling said a president is entitled to a “presumption of immunity” for “official acts,” but not for “unofficial acts” and “not everything the President does is official.”
• She said part of Trump’s “agenda” is to “limit access to birth control.” Project 2025, a conservative plan published by the Heritage Foundation, calls for ending mandatory health insurance coverage of emergency contraception, but Trump has said he opposes placing limits on birth control.
• Harris said Trump and his allies would “ban medication abortion and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress.” However, Trump has said this year that he would not sign a national abortion ban and has suggested he would maintain the status quo on medication abortion.
• The vice president claimed Trump plans to “force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.” Project 2025 proposes making such reporting mandatory, but Trump has said it should be up to individual states.
• Harris and other speakers said Trump “encouraged Putin to invade” a NATO country. In context, Trump said he told a NATO member that he “would encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” unless the country dedicated more money to defense spending.
• Continuing a theme for the week, Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin made the unsupported claim that Trump would cut Social Security and Medicare, pointing to a quote that his campaign says referred to cutting waste and fraud, not benefits.
• Harris also misleadingly claimed that Trump had “tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.” Trump’s budgets when he was president didn’t propose cuts to Social Security’s retirement benefits, and they included bipartisan proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare without cutting benefits. He did propose cuts for Social Security disability and supplemental income programs.

Impact of Trump’s tariffs

Harris claimed that Trump “intends to enact what in effect is a national sales tax, call it a Trump tax, that would raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year.”

She’s referring to Trump’s plan to impose “universal baseline tariffs” on foreign imports. Whether it will cost middle-income families that much is speculative, in part because Trump has been inconsistent and opaque about what exactly he is proposing.

The estimate cited by Harris comes from a liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, based on a 20 percent across-the-board import tax combined with a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. The group concluded such tariffs would amount to “a $3,900 tax increase for a middle-income family” annually.

Since announcing in February 2023 his proposal for ”universal baseline tariffs on most foreign products,” Trump has most often talked about setting those baseline tariffs at 10 percent, as he did in an Aug. 18, 2023, interview on Fox News. “I think we should have a ring around the collar, as they say,” Trump said, later adding, “I do like the 10 percent for everybody.”

But he hasn’t been definitive about that. In an April interview with Time, Trump was asked if that blanket 10 percent tariff was his plan. He responded, “It may be more than that. It may be a derivative of that.”

At a recent rally in North Carolina on Aug. 14, Trump increased the potential upper-end of the blanket tariff, saying, “We are going to have 10 to 20 percent tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years.”

That prompted the Center for American Progress Action Fund estimate of $3,900, which is based on 20 percent. Based on Trump’s initial 10 percent tariff suggestion, the group had previously put the cost to “a typical family” at $2,500 per year.

Other nonpartisan groups have come in with lower estimates. Based on a 10 percent worldwide tariff and a 60 percent tax on imported Chinese goods, the Tax Policy Center estimated a more modest $1,350 cost to middle-income households. Using those same parameters, an analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded Trump’s proposed tariffs would cost a typical middle-income household about $1,700 in increased expenses each year. The Tax Foundation estimates such tariffs would decrease the incomes of those in the middle by 1.5 percent.

So at best, the figure Harris cited is an upper-end estimate that assumes Trump would enact a 20 percent tariff on all imported goods (which, in fairness, he has at least floated as an upper-end possibility).

Further muddying Harris’ claim is that Trump has proposed other tax plans that would benefit some middle-income families, such as eliminating taxes on Social Security and tips. According to a Tax Policy Center analysis, eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits would result in an average tax cut of about $630 for about 28 percent of middle-income families. TPC has not modeled Trump’s tips idea “but the vast majority of middle-income households would not benefit, either because they have no tip compensation or because they get tips but still make too little to pay income tax, even under current law. Trump won’t say if he’d also exempt payroll taxes,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told us via email.

Trump has also proposed to extend the expiring individual tax cut provisions contained in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that he championed in 2017. Gleckman said TPC estimated middle-income households would get an average tax cut of about $1,000 from such an extension.

So how would the sum of Trump’s proposals affect middle-income families?

“It is impossible to know since Trump has proposed many different, and often inconsistent, proposals,” Gleckman told FactCheck.org via email. “And he’s left out important details for many proposals.”

“Most middle-income households probably would be worse off with a 20 percent worldwide tariff, if the CAP estimate is right,” Gleckman told FactCheck.org. “At a 10 percent rate, nearly everyone in the middle-income group would be somewhat worse off, even with those other tax cuts. But a middle-income household that now pays tax on Social Security benefits and is paid enough in tips might be close to break-even with a 10 percent tariff.”

Erica York, senior economist and research director with the Tax Foundation’s Center for Federal Tax Policy, told FactCheck.org via email that it is difficult to evaluate the full impact of Trump’s tax plans because he has haphazardly “tossed out several different tax policy ideas.”

“The ultimate effect on people’s incomes depends on how much of the tariff agenda is fully implemented compared to the tax cuts,” York said. “If tariffs are fully pursued, low- and middle-income taxpayers are likely to see tax increases on net, while upper income taxpayers are likely to still come out ahead.”

For his part, Trump insists — contrary to most economists — that tariffs would not affect Americans’ bottom line.

“A tariff is a tax on a foreign country,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania on Aug. 17. “That’s the way it is, whether you like it or not. A lot of people like to say, ‘Oh, it’s a tax on us.’ No, no, no. It’s a tax on a foreign country. … It’s a tax that doesn’t affect our country.”

Earlier this year, York told FactCheck.org that, to the contrary, “When the U.S. imposes a tariff, the person in the United States who is importing the good pays a tax to the U.S. government when they import the foreign goods. U.S. tariffs are taxes on U.S. consumers of foreign goods that must be paid by the importer of the good.”

Asked for comment about the specifics of what Trump is proposing and whether it would impact middle-income families, Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, told FactCheck.org via email: “President Trump successfully imposed tariffs on China in his first term AND cut taxes for hardworking Americans here at home – and he will do it again in his second term.”

Tax cuts

Harris made the misleading claim that Trump intends to reward billionaires with more tax cuts instead of looking out for the middle class.

“I think everyone here knows he doesn’t actually fight for the middle class,” she said of Trump. “Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends, and he will give them another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5 trillion to the national debt.”

As FactCheck.org has written, the vice president is referring to a 10-year cost estimate of extending all the income and corporate tax cuts included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed in December 2017. If Congress does not act, many of the tax cuts, including the individual income tax cuts, will expire after 2025. Trump has proposed keeping them.

But extending the tax cuts would not just benefit Trump and other billionaires, as Harris suggested.

Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, wrote in a July 8 blog item that it would cost an estimated $4 trillion over 10 years to extend the TCJA’s expiring tax cut provisions. If that happens, less than half — about 45 percent — of the tax cut benefits would go to taxpayers earning $450,000 or more, Gleckman said.

Also, President Joe Biden has advocated extending some of the tax cuts — the provisions for individual filers earning less than $400,000 and married couples making less than $450,000. Harris has not yet provided a detailed tax plan.

Trump with ‘no guardrails’

As Harris alluded to in her speech, Trump has repeatedly threatened during the course of the 2024 campaign to investigate and jail journalists and political opponents, and he has said he would consider pardoning everyone convicted for their actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

She then warned what a Trump presidency might mean after a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on the issue of presidential immunity.

“Consider the power he will have, especially after the United States Supreme Court just ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution,” Harris said. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States.”

The high court did not give the president total immunity from criminal prosecution, as Harris’ remarks suggested.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on July 1 that a president should enjoy a “presumption of immunity” when carrying out “official acts.” However, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s 6-3 ruling that “[t]he President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official.”

The decision was issued after Trump moved to dismiss a federal indictment that accused him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results. Trump claimed a president enjoys “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution, but the Supreme Court didn’t go quite that far. The court returned the case to the trial court with instructions to consider Trump’s specific actions cited in the criminal indictment.

For example, the ruling said Trump is “absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.” The lawsuit alleges that Trump and his unnamed co-conspirators pressured Justice officials to lie to state officials in seven states that Trump lost and tell them that “the Justice Department had identified significant concerns” about the election results. By doing so, Trump hoped to then convince lawmakers in those states to replace “legitimate” Biden electors with “fraudulent” Trump electors, the indictment said.

The high court further instructed the trial court that in “dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.”

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed “fear for our democracy,” writing that “a President’s use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution.”

Project 2025 and birth control

After speaking about how Trump was proud of appointing conservative judges who overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion, Harris made a variety of claims about Trump’s plans to put restrictions on women’s health.

“And understand he is not done,” she said. “As a part of his agenda, he and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress.”

This is a reference to Project 2025, a 900-page plan for a Republican presidency published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Earlier in her speech, Harris also tied Trump to the document. “We know what a second Trump term would look like,” she said. “It’s all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisors, and its sum total is to pull our country back to the past.”

Trump, however, did not have a role in crafting the document, and Project 2025 doesn’t serve as the official Republican platform.

In April 2022, Trump seemed to allude to the effort, calling the Heritage Foundation “a great group” that is “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” A CNN review identified at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration who participated in the project, including six former Cabinet secretaries.

But Trump has since distanced himself from Project 2025, saying he knows “nothing” about it and that he hasn’t even “seen” it. He has vaguely said that he agrees with some of it and disagrees with other parts.

On several key issues, though, Trump’s stance differs from what’s stated in the document. That includes birth control.

As FactCheck.org explained Wednesday, when Colorado Gov. Jared Polis made a similar claim about contraception, Project 2025 calls for a health insurance coverage change that could limit access to a particular emergency contraceptive, but it does not target typical birth control methods more broadly.

The document specifically proposes ending mandatory health insurance coverage of Ella, an emergency contraceptive that can be taken up to five days after sexual intercourse. Under the Affordable Care Act, health insurance plans must cover the drug, like other contraceptives and preventive care, at no cost to the patient. The document also calls for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, which could indirectly make it more difficult for many to obtain birth control.

But again, Trump has said he opposes placing limits on birth control.

Abortion

Harris also said that “as a part of his agenda,” Trump and his allies would “ban medication abortion and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress.” Other Democrats made similar claims on prior nights of the convention.

But Trump recently has expressed support for the status quo when it comes to medication abortion. He also has said he is no longer in favor of a nationwide abortion ban, preferring to leave the issue up to the states.

During his first campaign for president and in his presidency, Trump said he would support a federal ban on abortion past 20 weeks in most cases. But this year, he has said he would not sign a federal abortion ban. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” he said on Truth Social in April.

Trump also has recently expressed a desire to defer to the Supreme Court on medication abortion. “Well, it’s going to be available, and it is now,” he told CBS News on Aug. 19, in response to a question about whether medication abortion drugs should be available. “And as I know it, the Supreme Court has said, ‘Keep it going the way it is.’ I will enforce and agree with the Supreme Court.” (In the case in question, the high court said the plaintiffs didn’t have standing, but it didn’t rule on the merits of the challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of one of the drugs used in medication abortions.)

Project 2025 has endorsed further efforts to curtail abortion access nationwide. As FactCheck.org has previously written, the manual suggests that the Department of Justice should enforce an 1873 anti-vice law, called the Comstock Act, to prevent abortion pills from being sent through the mail. Experts have suggested the act could be used to prevent the shipment of all abortion-related materials.

In the same Aug. 19 CBS News interview, Trump said he would not enforce the Comstock Act “generally,” while saying “we will be discussing specifics of it.”

Project 2025 also contains further-reaching suggestions that the next conservative president should attempt to limit abortion nationwide, calling the decision to strike down Roe v. Wade “just the beginning.” The president “should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion,” the document says.

As FactCheck.org said, Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, saying he disagrees with some parts and agrees with others.

Miscarriage and abortion monitoring

As an extension of the things Trump “and his allies” would do, Harris claimed Trump “plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.”

Trump himself has not proposed this, but some of it matches what is detailed in Project 2025.

In a section dedicated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Project 2025 notes that states voluntarily report abortion data and calls for the improved reporting of those statistics, including through legislation that requires “states, as a condition of federal Medicaid payments for family planning services, to report streamlined variables in a timely manner.”

“HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method,” the document reads, referring to the Department of Health and Human Services. “It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.”

“Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion,” it adds.

Project 2025 does not include mention of a “national anti-abortion coordinator.” FactCheck.org asked the Harris campaign about this, but they did not immediately respond.

The document does list an “unapologetically pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families,” but that proposed position falls under the government’s international development agency. It doesn’t appear to have anything to do with domestic abortion data collection.

In an interview with Time in April, Trump was asked whether he thought states that had banned abortion “should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban.” Trump responded, “I think they might do that,” but said that would be left to “the individual states,” just as he says abortion laws should be determined by each state.

Biden has subsequently twisted Trump’s words to claim Trump said states “should” monitor women’s pregnancies, as FactCheck.org has written.

Trump’s ‘Whatever the hell they want’ comments

In her remarks on international relations, Harris said she would ensure that the U.S. will “not abdicate our global leadership.” She continued: “Trump, on the other hand, threatened to abandon NATO. He encouraged Putin to invade our allies, said Russia could, quote, ‘do whatever the hell they want.’”

Earlier in the evening, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona made a similar comment. Kelly said, “Today, Vladimir Putin is testing whether we’re still that strong. Iran, North Korea and especially China watch closely. What’s Trump’s answer? He invited Russia to do, and these are his words, not mine, ‘whatever the hell they want.’” Following Kelly, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, said: “Trump tells tyrants like Putin, they can do whatever the hell they want.”

But the Democrats omit the context of Trump’s statement and whom he says he was addressing when he made the comment.

At a campaign rally in South Carolina in February, Trump said that when he was president he had told a leader of a NATO member nation that the European partners had to dedicate more money to defense spending. He said that if the country was “delinquent” in its payments to NATO and Russia attacked it, “I would not protect you.”

“‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’” Trump said he told the unidentified NATO partner. “‘No I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”

So Trump wasn’t addressing Putin directly — though the Russian president likely is aware of Trump’s public remarks. Trump said he was pressuring a NATO member to direct more support to its defense budget.

As FactCheck.org wrote after Trump made those comments, he has long mischaracterized what he calls “delinquent” payments from alliance members to NATO.

Social Security/Mediscare, again

For the fourth night in a row, Democrats made the unsupported claim that Trump would cut Social Security and Medicare — a political talking point regularly seen in presidential races and have referred to as “Mediscare.” Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin kicked it off within the first hour of the evening program, claiming: “Donald Trump was asked what he would do about Social Security and Medicare and he said and I quote, ‘There’s a lot you can do in terms of cutting.’ Cutting? He’s talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare, while giving a huge new tax break to billionaires and corporations?”

But Trump has promised not to cut Medicare or the Social Security retirement program, and his campaign says the quote Baldwin cited referred to cutting waste and fraud.

In a March 11 interview with CNBC, Trump was asked how he would address the rising costs of both programs. Trump said: “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements.”

Again, the Trump campaign said he was referring to cutting waste and fraud in those programs – and there is evidence to support the idea that Trump wasn’t talking about cutting benefits, as Baldwin and other Democrats suggest.

Harris made a similar claim in her speech, misleadingly saying, “We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.” As FactCheck.org has written before, Trump’s budgets when he was president didn’t propose cuts to Social Security’s retirement benefits, although his budgets did propose cutting the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs.

His budgets also included bipartisan proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare without cutting benefits. The watchdog group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the Medicare proposals in Trump’s 2021 budget proposal, which were similar to those in the 2020 budget, “represent reductions in costs not cuts to benefits.”

As a candidate in this election, Trump hasn’t released any detailed proposal to cut either program. However, his plan to eliminate taxes on Social Security income for seniors could result in reduced Social Security and Medicare benefits in the next decade, unless Trump provides a plan to replace the revenues that both programs would lose under his no-tax plan. Otherwise, a future Congress and president would have to replace the lost funds.

As for Baldwin’s claim that Trump would give “a huge new tax break to billionaires and corporations,” most of the tax cuts Trump has proposed would benefit taxpayers at all income levels. Most notably, Trump plans to extend the individual tax cuts in the 2017 tax law, as FactCheck.org said. A Tax Policy Center distributional analysis found that for middle-income households, about 86 percent would pay less in taxes and 13 percent would pay more in 2027 if those tax provisions are extended.

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By SOPHIA TAREEN, LEA SKENE, JAKE OFFENHARTZ and JOEY CAPPELLETTI Associated Press

CHICAGO (AP) — As far as Chicago’s storied protests go, the numbers outside the Democratic National Convention were unremarkable. But organizers say they did something leaders inside didn’t: Make the war in Gaza part of the agenda.

The stakes were high for Chicago. Despite hosting more political conventions than any other American city, comparisons to the infamous 1968 convention, when police clashed with protesters on live television, were hard to shake. And one small unsanctioned protest that resulted in dozens of arrests and tense police standoffs didn’t help.

But organizers who won the right to protest near the United Center, and police, who spent more than a year preparing, say they were successful in broadcasting different narratives about the nation’s third-largest city.

“This is a very large contingent of people who are not willing to stand by quietly while people who are committing genocide are in our city,” said student organizer Liz Rathburn. “We showed the world that.”

Expectations for massive protests in Chicago — which came a month after the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee — were high. The largest protest in Milwaukee during the convention was roughly 1,000 people.

Chicago is known for its mass mobilizations, including in 2006 when nearly half a million people took to the streets to call for immigrant rights.

Organizers had predicted that as many as 20,000 would come to a march and rally on the convention’s opening day. While they conceded that the numbers didn’t end up that high, they disagreed with the city’s much lower estimate of about 3,500 participants.

Hatem Abudayyeh, a lead organizer and co-founder of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, said he was pleased with the turnout and the message of the largely family-friendly demonstrations that drew on the Chicago area’s large Palestinian population.

While activists backing numerous progressive causes came to Chicago, they united on a pro-Palestinian, anti-war message.

“We were the show,” Abudayyeh said. “The excitement was happening out here in the streets.”

Most of the large protests were relatively peaceful, but there were dozens of arrests after one group broke part of the security fence around the United Center and following an unsanctioned demonstration outside the Israeli Consulate.

Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling, who was highly visible at all of the major protests, said law enforcement leadership and communication with protest organizers contributed to the calm around convention. While Chicago had out-of-town police agencies helping with convention security, Chicago’s force alone handled the protests.

During the largest marches, hundreds of Chicago officers on bicycles lined the streets and guided protesters through residential streets surrounding the United Center.

“What we learned here is that preparation is everything,” Snelling said Thursday. “Two things you need for success: opportunity and preparation. We had the opportunity to respond to the Democratic National Convention, and we were prepared for it.”

However, police also faced criticism for their tactics and what some called excessive officer presence. In Milwaukee, police were notably absent at the largest convention protests.

During one demonstration outside the Israeli Consulate in downtown Chicago — organized by a group that was not part of the main activist coalition — police far outnumbered the dozens of protesters.

Rows of officers in riot gear and with wooden clubs closed off a busy downtown street to block in protesters. At one point, police surrounded protesters at a plaza, which resulted in several minor injuries and dozens of arrests.

Snelling, who praised officers’ handling, denied that police had “kettled” protesters — when police corral demonstrators in a confined area, a tactic that is banned under a Chicago consent decree. He called the response “proportional.”

In total, there were 74 arrests Monday through Thursday and no major injuries of protesters or police, Snelling said.

Still, the images of Chicago police and protesters facing off brought back flashes of 1968.

The demonstration outside the consulate was promoted with the slogan “Make it great like 68.” Whenever police and protesters came close, activists would start chanting “The whole world is watching,” a phrase used in the 1968 protests.

Snelling and city leaders have repeatedly said Chicago has evolved in the more than 50 years since, including by hosting the 1996 Democratic National Convention that largely went off without a hitch.

“If the 1968 convention went down in history as the example of police brutality, then the 2024 convention will go down as the example of constitutional policing,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said Friday.

Snelling put it more bluntly: “Can we stop talking about 1968? 2024, it’s a new standard.”

Activists also took credit for the largely peaceful protests, saying they had their own security and followed city protocols.

A small group of delegates who are part of the “uncommitted” movement expressed dissatisfaction that they couldn’t speak inside the convention and complained that mentions of Palestinians — who make up the the vast majority of the 40,000 killed killed in Gaza since October — were sparse. During Wednesday’s convention program, the parents of a 23-year-old American who was taken hostage by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel spoke. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

Still, activists acknowledged smaller crowds than anticipated.

Some protesters speculated that having Vice President Kamala Harris as the new Democratic nominee might have kept some people home. While signs and chants during the protests called her complicit in the war, many said they would wait for her to announce her plans for U.S. involvement in the war.

“I am excited to see what she does for healthcare. I am worried about her policy regarding Palestine and Gaza,” said pharmacist Fedaa Balouta, who is Palestinian. “Our vote matters.”

Bayan Ruyyashi, a 30-year-old biologist from the Chicago suburbs, said she had little hope that the protests, regardless of size, would have a meaningful impact on those inside the convention.

Rather, she said she attended a march on Wednesday so that her three children — ages 8, 5, and six months old — could witness the display of community and solidarity.

“I want them to feel that we have support. It’s not just what we’re hearing from Democrats,” said Ruyyashi, whose family is Palestinian and Jordanian. “I need them to know that we’re fighting for our homeland.”

Drew Hawkins, Gulf States Newsroom | (TNS) KFF Health News

For Roderick Givens, a radiation oncologist, the expansion of Medicaid isn’t just a policy issue. He practices medicine in a rural area in the Mississippi Delta and he sees daily how Medicaid coverage could help his uninsured patients.

“I can’t tell you the number of patients who I see who come in with advanced disease, who have full-time jobs,” Givens said. “They haven’t seen a physician in years. They can’t afford it. They don’t have coverage.”

This spring, the Mississippi Legislature considered but ultimately failed to expand Medicaid, which would have extended coverage to around 200,000 low-income residents. Mississippi is one of 10 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, the state and federal health insurance program for people with low incomes or disabilities.

Seven of those states are in the South. But as more conservative-leaning states like North Carolina adopt it, the drumbeat of support, as one Southern state lawmaker put it, grows louder.

Advocates for expanding Medicaid say opposition is largely being driven by political polarization, rather than cost concerns.

Givens, who is also chair of the board of trustees for the Mississippi State Medical Association, which supports Medicaid expansion, said the federal government would pay for the vast majority of it and that most Mississippians support it. “Why does that not translate when it comes to policy?” Givens asked. “It’s called the stupidity of politics. Period.”

Givens pointed to Arkansas as a potential model for Mississippi because the state has similar demographics and expansion has been in place there for a decade. “Look at what has worked for them and what needs to be tweaked,” he said. “For me, that’s just common sense.”

In states that have not expanded Medicaid, hundreds of thousands of people fall into the “coverage gap,” meaning they earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but are not eligible for subsidies to help pay for private insurance. Those in the coverage gap also can’t afford premiums and other out-of-pocket expenses on employer-sponsored insurance even if they are eligible.

The coverage gap is not an issue in states that have expanded Medicaid. In those states, a single person making up to 138% of the poverty level, or about $20,000 a year, can get on Medicaid. Someone making more than that can get subsidies for private health insurance.

For the first time in Mississippi, both the state Senate and House of Representatives proposed expanding Medicaid during the legislative session that ended in May. In the end, the efforts fizzled at the last minute.

Had the proposed bills succeeded, some 74,000 Mississippians who are stuck in the coverage gap would have gained access to Medicaid.

The House speaker, Jason White, a Republican who supports expansion, acknowledged the political hurdles. “It’s President Obama’s signature piece of legislation. It’s known as Obamacare,” White said. “So, there are a lot of political dynamics centered around it that probably never allowed it to get off the ground.”

White said this year was different because of increased support from the business community.

“I kidded some of my fellow Republicans. I said, ‘Come for the savings, if you will, and then you can stay for the salvation and the good things that it does to improve people’s lives,’” White said. “If you can’t get there because it’s the right or compassionate thing to do to help these individuals, get there because it makes sense from a business standpoint.”

In neighboring Alabama, politics also thwarted attempts to provide more health care this year. Although the state legislature didn’t vote on any direct expansion bills, there was an attempt to include expansion language in a bill about casino gambling — specifically, a provision to allocate some gambling profits to rural health systems.

Ultimately, the Alabama bill was stripped down, and the funding for rural health was removed.

If Alabama expanded Medicaid, at least 174,000 more people would be covered, according to KFF. But the connection to Obamacare remains a stumbling block in Alabama’s Republican-dominated state legislature.

“Just the partisan nature of this is definitely a problem,” said Regina Wagner, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama. Wagner said that most Alabama voters support expansion and that other states have adopted the programs after mounting public pressure.

“A lot of rural voters are Republicans. And so your own constituents are being hit by this and you’re not addressing it,” she said. “If the pressure gets high enough and sentiment shifts, maybe that’s going to be enough to push them.”

The main disagreement in the Mississippi Legislature revolved around work requirements — recipients would have to show they were working part-time or in school.

White said many of his Republican colleagues view extending health coverage through Medicaid as “some form of welfare, some form of giveaway, some form of expanding government.”

Opponents of Medicaid expansion in Alabama are also concerned about potential impacts on the workforce of what they call free health care.

“If you open up this federal subsidized program for hundreds of thousands of people, then it could actually hurt that labor participation rate, give them another reason not to go to work, to stay at home,” said Justin Bogie, senior director of fiscal policy at the Alabama Policy Institute, a research group that says it is committed to limited government.

The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, would have to issue a waiver to allow an expansion plan with a work requirement — something the Biden administration hasn’t done for any state.

This spring, Mississippi came close to a compromise bill that included a work requirement, something that needs a CMS waiver. Had the bill passed and CMS denied the waiver, expansion still would not have taken effect, and the state would have had to apply for the waiver from CMS every year, hoping for approval under a future — potentially more conservative — presidential administration.

That’s what happened in Georgia. In 2020, the Trump administration approved a waiver for a work requirement as part of a limited expansion effort. CMS later rescinded the waiver under the Biden administration, leading to a lawsuit. A federal judge ruled in favor of Georgia, reinstating the work requirement provisions.

However, only about 2,300 people are enrolled — which is fewer than half of 1% of the more than 430,000 uninsured Georgia adults who could gain access if Medicaid were fully expanded, according to KFF. The state’s alternative expansion plan has cost taxpayers at least $26 million, according to KFF, with nearly all of it going to administrative and consulting fees, not medical care for low-income residents.

As public support for expansion continues to grow in holdout states, North Carolina, the most recent Southern state to pass Medicaid expansion, may offer a glimpse of the future. Since its adoption last year, more than 600,000 people have become eligible.

“But it still took a long time,” said Robin Rudowitz, a vice president and director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. “It took the governor who continually supported expansion, and the legislature finally came to endorse and pass the expansion.”

Rudowitz said the fiscal incentive under the American Rescue Plan Act played a role in moving the needle in North Carolina and could help ignite debate in other holdout states. But ultimately, she said, the reasons the Affordable Care Act was established continue to be the strongest motivators.

“Without expansion, there are more people who are uninsured. Hospitals and other providers are not able to get reimbursement because individuals are uninsured,” Rudowitz said. “Those are the underlying issues that existed pre-ACA and continue to exist, particularly in states that haven’t adopted expansion.”

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This article is from a partnership that includes the Gulf States Newsroom , NPR , and KFF Health News.

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(KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By STEVE PEOPLES, JONATHAN J. COOPER and ZEKE MILLER Associated Press

CHICAGO (AP) — Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz and former President Bill Clinton are headlining the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday, the third day of the party’s choreographed rollout of a new candidate, Kamala Harris, and her pitch to voters.

In a delicate balancing act, Harris and the parade of Democrats speaking on her behalf all week are looking to harness the exuberance that has swept over their party since President Joe Biden stepped aside while making clear to their supporters that the election will be a fierce fight.

“So much is on the line in this election,” Harris said Tuesday in Milwaukee, where she spoke at a professional basketball arena in battleground Wisconsin as the convention continued 90 miles away in Chicago. “And understand, this not 2016 or 2020. The stakes are higher.”

In Chicago hours later, former President Barack Obama offered his own caution: “Make no mistake, it will be a fight,” Obama said. For all the energy and memes and rallies that have defined the campaign since Harris became the nominee, Obama said, “this will still be a tight race in a closely divided country.”

Harris is working to stitch together a broad coalition in her bid to defeat Republican former President Donald Trump this fall. She is drawing on stars like Obama and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, and other celebrities, officials from the far left to the middle, and even some Republicans to boost her campaign.

And while the theme of Tuesday was “a bold vision for America’s future,” the disparate factions of Harris’ evolving coalition demonstrated, above all, that they are connected by a deep desire to prevent a second Trump presidency.

Convention organizers dubbed the theme for Wednesday “a fight for our freedoms,” a nod to the concept around which Harris has organized her campaign. She frames Trump as a threat to abortion rights and personal choices, but also to democracy itself.

To shepherd that message, the night’s speaker list features a long list of big names and rising stars in the party, including Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was a finalist to be Harris’ running mate.

Also speaking will be several Democratic senators: Cory Booker of New Jersey, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of the nonprofit Reproductive Freedom for All, is expected to speak on reproductive rights. And as with the other nights of the convention, there will be remarks from what organizers describe as “everyday Americans” whose freedoms hinge on the upcoming election.

Walz’s job Wednesday when he accepts the nomination is to introduce himself to Americans who had never heard of the Minnesota governor until Harris plucked him from relative obscurity to join her ticket. His folksy, Midwestern-dad aura has endeared him to Democrats and balanced Harris’ coastal background.

In the intense scrutiny that comes with a presidential campaign, Walz has faced repeated questions about embellishing his background. His wife, Gwen Walz, this week clarified that she did not undergo in vitro fertilization but used other fertility treatments after Republicans pointed to multiple times her husband talked publicly about his family’s reliance on IVF. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, called Tim Walz a liar.

Republicans have also pointed to a 2018 comment in which Walz refers to weapons “that I carried in war” while talking about gun violence. Though he served in the National Guard for 24 years, Walz did not deploy to a war zone.

Still, polling data shows Walz had a smoother launch as Harris’ running mate than Vance did for Trump. About one-third of U.S. adults (36%) have a favorable view of Walz, while about one-quarter (27%) have a positive opinion of Vance, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Significantly more adults also have an unfavorable view of Vance than Walz, 44% to 25%.

Both are well-liked so far within their own parties. Independents are slightly more likely to have a positive view of Walz than Vance, but most don’t know enough about either one yet. About 4 in 10 Americans don’t know enough about Walz to have an opinion about him, the poll found.

Clinton, meanwhile, is a veteran of the political convention speech — and famously longwinded. He bored the audience with his keynote address at the 1988 Democratic convention, when he was the young, little-known governor of Arkansas. It damaged his reputation, but he recovered and when he next spoke at a convention four years later it was to accept the Democratic nomination.

Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York and Chris Megerian in Washington contributed to this report.

The Obamas came back home on Tuesday.

Former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama received a boisterous welcome from their old hometown at the United Center in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. Meanwhile, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker seized his prime time speaking slot to tie Illinois’ progressive policies to the message of economic progress Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is promoting.

One thing all three had in common on day two of the DNC: slamming former President Donald Trump.

The former first lady, in a roughly 20-minute address that brought conventioneers to their feet, attacked Trump and warned against complacency in the short 77 days until the election. Her husband, meanwhile, harkened back to the themes of hope and unity that helped catapult him to the national political scene 20 years ago. The Tribune’s Rick Pearson has the rundown from the full day’s proceedings.

In his eight-plus-minute speech, Pritzker did not shy away from his status as a billionaire. Dan Petrella and Olivia Olander have the dispatch.

Much of the day was focused on one of the most animating issues for Democratic voters: reproductive rights. It was a lead topic at Illinois’ delegation breakfasts, the evening’s speeches, and at one point, was the source of an interruption of Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz during a morning address to the DNC Women’s Caucus.

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth used her brief remarks on the United Center stage Tuesday night to warn “Republicans won’t stop at banning abortion.”

That abortion access message is one Democrats are likely to repeat. The theme for Wednesday’s proceedings is “A Fight for Our Freedoms,” and will feature a speech from one of the sparringest members of the Democratic Party: former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Former President Bill Clinton also takes the stage Wednesday night. The last time he was at a Chicago DNC, party chiefs — including then-Sen. Joe Biden — were celebrating a tough new anti-crime law and touting an endorsement from the National Fraternal Order of Police. While a former prosecutor leads the ticket today, the party is walking a finer line on crime, the Tribune’s Jeremy Gorner reports.

Here’s what happened Tuesday

Fresh off a star turn on “The Daily Show” Tuesday night, and an interview on the Politico-CNN stage at the convention, Pritkzer took to the United Center stage shortly after U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders Wednesday. He paid tribute to Illinois favorites Abraham Lincoln, Obama, and Michael Jordan within the first two paragraphs of his primetime speech, almost immediately pivoting to one of his default stances: swatting at Trump.

“Donald Trump thinks we should trust him on the economy because he claims to be very rich. Take it from an actual billionaire,” said Pritzker, not shying away from his estimated $3.5 billion worth and garnering applause. “Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.”

“I think it’s time we stop expecting women to clean up messes without the authority and the title to match the job,” Pritzker said of Harris. “Vice President was a good title for Kamala Harris. You know an even better one? President of the United States of America! Let’s go get ’em!”

The Obamas’ roughly hourlong closing appearance both riled up party faithful with digs at Trump while encouraging a return to civility in political dialogue.

“Hope is making a comeback!” Michelle Obama declared, drawing comparisons between the values of her late mother, Marian Robinson, and those of Harris.

Both she and her husband urged a departure from the anger, bitterness and racism of Trumpism and hailed Harris’ steely spine, honesty, and joy.

Obama closed by calling for Democrats to help “elect leaders up and down the ballot who will fight for the hopeful, forward-looking America we all believe in.”

Tuesday’s celebrity performances included Patti LaBelle, rapper Common and gospel singer Jonathan McReynolds. Celebrities popped up throughout the evening’s roll call: “Rudy” actor Sean Astin joined with the Indiana delegation, director Spike Lee joined New York, and rapper Lil John stood beside the Georgians.

Throughout the day, protests supporting Palestinians in the war in Gaza continued. On Tuesday, a demonstration led by the pro-Palestinian group Behind Enemy Lines outside the Israeli consulate downtown led to dozens of arrests. Chicago police lined up to form a barrier to protect the building and to separate counter-protestors supportive of Israel. Tribune reporters witnessed multiple protesters being taken into custody, including two independent journalists, before the crowd dispersed around 9 p.m.

The two protesters who breached one of the security fences Monday near the evening’s proceedings were ordered Tuesday morning to stay away for the rest of the convention. One was charged with throwing liquid at a police officer, and another was charged with resisting arrest. In all, 13 were arrested Monday, the Tribune’s protest team reported.

Despite some tense moments at protests largely focused on the war in Gaza, along the lakefront, a pair of runners — one Jewish, one Palestinian — have teamed up to push for both a ceasefire and a return of hostages. The Tribune’s Tess Kenney happened to be following the two on Tuesday when Gov. Tim Walz jogged by at the same time.

Tuesday brought other public safety incidents: Police responded to an anonymous bomb threat targeted at four downtown hotels, including the St. Regis on east Wacker Drive, where Mayor Brandon Johnson headlined a luncheon. After investigation, officials said they were not credible.

Other must-reads from the convention

• Conventions are nothing without delegates, volunteers, and merch hawkers. The Tribune team fanned out across the city to talk to all types about what brought them out for the festivities. The Tribune’s Jonathan Bullington also caught up with several delegates at the United Center Monday, including a chance encounter with Patrick Kane’s aunt. Don’t miss the portraits by our E. Jason Wambsgans and Terrence Antonio James.
• Outside the confines of McCormick Place and the United Center, urban historian Shermann “Dilla” Thomas is showing off the history of Chicago’s South and West Sides on a bus tour with delegates this week, the Trib’s Sylvan Lebrun reports. Wednesday’s tour focuses on the labor history of the Far South Side, and Thursday highlights the Mexican American heritage of Little Village and Pilsen.
• Trib’s Christopher Borrelli has a recap of “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert’s adventures across the city (including anonymously handing out hot dogs and hot dog water) and his broadcast from the Auditorium Theatre. Colbert is a Northwestern University and Second City graduate and seemed to relish — no pun intended — his time back in his adoptive home.

Here’s who is speaking Wednesday night

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is rumored to be partially responsible for President Biden’s decision to step away from a re-election bid, takes the stage tonight.
• Former President Clinton is slated to speak tonight, two days after spouse Hillary Rodham Clinton’s glass-ceiling address Monday night. When accepting the party’s nomination for a second term here in 1996, Clinton opened his more-than-hour-long speech saying he loved Chicago for many reasons: “for your powerful spirit, your sports teams, your lively politics, but most of all for the love and light of my life, Chicago’s daughter, Hillary.”
• Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz rounds off the night in one of his first national addresses as Harris’ vice presidential nominee.

Here’s what else is happening Wednesday

• Trump campaign counterprogramming kicks off for a third day at Trump Tower. Tuesday’s focus was public safety. Wednesday’s focus: national security, featuring Florida Congressman Mike Waltz.
• Catholics for Kamala and Catholics Vote Common Good are holding a 10:30 a.m. presentation about the importance of Catholic voters in 2024. The group says Catholic voters make up almost a quarter of the electorate in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. RSVP here.
• Think Big America, Gov. Pritzker’s pro-abortion organization, will join Personal PAC Executive Director Sarah Garza Resnick and several other abortion access leaders for an 11:30 a.m. panel to discuss abortion rights ballot initiatives and go through polling about “how to connect Republican candidates with the extremism of the MAGA movement and their policy agenda.”
• At 12:30 p.m., U.S. Sen Tammy Duckworth will lead a press conference with the state’s Asian American Caucus sharing a roadmap “for successful political growth and increased representation” at New Furama Restaurant. A panel discussion will follow.
• At 2 p.m., the City Club hosts the U.S. Conference of Mayors, including Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria at The Chicago Firehouse Restaurant.
• Mayor Brandon Johnson will join New York Mayor Eric Adams, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and Politico’s Suzanne Lynch for a mayoral panel at 3:30 p.m. at the CNN Politico Grill (United Center Lot C). Adams and Johnson are sure to touch on each city’s migrant crisis. New York and Atlanta were also contenders for the DNC last year and lost to Chicago. U.S. Sen Tammy Duckworth opens the day at the grill at 2:40 p.m. Members of the public can RSVP here.
• Drag PAC, a political action committee led by drag artists, will host a special “voter registration kiki,” drag show and meet and greet at Metro Chicago. Doors open at 7 p.m., tickets start at $5.

By Jim Saksa, CQ-Roll Call

WILMINGTON, Del. — As she pulls up in front of a downtown coffee shop, Sarah McBride answers a reporter’s question matter-of-factly, all while parallel parking. “I’ve never had a job where I haven’t had death threats,” she says.

That’s the reality for a transgender woman in politics. But before McBride can expound on that, she needs another coffee.

McBride, 34, basically subsists on coffee; it’s the only thing she consumes before dinner most days. Knocking on doors on this sunny Saturday morning, she comes across as bubbly and warm, remembering names and faces. She’s had practice: She spoke at the Democratic National Convention at age 25, published a memoir at 27 and won a state Senate seat at 30.

Now she’s on track to become the first trans member of Congress. She has the endorsement of her state party in the Sept. 10 primary, and things are looking good in November, too. Democrats haven’t lost a congressional race in Delaware since 2008.

For McBride, making history is both crucially important and completely beside the point.

“There are a lot of people right now in this country who don’t see themselves reflected in government, and they deserve to see that,” she says of her gender identity. “But on a day-to-day basis, it’s not what I’m talking about or thinking about. It’s not what voters are talking to me about.”

Delaware voters may not be talking about it, but Republicans across the nation are. Social conservatives have redoubled their opposition to the LGBTQ rights movement in recent years. The GOP has turned gender identity into a wedge issue, campaigning on promises to ban trans women from female sports, to restrict gender-affirming health care and to dictate which public bathrooms they can use.

McBride’s would-be colleagues have introduced 75 anti-trans bills this Congress, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker, and at the state level, 638 anti-trans bills have been introduced, with 45 passing so far in 2024.

Simply living life as an out trans person can subject you to gawking, invasive questions, threats of violence and worse. Running for office as a trans person amplifies all that.

“I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t (run) because of that risk, then they win, right? They achieve their goal of intimidating people into not fully participating in our democracy,” McBride says. “I wasn’t going to let them have that power.”

So, in June 2023, she announced her candidacy for a House seat opened up by Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester’s decision to run for Senate. A mudslide of hateful threats soon followed, McBride says.

In the state Senate that same month, a bill McBride was sponsoring came up for a vote after passing the Delaware House, 27-10. It was aimed at banning what’s known as the LGTBQ “panic” defense, or the idea that a defendant can be justified in attacking gay or trans people out of fear of their sexual or gender identity.

McBride rose warily on the floor to speak in its support. “I paused and I waited for my Republican colleagues to say, ‘this is a solution in search of a problem,’ at best, or worse, that ‘this is understandable, if not justifiable violence,’” she says.

But they didn’t. Instead, she says, “every single present senator on the Republican side stood up and not only declared they’d be voting for the bill, but — led by the most conservative member in that chamber — asked to be added as a co-sponsor.”

They “looked me in the eyes … and affirmed the dignity of LGBTQ lives,” she says.

The power of proximity

A political obsessive since childhood, when other kids were reading Harry Potter, McBride was reading about Harry Truman. For Christmas one year, she asked for a podium, so she could practice giving speeches in front of a mirror. She can pinpoint the exact time and place when she met her personal idol: at a local pizza shop, on Feb. 1, 2002, starstruck at age 11.

It was Joe Biden. She still has the autograph he gave her. Five years later, she was volunteering on his son’s campaign for state attorney general.

Her desire to serve, she says, stems in part from her time as a closeted kid scared that her life would be ruined and her family ashamed if she lived as her authentic self.

“As a young person, struggling with who I am and how I fit into this world, struggling with the fear that the heart of this country was not big enough to love someone like me, I went searching for hope,” she says.

Now she wants to take some of the hope and affirmation she felt last June — and every other time her proposals have gotten bipartisan support in Dover — and bring it to Washington.

“Through the power of our proximity, we can open some of the most closed-off hearts and minds, break through some of the perverse, base incentives in our politics,” she says. “But that only happens if you’re willing to work with people who disagree with you.”

McBride is no Pollyanna; she knows Washington’s most extreme Republicans, like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, aren’t going to warm to her.

“Look, the reality in politics is you’re never going to convince everyone of everything,” McBride says. “She’ll be particularly weird when it comes to me, but let her inhumanity contrast with my literal humanity and let her unhinged behavior contrast with my approach to the job, which is to roll up my sleeves, dive into the details, bring people together and work on actual policy.”

McBride has already found ways to turn personal attacks on their head. After Greene called her campaign in June a “complete evil” that would “curse” the nation, McBride partnered with Leaders We Deserve, a progressive “Emily’s List for young people,” to put out a fundraising appeal.

And in July, her campaign announced that she raised $750,000 in the second quarter of 2024, “the best financial quarter of fundraising for any U.S. House candidate in Delaware history, incumbent or not.”

A lot of that money comes from out of state — 63% this cycle, according to OpenSecrets. McBride acknowledges that national reach even while repeatedly steering the conversation back to voters in Delaware.

“Are there folks … in Delaware who are excited about shattering a national lavender glass ceiling? Sure,” she says. But “fighting for paid family and medical leave and affordable child care and gun safety and reproductive freedom, that’s where the excitement is.”

‘Every single door’

McBride’s instincts for retail politics are nothing new. As an undergraduate at American University, she “became the first candidate for student body president to knock on every single door in every single residence hall on the main campus,” she wrote in her memoir.

She won that early race handily, prompting a congratulatory call from then-Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, one of her political mentors. And after McBride came out as trans to her parents over winter break, it was a phone call from Markell that helped calm their fears that she’d be shunned by their old friends and neighbors.

As her term ended, McBride came out publicly in an essay in her school newspaper. The post went viral, and national outlets picked up the story. A few months later, she became the first openly trans White House intern.

Back home, she worked with Equality Delaware to push for the state’s first law banning discrimination against transgender people. “She’s probably the most natural and articulate orator I have heard in my lifetime,” says Mark Purpura, who co-led the group at the time.

During all this, McBride was dating a trans man she’d met at an LGBTQ pride event at the White House in 2012, Andrew Cray. The pair moved in together, met each other’s families and worked together at the Center for American Progress. Life seemed perfect before his cancer diagnosis.

McBride took weeks off work to care for Cray during his treatments. The pair wed on their apartment rooftop, Cray barely strong enough to say his vows. He died four days later. McBride still wears her wedding ring.

That experience would later inspire her leading legislative achievement, Delaware’s new statewide paid family and medical leave program.

After her husband’s death, she took a job at the Human Rights Campaign, becoming its national spokesperson. Jay Brown, now the advocacy group’s chief of staff, says he always expected McBride would go places.

“When you work in Washington, you meet so many people who you think might have the ambition to run for office — you don’t always want them to be the ones running for office,” he says. “Sarah is the one you want running for office.”

On the trail in Delaware

Walking door to door, McBride chats with voters like they’re old friends catching up over coffee. Granted, this is an upscale neighborhood in her state Senate district full of not just likely voters, but potential donors. Still, she seems to know everyone.

She remembers names and faces from brief interactions years ago — recalling, for instance, exactly where she first met a jogger who stopped to talk. (It was a drizzly, unseasonably warm winter day back in early 2020 over on Riddle Avenue.) McBride’s campaign manager swears it’s not an act for an out-of-state reporter.

“It’s a state of neighbors,” McBride says, before dropping an adage about the First State: “Everyone’s dated, mated or related.”

That line echoes throughout the day. One voter laughs with McBride about the “incestuous” nature of Delaware politics, and at a fish fry later that afternoon, retiring Sen. Tom Carper takes a break from working the crowd — you’d think he was still running — to share his opinion about McBride, who went to preschool with one of his kids.

“We’ve been friends with her family forever. Their home church, Westminster Presbyterian in Wilmington, is our home church as well. And so we’re close, we’re almost related,” Carper says, before adding, with a mischievous grin: “Other than that, we don’t like her.”

Her presumed Republican opponent, Donyale Hall, declined to take any personal digs at McBride in a phone interview, saying, “there’s nothing that I would say against any other candidate.” With neither facing serious competition in their respective primaries next month, the pair will likely square off in November.

Instead, Hall focused on issues like inflation and her own qualifications as a mother of 10 children, small-business owner and Air Force veteran. “Businesses are feeling the pinch of some of the things that Sen. McBride has championed,” she says. “The (family and medical leave) bill has put some very difficult burdens on businesses.”

As of the end of June, McBride had outraised Hall, $2.6 million to $21,000.

McBride doesn’t need to work this hard to win in November. But eking out a victory says one thing about the public’s willingness to support a trans politician; crushing the vote says something else, like she did in her state Senate race. She won that seat in 2020 with 73% of the vote, up from the prior Democrat’s 56%.

He may not live in Delaware, but Brown of HRC, a transgender man, says McBride’s success would feel personal. “She’ll give me a sense of hope and what’s possible,” he says. “She will prove to folks that we are more than just that one part of ourselves. … She’ll certainly make history, but she will also do a whole lot of good for a whole lot of reasons, well beyond who she is as a trans person.”

And a House seat might be just the first step, says Purpura. “I don’t think there is a ceiling for her. She could be governor, she could be senator, she could even be president one day.”

But, he adds, McBride has her doubts voters will ever be that accepting.

“She likes to joke and say there’s no way there’ll be another Delawarean president.”

Nina Heller contributed to this report.

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©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Kevin Hardy, Stateline.org

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Inside a white-walled conference room, a speaker surveyed hundreds of state lawmakers and policy influencers, asking whether artificial intelligence poses a threat to the elections in their states.

The results were unambiguous: 80% of those who answered a live poll said yes. In a follow-up question, nearly 90% said their state laws weren’t adequate to deter those threats.

It was among the many exchanges on artificial intelligence that dominated sessions at this month’s meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures, the largest annual gathering of lawmakers, in Louisville.

“It’s the topic du jour,” Kentucky state Sen. Whitney Westerfield, a Republican, told lawmakers as he kicked off one of many panels centering on AI. “There are a lot of discussions happening in all of our state legislatures across the country.”

While some experts and lawmakers celebrated the promise of AI to advance services in health care and education, others lamented its potential to disrupt the democratic process with just months to go before November’s elections. And lawmakers compared the many types of legislation they’re proposing to tackle the issue.

This presidential election cycle is the first since generative AI — a form of artificial intelligence that can create new images, audio and video — became widely available. That’s raised alarms over deepfakes, remarkably convincing but fake videos or images that can portray anyone, including candidates, in situations that didn’t occur or saying things they didn’t.

“We need to do something to make sure the voters understand what they’re doing,” said Kentucky state Sen. Amanda Mays Bledsoe.

The Republican lawmaker, who chairs a special legislative task force on AI, co-sponsored a bipartisan bill this year aimed at limiting the use of deepfakes to influence elections. The bill would have allowed candidates whose appearance, action or speech was altered through “synthetic media” in an election communication to take its sponsor to court. The state Senate unanimously approved the proposal but it stalled in the House.

While Bledsoe expects to bring the bill up again next session, she acknowledged how complex the issue is: Lawmakers are trying to balance the risks of the evolving technology against their desire to promote innovation and protect free speech.

“You don’t want to go too fast,” she said in an interview, “but you also don’t want to be too behind.”

Rhode Island state Sen. Dawn Euer, a Democrat, told Stateline she’s concerned about AI’s potential to amplify disinformation, particularly across social media.

“Election propaganda and disinformation has been part of the zeitgeist for the existence of humanity,” said Euer, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Now, we have high-tech tools to do it.”

Connecticut state Sen. James Maroney, a Democrat, agreed that concerns about AI’s effects on elections are legitimate. But he emphasized that most deepfakes target women with digitally generated nonconsensual intimate images or revenge porn. Research firm Sensity AI has tracked online deepfake videos for years, finding 90% of them are nonconsensual porn, mostly targeting women.

Maroney sponsored legislation this year that would have regulated artificial intelligence and criminalized deepfake porn and false political messaging. That bill passed the state Senate, but not the House. Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont opposed the measure, saying it was premature and potentially harmful to the state’s technology industry.

While Maroney has concerns about AI, he said the upsides far outweigh the risks. For example, AI can help lawmakers communicate with constituents through chatbots or translate messaging into other languages.

Top election officials on AI

During one session in Louisville, New Hampshire Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan said AI could improve election administration by making it easier to organize election statistics or get official messaging out to the public.

Still, New Hampshire experienced firsthand some of the downside of the new technology earlier this year when voters received robocalls that used artificial intelligence to imitate President Joe Biden’s voice to discourage participation in a January primary.

Prosecutors charged the political operative who allegedly organized the fake calls with more than a dozen crimes, including voter suppression, and the Federal Communications Commission proposed a $6 million fine against him.

While the technology may be new, Scanlan said election officials have always had to keep a close eye on misinformation about elections and extreme tactics by candidates or their supporters and opponents.

“You might call them dirty tricks, but it has always been in candidates’ arsenals, and this really was a form of that as well,” he said. “It’s just more complex.”

The way state officials responded, by quickly identifying the calls as fake and investigating their origins, serves as a playbook for other states ahead of November’s elections, said Cait Conley, a senior adviser at the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency focused on election security.

“What we saw New Hampshire do is best practice,” she said during the presentation. “They came out quickly and clearly and provided guidance, and they really just checked the disinformation that was out there.”

Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams told Stateline that AI could prove challenging for swing states in the presidential election. But he said it may still be too new of a technology to cause widespread problems for most states.

“Of the 99 things that we chew our nails over, it’s not in the top 10 or 20,” he said in an interview. “I don’t know that it’s at a maturity level that it’ll be utilized everywhere.”

Adams this year received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for championing the integrity of elections despite pushback from fellow Republicans. He said AI is yet another obstacle facing election officials who already must combat challenges including disinformation and foreign influence.

More bills coming

With an absence of congressional action, states have increasingly sought to regulate the quickly evolving world of AI on their own.

NCSL this year tracked AI bills in at least 40 states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Washington, D.C.

As states examine the issue, many are looking at Colorado, which this year became the first state to create a sweeping regulatory framework for artificial intelligence. Technology companies opposed the measure, worried it will stifle innovation in a new industry.

Colorado Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, said lawmakers modeled much of their language on European Union regulations to avoid creating mismatched rules for companies using AI. Still, the law will be examined by a legislative task force before going into effect in 2026.

“It’s a first-in-the nation bill, and I’m under no illusion that it’s perfect and ready to go,” he said. “We’ve got two years.”

When Texas lawmakers reconvene next January, state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione expects to see many AI bills flying.

A Republican and co-chair of a state artificial intelligence advisory council, Capriglione said he’s worried about how generative AI may influence how people vote — or even if they vote — in both local and national elections.

“Without a doubt, artificial intelligence is being used to sow disinformation and misinformation,” he said, “and I think as we get closer to the election, we’ll see a lot more cases of it being used.”

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Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

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