“It’s OK to vote against Donald Trump,” Mesa, Arizona’s Republican mayor, John Giles told a press conference on Monday. Giles remains a registered Republican but is stumping for Kamala Harris. He hopes to see the GOP “get away from the personality cult our party has become.”
“I think the time has come for us as Arizona Republicans to admit the obvious,” Giles told reporters, “which is that our party’s nominee is not qualified for office and that we need to vote for the adult in the room, and that is Kamala Harris.”
“Character matters,” said former GOP state Rep. Robin Shaw.
The Harris campaign days ago named Giles and Shaw to head up a task force to do outreach to Arizona Republicans:
“As a lifelong Arizonan and longtime Republican, I strongly believe in defending democracy and standing up for our personal freedoms. Donald Trump and JD Vance represent the greatest threat to American values and institutions that I have seen in my lifetime – and that’s why I am committed to defeating him in November,” Giles said in a written statement.
Republican Mayor of Mesa, AZ John Giles:
“I think the time has come for us as AZ Republicans to admit the obvious…which is that our party’s nominee is not qualified for office and that we need to vote for the adult in the room, and that is Kamala Harris.” pic.twitter.com/ZV7F2KTGIE
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) August 5, 2024
Giles authored a July 29 guest column in The Arizona Republic asking fellow Republicans to “put country over party.” Not unlike President Joe Biden putting country over personal ambition.
Since 2014, I have had the honor of being mayor of Mesa, the nation’s 36th-largest city and one of the most conservative. Under Trump, American cities didn’t get the support they deserved. Infrastructure week was made into a joke.
But under the Biden-Harris administration, Mesa has seen historic federal funding for the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, along with investments to make sure our streets and public transit systems benefit from modern technology.
With the CHIPS Act, Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden are delivering thousands of new jobs to Arizonans and helping us grow critical industries.
Many of the Republicans backing Harris are also supporting Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego in his Senate race against Republican Kari Lake.
Peggy Neely, the former vice mayor of Phoenix, tied her support for Harris to reproductive rights and the fall of the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case. Additional supporters from city government are former Scottsdale City Council member Virginia Korte, former Mesa Vice Mayor Claudia Reeder Walters and former Paradise Valley Vice Mayor Dan Schweiker.
“Donald Trump’s radical and regressive agenda poses the biggest threat to women’s rights in decades, not just in Arizona, but across the entire country. Donald Trump must be unequivocally defeated at the ballot box to safeguard our future,” Neely said in a written statement.
Others in the advisory group include former Maricopa County Clerk of the Superior Court Judith Allen, former Arizona state Republican Party executive director Jane Lynch and finance director Todd Bradford, and former First Assistant Arizona Attorney General Robert Carey.
Someone recently warned that those attached to MAGA and fascism-curious movements around the world risk being recorded along with history’s villains. It’s too late for most of the Trump administration, for the Trump family, and for the “toxic” Trump Organization. But for Republicans who kept silent during the reign of Trump hoping he would just go away, time is running out.
The time to get on the right side of history is now.
On Friday, the Washington Post broke a bombshell story about a credible allegation of bribery involving the 2016 election of Donald Trump, Egypt’s dictator Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and a mysterious $10 million all-cash withdrawal from an Egyptian state-run bank just five days before Trump became president — and adopted a more friendly aid policy toward the Middle Eastern nation.
The rumors of such an investigation have kicked around for years — most famously in the latter days of Trump’s term when part of a federal courthouse was closed off while prosecutors pushed for records from the Egyptian bank, although few details were known at the time. The new Post investigation revealed a stunning detail — that the Cairo bank had received a note from an agency believed to be Egyptian intelligence to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million in two, 100-pound bags full of U.S. $100 bills, five days before Trump became 45th president.
The case, which kicked off with a tip from a credible U.S. intelligence asset of a $10 million bribe from the Sisi regime to Trump to pay for a last-minute ad blitz in the 2016 campaign, remains a circumstantial one, lacking the smoking gun that could lie in Trump’s unexamined bank records. But what remarkable circumstances these are.
We know that Trump — reluctantly, at the urging of aides — did inject $10 million into his campaign in its final days. The Post said a Trump campaign official later told the FBI the money was structured as a loan which could be repaid to Trump. We now know about the Egyptian withdrawal of nearly $10 million in American cash, in line with the intelligence tip. And we know that Trump cozied up to Sisi — largely a U.S. pariah during the Obama administration — and even called him “my favorite dictator” before releasing nearly $1.4 billion in military aid to Egypt that had been held up because of its human-rights abuses.
The missing link in the probe was Trump’s bank records that might have shown receipt of $10 million. But, as the Post chronicled in great detail, the case was handed off in 2019 from the former special counsel, Robert Mueller, who’d chased the tip aggressively, to political appointees in then-Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department, including Barr himself. The Trump appointees refused to go after Trump’s bank records from 2017 as he became president — even after the evidence of the Egyptian withdrawal that January. And President Joe Biden’s AG Merrick Garland, whose tenure has been marked by his political cowardice, didn’t restart the case before the statute of limitations expired in January 2022.
In many ways, the failed bribery probe is not an isolated incident. This is the third major case — in addition to the allegations of a Trump cover-up in Mueller’s probe of 2016 Russian election interference, and the 2016 hush money to Stormy Daniels that eventually led to Trump’s conviction on 34 state felony counts — in which Barr is alleged to have put his finger on the scales of justice in a case involving the president who appointed him. That alone is worthy of a congressional investigation.
Yes it is.
The Justice Department has not interfered in the investigation of Hunter Biden who may very well end up doing time for a minor crime that is rarely prosecuted under the circumstances. And the DOJ prosecuted Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez who will almost certainly will go to jail for accepting bribes from …. Egypt! NO thumbs on the scale for their own. If anything, at least in the Hunter Biden case, it’s the opposite. He would almost certainly not have been prosecuted if he weren’t the son of the president. But Trump has gotten away with corruption on an unprecedented scale and there seems to be little appetite for even the Senate to take it up for transparency purposes. (We know he can’t be prosecuted for this, unfortunately, since the high court will almost certainly define this as part of his official duties.)
I suspect that everyone is just holding their breath hoping that Trump will lose and they’ll finally be rid of him without inciting the right wing again. But giving him a pass or delaying justice combined with the Supremes putting their thumbs on the scale has resulted in even more cynicism about the judicial system. The Democratic Senate has been completely asleep at the wheel.
Trump and his cronies have taken a wrecking ball to the rule of law and the Department of Justice and I’m not sure if or when it can be rebuilt. I’m afraid that the negative consequences of this era are profound and long lasting and I’m not sure that anyone’s going to even attempt to do anything about it.
Maduro is not a right winger. This is not about ideology. It’s about authoritarianism. That’s what he cares about. So when you hear people saying that the “threat to democracy” isn’t worth talking about, keep this in mind.
TONIGHT: Leaders Across the Progressive Movement Rally in Support of Kamala Harris
On Monday, August 5th at 8pm ET progressive leaders, following in the footsteps of Win With Black Women and other groups that are mobilizing their communities to elect Vice President Kamala Harris as the 47th President of the United States, will be holding a “Progressives for Harris” organizing call. RSVP to receive call details.
The call features an all-star lineup of organizers and standard-bearers from across the progressive movement, including (with additions expected):
Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates
Detroit AFT President Lakia Wilson-Lumpkins
AFT Massachusetts President Jessica Tang
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison
NYC Comptroller Brad Lander
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson
Wisconsin Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer
Tennessee Assembly Member Justin Jones
Black Voters Matter Co-Founder LaTosha Brown
Center for Popular Democracy Analilia Mejia
MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting
Common Defense Executive Director Jose Vasquez
Green New Deal Network National Director Kaniela Ing
Gen-Z for Change Executive Director Elise Joshi
PCCC Co-Founder Adam Green
Center for Popular Democracy Co-Executive Director Analilia Meijia
People’s Action Executive Director Sulma Arias
Ahead of the call, Progressives for Harris released the following statement:
“Can anyone remember the last time this many progressive champions representing such a wide breadth of the progressive movement were together on an organizing call like this? It shows how excited progressives are to support the Harris campaign. We understand that this November we have a chance not just to defeat fascism but also to elect someone who will, with our movement’s help, fight for an America where everyone has a roof over their head, a good job, retirement security, great healthcare, clean air and water, and a livable future. Time to get to work!”
When former President Donald J. Trump walked onto the stage at his rally in Atlanta on Saturday, fog machines shot white plumes of smoke into the air, heralding his arrival.
If you looked closely, you could almost imagine steam pouring out of his ears, too. All week long, something had been giving him the vapors.
“Crazy Kamala,” he fumed a minute into his speech. “She was here a week ago — lots of empty seats — but the crowd she got was because she had entertainers.”
Four days earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris had packed about the same number of people (10,000) into the arena, the Georgia State University Convocation Center. It was the first major rally of her newborn campaign, and she had two rappers (Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion) on hand to hype up her crowd.
Mr. Trump, who has been shunned by much of the entertainment industry, spun this as somehow cheating in the all-important competition over crowd size.
“I don’t need entertainers,” he said on Saturday. “I fill the stadium because I’m making America great again.”
Actually, Trump’s crowds have thinned over the years. Sure he has a hard core cult of Trump Deadheads. But he doesn’t draw like he used to. It was certainly thinner in Atlanta.
Mr. Trump couldn’t help but focus on those who weren’t piling in. He claimed that Georgia State University officials in charge of the arena prevented him from letting in more people. “We have beautiful cameras set up for the overflow crowds,” he said. A massive screen flashed to a live video feed of his red-capped supporters milling around outside in the 90-degree heat.
In Mr. Trump’s telling, this wasn’t a safety protocol but a conspiracy to humiliate him, perpetrated by the university and other nefarious forces. It all connects, in his estimation, to the biggest numbers game he has ever lost. “If they’re going to stand in the way of admitting people to our rally, just imagine what they’re going to do on Election Day,” he said. […]
Thirty minutes into his speech, he became distracted again by the seating: “There’s some seats right up there — they could let them come in.”
He complained about the venue to Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Republican of Georgia, who was sitting in the front row: “It’s obviously, Marjorie, a very liberal school, I guess, right? I’m not happy with the school.” He claimed that “they don’t want to show that we’re successful.”
And then he was back, once again, on Ms. Harris and her crowd size. “She has to go get entertainers,” he repeated. “They start leaving as soon as she opens her mouth.”
[…]
Still, an hour into his speech, the Atlanta crowd had emptied out more than usual. (Like Madonna, he often keeps his crowds waiting for an hour or more past the scheduled start time, which doesn’t help the situation.) Large splotches of blue had blossomed across the upper stands, and people on the floor had started to sneak away, too.
That’s because he’s incredibly boring.
Trump truly believes that his crowd sizes are indicative of his popularity in the country. He says he doesn’t believe in paying for polls when you have to do is look at them to see that he’s the winner. And he lies about the numbers of course.
It appears that Harris may be able to draw in ways that Clinton and Biden were not and the direct comparison between her crowd and his in the same arena has him rattled:
But there was something about Ms. Harris’s star turn at the same arena that had unsettled Mr. Trump. He seemed to be pining for the glory days of his first campaign, back when his rollicking rallies were but a harbinger of a stunning victory to come. He said that seeing two rappers open for Ms. Harris reminded him of how Mrs. Clinton used musicians to help summon the kinds of crowds he could command with ease.
“She got the idea from Hillary,” he told his supporters. “Hillary got Bruce Springsteen, I’ll never forget, and the place was pretty full.”
“Not full like our places are full,” he quickly added. “I don’t have a guitar. But our places are bigger — we get more people than anybody. I don’t care how many guitars they have.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch is pushing back against President Joe Biden’s recent proposals to restructure the Supreme Court.
“I just say: Be careful,” Gorsuch warned in an interview that aired on “Fox News Sunday.”
Less than a week after Biden announced he was reversing course and supporting 18-year term limits for justices and legislation to create a binding ethics code for the high court, the first of President Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees encouraged Americans to think long and hard before taking steps that might undermine the independence of the judicial system.
“The independent judiciary … What does it mean to you as an American?” Gorsuch asked about Biden’s new plan during an interview linked to a new book Gorsuch is releasing this week. “It means that when you’re unpopular, you can get a fair hearing.”
“If you’re in the majority, you don’t need judges and juries, to hear you, to protect your rights, if you’re popular,” Gorsuch continued. “It’s there for the moments when the spotlight’s on you — when the government’s coming after you. And don’t you want a ferociously independent judge and a jury of your peers to make those decisions?”
That’s a very odd thing to say. People in the “majority” (however that’s defined for this purpose) don’t need judges and juries to protect their rights because they’re popular? Is that how this works? That’s news to me. I thought the judiciary was there to protect the rights of everyone regardless of their relative popularity. Good to know.
Meanwhile., Judge Chutkan is right out of the gate on the J6 case via TPM:
After its ponderous sojourn at the Supreme Court, the Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump was officially returned Friday to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., and she immediately picked it back up again and started moving it forward.
Among her initial actions, notably undertaken over the weekend, Chutkan:
–denied a pending Trump motion to dismiss the case on statutory grounds, but gave him the chance to re-up it once the immunity questions in the case are resolved.
–denied a pending Trump motion to dismiss the case on the grounds of selective and vindictive prosecution.
And just like that, the case was up and running again. But don’t hold your breath that this will go to trial before the election. Time is simply too short at this point.
The elephant in the room is the Supreme Court’s expansive ruling in this very case on presidential immunity, how much that narrows the indictment, what kind of evidentiary hearings Chutkan needs to address presidential immunity, and the still-unknown ways in which the high court’s unprecedented ruling effects this and the other Trump prosecutions.
Hanging over all of that will be at least one more trip to the Supreme Court to give it a chance to weigh in on whether Chutkan properly jumped through all the hoops it has put in her way. Again, there’s no way for all this to happen before Election Day.
In her order denying Trump’s motion to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution, Chutkan used some of the same direct and non-nonsense language that had marked her earlier handling of the case:
At the outset, the court must address—as it has before—Defendant’s improper reframing of the allegations against him. … At this stage, the court cannot accept Defendant’s alternate narrative.
Well!
Sadly, the Supreme Court majority seems to have decided that Trump is a persecuted minority who needs their protection so I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Sure, he refused to accept the results of the election and incited an insurrection but you can’t hold him responsible because his allegedly powerful political rivals are the ones trying to hold him to it.
Musk has long been a champion of the pivot to electric vehicles. His company Tesla has largely led the way in developing the industry, which for a time made Musk a darling of the climate-conscious left.
But Musk has more recently embraced conservative politics, especially the issue of free speech. Musk bought Twitter in 2022, rebranded it to X, and has dismantled many of the checks and balances meant to limit hateful speech and misinformation on the platform.
Musk has publicly supported Trump since the assassination attempt last month. Musk, however, has denied reports that he pledged a $45 million donation to a pro-Trump super PAC.
Musk is backing a corrupt “get out the vote” PAC which is now under investigation for election interference:
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said he created and helped fund the America PAC, which is supporting former President Donald Trump. Musk has a net worth of over $225 billion, according to Forbes.
The committee has been acquiring detailed voter information from those living in Michigan and other battleground states after people submit their personal data through a section on the PAC’s website that says “register to vote.”
After clicking on the “register to vote” tab on America PAC’s website, users in states like Michigan can submit a ZIP code, address and phone number. People with a Michigan address are brought to a page that says “thank you” and asks users to “complete the form below” to help wrap up the voter registration process. As of Sunday afternoon, though, there was no other form to complete below the words “thank you.”
“Every citizen should know exactly how their personal information is being used by PACs, especially if an entity is claiming it will help people register to vote in Michigan or any other state,” a spokeswoman for the Michigan secretary of state’s office said in a statement to CNBC.
“While the America PAC is a federal political action committee, the Department is reviewing their activities to determine if there have been any violations of state law. We will refer potential violations to the Michigan Attorney General’s office as appropriate,” the spokeswoman added.
CNBC first reported on the group’s efforts and how the site does not directly register people to vote for those with an address in a swing state.
A person with direct knowledge of the PAC’s operations told CNBC that, at one point since the group registered with the Federal Election Commission in May, the links on the website were functioning properly — but admits now they’re not.
The group is planning to launch a new website in the coming weeks, this person explained. The person declined to be named in order to speak freely about private matters.
Five secretaries of state plan to send an open letter to billionaire Elon Musk on Monday, urging him to “immediately implement changes” to X’s AI chatbot Grok, after it shared with millions of users false information suggesting that Kamala Harris was not eligible to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot.
The letter, spearheaded by Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon and signed by his counterparts Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania, Steve Hobbs of Washington, Jocelyn Benson of Michigan and Maggie Toulouse Oliver of New Mexico, urges Musk to “immediately implement changes to X’s AI search assistant, Grok, to ensure voters have accurate information in this critical election year.”
Within hours of President Biden’s announcement that he was suspending his presidential campaign on July 21, “false information on ballot deadlines produced by Grok was shared on multiple social media platforms,” the secretaries wrote.
The secretaries cited a post from Grok that circulated after Biden stepped out of the race: “The ballot deadline has passed for several states for the 2024 election,” the post read, naming nine states: Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington.
You bet Trump is backing Elon’s company. Elon is delivering for him in a very big way.
“Here in Georgia, we’re watching as Trump and his allies prepare to sabotage the 2024 election by changing the rules around certification election results,” tweeted Max Flugrath on Sunday.
The thread by the communications director of Fair Fight Action raises the alarm over weirdness out of the ordinary for Donald Trump. At his Georgia rally on Saturday, Trump praised three Georgia State Election Board members by name.
Yesterday at Trump's Georgia rally, his lie-riddled & rambling speech had all the usual hits: false election conspiracies and attacks on VP Harris.
But one part of Trump's remarks stuck out.
And it may be a preview of his strategy in November.⬇️
It’s jarring enough that Trump name-checked these previously-obscure officials — and that they received such a warm reception from the crowd — but it’s even more concerning that he praised some of their work specifically. Trump is not a man of details. The importance of him even being aware of a rule of such election minutiae as that passed at the SEB’s last meeting is a shocking alarm bell that he and his campaign are highly aware of the mechanisms they need to employ in order to get their way in Georgia in November.
Put more simply: Trump knows about certification, and his comments Saturday night are surely reflective of a much-deeper understanding of the issue within the highest ranks of the Republican party, signaling a clear plan to weaponize certification to their greatest advantage on election night.
Of the three SEB members Trump praised — and who were apparently in the audience Saturday night — Jeffares and Johnston are confirmed election deniers, as I reported here at American Doom and for the Guardian. The third, King, is probably one as well, or is simply climbing her way up through the ranks of the Georgia Republican Party and doing whatever she’s told by her handlers in her capacity as a member of the SEB.
Flugrath again:
First, more context on the Election Board: It’s now a Trump-aligned government body. One new member is a former Republican Party operative.
Their meetings are chock full of false election conspiracy theories, many are based on Trump’s 2020 election lies.
The Georgia Republican Party & Republican National Committee emailed the GA Election Board members the text of these proposed election rule changes with talking points to use in meetings.
These proposed election rules changes effectively make the certification of election results discretionary.
But, Georgia law states that local election board officials **shall** perform their duties. Their duties are mandatory, not discretionary.
Another of the proposed election rules changes would increase workload demands on overburdened election workers, which could overwhelm county elections offices and ultimately slow down or stop the certification of the 2024 election results.
If you’re a Georgia resident & think these election rule changes are dangerous, please consider emailing a public comment of the GA State Election Board.
The deadline for accepting public comments is before 12:00 PM tomorrow, August 5th: SEBPublicComments@sos.ga.gov
Let’s not forget, in 2020, a Coffee County, GA elections official delayed certification of President Joe Biden’s victory, refusing to validate recount results and using MAGA-backed election conspiracies as the reason.
In the wake of Fulton County’s 2024 primary, Fulton County Election Board member Julie Adams filed a lawsuit to enable local elections officials to refuse certification.
Adams is connected to the Election Integrity Network, founded by Trump ally Cleta Mitchell, who joined Trump’s infamous ‘find me votes’ call to Secretary Raffensperger.
Here in Georgia, we’re watching as Trump and his allies prepare to sabotage the 2024 election by changing the rules around certification election results.
Trump’s election sabotage plan seems more concentrated in Georgia than any other state.
If these election rule changes are approved and MAGA-aligned officials obstruct the certification of the 2024 election results, our votes are crucial.
Check your voter registrations status. Encourage friends, family, and your community to register + vote. Volunteer if you can.
Early voting starts soon, make a plan.
Consider serving as a poll worker.
Volunteer with your local/state Democratic Party’s voter protection efforts.
Our collective participation is crucial to stopping Trump’s election sabotage scheme.
If we turnout and make our voices heard at the ballot box, we can protect American democracy. But we have to show up.
Please RT this to help spread the word.🙏
Be on watch for this. Election protection attorney Marc Elias warned in the recent Rolling Stone reporting that “we are going to see mass refusals to certify the elections.” As you can see from Trump’s pleased blathering, Republicans are “counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”
This is not a new GOP approach to “fixing” elections. It’s an upgrade, writes Elias, to their democracy downgrade.
Democrats’ switcheroo on presidential candidates is turning more than Republican and pundit heads. On top of polling showing Vice President Kamala Harris picking up support among Black voters, The New Republic has a scoop this morning regarding growing support for Harris among Latino voters:
Harris leads Trump by 55 percent to 37 percent in the head-to-head finding, which sampled 800 Latinos across Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina. The survey—provided to The New Republic in advance of its release on Monday—was conducted July 23-26, well after Biden stepped aside on July 21.
The poll dovetails with other national polls finding similar advantages for Harris among Latino voters. But, significantly, the larger Latino sample size in the survey—commissioned by the voter engagement group Somos PAC and conducted by Latino pollster Gary Segura—provides a stronger basis for confidence that Harris’s lead among Hispanics is real.
“Harris enters as the nominee with a very strong lead among Latinos,” says Segura, whose firm BSP Research did the poll (Segura’s business partner, Matt Barreto, polls separately for the Harris campaign). “We focused only on the battlegrounds, with a large enough sample in them to arrive at a confident estimate of the two-party vote in the states that will actually decide the election—not in states where the outcome is already determined, like Texas and California.”
SCOOP –> Kamala Harris leads Trump by 55-37 among Latino voters in the seven key swing states, according to the first large-sample poll of Latinos taken since she entered the race.
“Harris has strengthened and consolidated support,” Melissa Morales, president and founder of Somos PAC, tells Greg Sargent. Trump has “very low favorability within the Latino community. The more we remind them who Trump actually is, the more we expect that to go down.”
Harris seems to be putting Sun Belt states back into play for Democrats.
Among Latinos overall, 34 percent are more excited to vote Democratic now that Harris is running, versus only 10 percent who are less excited. Separately, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other third party candidates are included in questioning, Harris leads Trump by 46-31, mirroring other polls.
The poll also challenges certain media narratives about this race. It has often been said that inflation and the economy are what enabled Trump’s economic “populism” to cut deeply into Biden’s Latino support. The poll does find that 63 percent of Latinos view the cost of living and inflation as their top issue—vindicating arguments that the economy now far outpaces immigration in that regard.
The polling reveals that Latino voters warm to a progressive populist message stressing Trump’s intent to reward the rich and corporations with more tax breaks and a Harris agenda of raising their taxes and holding them accountable for price gouging.
Sen. Bernie Sanders commissioned a poll of over 1,150 voters in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that reveals a progressive agenda is overwhelmingly popular.
For instance, the poll shows that increasing taxes on the wealthy is supported by a 71%-27% margin overall. Even Republicans favored it by a 55%-43% majority.
Raising taxes on large corporations was also popular. A full 67% of respondents supported this, compared to 29% who said these companies should pay the same as they are now or less.
And there was very strong backing for increasing the minimum wage, with fully 89% saying the current $7.25 per hour rate needs to be boosted. Raising the rate to $17 per hour was backed by 70% of respondents, the majority of those strongly. The Senate rejected Sanders’ effort to increase the minimum wage to $15 back in March 2021, although many states have boosted it themselves.
Other elements Sanders has long advocated win similar support.
Sanders has not yet formally endorsed Harris but will appear on a “Progressives for Harris” organizing call tonight. and will use this poll to convince Harris to advance progressive policies that that continue President Joe Biden’s legacy Build Back Better agenda.
“What I want to make sure — and what this all is about — is to get the point not only to the vice president but to every Democratic candidate that if you run on issues, economic issues of concern to the working class of this country [that] we have ignored for too many years, you can win this election. That’s the main thrust of this poll.”
All this is good news for Democrats no matter what dark lining the press will inevitably highlight.
Those of you already working to turn out voters, do not take your feet off the gas/hybrid/EV. Accelerate out of the turn.
CBS has a new one and it shows that Harris has made up the ground Biden lost but it’s still looking like hand to hand combat… for now, anyway:
Boosted by Democrats, younger and Black voters becoming more engaged and likely to vote, and by women decidedly thinking she’d favor their interests more, Vice President Kamala Harris has reset the 2024 presidential race.
She has a 1-point edge nationally — something President Biden never had (he was down by 5 points when he left the race) — and Harris and former President Donald Trump are tied across the collective battleground states.
Looking ahead, voters are also defining why the next few weeks could be critical.
On one hand, Harris has additional edges with the wider electorate that Mr. Biden did not: she’s leading Trump on being seen as having the cognitive health to serve, a measure that was of course central to the campaign before Mr. Biden stepped aside.
And on policy generally, Harris is seen as a little different from Mr. Biden, opening some possibility of defining her stances for the electorate now, either way.
But to Trump’s advantage, some critical things have not changed: he keeps his sizable lead on voters saying they’ll be financially better off with him and that his policies would decrease migrants at the border.
The percentage of Democrats who say they’ll “definitely vote” has risen to its highest point this year. That narrows the partisan “turnout gap” we’ve seen throughout the campaign.
And today much higher numbers of Black voters say they’ll vote, compared to July when Mr. Biden was the nominee.
More generally, all this points to how the election might well hinge on turnout and specifically on marginal-turnout voter — those who don’t always show up to vote.
For example, among those who generally describe themselves as “sometimes” or “rarely” voting — but say they’ll definitely vote now — Harris is currently winning.
Related to this, the gender gap has widened some from earlier in the campaign. Harris leads Trump among women by a bigger margin than Mr. Biden had, while holding roughly the same support Mr. Biden had among men.
Most Democratic voters, and nearly half of voters overall, say that Harris as the Democratic nominee makes them feel more motivated to vote. (There is some countering effect, too: about a third of Trump voters are also more motivated to vote now that Harris is the nominee.)
It’s not just that Democrats are more excited, but also on a number of candidate qualities they feel they’ve gotten a candidate that can match up more closely with Trump.
Harris has an advantage over Trump on being seen as having the mental and cognitive health to serve, which was a critical deficit for Mr. Biden.
Black voters think Harris will look out for everyone, including Black people.
Republicans and Trump voters think Harris will help the interests of Black people more so than of White people; Harris’ voters think she’ll look out for everyone across gender and race lines.
Trump’s voters also think he’ll help the interests of everyone, though the wider electorate tends to think he’ll help the interests of men and White people more so than others.
