Doug Emhoff blasts Gov. Sanders’ remarks about Harris not having biological children
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(NEW YORK) — Second gentleman Doug Emhoff blasted remarks made by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who said Vice President Kamala Harris “doesn’t have anything to keep her humble” because she does not have biological children.
“We know that all parents, no matter how you become one, make the same sacrifices and revel in the same joys of raising children as any parent anywhere,” Emhoff defended his wife while speaking at a campaign event in Brooklyn, New York, Wednesday evening.
“As if keeping women humble, whether you have children or not, is something we should strive for. It is not,” the second gentleman said. “Women in this country will never humble themselves before Donald Trump.”
Emhoff referred to Sanders’ comment as “unbelievable,” and he expressed his appreciation for his wife, ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff, and their “big, beautiful, blessed family.”
Harris is the stepmom to Cole and Ella Emhoff, her husband’s children from his first marriage.
Kerstin Emhoff jumped to Harris’ defense as well, responding to a video of Sanders on X.
“Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families. That keeps you pretty humble,” she wrote Tuesday.
Sanders had been speaking at a Michigan town hall with former President Donald Trump on Tuesday when she made the comments. “So my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” she said.
During a visit Wednesday to a Bitcoin bar in Greenwich Village, New York, Trump was asked about Sanders’ remarks and whether Harris should be attacked for not having biological children.
“Well, I just don’t know what I think about it, you know,” Trump said during the event.
Ohio Sen. JD Vance previously commented on Harris and other women for not having children with his well-known “childless cat ladies” comment.
In the 2021 clip, which only recently resurfaced, Vance accused Harris and the Democrats of being “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
There has been much backlash to Vance’s remark, and some have even made mocked the comment by making it their own. Most famously, Taylor Swift signed her endorsement for Harris as a “childless cat lady.”
ABC News’ Will McDuffie, Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, Fritz Farrow, and Chris Donovan contributed to this report.
Democrats for years have struggled with working-class, populist voters, ceding precious political territory to Republicans. This year, a slate of congressional races could help reverse the tide — or intensify it, even beyond Election Day.
Democratic lawmakers like Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana, and Reps. Jared Golden of Maine, Mary Peltola of Alaska and Marie Gluesenkamp of Washington, represent working-class areas who are running tough reelection campaigns this year. With Republicans’ tissue-thin House majority and Democrats’ one-seat Senate majority, their races are among those at the heart of both parties’ paths to congressional control.
But with Republicans cleaning up with working-class voters and Democrats featuring fewer and fewer national leaders with brands that appeal to them, keeping those remaining lawmakers in office is also crucial to the party’s hopes of maintaining a bench of national spokespeople in the long-term fight over blue-collar populism.
Populist fervor among working-class voters is “definitely a major driving force,” said John LaBombard, a former Senate aide to red-state Democrats. “I tend to think that my party has at times been slow on the uptake in terms of what a winning message and a winning candidate means to working-class voters, and as a result of factors both in our control and out of our control, to a degree, we’ve been losing that fight big time.”
LaBombard emphasized “the importance of having go-to figures in the national party where those folks can stay to their constituents, ‘we’re not just another national Democrat. We understand working people. We understand and can speak to these issues.’ And it helps the Democratic Party to be a bigger tent and be more appealing and less toxic to winnable voters.”
Democrats have been on their back foot with white voters without college degrees since former President Donald Trump burst onto the political scene in 2015, using his brash brand of politics to appeal to voters frustrated with a government they felt had left them behind. That slippage, Democrats fear and polls suggest, is expanding with Black and Latino voters without a college degree.
(WASHINGTON) — Voters without college degrees are far from the only sought-after demographic — Vice President Kamala Harris is also working to gin up support among women and seniors with appeals to issues like abortion and entitlements, and Trump is working to expand backing from younger men, leaning on male-oriented podcasts to underscore a bravado his campaign believes is appealing.
But voters without college degrees are particularly coveted as one of the anchors of today’s politics. And they lean toward Republicans — backing Trump by a 50-48 margin in 2020 but a 53-42 margin in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll — risking Democrats’ path to the White House and congressional majorities this year.
“It’s the biggest engine that there is in Republican politics, and it is the biggest area of recovery that the Democrats are focused on in this election cycle in particular,” said former Wisconsin GOP strategist Brian Reisinger, the author of “Land Rich, Cash Poor,” which explores the economic struggles of farmers. “Republicans are doing everything they can to maximize it as their primary path to victory, and you’ve got Democrats who have recognized it.”
Democrats insist that their policies are more suited for working-class voters, pointing to their support for unions and tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, among other things. But, lawmakers and operatives said, there’s a more emotional hurdle Democrats have failed to pass before engaging in a policy discussion — recognizing voters’ frustrations.
“People communicate on an emotional level first and you do not talk people out of their feelings with a spreadsheet. You have to understand what they’re saying to you,” said Gluesenkamp Perez. “Rural communities like mine, we don’t like we don’t like it when a politician says, ‘hey, sorry, your economy’s collapsed, fill out this 200-page grant application, and maybe I’ll help you.'”
It’s a strategy that a shrinking handful of lawmakers have deployed effectively to remain in office, representing what on paper would appear to be hostile territory.
Golden, a tattooed combat veteran whose district is anticipated to once again back Trump this year, described populism in a speech in July as “the public’s disdain of an elite consensus that seems stacked in favor of the powerful and wealthy — regardless of party or ideology — at the expense of everyone else — regardless of party or ideology.”
Voters “trust that when necessary, I’ll stand up for them against elites who don’t care about them, or where they’re from, or how they’ve lived, even when that means standing up to my own party,” he said.
To persuade voters of that, though, Democratic lawmakers and candidates have to have a shared lived experience with the voters whose backing they want.
“You have to have candidates who are driving a s—box, who have struggled to get a home loan, who are working multiple jobs. You have to have different candidates,” said Gluesenkamp Perez, who ran an auto-repair shop before winning her seat in 2022. “The model that you need to be somebody with a J.D. and a trust fund and no kids does not deliver the nuance.”
Democrats are trying to create an opening.
Harris elevated Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a military veteran, hunter and former public schoolteacher, to be her running mate. Gluesenkamp Perez name checked Rebecca Cooke, who grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm, and Whitney Fox, the daughter of a nurse and single mother, as examples of congressional challengers who can expand the party’s appeal.
And the party still counts a coterie of lawmakers already in Congress — for now.
“There’s a lot of voters in rural areas who might be very conservative, they might be really leaning Republican, but they’re not all that ideological. What I mean by that is, if they think that you’re fighting for them, and they hear the right issues, they’re willing to vote for you,” Reisinger said.
Democrats’ ability, or lack thereof, to pull that off is crucial this year.
Brown and Tester’s races will likely decide the Senate majority, and there are enough Democratic populists who can make a difference in which party controls the House of Representatives.
And beyond fighting for congressional majorities, Democrats who are desperate to make up ground, particularly in rural America, said they need those lawmakers in office to make a strong case and show that rhetoric of a big tent party isn’t just talk.
But standing in their way is a Republican Party that under Trump has swallowed up support in rural America, clinching a longtime GOP goal.
“Twenty years ago, I said the Republican party should become the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club. Ironically, Donald Trump did more to advance that goal than any Republican candidate in a long time,” said former Republican Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.
And, some Democrats warned, prolonging existing perceptions of Democrats could morph into a political reality that could make it hard for candidates to defy.
“There’s still a lot of ground to make up in terms of credibility,” LaBombard said.
“Depending on how this election goes, we have the opportunity for some perhaps limited but significant steps in the right direction in terms of the Democratic Party appealing to working-class, populist-type voters. Or we also have the opportunity to lose a ton of ground in terms of the voices we have and have elevated up to this point.”
(ATLANTA) — The Fulton County judge overseeing Donald Trump’s Georgia election interference case on Thursday tossed out three more counts in the indictment, two of which the former president was facing.
The judge, Scott McAfee, previously threw out six counts in the indictment, three of which were against Trump.
“President Trump and his legal team in Georgia have prevailed once again,” Trump attorney Steve Sadow said in a statement following Thursday’s order. The trial court has decided that counts 15 and 27 in the indictment must be quashed/dismissed.”
Trump still faces eight counts in the case. He originally was charged with 13.
In his ruling Thursday, Judge McAfee dismissed three counts that related to the filing of false documents in federal court — essentially finding that the state did not have the authority to bring charges for alleged crimes committed against the federal government.
McAfee wrote that those three counts “lie beyond this State’s jurisdiction and must be quashed.”
The three counts include attempt to commit filing false documents, conspiracy to commit filing false documents, and filing false documents.
The motion to dismiss was brought by two of Trump’s codefendants, John Eastman and Shawn Still, on grounds related to the supremacy clause.
In a separate order Thursday, McAfee declined a motion to throw out the top racketeering — or RICO — charge in the indictment, writing that it is “facially sound and constitutionally sufficient as alleged.”
ABC News contributor Chris Timmons, a former Georgia prosecutor, said that Thursday’s ruling dismissing the charges “is definitely a win for the defense” but that “it’s not a significant victory” because the overall RICO charge remains in place.
“The actions in federal court can and likely will be brought in at trial as ‘acts in furtherance of the RICO conspiracy’ which don’t need to be crimes,” Timmons said.
A spokesperson for the Fulton County district attorney’s office told ABC News they were reviewing the order and had no further comment.
Trump and 18 others pleaded not guilty last year to all charges in a sweeping racketeering indictment for alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.
Four defendants subsequently took plea deals in exchange for agreeing to testify against other defendants.
A Georgia court of appeals paused the case in June pending the resolution of an appeal of the disqualification ruling that allowed District Attorney Fani Willis to stay on the case.
Oral arguments in that appeal are currently scheduled for Dec. 5, a month after the presidential election.
The former president has blasted the district attorney’s investigation as being politically motivated.
(TEMPE, Ariz.) — The campaign office shared by Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign and the Democratic Party in Tempe, Arizona, was damaged by gunfire for the third time in less than a month on Sunday, police told ABC News on Wednesday.
The Tempe Police Department provided new details in its investigation, including a picture of the suspect’s vehicle it says is possibly a 2008-2013 silver Toyota Highlander, and announced that Silent Witness was offering up to a $1,000 reward “for any information that leads to the arrest or indictment of the suspect(s) involved in this crime.”
The shooting occurred between midnight and 1 a.m., around the same time the previous two incidents occurred, police said. No one was injured in any of the three shootings.
Harris is scheduled to travel to Arizona on Thursday for a rally and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, was in the state on Wednesday.
After the second shooting on Sept. 23, police said they were taking “additional measures… to ensure the safety of staff and others in the area.” A motive for the shooting has not been determined as the investigation continues, according to police.
The office was shot at on Sept. 16 in an incident police said appeared to involve a BB or pellet gun. Police said that shooting caused “criminal damage.”
Law enforcement around the country is under heightened alert over an increase in political violence threats.
