Pelosi blames Harris’ loss on Biden’s late exit and no open Democratic primary
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON, D.C) — Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in portions of a New York Times podcast interview published Friday, blamed Vice President Kamala Harris’ election loss on President Joe Biden’s late exit from the presidential race and the lack of Democratic primary.
Pelosi told Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of “The Interview,” that “had the president [Biden] gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” the paper said in a story about the Thursday interview. The exchange won’t be posted in full until Saturday.
“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” Pelosi said.
“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different,” she added.
As ABC News has reported, Pelosi worked behind the scenes to urge Biden to drop out of the presidential race following his performance at CNN’s debate.
The Times reported Pelosi also took issue with Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders saying, after Harris’ loss, that “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
“Bernie Sanders has not won,” she said. “With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working-class families.”
The paper reported she suggested that cultural issues were more to blame for Democrats’ losses among working-class voters.
“Guns, God and gays — that’s the way they say it,” she reportedly said. “Guns, that’s an issue; gays, that’s an issue, and now they’re making the trans issue such an important issue in their priorities; and in certain communities, what they call God, what we call a woman’s right to choose.”
(ARIZONA) — Former President Donald Trump escalated his anti-immigrant rhetoric at a rally in battleground Arizona on Thursday, calling the United States a “garbage can for the world.”
“We’re a dumping ground. We’re like a — we’re like a garbage can for the world. That’s what, that’s what’s happened to us. We’re like a garbage can,” Trump said at a rally in Tempe, Arizona, on Thursday.
Trump made the comments as he criticized the Biden-Harris administration for its handling of the border, a key voter issue — especially in Arizona, a border state and swing state that President Joe Biden flipped to edge out Trump by 0.3 percentage points in 2020. Trump also made the comments with less than two weeks until Election Day — and as the former president and Vice President Kamala Harris duke it out in what’s expected to be a close contest.
The former president went on to claim that criminals and other bad figures are from all over the world are coming into the country unchecked.
“First time I’ve ever said ‘garbage can,'” Trump said. “But you know what? It’s a very accurate description.”
Harris told reporters in Houston on Friday that Trump’s assertion that America is a “garbage can for the world” “belittles our country.”
“This is someone who is a former president of the United States, who has a bully pulpit, and this is how he uses it, to tell the rest of the world that somehow the United States of America is trash,” Harris said. “And I think, again, the president of the United States should be someone who elevates discourse and talks about the best of who we are and invest in the best of who we are, not someone like Donald Trump, who is constantly demeaning and belittling who the American people are.”
While the “garbage can” remarks may be a first for Trump to utter at a rally, it’s not the first time he has used anti-immigrant rhetoric — now a common element at his events. Since he began campaigning for president this cycle, Trump has said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and called them “criminals” who will “cut your throat.”
Earlier this year, Trump repeated false claims about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating the dogs and cats of the town’s residents. Notably, Trump mentioned the baseless claims — which were amplified by right-wing politicians, including vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance – on the presidential debate stage.
Earlier this month, the former president used anti-immigrant rhetoric during an interview on Newsmax’s “Rob Schmitt Tonight” to disparage many of the legal Haitian migrants living in Springfield Ohio, referring to their temporary protective status as “a certain little trick.”
“Look at Springfield, where 30,000 illegal immigrants dropped, and it was, they may have done it through a certain little trick, but they are illegal immigrants as far as I’m concerned,” said Trump. “They’re destroying the town … they’ll end up destroying the state. We cannot let this happen.”
He has also called for the round up and deportation of millions of migrants living in the U.S. without legal permission.
Also in October, the former president suggested he believes that migrants have it “in their genes” to murder people, adding “we got a lot of bad genes in our country.”
“How about allowing people to come through an open border — 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” Trump said during an interview on the “Hugh Hewitt Show.”
Despite the fact that U.S. citizens commit crimes at higher rates than undocumented immigrants, Trump painted them as “criminals” who will “cut your throat” at a campaign stop in Wisconsin in September.
“And you remember when they say no, no, these are migrants and these migrants, they don’t commit crimes like us,” Trump said. “No, no, they make our criminals look like babies. These are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
Trump also featured anti-immigrant rhetoric in his 2016 White House bid — often casting them as rapists and drug traffickers.
ABC News’ Will McDuffie, Fritz Farrow and Gabriella Abdul-Hakim contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Democrats and Republicans have proposed vastly different policies on education – and one key difference highlights a battle that has been happening on the ground in states across the country.
Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs, and school vouchers have spurred debates at the local level for years.
ESA programs allow families to divert a designated amount of per-student public school spending to pay for expenses for private schools, microschools and homeschooling — including tuition, books, tutoring, transportation and more.
School vouchers similarly use public funds to allow students to pay for tuition.
Arizona passed the country’s first ESA program in 2011, and at least eight other states have followed its lead: Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia.
Former President Donald Trump has expressed support for ESAs and has proposed a plan that will allow parents to spend up to $10,000 a year per child in taxpayer money, “completely tax-free,” on alternative education or homeschooling costs.
The Democratic 2025 platform opposes using private school vouchers and tuition tax credits, opportunity scholarships, “and other schemes that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former public school teacher who is running for vice president on Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential ticket, has opposed private school vouchers in the past.
In opposition to a school voucher policy proposal from Republicans in his state amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Walz stated: “We are not going to defund our public schools at this time, when especially those hardest hit need them more than ever,” MPR News reported at the time.
The start of vouchers
Scholars trace the origins of school choice to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, where the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregating public school students based on race was unconstitutional.
Anti-segregation efforts led to state-funded school voucher programs in some states like Virginia and Georgia, offering financial assistance to white students to attend all-white private academies known as segregation academies.
However, the first modern private school voucher program started in Milwaukee in 1990, as some communities of color saw vouchers as a chance to help low-income students of color attend private schools.
Vouchers also have been geared toward disabled students; however, vouchers often force students with disabilities to forfeit some Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protections because they are considered “parentally placed” in private schools.
These schools are not legally required to provide individualized or “appropriate” education to students and are not held to the same nondiscrimination standards as public schools.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, microschools, private schools, and homeschooling have seen a boom — and so has the availability for families to use vouchers or ESAs to fund tuition at these institutions or fund alternative forms of education and their expenses.
According to pro-ESA organization EdChoice, the number of students using ESAs has increased seven-fold between 2022 and 2024 to a total of more than 328,000 students.
As these programs continue to gain momentum, the debate about these policies continues.
Evolution of voucher and ESA programs.
The debate about ‘school choice’
How much ESA programs cost has varied from state to state — in Arizona, the ESA program has been estimated by the state governor’s office to cost the state $943,795,600 for the 2024 fiscal year for roughly 79,728 students. Meanwhile, in West Virginia, it could cost over $10 million for roughly 2,333 applicants to the 2022-2023 academic year of the program, according to the scholarship program report.
This has been one major source of contention around ESAs.
Critics of school choice, including West Virginia Education Association President Dale Lee, say that public schools are already under pressure due to underfunding and poor staffing. Shifting funds away from public schools will make it harder for them to thrive, Lee said.
“Because of the loss of funding, we’ve reduced the opportunities in the curriculum areas that they have,” said Lee, adding that vocational and technical schools have reduced the number of offerings they have and reduce the number of courses that secondary students have available.
In some cases, that includes the arts.
“As a high school teacher myself, the arts are one of the areas that for many students, that’s what drew them into the school, and that’s why they were continuing,” Lee said.
He said public education is supposed to be “the great equalizer” … “if you go back to the system of the haves and have nots, you eliminate that opportunity for students.”
Emily Kirkland, communications director at the Arizona Education Association, slammed some ESA programs for funding controversial purchases. These purchases have been dubbed “welfare for the wealthy” by critics, after a CNN analysis of state and federal data found that wealthy communities are disproportionately benefiting from these programs.
ABC affiliate KNXV-TV in Arizona analyzed ESA data for the 2022-2023 school year and found that some of the money was used for purposes that have been condemned by critics, including ski resort passes, trampoline parks and ninja warrior training centers, aeroponic indoor gardens, pianos and more.
Expenses in some states, like Arizona, are approved by program staffers.
Supporters of school choice, including president and CEO of pro-school choice EdChoice Robert Enlow, applauds the transparency, arguing that its more insight into specific expenditures than is publicly known from public schools. He adds that the expenses allow families to tailor their education to their individual needs.
“You can see in Arizona, every single minute of every single day where every single dollar is going in the ESA program, I challenge you to do that in public schools, right?” said Enlow. “You may not like where the dollars are going. There may be an issue of whether you like it, but the reality is, you know exactly where they’re going.”
Enlow adds that these programs allow students to take an individualized approach, noting that those who may have different needs based on disability, neurodiversity, and other needs can make adjustments based on those needs.
He adds that criticism over spending doesn’t take into account that, in some cases, families are buying what schools would buy: “It’s OK if a government system buys $1,000 per classroom Lego set, but it’s not OK if a family does it?”
It is unclear how successful alternative education like microschooling or homeschooling can be. Rules and regulations dictating microschool and homeschool requirements are determined by each state’s Department of Education. For example, the National Microschooling Center notes that some microschool educators do not need to be licensed teachers and some institutions do not need to follow state academic standards.
Enlow notes that as these kinds of educations become more popular, the question about what regulation should look like and how success is measured is being asked: “You can’t put a one-size-fits-all system of regulation on a system that is meant for families to have individual options and choices.”
“Successes are in children making progress towards what makes them a successful human being, a successful strategy for coping and for living and for being successful right in life,” Enlow said. “We believe, for example, that families want to have knowledge about how their kids are doing on a test, but we don’t think this is the only way to go.”
Critics are concerned about the lack of regulations and accountability about the quality of education, success of the institution and the stability of the institution.
“I called microschools the food trucks of the education industry, because they can open up, go wherever they want, and close down very quickly,” said Josh Cowen, author of “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”
Cowen calls alternative education “a predatory environment where private schools and microschools are promising the world to each of these kids,” making it hard for families to know what the truth is because of the lack of oversight and measures of success.
He continued, “It could take months, if not years, for a parent to understand that they’ve gone to a school that has substantially altered their child’s academic trajectory. Or worse, it could take three or four years, and by then, it’s too late. And so that’s where you need oversight.”
In West Virginia, Lee argues that the school choice program has contributed to a teacher shortage, citing poor teacher pay, poor school funding and poor resources that contributes to low moral “when you’re seeing the dollars go to these microschools and learning pods where there’s no accountability.”
Enlow argues that adding more education paths for students could lead to improvements in public schools: “Who’s going to really buy a system where we’re just trying to let it continue the way it is without any kind of challenge?”
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden said on Monday the Secret Service “needs more help” as he briefly addressed the apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump while departing the White House.
Speaking to reporters before boarding Marine One, Biden said, “Thank God the president’s OK.”
“One thing I want to make clear, the [Secret] Service needs more help and I think the Congress should respond to their needs, if in fact they need more services,” Biden added. He said he believed the agency may need more personnel.
Secret Service agents accompanying Trump fired at a man armed with an AK-47-style rifle on or near the Trump International golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida on Sunday. The FBI said it is investigating the matter as a possible assassination attempt. The incident comes just two months after the former president was shot in the ear at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Trump thanked law enforcement, including the Secret Service, for keeping him safe during the incident.
Biden, in a written statement in Sunday, also commended the Secret Service and their partners “for their vigilance and their efforts to keep the former President and those around him safe” and denounced political violence.
“There is an active investigation into this incident as law enforcement gathers more details about what happened,” Biden said. “As I have said many times, there is no place for political violence or for any violence ever in our country, and I have directed my team to continue to ensure that Secret Service has every resource, capability and protective measure necessary to ensure the former President’s continued safety.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
