Former President George W. Bush will not make formal election endorsement, office says
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(DALLAS) — Former President George W. Bush doesn’t plan to make an endorsement or voice how he or his wife Laura will vote in November, his office told ABC News Saturday.
The announcement came a day after Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, announced he would cross party lines and vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Cheney said former President Donald Trump “can never be trusted with power again.”
“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” he said in a statement.
Cheney’s daughter, former Wyoming member of the House Liz Cheney, also announced this week that she would be voting for Harris.
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.”
(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.
(PHILADELPHIA) — After former President Donald Trump said during Tuesday’s debate that Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats will take people’s guns away, the vice president pushed back with a little-known fact about herself: She is a gun owner.
Harris briefly pivoted from a question on healthcare to respond to the attacks that Trump laid out during an earlier question.
“This business about taking everyone’s guns away, [Gov.] .Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this stuff,” she said.
Although Harris has not spoken about her gun-ownership status during the current campaign, she did bring it up five years ago while running for president — telling reporters in Iowa that she became a gun owner for personal safety issues when she was a prosecutor.
Her campaign told CNN at the time that the firearm, a handgun, was securely locked up.
Harris has supported several gun control measures including universal background checks and stricter penalties for drug trafficking.
Trump is also a gun owner, however, his permit will be revoked following his conviction in Manhattan.
