Some of Chicago’s young voters talk 2024 presidential election at the DNC
(CHICAGO) — Perhaps no demographic group has had more ink spilled about it this election year than young voters. Traditionally a Democratic group, 18- to 29-year-olds soured on Joe Biden’s presidency faster than many other groups — and that was before the war between Israel and Hamas touched off protests on college campuses and alienated young voters from Biden even further.
However, with Vice President Kamala Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee, young voters seem to have returned to the Democratic fold. According to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll from Aug. 9-13, registered voters under age 40 supported Harris over former President Donald Trump 57% to 37%. By contrast, in the previous ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, they supported Biden over Trump just 46% to 44%.
Of course, polls can tell us who voters support, but not necessarily why. So while in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, we convened a panel of three young voters — one liberal, one moderate and one conservative — to see how they were thinking about the 2024 election.
Two of them said they were likely to vote for Harris, while one was likely to vote for Trump, mirroring young voters overall. Among the reasons they gave included the candidates’ economic plans, high prices, health care, crime and the war in Gaza. Interestingly, all three panelists cited the economy as one of the most important factors to their vote — just as polls show that the economy is the top issue for young voters nationwide — but that didn’t always lead them to the same conclusions.
Before Biden dropped out of the race, both panelists we interviewed said they were likely to support him, but they were feeling much better about supporting the Democratic ticket now that Harris is headlining it. This mirrors a spike in enthusiasm among Democratic voters that has shown up in poll after poll since Biden’s withdrawal.
All three panelists also hailed from Chicago, and they weighed in on what it meant to them that the Windy City was once again hosting a DNC and whether anything they heard at the convention could change their votes.
Although young voters are usually only a small slice of the electorate, they are an important part of the Democratic coalition, so any drop in support among them could be a problem for Democrats. Our discussion shed some light on how these voters are approaching the 2024 election.
(WASHINGTON) — After more than three years supporting President Joe Biden’s policy agenda as his deputy, Vice President Kamala Harris must articulate her own agenda for her presidential campaign — and the first term that could follow.
Since Biden announced on Sunday that he was leaving the 2024 race, Harris has secured commitments from enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee if they all honor their commitment when voting, according to ABC News reporting.
Now Harris — who ran well to the left of Biden during her unsuccessful presidential primary campaign in 2020, but has since become a loyal advocate of the administration’s policies — is taking on the challenge of establishing her own path forward and stance on key issues that matter most to voters as the November election approaches.
Her 2020 platform and some remarks from during her vice presidency offer a glimpse of a Harris presidency that could prove more progressive than Biden’s in several key areas.
Israel-Gaza
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, with Harris — who, as vice president, customarily presides over such proceedings — noticeably absent.
While Harris’ team has said her absence is merely the result of a scheduling conflict and the vice president will meet one-on-one with Netanyahu later this week, she has in recent months signaled that she may take a more stern approach to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
In the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Harris was initially a strong supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas — knocking down a suggestion that the Biden administration might condition aid to the country in November, saying “we are not going to create any conditions on the support that we are giving Israel to defend itself.”
But by December, Harris began wading deeper into Middle Eastern diplomacy during a trip to Dubai for a United Nations climate conference where she also met with leaders from the region. During the trip, she took a more forceful tone with Israel than many other senior administration officials had done at the time, declaring “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and saying the administration believes “Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians.”
In a March address in Selma, Alabama, marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Harris called out Israel again — saying its government “must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid — no excuses” and calling on Israel to open border crossings and ensure humanitarian workers were not targeted.
In an interview published earlier this month in The Nation, Harris said young Americans protesting the war in Gaza are “showing exactly what the human emotion should be” and that while she “absolutely rejects” some of their statements, she understands “the emotion behind it.”
And she’s been vocal in her support of an at least temporary cease-fire, saying during her March speech in Selma that “given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate cease-fire” for at least six weeks.
Harris doesn’t have a long-standing relationship with Netanyahu in the same way Biden does, but she met with Israel’s Benny Gantz at the White House while he was serving on the country’s war cabinet in March. She also met with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog earlier this year on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
Abortion
Already the administration’s lead messenger on the central campaign issue of abortion rights, Harris has been consistently more boldly outspoken on the issue than Biden.
Before running for president in 2020, she went after crisis pregnancy centers as California attorney general and went viral for a line of questioning with then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, where she pressed him to name a single law that polices what men can do with their bodies.
Her 2020 platform included a proposal to pass a Reproductive Rights Act that would have taken affirmative steps to enforce Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court later overruled in 2022.
Since the Supreme Court’s decision affecting Roe, Harris has toured the country as bans went into place. She made history by being the first vice president to ever visit an abortion clinic in March — a move that demonstrated how loudly supportive of abortion rights she is — and delivered a fiery speech on then-GOP presidential candidate Ron Desantis’ home turf in Florida this spring when a six-week ban went into effect there.
She made it clear in her first rally on Tuesday that abortion rights would continue to be a central issue for her as a presidential candidate.
“We who believe in reproductive freedom will fight for a woman’s right to choose because one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do,” Harris said in a rally in Indiana on Wednesday, addressing the Zeta Phi Beta sorority.
That’s not to say Biden didn’t also make abortion rights a central tenet of his administration and campaign, said Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at University of California, Davis and abortion historian. However, she said, he was constrained by generational and religious differences that made Harris “the much more effective, passionate messenger on reproductive issues.”
Should Harris win in November, “I think there would be some differences in substance, really significant differences in tone, and then, maybe or maybe not, differences in outcome,” Ziegler said.
Outcomes — such as codifying Roe vs. Wade into law, going even further to also protect birth control or in-vitro fertilization, or pursuing further legal challenges to protect abortion rights — would depend primarily on how Democrats perform down the ballot in November and whether Harris has the opportunity to confirm any more justices to the Supreme Court.
Health care
In her remarks to campaign staff Monday, Harris said that her campaign will “fight to build a nation where every person has affordable health care.”
The Medicare for All plan that Harris proposed in 2020 would have covered all medically necessary services, including emergency room visits, doctor visits, vision, dental, hearing aids, mental health and substance use disorder treatment, and comprehensive reproductive health care services. The plan had a 10-year transition period.
Under Harris’ plan, Americans would have had a choice between the public Medicare for All plan and plans from private insurers that would have had to adhere to strict Medicare requirements on costs and benefits.
To pay for the program, she proposed charging an additional premium to households making above $100,000 per year, with a higher income threshold for those in higher-cost-of-living areas.
In 2020, Biden called for a less ambitious “Medicare for all who want it” public option plan. However, according to Roll Call, he hasn’t mentioned that public option since December of 2020 — before he took office.
Biden also previously suggested he would veto a Medicare for All bill, arguing that it would raise taxes for the middle class.
But the vice president’s past policy differences with Biden may not mean all that much for a Harris presidency.
“I wouldn’t expect it to change at all [from Biden’s agenda],” David Barker, a professor of government at American University, said. “Until there’s some indication that that’s politically realistic, I don’t think anybody’s going to even try.”
Barker added that smaller changes, similar to the $35 price cap on insulin for seniors on Medicare in the Inflation Reduction Act, is “the way they’ll continue” in a Harris administration.
Criminal justice
While Harris faced sharp criticism from the left during the 2020 primary for her background as a prosecutor, her platform that year contained a slate of ambitious reforms to the criminal justice system aimed at ending mass incarceration and fighting racial inequities.
Harris’ platform advocated to legalize marijuana and expunge some marijiuana-related convictions; end cash bail and mandatory minimums; eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine; and stop the use of private prisons and the death penalty.
Her criminal justice plan also sought to increase the Department of Justice’s oversight of police departments and limit them from acquiring certain kinds of military equipment. In a clip that has been circulated by Republicans, she also advocated for restoring the right of formerly-incarcerated people to vote and automatically expunging non-serious, non-violent offenses after five years.
The Biden administration’s most significant action on criminal justice came when it took action on marijuana, reducing federal criminal penalties for offenses relating to the drug and pardoning those with criminal charges for simple possession of marijuana.
While Harris’ 2020 platform went well beyond Biden’s on criminal justice, her recent remarks make no indication that it will be a major theme of her campaign. The issue went unmentioned in her speech at the campaign’s Wilmington, Delaware, headquarters on Monday.
(WASHINGTON) — After nearly two years of House Republicans vowing to investigate President Joe Biden and his family’s business dealings — while repeatedly falling short in substantiating their most significant claims — the House Judiciary, Oversight, and Ways and Means Committees on Monday released a nearly 300-page impeachment inquiry report filled with familiar allegations against the president, who has already announced he will not seek a second term.
The report, released on the first day of the Democratic National Convention and the morning of the day the president is slated to speak, rehashes many of the allegations Republicans previously made against President Biden while alleging that they have uncovered “impeachable conduct.”
However, the report does not recommend specific articles of impeachment; it instead says that the decision on the next steps will be left to the larger congressional body.
There appear to be no new bombshells in the report. The report details six so-called key findings alleging that the Biden family received $27 million from foreign entities using shell companies, $8 million in questionable loans, special treatment for Hunter Biden and White House obstruction of the impeachment inquiry into the president.
While the report is highly detailed and cites a wide array of documents and testimony, it provides few, if any, instances of Joe Biden himself being directly and knowingly involved in illegal or improper activities – mainly focusing on the actions of his son, Hunter Biden and his allies, and the president’s brother, Jim Biden.
The report appears to serve as a roadmap for House Republicans if they move to draft articles of impeachment for the House to then take up when Congress returns on Sept. 9.
It’s not clear yet what the next steps will be, including if articles of impeachment will even be drafted and formally introduced. If articles are introduced, one of the House committees — likely Judiciary led by Jim Jordan — would then hold a markup to pass the articles out of committee for House floor consideration. It’s not clear if Speaker Mike Johnson would hold an impeachment vote on the floor. Republicans have hesitated for months to move forward with impeaching Biden because they do not have enough votes to clear the measure, and many believe Biden’s actions do not merit impeachment.
Congress is only in session for three weeks in September and out on recess until after the November 2024 election. Notably, since Biden has dropped his reelection bid, House Republicans have already trained their sights on the new presumptive Democratic ticket, launching fresh investigations into both Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz.
One of the key allegations in the report says that James Biden and Hunter Biden received a total of nearly $8 million in loans from entertainment attorney Kevin Morris, who represented Hunter Biden; family friend Joey Langston; and car dealer John Hynansky.
The vast majority of the alleged loans — more than $6 million of it — came from Morris, who allegedly paid more than $1.9 million of Hunter Biden’s tax liabilities, helped the president’s son buy a new house in Venice, California, and hire security. But, the report added, “Mr. Morris’s wealth allowed him to cover these tax debts and other debts for Hunter Biden without regard to expectation of repayment.”
The report suggests Morris’ financial assistance “creates the perception, at the very least, there was an unspoken quid pro quo or unlawful campaign contribution for which Mr. Morris would erase Hunter Biden’s IRS troubles—and by extension, help the Biden campaign rid itself of a serious liability—and receive some benefit in return.”
But the report does not provide any direct evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden himself in relation to this financial assistance.
Notably, multiple previous associates of Hunter Biden told the Oversight Committee over the course of the investigation that President Biden had no involvement with Hunter’s business dealings. Rob Walker, a longtime business associate of Hunter Biden, said in a closed-door interview in January that President Biden “was never involved” in Hunter Biden’s business dealings. “To be clear, President Biden — while in office or as a private citizen — was never involved in any of the business activities we pursued. Any statement to the contrary is simply false,” Walker said in his opening statement.
The report also claims the White House obstructed the Committees’ investigation into President Biden’s alleged retention of classified documents by preventing White House officials from testifying, erroneously asserting executive privilege and limiting access to materials from the National Archives.
Biden’s alleged retention of classified documents was independently investigated by Special Counsel Robert Hur, who recommended against charging Biden. While Hur says he found evidence that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified information,” he determined that charges were not warranted because “evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Hur’s decision to not recommend charges against Biden relied in part on his finding that Biden would come off as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” to a jury, a statement the president has slammed.
The report sharply criticized the White House for asserting executive privilege over the audio of Biden’s interview with Hur, arguing that the recording itself was necessary to understand Biden’s “mental state” and overall culpability. The DOJ defended its decision not to turn over the recordings by arguing the audio was “cumulative” and releasing them would harm “the evenhanded administration of justice” by preventing future cooperation from witnesses.
In June, House Republicans voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over his failure to turn over the audio recordings, though the DOJ declined to prosecute Garland due to a longstanding policy against prosecuting an attorney general. A Republican-led effort to hold Garland in inherent contempt for his failure to turn over the audio tapes, which would have led to Garland being fined $10,000 per day until he complied with a congressional subpoena, failed in July.
(WASHINGTON) — On the presidential debate stage, Donald Trump was given an opportunity to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election. He did not take it.
ABC News moderator David Muir read aloud recent quotes from the former president in which he appeared to admit being defeated by President Joe Biden, including last week when he said he “lost by a whisker.”
“I said that?” Trump responded. He went on to say that such remarks were sarcastic and that he did not, in fact, accept his loss.
Trump’s false claims and grievances about the 2020 race have long been a central theme of his third campaign for the White House. But recently, his rhetoric’s escalated to threats to prosecute election workers and attempts to sow doubt on the 2024 outcome before a single vote has been cast.
In a social media post over the weekend, Trump pledged to jail election workers, donors, lawyers and others “involved in unscrupulous behavior” related to voting in the 2024 election if he wins. They’d be prosecuted, he said, under his scrutiny and “at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Election officials and law experts condemned the statement as irresponsible and damaging at a time when public servants charged with overseeing elections face increased threats and harassment.
“The remarks are despicable and dangerous,” Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, told ABC News.
“The continued claims of cheating are unsupported by any reliable evidence — but they will cause millions of people to continue to believe the false claims that U.S. elections are rigged,” Hasen said. “After Jan. 6, 2021, a responsible person would be more circumspect with rhetoric about elections and cheating. Donald Trump is doubling down.”
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat whose state was an epicenter of false claims of fraud in 2020, similarly worried about the impact of Trump’s statements.
“It makes me concerned that this will set other people off. I think the one thing that we’ve seen before is that words have consequences and meaning,” Fontes told ABC News. “And while we are concerned, we are also prepared. Elections officials across the country have been working with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to monitor and track threats, to make sure we’re keeping our voters safe and make sure we’re keeping our elections officials safe.”
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who experienced protests at her home after Trump’s 2020 loss, said her duty is to “rise above the noise and continue to ensure our elections are fair, secure, accessible, and that the results are accurate.”
The Pennsylvania Department of State, noting it conducts two audits after every election, told ABC News it was “confident in the integrity of county officials and election administrators across the Commonwealth, despite irresponsible statements that are not based in fact or supported by evidence.”
Several secretaries of state, including Benson and Fontes, were on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to testify on their 2024 election preparations.
Asked for comment on the concern from officials, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “President Trump believes anyone who breaks the law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, including criminals who engage in election fraud. Without free and fair elections, you can’t have a country. Ask Venezuela.”
Trump’s allegations of fraud in the 2020 election were debunked by his own administration officials. Dozens of legal challenges brought by his campaign or his allies in battleground states failed in the courts.
But the impact of the efforts to overturn results were tangible on election officials and poll workers.
Lawrence Norden, vice president of elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice, earlier this year reported a survey of local election officials across the U.S. found 38% reported experiencing threats, harassment or abuse. Fifty-four percent said they were concerned about the safety of their colleagues. In some cases, Norden said, offices reported installing bullet proof glass or provided extra security training to staff. Some have left their positions altogether.
Norden said it was “very frustrating” to see Trump’s comments after the steps taken by election workers to bring down the temperature these past four years, including efforts to combat misinformation and to improve transparency.
“Any political leader, and certainly somebody running for president of the United States, implying that election officials could be prosecuted is potentially doing two things,” he said. “It’s not going to change the behavior of any election worker or election official, but it’s potentially encouraging further threats or violence, and it is laying the groundwork to potentially undermine or question election results that you don’t like later on.”
In addition to his threat to prosecute election workers, Trump has repeatedly accused Democrats of staging a “coup” in nominating Vice President Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out of the race. He’s sent mixed messaging on voting methods, at times encouraging his supporters to vote in any way possible and at other times baselessly claiming mail-in ballots are ripe for abuse, despite using a mail ballot in Florida’s 2020 primary. He’s said a focus of his campaign is to make sure Democrats don’t “cheat.”
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When asked during the CNN debate in June if he would commit to accepting the November outcome, he only said: “If it’s a fair and legal and good election, absolutely.”