Harris campaign raised four times more than Trump in July; Tim Walz and Bill Clinton to address Democratic convention – live | US elections 2024

Lauren Gambino

Eva Longoria, actor, Democratic activist and proud Tejana, urged Democrats to sharpen their economic pitch to Hispanic voters.

“The argument of the economy is something that I think we’re not articulating well enough to our Latino brothers and sisters,” she told attendees of the Hispanic Caucus meeting on Wednesday morning.

And so I encourage you guys to get out there and really get rid of that disinformation, the misinformation, especially in Spanish language.

She argued that many of the White House’s economic policies have disproportionately buoyed “Latino families and Latino pocketbooks”, pointing to the Covid stimulus plan that helped Americans recover from the pandemic.

Longoria represented Texas in Tuesday afternoon’s roll call vote.

“It’s a very clear choice, because we have one candidate who’s using Latino issues and Latinos as a scapegoat, as a political agenda, really demonizing who we are, demonizing our contributions, minimizing our contributions to this country,” she said on Wednesday.

“There’s a lot of people who want us to stay home,” Longoria added.

And there’s a reason, because they know the Latino vote will be the deciding factor in this election.

Ohio senator JD Vance’s comments on Fox & Friends this morning followed reports that Robert F Kennedy Jr is considering abandoning his campaign as an insurgent independent presidential candidate in order to help the election of Donald Trump.

The startling disclosure was made by Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s vice-presidential candidate, who said the pair were considering dropping their campaign over fears it might help elect Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, as president.

Shanahan, a wealthy Silicon Valley attorney, reportedly worth $1bn as a result of her former marriage to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, said:

There’s two options that we’re looking at, and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and [Tim] Walz presidency because we draw votes from Trump … [Or] we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump … and we explain to our base why we’re making this decision.

JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, said it would be “good” for the Trump campaign if Robert F Kennedy Jr dropped out as an independent presidential candidate and joined forces with him and Donald Trump.

Vance, in an interview with Fox & Friends this morning, was asked about reports that Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, are considering abandoning their campaign to help the election of Trump.

Vance said he thinks “it would be good for the campaign” but added that he had not spoken to Kennedy about it, adding:

My pitch to him and to a lot of his voters would be the Democratic Party of my grandparents, that supported his uncle John F Kennedy for president, has been completely abandoned by the modern leadership of the Democratic Party.

Vance argued that the Democratic party has “gone so far in the leftward direction” that Kennedy is “no longer welcome” in the party.

“We’re hiring another football coach,” Mankato West high school principal John Barnett told Scarlets head football coach Rick Sutton after interviewing Tim Walz about a geography teaching position. “You’re definitely gonna want to talk to him.”

This was back in the spring of 1997, when Walz was a thirty-something national guardsman relocating to Minnesota from Nebraska so his wife could be closer to her family. So Sutton arranged a second informal interview at his house, one that would ultimately decide whether Walz’s $25,000-a-year teaching gig would come with a $2,500 bonus for working with the football team. “I knew very, very early on in our conversation that this was a guy that I definitely wanted on my staff,” Sutton recalls of Walz, who took the job.

By all accounts Walz made as strong a first impression with Kamala Harris; strong enough that the Democratic presidential nominee picked him to be her running mate over more popular choices. On Wednesday, the Minnesota governor takes center stage at the Democratic national convention to accept the party’s vice-presidential nomination. His primetime speech could well come off sounding like one of his old half-time pep talks.

Walz, whose progressive wins in the state legislature also recommended him for the job alongside Harris, has only recently emerged as a national figure since describing Maga Republicans and their retrograde politics as “weird”. With that one simple word, which suddenly has the right taking offense, Walz did in a single news cycle what Democrats haven’t been able to do in 16 years – and that’s retake control over the national political narrative by stealing a page from Donald Trump’s negative-branding playbook.

Read the full story here: ‘Clear eyes, full heart’: the unlikely championship that launched Tim Walz

Bill Pascrell, a Democratic congressman for New Jersey, died this morning aged 87, his family said.

Pascrell “fought to his last breath to return to the job he cherished and to the people he loved”, according to a statement posted to X.

Pascrell represented the Paterson area in New Jersey in Congress for nearly three decades, after being first elected to Congress in 1996 and having served on the House ways and means committee since 2007, according to local media.

Vladimir Putin exploited Donald Trump’s “ego and insecurities” to exert an almost mesmeric hold over the former US president, who refused to entertain any negative evaluation of the autocratic Russian leader from his own staff, and ultimately fired his national security adviser, HR McMaster, over it.

The bold assessment of Trump’s fealty to Putin comes in McMaster’s book At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, published by HarperCollins and arriving on 27 August. The Guardian obtained a copy.

“After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump,” McMaster recalls saying in the memoir covering the turbulent 457 days the now retired general served as national security adviser from February 2017 until he was effectively fired by tweet in April 2018.

The comment, to McMaster’s wife, Katie, came in the aftermath of the poisoning in the UK by Putin’s agents of Sergei Skripal, a Russian former intelligence officer, and his daughter, in March 2018.

Read the full story here: Vladimir Putin manipulated Donald Trump’s ‘ego and insecurities’, book says

As we reported earlier, Donald Trump will be campaigning in Asheboro, North Carolina, today. It will be his first outdoor campaign rally since surviving an assassination attempt on 13 July at an open-air rally near Butler, Pennsylvania.

Trump’s event today has enhanced security from past outdoor rallies, including panes of bulletproof glass boxing in the podium where he will speak.

From AP’s Michelle L Price:

Andrew Roth

Delegates called November’s ballot a “get out the vote” election and said that they needed to make clear to Michigan voters that Democrats stand for “freedom”.

“I’d say Michigan is ground zero for the presidency and for the control of the US Senate, and for control of the US Congress,” Jason Morgan, a state representative for the college town of Ann Arbor and vice-chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, told the Guardian.

And we have several US House seats that are open, that we need to win and hold on to. We have a US Senate seat that’s up and up for the first time in decades that is critical to the control of the US Senate, and we are the top battleground state in the country when it comes to the presidency.

We know that Michigan can go blue. We believe it will, but it’s going to take everything that we have to make sure we’re turning out voters, ensuring that they know how important this election is and winning every vote.

Morgan, who was dressed in a T-shirt and baseball cap, said he thought he would “just pop down and grab food” before he “realized we had such a robust program this year”. The energy was the highest he had felt in the state since 2008, he said, when Barack Obama was the candidate.

Having Nancy Pelosi here to talk to us is certainly exhilarating. And you know, it’s just something special.

Andrew Roth

The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and other Democratic heavy-hitters flocked to a breakfast of Michigan delegates on Wednesday as they try to build enthusiasm in a key battleground state with polls close to a dead heat.

The Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and the senator Gary Peters also attended the breakfast, which was meant to recognize the congressman Dan Kildee and the senator Debbie Stabenow, who are not running again.

But attention was focused on races up and down the ticket in Michigan, as part of a larger strategy of protecting a blue wall of states for the presidency and in both the house and the senate. Pelosi, who remains one of the Democratic party’s most influential operatives, said:

We fully intend to hold the house and to win you cannot add by subtracting. You cannot add by subtracting. So we have to win. All the seats that we have were very important.

Jeffries called Michigan a “critical state in the battle for our future”/

Polling data shows Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, has had a smoother launch as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate than JD Vance for Donald Trump.

About one-third of American adults, or 36%, have a favorable view of Walz, compared with about one-quarter (27%) who have a positive opinion of Vance, according to a survey by the Associated Press-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research.

Significantly more adults also have an unfavorable view of Vance than Walz, 44% to 25%, the poll shows.

The US job market appears weaker than first thought, according to official figures released on Wednesday.

The US created 818,000 fewer jobs than first calculated in the twelve month to the end of March, a 0.5% decrease, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ quarterly census of employment and wages.

The news comes as the Federal Reserve weighs a cut in its benchmark interest rate, the first since March 2020. The chair of the Fed, Jerome Powell, has signaled that the central bank is now leaning towards cutting rates after raising them to tamp down inflation. Powell will give an update on his views this Friday at the central bank’s annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The news also comes in an election season when the economy is the top priority for voters. The outgoing president, Joe Biden, has received low marks from voters for his handling of the economy despite a remarkable recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. While inflation is fading, voters remain unhappy about prices.

Some 16m jobs have been created since Biden took office and average unemployment has remained lower than during any administration in 50 years.