Hello, and welcome to the Guardian’s brand new US election newsletter.
I moved to the US from the UK as a keen but inexperienced reporter in 2011, and was immediately plunged into covering the 2012 presidential election, despite having next to no knowledge of American politics. After the ignominy of travelling to a Newt Gingrich campaign event and having to ask an audience member who Newt Gingrich was, I decided I needed to learn more.
Thirteen years later, much of it spent observing (sometimes open-mouthed) the chaos that goes on here when it’s time to vote, I’m now on my fourth Big Election. And I’m excited to be joining all of you every week – and more frequently as the big day gets closer – for what is likely to be the most important one of those elections yet.
Today, with just six months to go before the vote, as police storm an occupied building at Columbia University and violence erupts on UCLA campus, we’ll take a look at what the wave of pro-Palestinian student protests across the US could mean in November.
But first, some of the happenings in US politics.
Here’s what you need to know …
1. Trump’s mouth gets him further into debt
Donald Trump already owes $454m as a result of his civil fraud case in New York, and has been ordered to pay $88.3m to E Jean Carroll over a defamation lawsuit. Given Trump struggled to find the money for the former, the last thing he needed was to be fined $9,000 in his New York criminal trial, after he attacked witnesses online. Could the judge give him jail time if he does it again?
2. Biden’s banter bus
“The 2024 election is in full swing and yes, age is an issue,” Joe Biden said at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday. “I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old.” The joke continued Biden’s transition from grownup-in-the-room to Burn King in Chief, with the president and his campaign increasing their mocking attacks on Trump’s golf game, finances and mental aptitude.
3. Debate club
Republicans have been calling for Biden to agree to debate Trump, and on Friday Biden said he would do it, setting the stage for a tête-à-tête sometime after September. The three debates between these two in 2020 are mostly remembered for Trump interrupting, whining and calling on a white supremacist group to “stand back and stand by”, so let’s not get too excited just yet.
Could student protesters turn the 2024 election?
Tensions on university campuses, already high as a wave of pro-Palestinian encampment-style protests sweeps the US, got even higher overnight.
The protests, which have seen students pitch tents or occupy buildings at Columbia, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and others, began as an effort to get universities to ditch investments in companies which provide weapons and equipment to the Israeli military.
But they have since evolved into a full-throated critique of how the Biden administration, in protesters’ eyes, has failed to rein in Israel during its war in Gaza. More than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza , and as with other modern conflicts, much of the horror has been shared on social media.
It has made it easy for people on campuses and elsewhere to empathise with the plight of Palestinians – and to grow angry at Biden, who has remained largely supportive of Israel in the wake of the October 7 attacks and last week signed a foreign aid package which directed more than $26bn to the country.
Polling averages show Trump with a narrow lead in the seven swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – which are the key to winning the White House. Biden won Wisconsin, where demonstrations continue on campuses in Milwaukee and Madison, by just 21,000 votes in 2020, and has already survived pro-Palestinian protest votes against him in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where he won by similarly small margins.
All this means that, basically, Biden can ill afford to lose any young votes.
“The real threat to Biden is that younger voters, especially college-educated voters, won’t turn out for him in the election,” Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, told me this week.
He added: “In states like Pennsylvania the margins are going to be so small, that it’s at least possible that a couple thousand people not turning out, or voting for one of the third party candidates, could swing the election one way or the other.”
Although Gaza is not necessarily a front-burner issue among all young voters (the economy remains many Americans’ No 1 concern), Biden’s popularity with them, well, is not what it was. In April, a Harvard poll found that 60% of 18-29-year-olds believe the country is “off on the wrong track”, while only 9% believe things are “generally headed in the right direction”. Neither of those numbers sound as if young people are about to sprint down to the polls to cast their vote for Biden.
But the problem goes further than just Biden losing votes among young people. Rightwing media and the GOP have pounced on the issue, claiming that the “out of control” protests are representative of Biden’s presidency.
It makes life difficult for Biden. If he sides with the students, Republicans will continue to paint the president as someone unable to reign in chaos. If Biden is too critical of protesters, he risks alienating young people – who he needs in November.
Lie of the week
“I used to drive an 18-wheeler,” Biden said at a campaign event last week, referring to a vehicle also known as a tractor trailer or an HGV. The president was responding to a union member who had praised Biden for saving his pension.
The problem is: Biden never drove an 18-wheeler.
According to PolitiFact in 2021, after Biden made similar claims about his trucker past: “There’s no record that he drove an 18-wheeler, the typical meaning of a tractor trailer. The closest experience he had was in 1973, when, as a senator, he rode along on a 536-mile tractor-trailer trip from Delaware to Ohio.”
But Biden isn’t the only president to have a fascination with big trucks. Some people might remember the childlike delight on Donald Trump’s face when he was invited to sit in a truck cab in 2017. He got to honk the horn and everything!
Worst week: Kristi Noem in the doghouse
“I hated that dog,” writes Kristi Noem – seen, until now, as a contender to be Trump’s vice presidential pick – in a new book, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian, which broke the news last week.
The hard-right governor of South Dakota was talking about her time as a farmer some 20 years ago when her dog Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, attacked some chickens.
So, writes Noem, she shot and killed Cricket in a gravel pit – an experience she describes as “not a pleasant job”. (She also killed an unwanted goat.)
We may never know why Noem decided to commit this anecdote to print, other than poor political instincts. After an outraged response from people from all sides of the political spectrum, her chances of being vice-president are now reportedly zero.
RIP Cricket.
Elsewhere in US politics
• Joe Biden narrowly won Georgia in 2020, and Democrats are desperate to hang on to it. To that end, Kamala Harris was dispatched to Atlanta on Monday, in what our George Chidi describes as the “continuation of a full court press” to solidify support among Democrats, particularly Black Democrats.
• A physician, a lawyer, a CEO: that’s not the start of a joke, but instead some of the cast of 84 fake electors who allegedly tried to steal the 2020 election. Kira Lerner looked at the cast of characters. (There’s also a dairy farmer, a real estate agent and a QAnon fan.)
• The Senate election in very-Republican Nebraska has been shaken up by the candidacy of Dan Osborn, a pipe-fitter and union organizer from Omaha who in 2021 led a workers’ strike against Kellogg’s. Michael Sainato chatted with Osborn about whether he could spring a surprise.
Last word goes to …
… Don Blankenship, running to be the Democratic Senate candidate in West Virginia with the weirdest political ad of 2024. (So far.)
There’s a lot going on here. Is that 1980s pop star Tiffany looming behind Don Blankenship? Why is Robert F Kennedy Jr featured so prominently? When the voice over says: “Our government is not honest,” why does the video cut to eight non-white Democratic politicians? And what’s going on with the line: “If they tell you I fell off the bed and hung myself, I didn’t”? (Hint: he’s not the only one to say it, which the Bulwark reports has become popular among “people who style themselves dissidents, flattering themselves that powerful people may be trying to get rid of them soon”.)
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