Before Bernie Moreno was the 2024 Ohio Republican candidate for Senate, he was the owner of numerous luxury car dealerships, hawking rarified brands like Aston Martin and Mercedes-Benz.

To sell pretty cars, it helps to have pretty dealerships. So in December 2007, Moreno hired the firm Welty Building Company (WBC) “for the design and construction of a Porsche dealership and a Mercedes-Benz dealership” in the Cleveland area, according to a 2014 court document.

Details of the initial contract, such as exact work orders and total costs, are not public record. But legal documents obtained from Cuyahoga County’s clerk of courts show Moreno’s company M1 Motors failed to promptly pay Welty hundreds of thousands of dollars upon completion of the work. After an arbitrator declared in July 2014 that Moreno’s company owed WBC $313,058, Moreno still didn’t pay, forcing the construction firm to file a legal claim in September 2014 seeking a court to confirm the arbitrator’s decision. As a result, the court scheduled a conference meeting to discuss. Even after that meeting was scheduled, WBC had to file a “Motion to Enforce” before Moreno finally fulfilled his financial obligations to WBC in full, including post-judgment interest, sometime after early January 2015.

Delays aren’t necessarily standard-operating procedure after arbitration rulings. But many people, either out of inability to pay or frustration with the ruling, sometimes drag their feet. Jeremy Fogel, the executive director at the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former US District Court and state court judge, said he saw similar situations play out all the time when he held the gavel. “It’s a kind of litigation behavior that, unfortunately, is not unheard of,” he says. 

This saga, not previously reported, is just the latest example of past legal disputes involving Moreno. A litany of cases from Moreno’s pre-politics days of building a car dealership empire—lawsuits claiming racial, gender, and age discrimination, as well as wage withholding—have clouded Moreno’s attempt to portray himself as a self-made entrepreneur who knows what’s best for Ohio workers because he’s employed thousands of them at his dealerships. This is at least the second example from Moreno’s past in which he did not promptly comply with official legal renderings: Amid proceedings over a case in which he was ultimately found liable for withholding overtime wages from his employees in Massachusetts, Moreno shredded company documents that he and his lawyers “were required to preserve” and “knew or should have known [were] relevant.”

Welty CEO Donzell S. Taylor told Mother Jones that there’s no bad blood between his construction company and Moreno. “Issues like these are not uncommon in the construction business and this one was resolved through the proper channels,” he said in a statement. “We are proud of the work we did for Mr. Moreno and look forward to working with his team again in the future.” But evidently, Moreno was not the CEO’s first pick for the Senate seat: Federal Election Commission records show Taylor donated the election-cycle maximum of $6,600 to one of Moreno’s opponents in the GOP primary, Ohio secretary of state Frank LaRose.

A Moreno campaign spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

For the average Ohioan whose debt is more likely tied to a modest mortgage or credit cards, Moreno’s history of delaying or withholding payment to workers and contractors may impact how they view the candidate whose campaign hinges on his image as a wealthy businessman.

Initially, Moreno’s 2014 legal dispute with WBC took place outside of court. As is increasingly common, WBC and M1 Motors entered arbitration, an alternative legal process that is typically less expensive and tends to be friendlier to large corporations.

The independent arbitrator’s decision explains WBC pursued legal action to seek its remaining balance of $271,371 (which M1 “admittedly owed”), plus prejudgment interest of $39,688. For its part, M1 claimed WBC erred in its design and construction processes to the tune of $1.13 million.

“There was, for all practical purposes, no evidence that WBC’s design was deficient in any respect.”

Moreno’s company alleged construction errors from WBC required M1 to replace portions of the roof and relocate poorly designed drains for more than $100,000, re-do $70,000 worth of decorative concrete and pavers, rebuild a $265,000 car wash, fix exposed metal trusses costing $15,000, and replace a $416,000 Porsche metal wall panel. The arbitrator concluded M1 owed WBC $313,058, minus $30,000 WBC owed M1 for minor construction flaws. The $30,000 credit made the sum M1 owed WBC on July 28 come out to $283,058.

“The testimony of M1’s principal was that he did not believe that WBC’s designer did anything wrong. M1’s expert did not offer any opinion contrary to that testimony,” the arbitrator’s ruling concluded. “There was, for all practical purposes, no evidence that WBC’s design was deficient in any respect.”

According to a motion filed by WBC, Moreno didn’t comply with the decision for more than two months. In Ohio, the deadline to appeal an arbitration decision is 30 days from the date the judgment is rendered in an arbitrator’s report. There’s no evidence Moreno’s company appealed. “Despite the arbitration award itself and numerous requests from Welty’s counsel seeking payment, Ml refused to pay Welty,” a November 7 motion said.

To discuss M1’s non-payment, the court in mid-September scheduled a conference call hearing. Two days prior to that court conference slated for October 15, M1 Motors finally paid WBC its principal debt and pre-judgment interest of $283,058, a full 77 days after the arbitration concluded in July. However, M1 did not pay interest on the principal that accrued between the date of the July arbitration ruling and the date of the belated October 13 payment, which led WBC to file its “Motion to Enforce.”

Finally, a judge settled the matter on January 2, 2015. Citing previous case law, Judge Nancy Fuerst ruled M1 had to pay WBC “post judgment statutory interest.”

“No just cause for delay,” the judge wrote to M1. “So Ordered.”

In 2015, as Sen. Ted Cruz mounted a competitive presidential campaign and courted the religious right ahead of the Iowa caucuses, the Texas Republican touted the support of a controversial anti-abortion crusader.

“I am grateful to receive the endorsement of Troy Newman,” Cruz said. “He has served as a voice for the unborn for over 25 years, and works tirelessly every day for the pro-life cause. We need leaders like Troy Newman in this country who will stand up for those who do not have a voice.”

Newman wasn’t just any anti-abortion activist: He was, and is, the leader of Operation Rescue—a group that in 1991 held weeks-long protests at the abortion clinic of George Tiller, who was later assassinated by an anti-abortion extremist. Moreover, Newman has claimed that extreme weather was God’s punishment for America’s tolerance for abortion and gay rights; he also co-wrote a book that endorsed the execution of abortion providers.

“The United States government has abrogated its responsibility to properly deal with the blood-guilty. This responsibility rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists.”

Nearly a decade after the failed presidential bid, Cruz is locked in a tough reelection fight with Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, a former NFL player. The rollback of abortion rights has become a major issue in the Texas contest, as it has nationally, and the two-term senator has been notably quiet on the subject of late. It is a marked contrast from the 2016 presidential election, when Cruz sought to distinguish himself in the presidential contest as an uncompromising defender of the “pro-life” movement.

While other GOP candidates shared similar beliefs in 2016, Cruz argued he was better at proving his devotion to the cause. Ahead of the Iowa caucuses that year, he announced a “Pro-Lifers for Cruz” coalition of 17,000-plus members. “The question we ought to ask is, don’t tell me that you’re pro-life. Show me. When have you stood up and fought to defend the right to life?” Cruz said before the critical first-in-the-nation nominating contest.

It was at that point, in January 2016, that Cruz named Newman as one of 10 co-chairs leading the anti-abortion coalition. The Cruz campaign press release announcing Newman’s appointment mentioned Newman’s book, Their Blood Cries Out, in his bio. Now out of print, the anti-abortion manifesto, first published in 2000, contains eye-popping passages, including one section arguing that the US government should execute “abortionists”:

In addition to our personal guilt in abortion, the United States government has abrogated its responsibility to properly deal with the blood-guilty. This responsibility rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes in order to expunge bloodguilt from the land and people. Instead, the act of abortion has been elevated to a ‘God-given right’ and the abortionists canonized as saints. Consequently, the entire nation has the blood-red stain of the lives of the innocent upon its head.

Newman co-authored the book with Cheryl Sullenger, who was earlier convicted and imprisoned for her involvement in an attempt to bomb an abortion clinic in California in 1987.

In addition to suggesting the US government kill abortion providers, Newman and Sullenger wrote that the tendency to blame abortion providers and liberal lawmakers for abortions—rather than the women who obtain them—is a mistake:

Those responsible for innocent bloodshed should not be excused or comforted in their sin, yet, as a society, women who have abortions are treated as victims and those who support them in the decision to kill are considered heroes who were willing to stand by their friends or family members during a time of crisis. In reality, the woman is the same as a contract killer, hiring out the murder of her defenseless child, and the supporter is a co-conspirator, aiding and abetting the crime.

The full extent of Newman’s relationship to Cruz is unclear; neither Newman nor Cruz’s congressional office responded to inquiries from Mother Jones. But in addition to Cruz’s presidential campaign materials that mention Newman, there are pictures of Newman posing with Cruz, and with Cruz’s then-chief-of-staff, Paul Teller, on Newman’s Facebook profile alongside a caption: “Ted Cruz may have come in number two in the [presidential] primary, but he is number one to me!”

While the inflammatory contents of Their Blood Cries Out have previously been cited, including by Mother Jones eight years ago, the passages and Cruz’s connection to their author take on new relevance as abortion has become a defining issue of the national election and Cruz’s Texas reelection.

A Democrat hasn’t won a statewide election in Texas in three decades, but Cruz’s apparent lead against Allred is now squarely within the margin of error. Texas voters have reported abortion as one of their top issues this cycle. In recent weeks, Cruz has hesitated to address his views on the topic, as they may prove to alienate critical swing voters in November.

On August 1, people who had given money to the Democratic presidential ticket began getting ominous messages suggesting their identities may have been stolen. Some received texts from an unknown sender asking them to confirm recent donations. Others told Mother Jones that they received emails warning that their donations had been “flagged” and asking them to click a box to “verify” that they had really contributed the money—or to click “no” if they did not recall doing so.

One donor described the email he received as “mysterious, vague, and somewhat threatening.” That email, similar to the one pictured below, requested that he respond within “the next 24 hours.”

The recipients of these messages have something in common: they’re listed in federal campaign filings as having donated to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris using ActBlue, a ubiquitous online platform that makes it simple to contribute to a vast array of Democratic candidates and liberal causes. ActBlue, a non-profit, has become central to Democrats’ grassroots fundraising efforts. For years, Republicans struggled to emulate its success.

The mysterious emails were sent by the equally mysterious “Fair Election Fund”—a newly formed dark money group that says it is working to uncover supposed electoral malfeasance. When the organization released an initial advertisement in May, it touted a $5 million fund that it said would be used to pay whistleblowers who “expose cheating in our elections.” More recently, it launched a media blitz full of baseless and implausible claims that Kamala Harris’ eye-popping fundraising numbers might somehow be the result of a massive identity theft and money-laundering scheme carried out by ActBlue.

The goal of the Fair Election Fund’s messages to ActBlue users became clear on August 13, when the Washington Examiner reported the conservative group had “identified 60,000 people who were named as small-dollar donors in the Biden-Harris campaign’s July [FEC] report but did not recall making the contribution when contacted by the Fair Election Fund.” The Examiner said the organization had spent $250,000 to compile these initial findings.

“If the Democrats’ fundraising numbers sound outrageous, unbelievable, it’s because they might be,” the Fair Election Fund charged in a recent video, which displayed a headline about the $310 million Harris raised in July. “The Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue has been accused of stealing our identities to conceal donations from bad actors.” The group says it spent $50,000 to run this ad online.

This line of criticism piggybacks on long-running GOP attacks on ActBlue. Last year, James O’Keefe, a conservative activist previously ousted from the far-right video sting outfit Project Veritas, accused ActBlue of assigning large numbers of donations to the names and addresses of people who did not remember donating so often. Though O’Keefe’s claims of a “potential massive money laundering” scheme went unconfirmed, various GOP lawmakers, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), have faulted ActBlue for accepting some donations without requiring card verification values—the 3- or 4-digit codes on credit cards used to confirm their validity.

Contrary to the right-wing allegations, there is no public evidence that ActBlue has stolen anyone’s identity or has been involved in money laundering. ActBlue denies engaging in any wrongdoing. “We are aware of recent attempts to spread misinformation about our platform,” an ActBlue spokesperson told Mother Jones, while citing “robust and effective protocols in place to ensure our platform is secure.” The platform says that it now requires all new donors to provide CVV codes, though many longtime users can still make donations without them.

The Fair Election Fund’s recent claims about ActBlue coincided with Harris receiving an outpouring of support from first-time and small-dollar donors in the wake of Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race. In just the first week of her campaign, she raked in more than $200 million dollars, two-thirds of which came from people who hadn’t donated yet this cycle, the campaign announced.

After learning of the messages the Fair Election Fund was sending to contributors, ActBlue published an August 2 tweet warning they appeared to be part of “a dangerous disinformation campaign” targeting “Democratic donors.” ActBlue advised users to avoid replying to the messages and to instead report them as spam.

Donor safety and security are our top priority. We will continue to monitor bad-faith attempts to undermine grassroots power. These attacks pale in comparison to the historic enthusiasm small-dollar donors are bringing to the 2024 elections. pic.twitter.com/hIVISJRDzb

— ActBlue (@actblue) August 2, 2024

The August 13 Examiner story didn’t make clear how the Fair Election Fund conducted its research or how it arrived at the 60,000 figure, and the group didn’t answer questions from Mother Jones about its methodology. But it appears that the Fair Election Fund used FEC reports to identify small donors and then purchased commercially available data that allowed the group to contact them. Recipients told Mother Jones they received messages at phone numbers and email addresses that they had not provided to ActBlue or to the Biden or Harris campaigns.

Such a method could easily generate inaccurate results. Clicking a box telling an unsolicited emailer you don’t recall making a donation is not a sworn statement that you got scammed. It’s unclear how the Fair Election Fund ensured that the donor contact information it obtained was correct, or whether it accounted for the possibility that some donors may have simply forgotten signing up to make recurring contributions.

One ActBlue user who contacted Mother Jones, and who asked not to be identified, said she had replied “no” to a text message asking if she recalled donating to Biden in June. That drew a quick follow-up call from a woman who said she worked for the Fair Election Fund and asked for confirmation the user did not recall giving the money. The donor told the caller she did not recall the donation, but later realized she may have been mistaken. She told Mother Jones in an email that she suspected she had inadvertently signed up for recurring monthly contributions when she made an earlier donation.

More significantly, the Fair Election Fund and other ActBlue critics have offered zero evidence of the broader conspiracy they’re insinuating, in which fraudsters are supposedly stealing thousands of identities and using them to make hundreds of millions of dollars worth of illegal donations to Democratic candidates in small increments.

Anyone who wants to secretly bankroll a campaign, after all, has much better options. Super-PACs can accept unlimited amounts of money to spend on a candidate’s behalf with far less transparency. And other dark money groups spending big on the 2024 election, including the Fair Election Fund itself, likewise face significantly less public scrutiny.

Ironically, ActBlue—like its GOP counterpart, WinRed—is actually more transparent than even traditional forms of small-dollar fundraising. Under federal election law, if a person makes a donation of less than $200 directly to a campaign, their identity is never disclosed publicly. But all donations made through conduits like ActBlue must be publicly reported, which creates a detailed paper trail that otherwise would not exist.

Nonetheless, the Fair Election Fund’s claims have had impact. The Examiner story noted that the group had shared its findings with the offices of five Republican state attorneys general, two of whom quickly said in statements they would look into the allegations. “We are grateful to Fair Election Fund for sharing these concerning findings with us, as we explore whether any of our constituents have been defrauded by ActBlue,” Alabama AG Steve Marshall said.

Two of the attorneys general, Ken Paxton of Texas and Jason Miyares of Virginia, have said they were already investigating ActBlue, as has House Administration Committee Chair Bryan Steil, a Wisconsin Republican. “Certain features of campaign finance law may incentivize bad actors to use platforms like ActBlue to covertly move money to political campaigns to evade legal requirements,” Paxton said in an August 8 statement.

The Fair Election Fund is working on other initiatives, as well. The group in May announced it would give people who claimed to have evidence of election fraud “payment from our $5 million dollar fund.” It has not explained what criteria it will use to determine payouts. But the effort, four years after Donald Trump used lies and debunked stories of ballot-stuffing to try to steal the 2020 election, appears squarely aimed at generating new election fraud claims that could turn out to be just as unreliable.

The Fair Election Fund used what it said was a “six-figure” ad buy in swing states during the Olympics to tell people who report voter fraud that they “could be eligible for compensation.” The Raleigh News & Observer reported the group also spent $375,000 on ads and billboards attacking North Carolina’s Democratic-controlled Board of Elections for denying ballot access to third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. The group similarly said it spent “six figures” faulting efforts to keep West off the ballot in Michigan. It also recently touted an online ad that claims that efforts to keep West off Pennsylvania ballots would disenfranchise Black voters and represent “the real Jim Crow 2.0.”

Where all the money for these campaigns comes from is not clear. A spokesperson for the Fair Election Fund declined to comment on the group’s funding or to answer specific questions, including where the group is incorporated. Former Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), who has been identified in press reports as a co-founder as a well as senior adviser to the group, did not respond to repeated inquiries by Mother Jones. He appears to be the only individual publicly declaring an affiliation with the group.

The group claims on its website to be a nonprofit but provides no information about its incorporation or tax status, as most nonprofits do. It also does not appear in a national database of tax-exempt organizations that have registered with the IRS. The group’s spokesperson did not respond to questions about its nonprofit status. In reports it was required to file to the Federal Communications Commission, the group listed the address of a small building in Pittsburgh.

Google’s online Transparency Center for ads indicates that some of the digital ads the Fair Election Fund has run were paid for by another organization, a corporation registered last year in Delaware called “For Which it Stands Fund, Inc.” That group has no evident online presence.

Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer, said Fair Election Fund looks to be following a playbook favored by dark money recipients in recent election cycles. They can start operating without applying to the IRS for nonprofit status, as long as they plan to apply within the year. This delays the need to disclose any information publicly, including the filing of a so-called 990 tax form, until after the election. Some avoid even that belated disclosure by terminating their state registration before having to file a 990, Kappel said.

“Fair Election Fund appears to be a dark money group with very little known about how it’s funded or how it operates,” said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal-leaning watchdog group. “It seems to be trying to build out a conspiracy theory to use against Democratic candidates in the 2024 election. When groups like this pop up, it’s not out of the ordinary for them to hit quick and then disband before anything can be found out about them—or done about them.”

Campaign finance researchers contacted by Mother Jones said it was notable that the Fair Election Fund claimed to have $5 million when it launched but does not appear to be raising money online. That suggests the likelihood of a large preexisting source of money.

FCC filings list a woman named Tori Sachs as an official with the group. That is the name of a political consultant in Michigan who has helped spearhead several dark money efforts in support of Republican candidates in that state. Sachs has worked for multiple organizations funded by the billionaire DeVos family, including by Betsy DeVos, who was Trump’s Education secretary and previously chaired the Michigan GOP.

Sachs did not respond to inquires. A spokesperson for the DeVos family did not respond when asked if the family is providing funding for the Fair Election Fund.

Meanwhile, the Fair Election Fund is charging ahead, dangling cash for election fraud claims. And according to the Examiner, the group plans to “continue vetting Biden-Harris donors in the coming weeks.”

Additional reporting by Julia Lurie.

At a somber memorial event held Wednesday at Engine Company 4/Ladder Company 15 fire station in lower Manhattan, former president Donald Trump appeared to bring a special guest: 9/11 conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.

The appearance of Loomer, a far-right social media shit-poster with a long record of bigotry, follows her travel with Trump to Tuesday’s presidential debate between the former president and Vice President Kamala Harris.

But her attendance at a 9/11 remembrance event proved especially shocking. Last year, Loomer shared a video to Twitter that claimed the infamous terrorist attack was an “inside job.” Alongside the video, Loomer shared her false belief that the plane hijackings and resulting terrors were merely a ploy to allow the US government to surveil Americans moving forward.

“These actions destabilized the Middle East and allowed for the alphabet agencies to begin their campaign of WEAPONIZED GOVERNMENT AND MASS SURVEILLANCE against the American people,” Loomer wrote in June 2023.

Nearly 3,000 people died as a direct result of the attacks in 2001, including more than 2,500 civilians and firefighters at the World Trade Center in New York City; 184 people at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; and 40 passengers and crew members of Flight 93, which crashed in an empty field in western Pennsylvania. Thousands more have contracted illnesses believed to be linked to their time near the wreckage of the attacks, according to a government program that compiles data on survivors.

Further, more than 240,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan war-zone areas since the War on Terror began. Of those, more than 70,000 were civilians.

Beyond spreading lies about 9/11, Loomer has previously described herself as a “proud Islamophobe.” She has also called Islam a “cancer on humanity.” Though the purpose of her recent travel with Trump is unclear, Loomer appears to be angling for what one may call an “inside job” in a second Trump Administration, after coming close to a job in his 2024 campaign.

Taiwanna Anderson’s life changed forever in December 2021, when she found her 10-year-old daughter Nylah unconscious, hanging from a purse strap in a bedroom closet.

Barely an adolescent, Nylah wasn’t suicidal. She had merely come across the “Blackout Challenge” in a feed of videos curated her for her by TikTok’s algorithm. The challenge circulating on the video-sharing app encouraged users to choke themselves with household items until they blacked out. When they regained consciousness, they were supposed to then upload their video results for others to replicate. After several days in a hospital’s intensive care unit, Nylah succumbed to her strangulation injuries. Anderson sued TikTok over product liability and negligence that she alleges led to Nylah’s death.

For years, when claimants tried to sue various internet platforms for harms experienced online, the platforms benefited from what amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 statute that offers apps and websites broad immunity from liability for content posted to their sites by third-party users. In 2022, a federal district judge accepted TikTok’s Section 230 defense to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Anderson based on the assessment that TikTok didn’t create the blackout challenge video Nylah saw—a third-party user of TikTok did.

“TikTok reads 230 of the Communications Decency Act to permit casual indifference to the death of a ten-year-old girl.”

But on Tuesday, the federal 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals released an opinion reviving the mother’s lawsuit, allowing her case against TikTok to proceed to trial. TikTok may not have filmed the video that encouraged Nylah to hang herself, but the platform “makes choices about the content recommended and promoted to specific users,” Judge Patty Shwartz wrote in the appellate court’s opinion, “and by doing so, is engaged in its own first-party speech.”

“TikTok reads 230 of the Communications Decency Act to permit casual indifference to the death of a ten-year-old girl,” wrote Judge Paul Matey in a partially concurring opinion that sought to go even further than the other two judges on the panel.

Legal experts on tech liability say the panel’s overall decision could have immense ramifications for all kinds of online platforms that rely on algorithms similar to TikTok’s.

“My best guess is that every platform that uses a recommendation algorithm that could plausibly count as expressive activity or expressive speech woke up in their general counsel’s office and said, ‘Holy Moly,'” says Leah Plunkett, faculty at Harvard Law School and author of Sharenthood, a book about protecting kids online. “If folks did not wake up [Wednesday] thinking that, they should be.”

Advocates of Section 230 have long held the broad liability shield is necessary for the internet to exist and evolve as a societal tool; if websites were responsible for monitoring the heaps of content that hundreds of millions of independent users create, they contend, lawsuits would devastate platforms’ coffers and overwhelm the judicial system.

“If you have fewer instances in which 230 applies, then platforms will be exposed to more liability, and that ultimately harms the Internet user,” says Sophia Cope, senior attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free speech and innovation non-profit. A narrower interpretation of Section 230 immunity would make platforms “not want to host third party content, or severely limit what users can post,” Cope says, adding that the shift would amount to platforms engaging in “preemptive censorship” to protect their bottom lines.

But critics of Section 23o’s current scope say the statute has been interpreted far too leniently and that companies should at least sometimes be responsible for dangerous content their online platforms disseminate. In its monumental ruling this week, the appeals court said that when platforms curate harmful content, they—not their third-party users—may be engaging in a form of “expressive activity” for which they can be sued.

“TikTok made the conscious decision to not rein in the challenge, but instead to serve it up to more and more kids, many of whom were likely under the influence of TikTok’s addictive algorithms,” says Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer who has been involved in several product liability suits against tech companies.

Tuesday’s decision is a departure from previous federal court rulings about the liability (or lack thereof) of online platforms. That’s because the appeals court had new case law to consider. In July, the Supreme Court released a favorable ruling to tech platforms at the behest of the trade group NetChoice, buttressing the ability of platforms to engage in expressive activity such as curating content or de-platforming politicians if they so chose. To interfere with that ability would implicate the First Amendment rights of platforms, the Supreme Court said in a narrow ruling of that case, NetChoice v. Moody.

Some experts believe the NetChoice decision has little to do with Section 230, which was originally passed by Congress with the intent of protecting fledgling tech platforms from being sued for moderating some content, but not doing a good enough job of it. “There is NO CONFLICT between moderation and ranking being (1) the platform’s speech and also (2) immunized by 230,” Daphne Keller of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center wrote on Twitter. “The whole point of 230 was to encourage and immunize moderation.”

But for proponents of re-litigating 230, the fact that NetChoice’s earlier Supreme Court argument was used by Third Circuit to reconsider how expansive Section 230 protections should be is “deliciously ironic,” says Goldberg, because “NetChoice is the most pro-230 lobbyist organization out there.”

Tuesday’s appellate court decision does not guarantee that TikTok will be held liable for showing Nylah the video that culminated in her death; however, it means cases in the Third Circuit’s jurisdiction shouldn’t be thrown out on Section 230 grounds before trial courts can consider their facts.

The ruling “should send a message” to platforms that use content curation algorithms “that the gravy train is over,” Goldberg tells Mother Jones. “These tech behemoths have been minting money for too long, comfortable with the notion that dead kids are the price of outrageous growth.”

Taiwanna Anderson’s life changed forever in December 2021, when she found her 10-year-old daughter Nylah unconscious, hanging from a purse strap in a bedroom closet.

Barely an adolescent, Nylah wasn’t suicidal. She had merely come across the “Blackout Challenge” in a feed of videos curated her for her by TikTok’s algorithm. The challenge circulating on the video-sharing app encouraged users to choke themselves with household items until they blacked out. When they regained consciousness, they were supposed to then upload their video results for others to replicate. After several days in a hospital’s intensive care unit, Nylah succumbed to her strangulation injuries. Anderson sued TikTok over product liability and negligence that she alleges led to Nylah’s death.

For years, when claimants tried to sue various internet platforms for harms experienced online, the platforms benefited from what amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 statute that offers apps and websites broad immunity from liability for content posted to their sites by third-party users. In 2022, a federal district judge accepted TikTok’s Section 230 defense to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Anderson based on the assessment that TikTok didn’t create the blackout challenge video Nylah saw—a third-party user of TikTok did.

“TikTok reads 230 of the Communications Decency Act to permit casual indifference to the death of a ten-year-old girl.”

But on Tuesday, the federal 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals released an opinion reviving the mother’s lawsuit, allowing her case against TikTok to proceed to trial. TikTok may not have filmed the video that encouraged Nylah to hang herself, but the platform “makes choices about the content recommended and promoted to specific users,” Judge Patty Shwartz wrote in the appellate court’s opinion, “and by doing so, is engaged in its own first-party speech.”

“TikTok reads 230 of the Communications Decency Act to permit casual indifference to the death of a ten-year-old girl,” wrote Judge Paul Matey in a partially concurring opinion that sought to go even further than the other two judges on the panel.

Legal experts on tech liability say the panel’s overall decision could have immense ramifications for all kinds of online platforms that rely on algorithms similar to TikTok’s.

“My best guess is that every platform that uses a recommendation algorithm that could plausibly count as expressive activity or expressive speech woke up in their general counsel’s office and said, ‘Holy Moly,'” says Leah Plunkett, faculty at Harvard Law School and author of Sharenthood, a book about protecting kids online. “If folks did not wake up [Wednesday] thinking that, they should be.”

Advocates of Section 230 have long held the broad liability shield is necessary for the internet to exist and evolve as a societal tool; if websites were responsible for monitoring the heaps of content that hundreds of millions of independent users create, they contend, lawsuits would devastate platforms’ coffers and overwhelm the judicial system.

“If you have fewer instances in which 230 applies, then platforms will be exposed to more liability, and that ultimately harms the Internet user,” says Sophia Cope, senior attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free speech and innovation non-profit. A narrower interpretation of Section 230 immunity would make platforms “not want to host third party content, or severely limit what users can post,” Cope says, adding that the shift would amount to platforms engaging in “preemptive censorship” to protect their bottom lines.

But critics of Section 23o’s current scope say the statute has been interpreted far too leniently and that companies should at least sometimes be responsible for dangerous content their online platforms disseminate. In its monumental ruling this week, the appeals court said that when platforms curate harmful content, they—not their third-party users—may be engaging in a form of “expressive activity” for which they can be sued.

“TikTok made the conscious decision to not rein in the challenge, but instead to serve it up to more and more kids, many of whom were likely under the influence of TikTok’s addictive algorithms,” says Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer who has been involved in several product liability suits against tech companies.

Tuesday’s decision is a departure from previous federal court rulings about the liability (or lack thereof) of online platforms. That’s because the appeals court had new case law to consider. In July, the Supreme Court released a favorable ruling to tech platforms at the behest of the trade group NetChoice, buttressing the ability of platforms to engage in expressive activity such as curating content or de-platforming politicians if they so chose. To interfere with that ability would implicate the First Amendment rights of platforms, the Supreme Court said in a narrow ruling of that case, NetChoice v. Moody.

Some experts believe the NetChoice decision has little to do with Section 230, which was originally passed by Congress with the intent of protecting fledgling tech platforms from being sued for moderating some content, but not doing a good enough job of it. “There is NO CONFLICT between moderation and ranking being (1) the platform’s speech and also (2) immunized by 230,” Daphne Keller of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center wrote on Twitter. “The whole point of 230 was to encourage and immunize moderation.”

But for proponents of re-litigating 230, the fact that NetChoice’s earlier Supreme Court argument was used by Third Circuit to reconsider how expansive Section 230 protections should be is “deliciously ironic,” says Goldberg, because “NetChoice is the most pro-230 lobbyist organization out there.”

Tuesday’s appellate court decision does not guarantee that TikTok will be held liable for showing Nylah the video that culminated in her death; however, it means cases in the Third Circuit’s jurisdiction shouldn’t be thrown out on Section 230 grounds before trial courts can consider their facts.

The ruling “should send a message” to platforms that use content curation algorithms “that the gravy train is over,” Goldberg tells Mother Jones. “These tech behemoths have been minting money for too long, comfortable with the notion that dead kids are the price of outrageous growth.”

A familiar script echoed throughout the United Center arena on Monday night: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate but equally important groups. The police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.” 

It was an obvious nod to the long-running television show, Law & Order, and the crowd at the Democratic National Convention laughed in recognition. It was also clear why the campaign created this video: Kamala Harris’ history as a prosecutor is a tantalizing contrast to former president Donald Trump, who has been found guilty on 34 felony charges. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris recently said at a rally. “I know Donald Trump’s type.”

It’s a 180-degree turn from her 2020 presidential bid when her prosecutorial role was something of a liability. Amid a national reckoning about murders of Black men at the hands of police, a common refrain from some on the left was “Kamala is a cop.” While that critique wasn’t the only thing that hamstrung her campaign, it was something she felt the need to address with a thorough criminal justice reform plan, one that she hasn’t re-circulated this time around.

“It’s not a winning strategy, and it’s not the sure-fire sort of like zinger that Democrats think it is.”

Two things have changed in four years. First, public safety concerns have surged. Though crime has receded from its most recent peak from 2020-2021, fear-mongering about it is a tried-and-true tactic. Republicans have spent $130 million in the first five months of 2024 on ads focused on crime and immigration. Second, and more importantly, the law finally caught up with Trump. In May, a jury of his peers found him guilty on 34 felony counts for the hush money he paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels while he was trying to win the 2016 campaign. Another judge ruled him liable for sexual assault. Yet another judge found him liable for fraud in his New York business dealings. The Harris campaign’s mission is to quell public safety concerns and remind voters of Trump’s record in the most damning way possible.

At the same time, the campaign has a small window of time to introduce Harris to voters. Her background as a prosecutor is an appealing vehicle for imbuing Harris with a key set of traits: being tough, standing up to bullies, caring about people, and caring about the rule of law. To quickly define both candidates, a quippy prosecutor-versus-felon message has emerged.

But criminal justice reformers are raising questions about the effectiveness of this dichotomy, and its morality.

“It’s not a winning strategy, and it’s not the sure-fire sort of like zinger that Democrats think it is,” says Insha Rahman, the director of Vera Action, which advocates for criminal justice reform. “Calling Trump a convicted felon doesn’t really stick on him because he doesn’t fit the trope of what a convicted felon is, because it is a dog whistle—it is linking race and criminality.”

Rahman was at the convention to give a talk on the right way to approach both Harris’ past as a prosecutor and Trump’s current status as an unrepentant fraudster. Mother Jones sat down with her—literally, on the floor outside a conference room—to discuss the most effective way campaigns can run on public safety. After a scheduling conflict, Rahman’s panel had been canceled, but she didn’t seem to take offense. “The fact that the Democratic Party is willing to have these conversations here in the belly of the beast, to me, feels like we should be optimistic.”

In Rahman’s telling, both political parties still adhere to the tough-on-crime political playbook from the 1980s. Over the past two years, Vera Action has been pushing the Democratic Party to throw out this blueprint. Not just because it’s the right thing to do when it comes to dismantling racist stereotypes, but also because, Rahman believes, it’s the best way to win an election. 

For two years now, Rahman and Vera Action have poured significant resources into polling around effective criminal justice messaging. They have landed on what they believe is the strongest message for either party—shifting the focus from crime to safety and justice. “You actually need to own this issue, own safety, because it is a winning issue for you, and talk about it with the values that voters care about, which is safety and justice,” she tells Democrats. “The reaction we get when we talk to politicians is, ‘I don’t believe that’s right. How could that possibly be right?’ The incredulity is palpable.”

“Public safety is going to be one of the big issues in this election cycle. So showing how she is equipped to handle public safety concerns is really validating, especially as a contrast to Donald Trump.”

The party has shown an interest in her work. Vera Action has presented its findings to party officials in over 200 briefings, according to Rahman. Her message for the Democrats now is to rewrite the prosecutor-versus-felon frame. “If Kamala Harris says ‘I’m for the people, and here’s what I stand for, which is safety and justice,’ and contrasts that with ‘Donald Trump is only out for himself,’ that is actually the most winning statement,” she says. “It’s a way that Kamala Harris can use the prosecutor background to actually lean in and say what she stands for, and create a values contrast against Trump.” 

Rahman’s panel may have been canceled but her message seems to be catching on. The effort to push this version of Harris’ record comes through in the videos sprinkled throughout the convention’s televised programming. In a segment on Monday, the campaign shared an anecdote about Harris standing up to a bully in kindergarten, connecting a drive to “stand up to the bully” and “stand up for what is right” and “her calling” to be a prosecutor. 

Each evening in Chicago, speakers have added nuance to the portrayal of Harris as a prosecutor. On Wednesday night, Lateefah Simon, a congressional candidate in California who worked with Harris when she was the San Francisco district attorney, portrayed Harris as a compassionate prosecutor. “She wanted to get to the root cause of a broken criminal justice system,” Simon said. 

Simon was followed by Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, the top lawyer at Uber and one of Harris’ longtime political advisors. West portrayed Harris as dedicated to the people unjustly swept up into the criminal justice system with the story of an innocent woman who would have spent a weekend in jail if Harris hadn’t called the judge on a Friday afternoon to get her out. “She wondered, does this woman work weekends? Would she lose her job? Does she have young kids at home?” West said. “That’s what it means to stand for the people.”

On the final night of the convention, four members of the Exonerated Five, formerly called the “Central Park Five,” addressed the convention. They were imprisoned for a heinous crime they did not commit. Famously, Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for their execution, and has never apologized. Their presence clearly aligned the unfair dragnet of the criminal justice system on Black men with Trump, not Harris.

Pollster Roshni Nedungadi believes the campaign’s treatment of Harris’ background is effective. “What we’ve been doing is testing pieces of her accomplishments, and particularly what she’s been able to accomplish as district attorney and attorney general in California,” says Nedungadi, founding partner of HIT Strategies, which focuses on polling young voters, women, and people of color. “Just introducing small pieces of information about her bio increases her favorability by almost 50 percent.” Introducing voters to Harris’ Back on Track program, which she initiated in California to reduce recidivism, increased her favorability among voters of color by 52 percent, a HIT Strategies poll found.

“Public safety is going to be one of the big issues in this election cycle,” Nedunghadi continued. “So showing how she is equipped to handle public safety concerns is really validating, especially as a contrast to Donald Trump.”

Rahman notes that the most progress comes from Harris herself. “It’s actually rare, when VP Harris is on the campaign trail, to just reduce Donald Trump to a convicted felon,” she says. Notably, in Harris’ remarks on Thursday night, the word felon was absent, and her message echoed Rahman’s exhortations for a contrast in values. But the campaign and its surrogates are frequently using the word “felon” to brand Trump.

“The term ‘felon’ doesn’t really get at the nuance of what people are upset about,” says Joshua Hoe, a formerly incarcerated host of the Decarceration Nation podcast and policy manager at Dream.org. To Hoe, what angers people is that Trump “doesn’t take responsibility for anything that he does. He’s been more or less flouting that he violates the rules and the laws for years and years and never has any consequences while everyone else does. That’s why a very large number of people are actually upset.”

At a Thursday panel session exploring how Democrats can reach “unseen Black men,” a convention-goer asked the event’s host how to convince former “felons” to participate in elections.

Mondale Robinson, the founder of the Black Male Voter Project and the mayor of Enfield, North Carolina, offered a gentle correction: not felons, but “justice-impacted individuals.”

He went on to criticize Democrats’ embrace of framing the 2024 election around policing. The phrasing, he said, is an attempt to calm white voters’ fears about crime without “considering the harm that it’s going to do” to Black Americans, who are five times more likely to end up in state prisons than their white counterparts. It is a strategy, he says, that further alienates an untapped voting bloc of millions of Black people and others impacted by unjust policing.

“We need to take a break from these same media consultants we’ve been using forever, and switch up and rethink what it means to talk to voters that we’ve never talked to before,” Robinson said.

Other criminal justice reform activists share his concerns. Sheena Meade, CEO of the Clean Slate Initiative, said she was so “shocked” by the incessant use of the word “felon” as a stand-alone pejorative that she tore up the speech she planned to give at an NAACP event in Chicago and wrote a new one.

“We have to stop perpetuating this harmful rhetoric that draws on decades of fear-mongering and dehumanizes people with a record,” she said. “This kind of language impacts 72 million people, mostly adults, in the US—including me.”

To be sure, Trump is a felon. There are 34 guilty charges to prove it—and he is accused of the far more serious crime of trying to steal the 2020 election, among other infractions. But, as champions of restorative justice and prison reform, these advocates suggest that Democrats focus on Trump’s refusal to take accountability for his crimes, rather than the commission of them.

The advocates maintain they aren’t trying to sink the Harris campaign. People can support a presidential candidate and still want them to do better.

“Honest dialog about messaging should not be seen as an attack on the party, or the party’s candidates,” said Hoe, “but should be seen as an attempt to better ensure its messaging lives up to its ideals.”

There’s currently a bill sitting in the US Senate’s hopper that—if enacted—would expand eligibility for a child tax credit to include low-income and working-class families and provide a bit extra to parents with children under the age of 6.

More than 40 US senators have signed onto the legislation, which was introduced by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and is intended to help offset the skyrocketing costs of raising a child in a middle-class family: which, according to inflation-adjusted estimates from the US Department of Agriculture, average to more than $300,000 per kid over the course of their first 18 years.

But Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s presidential running mate, is not among the long list of co-sponsors. No Republican senators are—despite a temporary version of the tax credit reducing child poverty by nearly half during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and 75 percent of the public supporting the benefit.

Top Republicans claim to be the standard-bearers of family values; Trump brags about appointing the Supreme Court justices who gleefully overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and Vance seems to have an unrelenting obsession with a potential increase in babies that would logically follow the Dobbs decision. Particularly, he is infatuated with the role of parents mothers to raise those children.

“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs,” Vance tweeted in 2022, “you’ve been had.” Vance has also repeatedly said that women like vice president Kamala Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), are “childless cat ladies” and “sociopaths” for not having biological kids.

As such, the fact that the junior Ohio senator doesn’t back a wildly popular program that provides parents some spare change to cover essentials like baby formula and burp cloths or braces and back-to-school supplies is, perhaps, perplexing.

“If pro-family only means that you oppose abortion, then that’s a single issue. We vote on so many pro-family issues.”

Or is it? At the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago this week, lawmakers, delegates, and other attendees differentiated between the allegedly “pro-family” stances Vance and fellow Republicans support, versus the plans that the Democratic ticket endorses.

“So many health issues are pro-family. Education issues are pro-family. Job-training is pro-family. And I suggest somebody take a look at [Republicans’] voting record on these programs,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who sponsored the House version of the tax credit bill, tells Mother Jones. “If pro-family only means that you oppose abortion, then that’s a single issue. We vote on so many pro-family issues. It’s not just one issue.”

Nicole Wells Stallworth, an advocate for reproductive health and gender equity from Michigan, is deeply familiar with the concept of what it takes to raise a child. She became a mother at the age of 18.

As she was putting herself through college and graduate school, Wells Stallworth struggled to afford childcare. While working odd jobs to put food on the table, the single mom would normally have family members watch her daughter—unless her child was ill, in which case Wells Stallworth would bring her daughter to work and park her under a desk.

“I had to either bring her to work,” she tells me at a breakfast reception for Michigan Democrats on Wednesday, “or I would have to take time off and not be paid.”

“There’s a correlation between happy moms and successful children,” adds Wells Stallworth. “The Harris and the Biden administration’s family policies are policies that are truly supportive of the entire family, whereas the Trump-Vance policies—I’m just not sure how they benefit anyone. Other than [being] an ideological belief that is not shared by everyone.”

“They claim to be pro-family. No, they’re just pro-fetus and anti-woman.”

Monica Curls doesn’t have children of her own. But as an elected member of a school board in Kansas City, Missouri, she’s dedicated her professional life to kids’ educational journeys. “I get to advocate on behalf of thousands of children every day,” she says to me at the convention Tuesday night.

Curls mentions Republican opposition to legislation making childcare more affordable, the party’s desire to reduce expenditures on programs supplying nutritious food benefits to low-income families, and Trump’s desire to eliminate the US Department of Education. “How does that support the betterment of a child?” she asks, rhetorically. “They claim to be pro-family. No, they’re just pro-fetus and anti-woman.”

“It’s putting women in their place, and not giving them any other opportunities beyond that, because they don’t see us as valuable beyond that,” Curls says. “Our uterus is all we have to offer, according to them.”

Even then, factions of the party seem to have conditions around how those uteruses can be used to carry babies. For as much as Vance talks about his appreciation of motherhood and babies, he opposed a 2024 bill to enact protections of the fertility treatment IVF. (Some GOP state parties have also passed platforms stating they oppose the destruction of extra or abnormal embryos, which commonly result from IVF.)

During a brief prime-time DNC speech on Tuesday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq-war veteran who lost both legs when her helicopter was struck by a rocket, explained her previous battle with infertility. The Illinois Democrat called the 10-year ordeal “more painful than any wound I earned on the battlefield.”

Duckworth has since had two children, but warned that a second Trump administration could risk other families’ access to reproductive technology. “If they win, Republicans will not stop at banning abortion. They will come for IVF next,” she said.

To DeLauro, IVF access is one important component of pro-family policy. She defines the term as anything that makes families “not only succeed, but thrive. Our job is to use the power of the federal government to provide opportunity and make help to transform people’s lives. That’s what we are about.”

On the Trump-Vance version of the term, DeLauro doesn’t mince words. “You want to cut a fruit and vegetable program, you don’t want to deal with a WIC shortfall, and you don’t want to increase the funding for childcare?” she says, concluding: “Hell, you’re not pro-family.”

There’s currently a bill sitting in the US Senate’s hopper that—if enacted—would expand eligibility for a child tax credit to include low-income and working-class families and provide a bit extra to parents with children under the age of 6.

More than 40 US senators have signed onto the legislation, which was introduced by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and is intended to help offset the skyrocketing costs of raising a child in a middle-class family: which, according to inflation-adjusted estimates from the US Department of Agriculture, average to more than $300,000 per kid over the course of their first 18 years.

But Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s presidential running mate, is not among the long list of co-sponsors. No Republican senators are—despite a temporary version of the tax credit reducing child poverty by nearly half during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and 75 percent of the public supporting the benefit.

Top Republicans claim to be the standard-bearers of family values; Trump brags about appointing the Supreme Court justices who gleefully overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and Vance seems to have an unrelenting obsession with a potential increase in babies that would logically follow the Dobbs decision. Particularly, he is infatuated with the role of parents mothers to raise those children.

“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs,” Vance tweeted in 2022, “you’ve been had.” Vance has also repeatedly said that women like vice president Kamala Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), are “childless cat ladies” and “sociopaths” for not having biological kids.

As such, the fact that the junior Ohio senator doesn’t back a wildly popular program that provides parents some spare change to cover essentials like baby formula and burp cloths or braces and back-to-school supplies is, perhaps, perplexing.

“If pro-family only means that you oppose abortion, then that’s a single issue. We vote on so many pro-family issues.”

Or is it? At the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago this week, lawmakers, delegates, and other attendees differentiated between the allegedly “pro-family” stances Vance and fellow Republicans support, versus the plans that the Democratic ticket endorses.

“So many health issues are pro-family. Education issues are pro-family. Job-training is pro-family. And I suggest somebody take a look at [Republicans’] voting record on these programs,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who sponsored the House version of the tax credit bill, tells Mother Jones. “If pro-family only means that you oppose abortion, then that’s a single issue. We vote on so many pro-family issues. It’s not just one issue.”

Nicole Wells Stallworth, an advocate for reproductive health and gender equity from Michigan, is deeply familiar with the concept of what it takes to raise a child. She became a mother at the age of 18.

As she was putting herself through college and graduate school, Wells Stallworth struggled to afford childcare. While working odd jobs to put food on the table, the single mom would normally have family members watch her daughter—unless her child was ill, in which case Wells Stallworth would bring her daughter to work and park her under a desk.

“I had to either bring her to work,” she tells me at a breakfast reception for Michigan Democrats on Wednesday, “or I would have to take time off and not be paid.”

“There’s a correlation between happy moms and successful children,” adds Wells Stallworth. “The Harris and the Biden administration’s family policies are policies that are truly supportive of the entire family, whereas the Trump-Vance policies—I’m just not sure how they benefit anyone. Other than [being] an ideological belief that is not shared by everyone.”

“They claim to be pro-family. No, they’re just pro-fetus and anti-woman.”

Monica Curls doesn’t have children of her own. But as an elected member of a school board in Kansas City, Missouri, she’s dedicated her professional life to kids’ educational journeys. “I get to advocate on behalf of thousands of children every day,” she says to me at the convention Tuesday night.

Curls mentions Republican opposition to legislation making childcare more affordable, the party’s desire to reduce expenditures on programs supplying nutritious food benefits to low-income families, and Trump’s desire to eliminate the US Department of Education. “How does that support the betterment of a child?” she asks, rhetorically. “They claim to be pro-family. No, they’re just pro-fetus and anti-woman.”

“It’s putting women in their place, and not giving them any other opportunities beyond that, because they don’t see us as valuable beyond that,” Curls says. “Our uterus is all we have to offer, according to them.”

Even then, factions of the party seem to have conditions around how those uteruses can be used to carry babies. For as much as Vance talks about his appreciation of motherhood and babies, he opposed a 2024 bill to enact protections of the fertility treatment IVF. (Some GOP state parties have also passed platforms stating they oppose the destruction of extra or abnormal embryos, which commonly result from IVF.)

During a brief prime-time DNC speech on Tuesday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq-war veteran who lost both legs when her helicopter was struck by a rocket, explained her previous battle with infertility. The Illinois Democrat called the 10-year ordeal “more painful than any wound I earned on the battlefield.”

Duckworth has since had two children, but warned that a second Trump administration could risk other families’ access to reproductive technology. “If they win, Republicans will not stop at banning abortion. They will come for IVF next,” she said.

To DeLauro, IVF access is one important component of pro-family policy. She defines the term as anything that makes families “not only succeed, but thrive. Our job is to use the power of the federal government to provide opportunity and make help to transform people’s lives. That’s what we are about.”

On the Trump-Vance version of the term, DeLauro doesn’t mince words. “You want to cut a fruit and vegetable program, you don’t want to deal with a WIC shortfall, and you don’t want to increase the funding for childcare?” she says, concluding: “Hell, you’re not pro-family.”

At a Tuesday panel dedicated to “Protecting the Vote” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an expert speaker sounded as if he was holding back tears as he explained what motivates him to do the work.

His wife gave birth to a son just two weeks ago, he shared. Suddenly, his job wasn’t just about protecting democracy for the country, but also for his newborn. “I have to fight for his ability to continue to be a respected member of his community and a citizen of his country in a full way,” said Jake Kenswil, director of voter protection at the Democratic National Committee.

“This subject is emotional for us,” said Yvette Lewis, another speaker and the former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party. “What we need you to do is to be just as emotional when you’re talking to your communities,” she added, “and get them to feel what we hope we made you feel today—which is the urgency of why this is so very important.”

But there weren’t many people there to hear their pressing message. In a conference room that could have accommodated hundreds, less than 40 people showed; out of two dozen press-reserved seats, only one was filled (mine). The sparsely attended meeting hosted by Democratic legal experts belies the tremendous threat to voter confidence proliferating this cycle: Deepfake videos projecting fictitious messages from seemingly real officials. Disingenuous lawsuits amplifying debunked theories of fraud. Widespread challenges to voter rolls. Stricter laws on voter identification documentation. Plus, a torrent of requests and threats to local election workers trying to hold down the fort through all of the tumult.

“We have a lot of work to do to prepare for early voting, to ensure our elections are secure, [and] to protect the accuracy of our laws,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told me the following day. “And every minute we spend worrying or thinking about planning to protect against these threats is a minute that’s taken away from our ability to do our jobs.”

Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice, has a theory on the event’s low attendance Tuesday: “Lawyers are boring,” she, a lawyer herself, quipped at a separate event on Wednesday. Moreover, elected officials and election security experts have some trust in reforms that have occurred since President Donald Trump’s supporters infamously broke into the Capitol to overthrow the 2020 election on January 6, 2021.

“There is no legitimate loophole through which somebody can steal an election. It is actually illegal to throw out legitimate votes. It is illegal to reject certification. It is illegal to try to thwart a congressional count,” she said, pointing to the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act, which raised the threshold for members of Congress to challenge the Electoral College and clarified the role of the vice president in election certification.

That being said, with significant progress on protecting the sanctity of elections has come more aggressive tactics to undermine it. “There’s been a strengthening of safeguards,” Weiser said. “There’s also been an increase in risk level.”

In the spring, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump went on conservative cable news channel Newsmax to talk about the GOP’s efforts to ensure her father-in-law, former President Trump, is pleased with the election outcome in November.

“We have lawsuits in 81 states right now,” she said. Late-night television talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel was quick to mock her slip-up on elementary-level geography. “Not just Tennessee, eleven-essee, twelve-essee,” Kimmel joked about the impossible number of states. “West Dakota, South Virginia. Indiana, Out-diana, you name it—they’re suing.”

But as I reported in the September-October issue of Mother Jones, her claim was barely an exaggeration.

The RNC says it is already involved in at least 78 election-related lawsuits in 23 states, often working with white-shoe law firms—including Consovoy McCarthy, which employs multiple former clerks to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who may eventually be called upon to hear the merits of some of the cases. Several of them focus on longtime GOP bugaboos, like signature verification laws and absentee voting protocols. Others are dressed-up versions of Trump’s wilder conspiracies, including his claim that a “tremendous number of dead people” cast ballots in 2020. Importantly, the buckshot legal onslaught is preemptive, not defensive, and appears intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results. 

Despite the GOP’s claims repeatedly failing in courts, the lawsuits are effective in the sense that they “create smoke” before judges ultimately dismiss them, said Weiser. “They are exploiting a loophole in the system: Courts are slow.”

In our interview, Benson agreed that Republican National Committee lawsuits in Michigan—such as challenges to her state’s voter roll maintenance—are merely “an effort to drive a PR campaign, to drive a public narrative that sows seeds of distrust,” she said. “When the lawsuits ultimately get dismissed, the damage has already been done.”

Lawsuits aren’t the only weapon in the right’s arsenal. Several GOP-led states have enacted stricter voter identification laws that will increase barriers for voters who don’t possess identification for a variety of reasons. Election deniers are also running and winning positions in local election administration. Conservatives in Georgia are pushing for the ability to challenge voter registrations with limited data. And without an ounce of credible evidence, Trump also continues to insinuate there is fraud afoot, especially if he loses.

He maintains that the only way Democrats could win in 2024 is if they cheat. Therefore, he adds, his lead at the ballot box needs to be “too big to rig.” On the question of whether he will accept the 2024 results, Trump said during the June presidential debate: “If it’s a fair and legal and good election.” 

Legal experts on the left are countering Trump’s steady drumbeat of lies with tactics like publishing information about election rules in multiple languages, ensuring Democrat-allied lawyers observe court hearings related to election rules, and building relationships with local election boards to build trust, the panelists explained Tuesday.

At the state level, officials are also implementing new tools to fight the second iteration of the Big Lie.

Benson shared that her office is connecting overwhelmed election officials in her state with organizations that provide free legal support. Under her leadership, Michigan has also launched a “Democracy Ambassadors” program that distributes newsletters disproving election rumors and sharing helpful facts. The state has also emboldened messengers such as religious leaders and athletes to serve as sources of credible election information.

Michigan has also held “tabletop exercises that enable scenario planning and partnership building between law enforcement, first responders and clerks, so that there’s a direct line for them to call if something happens.”

“We at our office have all the information necessary to assure voters that their votes will be safe—their votes will be counted,” she added.

Efforts to fortify trust and stability in the electoral process will hopefully ensure that the vote of Kenswil’s newborn son will also be counted…in 18 years’ time.

In a coveted primetime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Monday night, three women shared the stage to speak about their harrowing personal experiences with pregnancy and abortion.

Amanda Zurawski told the story of how she was denied an abortion after going into pre-term labor well before her desired pregnancy was considered viable; the Texas woman developed a life-threatening case of sepsis and spent three days in an intensive care unit. Kentucky’s Hadley Duvall recounted how her stepfather raped her when she was 12, resulting in an (obviously) unwanted pregnancy that she (thankfully) did not carry to term due to a miscarriage. Kaitlyn Joshua discussed being turned away from two hospital emergency rooms that refused to treat her active miscarriage due to Louisiana’s strict abortion laws.

“I was in pain, bleeding so much my husband feared for my life,” Joshua said Monday. “No woman should experience what I endured, but too many have.”

The stories were jarring and emotional, and they contrasted sharply with how many Democrats have addressed abortion in the past. As recently as 2023, President Joe Biden—a devout Catholic—said he was not “big on abortion.”

But now, on the main stage of a national political convention with tens of thousands of attendees and millions more watching from home, the subject finally got stage-time proportional to its strength as a galvanizing political issue. “It’s a shift in the Democratic Party,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) tells Mother Jones. “For many years, people wouldn’t even say the word abortion out loud. I would be in a room saying, ‘We’re going to say the a-word here. We’re going to be to the point, because the harms that are being done are very blunt, they’re life and death.'”

The evolution is indicative of the changing of the guards—for starters, a person with ovaries now leads the presidential ticket—but also of abortion’s success at the polls and ballot measures since the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Reproductive rights groups have seen positive outcomes in every election in which abortion rights were tested in state referendums, including in the conservative strongholds of Ohio, Kentucky, and Kansas. Nationally, 63 percent of US adults support abortion in all or most cases, according to Pew Research Center.

On the party’s former messaging regarding abortion, Nebraska Democrat Jane Erdenberger, a convention attendee and former delegate, says: “We weren’t brave enough.”

“The best thing that happened to us as a party was to have Roe v. Wade overturned. People got so complacent. After 50 years, they just assumed it was a given, and now it’s like people are really shocked out of their lethargy,” adds Erdenberger’s husband, Mark Hoeger.

There remains some division among the left on how to discuss reproductive rights. A common rallying cry, including from Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, is that Democrats are working to reestablish Roe and thwart Republicans from advancing a national abortion ban.

According to some convention-goers and abortion-rights groups, that’s not nearly enough. The National Institute for Reproductive Health Action Fund (NIRHAF), for example, pushed out an email this week calling for Democrats to “scrap ‘Restore Roe'” from their lexicon.

Instead, NIRH Action Fund vice president Randi Gregory says the party needs to “clearly articulate what it looks like to liberate abortion rights from the chains of government interference.”

Pressley agrees that restoring the constitutional right to obtain an abortion isn’t a sufficient end goal. “Roe was always the floor. It was never the ceiling. Even when we had Roe, there were still gaps in access,” she says, touting her efforts to repeal restrictions on federal funding for the procedure.

But she points out that Democrats are certainly less likely to pass expansive abortion-rights legislation if they aren’t elected in the first place.

“One thing at a time here,” Pressley says. “So we need to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. We need to [get a majority] in the House. We need to get the gavel back, and we need to grow our number in the Senate, because [Harris] can’t do anything without partners.”

More critically, the party can’t do anything about abortion unless they are willing to prominently talk about abortion. Them doing so wasn’t always a guarantee.

“I’ve been in reproductive rights for close to 20 years, and I have never seen abortion this up-front in a presidential race,” says Nourbese Flint, president of All Above All, an abortion rights group. “I’m extremely excited that folks are talking about it—that people are saying the word abortion.”

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In a coveted primetime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Monday night, three women shared the stage to speak about their harrowing personal experiences with pregnancy and abortion.

Amanda Zurawski told the story of how she was denied an abortion after going into pre-term labor well before her desired pregnancy was considered viable; the Texas woman developed a life-threatening case of sepsis and spent three days in an intensive care unit. Kentucky’s Hadley Duvall recounted how her stepfather raped her when she was 12, resulting in an (obviously) unwanted pregnancy that she (thankfully) did not carry to term due to a miscarriage. Kaitlyn Joshua discussed being turned away from two hospital emergency rooms that refused to treat her active miscarriage due to Louisiana’s strict abortion laws.

“I was in pain, bleeding so much my husband feared for my life,” Joshua said Monday. “No woman should experience what I endured, but too many have.”

The stories were jarring and emotional, and they contrasted sharply with how many Democrats have addressed abortion in the past. As recently as 2023, President Joe Biden—a devout Catholic—said he was not “big on abortion.”

But now, on the main stage of a national political convention with tens of thousands of attendees and millions more watching from home, the subject finally got stage-time proportional to its strength as a galvanizing political issue. “It’s a shift in the Democratic Party,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) tells Mother Jones. “For many years, people wouldn’t even say the word abortion out loud. I would be in a room saying, ‘We’re going to say the a-word’ here. We’re going to be to the point, because the harms that are being done are very blunt, they’re life and death.'”

The evolution is indicative of the changing of the guards—for starters, a person with ovaries now leads the presidential ticket—but also of abortion’s success at the polls and ballot measures since the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Reproductive rights groups have seen positive outcomes in every election in which abortion rights were tested in state referendums, including in the conservative strongholds of Ohio, Kentucky, and Kansas. Nationally, 63 percent of US adults support abortion in all or most cases, according to Pew Research Center.

On the party’s former messaging regarding abortion, Nebraska Democrat Jane Erdenberger, a convention attendee and former delegate, says: “We weren’t brave enough.”

“The best thing that happened to us as a party was to have Roe v. Wade overturned. People got so complacent. After 50 years, they just assumed it was a given, and now it’s like people are really shocked out of their lethargy,” adds Erdenberger’s husband, Mark Hoeger.

There remains some division among the left on how to discuss reproductive rights. A common rallying cry, including from Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, is that Democrats are working to reestablish Roe and thwart Republicans from advancing a national abortion ban.

According to some convention-goers and abortion-rights groups, that’s not nearly enough. The National Institute for Reproductive Health Action Fund (NIRHAF), for example, pushed out an email this week calling for Democrats to “scrap ‘Restore Roe'” from their lexicon.

Instead, NIRH Action Fund vice president Randi Gregory says the party needs to “clearly articulate what it looks like to liberate abortion rights from the chains of government interference.”

Pressley agrees that restoring the constitutional right to obtain an abortion isn’t a sufficient end goal. “Roe was always the floor. It was never the ceiling. Even when we had Roe, there were still gaps in access,” she says, touting her efforts to repeal restrictions on federal funding for the procedure.

But she points out that Democrats are certainly less likely to pass expansive abortion-rights legislation if they aren’t elected in the first place.

“One thing at a time here,” Pressley says. “So we need to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. We need to [get a majority] in the House. We need to get the gavel back, and we need to grow our number in the Senate, because [Harris] can’t do anything without partners.”

More critically, the party can’t do anything about abortion unless they are willing to prominently talk about abortion. Them doing so wasn’t always a guarantee.

“I’ve been in reproductive rights for close to 20 years, and I have never seen abortion this up-front in a presidential race,” says Nourbese Flint, president of All Above All, an abortion rights group. “I’m extremely excited that folks are talking about it—that people are saying the word abortion.”

Shortly before Chicago’s 2023 mayoral election, Brandon Johnson appeared at a roundtable attended by the progressive activists and modern-day abolitionists powering his shoestring campaign. 

Johnson’s political beginnings weren’t that different from those of the activists supporting his candidacy. He started his career as a public school middle school teacher in a neighborhood once dubbed “the most dangerous” in the city. He went on to become a paid organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union, known for its polarizing yet successful teacher strikes in 2012 and 2019. In an effort to re-open a shuttered high school in 2015, Johnson joined a hunger strike and refused to eat solid foods for more than a week. Amid the racial justice protests of 2020, Johnson authored a resolution as a Cook County commissioner to “redirect funds from policing” to public services. (On the controversial concept of defunding the police, Johnson once said on a radio show, “I don’t look at it as a slogan. It’s an actual real political goal.”)

But as the 2023 election neared, the forward-thinking, cancel-rent, defund-the police campaign volunteers that launched Johnson from obscurity began to fear that Johnson’s campaign messaging was “straying from its initial public safety commitments.” 

At the roundtable, Johnson’s words fell a little short of revolutionary change. “I’m not going to become mayor and then capitalism will fall,” he joked, according to meeting attendee Asha Ransby-Sporn who wrote about the assembly for In These Times.

The gathering was significant in that it showed Johnson beginning to navigate the interests of his core constituency with those of the broader community that he now governs as Chicago’s mayor. And it is a place he finds himself in again as his city prepares to play host to the Democratic National Convention (DNC) beginning Monday.

His home turf will be teeming with thousands of local Chicago police officers whose Fraternal Order of Police union didn’t support his mayoral candidacy; droves of federal officials whose agencies will supersede his authority; marquee Democratic names who can easily boost political careers or stymie them; and tens of thousands of disillusioned progressive activists, who—like those at the meeting—feel discontent with the status quo, particularly Democrats’ continued support of Israel amidst its ongoing bombardment of Gaza.

A battle between protesters versus police. Constitutional rights versus safety public safety. Radicals versus realists.

But with his unique perspective as a former organizer and a critic of Israel’s aggressive military tactics who now helps oversee police accountability, Johnson is once more in the position of serving as a bridge between where he and fellow progressives want the party to be and where it is now. Only this time he’s playing that role on a national stage that may determine both the country’s political future, and his own.

“A number of people have had their careers get a springboard at the convention,” says Christopher Cooper, a Western Carolina University political science professor who points to Anthony J. Foxx rising from his post as a mayor hosting the 2012 DNC in Charlotte, North Carolina, to an Obama administration cabinet secretary in 2013.

The extent to which Johnson can manage the imperatives of the protesters to be heard and of law enforcement to ensure security will almost certainly affect whether the DNC serves as an accelerant for the momentum surging through liberal circles right now. Or, as was the case when anti-war protests broke out at the 1968 DNC, escalating stand-offs and violence between the two camps could bring enthusiasm to a screeching halt.

Outsiders describe the tensions as a battle between protesters versus police. Constitutional rights versus safety public safety. Radicals versus realists. But to Johnson, it’s a balance he wouldn’t be facing at all without his own activism-centered political ascension.

“I certainly understand that without protests,” he tells me during a 45-minute interview, “you and I don’t exist, quite frankly.”

At a contentious January city council meeting marked by passionate speeches and so much heckling that an hour-long recess had to be called, the new mayor cast the tie-breaking vote on a 23-23 deadlock to approve a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. More than 100 local governments have done so, but Chicago remains the largest by population.

If Johnson wasn’t mired in meetings with local and national lawmakers and law enforcement personnel ahead of the convention, it’s not crazy to envision a previous version of him among the activists painting picket signs to march near the convention site. His support for the city council resolution put him at odds with President Joe Biden and much of the rest of Democratic Party leadership, which has so far continued to supply Israel with military aid despite more than 40,000 reported Palestinian deaths since the terrorist-group Hamas launched its October 7 attacks on Israel, killing 1,200 and capturing more than 240 hostages.

“What’s happening right now is not only egregious, it is genocidal.”

Johnson’s position on the conflict also goes well beyond that of freshly minted Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who has shown sympathy for Palestinian suffering but has also expressed “unwavering” commitment to Israel and its security. “What’s happening right now is not only egregious, it is genocidal,” Johnson, by contrast, says in our interview. “We have to acknowledge and name it for what it is and have the moral courage to exercise our authority.”

His perspective on First Amendment rights also could not be more distinct from that of Richard J. Daley, who was Chicago’s mayor during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago—which is frequently compared to this year’s confab.

At the 1968 convention, Daley had the convention center surrounded with barbed wire. Working 12-hour shifts, police officers clubbed protesters with nightsticks. A few months before, during riots arising from Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Daley instructed the same police force to “shoot to kill arsonists” and “shoot to maim looters.”

In our interview, Johnson reiterates the role he believes protesters play in a just society—a position diametrically opposed to his 1968 predecessor. “My existence is not realized if it were not for protest, and protest is the place where the underdogs come together to win on behalf of the voiceless,” Johnson says.

Yet there are a striking number of similarities between this week’s DNC and the one that took place 56 years ago. In 1968, activists convened at the convention to hold Democrats accountable for their complicity in the Vietnam War; today, protest coalitions are amassing in the city to march against US support of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Reminiscent of Biden dropping out and endorsing his vice president to succeed him, incumbent president and early front-runner Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the 1968 race late in the game, enabling his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to clinch the Democratic nomination. In 2024, a gunman tried to assassinate Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Albeit unsuccessful, the recent shooting was redolent of the 1968 assassination on Robert F. Kennedy, whose eponymous son is now running for president this year as a controversial independent.

On the parallels, Johnson says: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes,” adding that his “preparation in the context of 1968” has been centered around what Chicago’s present values are.

Those values, Johnson says, are communicated through an expanded non-police crisis response network for mental health emergencies, a fledgling Department of Re-Entry to support formerly incarcerated individuals in avoiding recidivism, a newly appointed chief homelessness officer, and a $150 million outlay to manage the thousands of new migrants who have been bussed to Chicago by conservative governors with hard-line immigration views.

“These investments were going to happen whether the convention was coming or not,” he says. But an added bonus is that the convention will enable the rest of the country “to see what bold progressive leadership looks like.”

Though the DNC will allow Johnson to flaunt progressive politics to a broader audience and engage in dialogue about how the convention should operate logistically, he is far from having unilateral control. Since at least 2004, presidential nominating conventions have been designated as “National Special Security Events” (NSSE), which has shifted authority away from host city governments to fall under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security and Secret Service.

The NSSE designation “makes available the entire toolkit of the federal government to include very sensitive, even classified, resources that the federal government has and can use,” says former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, Frank Figliuzzi.

In case something goes awry, “there’s a clear chain of command,” Figliuzzi says. “If all hell breaks loose, the feds are in charge.”

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, who exchanged tips with his Chicago counterpart after his city hosted the Republican National Convention in July, maintains that a mayor can play an important role.

“He may not be calling the exact shots and leaving that to the decision makers, who are professionals and experts in the field of law enforcement,” says the Milwaukee leader. “But there’s still considerable involvement from his or her office in executing these sorts of events.”

Given his unique background in organizing and ties to protest groups, Johnson could also serve as an additional line of communication to foster goodwill between protesters and law enforcement.

“I have personally seen mayors weigh in and express their sentiments of, ‘I want people to have a voice. I want more designated protest platforms,’” adds Figliuzzi. “Does the chief of police have to listen to all that? Does the Secret Service really care what the mayor thinks? Yeah, they want to hear the mayor out.”

On Monday and Thursday, a coalition of more than 150 like-minded groups is planning to assemble tens of thousands of people for pro-Palestine marches that begin approximately half a mile from the DNC at Union Park.

The route is shorter than the one the protesters sought, though it will be much closer to the convention site than the city had initially intended. Johnson’s office suggested the 1.4 mile loop as an alternative to the city’s original request that the Coalition to March on the DNC begin their route almost four miles from the convention’s festivities.

“It’s not only a First Amendment issue, but it’s also a chance for the left of the Democrats—which is Brandon Johnson’s constituency—to put pressure on our Democratic leaders.”

Hatem Abudayyeh, a leader of the protest coalition, applauds Johnson for his help in securing their right to be within “sight and sound” of the convention. His help continued on Friday when Johnson personally intervened to rescind strict conditions the city applied to the coalition’s march, including limitations on sound systems and portable restrooms. Johnson’s negotiations made the group’s emergency motion about their First Amendment rights moot.

“He is a friend and an ally to all of the social justice movements in Chicago and beyond,” Abudayyeh says.

Not every protest group agrees Johnson’s advocacy has been sufficient. Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws, an organization fighting for reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, and an Israel-Palestine ceasefire, expressed that Johnson could have done more to help them secure a permit to march down Michigan Avenue, past the hotels hosting media and delegates, on Sunday before the convention kicks off. They applied for a permit in January, says member Anne Rumberger. It took a lawsuit from the ACLU for the organization to get their march approved in early August.

“It’s not only a First Amendment issue, but it’s also a chance for the left of the Democrats—which is Brandon Johnson’s constituency—to put pressure on our Democratic leaders at a national level,” says Rumberger. “Having some support from him around peacefully demonstrating and peacefully expressing views could have gone a long way if that support could have been part of the permit or appeals process.”

Spokesperson Ed Yohnka of the ACLU’s Illinois chapter says he isn’t convinced city leaders and police are on the same page when it comes to protest response tactics. Yohnka says they have not been assured the Chicago River drawbridges would not be raised to thwart protests, as was the case during the 2020 demonstrations responding to the murder of George Floyd.

“[Johnson’s] background—his history, certainly his instincts—are comforting,” says Yohnka. “But does that trickle down… to line officers who are going to be face to face with protesters?”

The answer to that question is almost certainly imminent. While the Coalition to March on the DNC was able to obtain its permit too, the approved route requires them to use certain side streets that the group believes may cause lengthy bottlenecks.

Whether or not the coalition gets full approval to use the streets they want, Abudayyeh says they will stick to their plans. “We dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t,’ and if they don’t [approve our plans], we’re still telling people: 12 noon, August 19, Union Park,” he says. “We’ve organized a ton of protests over the years without any permits—we know how to do that.”

Reportedly, a special courtroom has been prepared to process mass arrests. Criminal jury trials have also been re-scheduled for after the DNC, according to News Nation, and criminal judges have been told to free up their week in case their services are needed.

At a July 25 security briefing, federal and local law enforcement leaders as well as city and state officials laid out the preparations they’ve made ahead of the convention. According to officials, there will be 2,500 Chicago police officers, an additional 500 from out of town, plus an array of Secret Service personnel.

When it was his turn to speak, Johnson told the media “Chicago is ready” for its moment in the national political limelight.

We will soon find out whether the mayor is, too.

On Thursday, while attacking Vice President Kamala Harris during a meandering Mar-a-Lago press conference, the former president shared an anecdote about almost meeting his maker during a turbulent helicopter ride with her ex-boyfriend, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.

“I know Willie Brown very well. In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought, ‘Maybe this is the end.’ We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing. And Willie, he was a little concerned,” Trump claimed, adding that during their interaction Brown had told him “terrible things” about Harris.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten jumbled.

But Brown, who dated Harris in the mid-1990s and is now 90 years old, soon refuted Trump’s account, denying he ever shared a helicopter with Trump. “If I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!” Brown told the New York Times.

Instead, the paper suggestively reported that Trump did share a helicopter with a prominent California politician named Brown—but not that one—when he flew alongside former California governor Jerry Brown to survey wildfire damage in 2018. A spokesperson for Jerry Brown clarified there had been “no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”

Still, Trump doubled down, insisting that despite Willie Brown’s recollection to the contrary, the two had shared a nervy helicopter flight. He even suggested he might sue the newspaper over its reporting on the issue.

But later in the day, Nate Holden—a political figure from the Los Angeles area who, like Brown, is African American—stepped forward to explain that he and Trump had shared such a flight around 1990, when the two were discussing a Southern California real estate project. Trump has yet to comment on Holden’s explanation.

At last month’s Republican National Convention, the 78-year-old Trump became the country’s oldest-ever major-party presidential nominee. While Trump regularly brags about his mental acuity, it wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten jumbled. Here are three past highlights:

Former President Barack Obama… for Ben Carson

At a campaign event in 2016, Trump repeatedly referred to Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who was running in that year’s GOP primary, as “Obama.”

“What Ted Cruz did to Obama, where he said that Obama [was going to] quit the race… Right? Is that right?” asked Trump, in the midst of that year’s GOP primary battle.

Trump was actually referring to reports of the Cruz campaign spreading information that Carson, who would eventually become Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, would drop out of the running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

E. Jean Carroll… for his ex-wife

During a deposition for civil charges of sexual abuse and defamation filed against Trump by writer E. Jean Carroll, Trump mistakenly confused Carroll for his second wife, Marla Maples.

“That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,” he told Carroll’s lawyer when viewing an image of Carroll. Video of that moment was then shown to the jury, who would eventually find Trump liable for attacking Carroll in a department store.

Before the verdict Trump denied the allegations by claiming that Carroll, despite his having confused her with someone he married, was “not my type.”

Joe Biden… for Barack Obama

At a rally in Virginia in March, Trump repeatedly appeared to sub in Obama’s name for Biden’s when speaking about Russia’s relations with the United States. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said. According to Reuters, it was at least the seventh time he’d made the mistake, though at a February rally, Trump claimed he substitutes names on purpose.

 

On her way to a packed rally in Glendale, Arizona on Friday, Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris made a pit stop in Phoenix to greet campaign volunteers.

The Arizona Republic newspaper described the energy as “exuberant” as Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, worked the room to thank supporters for their work.

“What is that?” asked Harris, pointing to a large circle on a poster the volunteers had prepared for the rally, which would attract 15,000 people. “It’s a coconut,” said a volunteer, a reference to a line in 2023 Harris speech that has become a meme.

The tone reversal is paying off for Kamala Harris.

Harris responded with a big grin and her characteristic laugh. It was a quick moment, but one that embodied the spirit of the still-nascent Harris-Walz campaign. Under President Joe Biden’s steerage, the Democrats’ 2024 messaging was centered on former president Donald Trump’s threat to our governing system: a well-supported and somber allegation, but not a new one after eight years. In contrast, Harris has attempted to play up joy at her rallies, by including performances by Megan Thee Stallion and Bon Iver, and taking time to idealize a happy and well-functioning democracy.

New data suggest the tone reversal is paying off: Harris leads Trump in three critical swing states, according to fresh polling from the New York Times and Siena College. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan likely voters prefer Harris to Trump, 50-46 percent; when Biden led the ticket, similar polls were tied or showed a slight Trump advantage.

As Harris and Walz—a former football coach, educator, and congressman who has been compared to the big-hearted television character Ted Lasso—campaign for a future in which forming labor unions, retiring, buying homes, and obtaining health care are all easier, the New York Times reported in an in-depth article on Saturday showing that Trump is… well… being Trump: Obsessing over his deceitful claim that Democrats are hijacking elections; doubling-down on his earlier comments that Harris, who is Black, has only recently decided to be Black for political gain (“I think I was right,” Trump reportedly said privately); and instructing aides to bombard one of his wealthiest donors with a deluge of angry text messages.

According to the Times, Trump rejects the suggestion that he is a softer version of himself in the wake of the July assassination attempt against him, reporting that he insisted “I’m not nicer” at an early August dinner. The paper also pointed out that Trump called Harris “nasty” on cable news, and reported he has repeatedly referred to her as a “bitch” in private. (His campaign refutes the claim.)

At the same August dinner, a wealthy real estate mogul asked Trump how he planned to counter the Democrats’ more jubilant campaign strategy. Trump, according to the Times, didn’t show any interest in offering a positive vision or minimizing his repertoire of insults. He instead responded by criticizing Harris—and concluding that “I am who I am.”

On Thursday, while attacking Vice President Kamala Harris during a meandering Mar-a-Lago press conference, the former president shared an anecdote about almost meeting his maker during a turbulent helicopter ride with her ex-boyfriend, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.

“I know Willie Brown very well. In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought, ‘Maybe this is the end.’ We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing. And Willie, he was a little concerned,” Trump claimed, adding that during their interaction Brown had told him “terrible things” about Harris.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten jumbled.

But Brown, who dated Harris in the mid-1990s and is now 90 years old, soon refuted Trump’s account, denying he ever shared a helicopter with Trump. “If I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!” Brown told the New York Times.

Instead, the paper suggestively reported that Trump did share a helicopter with a prominent California politician named Brown—but not that one—when he flew alongside former California governor Jerry Brown to survey wildfire damage in 2018. A spokesperson for Jerry Brown clarified there had been “no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”

Still, Trump doubled down, insisting that despite Willie Brown’s recollection to the contrary, the two had shared a nervy helicopter flight. He even suggested he might sue the newspaper over its reporting on the issue.

But later in the day, Nate Holden—a political figure from the Los Angeles area who, like Brown, is African American—stepped forward to explain that he and Trump had shared such a flight around 1990, when the two were discussing a Southern California real estate project. Trump has yet to comment on Holden’s explanation.

At last month’s Republican National Convention, the 78-year-old Trump became the country’s oldest-ever major-party presidential nominee. While Trump regularly brags about his mental acuity, it wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten jumbled. Here are three past highlights:

Former President Barack Obama… for Ben Carson

At a campaign event in 2016, Trump repeatedly referred to Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who was running in that year’s GOP primary, as “Obama.”

“What Ted Cruz did to Obama, where he said that Obama [was going to] quit the race… Right? Is that right?” asked Trump, in the midst of that year’s GOP primary battle.

Trump was actually referring to reports of the Cruz campaign spreading information that Carson, who would eventually become Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, would drop out of the running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

E. Jean Carroll… for his ex-wife

During a deposition for civil charges of sexual abuse and defamation filed against Trump by writer E. Jean Carroll, Trump mistakenly confused Carroll for his second wife, Marla Maples.

“That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,” he told Carroll’s lawyer when viewing an image of Carroll. Video of that moment was then shown to the jury, who would eventually find Trump liable for attacking Carroll in a department store.

Before the verdict Trump denied the allegations by claiming that Carroll, despite his having confused her with someone he married, was “not my type.”

Joe Biden… for Barack Obama

At a rally in Virginia in March, Trump repeatedly appeared to sub in Obama’s name for Biden’s when speaking about Russia’s relations with the United States. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said. According to Reuters, it was at least the seventh time he’d made the mistake, though at a February rally, Trump claimed he substitutes names on purpose.

 

On her way to a packed rally in Glendale, Arizona on Friday, Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris made a pit stop in Phoenix to greet campaign volunteers.

The Arizona Republic newspaper described the energy as “exuberant” as Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, worked the room to thank supporters for their work.

“What is that?” asked Harris, pointing to a large circle on a poster the volunteers had prepared for the rally, which would attract 15,000 people. “It’s a coconut,” said a volunteer, a reference to a line in 2023 Harris speech that has become a meme.

The tone reversal is paying off for Kamala Harris.

Harris responded with a big grin and her characteristic laugh. It was a quick moment, but one that embodied the spirit of the still-nascent Harris-Walz campaign. Under President Joe Biden’s steerage, the Democrats’ 2024 messaging was centered on former president Donald Trump’s threat to our governing system: a well-supported and somber allegation, but not a new one after eight years. In contrast, Harris has attempted to play up joy at her rallies, by including performances by Megan Thee Stallion and Bon Iver, and taking time to idealize a happy and well-functioning democracy.

New data suggest the tone reversal is paying off: Harris leads Trump in three critical swing states, according to fresh polling from the New York Times and Siena College. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan likely voters prefer Harris to Trump, 50-46 percent; when Biden led the ticket, similar polls were tied or showed a slight Trump advantage.

As Harris and Walz—a former football coach, educator, and congressman who has been compared to the big-hearted television character Ted Lasso—campaign for a future in which forming labor unions, retiring, buying homes, and obtaining health care are all easier, the New York Times reported in an in-depth article on Saturday showing that Trump is… well… being Trump: Obsessing over his deceitful claim that Democrats are hijacking elections; doubling-down on his earlier comments that Harris, who is Black, has only recently decided to be Black for political gain (“I think I was right,” Trump reportedly said privately); and instructing aides to bombard one of his wealthiest donors with a deluge of angry text messages.

According to the Times, Trump rejects the suggestion that he is a softer version of himself in the wake of the July assassination attempt against him, reporting that he insisted “I’m not nicer” at an early August dinner. The paper also pointed out that Trump called Harris “nasty” on cable news, and reported he has repeatedly referred to her as a “bitch” in private. (His campaign refutes the claim.)

At the same August dinner, a wealthy real estate mogul asked Trump how he planned to counter the Democrats’ more jubilant campaign strategy. Trump, according to the Times, didn’t show any interest in offering a positive vision or minimizing his repertoire of insults. He instead responded by criticizing Harris—and concluding that “I am who I am.”

In the 1960s and 70s, Jane Goodman recalls dealing with systemic misogyny. Women were not able to get credit cards in their own names until 1974, for example. Now 78, Goodman, a former actress and government worker, also remembers accompanying her roommate for an “illegal abortion in a hotel room” in New York City during her sophomore year at Connecticut College for Women, before the constitutional right to an abortion was established via Roe v. Wade in 1973. “That was a chilling nightmare,” she says.

What Goodman does not recall are any disparaging comments on her status as a childless woman, even though she remained so until she had a child at age 40, during a period when the average age of becoming a mother was 21. “Nobody thought that I was not fulfilling my destiny or duty to society because I was being productive,” she says. “I had gone to college. I was using my degree. I got jobs, I paid taxes.”

Today, decades later, similarly situated women have recently faced a deluge of judgment triggered by former president Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. Unsurprisingly, Vance has repeatedly criticized liberals, but one particular and controversial target of his contempt are women—including presumed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris—who do not have biological kids.

In a 2021 interview that has recently dominated headlines, Vance told conservative TV firebrand Tucker Carlson, “We’re effectively run in this country—via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs—by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” (Vance specifically called out Vice President Harris, who has two step-children, and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as “people without children” in the Democratic party.)

Then, in a speech from 2021 that has also resurfaced, Vance suggested people with kids should have more voting power than people without. “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children,” he said at an event hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative group.

Vance isn’t the only person of influence criticizing childless women. Conservative writer John Mac Ghlionn recently penned a piece in Newsweek arguing that one of the most famous singers of all time, Taylor Swift, should not necessarily be considered a role model because “Swift remains unmarried and childless” at age 34, he wrote.

Barbara Collura, president of the national infertility support group Resolve, says women are accustomed to strangers expressing rude opinions about their maternal status. But what’s startling to her is that despite progress in policy and employment spaces regarding infertility and even paid leave for miscarriages, it is “disappointing” that there are now “national leaders just making a judgment about people who are childless.”

As voters of various political persuasions shift leftward in response to the GOP’s anti-abortion rhetoric, the focus on undermining people with no children has roused a new crowd of Harris campaign surrogates: the large, and growing, number of adults who, because of a deliberate choice not to have children or because of struggles with infertility, are without kids. (The proportion of adults under 50 unlikely to ever have kids rose 10 percent in the last five years, according to Pew Research Center.)

Harris—who is an involved stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two adult children from his first marriage—has not commented on Vance’s statements. But people without biological children across the political spectrum have resoundingly criticized the increasingly relentless pro-natalist perspective from the right, including from one of the party’s most prominent leaders.

“How dare you denigrate them and say they are not as valuable?”

“I have been trying to warn every conservative man I know—these JD comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends,” said Meghan McCain, the daughter of late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain, and vocal critic of Trump.

Among Vance’s detractors is the Hollywood superstar Jennifer Aniston, who has generally distanced herself from the political fray: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of the United States,” she wrote on social media. Former Trump Administration official Alyssa Farah Griffin (who denounced the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and, like Aniston, does not have children) also excoriated Vance. “How dare you denigrate them and say they are not as valuable?” Griffin said on the daytime television talk show The View.

Joining the chorus are everyday Americans who have battled infertility or chosen not to have children for a wide variety of personal reasons. “To follow my dreams, to not devote my time to taking carloads of kids to sports—I just knew my time had to be free,” said Nancy Strachan, 75, of Virginia. “I never regretted it.”

Sans children, Strachan has been able to fight world hunger and climate change in underdeveloped countries. She now says she is more motivated than ever to devote her free time to electing a Democrat to the White House, perhaps by volunteering for phone banks and donating money. “For him to judge women who were childless, it triggered something really, really deep in me,” she said.

Adult men without children, who are less often on the receiving end of probing questions about procreation plans, are also incensed. Bob Cranston, a self-described “childless cat dad” from Las Vegas, explains that he and his his ex-wife unsuccessfully attempted to start a family. “We had friends who did the $50,000 thing, and we just said, ‘Look, we’re not going to do that,'” he explained. “First, I just don’t have that kind of money to throw around. And secondly, we were not that desperate. If it happens, great. If it doesn’t, that’s life.” In the end, he says, “It just didn’t work out. I don’t think anybody should hold that against anybody.”

Approximately one in six US couples struggles with infertility, and they too have been outraged by Vance’s remarks—which have even more sting as an increasing faction of his party’s most extreme anti-abortion flank has attempted to make IVF more difficult by regulating the disposal of embryos, which often happens throughout the infertility treatment process.

“To make some judgment about a person without kids, and secondly, to then say that their worth to society is somehow less—I think that really hit our community incredibly hard,” said Resolve’s Collura. “Don’t mess with the infertility family-building community, because this is a community that’s not going to take kindly to people who are going to attack us, or somehow say that we’re less engaged in civil society because of what our family looks like.”

Vance’s comments about Harris not having kids was also perceived as the erasure of stepparents, who work hard to build meaningful, parental relationships with their spouses’ children. Rachelle Katz, family and marriage therapist and author of the book The Happy Stepmother, argues that talking about Harris as childless is “a modern way of stigmatizing stepmothers as wicked and evil—just updating the stereotype a little.”

“It makes me hopeful about Kamala. She’s worked hard as a step mother. She is used to hard work.”

A step-mother herself, Katz describes the process as “far and away, the hardest role in society.” She continues: “It makes me hopeful about Kamala. She’s worked hard as a step mother. She is used to hard work.”

In a combative interview at an event hosted by Black journalists on Wednesday, Trump defended his selection of Vance, saying, “historically, vice presidents have very little impact in terms of the election—I mean, virtually no impact.”

Droves of people hurt by Vance’s comments about people without children would disagree.

Strachan, who joined a Facebook group called “Cat Ladies for Kamala Harris” (48,300 members and counting) has one thing to say: “Wait for November 5.”

When President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race on July 21 and subsequently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the Democratic ticket, the rebrand was swift. No longer would the Democratic campaign be focused (almost entirely) around the proclamation that former President Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Cute campaign-speech references to Bidenism—“malarkey” and “ice cream”—have already been forgotten.

But calling 78-year-old Trump “weird” and his GOP running mate, JD Vance, a “creep”? Paying homage to pop star Charli XCX’s new album, Brat, in online campaign materials? NYSNC singer Lance Bass joining a Harris TikTok video to say “Bye Bye Bye” to Trump in November? These tactics are all In. In. In.

The tone shifts indicate a younger, more internet-savvy candidate ascending as the party’s presumed nominee. Unlike 81-year-old Biden—whose 1942 birthdate is several years closer to Abraham Lincoln’s presidential inauguration in 1861 than his own in 2021—Harris has step-children in their 20s. She goes to Beyoncé concerts. Occasionally, she even talks about astrological signs (she’s a Libra).

More than just the sign of a changing regime, the campaign’s refreshed vernacular also indicates a reinvigorated commitment to courting young voters. So far, the 59-year-old veep seems to be gaining ground. A July Axios–Generation Lab poll showed a 7 percent bump—from 53 to 60 percent—among voters under 35 since Harris was moved up the ticket. On Friday, 17 youth organizing groups released a joint statement supporting Harris, calling her a “champion of reproductive freedom, climate action, economic justice, and gun violence prevention.”

Still, it’s far from a done deal that young voters—many of whom are frustrated by the current administration’s steadfast support of Israel’s military operations amid death and famine in Palestine—will actually show up to cast ballots in November. And it will take more than assembling celebrity cameos and embracing Gen Z jargon to win them over.

Harris needs to not only get young people to vote, but also excited enough to campaign for her.

“We care about a lot more than just memes,” says Lily Greenberg Call, a 26-year-old alumna of the Biden-Harris administration and 2020 campaign, as well as a former intern to Harris on Capitol Hill.

As I wrote in February, the politically involved youth who are most frustrated by the Biden-Harris administration are also the people who historically have done the miles of door-knocking and marathon sessions of text-blasting that Democrats rely on to get out the vote:

The political issue Biden faces in 2024 isn’t merely that young people might not feel compelled to vote for him. Young people—often childless and more able to take on low-paid or even unpaid entry-level campaign work with unconventional hours and an abrupt end date of November 6—might not feel motivated to campaign for him. 

In a Saturday video address to Voters of Tomorrow, a political organization run by and for Gen Z, Harris acknowledged she has work to do.

“We know young voters will be key, and we know your vote can’t be taken for granted; it must be earned,” she said to the hundreds of teens and young twentysomethings gathered in Atlanta. “That’s exactly what we will do.”

When I spoke in February to a dozen young voters and campaign workers before Biden dropped out, they mostly expressed a “fractured” and “hopeless” malaise.

As I checked back in over the past few weeks, there is now a faint glimmer of hope in their voices. “I’m not feeling despair. Mostly concern…which is better…I think,” says Darcy Pollard, a 24-year-old former Biden 2020 campaign staffer who has since denounced Biden for his uncompromising commitment to Israel.

“Young people right now are cautiously optimistic about her, and we are watching carefully to see what she does and who she surrounds herself with,” says Santiago Mayer, the executive director of Voters of Tomorrow.

One of the most important choices for voters that Harris can make is who she will tap to join the ticket as her running mate.

“If she chooses someone who has been unsupportive of the pro-Palestine movement, that’s a strong communication to voters,” says Maryam Hassanein, 24, who used to work for the Biden administration’s Department of Interior before resigning in protest of America’s financial contributions to the war against Hamas that has displaced, injured, and killed thousands of Palestinians.

“I would be concerned if she picked someone who was supportive of the pretty intense police crackdown on non-violent protests,” says Greenberg Call, a Jewish American who wants Harris to use diplomatic leverage to push for Israel to initiate a permanent ceasefire and for Hamas to release the remaining Israeli hostages.

Last week, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington, DC, by invitation of congressional Republicans, roughly half of Democratic lawmakers declined to hear him speak. (One Democratic contender for vice president, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, attended the speech.) Harris met with the prime minister the next day, and had, in her words, a “frank and constructive” conversation with Netanyahu about the “dire” humanitarian circumstances in Gaza. Harris also denounced what she called “despicable acts by unpatriotic protestors” apparent at a pro-Palestine protest half a mile from the Capitol last week, in which activists burned American flags and graffitied a statue with references to Hamas.

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Hassanein was pleased the vice president expressed sympathy for Palestinians, but was disappointed that, in her post-meeting statement, Harris “lacked naming Israel as bad actors, in terms of what they are doing in Gaza.”

The presumed Democratic nominee needs to be more explicit of her positions, Hassanein adds: “It’s not wise to just immediately back someone when we don’t know how she’ll stand on really important issues.”

“In the context of Israel and the genocide it’s carrying out on Palestinians,” says University of Arizona pro-Palestine student organizer Asani Fowler, “she hasn’t necessarily denounced Israel and she hasn’t said whether she’d continue to support them.”

It’s not just Israel-Palestine. Young people are also looking for Harris to lay out a platform of her explicit policy intentions to build on what the current administration has accomplished.

“If Kamala Harris wants to be taken seriously by Gen Z, she needs to show us she’s serious about protecting our futures,” 18-year-old Adah Crandall said in a statement after joining a 150-person protest outside Democratic National Committee headquarters in DC on Monday. “That means campaigning on investing in green schools and housing, protecting our air and water from polluters, and rapidly building an affordable and renewable energy system.”

“I don’t think that the campaign should think that they have it in the bag. There has to be some actual teeth, not just talk. She has to prove herself to a lot of coalitions within the party,” says Greenberg Call. “I feel optimistic that her team understands that more than Biden’s team did. But I am still cautious.”

To be sure, Harris for President is still in its nascency. While the Harris campaign has hosted a national organizing call with thousands of young people and launched a youth Discord channel, staff are still figuring out the complete strategy. (If the Harris campaign is reading this: Mike Nellis, who used to oversee digital strategy for Harris, tells me he’d love to see her on the popular YouTube show Hot Ones. “There are things that she can do that Donald Trump and Joe Biden could not do,” Nellis says.)

It will be complex for Harris to differentiate herself, too. She is still number two in command in the current White House; there’s an inherent pressure for her not to overstep Biden’s positions on foreign and domestic policy while he’s still her boss.

But the power dynamics are changing. And slowly, so are youth outlooks.

In February, when I asked Darcy Pollard how she felt when her peers reached out about the presidential election, she told me she did not have much to retort. Often, she would tell them, “I see where you’re coming from.”

Now, when Pollard gets a ping from friends about the election, she has more reason to be cheery.

“They’re not saying, ‘Darcy, I’m not voting.’ They’re saying, ‘Wait, should I vote?'” Pollard explains. “The conversation has changed.”