As Georgia vote counters page through the absentee and mail-in ballots, a few folks seated nearby who self-identify as “poll observers” are watching closely. A new election law in Georgia permitted anyone designated by an “independent candidate, nonpartisan candidate, a political party, or political body” to gain more access to voting centers and tabulation sites. Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump—who happens to be former President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law—and RNC Chair Michael Whatley embarked on a drive to recruit more than 200,000 poll watchers. As absentee and mail-in ballots began to be tallied this weekend, Whatley tweeted, “We have eyes in the room as votes are being counted.”
Live from Fulton County, Georgia… meet the self-appointed "vote monitors" looking for fraud: pic.twitter.com/tAOA2hqdVt
Mother Jones editor andsenior reporter Kiera Butler lives in Georgia and visited the Fulton County Elections Hub and Operations Center, where she spoke with a few poll observers. She wondered why they were there, who they voted for, and what they thought about the 2020 election. Rodney Kelso, a Trump supporter from Chattahoochee Hills, wanted to observe and “make sure everything is fair and we have a smooth process.” Kelso believed the 2020 presidential election was riddled with problems and believes mail-in ballots made the US vulnerable to “more fraud and nefarious deeds.” Rodney’s wife, Debi, also a Trump supporter, who shares her husband’s suspicions about the 2020 election, signed on to observe the count in Fulton County because she wanted to see the process up close.
As far as the January 6 attack on the US Capitol is concerned, both Rodney and Debi believe it was a farce. “It was a coup d’état,” said Rodney, “Our government was overthrown by foreign agents.” These were not Trump supporters storming the Capitol, they said. Debi believes the FBI was in on it.
Accepting the results of the 2024 election for Debi will be no problem “if there’s no cheating and everything’s on the up and up,” she said. “Then the winners win, the losers lose, regardless of who it is.”
Today, voters in several states will get a say on ballot measures related to climate initiatives. Across the country, there are hotly debated propositions surrounding pipeline construction, climate infrastructure, and carbon reduction. (And fate of the planet aside, there’s also one referendum that could usher in a new tree-centric, state flag.)
Here’s a round-up of the green issues, big and small, that some voters will see on their ballot.
Alabama: Amendment 1 Currently, Alabama schools hold lands that are managed by the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which has prevented its timberland from being sold or leased. This amendment could allow some local boards of education to manage, sell, or lease land and its natural resources to fund education.
California: Proposition 4 California voters are deciding whether to allocate another $10 billion to climate change preparedness infrastructure projects. The money would go to preventing wildfires, developing drought and coastal resilience, mitigating rising sea level impact, improving drinking water, and other related projects, with 40 percent of the funding destined for disadvantaged communities.
Louisiana: Outer Continental Shelf Revenues for Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund Amendment Louisiana voters will decide whether money the state generates from the production of wind, solar, or other alternative energy on the Outer Continental Shelf will, like similar revenue from oil and gas, be used to fund wetlands preservation, coastal restoration, hurricane protection, and infrastructure directly impacted by wetlands loss.
Maine: Question 5 Maine’s flag might get a green boost. Residents will vote on replacing the state seal-based flag with one bearing the image of a pine tree and the North Star, inspired by “an Eastern White Pine in Governor’s Grove at Viles Arboretum,” according to the artist.
Minnesota: Amendment 1 If passed, Minnesota will be allowed to extend for another 25 years a program allocating 40 percent of the state’s lottery revenue into the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, which supports conservation projects.
Rhode Island: Question 4 Ocean State voters will weigh issuing $53 million in bonds to fund environmental infrastructure projects, including wind development projects and climate change resilience efforts.
South Dakota: Referred Law 21 South Dakotans will have a say in an ongoing battle surrounding a $5.5 billion carbon dioxide pipeline network and landowners rights. Supporters of the so-called “Landowner Bill of Rights,” argue it will create regulatory uniformity, protect private property, and boost agriculture. The opposition describes this bill as a ”trojan horse” for the pipeline company behind the project, Summit Carbon Solutions, allowing it to bypass local government by undermining “local control over zoning laws, pipeline setbacks, and other vital safety measures.”
Washington: Initiative 2066 This initiative, funded by fossil fuel and construction groups, would hinder, or even ban, government efforts to incentivize replacing gas stoves with energy-efficient electric appliances.
Initiative 2117 Residents of the Evergreen state may also vote to repeal its 2021 Climate Commitment Act, a carbon market program that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent by 2050. As of 2023, the program took in over $2 billion from the state’s largest polluters—money that went into environmental programs.
Across the country, you can find small town diners and watering holes proudly displaying photos of a president stopping by on the campaign trail. It’s not only a memento of how the person who got the nuclear codes may have ordered a burger or a slice of rhubarb pie—it’s a reminder of how voters have looked to national candidates’ food and beverage choices as one way to understand if inherently elite politicians are salt of the earth.
In forming her public image, Harris has showcased prowess in the kitchen.
This year, campaign season served up a buffet of food-related happenings and candidate signals, that sometimes, explains University of Buffalo political scientist Jacob Neiheisel, reveal politically salient “boundary markers between groups” and “status anxieties.”
One food gaffe that stands out in history came during incumbent Gerald Ford’s 1976 campaign, when he bit into a tamale in Texas, husk and all, and nearly choked. Such missteps are consequential, Neiheisel says, because it’s “seen as some kind of indicator that they’re out of touch with the electors, that they don’t know the people who they would be representing.”
This year, the closest we’ve come was JD Vance’s stop at Holt’s Sweet Shop, a Florida doughnut seller. His inability to engage the counter staff while standing draped in a suit and a seeming expectation that he’d be recognized—along with his order of “whatever makes sense”—brought national derision. As one succinct YouTube commenter put it, they had “never seen a VP candidate act with less charisma.”
Mountain Dew, also largely thanks to JD Vance, became a token of a certain kind of white manhood, after he, in attempting a jab against overreaching “woke” politics, spoke about drinking a Diet Mountain Dew and how Democrats were for some reason “going to call that racist.” A week later, Democrat vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz proved him wrong by reaffirming his historic love for Diet Dew, telling a voter online that drinking one was the best way to start a morning. In October, the Harris campaign published a video of a blaze orange-bedecked Walz hunting and holding a shotgun, saying he’s looking to “grab a Diet Dew” and “pound one down.” As that guns-and-ammo display suggests, “Diet Mountain Dew has something to say about masculinity,” Contois says, “but also about regionality,” referencing the drink’s “hillbilly”-tied branding and popularity across a so-called “Mountain Dew Belt” spanning parts of Appalachia and rural, middle America.
Despite Walz’s language calling to mind frat basement chugging, the Minnesota governor brings nearly 30 years of sobriety to the ticket. But when Kamala Harris went on Stephen Colbert’s show, the late night host brought up what he called one of the “old saws” of political likability: would I grab a beer with the candidate? (To play along, she was served a can of Miller High Life.)
But when it comes to playing politics with eating and drinking, Harris has largely been focused on letting voters know she likes to cook. That’s no surprise, according to the University of Tulsa’s Emily Contois, who has written that female candidates, in walking “an impossible line” of identity politics, often “navigate voter perceptions of both gender and electability through food and cooking.”
“You have to be masculine enough that they believe you can do the job,” Contois, a professor of media studies, says. “You have to be feminine enough that they think you’re a real woman and a believable one.”
Trump’s campaign bought McDonald’s more than 150 times—there’s no record Harris’ has once.
When Hillary Clinton ran for president, it was against the backdrop of the cultural controversy kicked off by her comments, amid her national introduction during her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, about how she had prioritized a legal career over staying at home and baking cookies. While men seeking the highest office sometimes seem to relish stuffing their faces on camera, in her 2016 campaign Clinton told the press—during an appearance where she was offered but refused cheesecake—that she had long ago “learned early on not to eat in front of all of you.”
“When it comes to women and food and eating and dieting and bodies,” Contois says, “it becomes a tangled thing.”
In forming her public image, Harris has repeatedly showcased interest and prowess in the kitchen. In her 2020 democratic presidential primary campaign, she ran a video series called “Cooking with Kamala” where she cheffed it up with celebrities, comedians, and politicians. In her speech accepting the party’s vice presidential nomination that year, Contois has written about how, by mentioning cooking Sunday dinner for her family to bolster claim to the nickname of Mamala, Harris sought to “cast herself as politically competent and suitably feminine in the eyes of voters… while also foregrounding her role as a mother and nurturer.”
Contois believes the quirky recipe details shared by Harris on the campaign trail—such as soaking greens in the bathtub—indicates genuineness and true passion, but also a savvy strategy. “It’s coming across as both truth, and a tactic that can help to construct that believably feminine side that people would expect and want to see in a woman,” Contois said.
Harris’ cooking references have become a tool of attack. As Laura Loomer, the right-wing influencer who has spent time on the campaign trail alongside Trump, posted in September, “Kamala spends more time making cooking videos than she does speaking to the media.” Loomer also, in a tradition that traces at least as far back as stigmatizing Italian migrants’ use of garlic, made a smear out of Harris’ Indian heritage and cooking by posting she would make “the White House smell like curry.”
“The spice and the smell and the difference,” Contois says, “that’s a more than 100-year-old tactic … of how to other someone.” An extreme version was also used to target Haitian migrants by the Trump and Vance ticket, in their comments pushing the false notion the community was eating pet dogs and cats. “To eat the family pet—it’s this huge anthropological, cultural taboo,” Contois said. “That’s why the rumor could take root and do so much harm.”
Donald Trump found his own way to use a kitchen to reshape his public image in the campaign’s closing weeks, by making his stage-managed appearance behind a fryer and drive-thru window at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. It was not only a reminder of his love for the company and fast food generally, but a salvo in his one-sided narrative battle about Harris’ actual experience working at a McDonald’s—one that contrasts with his own silver spoon-fed upbringing.
Harris’ cooking references have become a tool of attack.
Federal Elections Commission campaign spending data shows another clear Trump-Harris contrast related to McDonald’s. While his campaign has paid for food from the home of the Big Mac more than 150 times, there’s no record Harris’ has ordered even once. His team’s second most frequented food business is Dunkin’ Donuts, closely followed by Chick-fil-A, where he has spent over 10 times as much money as Harris. The Harris campaign, since it launched in July, has tended to go big on fast casual spots like Chipotle, where her campaign spent 15 times more than Trump’s, and Sweetgreen, where they spent three times as much as Trump.
Of course, to look beyond symbolism and such spending, the candidates have pushed policies that could affect what and how Americans eat. While Trump loves to blast the rise in cost of groceries, his plan to deport masses of immigrants has been predicted to cause an over 20 percent increase in the price of hand-picked crops while nearly doubling the price of milk. With those kind of stakes, it’s clear this year’s election has left voters with plenty to digest.
Earlier this month, the Lincoln Project rolled out an ad centered on abortion rights featuring a chilling line uttered by the narrator, a young woman, in a monologue addressed to her Trump-voting father: “You knew his politics would end my freedom, my rights, my life,” she says. “You chose hate over me.”
The ad, which depicts a woman dying in agony as she suffers complications while giving birth, was produced by the Lincoln Project to swing a demographic group they’ve dubbed “Dobbs Dads”—a group of men open to voting to protect or restore their daughters’ access to abortion—who just might be the downfall of Trump.
There’s evidence of such a shift in a recent Marist poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by 20 points among college educated white men—a 5 point improvement over Biden’s 2020 margin with the same demographic.
“We call them Dobbs Dads,” tweeted Joe Trippi, a veteran Democrat strategist who works with the Lincoln Project. “And they are breaking to Harris. One [of] our most important target groups.”
The Dobbs Dads moniker, of course, comes from the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling where the justices, led by three Trump appointees, effectively ended the federal right to access abortion. In the wake of that decision, 13 states have outright banned abortion, mothers have died due to lack of abortion access, maternal deaths in Texas doubled, infant deaths rose nationally, and Idaho’s legislature disbanded committees designed to investigate causes of maternal deaths, obscuring public understanding of how that state’s abortion ban has impacted mothers. With nearly two thirds of the U.S. public believing abortion should be legal, including 61% of men according to Pew research, the fast changing legal regime has made abortion rights one of the election’s top issues.
Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in swing states.
According to Stuart Stevens, another Lincoln Project advisor, pregnancy related medical trauma has left more men open to voting against Trump, who has refused to rule out signing a federal abortion ban, and for Harris, who would work to restore abortion rights. Those men include, as Stevens recently told MSNBC, “voters who are more conservative than not, many of whom would check a box to say they are anti-abortion. But they are appalled by the specter of these tragedies.”
“These are men who really have prided themselves as being the defenders of their daughter,” explains Trippi, “They suddenly are looking at what that means in terms of the Dobbs decision as they think about their daughter’s future and the world she’d live in.”
The Lincoln Project says its Dobbs Dads strategy is based on research conducted by a sister organization, the Lincoln Democracy Institute. An April 2023 LDI survey of over 17,000 voters helped their team zero in on two voting groups they considered ripe for persuasion: Dobbs Dads, and another they dubbed Red Dawn Republicans—older GOP voters who prioritize traditional international alliances, particularly in opposition to Russia.
Alex Shashlo, who helps run the Lincoln Project’s digital campaigns, said their “super targeted talking to dads approach on abortion” led them to choose female narrators for “Daisy”—the nightmarish ad set in a delivery room—and another similar spot, “This Year.” The strategy was partially inspired by a viral video clip of Taylor Swift speaking with her father about taking a political stand ahead of the 2018 elections. “If Taylor Swift said, ‘Hey, talk to your dad’, to all her followers, that would be a pretty powerful thing,” Trippi said. LDI’s research confirmed that the concept of daughters having conversations about abortion with their fathers could be effective in reaching men.
In a close election, the targeted campaign could make all the difference. The Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In a recent podcast, Trippi also mused on the demographic’s potential to “surprise people in these Senate races like in Florida, in Texas, maybe Montana.”
Earlier this month, the Lincoln Project rolled out an ad centered on abortion rights featuring a chilling line uttered by the narrator, a young woman, in a monologue addressed to her Trump-voting father: “You knew his politics would end my freedom, my rights, my life,” she says. “You chose hate over me.”
The ad, which depicts a woman dying in agony as she suffers complications while giving birth, was produced by the Lincoln Project to swing a demographic group they’ve dubbed “Dobbs Dads”—a group of men open to voting to protect or restore their daughters’ access to abortion—who just might be the downfall of Trump.
There’s evidence of such a shift in a recent Marist poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by 20 points among college educated white men—a 5 point improvement over Biden’s 2020 margin with the same demographic.
“We call them Dobbs Dads,” tweeted Joe Trippi, a veteran Democrat strategist who works with the Lincoln Project. “And they are breaking to Harris. One [of] our most important target groups.”
The Dobbs Dads moniker, of course, comes from the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling where the justices, led by three Trump appointees, effectively ended the federal right to access abortion. In the wake of that decision, 13 states have outright banned abortion, mothers have died due to lack of abortion access, maternal deaths in Texas doubled, infant deaths rose nationally, and Idaho’s legislature disbanded committees designed to investigate causes of maternal deaths, obscuring public understanding of how that state’s abortion ban has impacted mothers. With nearly two thirds of the U.S. public believing abortion should be legal, including 61% of men according to Pew research, the fast changing legal regime has made abortion rights one of the election’s top issues.
Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in swing states.
According to Stuart Stevens, another Lincoln Project advisor, pregnancy related medical trauma has left more men open to voting against Trump, who has refused to rule out signing a federal abortion ban, and for Harris, who would work to restore abortion rights. Those men include, as Stevens recently told MSNBC, “voters who are more conservative than not, many of whom would check a box to say they are anti-abortion. But they are appalled by the specter of these tragedies.”
“These are men who really have prided themselves as being the defenders of their daughter,” explains Trippi, “They suddenly are looking at what that means in terms of the Dobbs decision as they think about their daughter’s future and the world she’d live in.”
The Lincoln Project says its Dobbs Dads strategy is based on research conducted by a sister organization, the Lincoln Democracy Institute. An April 2023 LDI survey of over 17,000 voters helped their team zero in on two voting groups they considered ripe for persuasion: Dobbs Dads, and another they dubbed Red Dawn Republicans—older GOP voters who prioritize traditional international alliances, particularly in opposition to Russia.
Alex Shashlo, who helps run the Lincoln Project’s digital campaigns, said their “super targeted talking to dads approach on abortion” led them to choose female narrators for “Daisy”—the nightmarish ad set in a delivery room—and another similar spot, “This Year.” The strategy was partially inspired by a viral video clip of Taylor Swift speaking with her father about taking a political stand ahead of the 2018 elections. “If Taylor Swift said, ‘Hey, talk to your dad’, to all her followers, that would be a pretty powerful thing,” Trippi said. LDI’s research confirmed that the concept of daughters having conversations about abortion with their fathers could be effective in reaching men.
In a close election, the targeted campaign could make all the difference. The Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In a recent podcast, Trippi also mused on the demographic’s potential to “surprise people in these Senate races like in Florida, in Texas, maybe Montana.”
Late on Wednesday night, as Hurricane Milton made landfall, Ryan Hall, the self-proclaimed “Internet’s Weather Man,” hosted a video stream where viewers peppered him with questions about which areas looked likely to be hit, where tornadoes were touching down, and how high the water had reached in treasured parts of Florida.
“How’s Marco Island doing?”
“NORTH PORT storm surge?”
“Do you know if that came near D road? My sister has her horses there.”
The livestream featured Hall’s coverage, colleagues sharing tornado updates, dispatches from storm chasers on the ground, and a grid showing footage from cameras set up by the state of Florida, storm chasers, and other weather streamers to capture the hurricane’s arrival, landfall, and destruction. He drew in hundreds of thousands of viewers.
According to Dr. Simon Dickinson, a University of Plymouth academic who has written on livestreaming disasters, forums like Hall’s serve as digital spaces where people can ask advice, get guidance, and build a sense of community.
While there are of course viewers who could be defined as disaster voyeurs—people who want to see the “crash bang,” as Dickinson puts it—he says “there are also people there, equally, hoping that nothing happens.”
“Hazards and disasters have a new kind of cultural value.”
But Milton saw another kind of disaster streaming, with Rolling Stone documenting how the hurricane had given rise to an online “content storm” of people seeking clout by sharing video of them riding out the storm. One man decided to take on Hurricane Milton on a blow up mattress. “I’m out here trying to entertain the people in the most creative way we can,” the streamer boasted. “We started a whole new trend on TikTok. A lot of people are doing hurricane streams now. Shout out to the whole movement.”
Nearly 2 hours later, soaked by the rain, he cried “I’m done”—but only after supposedly making some $10,000.
While Dickinson notes it is dangerous for people to “put themselves in situations that they shouldn’t be for profit,” he has firsthand experience with video technology’s positive potential in a disaster. When studying for his PHd in the U.K., news broke about a tsunami alert in New Zealand, his home country. From a library he surveyed publicly available webcams, and soon realized he was “able to get more information about people and communicate to them from the other side of the world than they were able to in the event itself.”
Livestream resources and other cameras are even more common today than they were at the time. Doorbells, trail cams, and even traffic cameras can be repurposed to observe a hazard or disaster. News organizations are seeing the importance of providing these resources to their audience, like the Orlando Sentinel’s straightforward list of various webcams along Florida’s Gulf Coast to witness Hurricane Milton. Live Storms Media, a company specializing in weather footage, placed new ‘Surge Cams’ in areas they expected to be hit by Milton, which now provide a stark before and after gut check. And video’s frontier keeps expanding: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shared frightening images of the storm in the gulf produced by new waterborne drone technology, capturing waves over 28 feet high.
As the popularity of hurricane YouTube streams and social media trends about assembling ‘bugout bags’ suggests, “hazards and disasters have a new kind of cultural value,” Dickinson says, which can be used as a tool “in disaster communication.” When storm watching enters boring periods—last night, a commenter on one stream complained “all the cameras I’m watching keep dying” as others were, more prosaically, blurred by raindrops—the lulls can open the door to other valuable discussions.
“Because nothing is happening, because it is quite mundane, the backdrop is very boring; naturally, conversation turns to climate justice, climate change, environmental risk,” he says.
And sometimes the conversations veer towards nostalgia as places being viewed hold some connection to commenters’ lives. In one example, Dickinson recalls two commenters realizing they had honeymooned in the same exact path of a disaster.
“The threat of a pending doom or impending loss forces us to grasp what might be lost,” Dickinson says—not just in the storm on the screen, but in the many to come.
Late on Wednesday night, as Hurricane Milton made landfall, Ryan Hall, the self-proclaimed “Internet’s Weather Man,” hosted a video stream where viewers peppered him with questions about which areas looked likely to be hit, where tornadoes were touching down, and how high the water had reached in treasured parts of Florida.
“How’s Marco Island doing?”
“NORTH PORT storm surge?”
“Do you know if that came near D road? My sister has her horses there.”
The livestream featured Hall’s coverage, colleagues sharing tornado updates, dispatches from storm chasers on the ground, and a grid showing footage from cameras set up by the state of Florida, storm chasers, and other weather streamers to capture the hurricane’s arrival, landfall, and destruction. He drew in hundreds of thousands of viewers.
According to Dr. Simon Dickinson, a University of Plymouth academic who has written on livestreaming disasters, forums like Hall’s serve as digital spaces where people can ask advice, get guidance, and build a sense of community.
While there are of course viewers who could be defined as disaster voyeurs—people who want to see the “crash bang,” as Dickinson puts it—he says “there are also people there, equally, hoping that nothing happens.”
“Hazards and disasters have a new kind of cultural value.”
But Milton saw another kind of disaster streaming, with Rolling Stone documenting how the hurricane had given rise to an online “content storm” of people seeking clout by sharing video of them riding out the storm. One man decided to take on Hurricane Milton on a blow up mattress. “I’m out here trying to entertain the people in the most creative way we can,” the streamer boasted. “We started a whole new trend on TikTok. A lot of people are doing hurricane streams now. Shout out to the whole movement.”
Nearly 2 hours later, soaked by the rain, he cried “I’m done”—but only after supposedly making some $10,000.
While Dickinson notes it is dangerous for people to “put themselves in situations that they shouldn’t be for profit,” he has firsthand experience with video technology’s positive potential in a disaster. When studying for his PHd in the U.K., news broke about a tsunami alert in New Zealand, his home country. From a library he surveyed publicly available webcams, and soon realized he was “able to get more information about people and communicate to them from the other side of the world than they were able to in the event itself.”
Livestream resources and other cameras are even more common today than they were at the time. Doorbells, trail cams, and even traffic cameras can be repurposed to observe a hazard or disaster. News organizations are seeing the importance of providing these resources to their audience, like the Orlando Sentinel’s straightforward list of various webcams along Florida’s Gulf Coast to witness Hurricane Milton. Live Storms Media, a company specializing in weather footage, placed new ‘Surge Cams’ in areas they expected to be hit by Milton, which now provide a stark before and after gut check. And video’s frontier keeps expanding: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shared frightening images of the storm in the gulf produced by new waterborne drone technology, capturing waves over 28 feet high.
As the popularity of hurricane YouTube streams and social media trends about assembling ‘bugout bags’ suggests, “hazards and disasters have a new kind of cultural value,” Dickinson says, which can be used as a tool “in disaster communication.” When storm watching enters boring periods—last night, a commenter on one stream complained “all the cameras I’m watching keep dying” as others were, more prosaically, blurred by raindrops—the lulls can open the door to other valuable discussions.
“Because nothing is happening, because it is quite mundane, the backdrop is very boring; naturally, conversation turns to climate justice, climate change, environmental risk,” he says.
And sometimes the conversations veer towards nostalgia as places being viewed hold some connection to commenters’ lives. In one example, Dickinson recalls two commenters realizing they had honeymooned in the same exact path of a disaster.
“The threat of a pending doom or impending loss forces us to grasp what might be lost,” Dickinson says—not just in the storm on the screen, but in the many to come.
When Gov. Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’ running mate, Ben Jealous, the Sierra Club’s executive director, released a statement hailing him as someone who “has worked to protect clean air and water, grow our clean energy economy, and see to it that we do all we can to avoid the very worst of the climate crisis.”
But to a group of Indigenous environmental activists familiar with Walz’s record in Minnesota—particularly their view he broke a promise to block the construction of Line 3, a cross-state oil pipeline—such a ringing endorsement of his green credentials rings hollow.
A few days after her home state’s governor joined the ticket, Tara Houska, an attorney and Indigenous rights activist, expressed that point of view in an Instagram video post where she said he had led “a brutal, multi-year campaign to suppress Indigenous people and allies trying to stop Line 3 tar sands.” It showed a clash between protesters and police at a Line 3 pipeline construction site over a soundtrack of rising drums. In the final scene, Houska is being escorted away by police while in restraints.
Houska first became involved in protesting pipelines in 2016 when, after working as a Native policy advisor for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, news about the Dakota Access Pipeline drew her back to the Midwest. After six months demonstrating against that pipeline at the Standing Rock reservation, Houska returned to the East Coast. She soon saw news coming out of the Midwest about a different pipeline: “I was like, ‘Oh, I need to go home.’”
The debate in Minnesota, which would lead to hundreds of demonstrators being arrested, came in the wake of major protests against the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. The projects were opposed by environmental activists upset they would speed fossil fuel extraction and consumption, and by Indigenous communities concerned about the impact on their historic lands and waters.
The controversy dates back to April 2015, when Enbridge, a Canadian energy company, proposed to then-Gov. Mark Dayton’s administration a plan to replace an aging pipeline originally completed in 1968. The project, Enbridge argued, would address “integrity and safety concerns” and allow the company to transmit 760,000 barrels of oil per day. The proposed new route traveled from Canada to Minnesota’s border with Wisconsin, passing through state forests and the Fond du Lac Reservation, home to over four thousand members of the Lake Superior Chippewa.
Beyond climate-related concerns, opponents feared the pipeline would threaten water systems, especially wild rice beds, that Indigenous communities rely on. Enbridge’s track record includes two of the largest inland oil spills in national history. In 1991, Line 3 released 1.7 million gallons of crude oil in Northern Minnesota, and in 2010, another Enbridge pipe spilled over 1 million gallons in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
“We were sold one thing to vote for them…When we did vote, we were totally betrayed.”
Walz’s first public comments on the pipeline came in 2017, after Dayton announced he would not seek another term, and Walz, who had represented a southern Minnesota congressional district for 10 years, rolled out a campaign to succeed him. During a contested Democratic primary, Walz advocated against Line 3 by criticizing its harm to Native communities and lands.
“They got that extra push from climate folks and from tribal folks,” Houska recalled, explaining that Walz and his running mate, Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Nation, earned her vote in 2018.
Enbridge’s proposal, after years of reviews, appeals, and public forums, finally garnered the approval of Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission in June of 2018. But in the final weeks of Dayton’s term, his administration sued to overturn the decision, with the outgoing governor writing that he hoped to “ensure that a project with this magnitude of environmental impact upon our state serves the needs of our citizens.”
After Walz took office in early 2019, he said he would continue Dayton’s lawsuit, but in public remarks seemed to lay the groundwork to wash his hands of the issue, suggesting the project’s fate laid with an appeals court’s review of the commission’s decision. He explained he would not use executive powers to stop the pipeline “as a protection against the checks and balances being weakened.”
While Walz’s administration would continue to refile and support the suit Dayton launched, after a new environmental review, Enbridge was nonetheless able to obtain final permits and begin construction in December 2020. By early 2021, protests began to ramp up near Line 3 construction sites that would continue through the summer. In February, a group of tribal leaders asked Walz to enact an executive order to stop construction while litigation continued. At that point, a spokesperson for Walz said he did “not believe it is within his role to stay project permits that have been issued by state agencies after a thorough environmental review and permitting process.”
Houska says Walz passed the buck. “The reality is his administration could’ve stopped Line 3,” she argues, by upholding treaty obligations—specifically the Ojibwe nation’s unique right to harvest wild rice, which activists warned was threatened by the pipeline.
As opposition to the pipeline entered a new confrontational phase, demonstrators were met by a unique police force: the Northern Lights Task Force, which was made up of county law-enforcement agents whose time, training, and equipment were supported by a state account funded with $8 million from Enbridge. (Public records obtained by the Intercept show Walz hosted a conference call with senior task force members, and discussed its use of tear gas.) In addition to tear gas, rubber bullets, and other non-lethal weapons, police deployed “pain compliance” tactics that left multiple protestors partially paralyzed.
Walz’s choice of Flanagan, who had supported the Standing Rock pipeline protesters, as a running mate had been seen as a signal within Native communities that he would stand fast against the pipeline. “When it came through that he wasn’t doing anything, Peggy was very silent on the matter. She never showed up to rallies. Didn’t show up to the treaty camps,” says Dannah Thompson, an Anishinaabe anti-pipeline activist from Roseville, Minnesota.
As protest activity swirled, the lieutenant governor faced pressure to step in. Flanagan released a statement in July 2021 on Facebook: “While I cannot stop Line 3, I will continue to do what is within my power to make sure our people are seen, heard, valued and protected. Using my voice is an important part of that work.”
Walz’s administration did not respond to a request for comment. But in August 2021, just after a thousand Line 3 protestors picketed at the state capitol, Walz defended the project, by saying that while “we need to move away from fossil fuels… in the meantime if we’re gonna transport oil, we need to do it as safely as we possibly can with the most modern equipment.”
Construction only tookabout 10 months. (Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources has since documentedmultiple aquifer breaches that took place during building.) When tar sands began being pumped through the pipeline in the fall of 2021, MN350, a state climate justice non-profit, issued a blistering statement: “Shame on Governor Walz, who broke his campaign promise.”
“[We] fought as hard as we possibly could on every front: the ground fight, the regulatory fight, the political pressure, everything and anything to try to protect our wild rice and our waterways,” Houska said.
“Line 3 was an opportunity to prove that they wanted to take these bigger actions and stand up to financial powers and corporate powers,” says Thompson. “We were blindsided, and we were sold one thing to vote for them…When we did vote, we were totally betrayed.”
“There is a small faction of us that I know who aren’t able to move past this,” Thompson adds. Citing “the violence that was pushed towards Native people” by police, she says sorting through Walz’s record on the pipeline is a pre-election “conversation that is going to be had in the months coming up in the Native community.”
Ilhan Omar won renomination to Congress on Tuesday night, beating back a repeat challenger.
Leading up to the primary, it seemed Rep. Omar, after an aggressive campaign backed by a major financial advantage, would cruise to an easy win against her familiar opponent, Don Samuels, who lost the 2022 primary by a little over 2,000 votes. And that’s more or less how it turned out: Within two hours of the close of voting, Omar was declared the winner with a victory margin of around 16,00o votes, or 14 percent.
In the race’s final days, conservatives looking to oust Omar mounted a late effort to take advantage of Minnesota’s open primary format and convince Republicans to skip their party’s primary and instead vote for Samuels, a former member of the Minneapolis city council.
Royce White, the state GOP-endorsed Senate candidate, posted to X that he would gladly give up 5,000 votes in the fifth congressional district to help unseat Omar. Far-right influencer Laura Loomer tweeted that “Republicans, Independents and Democrats have a once in a lifetime opportunity to remove a HAMAS supporter from Congress. Everyone can vote in the open primary.”
A recent investigation by The Interceptrevealed a WhatsApp group named “Zionists for Don Samuels,” that played host to pro-Israel activists and a campaign consultant for Don Samuels; the group chat had also explored corralling Republican voters against Omar in the primary.
Omar won her primary by 14 percent.
Samuels campaign stated they had no part in the plan. On Twitter, Omar wrote that it “is shameful that my opponent is actively courting Republican votes.”
One participant in “Zionists for Don Samuels” boasted he had raised more than $120,000 for a pro-Samuels super-PAC in the last two weeks, part of a fundraising effort discussed in the channel that arose in response to a lack of support for Samuels from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. That lobbying group and its spending vehicle, the United Democracy Project have put over $25 million this primary season to supporting challengers that rose up to take on “squad” members who have been critical of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
While AIPAC reportedly planned to spend $100 million to elect more pro-Israel members of Congress in 2024, they seem to have sidestepped Samuels. Before he announced his repeat campaign, AIPAC sought to recruit sitting city councilmember LaTrisha Vetaw, as they reportedly believed Samuels had “reached his capacity” in 2022. But Vetaw’s campaign did not take shape, and Samuels again became Omar’s challenger.
In the 2022 primary, the Samuels-backing super-PAC Make a Difference MN 05 received $350,000 from UDP—a late donation that went unreported before the polls closed. This year, if late AIPAC support for Samuels exists, it has yet to be seen. But an almost identically named super-PAC sprung up in late July to amass over $100,000. Whatever its final receipts, this late funding was not enough to overcome Omar’s nearly $5 million lead.
Omar will now face Dalia Al-Aqidi, an Iraqi-immigrant who has the GOP endorsement, in the general election. The district has not sent a Republican to Congress since 1963. Omar won the 2022 general election with roughly 75 percent of the vote.
Next week, Rep. Ilhan Omar will take on a familiar opponent. On Tuesday, August 13, the progressive stalwart will face a second-consecutive primary challenge from Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis City Council member who came within 2 percent of beating her in 2022.
For Samuels, that narrow margin was enough evidence to try again. But he didn’t announce his plans for a rematch against the congresswoman until about a month after Hamas’ October 7 attack, as a wave of contenders emerged to take on left-leaning lawmakers who spoke critically of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza. Soon after getting in the race, Samuels staked his turf by going on TV to claim Omar had voiced opinions that were “the last straw in a long series of insensitive statements about Israel and Jewish people.”
Omar has “been raising money on the idea that AIPAC would attack her. That has not happened.”
Samuels and these other challengers stepped up as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the long standing lobbying group, announced plans to spend $100 million in 2024 to contest candidates that they’ve determined are not pro-Israel enough, many of whom, like Omar, count themselves among the group of incumbent progressive representatives known as the “squad.” The strategy paid off when Rep. Jamaal Bowman lost to George Latimer in a June race where 61 percent of the money spent was from the United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-affiliated vehicle. It did so again on Tuesday night in St. Louis, as Rep. Cori Bush lost her primary to prosecutor Wesley Bell—whose campaign has been supported by $9 million from United Democracy Project.
While Samuels has made Omar’s positions on Israel and Gaza a key talking point—even calling her a “pawn for Hamas”—unlike Latimer and Bell, he has failed to garner substantial pro-Israel PAC funding. Samuels didn’t have the same issue in 2022, when United Democracy Project contributed $350,000 to his efforts just days before voting. The donation was only disclosed a month after the 2022 primary; Samuels later complained that he did not receive as much support from pro-Israel funders as the failed challenger who took on Omar in 2020.
While a similar late infusion of money, potentially spurred on by Bell’s fresh win, remains a possibility, so far FEC filings show just one minor contribution backing Samuels from a pro-Israel PAC—$5,000 from an entity called To Protect Our Heritage.
Given Samuels’ strong showing two years ago, it’s not exactly clear why he’s failed to garner such support. In August, Jewish Insiderreported that while Samuels was already considering a rematch, AIPAC was instead seeking to recruit LaTrisha Vetaw, a sitting Minneapolis council member, to run against Omar. An operative involved in the discussions told the outlet that AIPAC had judged Samuels to have already “reached his capacity.” (AIPAC and UDP declined to comment on why they have not backed Samuels, or if they might still do so.)
While an AIPAC-supported Vetaw candidacy never materialized, Joelle Stangler, a Minneapolis teacher who is managing Omar’s primary campaign, says the hundreds of thousands of dollars AIPAC spent against the congresswoman in 2022 “could be seen as a bellwether” of the money spent this year taking down incumbents like Bowman and Bush. “We were a test case.”
Given Omar’s narrow victory over Samuels in 2022, Stangler admits the campaign “took our foot off the gas” in that election. This year Omar, who is one of a handful of Muslim members of Congress, has been aggressively campaigning. Another change: their 2022 primary took place about a year after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis cops, kicking off widespread and sometimes destructive protests against police violence. By suing to force the city to hire more cops at the same time Omar and energized activists were calling for the dismantling of the city’s police department, Samuels emerged, as the Star Tribune put it, as “the face of the backlash against calls to reduce the police force.” That pro-police image boosted him among moderate Democrats and was a cornerstone of his 2022 challenge to Omar—but it’s a less salient issue in 2024.
There’s no indication Samuels has the traction he did two years ago.
Omar has also already doubled the amount she fundraised in all of 2022; her nearly $7 million as of July 24 almost quintuples Samuels’ haul. Samuels has attempted to make an issue of the fact that a majority of Omar’s funding comes from out of state. “Representative Omar, with a large national fundraising base, has since November, been raising money on the idea that AIPAC would attack her. That has not happened,” says Joe Radinovich, Samuels’ campaign manager.
In June, Omar’s campaign put AIPAC aside when it released research identifying roughly $50,000 in 2024 contributions to Samuels that came from right-wing or Republican-backing donors, while noting his 2022 backers included Clarence Thomas-patron Harlan Crow and Republican-supporting super PACs.
Radinovich defends the donations, arguing “that there are a number of people out there, of all political stripes…willing to give their resources to Don Samuels, who supports universal health care, bold climate policy, a woman’s right to choose—then you know we’re going to use the money to get that message out.”
Molly Priesmeyer, a South Minneapolis resident and an Omar supporter, says Samuels’ conservative funders have become a voting issue. After people learn about “that kind of influence,” she says, “regardless of their feelings about Omar, they’re reluctant to go with Don Samuels.”
Samuels’ attacks have centered on Omar’s high number of missed votes, her foreign policy, a World Cup trip funded by the Qatari government, and an ongoing fraud case involving her husband. In spots that ran on local television during the Republican National Convention, Samuels’ debut ad slammed Omar for being “missing on the issues that matter most,” and assailed her position on police reform and her vote against Biden’s infrastructure bill.
But the ad also depicted her face on a missing persons poster—an image that immediately drew blowback from advocates from organizations focused on the disproportionate number of women of color who go missing or are murdered; one of them called it “insensitive, racist, [and] anti-women.” It wasn’t the first time Samuels was criticized for sexism. In November, Samuels spoke about Omar on a podcast, saying “You’re not cute enough, you don’t dress well enough, nothing about you is attractive enough to overcome that deficit.” Omar tweeted that the remarks were misogynist.
In the 2020 general election, Omar got about 73,000 fewer votes in her district than Joe Biden. “There is no Democratic congressional candidate in the country who trailed Joe Biden by more than Ilhan Omar in 2020,” Radinovich says, arguing that pool of Biden voters could be receptive to Samuels, who only lost by 2,500 votes last time.
But so far, there’s little indication Samuels is making new inroads, or has anything approaching the traction he did two years ago. While most polling data in the race has been released by Omar’s campaign, those figures have consistently shown her with a massive lead—numbers she released in late July put it at 27 points.
Correction, August 7: This story has been updated to reflect the number of Muslim women in Congress.
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