Before I could knock on the door of the house in rural, upstate New York, a big, burly man dressed in a plaid lumberjack jacket came outside to greet me. “I’m looking for Yvette Ovitt,” I told him, when he asked me what I wanted. “Oh, she’s dead,” he replied calmly. “She died back in June. Heart attack.”

After expressing my condolences, I explained my mission: I was testing a get-out-the-vote app that the Turning Point Action political action committee is using this election season. On its website, Turning Point says this app “is vital” to what it claims “will be the largest and most sophisticated ballot chasing operation the movement has ever seen.” The conservative youth organization is specifically deploying the technology to try to turn out “low-propensity” voters in Republican areas—people they believe are Trump supporters but who have rarely voted in recent elections. People like Yvette, apparently, may she rest in peace.

Rather than rely on the traditional campaign or Republican Party apparatus for the 2024 election, the Trump campaign has outsourced much of its ground game to Turning Point and other conservative PACs. The strategy is largely untested, as are the groups running the operation. Turning Point has promised to spend more than $100 million on its “chase the vote” effort this cycle to get Trump elected. The youth group was involved in such efforts in 2022, and many of the most high-profile candidates it backed lost. Others, like America PAC, a super PAC funded almost entirely by billionaire Elon Musk, got into the game just this summer.

Bad addresses, dead voters and people who refuse to answer the door are a regular feature of political canvassing for both the parties, so I wasn’t especially surprised to find that one of Turning Point’s targets was no longer with us. Fortunately, I wasn’t using the app to persuade people to vote. I was at the Ovitt house because I was interested in how well this app worked. I also wanted to know how Republicans it identified might feel about the ease with which I was able to access their personal information with it.

Phone apps are now a canvassing staple for elections. When they’re used by the major political parties, their use is closely supervised by the campaigns. The primary app used by Democrats is called MiniVan. When I downloaded MiniVan, I needed a code from a campaign official to access any of the data, which I did not have. No such privacy protections exist for the Turning Point app, where its extensive data is accessible to anyone with a phone.

Turning Point’s app was developed by a company called Superfeed that has close ties with its founder Charlie Kirk, whose mother-in-law is on the Superfeed board. Superfeed’s former CEO, Jeff DeWitt, was previously the Arizona GOP chairman, until he resigned from the party post in January after news broke that he’d allegedly tried to bribe Kari Lake to keep her from running for his state’s Senate seat.

Turning Point officials have marketed the Superfeed app to other conservative groups. Also using the app this cycle is Early Vote Action, a PAC founded by MAGA activist Scott Presler, whose GOTV work for Trump was recently boosted with a $1 million donation from Elon Musk. Presler has spent the past year trying to register Republican voters in overlooked groups, like hunters and the Amish. He claims to have flipped the voter registration figures in several Pennsylvania counties from blue to red. The Nevada, Delaware, Georgia and Arizona state Republican parties have also adopted the app.

The Superfeed corporate website is nonfunctional, but the Apple store says the Turning Point app allows users to “read original content and feeds from TPUSA top creators.” The app originally started as a vehicle for right-wing news distribution, not for election work. Giving how much is riding on the app in this election, I decided to give it a test run this month when I was in upstate New York leaf peeping in the reddest part of a reliably blue state.

After downloading the app, I discovered a mess of X social media posts on the home screen, from Kirk and other Turning Point surrogates including: pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec; Benny Johnson, a right-wing influencer and former Turning Point employee who was allegedly duped into taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a front group to create pro-Russia content; and Tyler Bowyer, the Turning Point COO who’s been indicted in Arizona for his alleged participation in Trump’s “fake elector” scheme to overturn the 2020 election results. (Bowyer has also served on the Superfeed board.)

Among the social media posts is a button that says, “Register To Vote: Tap Here.” Users are then led to the Turning Point Action website, where they’re instructed to fill out a form as if they were registering to vote. But there are clues that this is not an authentic voter registration form—“referred by,” and “referral email,” queries that have nothing to do with voting and a lot to do with data harvesting. Once the form is filled out, a new window opens announcing, “Wait! One more step! Confirm your state to register to vote online.” That’s when users click a state and are redirected to a government website where they can legitimately register to vote.

The arrow for the election “activist suite” is buried like an afterthought among the other junk on the app home screen, and accessing these tools requires users to again provide all their personal information and enable location tracking. Turning Point Action did not respond to questions about its privacy protocols and what it does with the data collected through the app.

The “activist“ tools include, among other things, a text-spamming and calling feature, both of which employ the users’ actual phone number. In contrast, Democratic phone banks always anonymize phone calls to protect the privacy of volunteers. There’s also a feature that invites users to upload all their phone’s contacts into the app. Users’ friends will no doubt appreciate this giveaway of their lucrative personal information once they start getting spammed with texts and calls.

I declined to give Turning Point my phone book, skipped the spam texts, and instead hit “knock on doors.” Then I hopped in my car to try to find the “voters near me” listed in the app, all of which eventually led me to Yvette Ovitt’s home.

As a journalist, I have never canvassed for any political party or candidate, so I am unfamiliar with these types of operations. Yet even my unsophisticated use of the app felt like a massive privacy violation. As I drove, a list of target contacts appeared, with the names, addresses, ages, and phone numbers of people up and down the road. Several entries were tagged with a red flag indicating that the address was home to multiple voters over the age of 75—a potential goldmine because older voters tend to vote more than younger ones.

This feature alone should be cause for concern by app users and potential contacts alike. A Democratic National Committee spokesperson told me that the party’s canvassing app doesn’t allow this sort of universal, geolocated address lookup; the party provides canvassers only a predefined walking list created by campaign administrators. The DNC spokesperson also says the systems are protected with encryption, two-factor authentication and other modern security measures—none of which was present on the Turning Point app.

Once I settled on an address to visit, I had trouble locating the scripts the app provided for talking to any potential voters. A so-called training video that I found on the Turning Point Action website was an hour-long gabfest on Rumble, frequently interrupted with ads for Ivermectin, so I didn’t finish it. By comparison, the Democrat’s MiniVan training video is a quick, ad-free five minutes.

No one was home at the first couple of addresses I tried, but I finally hit pay dirt at a large house with a beat-up old truck covered with graffiti parked on the road out front. A man outside asked me suspiciously if I had come up his driveway to buy his pickup. I explained that I was looking for a 22-year-old woman named Sophie, and showed him the app. He grudgingly informed me that Sophie was away at college.

He declined an interview and warned me not to knock at the house next door. A woman there, also listed in the app, was his 80-something year old mother. “She won’t want to talk to you,” he told me in a tone suggesting he was just about to yell at me to get off his lawn.

I moved on to a few more empty houses, and one address I simply couldn’t find. Finally, the app directed me to Yvette Ovitt’s home, a modest wood structure fully decked out with yards of artificial spider webs that looked professionally wrapped around the fence and adorned with smiling pumpkins and spooky signs wishing people a Happy Halloween.

The man who came out to meet me turned out to be Yvette’s older brother, Randy Ovitt. He lived there, too, so I showed him her name and asked what he thought about how easy it was for anyone to find this much information about his sister and their neighbors. “That’s fucked up—I mean messed up,” he corrected, laughing as he lit up a cigarette.

Looking at Yvette’s listing, I asked Randy whether his sister was a 51-year-old Republican. While he could confirm that his sister had died just shy of her 51^st birthday, which happened to be the day I showed up, Randy had no idea about her party affiliation. They didn’t talk about politics, he said, except about the “towelheads they keep dropping in here, getting their $1,000 debt cards.”

Randy was referring not to a Fox News myth, but a story that has gained prominence on the network and morphed into a MAGA talking point. In March, New York City mayor Eric Adams started giving pre-paid debt cards—valued at about $1,440 a month for a family of four—to migrants who had been bused to the city from Texas, so they could buy food and baby supplies. The cards were a cheaper way for the city to provide meals to the new arrivals than the city’s food-service contracts but they’d quickly become an anti-immigration talking point.

Randy was not listed in the app, possibly because he may have been a registered Democrat. At first, he told me he thought he wouldn’t vote in November. “It’s terrible, ain’t it?” he said of this year’s election. But after his second cigarette, he confessed that he “might of” voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and hinted that he might vote for Harris, too. When I showed him the list of voters I was looking for, he pointed to one name and said the man had been dead for a while. Randy explained that someone else listed at the same address was the partner of the dead man’s daughter Dawn, who also lived there. “Ernie will talk to you,” he said.

Encouraged, I headed down the road to a large compound in the woods, full of trailers, a mobile home, a small house, plus several vehicles. There I found Ernie Gray, cutting plywood to build an enclosed deck on the mobile home for Dawn. He told me he’d swapped a 4 x 4 for the work on the roof because at 60, he thought he was too old to be getting up on the ladder. He was doing the rest of the work himself.

I showed him the Turning Point app with his listing in it. “How the hell did you get that?” he asked with a good-natured growl. “All my information is supposed to be private!” The app had his phone number wrong—it had belonged to Dawn’s deceased father and had been disconnected ages ago—but the rest was spot on.

Dawn and Ernie were die-hard Trump fans, not low-propensity voters. He said they’d both already voted for Trump in the primary and planned to do it again in November.  Ernie elaborated extensively on the many ways he hated Joe Biden, as Dawn nodded along from behind the screen door, where she stood with a tiny dog at her feet. Ernie, too, complained about immigrants getting debit cards, an issue that seems to rank high on the list of concerns of voters in these parts.

It was getting late in the day, so I bid Ernie farewell and packed it in. After two hours of driving around, I’d used the Turning Point app to identify two dead people, one missing college student, an elderly woman with a protectively hostile son, a closet Democrat, and one Trump supporter who needed no persuasion.

Later, I spent some more time noodling around on the app. I finally found the door-knocking script, which instructed me to ask potential voters questions such as “Do you usually get an early ballot?” or “Can we help get your ballot in on time?” Just to see what happened, I clicked “no” or “I need more help” on these questions for a voter in Virginia and then hit “submit.” The app then helpfully made a pie chart report on all my efforts. Apparently, once I tagged these people as contacted, they dropped off the list so other canvassers would not bother them. The potential for mischief with this app seemed very high and I wondered: Is this the way to win an election?

“These people are amateurs,” a longtime Republican consultant who wanted to remain anonymous told me after I described my app test results. In a close presidential election, he said, “People are voting not because someone came to their door, certainly not because somebody they never met came to the door. They’re going to vote because of something they’ve read or seen, or because someone they know dragged them to the polls.” Still, he predicted, “I think Republicans are going to have a good night in 11 days, and then all these grifters are going to take credit for it.”

Good news, patriots! American voters have finally found something they can agree about: Their candidate is going to win in November. That’s according to a new survey by Bright Line Watch, a group of researchers who, since 2017, have been tracking the state of American democracy and potential threats to it. The survey finds some hopeful news about Americans’ faith in elections, but it also offers stark warning signs about threats to democracy that could arise if there’s a huge mismatch between voters’ expectations and the ultimate winner of the election.

The new survey asked about 2,700 people how they plan to vote in the presidential election. As with most polls, the results revealed a close race, with 46 percent of respondents saying they’d vote for Trump, while 49 percent will pull the lever for Vice President Kamala Harris. The researchers weren’t interested in only the horse race, though. They wanted to explore likely voters’ expectations for the election outcome. That’s because they have found that, as was the case in 2020, unexpected results tend to drive fraud and malfeasance around elections and mistrust in the integrity of the system.

The survey found that nearly 90 percent of both Republicans and Democrats expect their candidate to prevail in November. Sizable minorities also believe their candidate will win in a blowout. Nearly 40 percent of Republicans and more than a quarter of Democrats believe that their candidate will win by “quite a lot.” That disparity between outcomes and expectations, particularly among the most partisan media consumers, can make voters on the losing side vulnerable to the sorts of misinformation and conspiracy theories spread by Trump and his supporters’ 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign that laid the groundwork for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

“You can absolutely imagine something similar” happening this year “especially when Trump is telling people ‘we’re going to win unless they steal it,'” says Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College professor of government and a co-director of Bright Line Watch. “He’s playing into this in a way that is obviously dangerous and reckless.”

Despite similar expectations of victory among Democrats, Nyhan says it’s harder to imagine Harris supporters responding the same way MAGA devotees did in 2020. Bright Line surveys show that Democrats tend to be more accepting of election results. Plus, everyone expects Harris to concede if she loses.

Lest you think that Democrats are completely impervious to election misinformation and conspiracy theories, the Bright Line researchers are here to prove you wrong. “Polling shows Democrats are vulnerable,” Nyhan says. For instance, the Bright Line survey found that more than a third of Democratic respondents falsely believe that the assassination attempts on Trump were staged to help his election prospects.

Also recall the 2016 election, Nyhan says, when Hillary Clinton was predicted to win the presidential election. Many Democrats, he says, embraced conspiracy theories to explain Trump’s unexpected victory. Bright Line surveys show that today, Democrats still falsely believe in fairly high numbers—more than 50 percent of those polled—that Russia changed actual votes to swing the 2016 election in favor of Trump. (While Russia did hack computers at the Democratic National Committee and target state election systems in 2016, there is no evidence that Russia electronically tampered with people’s votes.)

Of course, Democrats who believe this myth about Russia didn’t storm the Capitol to challenge the election results. The difference, Nyhan says, is that Democratic elites don’t amplify fringe theories the way Republicans do. “There’s been no figure on the Democratic side who’s rejected the norms of democracy in the same way as Trump,” he says.

The Bright Line survey did offer some areas where disinformation has not captured voters’ attention. Attempts by Trump supporters to question Vice President Kamala Harris’ citizenship have persuaded “only” 22 percent of Republicans that she’s ineligible to run for the presidency. That’s a big improvement since Trump’s “birther” campaign against former President Barack Obama helped convince more than 70 percent of Republicans that he was ineligible for office. And the percentage of Republicans who believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020 has gone up slightly from 33 percent in October 2022 to 38 percent in September this year. Even 23 percent of those who say they are more Trump supporters than Republicans are willing to concede the 2020 election to Biden, compared with 16 percent in October 2022.

GOP voters also seem to have recovered some of their confidence in election integrity, perhaps because they’re so sure that Trump will prevail in November. Nearly 60 percent of the respondents now say they believe their votes will be counted fairly, as opposed to 49 percent who did so two years ago. Nonetheless, Republican voters suffer from a fair amount of cognitive dissonance when it comes to their faith in the electoral system.

“Everyone thinks the fraud is happening somewhere else. There’s not a high degree of internal consistency on these claims.”

Many people who think their own vote for, say, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), or the local dog catcher will be fairly counted apparently also believe the national vote will be fully corrupt. According to the Bright Line survey, 80 percent of Republicans believe their state votes will be counted accurately, but that figure falls precipitously when they’re asked about the national vote count. Only 57 percent of Republicans in the survey thought the national election would be fair. “Everyone thinks the fraud is happening somewhere else,” Nyhan says. “There’s not a high degree of internal consistency on these claims, obviously.”

Republican beliefs in widespread voter fraud, however, seem to have diminished since 2022. For instance, GOP respondents to the Bright Line survey were somewhat less likely to believe that voting machine software is changing votes. Independent voters were even less likely to believe it. The Bright Line report doesn’t speculate as to why this might be the case. But there is one possible explanation: the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News, which last year forced Fox to pay nearly $800 million to the company for making false claims about its voting machine software.  

After the settlement, Fox and other right-wing news outlets had to stop their false attacks on the integrity of voting machines. “It took it out of the right-wing information stream from those places,” says Nyhan. Still, he suspects there’s more to the decline than this one lawsuit. He thinks conservative voters are simply hearing less about voter fraud overall, aside from Trump’s oft-repeated claims that illegal immigrants are infiltrating the election system, a fiction that 70 percent of the survey respondents embraced.

Indeed, after four years of consistently attacking the electoral system as fraudulent, Republicans had a problem heading into 2024: how to convince their supporters to cast a ballot after they’d been persuaded by Trump that their votes wouldn’t count? To that end, the Republican National Committee has stopped pressing the voter fraud narrative and spent the last year trying to convince voters that their ballots will be secure, including the mail-in ballots Trump previously claimed were used to steal the 2020 election. The Bright Line Watch numbers suggest that perhaps the campaign is working.

On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Barbara Kingsolver is headlining a fundraiser for the Harris Victory Fund. She’ll join actress Ashley Judd and former Kentucky poet laureate Silas House for a “virtual conversation” about perspectives from rural Appalachia. The event coincides with a recent push by Vice President Kamala Harris to reach out to rural voters, who overwhelmingly support former President Donald Trump.

Kingsolver is an obvious Democratic counterweight to vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The Ohio senator came to fame through his book Hillbilly Elegy, which chronicled his dysfunctional family history that had roots in rural Kentucky. The Trump campaign has touted his appeal to working-class and rural white voters. Unlike Vance, who was raised in suburban Ohio, Kingsolver actually grew up in rural Kentucky and still lives in Appalachian Virginia. She won the Pulitzer for a novel set in the very places Vance claims to speak for.

“I live among Trump supporters in a county that’s probably 80 percent for Trump,” she told me when I interviewed her in May. “When I go to the grocery store, I’m going to Trump rally. When I drive to town, I go past gigantic Trump 2024 signs. This is where I live.”

“I live among Trump supporters in a county that’s probably 80 percent for Trump.”

Impoverished rural areas represent some of Trump’s strongest base. He won 65 percent of the country’s rural voters in 2020, and the totals were even higher in many parts of Appalachia. The Harris campaign has been trying to make inroads in many of these oft-forgotten places, particularly in swing states, in an effort to narrow Trump’s margins. In 2020, for instance, Trump won Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, 62–36 percent. But Harris made an appearance there last Thursday. And former President Bill Clinton has been deployed to the rural South in an attempt to also strengthen her appeal with these voters.

“We got to turn out folks, obviously, in base Democratic areas, but we also need to persuade a lot of people,” Dan Kanninen, Harris’ battleground states director, told CNN last week. “Shaving margins where you can, in counties that maybe Trump won 70-30, but if we can lose them 60-40 or 65-35, that makes a big difference over dozens of counties in a state.”

Kingsolver’s prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead, is a Dickensian coming-of- age tale set in the hollows of Appalachia where young Demon struggles through addiction, foster care, family disintegration, and the general failures of the American social welfare system all while trying to remain rooted in the hill country he loves. It’s an empathetic portrayal of the people Vance mostly scorned in his memoir. It’s no surprise, then, that the Harris campaign might see Kingsolver as a useful campaign surrogate who could help bridge the gap between the California coastal liberal and rural voters who overwhelmingly support Trump.

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The young protagonist of Demon Copperhead is born in Lee County, Virginia, a real place where 45 percent of the children live below the poverty line. The disability rates among adults in Lee County are twice the national average—nearly 50 percent of the elderly residents have a disability. Trump also won nearly 85 percent of the vote there in 2020. Kingsolver thinks the dismal state of infrastructure, health care, and education opportunities in rural America leaves its residents vulnerable to someone like Trump, who claims to see them.

“He channels their rage,” she told me, even if his agenda will do little to help their material condition. “What they have in common is that they feel like the government has failed them. Any other attempt to sort of reduce Trump voters to a monoculture is really very bigoted.”

There’s a moment in Demon Copperhead where Demon is talking to his friend Tommy, who recently started working at a local newspaper where he has discovered for the first time how the rest of the world views Appalachia. “Blight on the nation” read the headline of one story that crosses his desk. Demon tries to explain how the world is organized to Tommy, and the way everyone needs someone to dump on—much like a kid kicking a dog after getting yelled at by his mom, who got smacked by his stepfather. “We’re the dog of America,” he explains. Demon thinks his friend spent high school in the library, instead of watching the “hillbilly-hater marathon: Hunter’s Blood, Lunch Meat, Redneck Zombies” that a local station had aired for a month.

“And the comedy shows, even worse,” Demon adds, “with these guys acting like we’re all on the same side, but just wait. I dated a Kentucky girl once, but she was always lying through her tooth. Ha ha ha ha.” Tommy, dismayed, wonders why the people of Appalachia had to be the ones who got kicked around.  “Just bad luck, I reckon,” Demon replies. “God made us the butt of the joke universe.”

When I read this section, I thought it could easily describe the way the media often portrays Trump supporters. “As Demon says in the book, ‘We can see you. We have cable,’” Kingsolver told me. “You act like you’re making these jokes behind our backs. We see it. I wrote the whole book just to write that part.”

Kingsolver is infuriated by the way rural voters are dismissed so casually by liberals, even as she is both a rural voter and a liberal.

Earlier this year, I had been struggling (and failing) to write a sympathetic story about Trump’s most hardcore supporters and the way they tend to be ridiculed—often for good reason—by liberals and in the media. Frustrated, I called Kingsolver to see if she could offer some guidance in understanding and writing about these complicated Americans who are so easily caricatured. She summed up the stereotypes succinctly: “We’re just backward hillbillies that don’t have ambition or drive because if we did, we would all be JD Vance, vying to be Vice President right now.”

Indeed, she is infuriated by the way rural voters are dismissed so casually by liberals, even as she is both a rural voter and a liberal. “It really galls me that people are ready to write off 50 percent of the population as crazy, stupid, uninformed, whatever. That’s so elitist.” She understands why Trump’s rural supporters are so angry—and why they like him so much.

Kingsolver spent some of her childhood in Congo, where her parents worked as public health missionaries. (Her father was a doctor.) She lived there when the country won its independence from Belgium in 1960. “When Belgium pulled out abruptly, and there were no educated Congolese, the whole social service network was handled by volunteers and missionaries,” she said. “Well, that’s kind of what’s going on here. So many of the services are handled by nonprofits like RAM [Remote Area Medical]. It’s like Doctors Without Borders, who come to rural Tennessee.” She adds, “It’s a very normal thing for kids here, like for a 13-year-old child never to have been to the dentist.” The RAM clinics, she said, are “like Coachella, except not as happy…with hundreds and hundreds of people with their kids trying to get seen by a doctor. It’s like the Congo. We’re depending on missionaries for what the government should be doing here.”

Then there is language used in public conversations to describe Trump’s rural supporters, which she insists would never be acceptable for other marginalized communities. “Progressive people will really bend over backward not to laugh at someone who has faced other kinds of prejudice, to give people the benefit of the doubt and say, Okay, structural racism has left this poor woman not very well informed,” she told me. “We will try hard to meet her in the middle. You’re not doing the same thing for people who are suffering from structural classism, and from sort of rural oppression.” Not to mention a host of “rural stereotypes, from educated, informed, progressive, well-meaning people.” She recalled a recent book tour for Demon where “the first question of a live radio interview was, ‘Why do you choose to write about degenerate people?’ Degenerate?”

And yet, there are good reasons why liberals are often so quick to disparage Trump supporters. It’s not hard to find them outside a Trump rally, for instance, offering up insane political beliefs and conspiracy theories. I told her about some of the ones I have met this year, almost all of whom believe Trump won the 2020 election.

“It’s not literally insane for people to believe that, when every news source available to them, including the leader of their church, is telling them that,” she countered. “We all rely on the sources we trust. I think it would be crazy for some people not to think that when it’s absolutely what everybody around them says.” Kingsolver continued. “What progressive people say about gender sounds crazy to a lot of my neighbors and a lot of my family—the idea of like, you’re not born with a gender, you decide on your gender. That sounds insane to a lot of people. When you talk between these silos, everybody sounds crazy.”

Despite her roots in Appalachia, Kingsolver has feet in two worlds. In July 2023, first lady Jill Biden was seen reading Demon Copperhead on the beach in Delaware. When I talked to Kingsolver in May, she told me she had been trying to get the Biden campaign to do an event in Bristol, Virginia, to reach out to rural voters. Less than two weeks later, she attended a state dinner at the White House for William Ruto, president of Kenya.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are having a beach day at Rehoboth Beach. The first lady is reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Photo by CNN’s @JayMcMichaelCNN pic.twitter.com/05Fzl6s3Ou

— Betsy Klein (@betsy_klein) July 30, 2023

The Bristol event didn’t materialize before Biden dropped out of the presidential race. But Harris seems to have picked up where Biden left off by deploying Kingsolver for Friday’s fundraiser, where the top-tier ticket costs $6,600. (Kingsolver fans can still tune in for the conversation for $25.) Kingsolver won’t be on the campaign trail jousting with Vance. Friday’s fundraiser is her only Harris event. “I’m actually terrible at knocking on doors or making phone calls,” she says. “I am a writer. So when I saw an announcement for the first of this series of ‘Writers for Harris events, I immediately wanted to sign on. This is what I can do!” 

On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Barbara Kingsolver is headlining a fundraiser for the Harris Victory Fund. She’ll join actress Ashley Judd and former Kentucky poet laureate Silas House for a “virtual conversation” about perspectives from rural Appalachia. The event coincides with a recent push by Vice President Kamala Harris to reach out to rural voters, who overwhelmingly support former President Donald Trump.

Kingsolver is an obvious Democratic counterweight to vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The Ohio senator came to fame through his book Hillbilly Elegy, which chronicled his dysfunctional family history that had roots in rural Kentucky. The Trump campaign has touted his appeal to working-class and rural white voters. Unlike Vance, who was raised in suburban Ohio, Kingsolver actually grew up in rural Kentucky and still lives in Appalachian Virginia. She won the Pulitzer for a novel set in the very places Vance claims to speak for.

“I live among Trump supporters in a county that’s probably 80 percent for Trump,” she told me when I interviewed her in May. “When I go to the grocery store, I’m going to Trump rally. When I drive to town, I go past gigantic Trump 2024 signs. This is where I live.”

“I live among Trump supporters in a county that’s probably 80 percent for Trump.”

Impoverished rural areas represent some of Trump’s strongest base. He won 65 percent of the country’s rural voters in 2020, and the totals were even higher in many parts of Appalachia. The Harris campaign has been trying to make inroads in many of these oft-forgotten places, particularly in swing states, in an effort to narrow Trump’s margins. In 2020, for instance, Trump won Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, 62–36 percent. But Harris made an appearance there last Thursday. And former President Bill Clinton has been deployed to the rural South in an attempt to also strengthen her appeal with these voters.

“We got to turn out folks, obviously, in base Democratic areas, but we also need to persuade a lot of people,” Dan Kanninen, Harris’ battleground states director, told CNN last week. “Shaving margins where you can, in counties that maybe Trump won 70-30, but if we can lose them 60-40 or 65-35, that makes a big difference over dozens of counties in a state.”

Kingsolver’s prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead, is a Dickensian coming-of- age tale set in the hollows of Appalachia where young Demon struggles through addiction, foster care, family disintegration, and the general failures of the American social welfare system all while trying to remain rooted in the hill country he loves. It’s an empathetic portrayal of the people Vance mostly scorned in his memoir. It’s no surprise, then, that the Harris campaign might see Kingsolver as a useful campaign surrogate who could help bridge the gap between the California coastal liberal and rural voters who overwhelmingly support Trump.

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A post shared by Barbara Kingsolver (@barbara.kingsolver)

The young protagonist of Demon Copperhead is born in Lee County, Virginia, a real place where 45 percent of the children live below the poverty line. The disability rates among adults in Lee County are twice the national average—nearly 50 percent of the elderly residents have a disability. Trump also won nearly 85 percent of the vote there in 2020. Kingsolver thinks the dismal state of infrastructure, health care, and education opportunities in rural America leaves its residents vulnerable to someone like Trump, who claims to see them.

“He channels their rage,” she told me, even if his agenda will do little to help their material condition. “What they have in common is that they feel like the government has failed them. Any other attempt to sort of reduce Trump voters to a monoculture is really very bigoted.”

There’s a moment in Demon Copperhead where Demon is talking to his friend Tommy, who recently started working at a local newspaper where he has discovered for the first time how the rest of the world views Appalachia. “Blight on the nation” read the headline of one story that crosses his desk. Demon tries to explain how the world is organized to Tommy, and the way everyone needs someone to dump on—much like a kid kicking a dog after getting yelled at by his mom, who got smacked by his stepfather. “We’re the dog of America,” he explains. Demon thinks his friend spent high school in the library, instead of watching the “hillbilly-hater marathon: Hunter’s Blood, Lunch Meat, Redneck Zombies” that a local station had aired for a month.

“And the comedy shows, even worse,” Demon adds, “with these guys acting like we’re all on the same side, but just wait. I dated a Kentucky girl once, but she was always lying through her tooth. Ha ha ha ha.” Tommy, dismayed, wonders why the people of Appalachia had to be the ones who got kicked around.  “Just bad luck, I reckon,” Demon replies. “God made us the butt of the joke universe.”

When I read this section, I thought it could easily describe the way the media often portrays Trump supporters. “As Demon says in the book, ‘We can see you. We have cable,’” Kingsolver told me. “You act like you’re making these jokes behind our backs. We see it. I wrote the whole book just to write that part.”

Kingsolver is infuriated by the way rural voters are dismissed so casually by liberals, even as she is both a rural voter and a liberal.

Earlier this year, I had been struggling (and failing) to write a sympathetic story about Trump’s most hardcore supporters and the way they tend to be ridiculed—often for good reason—by liberals and in the media. Frustrated, I called Kingsolver to see if she could offer some guidance in understanding and writing about these complicated Americans who are so easily caricatured. She summed up the stereotypes succinctly: “We’re just backward hillbillies that don’t have ambition or drive because if we did, we would all be JD Vance, vying to be Vice President right now.”

Indeed, she is infuriated by the way rural voters are dismissed so casually by liberals, even as she is both a rural voter and a liberal. “It really galls me that people are ready to write off 50 percent of the population as crazy, stupid, uninformed, whatever. That’s so elitist.” She understands why Trump’s rural supporters are so angry—and why they like him so much.

Kingsolver spent some of her childhood in Congo, where her parents worked as public health missionaries. (Her father was a doctor.) She lived there when the country won its independence from Belgium in 1960. “When Belgium pulled out abruptly, and there were no educated Congolese, the whole social service network was handled by volunteers and missionaries,” she said. “Well, that’s kind of what’s going on here. So many of the services are handled by nonprofits like RAM [Remote Area Medical]. It’s like Doctors Without Borders, who come to rural Tennessee.” She adds, “It’s a very normal thing for kids here, like for a 13-year-old child never to have been to the dentist.” The RAM clinics, she said, are “like Coachella, except not as happy…with hundreds and hundreds of people with their kids trying to get seen by a doctor. It’s like the Congo. We’re depending on missionaries for what the government should be doing here.”

Then there is language used in public conversations to describe Trump’s rural supporters, which she insists would never be acceptable for other marginalized communities. “Progressive people will really bend over backward not to laugh at someone who has faced other kinds of prejudice, to give people the benefit of the doubt and say, Okay, structural racism has left this poor woman not very well informed,” she told me. “We will try hard to meet her in the middle. You’re not doing the same thing for people who are suffering from structural classism, and from sort of rural oppression.” Not to mention a host of “rural stereotypes, from educated, informed, progressive, well-meaning people.” She recalled a recent book tour for Demon where “the first question of a live radio interview was, ‘Why do you choose to write about degenerate people?’ Degenerate?”

And yet, there are good reasons why liberals are often so quick to disparage Trump supporters. It’s not hard to find them outside a Trump rally, for instance, offering up insane political beliefs and conspiracy theories. I told her about some of the ones I have met this year, almost all of whom believe Trump won the 2020 election.

“It’s not literally insane for people to believe that, when every news source available to them, including the leader of their church, is telling them that,” she countered. “We all rely on the sources we trust. I think it would be crazy for some people not to think that when it’s absolutely what everybody around them says.” Kingsolver continued. “What progressive people say about gender sounds crazy to a lot of my neighbors and a lot of my family—the idea of like, you’re not born with a gender, you decide on your gender. That sounds insane to a lot of people. When you talk between these silos, everybody sounds crazy.”

Despite her roots in Appalachia, Kingsolver has feet in two worlds. In July 2023, first lady Jill Biden was seen reading Demon Copperhead on the beach in Delaware. When I talked to Kingsolver in May, she told me she had been trying to get the Biden campaign to do an event in Bristol, Virginia, to reach out to rural voters. Less than two weeks later, she attended a state dinner at the White House for William Ruto, president of Kenya.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are having a beach day at Rehoboth Beach. The first lady is reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Photo by CNN’s @JayMcMichaelCNN pic.twitter.com/05Fzl6s3Ou

— Betsy Klein (@betsy_klein) July 30, 2023

The Bristol event didn’t materialize before Biden dropped out of the presidential race. But Harris seems to have picked up where Biden left off by deploying Kingsolver for Friday’s fundraiser, where the top-tier ticket costs $6,600. (Kingsolver fans can still tune in for the conversation for $25.) Kingsolver won’t be on the campaign trail jousting with Vance. Friday’s fundraiser is her only Harris event. “I’m actually terrible at knocking on doors or making phone calls,” she says. “I am a writer. So when I saw an announcement for the first of this series of ‘Writers for Harris events, I immediately wanted to sign on. This is what I can do!” 

In July, former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated by a 20-year-old man wielding an AR-15-style rifle. That near miss hasn’t stopped the Rod of Iron Ministries from holding a raffle this coming weekend for a special Trump-branded AR-15 at its fifth annual “Freedom Festival.”

Billed as the “largest open carry rally in America,” the festival draws attendees to celebrate the Second Amendment and hear from headliners that will include former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, radio host Sebastian Gorka, former US Rep. Allen West, former Trump ICE Director Tom Homan, and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. Anyone who registers early for the free tickets can enter the raffle to win the Trump gun.

The Rod of Iron Ministries was founded by Hyung Jin ”Sean” Moon as a militant breakaway from the Unification Church founded by his father, the late Sun Myung Moon. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Pastor Sean Moon’s sermons and social media videos espouse a particular End Times theology that predicts a future overthrow of the American government. He believes the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s divine justice—the “rod of iron” invoked in Revelation 2:27.

Moon often wears a crown of bullets, carries a gold-plated assault weapon, and rides a Harley in a helmet with a creepy skeleton facemask. (Moon also seems to have musical aspirations: He raps under the name King Bullethead and will also perform at this weekend’s Freedom Fest.)

With the help of a $5 million loan from their father, Moon’s brother Justin founded the Kahr Firearms Group in 1995. It started off manufacturing mostly small arms designed to tap into the growing market for American-made concealed weapons as states began to relax their gun laws. It has since expanded, and now Kahr is a sponsor of “Freedom Fest,” which will be held at its TommyGun warehouse in Greeley, Pennsylvania.

Both Moons have cultivated significant MAGA ties, including with the Trump brothers, Eric and Don Jr. Kahr Firearms now offers several Trump-themed weapons, and the company’s products are frequently promoted in Don Jr.’s weapons-themed outdoor magazine, Field Ethos. When the firearms company opened its TommyGun warehouse in 2016, Eric Trump gave a speech.

Given Sean Moon’s obsession with the downfall of the current American government, it’s no surprise that he was involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He was at the US Capitol on January 6, and while he didn’t go in, he was close enough to get tear-gassed.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hyungjin Moon (KINGBULLETHEAD) (@kingbulletheadrodofironkingdom)

The Rod of Iron pastor has never seemed especially concerned with appearances or suggestions that his ministry is a cult. “We’re used to that type of persecution,” Moon told Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson in 2022, noting that followers of his father’s church are known colloquially as “Moonies.”

Under Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church gained some renown for conducting mass weddings for its believers. (One at Madison Square Garden in 1982 joined 2,075 couples.) In 2018, the Rod of Iron updated this tradition by holding a mass wedding and vow-renewal ceremony in which couples carried (unloaded) assault weapons similar to the one used just days before to mow down dozens of staff and high school students in the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting.

This year won’t be the first time the Freedom Festival has given away a Trump gun. But considering the Rod of Iron’s reverence for Trump, I wondered whether the Freedom Festival organizers might have had second thoughts about raffling off a weapon favored by the former president’s would-be assassin. “That wouldn’t affect the decision to do this, not at all. I don’t think we’d see the connection,” Tim Elder, the church’s director of world missions, told me. “It’s not the AR’s fault. It’s the guy that was pulling the trigger. It’s his fault. We’re not going to blame the AR for that incident.”

But if the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s justice, what does it mean if it’s used to try to assassinate Trump? “We see that God’s hand is on this man,” Elder said simply.

The festival starts Friday, with an appearance by Flynn and a screening of his eponymous new movie.

In July, former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated by a 20-year-old man wielding an AR-15-style rifle. That near miss hasn’t stopped the Rod of Iron Ministries from holding a raffle this coming weekend for a special Trump-branded AR-15 at its fifth annual “Freedom Festival.”

Billed as the “largest open carry rally in America,” the festival draws attendees to celebrate the Second Amendment and hear from headliners that will include former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, radio host Sebastian Gorka, former US Rep. Allen West, former Trump ICE Director Tom Homan, and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. Anyone who registers early for the free tickets can enter the raffle to win the Trump gun.

The Rod of Iron Ministries was founded by Hyung Jin ”Sean” Moon as a militant breakaway from the Unification Church founded by his father, the late Sun Myung Moon. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Pastor Sean Moon’s sermons and social media videos espouse a particular End Times theology that predicts a future overthrow of the American government. He believes the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s divine justice—the “rod of iron” invoked in Revelation 2:27.

Moon often wears a crown of bullets, carries a gold-plated assault weapon, and rides a Harley in a helmet with a creepy skeleton facemask. (Moon also seems to have musical aspirations: He raps under the name King Bullethead and will also perform at this weekend’s Freedom Fest.)

With the help of a $5 million loan from their father, Moon’s brother Justin founded the Kahr Firearms Group in 1995. It started off manufacturing mostly small arms designed to tap into the growing market for American-made concealed weapons as states began to relax their gun laws. It has since expanded, and now Kahr is a sponsor of “Freedom Fest,” which will be held at its TommyGun warehouse in Greeley, Pennsylvania.

Both Moons have cultivated significant MAGA ties, including with the Trump brothers, Eric and Don Jr. Kahr Firearms now offers several Trump-themed weapons, and the company’s products are frequently promoted in Don Jr.’s weapons-themed outdoor magazine, Field Ethos. When the firearms company opened its TommyGun warehouse in 2016, Eric Trump gave a speech.

Given Sean Moon’s obsession with the downfall of the current American government, it’s no surprise that he was involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He was at the US Capitol on January 6, and while he didn’t go in, he was close enough to get tear-gassed.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hyungjin Moon (KINGBULLETHEAD) (@kingbulletheadrodofironkingdom)

The Rod of Iron pastor has never seemed especially concerned with appearances or suggestions that his ministry is a cult. “We’re used to that type of persecution,” Moon told Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson in 2022, noting that followers of his father’s church are known colloquially as “Moonies.”

Under Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church gained some renown for conducting mass weddings for its believers. (One at Madison Square Garden in 1982 joined 2,075 couples.) In 2018, the Rod of Iron updated this tradition by holding a mass wedding and vow-renewal ceremony in which couples carried (unloaded) assault weapons similar to the one used just days before to mow down dozens of staff and high school students in the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting.

This year won’t be the first time the Freedom Festival has given away a Trump gun. But considering the Rod of Iron’s reverence for Trump, I wondered whether the Freedom Festival organizers might have had second thoughts about raffling off a weapon favored by the former president’s would-be assassin. “That wouldn’t affect the decision to do this, not at all. I don’t think we’d see the connection,” Tim Elder, the church’s director of world missions, told me. “It’s not the AR’s fault. It’s the guy that was pulling the trigger. It’s his fault. We’re not going to blame the AR for that incident.”

But if the AR-15 is an instrument of God’s justice, what does it mean if it’s used to try to assassinate Trump? “We see that God’s hand is on this man,” Elder said simply.

The festival starts Friday, with an appearance by Flynn and a screening of his eponymous new movie.

During the vice presidential debate, CBS news moderator Margaret Brennan pressed Ohio Sen. JD Vance about former President Donald Trump’s proposal to seize public lands to use them for housing construction. “Senator, where are you going to seize the federal lands?” she asked. “Can you clarify?”

“Well, what Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything,” Vance replied. “They’re not being used for national parks. They’re not being used. And they could be places where we build a lot of housing.”

Vance was referring to an idea Trump floated in 2023 when he announced that his next administration would solve the nation’s housing crisis by holding a contest to charter 10 new “freedom cities” on public land. “These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and, in fact, the American dream,” he said in a video announcing the proposal. (In the same video, Trump also pledged to solve the country’s transit woes with flying cars.)

Whether he realized it or not, Trump’s ”freedom cities” put a new face on an old pet cause of Western conservatives and Sagebrush Rebellion sympathizers. For years, these anti-government activists have been agitating for the federal government to sell off public lands or place them under state control. But affordable housing has never been part of their agenda. After all, most public land out West is in remote places with little water and infrastructure, and where few people want to live. (Dunn County, North Dakota, anyone?)

The push to sell off public lands has long been backed by big corporations seeking cheap land for grazing, oil and gas drilling, or coal and uranium mines, all free from many federal environmental regulations. Even so, Trump isn’t the first politician to propose using public land for housing. The idea was most recently, and most prominently, brought into circulation by the far-right agitator Ammon Bundy.

He’s the son of rogue Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who engaged in a 2014 armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management when the agency attempted to impound cows he’d been illegally grazing for years on federal land. Two years later, Ammon Bundy orchestrated the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a confrontation that ultimately led an FBI agent to fatally shoot one of the occupiers, LaVoy Finicum. Bundy was tried twice for his role in the standoffs. The first case, in Nevada, ended in a mistrial after misconduct by the government. A jury in Oregon ultimately found him not guilty of the Malheur occupation.

The confrontations—and the failure of the Justice Department to punish him—turned Bundy into an outlaw hero to those who oppose federal control of public lands in the West. After instigating protests against Covid restrictions during the pandemic, in 2021, he leveraged his fame into a political campaign and announced he was running as a Republican for governor of Idaho. And that’s when his housing policy came into play. Bundy stumped heavily on using public lands in Idaho to help state residents buy affordable homes. On his campaign website, he wrote:

If we are going to maintain our historic and traditional values, and ultimately Keep Idaho IDAHO, we must spread out and make Idaho’s land available to the people while simultaneously ensuring that necessary land remains public land for multiple use purposes (under local jurisdiction). Then we can enjoy the fruits of prosperity and land ownership while maintaining our culturally conservative identity.

The current affordable housing crisis is caused by a number of complicated factors, many of which have been caused by the Federal Government. Nevertheless, at its core, this crisis is simply a supply-and-demand issue. To lower prices, we simply need more supply. And to have more supply, we need to take our land back.

“I’m not sure if Ammon Bundy pioneered the idea of seizing public lands to create more sprawl, but he definitely leaned hard into it when he was running for governor of Idaho,” says Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the nonprofit Center for Western Priorities, who has followed Bundy’s career for many years. “Sometimes terrible ideas come back around with a fresh coat of lipstick, but it’s still the same old land-seizure movement.”

“Sometimes terrible ideas come back around with a fresh coat of lipstick, but it’s still the same old land seizure movement.”

Bundy’s proposal made news, but it didn’t do much for his campaign. After losing the GOP primary to the current sitting governor, Brad Little, he ran as an independent in the general election in 2022 and lost again. But Bundy seemed fairly sincere about wanting to build housing on public lands. In interviews, he said his own adult daughter was struggling to afford a house in Boise’s overheated housing market. (He’s also not a Trump supporter. He criticized the former president in 2018 for his hateful anti-migrant rhetoric.)

Trump’s housing plan, however, seems much more like cover for the same old agenda pushed by Republicans from Reagan to George W. Bush. It boils down to a simple premise: giving away public lands to fossil fuel companies and other extractive industries that want to plunder them on the cheap. Indeed, people hoping to shape the next Trump administration’s public lands policy have not demonstrated much interest in housing in the past.

Take William Perry Pendley, who served as the acting BLM director during the Trump administration for more than a year despite never getting confirmed by the Senate; he even ignored a ruling from a judge who said he had to leave the job because he was serving illegally. When Trump tapped him as acting BLM director, Pendley released an extensive recusal list of former clients in the oil, gas, and mining industries.

Pendley has been arguing in favor of the fire sale of public lands since he served in the Reagan administration working for the infamously anti-environment Interior Secretary James Watt. The author of Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan’s Battle With Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today, Pendley was involved in an agency scandal over leasing land to coal companies at bargain basement prices.

During the 2014 armed standoff at the Bundy ranch in Nevada, Pendley wrote a column in National Review expressing support for the embattled rancher and his fight with the federal government. “Westerners are tired of having Uncle Sam for a landlord,” he complained. Two years later, Pendley wrote again in National Review, “the Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.”

More recently, Pendley authored the Interior Department section of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a new Trump administration. It outlines 28 pages of proposals for turning over more public lands to unfettered oil, gas, and mineral development, including in sensitive areas from Alaska to Minnesota. But suddenly, Pendley has become an affordable housing advocate. In July, he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Examiner headlined “Solve the housing crisis by selling government land.”

Strangely enough, using public land for housing is a rare point of agreement between Trump and President Joe Biden—sort of. After all, the Biden administration has already done it. In July, the BLM announced the sale of a small 20-acre parcel in the Las Vegas Valley for the specific purpose of developing affordable housing. The land would be sold cheaply to the Clark County Department of Social Services, with strict requirements about how it can be used. Eighty percent of the housing must be sold to first-time homebuyers with household incomes at or below 80 percent of the Las Vegas area median income, for instance, and the rest will go to first-time buyers at or below 100 percent of the area’s median income.

“The Biden administration just called the bluff of land transfer proponents,” Weiss said in a statement at the time. “The Interior Department is showing how public lands that are already well-suited to development can be part of the housing solution, with appropriate safeguards to make sure the housing is affordable and doesn’t end up as trophy homes for billionaires.”

Bundy doesn’t seem to have weighed in on the Trump “freedom cities” proposal. He’s been a little busy dodging the payment of a $50 million defamation judgment against him, the result of an armed protest he organized in 2022 against an Idaho hospital he falsely claimed had kidnapped the baby of one of his supporters. (Social workers had taken the baby in for being malnourished.) After the jury verdict last year, Bundy took his family and went into hiding. The hospital seized his house to help pay the judgment. Bundy later resurfaced at an undisclosed location somewhere in Utah.

While he too may need some affordable housing, it’s not clear that he’d be a fan of Trump’s “freedom cities.” After all, Bundy despises cities. “History and human nature demonstrate that if we go down the path we are on now and build up and create dense and congested cities with large populations, traffic, and pollution, we will lose our conservative, traditional values,” he wrote on his campaign website in 2021. “It’s just what happens.”

One in every 10 pregnancies in the US ends in a miscarriage, a common medical event for which there are safe and effective treatments should there be complications. But over the past two years, having a miscarriage in many states has become far more dangerous, thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade.

Thirteen states have passed total abortion bans. Three others ban abortion after six weeks—a de facto ban. These laws have resulted in a rash of horror stories—not about the anticipated illegal backroom abortion deaths, but about ordinary women having ordinary but occasionally life-threatening pregnancy complications, while hospitals and doctors refuse to treat them for fear of being prosecuted.

Reporters and lawyers have chronicled stories of miscarrying women nearly dying from blood loss and infection, suffering debilitating injuries, and future infertility because of delayed care. One Texas hospital, the AP reported, even left a woman to miscarry in the ER restroom because the staff refused to treat her. Her husband had to call 911 from the ER for help.

Among the legion of GOP anti-abortion politicians in the US who’ve helped create this carnage, there is one you might expect to have some sympathy for the suffering of these women: Vice presidential candidate and Ohio Sen. JD Vance. On the surface, the politician who denigrated Democrats as the party of “childless cat ladies” and suggested that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,” was to take care of children, would not be an obvious softie for the victims of policies that have left women bleeding out in hospital restrooms. And yet, he might understand the situation better than many of his Republican colleagues.

Vance owes much of his fame and political career to his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, a coming-of-age story about his triumph over family dysfunction, addiction, absent fathers, and cycles of abuse.

The memoir’s beating heart is Bonnie Blanton Vance, or “Mamaw,” the maternal grandmother Vance called his “guardian angel” in his July acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Blanton helped raise the future Yale Law School grad when his drug-addicted mother could not, saving him from becoming just another entry in a long family history of shiftless angry men.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance holds Blanton up as the force of nature behind his successes. But the book also suggests she may be an unintended case study of something quite different: the importance of reproductive health care for everyone. In his memoir, Vance says that his beloved grandmother suffered eight miscarriages over 10 years, plus four pregnancies that came to term. Today, many of the women suffering from denied miscarriages and abortion care “have similar life stories to his grandmother,” says Debra Stulberg, a professor of family medicine at the University of Chicago who studies miscarriage care.

The word “abortion” never appears in Hillbilly Elegy, and Vance doesn’t seem to have ever spoken publicly about the particular chapter of his grandmother’s difficult life. (A spokesperson for Vance did not respond to questions for this story by publication.) But his grandmother’s story, which helped make him famous, seems to underly Vance’s intense opposition to abortion—one that’s even more extreme than the man he shares the GOP ticket with.

In 2023, Vance signed on to a letter to the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, along with 29 other Republican lawmakers, urging the agency to reverse a new rule that bars law enforcement officers from accessing patients’ reproductive healthcare records, particularly those trying to prosecute women for crossing state lines for abortion care. “Abortion is not health care,” the letter said. “It is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women.”

Vance supports a national abortion ban, and he doesn’t believe in exceptions for rape and incest. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said in an interview during his 2022 Ohio Senate campaign. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”

“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”

Vance’s position is a curious one for someone whose origin story begins with the pregnancy of a 13-year-old girl.

In his memoir, Vance writes that his grandfather, Jim Vance, and his grandmother’s best friend, Bonnie Smith, were lovers. At some point, he writes, 16-year-old Jim cheated on Bonnie Smith with 13-year-old Bonnie Blanton. The “affair” resulted in a pregnancy that prompted the couple to flee Appalachian Kentucky for Dayton, Ohio, to escape Blanton’s murderously protective brothers.

Today, Blanton’s first pregnancy would be considered the result of statutory rape in many states, and a felony carrying prison time. The pregnancy was also exceedingly dangerous. “Teen pregnancies, especially 15 and under, are by definition high risk,” says Stulberg. Perhaps no surprise, then, that Blanton’s baby died a week after she was born.

It seems clear from Hillbilly Elegy that Blanton’s unplanned pregnancy at 13 was a singular catastrophic event that trapped her in a violent marriage for decades. “Mamaw never spent a day in high school,” Vance writes. “She’d given birth to and buried a child before she could legally drive a car.” Her husband was an abusive alcoholic; Blanton famously once tried to set him on fire when he had passed out drunk on the couch.

Yet Vance seems to view Mamaw’s adolescent pregnancy not as a catastrophe but as the catalyst that launched his family out of Hatfield and McCoy territory and into suburban Ohio, where there were more opportunities. “Mamaw’s entire life—and the trajectory of our family—may have changed for a baby who lived only six days,” he writes. Blanton died in 2005, at the age of 72, when Vance was only 20 and still in the Marines. As a result, “We don’t get to hear her take on this story,” Stulberg says. “That could be very different from his.”

Having a baby at 13 may have set in motion Vance’s path to the vice president’s office. But it also may have set up Blanton for the years of fertility issues Vance describes in his memoir. According to him, she had eight miscarriages in the decade between the live birth of an uncle in 1951 and the birth of his mother in 1961. But in his book, Vance displays a striking lack of curiosity about the details of those miscarriages, other than to speculate that they may have been triggered by the stress of being married to an abusive alcoholic.  

Without Blanton around to fill in the details, such as how far along in her pregnancies she was when she miscarried, we can only speculate. But experts I spoke with found it highly unlikely that a woman who’d had eight miscarriages, plus four pregnancies, the first at 13, would not at some point have needed either a therapeutic abortion or the sort of miscarriage treatment that Vance’s preferred reproductive health policies now make difficult to obtain in many states.

Having a history of multiple pregnancies itself is a risk factor, Stulberg notes. “The risks of preterm labor and postpartum hemorrhage are higher,” she says. Preterm labor is a common reason for miscarriage management, including what is essentially the abortion of a nonviable fetus.

“Politicians may say very easily that there’s no reason why miscarriage should be affected by these [abortion bans],” says Daniel Grossman, an OB-GYN at the University of California, San Francisco, and head of a research program that has been tracking the state of reproductive health care since the overturning of Roe. “But in fact, the treatments that are done for miscarriage are almost identical to the treatments for abortion, including the abortion pill.”

“The treatments that are done for miscarriage are almost identical to the treatments for abortion, including the abortion pill.”

Grossman recently co-authored a study that compiled accounts from dozens of clinicians who had observed the horrific treatment of pregnant women in need of medical care that they were either denied or forced to obtain at great expense because of strict state abortion bans, often with great trauma.

Consider this account from a clinician in a state with an abortion ban, describing what happened to a woman who was 19 to 20 weeks pregnant. When she arrived at the ER, doctors found that the amniotic sac was protruding through her cervix—evidence of a doomed pregnancy. But they sent her home. The next day, she showed up at the ER in the immense pain of advanced labor.

Anesthesiologists refused to provide her an epidural for pain because they believed it “could be considered [a crime] under the new law,” the clinician reported. Instead, they gave her some IV morphine as she labored for several more hours to deliver a dead fetus. “I overheard the primary provider say to a nurse that so much as offering a helping hand to a patient getting onto the gurney while in the throes of a miscarriage could be construed as ‘aiding and abetting an abortion,’” the horrified clinician reported. “Best not to so much as touch the patient who is miscarrying.”

Even before Roe v. Wade, doctors didn’t treat pregnant patients like this, says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California Davis who studies the history of abortion care in the United States. Back then, doctors were given more deference to decide when a woman’s life was in danger. She says even in 1946, when Blanton first got pregnant, a family doctor would likely have been able to quietly perform an abortion on a 13-year-old without running afoul of the authorities. Indeed, it was exactly these sorts of child pregnancies that led to legal reforms that created exceptions to anti-abortion laws in the first place, she says.

Today, however, 10 states now have abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest, and six have no exceptions for the health of patients, even if they’re children. Politicians like Vance “don’t see exceptions [to abortion bans] as being necessary to address tragedies,” Ziegler says. “They see them as loopholes.”

For Stulberg, Vance may be misreading his grandmother’s story. She says research shows that women who want abortions but can’t get them fare much more poorly than women who do. But they also manage to survive, as Vance’s grandmother did. “It’s almost like women’s resilience protects society from seeing the harm,” she says. “To be that educated,” Stulberg says of Vance, and to have his life experience, and “then choose to support these policies is not caring that women are going to die.”

Women just like his grandmother.

Update, October 1: After this story published, Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Vance, sent this comment: “Throughout his campaign for U.S. Senate and during his time in office, Senator Vance has consistently made clear that he supports reasonable exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. Senator Vance has also stated repeatedly that he agrees with President Trump on abortion policy being set at the state level, not the federal level, and like President Trump, he agrees that we need to find common ground on this issue. As a senator, he has not supported any legislation which would impose a federal abortion ban.”

There may be no better example of the stark choices on this year’s presidential ballot than the schedule of events today for the competing vice presidential candidates.

Democrat Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, is spending his morning in Michigan at the Michigan-Minnesota football game. Social media posts show happy photos of the former high school football coach hanging out with the tailgaters at the Harris-Walz booth in the parking lot.

https://twitter.com/umichvoter/status/1840054228011593924

AP reports that “Earlier in the day, Walz was greeted at the airport by University of Michigan students, who had arrived in a bus donning a banner that read “Put Me In, Coach!”

Sen. JD Vance is spending his afternoon in Monroeville, Pa., speaking at a town hall convened by Lance Wallnau, a self-proclaimed apostle who claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris’s debate performance against former president Donald Trump was a form of “witchcraft.”

“She represents an amalgam of the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component, and she’s younger,” Wallnau said in a video.

Meanwhile, social media is still buzzing over a rediscovered video of Vance blaming car seats for Americans’ failure to have more kids.

@whattheactualkaren

OMG. How about affordable #childcare #healthcare #maternityleave #paternityleave ? I don’t think #carseats are the determining factor. Did he #create this story too? #weird #jd #jdvance #debate #kamala #harris #president #vicepresident #walz #timwalz #kamalaharris #vote #voteblue #magaisacult #votethemout #wewontgoback #oldwhitemen #gop #republicans #callyourdadyoureinacult #service #country #america #usa #politics #2024 #bluewave2024 #kamala2024 #voteblue2024

♬ original sound – WhatTheActualKaren

MAGA influencer Brandon Straka is still on probation for a criminal charge related to his participation in the mob at the US Capitol on January 6. But on Sunday, he will be back in DC, where he’s slated to appear on the National Mall at the “Rescue the Republic” event, alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Brand, a handful of anti-vax doctors, evangelical preachers, plus journalist Matt Taibbi.

The hodgepodge speaker lineup reflects the mishmash of the event’s agenda. The website declares that the United States “is under attack by a conglomerate of industrial complexes,” and calls on Americans to “join the resistance.” It’s the production of the Libertarian Party; a group that fought vaccine mandates during the pandemic; and activists opposed to sending military aid to Ukraine. Gabbard and Kennedy are now officially also surrogates for the Trump campaign.

Straka’s primary issue seems to be himself. A gay former New York City hairdresser, he came to fame in 2018 after making a video declaring his intention to “walk away” from the Democratic Party. The video went viral, with some help from Russian propaganda outlets, and his movement was born. He accumulated hundreds of thousands of social media followers, and even spoke at a 2019 Trump rally. In 2020, Straka joined up with the “Stop the Steal” movement that sought to cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election results, and that year, his #WalkAway foundation raised nearly $2 million.

As part of that campaign, Straka was on deck to speak at a side rally outside the US Capitol on January 6, but the event was cancelled after Trump spoke at the Ellipse and urged the crowd to march on the US Capitol. Straka joined the crowd and made a video of himself among the mob just outside the Capitol doors.

About three weeks later, he was arrested. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge after cooperating with the government’s investigation.

As part of his plea agreement, Straka admitted under oath that he had yelled “Go! Go! Go!” to encourage other protesters to go inside the Capitol while police tried to hold them back. He also admitted to chiming in with the crowd yelling, “Take it! Take it!” to a group of rioters as they seized a shield from a Capitol police officer. Straka was sentenced to three months’ house arrest and three years’ probation.

The arrest prompted Facebook to shut down his accounts, and payment processers refused to work with him. His fundraising dried up. In the summer of 2023, he appeared before a “field hearing” on the “weaponization” of government at the Capitol convened by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), where he complained about having lost his TSA PreCheck and being treated like a terrorist at the airport.

Straka has spent the past three years desperately trying to rehabilitate his image and reassemble his following by appearing at B-list political events like the “Rescue the Republic.” Last month, he made a new video celebrating the six-year anniversary of his original. Despite a plug from Trump on his social media platform Truth Social, the YouTube video has racked up only about 60,000 views.

The self-proclaimed influencer’s lack of meaningful influence doesn’t seem to have stopped a few rich donors from keeping his organization afloat since his arrest. For instance, IRS records show that between November 2021 and October 2023, his foundation received $220,000 from the Bell Charitable Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Kathleen Bell Flynn, heir to the Taco Bell fortune.

On Wednesday, Straka sent out a press release announcing “a critical fundraising initiative aimed at disseminating his influential new video.” The new money will essentially support a spam campaign that will harness “cutting-edge geo-targeting technology to send text messages and place streaming audio ads and internet ads directly to targeted demographics using mobile phones, tablets, and computers.” Straka said that “an extraordinary donor” has stepped up to match donations up to $100,000, provided he can raise that much by October 15.

There may be no better example of the stark choices on this year’s presidential ballot than the schedule of events today for the competing vice presidential candidates.

Democrat Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, is spending his morning in Michigan at the Michigan-Minnesota football game. Social media posts show happy photos of the former high school football coach hanging out with the tailgaters at the Harris-Walz booth in the parking lot.

https://twitter.com/umichvoter/status/1840054228011593924

AP reports that “Earlier in the day, Walz was greeted at the airport by University of Michigan students, who had arrived in a bus donning a banner that read “Put Me In, Coach!”

Sen. JD Vance is spending his afternoon in Monroeville, Pa., speaking at a town hall convened by Lance Wallnau, a self-proclaimed apostle who claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris’s debate performance against former president Donald Trump was a form of “witchcraft.”

“She represents an amalgam of the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component, and she’s younger,” Wallnau said in a video.

Meanwhile, social media is still buzzing over a rediscovered video of Vance blaming car seats for Americans’ failure to have more kids.

@whattheactualkaren

OMG. How about affordable #childcare #healthcare #maternityleave #paternityleave ? I don’t think #carseats are the determining factor. Did he #create this story too? #weird #jd #jdvance #debate #kamala #harris #president #vicepresident #walz #timwalz #kamalaharris #vote #voteblue #magaisacult #votethemout #wewontgoback #oldwhitemen #gop #republicans #callyourdadyoureinacult #service #country #america #usa #politics #2024 #bluewave2024 #kamala2024 #voteblue2024

♬ original sound – WhatTheActualKaren

MAGA influencer Brandon Straka is still on probation for a criminal charge related to his participation in the mob at the US Capitol on January 6. But on Sunday, he will be back in DC, where he’s slated to appear on the National Mall at the “Rescue the Republic” event, alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Brand, a handful of anti-vax doctors, evangelical preachers, plus journalist Matt Taibbi.

The hodgepodge speaker lineup reflects the mishmash of the event’s agenda. The website declares that the United States “is under attack by a conglomerate of industrial complexes,” and calls on Americans to “join the resistance.” It’s the production of the Libertarian Party; a group that fought vaccine mandates during the pandemic; and activists opposed to sending military aid to Ukraine. Gabbard and Kennedy are now officially also surrogates for the Trump campaign.

Straka’s primary issue seems to be himself. A gay former New York City hairdresser, he came to fame in 2018 after making a video declaring his intention to “walk away” from the Democratic Party. The video went viral, with some help from Russian propaganda outlets, and his movement was born. He accumulated hundreds of thousands of social media followers, and even spoke at a 2019 Trump rally. In 2020, Straka joined up with the “Stop the Steal” movement that sought to cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election results, and that year, his #WalkAway foundation raised nearly $2 million.

As part of that campaign, Straka was on deck to speak at a side rally outside the US Capitol on January 6, but the event was cancelled after Trump spoke at the Ellipse and urged the crowd to march on the US Capitol. Straka joined the crowd and made a video of himself among the mob just outside the Capitol doors.

About three weeks later, he was arrested. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge after cooperating with the government’s investigation.

As part of his plea agreement, Straka admitted under oath that he had yelled “Go! Go! Go!” to encourage other protesters to go inside the Capitol while police tried to hold them back. He also admitted to chiming in with the crowd yelling, “Take it! Take it!” to a group of rioters as they seized a shield from a Capitol police officer. Straka was sentenced to three months’ house arrest and three years’ probation.

The arrest prompted Facebook to shut down his accounts, and payment processers refused to work with him. His fundraising dried up. In the summer of 2023, he appeared before a “field hearing” on the “weaponization” of government at the Capitol convened by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), where he complained about having lost his TSA PreCheck and being treated like a terrorist at the airport.

Straka has spent the past three years desperately trying to rehabilitate his image and reassemble his following by appearing at B-list political events like the “Rescue the Republic.” Last month, he made a new video celebrating the six-year anniversary of his original. Despite a plug from Trump on his social media platform Truth Social, the YouTube video has racked up only about 60,000 views.

The self-proclaimed influencer’s lack of meaningful influence doesn’t seem to have stopped a few rich donors from keeping his organization afloat since his arrest. For instance, IRS records show that between November 2021 and October 2023, his foundation received $220,000 from the Bell Charitable Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Kathleen Bell Flynn, heir to the Taco Bell fortune.

On Wednesday, Straka sent out a press release announcing “a critical fundraising initiative aimed at disseminating his influential new video.” The new money will essentially support a spam campaign that will harness “cutting-edge geo-targeting technology to send text messages and place streaming audio ads and internet ads directly to targeted demographics using mobile phones, tablets, and computers.” Straka said that “an extraordinary donor” has stepped up to match donations up to $100,000, provided he can raise that much by October 15.

While President Joe Biden was holed up in Rehoboth, Delaware, recovering from Covid on Saturday afternoon, about 50 people came out in the rain to attend a rally at the White House to pressure him to abandon his reelection campaign. “Hey, hey; ho ho; thank you Joe it’s time to go,” they chanted, waving hand-painted signs emblazoned with “Pass the Torch” and “Country before Ego!”

“Young people have been shutting down streets, lobbying Congress, pressuring the White House, organizing for a chance to save our democracy, beat MAGA fascism, and win November’s presidential election with a new democratic presidential nominee,” said speaker Claudia Nachega, a 19-year-old college student and reproductive justice activist. Other speakers included Quentin Colón Roosevelt, a Princeton student and DC advisory neighborhood commissioner who is a member of the Sunrise Movement, the youth climate change organization that has called on Biden to exit the race.

The rally was co-organized by Aaron Regunberg, a former democratic Rhode Island state legislator who also helped start a new Pass the Torch political action committee. The PAC was created on July 9, just a few days after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, which proved to be a turning point in his support among Democrats. The PAC has spent nearly $40,000 in the past two weeks running ads in DC and Delaware urging Biden to step aside.

President Biden, you saved democracy in 2020.
Now you have a chance to do it again.
It's time to #PassTheTorchJoe.

Our new ad pic.twitter.com/Ba7mgbe6Ed

— PassTheTorchJoe (@PassTheTorch24) July 19, 2024

Organizers at the rally noted that while the name is similar, the group is not affiliated with the Pass the Torch USA PAC, which was started by Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn) as part of his quixotic primary challenge of Biden.

“I’m less hung up on who replaces him. I care about the fact that he has no chance of winning.”

Word of the rally spread through social media over the past few days, with a boost from former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang on X. Atul Jain works at a software company in Northern Virginia. He attended the rally with his father-in-law because they were concerned that Biden’s weakness is turning Virginia, which has been a reliably blue state in recent elections, into a battleground state.

“We want Democrats to win,” he told me. “We don’t want Trump to come to power.” Like many people I spoke with, Jain wasn’t especially concerned about which Democrat might replace Biden on the ticket. “Probably Kamala Harris is the heir apparent, but I’m less hung up on who replaces him. I care about the fact that he has no chance of winning. And we don’t want him to stand in the way of giving somebody else a chance.”

Jain had been supportive of Biden until he watched him in the June debate, and he’s angry that the people around Biden have been hiding his condition from the public and “patriotic Democrats.”

“There is absolutely no way he can win,” he said. “He has to go. It is just a question of: Does he realize it? When does he realize it? In my mind, today is better than tomorrow. Tomorrow is better than day after. But I believe he has to go. I don’t see any path to him surviving. He may be the only one who thinks he can. I love the guy. I think he’s done a great job for this country. I think he did save us in 2020. But I can’t believe that he doesn’t realize this is not his time.”

For those who would like to see Joe Biden do the right thing for the country this rally on Saturday in DC is a big deal – all of the major media outlets will be there. Let Joe know it’s time to #PassTheTorch. https://t.co/CZK6gPhRZQ

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) July 19, 2024

Charlie Bulman worked on the Biden campaign as an organizer in 2019 and 2020, first in Nevada for the caucuses and then in Pennsylvania for the general election. But he didn’t support Biden’s decision to run again. “I just think it’s clear that the president is not going to be up to do the job for another four years, that his candidacy is not putting us in the best position to win,” he told me. “I think he’s unambiguously the best president of my lifetime and has done a fantastic job. But we need someone new.”

Bulman worries about the impact of Biden’s campaign on down-ballot races and the party’s credibility. “I think it puts other folks in a tough position defending his competency,” he said. “And I think that they might lose trust among voters if they’re forced to do that.”

For all the Democratic establishment concerns about the chaos of an open nominating convention or replacing Biden on the ticket, no one I spoke with at the rally believed there was a downside to replacing Biden. They all suggested Democrats would rally behind the anyone but Biden ticket. Ernest Shepard, 34, is originally from Kansas but now lives in DC. I asked him whether he’d seen evidence of Biden losing support among Black men like himself, as the polls have suggested. He said he was shocked recently when he saw some friends from Kansas who told him adamantly they were not going to vote for Biden.

“They aren’t going to vote for Trump,” he said, but “people will sit on the couch.” What’s frustrating for him is that the evidence about Biden’s decline has been clear for a long time. “In every poll that asks the question ‘do you want Biden to keep running?’ they say ‘no,'” he said. “It’s a shame that it took this.”

Shepard says if there had been a real primary, Democrats would be running against a very flawed candidate with someone better. “We could have been excited about who it is.”

Pass the Torch Joe rally goers braving the rain still pic.twitter.com/KjRedQM75U

— Stephanie Mencimer (@smencimer) July 20, 2024

The “Pass the Torch” movement is unusual in that it only has one goal—getting Biden to quit the race—and it’s a short-term one. Many attendees expressed hope that they could soon go back to focusing on the campaign to defeat Trump in November.

Alex Lintz, a rally co-organizer, after watching the June debate, gave up and helped organize the “Pass the Torch” rally. “To be honest,” he said, “we are hoping we don’t have to do another one.”

While President Joe Biden was holed up in Rehoboth, Delaware, recovering from Covid on Saturday afternoon, about 50 people came out in the rain to attend a rally at the White House to pressure him to abandon his reelection campaign. “Hey, hey; ho ho; thank you Joe it’s time to go,” they chanted, waving hand-painted signs emblazoned with “Pass the Torch” and “Country before Ego!”

“Young people have been shutting down streets, lobbying Congress, pressuring the White House, organizing for a chance to save our democracy, beat MAGA fascism, and win November’s presidential election with a new democratic presidential nominee,” said speaker Claudia Nachega, a 19-year-old college student and reproductive justice activist. Other speakers included Quentin Colón Roosevelt, a Princeton student and DC advisory neighborhood commissioner who is a member of the Sunrise Movement, the youth climate change organization that has called on Biden to exit the race.

The rally was co-organized by Aaron Regunberg, a former democratic Rhode Island state legislator who also helped start a new Pass the Torch political action committee. The PAC was created on July 9, just a few days after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, which proved to be a turning point in his support among Democrats. The PAC has spent nearly $40,000 in the past two weeks running ads in DC and Delaware urging Biden to step aside.

President Biden, you saved democracy in 2020.
Now you have a chance to do it again.
It's time to #PassTheTorchJoe.

Our new ad pic.twitter.com/Ba7mgbe6Ed

— PassTheTorchJoe (@PassTheTorch24) July 19, 2024

Organizers at the rally noted that while the name is similar, the group is not affiliated with the Pass the Torch USA PAC, which was started by Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn) as part of his quixotic primary challenge of Biden.

“I’m less hung up on who replaces him. I care about the fact that he has no chance of winning.”

Word of the rally spread through social media over the past few days, with a boost from former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang on X. Atul Jain works at a software company in Northern Virginia. He attended the rally with his father-in-law because they were concerned that Biden’s weakness is turning Virginia, which has been a reliably blue state in recent elections, into a battleground state.

“We want Democrats to win,” he told me. “We don’t want Trump to come to power.” Like many people I spoke with, Jain wasn’t especially concerned about which Democrat might replace Biden on the ticket. “Probably Kamala Harris is the heir apparent, but I’m less hung up on who replaces him. I care about the fact that he has no chance of winning. And we don’t want him to stand in the way of giving somebody else a chance.”

Jain had been supportive of Biden until he watched him in the June debate, and he’s angry that the people around Biden have been hiding his condition from the public and “patriotic Democrats.”

“There is absolutely no way he can win,” he said. “He has to go. It is just a question of: Does he realize it? When does he realize it? In my mind, today is better than tomorrow. Tomorrow is better than day after. But I believe he has to go. I don’t see any path to him surviving. He may be the only one who thinks he can. I love the guy. I think he’s done a great job for this country. I think he did save us in 2020. But I can’t believe that he doesn’t realize this is not his time.”

For those who would like to see Joe Biden do the right thing for the country this rally on Saturday in DC is a big deal – all of the major media outlets will be there. Let Joe know it’s time to #PassTheTorch. https://t.co/CZK6gPhRZQ

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) July 19, 2024

Charlie Bulman worked on the Biden campaign as an organizer in 2019 and 2020, first in Nevada for the caucuses and then in Pennsylvania for the general election. But he didn’t support Biden’s decision to run again. “I just think it’s clear that the president is not going to be up to do the job for another four years, that his candidacy is not putting us in the best position to win,” he told me. “I think he’s unambiguously the best president of my lifetime and has done a fantastic job. But we need someone new.”

Bulman worries about the impact of Biden’s campaign on down-ballot races and the party’s credibility. “I think it puts other folks in a tough position defending his competency,” he said. “And I think that they might lose trust among voters if they’re forced to do that.”

For all the Democratic establishment concerns about the chaos of an open nominating convention or replacing Biden on the ticket, no one I spoke with at the rally believed there was a downside to replacing Biden. They all suggested Democrats would rally behind the anyone but Biden ticket. Ernest Shepard, 34, is originally from Kansas but now lives in DC. I asked him whether he’d seen evidence of Biden losing support among Black men like himself, as the polls have suggested. He said he was shocked recently when he saw some friends from Kansas who told him adamantly they were not going to vote for Biden.

“They aren’t going to vote for Trump,” he said, but “people will sit on the couch.” What’s frustrating for him is that the evidence about Biden’s decline has been clear for a long time. “In every poll that asks the question ‘do you want Biden to keep running?’ they say ‘no,'” he said. “It’s a shame that it took this.”

Shepard says if there had been a real primary, Democrats would be running against a very flawed candidate with someone better. “We could have been excited about who it is.”

Pass the Torch Joe rally goers braving the rain still pic.twitter.com/KjRedQM75U

— Stephanie Mencimer (@smencimer) July 20, 2024

The “Pass the Torch” movement is unusual in that it only has one goal—getting Biden to quit the race—and it’s a short-term one. Many attendees expressed hope that they could soon go back to focusing on the campaign to defeat Trump in November.

Alex Lintz, a rally co-organizer, had decided to volunteer on the Biden campaign a couple of months ago. But after watching the June debate, he gave up and helped organize the “Pass the Torch” rally. “To be honest,” he said, “we are hoping we don’t have to do another one.”

I found the “Secretary of Retribution” on Tuesday, sitting on a couch on media row during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. As an associate filmed him with a phone camera, Ivan Raiklin was railing against enemies of former President Donald Trump. The self-styled Retribution Secretary had an ominous message: “Constitutional sheriffs,” he warned, were going to round up all the people on Raiklin’s “Deep State target list” in live-streamed “swatting raids” so they could be punished for treason.

Those who wanted to avoid such a fate, he said, had until September 3 to “come out as a whistleblower,” by reaching out to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) or Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) to help with their investigations into the “weaponization” of government. Then, he said, “We will spare you. Everyone else will be treated as a co-conspirator.”

It’s the kind of crazy talk that the Trump campaign has tried hard to dial back this week at the gathering of the Republican faithful. Many of MAGA world’s most controversial stars, such as conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Roger Stone, who featured prominently at the 2016 GOP convention, have been largely sidelined. This year, speakers have focused on unity, comity, and winning in November in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump. But Raiklin doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

A former Green Beret and military intelligence officer, a lawyer, and a failed Virginia US Senate candidate, Raiklin also calls himself the “Deep State Marauder.” He’s a colleague of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and has been traveling the country with him this year as part of Flynn’s ReAwaken American tour. He’s also helped promote Flynn’s new movie, in which he has a cameo. When I saw the film at a screening in Charleston, West Virginia, Raiklin was on stage with Flynn, after playing the heavy and booting out all the media.

Raiklin was involved with Flynn’s efforts to help overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is the author of the “Operation Pence Card” memo, which proposed that Vice President Mike Pence could block certification of the election results on January 6. Raiklin’s name came up repeatedly during the House committee investigation of January 6, but he was never subpoenaed.

For the past six months or so, Raiklin has been circulating an enemies list of about 350 people whom he believes should be prosecuted for treason. The list, which has unnerved many democracy advocates, includes former Vice President Mike Pence, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, journalists, witnesses from Trump’s impeachment hearings, Capitol police officers, and more.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told Raw Story, which recently published a long investigation about Raiklin’s list, “This is a deadly serious report. A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a question about whether Raiklin was speaking for the former president when he portrays himself as the future “secretary of retribution.”

I was not completely surprised to find Raiklin at the Republican convention, and not just because Trump himself has frequently threatened that his second term would focus on retribution against his alleged enemies. Raiklin has made himself a fixture on the right-wing media circuit. He tends to appear randomly at congressional hearings or court proceedings for January 6 defendants, including the first Oath Keepers trial and much of the Proud Boys’ trial.

My colleague Dan Friedman approached Raiklin in the cafeteria at the DC federal courthouse last year to ask him why he attended so many January 6-related proceedings and if he was concerned about facing criminal charges connected to January 6. “Most of our conversation was off the record,” Friedman says. “But I can say that he didn’t really answer the question about criminal charges. And he threatened to retaliate against me if I wrote anything he felt was unfair. It wasn’t clear exactly what he meant, but it may have been the most direct threat I’ve received in 20 years as a reporter.”

Later, Raiklin appeared in the media room at the federal courthouse, bothering some of the regular January 6 reporters. One of them told Friedman that Raiklin “does that all the time.”

Before ensconcing himself on media row at the Republican convention Tuesday, Raiklin had been on InfoWars talking with Alex Jones about how the Trump shooting was an inside job. (Jones was broadcasting from Racine, at least 30 minutes away from the actual convention site.) When I found Raiklin on the couch in the Panther Center, he was being filmed by a man who would say only that he was from Minnesota. After they finished, I attempted to ask Raiklin about the allegations that he was inciting political violence with his target list.

It did not go well.

“When you can showcase to me that you have gotten a story accurate, I will consider interacting with you as a human being in your individual capacity,” he said, launching into a long and impenetrable interrogation of my journalism. Here’s a sampling:

“I have full 100 percent disrespect for your news organization. One hundred percent. When you can lower that to below 99.9 percent, then I’ll consider communicating with you. Is that fair?…When you can show that level of repentance to start getting things right, then I’ll see you’re making a good faith effort to try to report accurately and truthfully. So you may want to go back to your employer and start to inform them that they need to start becoming an accurate purveyors of content. Until that happens, well, you can go and talk to other people, ‘cause I’m not moving.”

“What about the kidnapping of Steve Bannon? He’s still in captivity. What about the kidnapping of Peter Navarro? He’s still in captivity until tomorrow.”

I pressed him about political violence, at which point he gave me a lecture about the sort of left-wing political violence he was opposed to. “What about the kidnapping of Steve Bannon? He’s still in captivity,” he said. “What about the kidnapping of Peter Navarro? He’s still in captivity until tomorrow.” (Bannon, a Trump adviser, is serving a four-month sentence in federal prison for defying a subpoena from Congress, and Navarro, who worked in the Trump White House, just finished his four-month sentence for the same crime on Wednesday.) Raiklin told me cryptically to “talk to Elon Musk” about the Deep State list.

Several months ago, during an appearance on InfoWars, Raiklin suggested that Trump getting assassinated might have some beneficial effects for the campaign to eradicate the Deep State by setting off the “best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”

5 months ago, Alex Jones and InfoWars guest Ivan Raiklin discussed how assassinating Trump would be beneficial, according to them, because it would lead to retaliatory “in kind” assassinations of a “deep state” list which includes President Joe Biden.

Ivan Raiklin: “If they… pic.twitter.com/yzc1x1QJxh

— PatriotTakes (@patriottakes) July 14, 2024

Given his fondness for that sort of dangerous rhetoric, I was curious to know how Raiklin had been allowed inside the convention, where security was tight. I asked him what sort of credentials he had—was he media or a delegate?—which require vetting by the Secret Service. He turned on me and said, “We’re done.” (A convention press contact did not respond to questions about Raiklin’s credentials.) When I tried to ask his “videographer” where I might watch the interview he’d been conducting when I arrived, Raiklin got up in my face and said, “Are you deaf and dumb? I just answered the question three times. Can you focus and listen to the answer? I’ve answered it already.”

Did this mouse fall into the mousetrap? pic.twitter.com/ynLm6iMv4t

— Ivan Raiklin (@IvanRaiklin) July 17, 2024

Raiklin became so hostile that a convention staffer came over to ask me if I was ok. He asked Raiklin what he was doing on media row. “I’m a guest,” he retorted, insisting that he’d been giving a half-dozen interviews to outlets like “FrankSpeech” TV, the media organ of MyPillow’s Mike Lindell. Raiklin told the convention staffer to throw me out. “I’m not going to do that,” the staffer said. He later told me that Raiklin had been causing some problems and wasn’t supposed to be setting up shop there with his guest pass.

Eventually, Raiklin walked away, and not long afterward he posted a video of this “epic takedown of a reporter” on his X account. But not before giving me a warning (which he left out of his video). “You’re gonna have a really fun 2024 with the way you’re interacting with me,” he said menacingly. “Expect a really fun 2024. At a personal level. Mark my words.” When I asked him if that was a threat, he said, “It’s going to be good times.”

I found the “Secretary of Retribution” on Tuesday, sitting on a couch on media row during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. As an associate filmed him with a phone camera, Ivan Raiklin was railing against enemies of former President Donald Trump. The self-styled Retribution Secretary had an ominous message: “Constitutional sheriffs,” he warned, were going to round up all the people on Raiklin’s “Deep State target list” in live-streamed “swatting raids” so they could be punished for treason.

Those who wanted to avoid such a fate, he said, had until September 3 to “come out as a whistleblower,” by reaching out to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) or Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) to help with their investigations into the “weaponization” of government. Then, he said, “We will spare you. Everyone else will be treated as a co-conspirator.”

It’s the kind of crazy talk that the Trump campaign has tried hard to dial back this week at the gathering of the Republican faithful. Many of MAGA world’s most controversial stars, such as conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Roger Stone, who featured prominently at the 2016 GOP convention, have been largely sidelined. This year, speakers have focused on unity, comity, and winning in November in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump. But Raiklin doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

A former Green Beret and military intelligence officer, a lawyer, and a failed Virginia US Senate candidate, Raiklin also calls himself the “Deep State Marauder.” He’s a colleague of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and has been traveling the country with him this year as part of Flynn’s ReAwaken American tour. He’s also helped promote Flynn’s new movie, in which he has a cameo. When I saw the film at a screening in Charleston, West Virginia, Raiklin was on stage with Flynn, after playing the heavy and booting out all the media.

Raiklin was involved with Flynn’s efforts to help overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is the author of the “Operation Pence Card” memo, which proposed that Vice President Mike Pence could block certification of the election results on January 6. Raiklin’s name came up repeatedly during the House committee investigation of January 6, but he was never subpoenaed.

For the past six months or so, Raiklin has been circulating an enemies list of about 350 people whom he believes should be prosecuted for treason. The list, which has unnerved many democracy advocates, includes former Vice President Mike Pence, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, journalists, witnesses from Trump’s impeachment hearings, Capitol police officers, and more.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told Raw Story, which recently published a long investigation about Raiklin’s list, “This is a deadly serious report. A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a question about whether Raiklin was speaking for the former president when he portrays himself as the future “secretary of retribution.”

I was not completely surprised to find Raiklin at the Republican convention, and not just because Trump himself has frequently threatened that his second term would focus on retribution against his alleged enemies. Raiklin has made himself a fixture on the right-wing media circuit. He tends to appear randomly at congressional hearings or court proceedings for January 6 defendants, including the first Oath Keepers trial and much of the Proud Boys’ trial.

My colleague Dan Friedman approached Raiklin in the cafeteria at the DC federal courthouse last year to ask him why he attended so many January 6-related proceedings and if he was concerned about facing criminal charges connected to January 6. “Most of our conversation was off the record,” Friedman says. “But I can say that he didn’t really answer the question about criminal charges. And he threatened to retaliate against me if I wrote anything he felt was unfair. It wasn’t clear exactly what he meant, but it may have been the most direct threat I’ve received in 20 years as a reporter.”

Later, Raiklin appeared in the media room at the federal courthouse, bothering some of the regular January 6 reporters. One of them told Friedman that Raiklin “does that all the time.”

Before ensconcing himself on media row at the Republican convention Tuesday, Raiklin had been on InfoWars talking with Alex Jones about how the Trump shooting was an inside job. (Jones was broadcasting from Racine, at least 30 minutes away from the actual convention site.) When I found Raiklin on the couch in the Panther Center, he was being filmed by a man who would say only that he was from Minnesota. After they finished, I attempted to ask Raiklin about the allegations that he was inciting political violence with his target list.

It did not go well.

“When you can showcase to me that you have gotten a story accurate, I will consider interacting with you as a human being in your individual capacity,” he said, launching into a long and impenetrable interrogation of my journalism. Here’s a sampling:

“I have full 100 percent disrespect for your news organization. One hundred percent. When you can lower that to below 99.9 percent, then I’ll consider communicating with you. Is that fair?…When you can show that level of repentance to start getting things right, then I’ll see you’re making a good faith effort to try to report accurately and truthfully. So you may want to go back to your employer and start to inform them that they need to start becoming an accurate purveyors of content. Until that happens, well, you can go and talk to other people, ‘cause I’m not moving.”

“What about the kidnapping of Steve Bannon? He’s still in captivity. What about the kidnapping of Peter Navarro? He’s still in captivity until tomorrow.”

I pressed him about political violence, at which point he gave me a lecture about the sort of left-wing political violence he was opposed to. “What about the kidnapping of Steve Bannon? He’s still in captivity,” he said. “What about the kidnapping of Peter Navarro? He’s still in captivity until tomorrow.” (Bannon, a Trump adviser, is serving a four-month sentence in federal prison for defying a subpoena from Congress, and Navarro, who worked in the Trump White House, just finished his four-month sentence for the same crime on Wednesday.) Raiklin told me cryptically to “talk to Elon Musk” about the Deep State list.

Several months ago, during an appearance on InfoWars, Raiklin suggested that Trump getting assassinated might have some beneficial effects for the campaign to eradicate the Deep State by setting off the “best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”

5 months ago, Alex Jones and InfoWars guest Ivan Raiklin discussed how assassinating Trump would be beneficial, according to them, because it would lead to retaliatory “in kind” assassinations of a “deep state” list which includes President Joe Biden.

Ivan Raiklin: “If they… pic.twitter.com/yzc1x1QJxh

— PatriotTakes (@patriottakes) July 14, 2024

Given his fondness for that sort of dangerous rhetoric, I was curious to know how Raiklin had been allowed inside the convention, where security was tight. I asked him what sort of credentials he had—was he media or a delegate?—which require vetting by the Secret Service. He turned on me and said, “We’re done.” (A convention press contact did not respond to questions about Raiklin’s credentials.) When I tried to ask his “videographer” where I might watch the interview he’d been conducting when I arrived, Raiklin got up in my face and said, “Are you deaf and dumb? I just answered the question three times. Can you focus and listen to the answer? I’ve answered it already.”

Did this mouse fall into the mousetrap? pic.twitter.com/ynLm6iMv4t

— Ivan Raiklin (@IvanRaiklin) July 17, 2024

Raiklin became so hostile that a convention staffer came over to ask me if I was ok. He asked Raiklin what he was doing on media row. “I’m a guest,” he retorted, insisting that he’d been giving a half-dozen interviews to outlets like “FrankSpeech” TV, the media organ of MyPillow’s Mike Lindell. Raiklin told the convention staffer to throw me out. “I’m not going to do that,” the staffer said. He later told me that Raiklin had been causing some problems and wasn’t supposed to be setting up shop there with his guest pass.

Eventually, Raiklin walked away, and not long afterward he posted a video of this “epic takedown of a reporter” on his X account. But not before giving me a warning (which he left out of his video). “You’re gonna have a really fun 2024 with the way you’re interacting with me,” he said menacingly. “Expect a really fun 2024. At a personal level. Mark my words.” When I asked him if that was a threat, he said, “It’s going to be good times.”

On Tuesday morning, just a few days after a lone 20-year-old climbed a roof in Butler, Pennsylvania, shot former President Donald Trump in the ear, and killed one person using an AR-15 rifle, attendees of the Republican National Convention were gathered in a swank hotel room to hear members of Congress and the Trump campaign talk about protecting the rights of gun owners. In a normal world, the event, organized by the US Concealed Carry Association, may have faced some criticism for being in poor taste, taking place, as it did, within days of the attack on Trump.

Instead, Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita spoke to the group about his therapeutic trips to the gun range and worries about accidentally taking his (legal) weapon to the airport. And members of Congress spoke about the need to stand firm in the face of any new attempts to limit the ownership of such powerful semi-automatic weapons.

Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt (R) was adamant: The left, he said, is going to “use the AR-15 as a scapegoat to infringe on your rights. They are going to demonize AR-15s” and make out the people who own them as a bunch of “crazed mass shooters.” He claimed that assault weapons were used in only a small portion of US gun homicides committed every year. Hunt warned the audience to be vigilant lest the Democrats use the AR-15 as a “Trojan horse” to take away their Second Amendment rights.

After his talk, I asked him if he thought that Democrats in Congress would use the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump to try to revive the assault weapon ban. “No, they won’t,” he said. “They won’t because the assassination attempt was against President Trump.”

Hunt was particularly vociferous in his defense of the assault weapon, but the attack on Trump doesn’t seem to have caused any shift among Republicans when it comes to gun control. Delegates and others I spoke with at the convention voiced little enthusiasm for bringing back a ban on assault weapons. There’s even an AR-15 giveaway going on in the convention center.

Abby Vesoulis/Mother Jones

I waited in the security line to get into the hotel hosting Tuesday’s concealed carry event with Jay Kemmerer, the wealthy pro-Trump co-owner of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming, and an influential Republican who helped knock Liz Cheney out of Congress. He was dressed in a fancy American flag shirt and a straw cowboy hat, with every possible convention credential hanging from his neck. I figured he had a pretty good handle on where the party stood on the issue.

I asked him if he thought Republicans might be more open to bringing back the assault weapon ban in light of the assassination attempt on Trump. He told me he thought the Republican Party still believes people should keep their guns. “Assault weapons? You could probably debate that,” he said thoughtfully. But not right now. At the moment, he said, the party was focused on its unity message and getting Trump elected. “There’s another time for that debate.”

On Tuesday morning, just a few days after a lone 20-year-old climbed a roof in Butler, Pennsylvania, shot former President Donald Trump in the ear, and killed one person using an AR-15 rifle, attendees of the Republican National Convention were gathered in a swank hotel room to hear members of Congress and the Trump campaign talk about protecting the rights of gun owners. In a normal world, the event, organized by the US Concealed Carry Association, may have faced some criticism for being in poor taste, taking place, as it did, within days of the attack on Trump.

Instead, Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita spoke to the group about his therapeutic trips to the gun range and worries about accidentally taking his (legal) weapon to the airport. And members of Congress spoke about the need to stand firm in the face of any new attempts to limit the ownership of such powerful semi-automatic weapons.

Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt (R) was adamant: The left, he said, is going to “use the AR-15 as a scapegoat to infringe on your rights. They are going to demonize AR-15s” and make out the people who own them as a bunch of “crazed mass shooters.” He claimed that assault weapons were used in only a small portion of US gun homicides committed every year. Hunt warned the audience to be vigilant lest the Democrats use the AR-15 as a “Trojan horse” to take away their Second Amendment rights.

After his talk, I asked him if he thought that Democrats in Congress would use the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump to try to revive the assault weapon ban. “No, they won’t,” he said. “They won’t because the assassination attempt was against President Trump.”

Hunt was particularly vociferous in his defense of the assault weapon, but the attack on Trump doesn’t seem to have caused any shift among Republicans when it comes to gun control. Delegates and others I spoke with at the convention voiced little enthusiasm for bringing back a ban on assault weapons. There’s even an AR-15 giveaway going on in the convention center.

Abby Vesoulis/Mother Jones

I waited in the security line to get into the hotel hosting Tuesday’s concealed carry event with Jay Kemmerer, the wealthy pro-Trump co-owner of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming, and an influential Republican who helped knock Liz Cheney out of Congress. He was dressed in a fancy American flag shirt and a straw cowboy hat, with every possible convention credential hanging from his neck. I figured he had a pretty good handle on where the party stood on the issue.

I asked him if he thought Republicans might be more open to bringing back the assault weapon ban in light of the assassination attempt on Trump. He told me he thought the Republican Party still believes people should keep their guns. “Assault weapons? You could probably debate that,” he said thoughtfully. But not right now. At the moment, he said, the party was focused on its unity message and getting Trump elected. “There’s another time for that debate.”

The last official anti-Trump resistance within the GOP went out with a whisper in Milwaukee on Monday night at the Republican convention.

During the official roll call, representatives from every state from California to Vermont sent a representative to the stage to enthusiastically pledge all their delegates to nominate former President Donald Trump, often calling him the greatest president of all time. And then at the very end, after all 50 states and some territories, came the District of Columbia’s turn.

When DC GOP chairman Patrick Mara took the stage before thousands of cheering Republicans, he didn’t promote the city or laud President Trump. Instead, he quickly and uncomfortably announced that DC would be pledging its 19 delegates “in accordance with the rules.” And then he fled without further elaboration—as any sane person would under the circumstances.

The opening day of the Republican convention in Milwaukee featured a party dominated by Trump and his most fervent supporters. But in its GOP primary, DC voters had overwhelmingly chosen former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley over the former president, 63 percent to 33 percent, giving her one of only two state victories before she dropped out of the race.

Earlier this month, Haley had released her delegates so that they were free to vote for Trump if they wanted to. In every other state—including Vermont, where she’d won the most delegates outside of DC—they did just that.

But DC party rules required the city’s delegates to go to Haley. And if any group was poised to make a last-ditch protest vote against a twice-indicted former president who refused to accede to the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and paid hush money to a porn star, it was the DC delegation. The former president has referred to the Nation’s Capital as a city of “filth and decay” and campaigned on a “federal takeover of this filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation.”

With nearly 700,000 residents, DC is taxed without representation, and relegated to the same stateless status as Guam and Puerto Rico, with only a non-voting delegate to represent its residents in Congress. It’s also overwhelmingly Democratic. More than 92 percent of the voters chose Joe Biden in 2020. The city has never supported a Republican for president since winning the right to vote in 1961. The Republicans who do live in DC tend to be Never Trumpers.

But a lot has changed in the past week. On the convention floor, I caught up with Mara, who told me that after Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the assassination attempt on Trump, the DC Republicans had “pretty much solidified” around the former president. In fact, he said, most of the delegates would probably have gone to Trump after Haley released them if the party had not changed its rules last year. It did so to prevent a repeat of the potentially fractured delegation of 2016 or 2020, where people were threatening to write in other candidates. The new winner-takes-all rules ended up constraining the delegates once Haley released them. “We over-corrected,” Mara confessed, noting that the party will probably take another look at the rules before the next election.

In the meantime, now that DC has fallen into line, in spirit if not in delegate votes, Trump will come out of the convention with a fully united party behind him as he faces off with President Joe Biden in November—a feat Democrats will be hard pressed to match.