Walz defends military service in first solo campaign appearance
Speaking of the Harris campaign, the vice-president’s newly minted running mate, Tim Walz, today made his first solo campaign appearance at a convention of union members.
The Minnesota governor gave a wide-ranging speech in which he attacked Donald Trump and cheered the power of organized labor, while also taking time to respond to attacks from the former president and his supporters, who say Walz has exaggerated his military service.
Here’s what he said in response, at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees’s annual convention:
"I am damn proud of my service to this country. And I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person's service record."
— Amid GOP attacks, Tim Walz defends the timing of his decision to retire from the National Guard in 2005 pic.twitter.com/zEXTt2cXLA
The attacks on Walz’s military service, from Trump allies including his running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, have centered on the timing of his decision to retire after 24 years of army national guard service. Here’s more on that:
Standing before a large ballroom at the Balboa Bay Resort, a waterfront hotel in Newport Beach, Walz ran through his resume: governor, congressman, educator, coach — “We won the damn state championship,” he reminded a cheering audience. He ran through his platform — supporting gun ownership when balanced with certain regulations, paid family leave and clean air regulations.
‘They keep talking about these are radical things, and I’m like, go ahead and label me whatever you want because I’ll damn sure guarantee you 80% of people in Minnesota and across the country want those things,’ said Walz to applause.
‘You know better than anybody in this state what we’ve got in the vice president,’ Walz said. ‘She’s found her voice.’
One of the fundraiser’s hosts, attorney Wylie Aitken, said he had never seen so much enthusiasm in all the years he’d been doing this:
'“It’s amazing that when everybody was kind of down and out and feeling, legitimately, concern with Biden, etc., then suddenly to have this reversal and to see this incredible enthusiasm that’s energised everyone.”
Abortion will be on ballot in at least eight states in November
Missouri voters will decide in November whether to guarantee a right to abortion with a constitutional amendment that would reverse the state’s near-total ban on the procedure.
Missouri has become the eighth state to have abortion on the ballot in November.
The secretary of state’s office certified Tuesday that an initiative petition received more than enough signatures from registered voters to qualify for the general election. It will need approval from a majority of voters to become enshrined in the state constitution.
People rally in support of abortion rights, 2 July 2022, in Kansas City, Missouri. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP
Missouri will join at least seven states voting on abortion rights during the presidential election.
Arizona’s secretary of state certified an abortion-rights measure for the ballot on Monday. Measures also will go before voters in Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Nevada and South Dakota.
While not explicitly addressing abortion rights, a New York ballot measure would bar discrimination based on “pregnancy outcomes” and “reproductive healthcare,” among other things.
Harris and Walz are planning to hold a rally in Milwaukee while the DNC is happening in Chicago next week, the New York Times reports – in the venue where Trump accepted the Republican nomination last month.
The rally is planned for Tuesday, according to the report, which cites four people briefed on the discussions.
The Fiserv Forum, where the rally will reportedly take place, is 80 miles, or 128km, from the United Center in Chicago, where the DNC is taking place all week.
The move is not unusual, but is interesting because it will serve as a direct comparison of crowd size and energy to Trump’s event. Trump has claimed, falsely, that Harris’s crowd sizes are fake.
Meanwhile Joe Biden says Ukraine’s military incursion into Russia has “created a real dilemma” for Russian President Vladimir Putin. He added that US officials are in constant touch with the Ukrainians about the move.
About 1,000 Ukrainian troops rammed through the Russian border in the early hours of 6 August, with tanks and armoured vehicles, Reuters reports. A US official said late on Tuesday that the goal of Ukraine’s Kursk incursion appears to be to force Russia to pull troops out of Ukraine to defend Russian territory against the cross-border assault.
Answering questions from reporters upon arrival in New Orleans, Biden said he has been briefed every four to five hours for the last six to eight days on Ukraine’s action.
“It’s creating a real dilemma for Putin,” he said in his first substantive comments about the operation, which appeared to have caught the Russians off guard.
The US has provided billions of dollars of weaponry to Ukraine intended largely for defensive purposes, as Ukraine tries to repel the Russian invasion launched in February 2022.
US President Joe Biden visits New Orleans on 13 August 2024. Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
In May, Biden authorised Kyiv to launch US-supplied weapons at military targets inside Russia that are supporting an offensive against the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
The White House said Ukraine did not provide advance notice of its incursion, which took place in the Kursk region of Russia. Russian forces on Tuesday struck back at Ukrainian troops with missiles, drones and airstrikes.
As we await news of Walz’s appearance at a fundraiser in California, here is AP’s look at his first solo appearance since being named the Democratic vice presidential nominee last week:
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz warned cheering union members Tuesday that Donald Trump would wage war on working people while threatening Medicare and Social Security as he kicked off a five-state fundraising swing.
Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Convention in Los Angeles, Tuesday, 13 August. Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP
Speaking in a cavernous, dimly lit ballroom to thousands of members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Walz said he and Vice President Kamala Harris want to spread collective bargaining and other worker protections to “every state in the union.”
“When unions are strong, America is strong,” Walz, a former school teacher and union member, said.
The Democratic campaign chose to kick off Walz’s national swing on the safest of political terrain — heavily Democratic California, home to Vice President Harris and where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans about 2-1.
Tim Walz is scheduled to appear at a fundraiser in Newport Beach, California this afternoon. On Wednesday, he will address fundraisers in Denver and Boston, and then wrap up his trip on Thursday in Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York.
Walz’s focus on fundraising this week comes after he stormed through a series of battleground states with Harris last week to introduce himself to voters nationally. The two held rallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.
His speeches so far have been built around key themes for Democrats in 2024: support for abortion rights, lifting the middle class and characterizing Trump as “weird” — an attack line Walz has been credited with authoring.
Supporters hold signs as US Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz speaks at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) 46th International Convention in Los Angeles, California, US, 13 August 2024. Photograph: Ringo Chiu/Reuters
Democratic voter registration surges since Biden drops out - report says
Democratic voter registration has surged following Biden dropping out – and Harris stepping in, the New York Times reports.
This follows an almost year-long trend of more people registering as Republicans than Democrats in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, including a spike after the Trump assassination attempt.
But after Biden dropped out, weekly Democratic registrations outnumbered Republican nominations in North Carolina.
Pennsylvania saw the largest Democratic margin for new registrations since late last year.
The paper’s chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, points out that the Democrats nonetheless still need to catch up:
Whatever possessed Vice President Kamala Harris to pick Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, it probably wasn’t a desire to inflame arguments about apostrophes. But it doesn’t take much to get grammar nerds fired up. They’re all over social media debating rules for possessive proper names ending in S. Some agree with The Associated Press, which says just add an apostrophe to Harris to make it possessive. Others agree with The New York Times and other outlets that add an apostrophe S. Timothy Pulju, a senior lecturer in linguistics at Dartmouth College, says the AP guidance reflects how English was spoken and written centuries ago but a shift is underway. For now, he says both are acceptable.
“The lower the stakes, the bigger the fight,” Ron Woloshun, a creative director and digital marketer in California told AP.
If we don’t agree on these rules right now, it’s going to be a very long eight years:
Let’s do an S after the apostrophe after Harris, and an S after the apostrophe after Walz.
“Harris’s pick vindicates Walz’s message.”
I will not be taking further questions at this time.
— The.Ink, from Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) August 6, 2024
The resident punctuation guru on my desk, Warren Murray, has this rule: you use apostrophe and -s when that is the way you say it. Otherwise, it is an apostrophe. So it is Harris’s, and Walz’s. (At my Anglican high school the rule was that only Jesus got an apostrophe -s).
The Guardian’s style guide says: The possessive in words and names ending in S normally takes an apostrophe followed by a second S (Jones’s, James’s), but be guided by pronunciation.
Tuesday’s Minnesota Democratic primary is the last in a series of heated primaries for the progressive “Squad” of House Democrats who have been vocal in their criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Fellow Squad members Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri were recently defeated by candidates supported by a deluge of pro-Israel spending. But Omar faces a lower-key race.
The two-term congresswoman became the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in the US House of Representatives in 2019. While in office, she has allied herself with the left wing of the Democratic party, serving as the deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and backing key progressive measures such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.
United States Representative Ilhan Omar. Photograph: Shutterstock
Even before the 7 October Hamas attacks and Israel’s ensuing offensive, Omar had established herself as a vocal critic of Israel. She memorably drew criticism in 2019 for quipping that US politicians’ support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins”, in reference to donations from the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (Aipac). The comment drew accusations of antisemitism and she later apologized for it.
In the wake of the 7 October attacks, and as Israel escalated its retaliatory war, Omar was among the first in Congress to call for a ceasefire. She has spoken out in support of the university encampments in solidarity with Gaza. Her daughter was suspended from Barnard College for taking part.
These together would seem to make Omar a natural target of pro-Israel groups, but Samuels, a former Minneapolis city councilman has not drawn support from Aipac or its affiliated Super Pac, United Democracy Project. In contrast, UDP dropped more than $20m to unseat Bowman and Bush.
The lobby groups have not said why they have not gotten involved in the Minnesota primary – but it is possible that Omar just did not provide them the fodder.
Hello, this is Helen Sullivan taking over our live US politics coverage. Coming up today, we’re expecting Tim Walz to speak at a Harris-Walz campaign reception in Newport Beach, California.
And Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is defending her seat in the state Democratic primary, a rematch against Don Samuels that comes two years after she barely eked out a victory against him. Polls close at 8pm Minnesota time – in about three hours.
Elon Musk is basking in the afterglow of the interview he conducted on Twitter/X with Donald Trump last night. The Tesla CEO said their conversation had attracted 1bn views and comments, a number that was impossible to verify, while adding he would be willing to hold a similar event with Kamala Harris. But a remark the ex-president made during the interview about firing employees who strike has spurred the United Auto Workers to file a federal labor law complaint against both Trump and Musk, while Harris’s campaign dismissed last night’s event as a chat between “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a live stream in the year 2024”. The campaign also went public with news that it had received warning from the FBI of foreign hackers trying to breach its systems, but does not think they have been successful.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor who is Harris’s running mate, made his first solo campaign appearance at a union convention, and defended his military service.
Harris has no public events scheduled today, but her campaign continues to face questions over why the vice-president hasn’t held a press conference or granted a sit-down interview since announcing her bid for the White House.
Musk has a long history of opposing unions, including at Tesla, where the UAW has been trying to encourage workers to organize.
Trump has been flying around to campaign events in a plane once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, according to a report.
Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator, warned that Trump was “laying the groundwork” to dispute the November election, if he loses.
In the further annals of Republicans who broke with Donald Trump returning to the fold, former North Carolina senator Richard Burr said he will vote for the ex-president in November.
Burr, who declined to seek re-election and left the Senate in 2022, was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump after he was impeached by the House of Representatives in response to the January 6 insurrection.
The conviction ultimately failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate required to be approved, and North Carolina’s GOP censured Burr for his vote.
Maybe someone will have a hard time squaring with it. I don’t have a hard time squaring with it because I firmly understood why I voted for impeachment. And like I said, that’s not a disqualifier as to whether you can serve. It’s a bad choice I thought a president made one time.
