Latest news with #Kamala Harris
Fox News
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Fox News
Kamala Harris mocked for post celebrating one-year anniversary of failed presidential campaign
Former Vice President Kamala Harris was mocked on Monday for commemorating the one-year anniversary of the start of her failed presidential campaign. One year ago Monday, then-President Joe Biden announced via social media that he would be dropping out of the presidential race. He shortly thereafter endorsed Harris, who went on to become the Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election. Harris celebrated the anniversary by writing a post on X with photos from her past campaign. "One year ago today, I began my campaign for President of the United States. Over the 107 days of our race, I had the opportunity and honor to travel our nation and meet with Americans who were fighting for a better future. And today, millions of Americans continue to stand up for our values, our ideals, and our democracy. Their courage and resolve inspires me. Whether you are attending a protest, calling your representatives, or building community, I want to say: Thank you. We are in this fight together," Harris wrote. Many social media users were not as impressed, with some pointing out that she neglected to reference Biden in the photos or the post. "You didn't get a single primary vote. How very democratic," Twitchy's Amy Curtis wrote. RNC Research, managed by the Republican National Committee, posted, "Becoming the presidential nominee without getting a single vote is not the flex you think it is." Washington Free Beacon investigative reporter Chuck Ross joked, "lol. complete Joe Biden erasure." Political commentator Link Lauren agreed, "No mention of Biden again. Really trying to erase her association with him. She was there in lockstep with that failing administration. I don't have amnesia." "I wonder what caused that campaign to begin on July 21," National Review senior writer Dan McLaughlin remarked. "'One year ago today, I began my campaign for President of the United States.' Oh wow, I remember that. What did Drew Barrymore call you? Momala? Oooh, and Beyonce endorsed you, right? How did you work out? Did you win?" author John Hawkins joked. "Your failure and reputation were complete," columnist Kurt Schlichter wrote. Fox News Digital reached out to Harris' team for comment. FEC filings showed the Harris campaign spent more than $1 billion in three months, including spending on celebrity influencers, radical activist groups and private jets. She lost to President Donald Trump in November.
The Guardian
17 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Are non-voters the key to Democrats winning in 2028?
Since Bernie Sanders's first presidential campaign, the electoral theory of the American left has rested upon the idea that a sizable bloc of Americans – alienated from the traditional politics of left and right – have withdrawn from politics entirely. They stand closer to the Democrats on many issues, but, seeing little by way of material benefit from the party's soaring rhetoric of 'defending democracy', they have opted out of the political process. And, as the theory goes, a bold, populist candidate – someone like Sanders himself – could bring this silent constituency back into the fold. If that logic once explained how Sanders might have won, it might now explain why Kamala Harris lost. And, as new troves of post-election data surface, the debate over whether Democrats might have avoided last year's defeat by mobilizing non-voters has become one of the party's hottest factional disputes. Among those strategizing within the Democratic party, one's confidence in voter activation is often a proxy for their broader politics. Those who believe Harris's campaign failed to activate non-voters typically argue her platform lacked the populist edge needed to mobilize disaffected Americans. Their critics tend to believe the problem ran in the opposite direction: the electorate had moved right and the Democrats' failure lay in their inability to meet it there. Detractors of the activation theory point to a 26 June Pew Research report – which found Donald Trump leading Harris by three points among non-voters – as decisive proof that non-participants lean Republican. The catch, though, is that the survey concluded less than two weeks after Trump's victory. Polling taken in the aftermath of a race is notoriously vulnerable to distortion, and the bandwagon effect can temporarily inflate a victorious candidate's popularity. That effect is especially pronounced among disengaged or loosely affiliated voters. That number almost certainly marks the high-water line of Trump's support among non-voters. Another oft-cited figure from the New York Times/Siena College, which the Democratic strategist and data scientist David Shor referenced during his own interview with the Times's Ezra Klein, found Trump leading by 14 points among 2020 non-voters. But it uses survey data collected before Biden dropped out of the race. Then there is Shor's own post-election poll, conducted through his polling firm Blue Rose Research, which found Trump leading by 11 points among non-voters – though the underlying data remains private and the methodology undisclosed. The Cooperative Election Study (CES) – a late-November survey of more than 50,000 voters – offers one of the few high-quality, public windows on 2024. An analysis of the CES data by political scientists Jake Grumbach, Adam Bonica and their colleagues found that a plurality of non-voters identified themselves as most closely aligned with the Democratic party – and an absolute majority of registered voters who declined to cast a ballot in 2024 considered themselves Democrats. The non-electorate certainly wasn't blue enough to have swung the race, but by no means as red as the activation theory's opponents claim. What's even clearer is the geography of turnout. Voter participation dropped especially sharply in Democratic strongholds – particularly urban counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. By contrast, turnout in Republican areas held steady or even increased modestly. In other words, the Democratic campaign had more to gain from energizing its own base than from chasing centrist swing voters. Harris wouldn't have prevailed under conditions of 100% turnout. (Grumbach, Bonica, etc don't claim as such.) But a more focused strategy – mobilizing the Democratic base, speaking directly to material concerns, and resisting the pull toward bland centrism – might have narrowed the margin significantly. Ironically, the aforementioned Pew report concludes the same. 'As in prior elections, a change in voters' partisan allegiances – switching from the Democratic to the Republican candidate or vice versa – proved to be a less important factor in Trump's victory than differential partisan turnout,' write the authors. 'Republican-leaning eligible voters simply were more likely to turn out than Democratic-leaning eligible voters in 2024.' Even so, the CES data may disappoint progressives, if not for the reasons their critics imagine. An analysis of the CES from the Center for Working Class Politics's Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella found that Democrats who stayed home in 2024 were, on average, less ideologically liberal on hot-button social questions – more skeptical of an assault-rifle ban, receptive to a border wall, less concerned with climate change, and cooler to the language of structural racism – than the Democrats who showed up. Yet, as Abbott and Guastella found, those same non-voters were more economically populist: disproportionately working-class and non-college, while eager for bigger public investment programs, a higher corporate tax rate, and a stronger social safety net. The Democratic non-electorate doesn't clearly align with progressive orthodoxy. Equally clear, though, is that a blanket lurch toward cultural moderation, absent populist economics, would do little to fire up non-voters who already share many progressive economic instincts. Making decisive claims about non-voters is necessarily difficult. By definition, they are the least likely to respond to pollsters, and their political preferences are often tentative or inconsistent. Yet certain commentators' eagerness to cast non-voters as Trump supporters reveals more about elite assumptions than about public sentiment. There's been a rush to cast non-voters as conservatives, not because the evidence demands it, but because the alternative – that Democrats need to speak more directly to the working class – remains uncomfortable for the party establishment. There is no way around the fact that in 2024, those Americans didn't hear anything worth voting for. Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York
The Guardian
19 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Are non-voters the key to Democrats winning in 2028?
Since Bernie Sanders's first presidential campaign, the electoral theory of the American left has rested upon the idea that a sizable bloc of Americans – alienated from the traditional politics of left and right – have withdrawn from politics entirely. They stand closer to the Democrats on many issues, but, seeing little by way of material benefit from the party's soaring rhetoric of 'defending democracy', they have opted out of the political process. And, as the theory goes, a bold, populist candidate – someone like Sanders himself – could bring this silent constituency back into the fold. If that logic once explained how Sanders might have won, it might now explain why Kamala Harris lost. And, as new troves of post-election data surface, the debate over whether Democrats might have avoided last year's defeat by mobilizing non-voters has become one of the party's hottest factional disputes. Among those strategizing within the Democratic party, one's confidence in voter activation is often a proxy for their broader politics. Those who believe Harris's campaign failed to activate non-voters typically argue her platform lacked the populist edge needed to mobilize disaffected Americans. Their critics tend to believe the problem ran in the opposite direction: the electorate had moved right and the Democrats' failure lay in their inability to meet it there. Detractors of the activation theory point to a 26 June Pew Research report – which found Donald Trump leading Harris by three points among non-voters – as decisive proof that non-participants lean Republican. The catch, though, is that the survey concluded less than two weeks after Trump's victory. Polling taken in the aftermath of a race is notoriously vulnerable to distortion, and the bandwagon effect can temporarily inflate a victorious candidate's popularity. That effect is especially pronounced among disengaged or loosely affiliated voters. That number almost certainly marks the high-water line of Trump's support among non-voters. Another oft-cited figure from the New York Times/Siena College, which the Democratic strategist and data scientist David Shor referenced during his own interview with the Times's Ezra Klein, found Trump leading by 14 points among 2020 non-voters. But it uses survey data collected before Biden dropped out of the race. Then there is Shor's own post-election poll, conducted through his polling firm Blue Rose Research, which found Trump leading by 11 points among non-voters – though the underlying data remains private and the methodology undisclosed. The Cooperative Election Study (CES) – a late-November survey of more than 50,000 voters – offers one of the few high-quality, public windows on 2024. An analysis of the CES data by political scientists Jake Grumbach, Adam Bonica and their colleagues found that a plurality of non-voters identified themselves as most closely aligned with the Democratic party – and an absolute majority of registered voters who declined to cast a ballot in 2024 considered themselves Democrats. The non-electorate certainly wasn't blue enough to have swung the race, but by no means as red as the activation theory's opponents claim. What's even clearer is the geography of turnout. Voter participation dropped especially sharply in Democratic strongholds – particularly urban counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. By contrast, turnout in Republican areas held steady or even increased modestly. In other words, the Democratic campaign had more to gain from energizing its own base than from chasing centrist swing voters. Harris wouldn't have prevailed under conditions of 100% turnout. (Grumbach, Bonica, etc don't claim as such.) But a more focused strategy – mobilizing the Democratic base, speaking directly to material concerns, and resisting the pull toward bland centrism – might have narrowed the margin significantly. Ironically, the aforementioned Pew report concludes the same. 'As in prior elections, a change in voters' partisan allegiances – switching from the Democratic to the Republican candidate or vice versa – proved to be a less important factor in Trump's victory than differential partisan turnout,' write the authors. 'Republican-leaning eligible voters simply were more likely to turn out than Democratic-leaning eligible voters in 2024.' Even so, the CES data may disappoint progressives, if not for the reasons their critics imagine. An analysis of the CES from the Center for Working Class Politics's Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella found that Democrats who stayed home in 2024 were, on average, less ideologically liberal on hot-button social questions – more skeptical of an assault-rifle ban, receptive to a border wall, less concerned with climate change, and cooler to the language of structural racism – than the Democrats who showed up. Yet, as Abbott and Guastella found, those same non-voters were more economically populist: disproportionately working-class and non-college, while eager for bigger public investment programs, a higher corporate tax rate, and a stronger social safety net. The Democratic non-electorate doesn't clearly align with progressive orthodoxy. Equally clear, though, is that a blanket lurch toward cultural moderation, absent populist economics, would do little to fire up non-voters who already share many progressive economic instincts. Making decisive claims about non-voters is necessarily difficult. By definition, they are the least likely to respond to pollsters, and their political preferences are often tentative or inconsistent. Yet certain commentators' eagerness to cast non-voters as Trump supporters reveals more about elite assumptions than about public sentiment. There's been a rush to cast non-voters as conservatives, not because the evidence demands it, but because the alternative – that Democrats need to speak more directly to the working class – remains uncomfortable for the party establishment. There is no way around the fact that in 2024, those Americans didn't hear anything worth voting for. Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
CBS says Stephen Colbert's 'The Late Show' to end in May 2026
Stephen Colbert's "The Late Show", long a staple of late night US television, will end in 2026, the CBS network said Thursday, days after the comedian blasted parent company Paramount's $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump as "a big fat bribe". CBS said in a statement the cancellation was "purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night," and was "not related in any way to the show's performance, content or other matters happening at (parent company) Paramount." "Next year will be our last season," the host announced on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" on Thursday to boos and shouts of disbelief. "The network will be ending the show in May (2026)." Paramount, CBS's parent company, reached its $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump this month in a lawsuit the entertainment giant described as meritless. Trump had sued Paramount for $20 billion last year, alleging that CBS News' "60 Minutes" program deceptively edited an interview with his 2024 election rival, Kamala Harris, in her favor. The company is seeking to close its $8 billion merger with the entertainment company Skydance, which needs federal government approval. Colbert said on Thursday the cancellation was not just the end of his show but the end of decades-old "The Late Show" franchise, which has been broadcast continuously on CBS since 1993. "I'm not being replaced. This is all just going away," he said. 'America deserves better' Trump's political opponents and other critics drew attention to the timing of the decision. "CBS canceled Colbert's show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump -- a deal that looks like bribery," Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said on social media platform X. "America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons," Warren said. Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, who was on Colbert's show the night he announced it would be ending, said: "If Paramount and CBS ended the 'Late Show' for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better." Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who has his own late night program "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" for ABC, was among the celebrities that condemned CBS's decision. "Love you Stephen." CBS said in its Thursday statement it was "proud that Stephen called CBS home." "He and the broadcast will be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late night television," its statement said. Colbert, one of the most popular American comedians who made use of humor in his incisive political commentatary, succeeded David Letterman as the host of "The Late Show" in 2015. Before that Colbert was a regular on Comedy Central alongside fellow talk show host and political pundit Jon Stewart. The late-night television landscape has long been dominated by satirical comedy shows that blend entertainment with political commentary. For decades, programmes such as "The Late Show", "The Tonight Show," and "Late Night" have served as television touchstones, with hosts like Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, David Letterman and more recently Colbert and Jimmy Fallon shaping public discourse through humour and celebrity interviews. abs/fox
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
CBS says Stephen Colbert's 'The Late Show' to end in May 2026
Stephen Colbert's "The Late Show", long a staple of late-night television, will come to an end in 2026, the comedian and network CBS said on Thursday. "Next year will be our last season," the host announced on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" to boos and shouts of disbelief. "The network will be ending the show in May (2026)." CBS called the cancellation "purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night," and said in a statement the move was "not related in any way to the show's performance, content or other matters happening at (parent company) Paramount." Paramount, CBS's parent company, reached a $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump this month in a lawsuit the entertainment giant described as meritless. The company is seeking to close its $8 billion merger with the entertainment company Skydance, which needs federal government approval. Trump had sued Paramount for $20 billion, alleging that CBS News' "60 Minutes" program deceptively edited an interview with his 2024 election rival, Kamala Harris, in her favor. Colbert, an outspoken critic of Trump, described the settlement as "a big fat bribe" on his show this week. He said on Thursday the cancellation was not just the end of his show but the end of "The Late Show" franchise on CBS. "I'm not being replaced. This is all just going away," he said. However, Trump's political opponents and other critics drew attention to the timing of the decision. "CBS canceled Colbert's show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump -- a deal that looks like bribery," Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said on social media platform X. "America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons," Warren said. Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, who was on Colbert's show the night he announced it would be ending, said: "If Paramount and CBS ended the 'Late Show' for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better." CBS said in its Thursday statement it was "proud that Stephen called CBS home." "He and the broadcast will be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late night television," its statement said. abs/pbt
