Obama criticizes progressives for abandoning men, explains demo swing to Trump
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USA Today
42 minutes ago
- USA Today
Department of Justice wants to inspect swing state voter rolls
The Justice Department effort has targeted battleground states. It follows a March executive order. The Department of Justice is going state by state to scrutinize how officials manage their voter rolls and remove ineligible voters. The effort is so far focused on battleground states and follows President Donald Trump's widely challenged executive order in March that sought to create new requirements to register to vote and backed a range of voting policies long supported by Republicans. In nearly identical letters to state election officials in Minnesota, Nevada and Pennsylvania, the Department of Justice asked them to describe how they identify people who are felons, dead, nonresidents or noncitizens, and how they remove them from their voter lists. A letter to Arizona officials said the state should be requiring people who have driver's license numbers to register to vote using that number instead of the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. The Department of Justice said the office should conduct a review of its voter file. The department also sued Orange County, California for not providing enough identifying information in response to a records request; and filed documents in support of lawsuits brought by the right-leaning group Judicial Watch that say Illinois and Oregon have not been not removing enough people from their voter rolls. 'It is critical to remove ineligible voters from the registration rolls so that elections are conducted fairly, accurately, and without fraud,' said Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division said in a statement that a spokesperson provided to USA TODAY. She said the department would 'vigorously enforce' federal law that requires states to 'conduct a robust program of list maintenance.' From 2024: Republican Party sues over absentee ballots, voter rolls in battleground states Several of the states in question have competitive elections in November 2026, when all seats in the House and one-third of the seats in the Senate are on the ballot. Minnesota has a race for an open Senate seat. Arizona and Pennsylvania have multiple competitive House races, and there will be a tight race for a House seat in California that includes part of Orange County. Americans are more likely to get struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud, according to a study from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan good government group based at New York University. 'I do think this is part of a broader effort number one to lay the groundwork for attempts to overturn election results that they don't like in 2026,' said Jonathan Diaz, the voting advocacy director at Campaign Legal Center. 'So they can cook up some story about how these states' voter rolls can't be trusted and so we can't trust their election results if Democrats win.' Trump's March executive order alleged that previous administrations didn't do enough to keep noncitizens of the voter rolls and said having accurate voter rolls protects voters. What DOJ wants from the lawsuits In Orange County, the Department of Justice wrote in a federal lawsuit in June that the Attorney General received a complaint about a noncitizen receiving a ballot, and that the department requested five years of data on how the county removes noncitizens from voter registration rolls. The county provided information but redacted identifying numbers and signatures, among other things, according to the lawsuit. The Department of Justice says that's illegal, and wants the federal court to force the county to provide the full information. Diaz said the Department of Justice in general is 'asking for a lot of very specific data about individual voters, which normally would not be necessary.' He said that information is much more specific than what states would provide to political campaigns or journalists, who often obtain voter registration files. The Department of Justice also asked Nevada and Minnesota for copies of their statewide voter registration list with both active and inactive voters. Inactive voters generally have not voted in recent elections and are put on the inactive list to preserve their registration while queuing them for future removal. Diaz said the requests read "like a fishing expedition." He predicted that the Department of Justice may find a human error, such as a noncitizen who checks the wrong box when getting their drivers license and registers to vote, and then "make that a referendum on the entire electoral system." 'They are looking for anything they can find so they can yell about noncitizen voting or dead people voting or whatever their conspiracy theory of the day is," Diaz said. Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a right-leaning organization that advocates for government transparency, said many states are not doing enough to maintain clean voter rolls. He said his organization has sued multiple jurisdictions over the years to get about 5 million names removed from voter rolls, including in New York City and Los Angeles. Fitton said a voter registration list is 'a pool of names from which someone with problematic intent can draw to engage in fraud. And the appearance of dirty voting lists undermines voter confidence and participation.' The conservative Heritage Foundation alleges there have been about 1,600 cases of voter fraud over a period of many years. That compares to more than 150 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election alone. Fitton acknowledged that showing up to vote in another person's name requires a level of "chutzpah" that "might be a step too far to even political fraudsters." He posited that it'd be easier to impersonate a dead voter, but concluded: "All that is speculation. The law requires the names to be cleaned up, and it's not being done." In its federal lawsuit in Oregon, which the Department of Justice is backing, Judicial Watch alleges the state has too many people on its voter rolls in comparison to its voting-age population, and wants the federal court to force the state to develop a new removal program. Oregon contends that the organization doesn't have the right to sue and hasn't proven it's been harmed, which are both necessary for the suit to move forward. In Illinois, Judicial Watch says that 11 counties removed no voter registrations between November 2020 and November 2022, and 12 other counties removed 15 or fewer during the same time period. The suit does not allege that anyone voted illegally, but questions whether so few voters could have moved or died. The Illinois State Board of Elections declined to comment on pending litigation. 'When Illinois voters cast their ballots, they should be confident that their vote is given its due weight, undiluted by ineligible voters,' the Department of Justice wrote in its July 21 filing in the case. 'This confidence is the bedrock of participatory democracy.'
USA Today
2 hours ago
- USA Today
Men don't like how Trump treats the economy. Democrats must cash in on that.
Democrats are being given an opportunity to fix their messaging with Americans who are quickly turning on President Donald Trump. According to new polling, American men are beginning to lose faith in President Donald Trump. It took them long enough, but I'm glad they're here with the rest of us. A CBS News/YouGov poll showed that the president's approval rating among men had dropped to 47%, while 53% disapproved of the job he was doing. It's a stark contrast from the November election, when Trump won male voters by 55%. It's a troubling sign for Republicans, but an opportunity for Democrats to gain ground with male voters before 2026. While men tend to go for the GOP, there is a possibility that Trump continues to alienate them by continuing to torpedo the economy and making irrational decisions when it comes to foreign policy and immigration. Can Democrats fix their messaging? The big issue for men? How Trump handles the economy. Men are particularly upset by Trump's handling of the economy. According to the CBS News/YouGov poll, 49% of men say the economy is getting worse, and 59% disapprove of how he's handling inflation. Sixty percent of men think he's focusing too much on tariffs, while 65% say he isn't doing enough to lower the cost of goods and services. Opinion: MAGA, I feel bad Trump lied to you about the Epstein list. Who saw this coming? Democrats, who tend to have weaker messaging on the economy, should take these criticisms and run with them. The cost of tariffs is likely to be passed on to the consumer. The nation's gross domestic product just declined for the first time in three years. Inflation may be cooling, but prices aren't falling. By putting the blame on Trump for the economic strife Americans are feeling, the Democratic Party could potentially show men that Republican lawmakers may not be the ones to rely on when it comes to their finances. When the rest of us know that was always the case. Men are also dissatisfied with the conflict in Gaza, and immigration While 55% of men say the economy and inflation are critical in how they view the president, there are some issues where Trump is also beginning to lose favor. For example, 53% of men say they are dissatisfied with the Trump administration's handling of the Israel-Hamas war, which the president said he'd end on the campaign trail. Fifty-one percent disapprove of his interactions with Iran. Fifty percent of men disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration, with 47% saying the administration is deporting more immigrants than they believed it would, according to that same poll. All of these concerns are corroborated by other polls that show Trump is widely disliked. This should be a wake-up call that Democrats need to strengthen their message on the Israel-Hamas war, at least advocating for peace talks. They could also combine immigration with economic issues, and stress how Trump's deportation agenda could negatively affect the GDP and increase the cost of food. Opinion: Trump keeps brutalizing immigrants because he's failing at everything else Gen Z is particularly unhappy Generation Z, born between 1997 to 2012, also seems to have woken up to Trump's failures. The CBS News/YouGov poll found that his approval rating among 18- to 29-year-olds plummeted to 28% in July. Seventy-one percent of those under 30 disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy, and 73% disapprove of how he's handling inflation. As with men, it's a far cry from how Gen Z felt about Trump in the 2024 election, when voters ages 18-29 supported Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris by a much smaller margin than they supported former President Joe Biden in 2020. Among this age group, 56% of males voted for Trump, 1 percentage point more than among all male voters. Opinion: Trump is unpopular, polls show, and he's building an America most Americans hate It's telling that the generation whose perception of the Republican Party is entirely shaped by the rise of Trump is suddenly souring on him. Perhaps people around my age are finally realizing that targeting marginalized communities won't actually improve their quality of life, or that Trump made promises he couldn't keep. They might also be realizing that the positive emotions they felt during the first Trump administration can be chalked up to childhood nostalgia. For those of us in the generation who were old enough to vote in 2016, the negatives of Trump's first presidency were unavoidable. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. If the Democrats are clever, they'll consider this polling and begin brainstorming ways to further drive a wedge between Trump and male voters, particularly those in Gen Z. Yet I'm not sure Democrats are prepared to pick up the young voters Republicans are siphoning off. Their solution now seems to be doing nothing – Democratic leadership essentially disappeared after the 2024 election, and no one seems to know how to get the party back on track. Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, they need to focus on more than podcasts and memes. They need to be working on crafting a populist message and focusing on economic issues, because that seems to be the deciding factor in whether or not a president is doing well. Follow USA TODAY columnist Sara Pequeño on X, formerly Twitter: @sara__pequeno You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter.
New York Post
3 hours ago
- New York Post
Chuck Todd blasts podcasters for platforming Hunter Biden, ‘spectacle' hurting Democrats
Former NBC News anchor Chuck Todd condemned media outlets for platforming former President Joe Biden's son, Hunter, arguing he is a hazard to himself and the Democratic Party. As Democrats struggle to chart a new course after their defeat in the 2024 election, the one thing many can agree on is that the Bidens should step away from public life. Advertisement Hunter Biden was in the news again after he spoke on Andrew Callaghan's 'Channel 5' podcast last weekend and Monday's episode of former DNC chair Jaime Harrison's 'At Our Table' podcast, making headlines for wild tirades defending his father and blasting his critics. Todd responded on his own podcast by declaring, 'I will never book Hunter Biden,' and explained why. 'Number one, he's not the candidate. He wasn't on the ballot. Anything he says in defense of his father, I don't know whether it's true or not, but it doesn't matter. He's a son defending his father,' he said. Todd reserved his full ire for those who platform Hunter, saying, 'I have a real problem with the folks that are booking him. If you've chosen to book Hunter Biden, you've chosen to book spectacle. You're not interested in – and you know, the two interviews that have gone viral were both designed to get attention, not to surface new facts, not to give you a better understanding of what may have happened. It was just, 'Let's give him a platform to settle some scores that maybe he wants to settle.'' 3 Chuck Todd condemned media outlets for platforming Hunter Biden. The Chuck ToddCast / YouTube Advertisement He continued, 'I don't think this does Hunter Biden any good. I don't think this does Joe Biden any good. It certainly doesn't do the Democratic Party any good. That's why it's surprising to see the former DNC chair start a podcast and decide that the best way to market it is Hunter Biden.' 'It's a choice who you book,' he argued. 'I make choices. Everybody makes choices. It's a choice who you book. If you're putting Hunter Biden on, you know what you're doing. Look, I think there's a lot of things going on there.' 3 Hunter Biden recently went on the 'Channel 5' podcast to defend his father and blast his critics. CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images 'I don't like it when politicians use the media or campaigns or voters for their own therapy.' Todd added he's a big advocate of going to therapy, 'but let's not do it in public. Try to deal with your issues amongst yourself.' Advertisement 'This is ultimately why I was critical of Joe and Joe Biden for running in the first place, because their family wasn't ready for this,' he added. 'And I think Hunter Biden's behavior now post-election is more proof the family wasn't in a position… this is why running for president can do major damage to a candidate's family.' 3 Both Hunter Biden and his father have been criticized for remaining in the public eye after the Democratic Party's defeat in November. AFP via Getty Images After surviving the death of his first wife and daughter in 1972, the death of his eldest son Beau in 2015 hit Biden very hard and Todd argued the family didn't take enough time to grieve and recover from it before he launched his 2020 presidential campaign. Advertisement In the past, the Bidens seemed to be 'the poster child' of balancing public service and supporting one's family to Todd. 'But that was a family in crisis internally,' he said. Fox News Digital reached out to the 'Channel 5' podcast, the 'At Our Table' podcast, representatives of Joe Biden, and the legal representation of Hunter Biden, and did not receive an immediate reply.
