Vice President Kamala Harris may have better odds in the presidential election than previously predicted.
A poll published Monday by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago suggests that Harris has more than a marginal lead in favorability over the Republican presidential nominee, but is actually surging by double digits.
The nationwide poll, conducted last week, found Harris’s favorability to be significantly higher than Trump’s, with 51 percent of registered voters viewing Harris as a favorable candidate compared to just 40 percent who felt the same about Trump. Independent voters, notably, were equally split on their opinions of Harris, while the majority of independent voters—58 percent—felt negatively about Trump.
Surveyed voters also leaned toward the Democratic presidential nominee on a wide range of issues. Harris led with voters by 20 percent on election integrity, by 12 percent on middle-class taxes, by 11 percent on natural disaster relief, by five percent on the national housing crisis, and by two percent on jobs and unemployment. Trump, meanwhile, led with voters on immigration and crime, which he led Harris by eight percent and five percent, respectively.
But perhaps no Democratic stance resonated more with voters than abortion, which saw Harris lead Trump by 23 percent.
Abortion has become a losing issue for Republicans nationwide. The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn abortion access proved disastrous for Republicans that November, resulting in major midterm losses in districts where abortion was a key talking point. Post-election, at least some members of the conservative party had a stunning reversal, with GOP consultants referring to the turning tide on the issue as a “major wake-up call.”
But much of the Republican party, especially the MAGA movement, has refused to give it up. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, for one, has previously likened abortion to murder, and has supported efforts to strip abortion access away from women. In 2023, the Ohio politico called for a “minimum national standard” on abortion restrictions, and his run for U.S. Senate in 2022 included language on his website that described him as “100 percent pro-life.”
Trump, meanwhile, has made abortion a key component of all three of his campaigns, repeatedly promising over the last eight years to ban the medical procedure at every available opportunity. While in office, he expressed support for a bill that would have banned abortion nationwide at 20 weeks.
Since then, he has used scare tactics to spread disinformation about the procedure, erroneously claiming that Democrats support abortions “after birth”—otherwise known as murder. And Trump’s track record includes the most egregious offense against national access—the appointment of three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Donald Trump was sued by the Central Park Five Monday for defamation over comments he made during the September 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia. The lawsuit argues Trump’s debate comments were “extreme and outrageous, and … intended to cause severe emotional distress” to the Central Park Five.
The group of five men were charged and convicted of the rape and assault of a white female jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989, in a case that garnered national attention. The five Black and Hispanic men were just teenagers when they were convicted. More than a decade later, DNA evidence exonerated them after a serial rapist confessed to the crime, and the teens settled a $41 million lawsuit against the city in 2014.
At the time, Trump took out full-page ads for $85,000 attacking Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise, calling for the return of the death penalty in the city’s four newspapers: The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post, and New York Newsday. Years later, when he ran for president in 2016, Trump continued to claim that the five were guilty, saying, “the fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.”
During the debate last month, Trump repeated the false claim that the five pleaded guilty, that they killed someone, and that Mayor Bloomberg agreed with him, according to the legal filing.
“Defendant Trump falsely stated that Plaintiffs killed an individual and pled guilty to the crime. These statements are demonstrably false,” the civil suit read. “Plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing. Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed.”
The lawsuit requests an unspecified amount in compensatory and punitive damages.
At the Democratic National Convention in August, members of the group spoke out against Trump, with newly elected New York City Council Member Salaam saying about the former president, “Forty-five wanted us un-alive, he wanted us dead.”
“That guy says he still stands by the original guilty verdict. He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed and he never will,” Salaam told the Chicago audience.
“Our youth was stolen from us. Every day, as we walked into [the] courtroom people screamed at us, threatened us, because of Donald Trump,” said Korey Wise.
This story has been updated.
A cohort of states with some of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the nation are suing the federal government to limit access to mifepristone, one of the pills used to induce an abortion—but an underlying reason behind the suit is perhaps one of the most insidious anti-abortion initiatives yet.
Mifepristone, combined with misoprostol, composes the two-step prescription referred to as “the abortion pill.” The procedure accounts for more than half of all abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute, and has become a crucial tool as abortion restrictions limit access to in-person medical visits.
The suit was filed by the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho, who argued that the medication should be illegal for minors entirely (misoprostol is fully legal as it is used for other treatments). The suit also accuses the Food and Drug Administration of having “unlawfully removed its prohibition against mailing abortion drugs,” allowing what the attorneys general describe as “a 50-state abortion drug mailing economy” to undermine their states’ abortion laws.
But their moral ground for pushing the ban was seemingly less focused on protecting children’s health than it was on actually creating more children, with the suit detailing the (apparently) unfortunate ramifications that abortion access has on an (apparently) desirable conundrum: teenage pregnancy.
“This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected,” the suit reads on page 190.
And that could lead to cataclysmic losses for the Republican states, whose legal counselors quietly noted that a diminished population could cost them as much as a seat in Congress.
“A loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States subsequent ‘diminishment of political representation’ and ‘loss of federal funds,’ such as potentially ‘losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are’ reduced or their increase diminished,” the suit continued.
The Supreme Court unexpectedly saved mifepristone access in June, when it unanimously ruled that a group of different plaintiffs, represented by the right-wing Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, did not have legal standing to sue the FDA and that the legal organization had failed to demonstrate how its clients were personally harmed by the drug’s existence on the market.
By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 13 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 34 percent said it should be legal under any circumstances, and an additional 13 percent said it should be legal in most circumstances.
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Source : New Republic