BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Argentines voted Sunday in a primary election that will act as a bellwether ahead of October general elections and give a hint at how eager citizens are for a change in a country that is suffering one of the world’s worst inflation rates.
The primary will determine who will be the presidential candidate in the main center-right opposition coalition in which Buenos Aires Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta is facing off against former Security Minister Patricia Bullrich.
Whoever comes out on top will almost certainly be running against Economy Minister Sergio Massa, who is facing a leftist challenger to become the candidate of the ruling coalition. Center-left President Alberto Fernández decided not to run for reelection as he suffers from rock-bottom approval ratings amid annual inflation of more than 100%, rising poverty and a rapidly depreciating currency.
The primary will also finally give a firm answer on how much traction upstart right-wing populist candidate Javier Milei has gained with voters. An admirer of former U.S. President Donald Trump, Milei has attracted voters with an anti-establishment message that has particularly resonated with the young.
There were delays in the voting in some polling locations in the capital amid difficulties with new electronic voting machines being used to select candidates for mayor and other local positions. A judge in charge of the electoral process criticized what she characterized as the “degree of improvisation” and said the voting time could be extended.
The long lines meant some people had to wait for two hours to cast a ballot forcing some polling locations in Buenos Aires to remain open past the official closing time of 6 p.m. local time (9 p.m. GMT). Authorities said all those in line would be able to cast a ballot.
First results were expected to start coming in around three hours after polls closed although the delays at polling locations could push that later.
In the run-up to Sunday’s vote, the campaign had been largely dominated by the sometimes-bitter contest between Bullrich and Larreta. Pollsters say the winner of this race will have a strong chance of becoming president amid general anger at the government due to the country’s economic malaise.
Asked about what the pre-primary discussions could mean for the coalition, Larreta assured journalists there would be unity after Sunday’s vote. “Always together,” Larreta said. “Yesterday, today, tomorrow, always together.”
Former President Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), a leader in the main opposition coalition, called on Argentines to cast their ballot Sunday “to leave behind an era that has brought us so much harm and sadness.”
The primaries are taking place with an undercurrent of concern over how the vote could impact the economy. Four years ago, an unexpectedly strong showing by now-President Fernández led to a sharp depreciation of the currency as markets saw the primary results indicating that business-friendly Macri was on his way out.
After casting his ballot Sunday, Massa told journalists the Economy Ministry had been working on the issue.
“On Friday, from noon until the afternoon, and yesterday, back at the Economy Ministry, we worked with the team so that the week and the markets, in some way, do not influence people’s everyday lives,” Massa said.
Once results start coming in, particular attention will be paid for signs that the main center-right opposition could win the presidential election outright and avoid a second round runoff in November.
After casting his ballot, Fernández made clear he expects the presidential race won’t be over quickly.
“We have started an electoral process that will likely conclude in November,” Fernández, who has been largely absent from the campaign, said. His vice president, Cristina Fernández, who was the country’s president from 2007 to 2015, has also kept a low profile during the campaign so far.
The discussions in the run-up to Sunday’s vote were largely dominated by the economy, but crime suddenly took center stage in the final days of campaigning after the killing of an 11-year-old girl during a snatch-and-grab robbery in a Buenos Aires suburb Wednesday. There also was outrage in Buenos Aires following the death of a leftist political activist, who suffered a heart attack while being detained by police during a protest Thursday.
Many in Buenos Aires expressed anger at politicians and said they had little faith things would change.
“Whoever rises, things will remain the same,” said Jennifer Marín, a retail worker.
Political leaders pushed the citizenry to cast a ballot amid concerns participation could be lower than normal amid a lack of enthusiasm. Although voting is mandatory, the fine for failing to cast a ballot is largely symbolic. Recent national elections have seen a participation rate of around 70%.
CHICAGO — Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson on Sunday stayed within the ranks and named Larry Snelling, the police department’s counterterrorism head, as his choice for police superintendent of the nation’s third-largest city.
The announcement comes after a monthslong search led by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. The selection of Snelling, 54, to head the department, is subject to City Council approval.
Snelling will succeed David Brown, who in March announced that he would step down the day after Chicago’s mayoral primary election in which crime was a central issue. Then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost that primary and Johnson went on to win the mayoral race in April.
“Today, a new chapter begins in our journey to create a better, stronger and safer Chicago,” Johnson said in a news release. “Chief Snelling is a proven leader who has the experience and the respect of his peers to help ensure the safety and well-being of city residents, and address the complex challenges we all face related to community safety.”
Snelling was raised on the city’s South Side and attended its public schools. He has a bachelor’s degree in adult education from DePaul University and joined the department in 1992 as a patrol officer.
“It is a tremendous honor to answer the call to serve my hometown and the people of Chicago as superintendent of the Chicago Police Department,” Snelling said in a statement. “It is also a tremendous responsibility, and one that I do not take lightly.”
“In order to continue to make progress as a department, we must embrace innovation, continue to strengthen morale, and go further in strengthening bonds of trust between police and community,” Snelling said.
He has been chief of the department’s bureau of counterterrorism, which coordinates with the Office of Emergency Management and Communication and other city agencies, since 2022.
While crime in Chicago often focuses on murders and shootings, the numbers so far in 2023 are down in both categories by 5% and 10%, respectively, according to the most recent department crime statistics. However, overall major crime rates are up 35% so far this year over 2022.
Snelling was one of three finalists nominated by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. The other two finalists were Shon Barnes, the police chief in Madison, Wisconsin; and Angel Novalez, Chicago police chief of constitutional policing and reform.
RENO, Nev. — Republicans in Nevada could have two chances next year to decide who they want to be their party’s presidential nominee. The catch: Only one will count.
The Nevada GOP is insisting on holding its own caucus despite a new state law calling for a primary election, a move critics say is designed to benefit former President Donald Trump. The competing contests are likely to confuse some and require GOP campaigns to spend extra time and money educating voters in one of the earliest states to cast ballots for the presidential nomination.
The results in the GOP primary are unlikely to matter because the state Republican Party has said it will use its party-run caucus to determine which candidate will receive the state’s delegates to the Republican National Convention. An official caucus date has not yet been set but is expected to be around the same time as the Feb. 6 primary, which falls after the Iowa caucus and primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina.
“I do believe it’s going to create confusion among the voters,” said Tami Rae Spero, the state’s longest-serving county clerk who is based in rural Humboldt County, which leans heavily Republican.
Spero said she already is preparing a voter-education strategy that will include interviews with local news outlets and social media posts, although she’s not quite sure how to explain that the primary results may not matter in nominating a Republican presidential candidate.
It’s not the first time states and political parties have proposed dueling nominating methods. In 2016, Washington state spent $9 million on a meaningless primary after the state Democratic Party held its own caucus to determine a nominee and Trump’s Republican challengers had all dropped out by the time voters were scheduled to cast ballots.
Some state parties have even relied on multiple contests. For years, the “Texas Two-Step” featured both a caucus and presidential primary to divide delegates before it was discontinued before the 2016 election. A similar strategy is likely to play out next year in Michigan, one of several states where the Republican Party is controlled by Trump allies who have altered delegate rules in ways seen as favorable to the former president.
In Nevada, caucuses had been the preferred method until state Democrats pushed through a law in 2021 moving to a primary, a system that tends to get higher rates of voter participation. Primaries allow early voting and mail voting while using polling places that are familiar to voters.
A caucus has traditionally been limited to in-person participation, although parties experimented with alternative voting methods during the COVID-19 pandemic. While primaries are run by local election officials and paid for by the state, political parties are responsible for planning and administering caucuses.
With primaries, campaigns can rely more on TV ads to generate support. For a caucus, campaigns must organize their backers locally — from Las Vegas and Reno to Nevada’s far-flung rural communities.
Nevada Republicans had sought to block the primary, but a state judge last month denied the request. State Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald said the Nevada GOP is considering other options to eliminate the presidential primary, including appealing the case to the Nevada Supreme Court.
McDonald has long been friendly with Trump and was among those who signed certificates falsely stating Trump had won Nevada in 2020. In a recent interview, he criticized Democrats for failing to consider Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo’s proposal to implement a voter ID requirement and said the party-run caucus was a “more pure process for the electorate to be involved in.”
“They have that opportunity to come and voice their opinions about their candidate, and also to hear about the other candidates,” he said.
Critics from both parties have said caucuses make it harder for many people to vote, particularly those who don’t have the time to spend hours debating their picks, work irregular hours or have limited English skills. Some said the tight-knit settings are ripe environments for groups to exert political pressure or even intimidate their opponents — although McDonald said caucus ballots will be private.
The Nevada attorney general’s office made similar points when arguing on behalf of the state’s top election official to defend the 2021 law in court.
Former Nevada GOP chair Amy Tarkanian, who helped organize the party’s 2012 caucus, cited a number of problems with a caucus system, including voters who are unable to participate or who can’t stay throughout the drawn-out process.
“We left a caucus for a good reason,” she said. “It was confusing.”
A frequent critic of the state party she once ran, she said she was disappointed to see Nevada pushing a nominating process that appears to benefit Trump.
McDonald said he has spoken to Trump’s campaign about the party’s effort to stop the primary, but said the team did not express a preference for one over the other. Trump’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Zachary Moyle, a GOP strategist who was the state party’s executive director from 2006 to 2009, said a primary system is better organized. He said caucuses can be confusing for voters, especially those who are not as active, and have less stringent rules against electioneering.
While running then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign in Nevada, Moyle said GOP voters told him that many of those who were working the caucuses had hats, buttons and shirts supporting Trump. He called that an example of “indirect voter intimidation” that is a byproduct of a state party rather than election officials running the nominating process.
Still, Moyle cautioned against blaming the party for intentionally tailoring the election process to favor Trump.
While caucuses may have lower turnout and benefit the former president because of his campaign’s experience in 2016, he said the state party may have other interests in mind. The party runs the caucus, puts on its own events and decides how much each candidate must pay to be on the ballot.
“It’s the ability to be able to control the process, but it’s also a money process,” he said.
As the Nevada GOP considers its next steps to block the state-run primary, McDonald has helped lead an effort to educate conservative voters about the caucus, including media appearances, text notifications and community outreach.
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert in the presidential nominating system, said a caucus ultimately boils down to the candidates themselves and how well they are able to organize and turn out supporters.
“It sounds like it would be massively confusing to the voters, but in practice it isn’t,” she said. “It’s in the interest of every single candidate to make sure voters know how to participate.”
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Cassidy reported from Atlanta.
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Stern is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a program that places journalists in local newsrooms. Follow Stern on Twitter: @gabestern326.
WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats are teaming up with the Biden administration and a progressive advocacy group to turn policy efforts to curb “ junk fees ” into a political rallying cry, betting that a small but potentially potent kitchen table issue will resonate with voters.
President Joe Biden promised in this year’s State of the Union address to target unexpected fees tacked on to things like plane and concert tickets, hotel rooms, hospital and cellphone bills and housing transactions. He’s since worked with major businesses to see that pricing is more transparent about all fees.
More than a dozen House Democrats around the country plan to hold events organized with help from the Progressive Change Institute to promote the administration’s effort to curb junk fees. Events have already happened in suburban Detroit, Philadelphia, central New Jersey and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Similar efforts are planned in coming weeks in Pittsburgh, New York and Las Vegas, as well as in Wisconsin, Ohio and North Carolina. Still others are in the works.
“Hidden and deceptive junk fees cost Americans billions of dollars every year,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic House leader. “House Democrats will continue to work with President Biden to fight these excessive fees, hold corporations accountable and lower costs for families across the country.”
Rep. Elissa Slotkin a swing-district Michigan Democrat who is now running for the Senate, is planning an event in a few weeks and said “the administration’s initiative to eliminate junk fees will put money back in peoples’ pockets.”
Fellow Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib referred to seat assignment fees in saying she was “taken aback to see airlines charging more for you to sit next to your child” during an event last week at a health center outside Detroit with Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell.
The push is part of “ Bidenomics,” the president’s effort to stimulate the economy by increasing social spending in ways he says can strengthen the middle class. It could ease the sting of inflation, which has moderated in recent months but remains high. But it may also help Biden bridge the gap between an economy that many metrics show is strong — with low unemployment rates and wages rising — and polling suggesting that many Americans don’t view that as a positive for Democrats.
“We’ve got to be in a position to show people what we’ve done,” Biden said at a fundraiser last week for his 2024 reelection campaign in New Mexico, referring to public perceptions on the economy. He added: “It doesn’t show. It takes time for people to realize why that’s there.”
The Biden administration has used executive action to try to limit ticketing and medical fees, and used federal agencies to try to curb unexpected charges in banking, airlines and other sectors. The president also announced in June that company executives meeting with him at the White House, including from Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, and SeatGeek, had agreed to disclose more ticketing fees up front so consumers have a better idea of final pricing as they comparison shop.
House Democrats have introduced legislation to crack down on unexpected fees and, at their events, some are seeking to localize the issue, inviting people to speak about their experiences of being forced to pay them.
One such story comes from Joe Pfister, a 36-year-old paralegal. He had been looking to buy a home for a year and a half and went for a tour of the Brooklyn co-op he eventually bought on the day before New York shut in the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. But he wasn’t expecting thousands of dollars in additional fees that came later from the mortgage lender, real estate agent and co-op company.
“They just kind of sprang up one at a time, and you just had to keep paying to move your application forward,” said Pfister, whose unexpected charges included more than $400 worth of questionnaire fees, $200 in COVID-19 cleaning fees and a $750 move-in deposit. “You were kind of on the ride and you couldn’t get off.”
The Progressive Change Institute’s political arm, the Progress Change Campaign Committee, was closely allied with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign, which was built around championing consumer protections and promoting progressive causes through economic populism. Combating unexpected fees could be an extension of that theme, with appeals for progressives but also for moderate Democrats and swing voters.
“Fighting surprise junk fees is super popular and bipartisan with the public because everyone hates these abusive extra costs,” said Adam Green, the Progressive Change Institute co-founder.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s House campaign arm, says its members are spending the August recess trumpeting the economic impact of Biden-championed legislation promoting domestic microchip production and the Inflation Reduction Act, which advanced green energy and drastically increased federal social spending. But some lawmakers, including in competitive districts, are pointing to quelling junk fees as a pocketbook issue that voters will feel more immediately than data points about the larger economy.
“Bidenomics is about growing the middle class, which is why President Biden is spearheading the fight against junk fees that are unjustly raising costs,” said Kevin Munoz, a spokesperson for Biden’s reelection campaign.
The White House sees the effort as an example of good governance with bipartisan benefits. Consumer Reports conducted a 2018 survey that found that at least 85% of Americans have experienced a hidden or unexpected fee for a service in the previous two years.
Still, some Republicans dismiss the issue as a distraction that won’t have a lasting impact. “Dumpster fires polled better with the American people than Bidenomics, so extreme Democrats threw it in the garbage to talk about ‘junk fees’ because they know Biden’s economy is trash,” quipped Will Reinert, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the GOP’s House campaign arm.
Republican South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who is now running for president, told Fox News Radio in February: “Having fee control, income control, price control, it sounds more like socialism than free markets and capitalism.”
The Biden administration says industry groups have embraced greater transparency on fees, believing they can give consumers comparing prices a more accurate picture of costs — as long as they apply to everyone. But capping such fees is a different matter and could cause some pushback, it acknowledges.
“I think most people experience at least one kind of junk fee each month,” said Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director for the White House’s National Economic Council and a former top economic adviser to Warren. “Across party lines, there’s broad support for addressing these fees, either eliminating them or disclosing them up front so that people can shop with full transparency.”
Pfister predicted that combating hidden fees would get voters’ attention.
“I think this is very much a working class issue,” he said. “This is, I think, a good tactic for Democrats to take to show that they are on the side of everyday people — that they don’t respond to monied interests only and that they’re doing something to protect consumers.”
WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats are teaming up with the Biden administration and a progressive advocacy group to turn policy efforts to curb “ junk fees ” into a political rallying cry, betting that a small but potentially potent kitchen table issue will resonate with voters.
President Joe Biden promised in this year’s State of the Union address to target unexpected fees tacked on to things like plane and concert tickets, hotel rooms, hospital and cellphone bills and housing transactions. He’s since worked with major businesses to see that pricing is more transparent about all fees.
More than a dozen House Democrats around the country plan to hold events organized with help from the Progressive Change Institute to promote the administration’s effort to curb junk fees. Events have already happened in suburban Detroit, Philadelphia, central New Jersey and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Similar efforts are planned in coming weeks in Pittsburgh, New York and Las Vegas, as well as in Wisconsin, Ohio and North Carolina. Still others are in the works.
“Hidden and deceptive junk fees cost Americans billions of dollars every year,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic House leader. “House Democrats will continue to work with President Biden to fight these excessive fees, hold corporations accountable and lower costs for families across the country.”
Rep. Elissa Slotkin a swing-district Michigan Democrat who is now running for the Senate, is planning an event in a few weeks and said “the administration’s initiative to eliminate junk fees will put money back in peoples’ pockets.”
Fellow Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib referred to seat assignment fees in saying she was “taken aback to see airlines charging more for you to sit next to your child” during an event last week at a health center outside Detroit with Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell.
The push is part of “ Bidenomics,” the president’s effort to stimulate the economy by increasing social spending in ways he says can strengthen the middle class. It could ease the sting of inflation, which has moderated in recent months but remains high. But it may also help Biden bridge the gap between an economy that many metrics show is strong — with low unemployment rates and wages rising — and polling suggesting that many Americans don’t view that as a positive for Democrats.
“We’ve got to be in a position to show people what we’ve done,” Biden said at a fundraiser last week for his 2024 reelection campaign in New Mexico, referring to public perceptions on the economy. He added: “It doesn’t show. It takes time for people to realize why that’s there.”
The Biden administration has used executive action to try to limit ticketing and medical fees, and used federal agencies to try to curb unexpected chargers in banking, airlines and other sectors. The president also announced in June that company executives meeting with him at the White House, including from Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, and SeatGeek, had agreed to disclose more ticketing fees up front so consumers have a better idea of final pricing as they comparison shop.
House Democrats have introduced legislation to crack down on unexpected fees and, at their events, some are seeking to localize the issue, inviting people to speak about their experiences of being forced to pay them.
One such story comes from Joe Pfister, a 36-year-old paralegal. He had been looking to buy a home for a year and a half and went for a tour of the Brooklyn co-op he eventually bought on the day before New York shut in the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. But he wasn’t expecting thousands of dollars in additional fees that came later from the mortgage lender, real estate agent and co-op company.
“They just kind of sprang up one at a time, and you just had to keep paying to move your application forward,” said Pfister, whose unexpected charges included more than $400 worth of questionnaire fees, $200 in COVID-19 cleaning fees and a $750 move-in deposit. “You were kind of on the ride and you couldn’t get off.”
The Progressive Change Institute’s political arm, the Progress Change Campaign Committee, was closely allied with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign, which was built around championing consumer protections and promoting progressive causes through economic populism. Combating unexpected fees could be an extension of that theme, with appeals for progressives but also for moderate Democrats and swing voters.
“Fighting surprise junk fees is super popular and bipartisan with the public because everyone hates these abusive extra costs,” said Adam Green, the Progressive Change Institute co-founder.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s House campaign arm, says its members are spending the August recess trumpeting the economic impact of Biden-championed legislation promoting domestic microchip production and the Inflation Reduction Act, which advanced green energy and drastically increased federal social spending. But some lawmakers, including in competitive districts, are pointing to quelling junk fees as a pocketbook issue that voters will feel more immediately than data points about the larger economy.
“Bidenomics is about growing the middle class, which is why President Biden is spearheading the fight against junk fees that are unjustly raising costs,” said Kevin Munoz, a spokesperson for Biden’s reelection campaign.
The White House sees the effort as an example of good governance with bipartisan benefits. Consumer Reports conducted a 2018 survey that found that at least 85% of Americans have experienced a hidden or unexpected fee for a service in the previous two years.
Still, some Republicans dismiss the issue as a distraction that won’t have a lasting impact. “Dumpster fires polled better with the American people than Bidenomics, so extreme Democrats threw it in the garbage to talk about ‘junk fees’ because they know Biden’s economy is trash,” quipped Will Reinert, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the GOP’s House campaign arm.
Republican South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who is now running for president, told Fox News Radio in February: “Having fee control, income control, price control, it sounds more like socialism than free markets and capitalism.”
The Biden administration says industry groups have embraced greater transparency on fees, believing they can give consumers comparing prices a more accurate picture of costs — as long as they apply to everyone. But capping such fees is a different matter and could cause some pushback, it acknowledges.
“I think most people experience at least one kind of junk fee each month,” said Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director for the White House’s National Economic Council and a former top economic adviser to Warren. “Across party lines, there’s broad support for addressing these fees, either eliminating them or disclosing them up front so that people can shop with full transparency.”
Pfister predicted that combating hidden fees would get voters’ attention.
“I think this is very much a working class issue,” he said. “This is, I think, a good tactic for Democrats to take to show that they are on the side of everyday people — that they don’t respond to monied interests only and that they’re doing something to protect consumers.”
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Douglas Guzmán’s TikTok feed was dotted with workout routines and videos showcasing his favorite parts of his country.
That changed about a year ago, as rights groups, civil society and even some officials criticized El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele for violating human rights in his crackdown on criminal gangs, and said that his unconstitutional bid for re-election would corrode the country’s democracy.
Within days of Bukele announcing his bid for a second five-year term, Guzmán’s feed was plastered with videos describing Bukele as the “future liberator of Latin America” and slick montages of the leader’s “mega-prison” for accused gangsters.
Views on the social media influencer’s videos skyrocketed. The 39-year-old member of Bukele’s party said he found a new mission: counteracting negative press from independent media about his populist president.
“(Journalists) don’t know anything. All they do is sit at their desks and watch as President Bukele … makes a massive effort to save thousands of lives. But they don’t see that because they’ve never cared about the lives of Salvadorans,” Guzmán said. “That’s why we’re here. To show the true reality.”
Guzmán is part of an expanding network of social media personalities acting as a megaphone for the millennial leader. At the same time Bukele has cracked down on the press, his government has embraced those influencers. As the president seeks to hold onto power, he has harnessed that flood of pro-Bukele content slowly turning his Central American nation into an informational echo chamber.
“A news organization doing an investigation can’t compare to the sounding board that these influencers have because they flood your social media with the government’s narrative,” said Roberto Dubon, a communications strategist and congressional candidate for Bukele’s former party, FMLN. “What you have is an apparatus to spread their propaganda.”
Bukele, a 42-year-old leader often donning a backwards baseball cap, worked years in political advertising before social media became a key to his rise to power five years ago. Since, his approval ratings have soared to 90%, according to a June CID Gallup poll. Bukele’s modern political messaging, charisma and brutal crackdown on the country’s gangs only continue to win him fans domestically and abroad even in the midst of controversy.
By doing so, Bukele is using a playbook increasingly utilized by 21st century autocrats, said Seva Gunitsky, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.
Social media was once hailed as the ultimate democratic tool to organize protests, even revolutions, across the world. Now, governments from Russia to Uganda are now using it to control the narrative.
“They use this tool of liberation technology to actually prolong and strengthen their rule,” Gunitsky said. Such governments use influencers because their content “doesn’t look as much like propaganda and is more about shaping the narrative in more subtle ways.”
Under Bukele, El Salvador constructed a sophisticated communications machine. It locked down access to information out of line with official messaging and hired teams of former journalists to produce blockbuster-quality videos showcasing security forces taking on the nation’s gangs. The government also mimicked Russia, building an army of tech-savvy contractors – or “trolls” – to create fake social media accounts, spread falsities and harass critics.
At the same time his message of a strong-handed response to gang violence rippled across the region, gaining traction in other nations struggling with crime across Latin America and Caribbean.
With it, an “entire industry” has been born as influencers latch onto the president’s image, said Oscar Picardo, director of investigations at El Salvador’s Universidad Francisco Gavidia.
A study by Picardo’s university and local investigative outlet Factum examined 69 pro-Bukele YouTube accounts, which collectively have more followers than the population of El Salvador. They found many accounts – which make money through view and subscriber counts – can earn up to tens of thousands of dollars a month, far greater than El Salvador’s average salary. That content is devoured both within El Salvador, and by many of the 2.3 million Salvadorans living in the United States.
The cluster of accounts pumped out nearly 32 hours of pro-Bukele content in a single day in May, the study found. Almost always mirroring government language, 90% of the videos analyzed contained false or misleading information.
One account, Noticias Cuscatlecas, may earn much as $400,000 annually posting videos of violent attacks from alleged gang members layered over chilling music, UFG and Factum calculated.
The channel often concludes videos with the same message: “(Bukele) devised a plan to exterminate this cancer from society, and the incredible thing is that he is succeeding. Now the people no longer live in fear.”
On TikTok, one video declares “God chose Bukele as president of El Salvador.” On YouTube, personalities dressed as TV anchors attack human rights groups and journalists. They feature Bukele’s critics bursting into flames while claiming their channel “brings you the latest news”. Others sit down for an exclusive interview with the president.
In April, the president of El Salvador’s congress Ernesto Castro announced he was opening the assembly to YouTubers and social media influencers to “inform with objectivity.”
“The right to inform and be informed is a power not just in the hands of media companies,” Castro wrote on Twitter.
Requests by the AP for interviews with Bukele and his cabinet throughout his more than four years in office have been declined or ignored. Two people with knowledge of the inner workings of Bukele’s media machine declined to speak to the AP out of fear of the government.
For Guzmán and others, the access was empowering, enabling them to grow their audiences. Since, Guzmán has been offered access to other large events like the inauguration of Central American and Caribbean Games, something experts say Bukele used to show a friendly face to the world.
Press credentials hung around the TikToker’s neck and he brimmed with pride in a government press box, standing among other selfie stick-wielding influencers.
“Us being here, accredited, I feel like I am a part of this,” Guzmán said, eyes crinkling with a broad smile.
Around him, others took turns interviewing each other and bragged about how many people were connected to their feeds. One man wearing a Hawaiian shirt leapt over rows of bleachers to get a better signal. When Bukele walked on stage to give a speech, Guzmán and others chanted “Re-election!”
El Salvador’s government is not the first to open its doors to social media personalities, but researchers and critics says the atmosphere created in El Salvador marks a particular risk as other leaders in the region seek to mimic Bukele.
Picardo, the UFG investigator, said such accounts post a deluge of content when the government is trying to publicize something, like the leader’s experiment with Bitcoin, its gang crackdown or the Games.
The researcher warned their increasingly hostile tone acts as a harbinger for further deteriorating press freedoms, echoing State Department alarms of a “villainization” of journalists by Bukele.
Oscar Martínez’s award-winning news organization El Faro is among those facing attacks and harassment for its intensive investigation of Bukele, including audio evidencing that Bukele’s administration negotiated with gangs in order to dip violence.
The government opened a case against El Faro for tax evasion, something the news site called “ completely baseless.” Phones of dozens of journalists were hacked with Pegasus spyware, regularly used by governments to spy on opponents.
In April, El Faro announced it would move its center of operations to Costa Rica due to escalating harassment.
He worries their investigations is being drowned out by the flood of disinformation, and said if Bukele stays in power in the upcoming elections, it will put reporters in El Salvador “much more at risk.”
“At that moment, Bukele is going to decide to get rid of any obstacle he has within the country, and the main obstacle he has right now is the free press,” Martínez said.
MADISON, Wis. — If Wisconsin state Rep. Jimmy Anderson wants to visit residents in some of the northern neighborhoods he represents, he first must leave his own district — twice.
From his Fitchburg home in suburban Madison, Anderson must exit his 47th Assembly District, pass through the 77th District, reenter the 47th District, then head north through the 48th District to finally reach a cluster of homes assigned like a remote outpost to his district.
Unusual? Yes. Inconvenient? Yes.
Unconstitutional? Perhaps.
Though the Wisconsin Constitution requires legislative districts “to consist of contiguous territory,” many nonetheless contain sections of land that are not actually connected. The resulting map looks a bit like Swiss cheese, where some districts are dotted with small neighborhood holes assigned to different representatives.
Wisconsin’s nationally peculiar practice of detached districts is cited as one of several alleged violations in a recent lawsuit seeking to strike down current Assembly and Senate districts and replace them before the 2024 election.
Like similar cases in states ranging from North Carolina to Utah, the Wisconsin lawsuit also alleges partisan gerrymandering is illegal under the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and free speech.
Though such claims have had mixed results nationally, Democrats hope the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s new liberal majority will deliver a resounding rejection of gerrymandering that has given Republicans a lopsided legislative majority.
But the challenge to noncontiguous districts could provide judges a way to decide the case without ever addressing whether partisan gerrymandering is illegal.
“It could be that this gives the court a completely neutral basis for deciding the maps are no good,” said Kenneth R. Mayer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor.
Wisconsin’s Assembly districts rank among the most tilted nationally, with Republicans routinely winning far more seats than would be expected based on their average share of the vote, according to an Associated Press analysis. In other states, such as Nevada, Democrats have reaped a disproportionate advantage from redistricting.
Most states are guided by at least four traditional principles for reshaping state legislative districts after each decennial census. Those include districts being nearly equal in population, compact and contiguous and following the boundaries of cities and counties. “Contiguous” generally is understood to mean all parts of a district are connected, with some logical exceptions for islands.
In some states, mapmakers have gotten creative by using narrow strips of roads or rivers to connect otherwise distinct parts of a district. But few have gone so far as Wisconsin in treating contiguous as a loose synonym for “nearby.”
Wisconsin’s detached districts are ”profoundly weird,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Marymount University Law School in Los Angeles who created the All About Redistricting website.
Anderson’s legislative district, for example, includes more than a dozen remote territories scattered around the Madison area that are disconnected from the district’s main portion in Fitchburg, McFarland and Monona. That makes door-to-door canvassing particularly challenging for Anderson, who uses a wheelchair that must be repeatedly loaded and unloaded from a van.
The situation also is confusing for his remote constituents whose neighbors are represented by someone else, Anderson said.
“It just doesn’t serve the people that live in those little bubbles to not have the same kind of community cohesion and interests being represented,” he said.
Gabrielle Young, 46, lives in one of the “land islands” Anderson represents. But until she was contacted by lawyers filing the redistricting lawsuit, Young said she had no idea Anderson had to travel through another district to campaign in her neighborhood. Young agreed to serve as a plaintiff in the lawsuit alleging the disconnected districts violate the state constitution.
“I could have gone the rest of my life living here not realizing it was happening, but that doesn’t make it OK,” she said. “It’s ridiculous.”
Among other things, the lawsuit cites an 1892 case in which the Wisconsin Supreme Court stated districts “cannot be made up of two or more pieces of detached territory.” Yet the practice proliferated over time, with 55 of the 99 Assembly districts and 21 of the 33 Senate districts now composed of disconnected portions, according to the lawsuit.
“Clearly, at some point, things sort of went awry,” said Mark Gaber, senior director of redistricting at Campaign Legal Center, a Washington, D.C.-based group that helped bring the lawsuit.
“It seems pretty clear to me that you have to enforce the words as they are written,” Gaber added.
That has not always been the case.
In 1992, a federal judicial panel considering a Wisconsin redistricting lawsuit essentially endorsed detached legislative districts. Wisconsin’s Democratic-led Legislature and Republican governor had failed to agree on new districts following the 1990 census. The court was left to pick among various plans submitted by the parties. Republican plans proposed districts with literal contiguity, but the judges opted for a Democratic approach that did not.
The federal judges said legislative districts containing disconnected “islands” of land were similar to towns that had been legally permitted to annex noncontiguous areas.
“Since the distance between town and island is slight, we do not think the failure of the legislative plan to achieve literal contiguity a serious demerit,” the judges wrote in 1992.
The political roles are reversed 30 years later. Republicans, who now control the Legislature, proposed Assembly and Senate maps with disconnected districts that the Wisconsin Supreme Court adopted last year. Democrats, who control the governor’s office, are backing the legal challenge.
“The districts are constitutional because they are legally contiguous,” Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said in a statement to The Associated Press alluding to prior court rulings. He declined further comment.
Though contiguity requirements have a long national history in redistricting, they have not always been explicitly defined, thus leaving room for interpretation, said Micah Altman, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose specialties include redistricting.
Criteria such as contiguous and compact districts must be balanced with other principles, such as distributing the population equally and not splitting municipalities and counties among districts, he said.
“Turning one knob on the system makes you have to turn down the other knob at least a bit,” Altman said.
In the case of Anderson’s district, the disconnected sections likely have not made much difference in the partisan composition of his voters. Anderson is a Democrat, and so are the majority of Madison-area voters.
But redistricting experts say there still is potential for politicians to rig the map to their favor by drawing remote sections of districts.
“When you allow mapmakers to draw districts that are noncontiguous, you give them even more flexibility to perpetrate abuse,” Levitt said.
MADISON, Wis. — If Wisconsin state Rep. Jimmy Anderson wants to visit residents in some of the northern neighborhoods he represents, he first must leave his own district — twice.
From his Fitchburg home in suburban Madison, Anderson must exit his 47th Assembly District, pass through the 77th District, reenter the 47th District, then head north through the 48th District to finally reach a cluster of homes assigned like a remote outpost to his district.
Unusual? Yes. Inconvenient? Yes.
Unconstitutional? Perhaps.
Though the Wisconsin Constitution requires legislative districts “to consist of contiguous territory,” many nonetheless contain sections of land that are not actually connected. The resulting map looks a bit like Swiss cheese, where some districts are dotted with small neighborhood holes assigned to different representatives.
Wisconsin’s nationally peculiar practice of detached districts is cited as one of several alleged violations in a recent lawsuit seeking to strike down current Assembly and Senate districts and replace them before the 2024 election.
Like similar cases in states ranging from North Carolina to Utah, the Wisconsin lawsuit also alleges partisan gerrymandering is illegal under the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and free speech.
Though such claims have had mixed results nationally, Democrats hope the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s new liberal majority will deliver a resounding rejection of gerrymandering that has given Republicans a lopsided legislative majority.
But the challenge to noncontiguous districts could provide judges a way to decide the case without ever addressing whether partisan gerrymandering is illegal.
“It could be that this gives the court a completely neutral basis for deciding the maps are no good,” said Kenneth R. Mayer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor.
Wisconsin’s Assembly districts rank among the most tilted nationally, with Republicans routinely winning far more seats than would be expected based on their average share of the vote, according to an Associated Press analysis. In other states, such as Nevada, Democrats have reaped a disproportionate advantage from redistricting.
Most states are guided by at least four traditional principles for reshaping state legislative districts after each decennial census. Those include districts being nearly equal in population, compact and contiguous and following the boundaries of cities and counties. “Contiguous” generally is understood to mean all parts of a district are connected, with some logical exceptions for islands.
In some states, mapmakers have gotten creative by using narrow strips of roads or rivers to connect otherwise distinct parts of a district. But few have gone so far as Wisconsin in treating contiguous as a loose synonym for “nearby.”
Wisconsin’s detached districts are ”profoundly weird,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Marymount University Law School in Los Angeles who created the All About Redistricting website.
Anderson’s legislative district, for example, includes more than a dozen remote territories scattered around the Madison area that are disconnected from the district’s main portion in Fitchburg, McFarland and Monona. That makes door-to-door canvassing particularly challenging for Anderson, who uses a wheelchair that must be repeatedly loaded and unloaded from a van.
The situation also is confusing for his remote constituents whose neighbors are represented by someone else, Anderson said.
“It just doesn’t serve the people that live in those little bubbles to not have the same kind of community cohesion and interests being represented,” he said.
Gabrielle Young, 46, lives in one of the “land islands” Anderson represents. But until she was contacted by lawyers filing the redistricting lawsuit, Young said she had no idea Anderson had to travel through another district to campaign in her neighborhood. Young agreed to serve as a plaintiff in the lawsuit alleging the disconnected districts violate the state constitution.
“I could have gone the rest of my life living here not realizing it was happening, but that doesn’t make it OK,” she said. “It’s ridiculous.”
Among other things, the lawsuit cites an 1892 case in which the Wisconsin Supreme Court stated districts “cannot be made up of two or more pieces of detached territory.” Yet the practice proliferated over time, with 55 of the 99 Assembly districts and 21 of the 33 Senate districts now composed of disconnected portions, according to the lawsuit.
“Clearly, at some point, things sort of went awry,” said Mark Gaber, senior director of redistricting at Campaign Legal Center, a Washington, D.C.-based group that helped bring the lawsuit.
“It seems pretty clear to me that you have to enforce the words as they are written,” Gaber added.
That has not always been the case.
In 1992, a federal judicial panel considering a Wisconsin redistricting lawsuit essentially endorsed detached legislative districts. Wisconsin’s Democratic-led Legislature and Republican governor had failed to agree on new districts following the 1990 census. The court was left to pick among various plans submitted by the parties. Republican plans proposed districts with literal contiguity, but the judges opted for a Democratic approach that did not.
The federal judges said legislative districts containing disconnected “islands” of land were similar to towns that had been legally permitted to annex noncontiguous areas.
“Since the distance between town and island is slight, we do not think the failure of the legislative plan to achieve literal contiguity a serious demerit,” the judges wrote in 1992.
The political roles are reversed 30 years later. Republicans, who now control the Legislature, proposed Assembly and Senate maps with disconnected districts that the Wisconsin Supreme Court adopted last year. Democrats, who control the governor’s office, are backing the legal challenge.
“The districts are constitutional because they are legally contiguous,” Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said in a statement to The Associated Press alluding to prior court rulings. He declined further comment.
Though contiguity requirements have a long national history in redistricting, they have not always been explicitly defined, thus leaving room for interpretation, said Micah Altman, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose specialties include redistricting.
Criteria such as contiguous and compact districts must be balanced with other principles, such as distributing the population equally and not splitting municipalities and counties among districts, he said.
“Turning one knob on the system makes you have to turn down the other knob at least a bit,” Altman said.
In the case of Anderson’s district, the disconnected sections likely have not made much difference in the partisan composition of his voters. Anderson is a Democrat, and so are the majority of Madison-area voters.
But redistricting experts say there still is potential for politicians to rig the map to their favor by drawing remote sections of districts.
“When you allow mapmakers to draw districts that are noncontiguous, you give them even more flexibility to perpetrate abuse,” Levitt said.
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Douglas Guzmán’s TikTok feed was dotted with workout routines and videos showcasing his favorite parts of his country.
That changed about a year ago, as rights groups, civil society and even some officials criticized El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele for violating human rights in his crackdown on criminal gangs, and said that his unconstitutional bid for re-election would corrode the country’s democracy.
Within days of Bukele announcing his bid for a second five-year term, Guzmán’s feed was plastered with videos describing Bukele as the “future liberator of Latin America” and slick montages of the leader’s “mega-prison” for accused gangsters.
Views on the social media influencer’s videos skyrocketed. The 39-year-old member of Bukele’s party said he found a new mission: counteracting negative press from independent media about his populist president.
“(Journalists) don’t know anything. All they do is sit at their desks and watch as President Bukele … makes a massive effort to save thousands of lives. But they don’t see that because they’ve never cared about the lives of Salvadorans,” Guzmán said. “That’s why we’re here. To show the true reality.”
Guzmán is part of an expanding network of social media personalities acting as a megaphone for the millennial leader. At the same time Bukele has cracked down on the press, his government has embraced those influencers. As the president seeks to hold onto power, he has harnessed that flood of pro-Bukele content slowly turning his Central American nation into an informational echo chamber.
“A news organization doing an investigation can’t compare to the sounding board that these influencers have because they flood your social media with the government’s narrative,” said Roberto Dubon, a communications strategist and congressional candidate for Bukele’s former party, FMLN. “What you have is an apparatus to spread their propaganda.”
Bukele, a 42-year-old leader often donning a backwards baseball cap, worked years in political advertising before social media became a key to his rise to power five years ago. Since, his approval ratings have soared to 90%, according to a June CID Gallup poll. Bukele’s modern political messaging, charisma and brutal crackdown on the country’s gangs only continue to win him fans domestically and abroad even in the midst of controversy.
By doing so, Bukele is using a playbook increasingly utilized by 21st century autocrats, said Seva Gunitsky, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.
Social media was once hailed as the ultimate democratic tool to organize protests, even revolutions, across the world. Now, governments from Russia to Uganda are now using it to control the narrative.
“They use this tool of liberation technology to actually prolong and strengthen their rule,” Gunitsky said. Such governments use influencers because their content “doesn’t look as much like propaganda and is more about shaping the narrative in more subtle ways.”
Under Bukele, El Salvador constructed a sophisticated communications machine. It locked down access to information out of line with official messaging and hired teams of former journalists to produce blockbuster-quality videos showcasing security forces taking on the nation’s gangs. The government also mimicked Russia, building an army of tech-savvy contractors – or “trolls” – to create fake social media accounts, spread falsities and harass critics.
At the same time his message of a strong-handed response to gang violence rippled across the region, gaining traction in other nations struggling with crime across Latin America and Caribbean.
With it, an “entire industry” has been born as influencers latch onto the president’s image, said Oscar Picardo, director of investigations at El Salvador’s Universidad Francisco Gavidia.
A study by Picardo’s university and local investigative outlet Factum examined 69 pro-Bukele YouTube accounts, which collectively have more followers than the population of El Salvador. They found many accounts – which make money through view and subscriber counts – can earn up to tens of thousands of dollars a month, far greater than El Salvador’s average salary. That content is devoured both within El Salvador, and by many of the 2.3 million Salvadorans living in the United States.
The cluster of accounts pumped out nearly 32 hours of pro-Bukele content in a single day in May, the study found. Almost always mirroring government language, 90% of the videos analyzed contained false or misleading information.
One account, Noticias Cuscatlecas, may earn much as $400,000 annually posting videos of violent attacks from alleged gang members layered over chilling music, UFG and Factum calculated.
The channel often concludes videos with the same message: “(Bukele) devised a plan to exterminate this cancer from society, and the incredible thing is that he is succeeding. Now the people no longer live in fear.”
On TikTok, one video declares “God chose Bukele as president of El Salvador.” On YouTube, personalities dressed as TV anchors attack human rights groups and journalists. They feature Bukele’s critics bursting into flames while claiming their channel “brings you the latest news”. Others sit down for an exclusive interview with the president.
In April, the president of El Salvador’s congress Ernesto Castro announced he was opening the assembly to YouTubers and social media influencers to “inform with objectivity.”
“The right to inform and be informed is a power not just in the hands of media companies,” Castro wrote on Twitter.
Requests by the AP for interviews with Bukele and his cabinet throughout his more than four years in office have been declined or ignored. Two people with knowledge of the inner workings of Bukele’s media machine declined to speak to the AP out of fear of the government.
For Guzmán and others, the access was empowering, enabling them to grow their audiences. Since, Guzmán has been offered access to other large events like the inauguration of Central American and Caribbean Games, something experts say Bukele used to show a friendly face to the world.
Press credentials hung around the TikToker’s neck and he brimmed with pride in a government press box, standing among other selfie stick-wielding influencers.
“Us being here, accredited, I feel like I am a part of this,” Guzmán said, eyes crinkling with a broad smile.
Around him, others took turns interviewing each other and bragged about how many people were connected to their feeds. One man wearing a Hawaiian shirt leapt over rows of bleachers to get a better signal. When Bukele walked on stage to give a speech, Guzmán and others chanted “Re-election!”
El Salvador’s government is not the first to open its doors to social media personalities, but researchers and critics says the atmosphere created in El Salvador marks a particular risk as other leaders in the region seek to mimic Bukele.
Picardo, the UFG investigator, said such accounts post a deluge of content when the government is trying to publicize something, like the leader’s experiment with Bitcoin, its gang crackdown or the Games.
The researcher warned their increasingly hostile tone acts as a harbinger for further deteriorating press freedoms, echoing State Department alarms of a “villainization” of journalists by Bukele.
Oscar Martínez’s award-winning news organization El Faro is among those facing attacks and harassment for its intensive investigation of Bukele, including audio evidencing that Bukele’s administration negotiated with gangs in order to dip violence.
The government opened a case against El Faro for tax evasion, something the news site called “ completely baseless.” Phones of dozens of journalists were hacked with Pegasus spyware, regularly used by governments to spy on opponents.
In April, El Faro announced it would move its center of operations to Costa Rica due to escalating harassment.
He worries their investigations is being drowned out by the flood of disinformation, and said if Bukele stays in power in the upcoming elections, it will put reporters in El Salvador “much more at risk.”
“At that moment, Bukele is going to decide to get rid of any obstacle he has within the country, and the main obstacle he has right now is the free press,” Martínez said.
Malaysia’s political blocs split victories in regional elections, but opposition makes gains in a a challenge for the ruling coalition.
Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s ruling coalition has retained control of three states in regional polls, although official results showed the opposition making gains across the Malay peninsula.
The election in six of Malaysia’s states on Saturday will not directly affect Anwar’s two-thirds majority in parliament but is widely seen as a referendum on his nine-month-old coalition government.
Data from the Election Commission showed Anwar’s multiethnic Pakatan Harapan (PH) alliance triumphing in the three states it held prior to the vote: Selangor and Penang, which are the country’s richest, as well as Negeri Sembilan.
The results also showed the opposition Perikatan Nasional (PN), which includes the religious conservative Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), keeping its hold on the heartland states of Kedah, Kelantan and northern Terengganu.
Anwar welcomed the results at a late-night press conference and appealed for unity.
“This is a decision of the people. We have to respect this decision,” the prime minister said.
“The federal government remains strong after this poll and we will continue to promote a prosperous Malaysia,” he added.
The opposition, however, called the outcome a “defeat” for the ruling coalition.
Muhyiddin Yassin, who leads the PN, noted strong gains by the opposition bloc, including in Selangor where it increased its share of seats from five in the previous election to 22 and denied the ruling coalition its two-thirds majority.
In Penang, the opposition bloc won 11 seats, up from one in the previous vote, and in Negeri Sembilan, it won five seats, up from zero in the last election.
Muhyiddin called the outcome “very encouraging” and said the “state polls are a referendum by the people rejecting the unity government led by Pakatan Harapan”.
He said Anwar and his deputy, Zahid Hamidi, should resign to “take responsibility for this defeat”.
Analysts, meanwhile, said the outcome lifted pressure on Anwar and would boost the stability of his nascent government.
The 76-year-old politician took office in November at the head of a unity government after a general election resulted in an unprecedented hung parliament.
Anwar’s PH had won the most seats but fell short of the outright majority needed to form a government. At the behest of the king, the PH and rival parties, including former foe, the corruption-tainted United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), came together to secure a two-thirds parliamentary majority.
But analysts say this loose alliance is perceived as unstable and needs stronger support from the Malay majority.
Oh Ei Sun, an analyst at the Pacific Research Center of Malaysia think tank, said Saturday’s outcome “was a nail-biting win for Anwar after he thwarted the challenge from the powerful Islamic party PAS”.
But Anwar “must remain vigilant”, Oh said.
“There is no guarantee that his government will stay until the next general elections.”
Mustafa Izzuddin, a political analyst with consultancy Solaris Strategies Singapore, told the AFP news agency that “it was in many ways a stress reliever for Anwar not to be confronted with any major political shifts that could alter the status quo”.
But the outcome was also a disappointment in that “his coalition did not make much significant inroads”, Mustafa said.
Still, Anwar “has more than enough time” before the 2027 general elections “to shore up support including the complex political bargaining that may need to happen within the coalition”, he added.
NEW YORK — As he gears up for reelection, President Joe Biden is already facing questions about his ability to convince voters that the economy is performing well. There’s skepticism about the 80-year-old president’s ability to manage a second term. And on Friday, Biden faced a fresh setback when Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to probe his son, Hunter.
Biden’s challenges pale in comparison with his predecessor and possible future rival, Donald Trump, who is facing three criminal indictments, with additional charges expected soon. But the appointment of the special counsel was nonetheless a reminder of the vulnerabilities facing Biden as he wages another election campaign in a deeply uncertain political climate.
There was little immediate sign that Garland’s decision meaningfully changed Biden’s standing within his party. If anything, it underscored the unprecedented nature of the next election. Rather than a battle of ideas waged on the traditional campaign trail, the next push for the presidency may be shaped by sudden legal twists in courtrooms from Washington to Delaware and Miami.
“Prior to Trump, this would be a big deal,” New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley said of Friday’s announcement. “Now, I don’t think it means anything. Trump has made everyone so numb to this stuff.”
Referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, Buckley added, “Because of how dismissive MAGA America is to the very real crimes of Trump and his family, it has numbed the minds of swing voters and Democratic voters or activists who would normally be fully engaged and outraged.”
Polling has consistently shown that Democratic voters were not excited about Biden’s reelection even before Garland’s announcement.
Just 47% of Democrats wanted Biden to run again in 2024, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in April. Democrats’ enthusiasm for Biden’s presidential campaign has consistently trailed behind Republicans’ enthusiasm for Trump’s: 55% of Republicans said they wanted Trump to run again in the AP-NORC poll. And Biden’s approval rating in polling by Gallup stood at 41% on average over the last three months. Only Jimmy Carter notched a lower average rating in Gallup’s polling at this point in his presidency, while ratings for Trump were about the same at 43%.
Garland announced Friday that he was naming David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware, as the special counsel in the Hunter Biden investigation. It comes as plea deal talks involving tax and gun charges in the case Weiss had already been probing hit an impasse.
The appointment of a special counsel ensures that Trump will not stand alone as the only presidential candidate grappling with the fallout of a serious criminal investigation in the midst of the 2024 campaign season.
Of course, the cases are hardly equal in the context of the next presidential election.
There is no evidence that President Biden himself has committed any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Trump has been charged in a plot to undermine democracy for his actions leading up the the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
He’s also facing separate charges for refusing to turn over classified documents after leaving the White House and financial crimes in New York related to a hush money case involving a porn star. And Georgia prosecutors are investigating whether Trump broke state laws by interfering in the 2020 election.
Still, Republicans were hopeful that the new special counsel may ultimately shift attention away from Trump’s baggage while bolstering conservative calls to impeach the Democratic president, a proposal that has divided the GOP on Capitol Hill, which has long sought evidence linking Hunter Biden’s alleged wrongdoings to his father.
Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, has already obtained thousands of pages of financial records from various members of the Biden family through subpoenas to the Treasury Department and various financial institutions as part of a congressional probe. He released a statement Friday accusing Garland of “trying to stonewall congressional oversight.”
Comer vowed “to follow the Biden family’s money trail.”
Trump, the overwhelming front-runner in the crowded Republican presidential nomination fight, used the opportunity to put his likely general election opponent on the defensive, referring to the “Biden crime family” and the “Biden cartel.”
“If this special counsel is truly independent — even though he failed to bring proper charges after a four year investigation and he appears to be trying to move the case to a more Democrat-friendly venue — he will quickly conclude that Joe Biden, his troubled son Hunter, and their enablers, including the media, which colluded with the 51 intelligence officials who knowingly misled the public about Hunter’s laptop, should face the required consequences,” the Trump campaign said in a statement.
Back in New Hampshire, Buckley acknowledged that voters are not excited about Biden’s reelection.
“But they’re really not excited about Trump,” he said. “There’s a seriousness around this election. People can say they’re not excited (about Biden). They can say, ‘Oh, he shouldn’t run again.’ But the reality is that he’s the only alternative to Trump.”
Meanwhile, it’s unclear how closely key voters are paying attention.
A Marquette Law School Poll conducted last month found that about three-quarters of Americans had heard about Hunter Biden’s agreement to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges of tax evasion and a gun charge. Republicans were slightly more likely than Democrats to say they have heard “a lot” about the topic, with independents being much less likely to be paying attention.
Democratic strategist Bill Burton suggested the GOP’s focus on the president’s son would backfire.
“From a political standpoint, I think Republicans are stupid to spend so much time talking about the president’s son,” he said. “People are going to be voting on the economy. They’re going to be voting on who’s tougher on social media companies and national security.”
Burton continued, “As a dad, I think it’s pretty disgusting that you would attack someone’s son like this.”
___
AP polls and surveys reporter Linley Sanders in Washington contributed.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — After Ohio voters repealed a law pushed by Republicans that would have limited unions’ collective bargaining rights in 2011, then-GOP Gov. John Kasich was contrite.
“I’ve heard their voices, I understand their decision and, frankly, I respect what people have to say in an effort like this,” he told reporters after the defeat.
The tone from Ohio Republicans was much different this past week after voters resoundingly rejected their attempt to impose hurdles on passing amendments to the state constitution — a proposal that would have made it much more difficult to pass an abortion rights measure in November.
During an election night news conference, Republican Senate President Matt Huffman vowed to use the powers of his legislative supermajority to bring the issue back soon, variously blaming out-of-state dark money, unsupportive fellow Republicans, a lack of time and the issue’s complexity for its failure.
He never mentioned respecting the will of the 57% of Ohio voters across both Democratic and Republican counties who voted “no” on the Republican proposal.
The striking contrast illustrates an increasing antagonism among elected Republicans across the country toward the nation’s purest form of direct democracy — the citizen-initiated ballot measure — as it threatens their lock on power in states where they control the legislature.
Historically, attempts to undercut the citizen ballot initiative process have come from both parties, said Daniel A. Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida.
“It has to do with which party is in monopolistic control of state legislatures and the governorship,” he said. “When you have that monopoly of power, you want to restrict the voice of a statewide electorate that might go against your efforts to control the process.”
According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Fairness Project, Ohio and five other states where Republicans control the legislature — Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Missouri and North Dakota — have either passed, attempted to pass or are currently working to pass expanded supermajority requirements for voters to approve statewide ballot measures.
At least six states, including Ohio, have sought to increase the number of counties where signatures must be gathered.
The group found that at least six of the 24 states that allow ballot initiatives have prohibited out-of-state petition circulators and nine have prohibited paid circulators altogether, the group reports.
Eighteen states have required circulators to swear oaths that they’ve seen every signature put to paper. Arkansas has imposed background checks on circulators. South Dakota has dictated such a large font size on petitions that it makes circulating them cumbersome.
Sarah Walker, policy and legal advocacy director for the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, said Republicans in Ohio and elsewhere are restricting the ballot initiative process in an era of renewed populism that’s not going their way. She said conservatives had no interest in amending the ballot initiative process when they were winning campaigns in the 1990s and early 2000s.
“Since then, you’ve seen left-leaning organizations really developing their organizational skills and starting to win,” she said. “The reason given for restricting the ballot initiative is often to insulate the state from outside special interests. But if lawmakers are interested in limiting that, there are things they can do legislatively to restrict those groups, and I don’t see them having any interest in doing that.”
Aggressive stances by Republican supermajorities at the Ohio Statehouse — including supporting one of the nation’s most stringent abortion bans, refusing to pass many of a GOP governor’s proposed gun control measures in the face of a deadly mass shooting, and repeatedly producing unconstitutional political maps — have motivated would-be reformers.
That prompted an influential mix of Republican politicians, anti-abortion and gun rights organizations and business interests in the state to push forward with Tuesday’s failed amendment, which would have raised the threshold for passing future constitutional changes from a simple majority to a 60% supermajority.
Another example is Missouri, where Republicans plan to try again to raise the threshold to amend that state’s constitution during the legislative session that begins in 2024 — after earlier efforts have failed.
Those plans come in a state where state lawmakers refused to fund a Medicaid expansion approved by voters until forced to by a court order, and where voters enshrined marijuana in the constitution last fall after lawmakers failed to. An abortion rights question is headed to Missouri’s 2024 ballot.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose is among Republicans in the state who cast Issue 1 as a fight against out-of-state special interests, although both sides of the campaign were heavily funded by such groups.
He called the $20 million special election “only one battle in a long war.”
“Unfortunately,” he said, “we were dramatically outspent by dark money billionaires from California to New York, and the giant ‘for sale’ sign still hangs on Ohio’s constitution,” said LaRose, who is running for U.S. Senate in 2024.
Fairness Project Executive Director Kelly Hall said Ohio Republicans’ promise to come back with another attempt to restrict the initiative process “says more about representational democracy than it does about direct democracy.”
She rejected the narrative that out-of-state special interests are using the avenue of direct democracy to force unpopular policies into state constitutions, arguing corporate influence is far greater on state lawmakers.
“The least out-of-state venue is direct democracy, because then millions of Ohioans are participating, not just the several dozen who are receiving campaign contributions from corporate PACs, who are receiving perks and meetings and around-the-clock influence from corporate PACs,” she said.
“Ballot measures enable issues that matter to working families to actually get on the agenda in a state, rather than the agenda being set by those who can afford lobbyists and campaign contributions.”
SAN JUAN SACATEPEQUEZ, Guatemala — Over the past decade, Guatemalan presidential candidate Sandra Torres has been drifting rightward on the political spectrum as she repeatedly has tried to win the presidency.
Now, in her third bid, the former first lady has drafted an evangelical pastor as her running mate and is leaning heavily on her firm commitments to keeping abortion and same-sex marriage illegal in Guatemala.
Her opponent in the Aug. 20 runoff, Bernardo Arévalo of the progressive Seed Movement, also has said Guatemala’s abortion ban should remain untouched. But he has declined to make any such declaration on same-sex marriage, saying only that his government would be against any sort of discrimination, without elaborating.
Torres made a recent campaign stop in jeans and a national soccer team jersey at a school in San Juan Sacatepequez, an impoverished suburban city of more than 250,000, where she told several hundred supporters that she wanted the government to respect life from conception. She promised she would never accept same-sex marriage, quickly adding that she wasn’t homophobic.
“I want to run this country with the fear of God,” she told the crowd.
Torres, 67, leads the National Unity of Hope party that once was considered the country’s social democratic party but has moved rightward with Torres, though she also promises many social programs to benefit the country’s “forgotten” poor. Her party is the second-largest in the unicameral legislature.
In the administration of her ex-husband, Álvaro Colom, Torres led the government’s social programs, giving her significant government experience. His campaign, plus three of her own, also give her a long history of trying to court voters across Guatemala.
Torres was the leading vote-getter in the first round of this year’s presidential election on June 25. Both of her previous defeats came in the second-round runoff. So while it was no surprise to find Torres in a runoff, her opponent surely has come as a shock.
In the days before the first round vote, Arévalo, who largely campaigned on rooting out corruption, was barely in the country’s political conversation. He was polling below 3%, behind seven other candidates. But the results gave him 11% of the vote — enough to give him the second slot in the runoff.
In the first round, Torres’ competition came mostly from other conservative populists. Now, voters face a real choice between conservative and progressive proposals, and Torres is appealing to Guatemalans’ conservative social values at every opportunity.
Luis Mack, a political scientist with San Carlos University, said that Torres’ current campaign is part of a trend across the region of bringing religion into elections. “It is an open manipulation of politics and faith,” he said.
Torres did not previously have the support of the country’s evangelical churches, which had been more closely associated with the administration of outgoing President Alejandro Giammattei, said David Pineda, president of the Guatemalan Secular Humanist Association.
But if Arévalo should win, the churches would be afraid of losing the close relationship they had with the government, and might face unwelcome scrutiny of their finances, Pineda said.
Until he registered as Torres’ running mate, 47-year-old Romeo Guerra was pastor of the Christian Sion Mission church founded by his father in Guatemala City. An opposing party tried to block Guerra’s candidacy on the grounds that Guatemala’s constitution bars clergy from running for office. But the nation’s top court allowed it.
Guerra has not been a fixture in Torres’ campaign stops and seems uncomfortable speaking outside the pulpit. But he recently met with dozens of evangelical pastors alongside Torres, who has proposed creating a ministry of religious affairs.
Evangelical pastors in Guatemala have a history of siding against leftists, with some of them disseminating government propaganda against leftist guerrillas in late 1970s and early ’80s during the country’s civil war.
Shortly after Arévalo won his place in the runoff, evangelical pastor Sergio Enríquez of Ebenezer Ministries told his congregation “we have to pray a lot to not allow this communist from (the Seed Movement) to make it.” Other pastors in mega churches across Guatemala haven’t been as explicit but have emphasized issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, as Torres has done.
In San Juan Sacatepequez on a recent Sunday, hundreds of Indigenous women lined up for a free reusable shopping bag before Torres was scheduled to speak. Four hours later the candidate arrived in a helicopter.
Torres’ campaign is unabashedly populist, filled with promises for poor communities. She has said that as president she would distribute 1 million computers to schoolchildren, scholarships to cover school costs and big bags of basic foodstuffs delivered monthly to families’ doorsteps.
She reminds families that they received similar bags of products when she was first lady, and heads nod.
“I remember her very well,” said Azucena Sarpec, holding her 6-month-old in her arms. “When she was in government, years ago, because of her they brought us the solidarity bag” of food, Sarpec said, adding that the promise of more such bags was enough to earn her vote.
She said that since Torres’ ex-husband left power nearly a decade ago, the streets which are mostly dirt haven’t been maintained, and there’s more malnutrition, poverty and crime.
Now, her family has to pay protection money to gangs to guarantee their safety, she said. “They ask for $65 to start and then $45 every month. You can’t do it,” said Sarpec, whose husband works for minimum wage in an assembly plant.
Lázaro Borror, 38, said he came to hear Torres so that he can decide which candidate to support. He said he believes Torres would distribute bags of food if elected, “but I don’t think she’s going to stop corruption.”
Borror said he’s accustomed to candidates making promises at election time, but then forgetting those who put them in office.
“They only do something the first few months, then they forget us,” he said.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Voting began Saturday in crucial state elections in Malaysia, where Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s multi-coalition government is seeking to strengthen its hold against a strong Islamic opposition.
Queues formed outside schools and other polling stations as voters began to stream in. Nearly 9.8 million people, or about half the country’s electorate, are eligible to elect 245 assembly members in six states that contribute more than half of Malaysia’s gross domestic product.
The polls are widely viewed as an early referendum both for Anwar’s leadership and also the strength of the Islamist opposition after a divisive general election in November.
While the local elections have no direct impact on the federal government, the outcome could signal whether Anwar’s government can last a full five-year term. The two contending coalitions currently control three states each. If the opposition takes control of states led by Anwar’s bloc or otherwise has a strong showing in state polls, analysts say it will put pressure on Anwar and could rock the country’s political stability.
Before Anwar, Malaysia had three prime ministers since 2018 after lawmakers switched support for political mileage.
“The stakes are high for Anwar and his leadership,” said Amir Fareed Rahim, director of strategy at political risk consultancy KRA Group. “A good showing will be a boost for the longer-term stability of Anwar’s unity government. Otherwise, there will be increased political noise that can disrupt and undermine the political authority of his government.”
Malaysia’s politics were thrown into disarray after November’s general election led to an unprecedented hung Parliament. Anwar’s Pakatan Harapan (PH) alliance won the most seats but failed to win a majority after many ethnic Malays threw their support behind the Perikatan Nasional (PN) bloc, led by former Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin. The PN bloc includes the conservative Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), which emerged as the largest single party in Parliament.
At the behest of the nation’s king, rival parties came together to form Anwar’s unity government. The support of the once-dominant United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and other smaller parties gave Anwar a two-thirds majority in Parliament, but analysts say this loose alliance is perceived as unstable and needs stronger support from the Malay majority.
The polls are in Selangor and Penang, two of the country’s richest states, as well as Negeri Sembilan, which were ruled by Anwar’s PH alliance. Three poorer Malay heartland states — Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu — were controlled by PAS. Most political observers predict a status quo but believe there will be increased support for the PN opposition.
Voting ends at 6 p.m. (1000 GMT) and the results will be known later Saturday.
Anwar, 76, has zig-zagged across the country pitching the appeal of political stability and his concept of a progressive government. He marked his 76th birthday on Thursday by giving fiery speeches late into the night at political rallies in Selangor.
In a Facebook video Friday, Anwar urged Malaysians to vote wisely and opt for unity for a stable future and a strong economy. He has said a win for his unity government will save the country from racial and religious bigotry, and appealed for time for his government to deliver on its promises for reforms.
Many in the Malay community view Anwar as too liberal and fear their Islamic identity and economic privileges under a decades-old affirmative action program could be chipped away. By law, all Malays are Muslims and Islam is the official religion in Malaysia. Malays make up over 2/3 of Malaysia’s 33 million people, with large Chinese and Indian minorities.
The rise of PAS, which espouses a theocratic state and has long positioned itself as a defender of Islam and Malays, partly reflected a growing religious conservatism among Malays. Despite a poor economic track record in the three states it rules, PAS retained loyalty through its religious agenda.
In a Facebook post this week, PAS hard-line leader Abdul Hadi Awang implied that the opposition can topple Anwar’s government if they sweep all six states.
Analysts said Anwar would have time to build his political base before the next general election in 2027 if he can keep the three states under his alliance. If Anwar fails, it could prompt allies in his government to rethink their partnership. A shift in allegiance could plunge the country into new turbulence, analysts said.
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Find more of AP’s Asia-Pacific coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/asia-pacific
BRASILIA, Brazil — Brazil’s federal police on Friday alleged former President Jair Bolsonaro received cash from the nearly $70,000 sale of two luxury watches he received as gifts from Saudi Arabia while in office, posing another potential blow for the embattled far-right leader.
Earlier in the day, officers raided the homes and offices of several people purportedly involved in the case, including a four-star army general. Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing involving the gifts.
A Federal Police officer said the force is seeking authoriziation to access the personal banking and financial information of Bolsonaro. The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation, said the Federal Police had asked for help from the FBI.
Bolsonaro’s lawyers said in a statement that he would authorize Brazil’s judiciary to have access to his banking records.
“President Bolsonaro has never embezzled or misplaced any public assets,” it said.
The case adds to the legal jeopardy facing Bolsonaro for activities while he was president. He is also being investigated in relation to a rampage by his supporters in the national capital after he left office as well as acts during the presidential election campaign he lost last fall.
Brazil requires its citizens arriving by plane from abroad to declare goods worth more than $1,000 and, for any amount above that exemption, pay a tax equal to 50% of their value. The jewelry would have been exempt from tax had it been a gift from Saudi Arabia to Brazil, but would not have been Bolsonaro’s to keep.
“The amounts obtained from these sales were transformed into cash and then became personal assets of the former president through middle people and without entering the formal banking system,” Federal Police contend, according to an order issued by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
The judge said police believe the strategy of the suspects was “hiding the origin, location and ownership of these amounts.”
According to the investigation, Bolsonaro’s aide, Lt. Col. Mauro Cid, in June 2022 sold to a store in the U.S. a Rolex watch and a Patek Philippe watch given as a gift by the government of Saudi Arabia in 2019 for a total of $68,000, the judge’s order said. The money was allegedly transferred to the bank account of Cid’s father the same day.
In March 2023, when investigations were already underway and the Federal Police requested Bolsonaro return two sets of jewelry gifts, his lawyer, Frederick Wassef, repurchased the Rolex watch in Miami and turned it over to Brazilian authorities in April, the order said.
Both Wassef and Cid’s father were targets of the search and seizure warrants issued Friday, along with a close adviser to Bolsonaro responsible for returning the sets of jewelry.
Earlier this year, Bolsonaro was ruled ineligible to run for office until 2030 after a panel of judges ruled he abused his power and cast unfounded doubts on the country’s electronic voting system. He also is facing trial in several other cases that could put him behind bars.
One of the investigations revolves around Cid’s arrest in May for allegedly falsifying COVID-19 vaccine cards for his own family and Bolsonaro’s family during the pandemic.
The chief legal officer at Fox Corp. who oversaw a $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over defamation allegations against Fox News is leaving the company
NEW YORK — Fox Corp. said Friday that its chief legal officer who oversaw a $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over defamation allegations is leaving the company.
Viet Dinh, Fox’s chief legal and policy officer, will step down effective Dec. 31, the New York-based company said in a statement. He will remain a “special advisor” to Fox Corp., it added.
Fox News, a unit of Fox Corp., agreed to settle the case brought by the voting machine producer in mid-April following weeks of pretrial disclosures that revealed the network had aired false claims about the 2020 U.S. presidential election, even though many within the company knew they were not true.
The company did not say why Dinh was leaving Fox Corp. Brian Nick, a spokesman for Fox, said the company had no comment beyond the statement.
Records released as part of the lawsuit showed Fox aired the claims in part to win back viewers who were fleeing the network after it correctly called hotly contested Arizona for Democrat Joe Biden on election night. One Fox Corp. vice president called the claims “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS.”
During a deposition, Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch testified that he believed the 2020 election was fair and had not been stolen from former President Donald Trump.
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin says he has been thinking “seriously” about leaving the Democratic Party and becoming an independent
FILE – Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., speaks during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, July 11, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Manchin says he has been thinking “seriously” about leaving the Democratic Party and becoming an independent. The West Virginia senator made the comments on MetroNews “Talkline,” on Thursday. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
The Associated Press
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin said that he has been thinking “seriously” about leaving the Democratic Party and becoming an independent.
The West Virginia lawmaker, who has raised his national profile as a swing vote on major spending packages in the closely divided U.S. Senate, made the comments on MetroNews “Talkline” on Thursday.
“I would think very seriously about that. I’ve been thinking about that for quite some time. I haven’t made any decisions whatsoever on any of my political direction,” Manchin said. “I want to make sure my voice is truly an independent voice, when I’m speaking I’m speaking about the good the Republicans do and the good the Democrats continue to do.”
Manchin hasn’t officially announced whether he will run for reelection, but two Republicans, Gov. Jim Justice and Rep. Alex Mooney, have already announced their candidacies for his Senate seat. The senator had recruited Justice to run for governor as a Democrat before Justice switched to the GOP at a rally for former President Donald Trump during his first term.
The comments from Manchin on Thursday are the most serious he’s made about a possible switch to independent.
“For me, I have to have peace of mind basically,” he said. “The brand has become so bad. The ‘D’ brand and ‘R’ brand. In West Virginia, the ‘D’ brand because it’s nationally bad. It’s not the Democrats in West Virginia. It’s the Democrats in Washington or the Washington policies of the Democrats. You’ve heard me say a million times that I’m not a Washington Democrat.”
In the Democratic caucus, his colleagues over the past few years have grown weary of Manchin, whose vote is one of two they cannot live without in a 51-49 Senate — but whose nearly constant chides at many in party, particularly Democratic President Joe Biden has left them concerned that he could switch parties and take away their slim hold on power.
One of his most stunning rebukes of his party came in December 2021 when after months of painstaking negotiations directly with the White House, Manchin pulled his support from a $2 trillion social and environment bill, dealing a fatal blow to Biden’s leading domestic initiative in his first year in office.
Months later, in a shocking turn of events, Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer crafted a compromise package to ultimately pass and sign into law a modest domestic bill focused on healthcare and combating climate change.
WREXHAM, Wales — Sitting in the Royal Oak, a narrow but implausibly long pub in Wrexham’s town center, Gary Tipping is reflecting on the rollercoaster fortunes of his favorite football team.
Wrexham Association Football Club (A.F.C.) — a lower-league team barely recognizable since it was bought up by Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in 2021 — has just lost its opening game of the season. But little can dampen the enthusiasm of Tipping or his fellow fans.
“What they’ve done for this town, it’s beyond what I could have ever dreamed of,” he says.
“People want to see the town and breathe in the atmosphere here,” adds his 21-year-old son Sam, who’s been going to the football with Gary since he was 5 years old. “There’s a hype around the place.”
“Hype” was not a word formerly associated with Wrexham. The third-oldest professional football club in the world, it had fallen on hard times and was struggling to stay afloat in the 2010s. But everything changed when Reynolds and McElhenney arrived, in search of a project and with movie-star money to spend.
Wrexham’s fortunes were transformed by new players and a new manager, financed by American dollars. The fans flooded back. A Netflix documentary series charting their progress, “Welcome to Wrexham,” was a smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic. In May, the rejuvenated team was promoted back into the professional football league after a 15-year absence.
The town, too, feels like a different place.
Strolling through a lively Wrexham high street on a Saturday night, local call center worker Christopher Lamb points out a raft of new bars that have opened over the past two years.
“The town was going downhill for quite a while since 2010. But it’s changed a lot. Now you get a lot of American tourists here — though they don’t always go to the places that need the money,” Lamb says.
But not every ailing football club — nor every ailing town — finds a superhero.
Football in the English leagues — where Wrexham play, despite the town’s north Wales location — is a wildly unequal game. The hundreds of millions of pounds powering top-level Premier League clubs contrast sharply with the tiny budgets of lower-league teams, most of whom struggle just to stay afloat.
Wrexham faced the same endless financial battles before its unlikely takeover, with financial distress leaving the team at its lowest sporting ebb. Other clubs under constant threat of extinction look on in envy, and with a lingering sense of injustice.
Wrexham’s fortunes were transformed by new players and a new manager, financed by American dollars | Malcolm Couzens/Getty Images
Knights in shining armor?
“You’ve got wonderful things like Wrexham — that’s a dream isn’t it?” says Jenny Chapman, formerly the MP for the northeast town of Darlington, and now a Labour member of the House of Lords. “We were hoping for that knight in shining armor.”
First elected to parliament in 2010, Chapman was thrust straight into a local nightmare: the imminent collapse of her town’s beloved football club.
Darlington F.C. had been placed into emergency financial proceedings multiple times through the 2000s, having gambled unwisely on an outsized new stadium on the outskirts of the town. That purchase had been covered in part by a £4 million loan taken out by the club’s former owner, George Reynolds — who arrived with ambitions of taking the club to the Premier League, but ended up in prison for tax avoidance.
“It was a very difficult period and it was overwhelming,” Chapman recalls.
“I’m not a football fan at all, never pretended to be. But I felt very strongly that Darlington was a club with a real heritage to it and it was an important part of the community that needed to be supported and should survive,” she adds.
As the club desperately looked for a buyer to save it from liquidation, Chapman spent hours each day on the phone with the club’s administrator, and tried to vet and cajole prospective buyers.
It was to no avail. Darlington was eventually expelled from the Football Association in 2012. A phoenix club — owned by fans — was formed in its place, and is currently attempting to rise from the very bottom of the English football pyramid.
“There definitely wasn’t any support from Westminster,” Chapman recalls.
But a decade on, there are signs Westminster is starting to pay attention. A similar collapse in 2019 at Bury F.C. — another lower-league cub in the north of England — grabbed headlines far beyond the Greater Manchester area, and happened just as the politics around football were starting to shift.
The constituencies containing Wrexham, Bury and Darlington all flipped from Labour to the Conservatives in 2019. All could be characterized as the kind of “Red Wall” seats that the Tories had promised under Boris Johnson to “level up” and regenerate after years of post-industrial decline.
Football is of particular importance in these seats. Research by the center-right Onward think tank earlier this year showed that people in the north of England “are more likely to view their local football team as one of the main sources of pride in the local area.”
“You’ve got to think about the institutions that are fundamental and core to these places,” says Tory MP John Stevenson, chair of the Northern Research Group, a backbench Conservative caucus focused on supporting northern England.
Bury F.C. was expelled from the English Football League in 2019, after failing in its bid to find a buyer | WPA pool photo by Danny Lawson/Getty Images
“I always come up with two: one is universities and the second one is football clubs. As a social enterprise, an economic enterprise and a sporting one, football clubs are very much at the forefront of their communities.”
Dead and Bury’d
Bury was expelled from the English Football League in 2019, after the cash-strapped club failed in its bid to find a buyer. Onward’s research shows that northern clubs — like Bury and Darlington — have been particularly exposed to financial stress, often by unscrupulous owners who stretched them far beyond their means.
In response to Bury’s expulsion, Conservative MP and former Sports Minister Tracey Crouch was commissioned by Johnson’s government to carry out a fan-led review into the governance of English football clubs. The review, published in November 2021, recommended a new, independent regulator for English football and the introduction of tests to better police club ownership.
The government accepted Crouch’s call to establish a regulator in a white paper — a draft legislative document — responding to her review. But there’s no sign yet of any legislation to formally enact her recommendations, prompting angry claims of foot-dragging.
“The fan-led review went a long way … but it seems incredibly slow. It’s taken two years just for a white paper to come forward,” says Christian Wakeford, the MP for Bury North — who switched from the Conservatives to Labour last year.
“There are so many clubs that are on that threshold of not existing anymore — we don’t want anymore Burys. It’s not fair for the fans and it’s not fair for a town,” he adds.
Tory MP and NRG Chair Stevenson adds: “I’m of the belief that governments of all persuasions neglected [and] ignored northern communities. It’s not just about economies, it’s also about communities. And football clubs are very much part of that.”
A government official pointed POLITICO to a speech made by Sports Minister Stuart Andrew in June to the English Football League’s annual conference, in which he acknowledged that there are “a number of clubs across the EFL that are in real distress today.” Andrew said the government intends to publish its response to a consultation on the white paper “in the coming weeks.”
While some MPs eagerly await the government’s next move, not everyone is convinced it’s the state’s place to try to save clubs from the vagaries of the market — particularly given that the country’s top flight appears to be in rude health.
Tory peer and West Ham United Vice Chairman Karren Brady said last year that “much of [the fan-led review] should be welcomed like a giant hole in Wembley’s pitch.”
“It is messing with an industry which works better than most, and it’s hard to see what football has in common with banks or other financial institutions who also have regulators,” she wrote in the Sun newspaper. “We have to remember the Premier League is the envy of world sport, so why break it because Bury went bust?”
This is Wrexham
Back in Wrexham, the signs of what forward-thinking — and extremely wealthy — owners can do are on full display. It’s little surprise that MPs keen for their own local success story are eyeing the club with envy.
Wrexham may have lost its opening game of the season, but little can dampen the enthusiasm of its fans | Malcolm Couzens/Getty Images
“All of a sudden, everyone knows who Wrexham is — it’s had a massive effect,” says Geraint Andrews, a local engineer standing outside another thriving town center bar.
Indeed, the whole town center is awash with Wrexham A.F.C. replica shirts and memorabilia dedicated to the club and the “This Is Wrexham” documentary series. A Wrexham A.F.C. mural adorns the glass of the town’s branch of McDonald’s. U.S. flags held by tourists or fans who have taken the Hollywood stars to heart are only narrowly outnumbered by Welsh national flags.
Since the takeover in 2021, the town of Wrexham has even been officially upgraded to a city. Amid the takeover buzz, it was also shortlisted for the U.K. City of Culture title last year.
For fans of other small-town clubs, like Bury and Darlington — not to mention the currently struggling Derby County — just some stability would do.
“Not everybody can win the league,” Stevenson of the Northern Research Group notes.
“But through the good times and the difficult times, you want clubs to have financial stability and good management. That’s what we’re asking for.”
RADAWIEC DUŻY, Poland — Forget mass campaign rallies: Poland’s ruling conservatives are betting that prayer, straw-weaving contests and homegrown disco hits can win them this fall’s general election.
At an airstrip in Radawiec Duży, in the country’s eastern rural heartland, planes have been cleared to make way for the central stage. Some 200 people are ushered to their seats to the sound of folk music sung by a local choir.
Despite the sweltering summer heat, the men wear dark suits and the women traditional floral dresses and skirts as they gather around the stage. On this otherwise barren stretch of land, everything — and everyone — is adorned with stems of straw.
Dożynki, as the festival is called, is a celebration of rural life and the summer harvest. At its heart lie the elaborate sculptures woven by local peasant women. Later in the day, a competition will be held to choose the best one, from among those crafted into a Polish eagle, storks and even a crucified Jesus Christ.
The festival is held annually, and countless others like it take place throughout rural Poland between August and September. This year, however, it takes on a double meaning, as it melds neatly into a string of what are being cast as “picnics” in which the ruling party is hoping to shore up its support in traditional countryside bastions.
On October 15, Poland will hold a national election in which Jarosław Kaczyński’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) wants to win an unprecedented third term in office. To do so, they need the support of rural voters. But amid mass protests by farmers, furious over farm produce pouring across the border from Ukraine, their traditional constituency is wavering.
Preaching to the choir
One by one, local dignitaries take the stage to thank the farmers for their hard work and dedication. Jarosław Stawiarski, the 58-year-old marshall of the Lublin voivodeship, or region, decides to take it up a notch, highlighting that the PiS-led government has done more to help the countryside than any other before it.
“The Polish countryside is the essence of our nation,” he tells the crowd. “The people in power now are doing everything they can to ensure that the farmer’s toil is fairly rewarded. God bless.”
Bishop Mieczysław Cisło leads a traditional Catholic mass with a cautionary message: The secular West is a threat to Poland’s traditional way of life.
“Today a fundamental conflict is taking place over the shape of a united Europe and the attitude of those who are responsible for their homeland, for the nation,” Cisło says.
“People don’t appreciate the great sacrifice, every drop of blood shed for the nation, every drop of sweat from the farmer’s forehead that soaked into the native soil.”
Poland’s education minister, Przemysław Czarnek, breaks bread with participants of the harvest festival in Radawiec Duży | Bartosz Brzeziński/POLITICO
In the VIP tent, Poland’s education minister, Przemysław Czarnek, nods in agreement, as do the local lawmakers, businessmen, military officials and clergymen seated around him.
Soon, everyone will break bread blessed by Cisło.
Target voters
Most of the people gathered at the airstrip, however, are farther afield, mingling among the stands selling curly fries, sausages, beer and tractor-shaped balloons. There’s an amusement park with a 30-meter drop ride and bumper cars. Older children can experience what it feels like to be part of Poland’s burgeoning military by holding a sniper rifle under the watchful eye of a uniformed army officer.
A PiS volunteer collects voters’ signatures. She gets one from a frail 80-year-old man called Marek, who’s biked here from the regional capital of Lublin, about 12 kilometers away.
“Donald Tusk is an anti-Polish German,” he says, referring to the leader of the main opposition group, the Civic Coalition, which is seeking to dethrone the government. “PiS doesn’t lie — at least not usually.”
Older children can experience what it feels like to be part of Poland’s burgeoning military by holding a sniper rifle under the watchful eye of a uniformed army officer | Bartosz Brzeziński/POLITICO
Marek declines to give his full name because he doesn’t trust the Western media.
Back by the stage, the last of the speeches are finished, the straw sculptures are taken down, and the VIP guests disperse.
The organizers are lucky — similar PiS-linked celebrations elsewhere in the country this summer have not gone as smoothly, with one resulting in the near crash of a Black Hawk helicopter worth tens of millions of dollars.
‘Not my vibe’
Soon the stage is being prepared for evening concerts of disco polo, a Polish variant of dance pop that is hugely popular in the countryside.
The crowd has swelled to thousands — but it’s also undergone a generational change.
Patryk Bielak, 30, came with his girlfriend, but they skipped the earlier part of the program.
“We came for Zenek,” he says, referring to one of the disco polo performers. “We’re young, we’re not interested in political pandering.”
Bielak plans to vote for the Civic Coalition.
Disco polo band Bayera on the stage of the harvest festival in Radawiec Duży | Bartosz Brzeziński/POLITICO
Another late arrival, Gabriela Frąk, 20, has opted for the far-right Konfederacja.
“PiS has nothing to offer young people,” she says. “Everything is packaged for seniors who won’t have much influence on what will happen in Poland in 10, 15 or 20 years.”
With just over a month to go before the October election, PiS is still in the lead with 37 percent of the vote, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. The Civic Coalition is in second place with 31 percent, followed by Konfederacja with 10 percent.
CORRECTION: This story has been amended to correct the first name of Poland’s education minister.
Quito — A popular Ecuadoran presidential candidate was shot dead while leaving a rally in the nation’s capital on Wednesday, prompting President Guillermo Lasso to declare a state of emergency and blame the assassination on organized crime. Fernando Villavicencio, a 59-year-old anti-corruption crusader who had complained of receiving threats, was murdered as he was leaving a stadium in Quito after holding a campaign rally, officials said.
Lasso declared a two-month state of emergency early Thursday following the assassination, but said general elections slated for August 20 would be held as scheduled.
“Outraged and shocked by the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio,” the president said in a statement on social media, blaming the killing on “organized crime.”
“For his memory and for his fight, I assure you that this crime will not go unpunished.”
Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio speaks to journalists upon his arrival at the Attorney General’s Office in Quito, August 8, 2023.
RODRIGO BUENDIA/AFP/Getty
Villavicencio was the second most popular candidate in the presidential race, according to recent opinion polls.
“The Armed Forces as of this moment are mobilized throughout the national territory to guarantee the security of citizens, the tranquility of the country and the free and democratic elections of August 20,” Lasso said in a YouTube address.
The president also declared three days of national mourning “to honor the memory of a patriot, of Fernando Villavicencio Valencia.”
“This is a political crime that acquires a terrorist character and we do not doubt that this murder is an attempt to sabotage the electoral process,” he added.
Lasso has said he will not seek re-election.
A bullet-riddled vehicle is surrounded by police as they guard the hospital where several of the injured were taken after an attack in which presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was shot to death in Quito, Ecuador, Aug. 9, 2023.
Juan Diego Montenegro/AP
President of the National Electoral Council Diana Atamaint said “the date of the elections scheduled for August 20 remain unalterable.”
Nine other people were injured in the shooting attack, including a candidate running for the national legislature and two policemen, prosecutors said.
Villavicencio had been protected by three layers of security, the National Police said Thursday. The innermost ring of guards consisted of five police officers, who were flanked by a support team and two patrol cars.
One of the alleged attackers was shot and killed by security personnel following a pursuit, police said. And police detonated an explosive device planted in the area, said chief investigator Alain Luna.
Three officers who fended off the armed attacker were hit by ammunition, police said. They remain hospitalized in stable condition.
Police later confirmed they found a pistol-type firearm, ammunition and a grenade explosive at the crime scene. The grenade was neutralized with a controlled detonation.
Carlos Figueroa, a friend of Villavicencio’s who was with him at the time of the attack, told local media that the assailants fired around 30 shots.
“They ambushed him outside” the sports center, Figueroa said. “Some (of those present) even thought they were fireworks.”
The country’s main newspaper, El Universo, reported that Villavicencio was assassinated “hitman-style and with three shots to the head.”
Prosecutors later said six other suspects were arrested in raids carried out in southern Quito and in a neighboring town, and that Villavicencio’s body was brought to a police department and would undergo an autopsy.
Police on Thursday said all six people detained during the raids were foreign nationals linked to organized crime groups. Officers raided several homes and recovered a number of firearms and contraband, including a submachine gun, grenades, motorbikes and a stolen vehicle, police said.
In recent years, Ecuador has been hit by a wave of violence linked to drug trafficking which, in the midst of the electoral process, has already led to the death of a mayor and a parliamentary candidate.
National police officers work at the crime scene of an attack on a patrol car where two policemen were killed in the Maria Piedad neighborhood in Duran, Ecuador, November 1, 2022.
“Organized crime has gone too far, but the full weight of the law will be applied to them,” Lasso said in his post.
According to the latest polls, Villavicencio, a former journalist who wrote about corruption and served in parliament, polled at 13% behind lawyer Luisa Gonzalez, who is close to former left-wing president Rafael Correa.
Gonzalez and other presidential candidates denounced the murder and said they were suspending their campaigns, local media reported.
“We will never allow such acts to go unpunished. When they touch one, they touch all. When one’s life is at risk, everyone’s life is at risk,” Gonzalez wrote on social media.
National Court of Justice president Ivan Saquicela called Villavicencio’s murder “very painful for the country.”
“I am very hurt and very worried about Ecuador,” he said.
The United States, Spain, Chile and the Organization of American States observer mission have also condemned the crime.
U.S. Ambassador Mike Fitzpatrick said he was “deeply shocked” by the assassination, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the U.S. “condemns this brazen act of violence and assault on Ecuador’s democracy.”
Lasso on Thursday said he’s asked the FBI to assist in the investigation and expects a U.S. delegation to arrive in Ecuador “in the next few hours.”
“We are horrified by the tragic attack… Violence cannot win. Democracy can,” European Union ambassador to Ecuador Charles-Michel Geurts said in a tweet.
As a journalist, Villavicencio uncovered a corruption scheme for which former president Correa (2007-2017) was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Villavicencio later served as president of the legislative oversight commission, where he continued to denounce corruption.
The politician had complained this month that he and his team were receiving threats allegedly coming from the leader of a criminal gang linked to drug trafficking.
“Despite the new threats, we will continue fighting for the brave people of our #Ecuador,” he said at the time.
Atamaint, head of the electoral council, also said that several members of her organization, which is responsible for supervising the ballot, had received death threats.
President Lasso sent a message to Villavicencio’s family.
“My solidarity and my condolences with his wife and his daughters,” he said in his post.
