Raw Story

When around 14,000 Philadelphians packed Temple University's Liacouras Center for 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris' first campaign rally with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the vice president made a point of describing herself as an "underdog.”

Her use of that word is quite strategic, experts say — for all the campaign's energy, she wants to make sure that her Democratic supporters don't become complacent.

Nonetheless, many of the polls released in early August have found Harris with small single-digit leads over GOP nominee Donald Trump.

Although Trump leads Harris by 2 percent in a CNBC poll released on August 8, Harris is ahead by 4 percent in a Morning Consult poll and 3 percent in polls from NPR/PBS/Marist and Survey USA. A Marquette University poll released on August 7 showed Harris with a 6 percent lead.

READ MORE:'Coming home': Harris-Walz 'transformative' campaign 'ominous for Trump,' experts say

But in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark, journalist A.B. Stoddard warns that if Harris wins in November, an "entire army of Republicans" is "ready to block certification of the election at the local level."

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump battle for Michigan, a ‘tipping-point state’ in the presidential race

"Trump is no longer on track to win the election — which he has been for more than six straight months," Stoddard wrote. "Instead, the momentum, money, voter registration, volunteering, grassroots organizing, polling, and online engagement all favor the Democrats, and it looks now like Trump could easily lose.

“But that won’t happen, because Trump doesn't lose.…. No need to worry about mayhem on January 6, 2025 when Congress meets in joint session; the election deniers plan to stop a result right away if it looks like Harris is winning."

Stoddard continues, "Their goal: Refuse to certify anywhere — even a county that Trump won — and prevent certification in that state, which prevents certification of the presidential election. A Harris victory could become a nightmare."

Stoddard notes that, according to Rolling Stone, "pro-Trump election conspiracists" in key swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia are working as "county election officials" and plan to refuse to certify the election results if Harris wins.

READ MORE: 'Coming home': Harris-Walz 'transformative' campaign 'ominous for Trump,' experts say

Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, publisher of Democracy Docket, told Rolling Stone, "I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election…. Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared."

Stoddard warns that "there are more than enough such individuals in these key posts to bring us to a constitutional crisis."

"So Trump knows there are millions among us who believe him when he says Democrats can only win if they cheat and who believe dark forces are at work to thwart him again," Stoddard explains. "And Trump needs to be president again. He wants to get his criminal cases thrown out, and to stay out of jail. There is nothing he won't try."

READ MORE: 'Flailing' MAGA Republicans are 'in a tire fire' — but still pose an 'existential danger': conservative

Georgian-American businessman Giorgi Rtskhiladze will be allowed to sue for being mentioned in Robert Mueller's final report over Russian election meddling, court documents show.

Rtskhiladze was named in the report, which he says has hurt his reputation. The U.S. Court of Appeals in the Washington, D.C. Circuit agreed on Friday that he can pursue a case, but he can't claim for damages, reported Politico's Kyle Cheney on X.

The Mueller report talked about the Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the investigation ultimately indicted a number of Americans and over a dozen Russian-affiliated hackers.

Read Also: Inside the 'irregular warfare' campaign Putin is conducting against America

Rtskhiladze claims that a footnote in the report misquotes a text message from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and falsely calls him Russian.

It “could continue to harm Rtskhiladze,” the Appeals court agreed.

The U.S. Senate filed its own report that corrected those errors in Mueller's report, but the court agreed that it "does not extinguish the harm from an earlier government report."

“Congress neither speaks for DOJ, nor speaks infallibly. Either way, a court could redress the ongoing injury by ordering DOJ to correct the Mueller Report,” Judge Justin Walker wrote in the ruling.

Rtskhiladze alleged that he was defamed and asked for damages using the Privacy Act. However, that act says there must be proof of "intentional or willful" conduct. He was unable to prove that.

Thus, Rtskhiladze “has not even attempted to meet the Privacy Act’s requirements” and instead “cites common-law defamation precedents,” Walker then writes.

Rtskhiladze worked for the Trump organization on a possible Trump project. His text message to Cohen in 2016 said: “Stopped flow of some tapes from Russia.” The Mueller report omits the word "some."

Rtskhiladze's suit claimed not having the word is “significant,” as it “suggests familiarity” with the "tapes." The filing, he said, also says that the footnote excluded additional text messages referring to the "tapes" in which he says he was "not sure of the content."

Cohen maintains that no such tape has been found after many years of searching, and all claims by individuals who stated they had the tape have been debunked.

"I don't believe that either the event took place or that a tape exists," he told Raw Story.

Rtskhiladze's next steps would be a lawsuit in which he could depose Robert Mueller, but the end goal remains unclear since the court ruled he could not be awarded damages.

Read the whole court filing here.

Three powerful far-right pundits recently made statements denigrating former President Donald Trump's campaign, a surprising trend raising questions about the future of his candidacy.

White Supremacist Nick Fuentes, right-winger Joe Rogan — whom the New York Times recently described as hosting "the most popular podcast in the world" — and reactionary pundit Tim Pool all spoke out against the Republican nominee's second reelection campaign, investigative journalist Dave Troy reported on X.

"Something is afoot," Troy wrote, saying they all made "statements against Trump."

"What exactly remains to be seen."

Fuentes, who frequently praises Adolf Hitler, revoked his support for Trump’s campaign on X shortly after 12 a.m. ET on Friday.

"We support Trump, but his campaign has been hijacked by the same consultants, lobbyists, & donors that he defeated in 2016, and they're blowing it," wrote Fuentes. "Without serious changes we are headed for a catastrophic loss."

Rogan Thursday endorsed independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., telling his listeners the conspiracy theorist — who says a worm ate part of his brain and admits he staged a phony bear cub crime scene — was the only one who "makes sense."

ALSO READ: Why ‘vanilla’ Tim Walz is the ingredient to beat Trump: Dem lawmakers

“He’s the only one that doesn’t attack people," Rogan said. "He attacks actions and ideas. He’s much more reasonable and intelligent."

Pool posted on X, "Ok I'm voting for RFK Jr now" but later walked back the comment, telling followers he was just "trolling" and responding to Kennedy's thanks with affirmation that he would vote for Trump.

"There's no real argument against voting Trump," Pool wrote. "But f--- me some of these die hard magas are as destructive as the leftists."

Troy, who is a contributor to the Washington Spectator and featured on PBS News, argued it was too soon to predict how Trump's campaign would respond, but suggested the outbursts themselves were telling.

"While these three are execrable, and *what* they say is of little value, the fact they are saying it in unison is a signal in the realm of information warfare," Troy wrote. "Watch this space."

The Trump campaign is trying to learn from its mistakes in 2020, according to a new report by The New York Times — specifically, they want to stop accidentally pushing Democrats to the polls.

"The Trump officials ... said they had learned from mistakes of the last cycle," reported Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Shane Goldmacher. "One of Mr. Trump’s 2024 advisers said that the 2020 campaign had poorly anticipated which voters were actually persuadable, only to learn that as many as 80 percent of the people it believed could be swayed were actually hardened partisans, which led to costly wasted efforts. In some cases, the Trump campaign wound up driving Biden supporters to the polls, officials said."

Democratic in-person outreach operations were significantly reduced in the 2020 election, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

ALSO READ: 21 worthless knick-knacks Donald Trump will give you for your cash

The Trump team told The Times they are confident that, despite the recent downturn in polls since Vice President Kamala Harris took over as Democratic nominee, they still have the clearer path to win, specifically by flipping Pennsylvania and either Georgia or a combination of Arizona and Nevada. All of these states remain toss-ups in polling despite Democratic gains in recent weeks.

Above all, Trump's pollster Tony Fabrizio said Harris “has gotten the equivalent of the largest in-kind contribution of free media I think I have ever seen in all the years I’ve been doing presidential campaigns — and I’ve been doing it a long time — and even with that, we still have the advantage in the Electoral College.”

While the Trump campaign is vowing to better target voter outreach, the priority seems to be election monitoring; the campaign has also moved to recruit as many as 100,000 "poll watchers," which observers fear will be used to try to find pretexts to challenge the election in any battleground state Trump loses in November.

A state lawmaker in California is ditching the Democratic Party — after becoming the first Democrat to win her district in decades — and heading to the GOP, and revealed to a newspaper's editorial board what she called the "last straw."

State Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil was elected two years ago to represent the following counties: Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Mono, Nevada, Placer, Stanislaus and Tuolumne.

Marcos Bretón, of The Sacramento Bee's editorial board, noted that while the switch would be "notable" in other states, it's "highly unusual" in California.

“This wasn’t a discussion I took lightly, but there was a last straw,” Alvarado-Gill told the Bee. “For me, the last straw was the Proposition 47 shenanigans, the ‘poison pill’ amendments.”

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Voters approved Prop. 47 a decade ago to reduce penalties for certain property crimes. Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democrats in the state government unsuccessfully attempted to scuttle reform to the initiative in June.

"A law-and-order package of bills, including from Alvarado-Gil, were hijacked and loaded with amendments — ‘poison pills’ — that would have killed the bills if voters passed a Prop. 47 reform initiative in November," Bretón said.

Alvarado-Gil said Newsom was "very aggressive" in getting his party to "fall in line." She was among a few who refused.

"I was vocal about it...So I sat with that for a little while. The consideration of separating myself from the majority party, their tactics and a misalignment of our values has been percolating for some time," she said.

Former President Donald Trump's bizarre press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday was a desperate attempt to force the media's focus off Vice President Kamala Harris and back onto himself, argued former Trump administration communications official Alyssa Farah Griffin on CNN.

The problem is, she added, it wasn't the kind of attention that benefits him.

"We've seen Trump do this before, arrange a news conference when he doesn't like the way the news cycle is going," said anchor Kaitlan Collins. "But he is very clearly trying to get it back now from Harris, from her crowd sizes, from the momentum she's seeing. He was claiming there's only 1,500 people at her rally. It was closer to 15,000. What did you see in that press conference today?"

"I mean, it was an absolute dumpster fire of a press conference," said Griffin. "I don't know how you could frame it any other way."

ALSO READ: Why ‘vanilla’ Tim Walz is the ingredient to beat Trump: Dem lawmakers

"He does feel like the focus is not on him," Griffin agreed. "She's getting a lot of attention and he's kind of getting into 'I alone can fix it' mode. I don't think advisers would have told him that 90 minutes of ranting and raving and re-litigating the former election is a useful way to be campaigning, but he did what he's going to do. He had shouted some of his greatest hits."

As for why he has been oddly absent from the campaign trail lately, Griffin continued, "I think that there is something to the fact that the last time he was in a battleground state was in Georgia. He went after the popular governor and his wife. That's not helpful in a swing state. So I think advisers are thinking, maybe have him do these interviews with influencers, maybe have him call into Fox News, but figure out, until he can hone a message and have some level of discipline, having him out there actually isn't that helpful."

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