In black-majority city for white votes?

CLEVELAND: An African-American journalist stood up at a Republican briefing ahead of the party convention and asked how Donald Trump intended to win the presidency with zero per cent support from black voters in the battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, as an NBCWSJ poll indicated over the weekend.

After all, no Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio. “Any poll showing zero per cent can't be true,“ Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who has previously dallied with ISI-linked separatist Kashmiri groups in US, responded sharply. Trump himself once boasted that one poll last year showed him with 25% black support, and if that number held, the election was “as good as over.“

At a moment of immense black ferment in the US, no poll showed Trump getting more than 10% of the black vote, which the Democrats typically own. The most recent instance where a Republican won more than 10% black vote was George Bush in 2004 (11%, after polling only 8% in 2000). Yet, the Republican National Convention pitches its tent in Cleveland, a black majority city. To win over the black vote? Or to consolidate the white vote?

Clearly the latter, according to John Green, director of the Ray C Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at The University of Akron. The arc stretching from Cleveland in Ohio to Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania is part of the famed Rust Belt, and home to a constituency of angry white voters.

Kamala gets Obama support for Senate

US President Barack Obama and Vice-president Joe Biden on Tuesday backed California's Indian-American attorney general Kamala Harris to be the state's next senator, with Obama saying that “she will be a fearless fighter for the people“. If elected in the November general elections, Harris would be the first Indian-American to ever be a member of the US Senate.