“She cast the deciding vote for the so-called Inflation Reduction Act that sent a lot of our resources to China.”

— JD Vance, GOP vice-presidential candidate, remarks in Eau Claire, Wis., Aug. 7

“Kamala Harris has doubled down on this green energy scam that’s actually shipped a lot more manufacturing jobs to China.”

— Vance, remarks in Waite Park, Minn., July 28

As Vance has toured the industrial Midwest in recent weeks, one of his consistent claims is that Vice President Kamala Harris shipped jobs to China by casting the tiebreaking vote in 2022 in the Senate for the Inflation Reduction Act, a catchall bill that included $370 billion in climate and energy funding to combat climate change.

His comments in Minnesota won the approval of Donald Trump Jr., who posted on social media that Vance “destroys Kamala’s anti-American energy and manufacturing record.”

Trump’s son may be impressed by the rhetoric, but on the face of it, Vance’s claims make little sense. The IRA was designed to foster green manufacturing jobs in the United States — and the evidence shows that it’s working. What’s Vance’s case for saying that the IRA is sending “a lot of our resources” and “more manufacturing jobs” to China?

The facts

Vance’s spokesman pointed us to an opinion article that Vance wrote for the Toledo Blade in 2023 urging the United Auto Workers to use its leverage to persuade the Biden administration to abandon efforts to encourage electric vehicles. “China dominates the global supply chain for electric vehicles — especially for critical minerals and batteries,” Vance wrote. “While an electric vehicle may bear the logo of Ford, Chevy, or Chrysler, its core components were probably made in China with Chinese labor and Chinese materials.”

In effect, Vance’s theory is that by shifting the auto industry toward EVs, the United States is going to send significant amounts of money and jobs to China.

But this claim ignores what is actually in the IRA. The law was intended to help the United States catch up with China before Beijing completely takes over the EV market. The Chinese government has given huge subsidies to the EV industry in a quest to dominate it.

In 2021, the United States accounted for 10 percent of global EV assembly and 7 percent of battery production, according to the International Energy Agency. That same year, China sold more EVs than the rest of the world combined — and produced three-quarters of all lithium-ion batteries.

The Biden administration and congressional leaders understood there was a balancing act — boosting EV production without aiding China.

So the law included provisions to make sure more of the supply chain is produced in the United States, such as a consumer tax credit for EVs. The Treasury Department wrote regulations that make it harder for vehicles to qualify for the full federal EV tax credit of $7,500 if key components are sourced from China, with a grace period for some rare materials like graphite. As part of the IRA, final assembly of EV models must occur in North America to be eligible. The administration in May also imposed a 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs.

In response to the IRA, China in March filed a formal complaint with the World Trade Organization, decrying the EV subsidy policy as discriminatory because it excluded Chinese products, distorted fair competition and disrupted the global supply chain for new-energy vehicles. That’s a significant step — which may take a long time to resolve in the WTO dispute settlement system — but it’s certainly a sign that China does not believe the law is sending jobs its way.

Indeed, General Motors board member Jon McNeill, a former president of Tesla, told CNBC in May that any rollback of the IRA provisions would help China. “I think we risk losing the auto manufacturing share to China. We really do, globally,” he said, adding that the IRA is providing enticements to both the manufacturers and consumers “to level the playing field” against Chinese car companies.

When Trump was president, he did not encourage EV production or seek to counter China’s big investment in the technology. Trump would sometimes joke — falsely — about how little an EV could travel on a single charge. He proposed to eliminate programs that encouraged the manufacture or purchase of EVs and proposed no legislation designed to encourage EV manufacturing in the United States.

During this presidential campaign, Trump has pledged to repeal automobile air pollution limits issued in March by the Environmental Protection Agency — what he claims is an “EV mandate” — on his first day in office. The Biden administration has also set a goal of having 50 percent of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030.

The other problem with Vance’s critique is that he ignores that many provisions in the IRA have sparked a manufacturing boom in the United States — also designed to counter China’s dominance in the green energy arena. Besides EVs, the bill included tax incentives intended to spur manufacturing of solar modules, wind turbines, inverters, EV batteries and power storage, and the extraction and refining of critical minerals. According to the IEA, China now has 85 percent of solar cell manufacturing capacity, while only 0.6 percent is located in North America, so there is a lot of ground to make up.

In the first year after passage of the IRA, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs, 280 clean energy projects were announced across 44 states, representing $282 billion of investment that would create 175,000 jobs. “What we found was that — so far at least — the reality is living up to or even exceeding expectations,” the report said.

An updated count issued in June by Climate Power, an environmental communications group, estimated that the investment has climbed to $361 billion in 47 states, representing 585 projects and creating nearly 313,000 jobs. “Plans include 173 new battery manufacturing sites, 137 new or expanded electric vehicle manufacturing facilities, and 166 solar and wind manufacturing plants,” the report said, adding that a majority of the projects are in districts represented by Republican House members.

This month, 18 House Republicans sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) urging that the IRA not be fully repealed if Republicans retain control of the House. “Energy tax credits have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country — including many districts represented by members of our conference,” the letter said.

Vance’s blast that earned the admiration of Trump’s son was made in Waite Park. Evidence of the IRA’s impact could have been found if Vance had driven for a half-hour to the nearby Minnesota town of Becker — where regulators in July approved a permit to replace a massive coal plant with one of America’s largest solar farms. The project was realized with the help of the IRA, company officials said, and will create 400 union construction jobs.

Xcel Energy chief executive Bob Frenzel told analysts that “the solar tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act will lower the ‘levelized’ cost of the company’s Sherco solar project in Minnesota by 30 percent, even accounting for inflation and supply chain pressures,” Politico’s E&E News reported. The project also received tens of millions of dollars in direct funding because of the IRA.

“Xcel predicted in PUC filings Sherco 3 would decrease customer bills through the first 10 years of operations thanks to production tax credits,” the Star Tribune reported.

The Pinocchio Test

Vance’s claim that the IRA is sending jobs and resources to China is based on a facile hunch, not evidence. He assumes that China will benefit if more EVs are sold because China currently dominates the supply chain. He ignores that the IRA is intended to break up that pattern — and bring more of those jobs to the United States. That’s one reason China has formally protested the law. He also ignores the fact that the IRA is creating many jobs — even in communities where he makes these outlandish claims.

Vance earns Four Pinocchios.

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The first person who I noticed spreading the idea that images of Vice President Kamala Harris’s rally in Michigan had been manipulated was conservative moviemaker Dinesh D’Souza.

On Saturday evening, D’Souza posted a photo on social media of Harris exiting her airplane with a crowd of supporters looking on. Two reflections from the airplane were circled in red, illustrating that, despite the crowd, no one was visible in the reflection.

“Does this look like a real picture to you?” D’Souza asked. Within hours, similar questions were everywhere on social media — and by Sunday had popped up in former president Donald Trump’s feed at Truth Social.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump wrote. “She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane.”

“She’s a CHEATER,” he reiterated.

That D’Souza was at the leading edge of this argument is not surprising. It was D’Souza, you may recall, who produced a feature-length movie arguing without evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen by “mules” who collected and submitted ballots on behalf of Joe Biden. Then, as now, D’Souza’s claims were rooted in a trivial misrepresentation of digital information.

There was a crowd in Michigan to meet Harris, as shown below in a photograph taken by a Washington Post photographer. You can also see why the reflection from the plane didn’t show the crowd; it was angled away from the speaking platform.

No AI. No whistleblowing maintenance worker, ginned up from the ether to make the claim of dishonesty seem more credible. And no “cheating” by Harris.

Why would Trump and his allies spread a false claim about attendance at a rally that was covered on C-SPAN? In part because many elements of Trump’s base have embraced rejections of basic reality (like the existence of “mules”) for years. In part, it’s confirmation bias, with partisans being more likely to accept false information as true when it supports their preexisting beliefs. But in part, it’s because Trump and his allies are already eagerly raising questions about the reliability of measures of Harris’s support — and by extension, the reliability of the results in November.

Harris is a CHEATER, Trump asserts. It is not subtle.

Recall that his efforts to reject the 2020 results did not emerge out of the blue in November of that year. Trump began raising questions about the purported insecurity of mail-in ballots soon after it became obvious that the coronavirus pandemic would spur more remote voting. He and his staff amplified all sorts of claims about ballot security, including a bizarre claim that July that a mail truck that caught fire was somehow suspicious. His base was more than prepared when he subsequently challenged the actual election results.

That’s the pattern that is again underway, exemplified well beyond this one goofy assertion about the Michigan rally. In reporting its lengthy assessment of Trump’s recent campaign stumbles, the New York Times spoke with someone close to Trump who described the former president’s framing of Harris’s ascent to be her party’s nominee.

“Mr. Trump told one aide,” Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported, “that Democrats were trying to ‘steal’ the election again from him — comparing the reshuffling of the Democratic ticket to when state legislatures changed voting rules midway through the 2020 election cycle because of the Covid pandemic.”

States making it easier for people to vote without risking coronavirus infections in 2020 was not cheating in any way that doesn’t assume that ensuring voters can vote is somehow unfair. Nor is a political party choosing its own nominee. But it is important to Trump that he keep this escape hatch open, this idea that the election was or will be stolen from him even in the most abstract terms, because it allows him to muster resources to contest his loss or, alternatively, to retain the loyalty of his base.

A loss this November looks more possible than it did a month ago, certainly. Over the weekend, the New York Times released new swing-state polling showing Harris with leads across the Upper Midwest. So, naturally, Trump’s campaign released a memo suggesting that the polling was fake or misleading.

The results, pollster Tony Fabrizio and data consultant Tim Saler argue, “dramatically understated President Trump’s support both among all registered voters and in their likely-voter model.” Their evidence for this is that the recalled vote of respondents — that is, people saying how they voted in 2020 — understates the actual support Trump saw in those states four years ago.

As Fabrizio certainly knows, though, voter recall is unreliable. People tend to misremember or misreport how they actually voted, with a shift in favor of the electoral winner. In fact, there’s been research showing that using recalled votes to adjust current polls is fraught. But that’s what Fabrizio and Saler do.

“In each state, the gap between the survey’s recalled 2020 vote and the reported 2020 election results is more than the margin between Kamala Harris and President Trump,” they write. “Once again, we see a series of public surveys released with the clear intent and purpose of depressing support for President Trump.”

That last argument is particularly silly. The idea — one Trump himself offered repeatedly in 2020 — is that polls showing Trump trailing somehow make Trump supporters less likely to support Trump. It’s not clear how this manifests; is the argument that those voters will consider casting a ballot in November until they remember the Times’s August poll?

The simple answer is that this unskewing of the poll (to revive an infamous 2012 phrase) is simply meant to suggest that no measure of reality can be trusted unless it favors Trump. The results in those states might not reflect this poll, certainly, but the argument that the results were skewed against Trump to damage him in some esoteric way is ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as claiming that an unnamed worker at an airport is more reliable than multiple photos and live video.

But the point isn’t to increase Trump’s credibility. It’s to erode everyone else’s. That way, when they accurately report the results in November, Trump can remind his supporters to reject them if necessary.

Later this month, thousands of members of a massive international constituency plan to join a conference call in support of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. Other such calls have convened Black women, White men, Republicans and even (in a nod to past comments from Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance) cat ladies. But the group getting on the phone in a couple of weeks might have an influence that those others don’t.

Prepare for Swifties4Kamala.

A “Swiftie,” as you probably know, is a fan of musician Taylor Swift. Swift is one of the most famous celebrities in the world and has a (probably immeasurably) huge base of fans. Once President Joe Biden announced that he was no longer going to seek the Democratic nomination for president, some of Swift’s fans formed an ad hoc group to support his replacement. The effect might be that, six years after Swift first dipped her toes into politics, her fans could help swing a presidential election.

One reason that’s the case is that Swift’s profile has fairly recently skyrocketed. Google searches for her name were relatively steady until 2020, peaking with awards shows or album releases. With the launch of her Eras Tour last year, it surged. Swift has never been the focus of more search interest than she was in February of this year — the month of the Super Bowl in which her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, was playing.

YouGov polling shows that Swift’s favorability has increased since 2018 as well. In October that year, right about the time that she offered her endorsement of a (ultimately unsuccessful) Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee, 46 percent of Americans viewed her favorably. In January of this year, that had climbed to 54 percent. Swift is now viewed favorably by most American men, women and Democrats. Her favorability improved among independents and Republicans, too, and surged in particular among younger Americans.

The stereotype that has followed Swift for years, of course, is that her fan base is largely made up of tween and young teenage girls. There’s an element of truth to that, certainly, but a 13-year-old Swift fan in 2018 is now a 19-year-old Swift fan who is old enough to vote.

Whether Swift endorses Harris remains to be seen. (Swifties4Kamala is not a function of the artist’s efforts.) But she may not need to do so to have an effect.

One of the shifts in the race that followed Harris’s rise to the nomination was that younger voters, shown in polling to be apathetic about the prospect of reelecting Biden, have begun shifting more favorably toward Harris. Several recent polls, including in swing states, have suggested that Harris’s improved position relative to Trump is in part a function of her enjoying wider margins with younger Americans.

Against Biden, Trump’s relative position with younger voters was weaker when pollsters filtered for the likelihood of voting. This is the central question with younger voters, as it always is: Will they actually turn out to vote? A deliberate effort to increase turnout within Swift’s fan base would probably benefit Harris. One reason that Biden won in 2020 after Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 was that the electorate four years ago had a larger percentage of young voters.

And again, Swift is more popular, and interest in Swift is larger than it was four years ago. Her fan base is enthusiastic and centered on community and common identifiers in a way that didn’t exist to the same degree four years ago. If voting or pressing one’s parents to vote for Harris — for the potential first woman president — becomes even a small element of Swift fandom, it’s hard to know what the effect might be.

Should Swift take an active hand in stoking that engagement, the effects would probably be non-trivial. When she last year encouraged her Instagram followers to register to vote, tens of thousands did. If Swift encourages her fan base to make a plan to vote in November and to work with their parents or partners or friends to do so, voter turnout would increase. (Online community encouragement can have a demonstrable effect on the number of people casting a ballot.)

Again, this is without considering an explicit endorsement. If Swift does endorse Harris (as she did with Biden in 2020), this, too, might boost the Democrat’s vote total. A Suffolk University poll conducted for USA Today in May asked Americans whether a Swift endorsement would influence their vote choice. Most said it wouldn’t. But 9 percent of respondents said it might influence them at least a little — including 1 in 10 women, Americans under 35 and independents. This is probably overstated, but a Swiftian nudge would not do nothing.

The nature of this presidential contest appears, at the moment, to mirror what we saw in 2016 and 2020: a race that favors the Democrat nationally but that might come down to narrow vote totals in several swing states. Biden’s electoral vote majority was a function of fewer than 50,000 votes in three states four years ago. Getting a small segment of the massive Taylor Swift fan base to vote that otherwise wouldn’t? Hard to dismiss the idea that it could tip the balance.

Since August 2023, the state with the seventh-most search interest in Taylor Swift was Pennsylvania, believed to be the most likely state to swing the results of the 2024 presidential contest. Wisconsin was 14th.

This may not mean anything. Or it may mean that, after the surge in Swift’s popularity, everything has changed.

Authorities are investigating a burglary at former president Donald Trump’s campaign office in Ashburn, Va., after reviewing surveillance footage showing a man inside with a backpack strapped to his chest on Sunday.

The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office said it responded to the burglary report about 9 p.m. Sunday and that a video showed a man inside wearing a dark baseball cap with insignia and a dark hoodie. The man’s backpack appears to be partially full in the still images from the surveillance video released by the sheriff’s office.

“It is rare to have the office of any political campaign or party broken into,” Sheriff Mike Chapman said in a statement. “We are determined to identify the suspect, investigate why it happened, and determine what may have been taken as well as what may have been left behind.”

Ashburn is a Northern Virginia suburb about 30 miles from downtown Washington. The sheriff’s office said the Trump for President campaign is leasing the office.

A spokesman for the sheriff said Monday that the Trump campaign office, which also serves as the headquarters of the Virginia 10th District Republican Committee, had been cleared out while law enforcement agencies from Loudoun County and other jurisdictions canvassed the location. They asked for the public’s help identifying the suspect.

“It’s an office park area, kind of a remote office park area, so there would not have been an awful lot of people” on Sunday night, spokesman Thomas Julia said. “Once we know who this person is and the motivation, we’ll have a second statement.”

Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Rich Anderson said he knows “very little” about the incident.

“I got a phone call from my people this morning telling me that an intruder had somehow made his way in,” Anderson said. “They’ve handed it off to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office. It’s really in their hands, so we’re just in a wait-and-see mode.”

Anderson said he had not been briefed yet on whether anything was missing from the office.

This is a developing story and will be updated. Gregory S. Schneider and Teo Armus contributed to this report.

A Colorado jury on Monday found a former county election official guilty of seven charges connected to allowing a purported computer expert to copy election data from her office as Donald Trump and his allies spread false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and searched for evidence to prove it.

Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk, was found guilty on seven of 10 charges, including several counts of attempting to influence a public servant and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. She will be sentenced on Oct. 3 and could face prison time.

Peters is one of the few officials to face consequences for using their positions in local elections offices to try to prove false claims that took root after Trump’s defeat.

The verdict comes three months ahead of the 2024 presidential election and as Trump is already seeking to sow doubt about the fairness of the electoral outcome. As election officials around the nation have confronted years of hostility and suspicion about their work from those outside their offices, they have also sought to prevent — and prepare — threats from people working within.

Election experts have cited the breach in Mesa County as a consequence of falsehoods spread about voting systems. Peters has been embraced and championed by many of those who continue to falsely claim the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

Peters stood as 21st Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett warned those gathered in his courtroom against verbal outbursts before he read the verdict. The decision came about four hours after closing arguments in the closely watched trial, which lasted more than a week. Peters did not show visible emotion as the verdict was read or as the judge ordered her to report to a probation office on Tuesday.

The jury found her not guilty of three counts: criminal impersonation, a count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and identity theft.

Prosecutors charged Peters in 2022 and accused her of helping secretly copy Dominion Voting Systems hard drives by sneaking a former professional surfer and purported computer expert into secure areas of her office in 2021 using someone else’s security badge. Within months, data from her office appeared online and was featured at a symposium held by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who continues to trumpet false claims about elections and seeks to end the use of machines that count ballots.

Closing arguments in the case began Monday, with prosecutors telling jurors that Peters tricked election workers and other public employees to let an outsider take images of the county’s election system hard drive to cast herself as a hero at a Lindell event.

“This case is simply about crimes committed by her in concert with others that were simply designed to be a coverup — and that this case is a simple case centered around the use of deceit to commit a fraud,” said prosecutor Robert Shapiro. “It’s not about computers, it’s not about election records. It’s about using deceit to trick and manipulate others … who were simply trying to do their job.”

Her attorney, John Case, maintained that Peters was seeking to save records to help determine if foreign individuals had accessed voting systems while ballots were still being tabulated.

He told jurors on Monday morning that they were the only thing “that stands between Clerk Peters and that government semi” truck. He sought to cast doubt that Peters stood to gain anything of value for her actions and said that she sought to find purpose in her job and community after her son died.

Peters, who did not testify, was the first election official to face criminal charges after the 2020 election, according to election experts.

Peters cast doubts on the 2020 election and raised further concerns after an April 2021 municipal election. Soon afterward, she met with Douglas Frank, a high school math teacher who has made appearances around the country to question how elections are conducted. Frank told Peters he believed an upcoming software update would delete data that would prove the election had been rigged, he told The Washington Post in 2022. She sought help, and he relayed her request to someone in Lindell’s circle, he said.

Peters was accused of allowing Conan Hayes, the former professional surfer who was affiliated with Lindell, to watch the software update and make copies of the hard drive using the security badge of another man who Peters had said worked for her. Prosecutors alleged that Peters’s activities amounted to identity theft — an allegation Peters disputed.

Later, in August 2021, Ron Watkins, who has ties to false election theories spread in Colorado, Arizona and elsewhere, published photos of election equipment and passwords that were quickly traced to Mesa County. Watkins is the former administrator of the 8kun message board that has been a hotbed of posts about the QAnon conspiracy theory.

A week after Watkins first posted about the equipment, copies of two Mesa County hard drives appeared online. Soon afterward, Peters said she commissioned someone to copy the hard drives to preserve their data and compare them to the hard drives after the software update.

After the material appeared online, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) successfully sued to block Peters from running elections. Peters in 2022 ran for secretary of state but lost the Republican primary. Griswold said in a statement Monday night that Peters “will now face the consequences of her actions.”

“Today’s verdict sends a clear message: we will not tolerate any effort to threaten the security of our gold standard elections,” she said.

The Colorado County Clerks Association said in a statement that clerks around the state were pleased with the verdict.

“We take seriously our role as guardians of the best election process in the nation and are grateful to see the justice system hold those who would harm our elections accountable,” executive director Matt Crane said in a statement.

Despite the charges, Peters has not stopped promoting baseless information. Ahead of the trial, Peters appeared on the Conservative Daily podcast and claimed without evidence that someone was able to inflate the voting rolls and cast ballots in the names of others. She blamed “the deep state” for her divorce and called for ending the use of voting machines.

“They’re coming after me because I exposed this,” she said on the podcast in June. “The deep state all the way up to [Attorney General] Merrick Garland, they want to put me in prison to send a chilling effect to everyone out there that speaks out about elections, that speaks out about elections that they will not question anymore. Just like what they did with the January 6 hostages.”

She used the appearance to promote jury nullification — the practice of juries acquitting someone who they believe broke the law. “There’s some really good people out there talking about jury nullification,” she said.

She added: “When the jury walks in, the judge and the gallery rises because they are the law. If a law is unrighteous, they can actually rule against it in favor of the defendant.”

Before she was elected the Mesa County clerk, Peters ran a family construction company and for a time sold magnets and other wellness products through a multilevel marketing company. Early in her tenure, her office failed to collect 574 ballots that had been left in a drop box for a November 2019 election. An effort to recall her failed.

A New York judge ruled Monday that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will not appear on the state’s ballot in November after he falsely claimed that he lived at a friend’s house in New York on his qualifying petitions.

While Kennedy had claimed he lived in a spare bedroom of his friend’s Katonah, N.Y. home, he had stayed only one night in the home last month after a lawsuit was filed against him disputing that he lived there, Albany County Supreme Court Justice Christina Ryba wrote in her decision.

The ruling comes after the Democratic-aligned Clear Choice super PAC challenged Kennedy’s application for ballot access in New York and other states over alleged inaccuracies in his paperwork.

The decision, if upheld, marks Kennedy’s first loss in his effort to appear on state ballots, and it could be a warning sign for his other state petitions as his campaign listed the same address in all of his election filings nationwide.

In a statement, Kennedy decried the decision as anti-democratic. “The Democrats are showing contempt for democracy,” he said. “They aren’t confident they can win at the ballot box, so they are trying to stop voters from having a choice. We will appeal and we will win.”

Clear Choice and the Democratic National Committee celebrated the decision Monday, noting inaccuracies and inconsistencies in Kennedy’s statements during his testimony.

“Today’s ruling makes clear that Mr. Kennedy lied about his residency and provided a false address on his filing papers and candidate petitions in New York, intentionally misleading election officials and betraying voters’ trust,” the PAC said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Democrats lost a separate case in North Carolina on Monday in which they claimed that Kennedy’s political party should not receive ballot access as it was a vehicle for Kennedy to avoid strict ballot requirements imposed on independent candidates.