This is the third of the #transitzone USA 2024 presidential election campaign updates, recorded Friday 9 August. It has been 18 days since Joe Biden withdrew from the race. 25 days since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

Margo Kingston and Peter Clarke have been tracking some of the key events and developments in this extraordinary fast forward campaign.

The Republican candidate, former president, Donald Trump, has just held a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Disciplined, focussed, rational, it was not. It was the typical Trump ranty mix of lies, self-infatuated claims and vitriolic invective. He is still fixated on his rally crowd sizes even claiming his January 6 2021 Washington, Ellipsis address was bigger than that for Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1963.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris and her VP running mate pick, Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz, are on a multi swing state rally blitz attaining a huge amount of “earned media” coverage from the networks, cable news outfits and online entities.

Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance is shadowing them city by city.

The Democrats’ national convention starts in Chicago on 19 th of August.

And THE NEWS is apparently Trump and Harris have come to some kind of agreement to meet for a nationally televised debate hosted, as was originally planned with Joe Biden, by the ABC network on 10th of September.

Margo and Peter discuss Kamala Harris's VP pick, the latest unhinged speech from Trump, his apparent self-sobataging in the state of Georgia by attacking its popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp and the looming national televised debates.

RESOURCES

First combined Kamala Harris - Tim Walz rally in Philadelphia:

https://youtu.be/eBRFGMw38zI?si=VGLfgB1zoBXwYVVn

Trump press conference, 8 August, Mar-a-Lago:

https://www.youtube.com/live/McXjpQFFN90?si=1Z8szclourbZwCu2

Margo Kingston and Peter Clarke take stock of the unfolding USA presidential election at the end of the second week of the Kamala Harris presumptive candidacy for the Democratic Party.

Donald Trump appeared for a tense and heated interview with three Black women journalists at the annual convention of the National Black Journalists' Association. It did not go well. The former president questioned whether Kamal Harris was, "Indian or Black": a self-evident false binary. His campaign is going all out to define his opponent as "fake". Meanwhile, Harris addressed a wildly enthusiastic 10,000 strong rally in Atlanta, Georgia, delivering her evolving stump speech with "Freedom" as its rhetorical leitmotif. She also fired back at her GOP opponent's racist attack.

With Harris's choice of VP running mate looming, Peter and Margo try to predict that choice.

This year marks a significant anniversary in Australian political history. But few Australian citizens will be celebrating it mainly because they simply don’t know what it is. In 1924, as Australia entered its third decade of federation, our federal parliament passed legislation mandating compulsory voting. 100 years later, that innovation has been meshed into our political lives and democracy as utterly normal. The “democracy sausage” effect. Our turn out for elections is persistently high, unlike most other democracies we might compare ourselves with.

How has compulsory voting shaped our democracy over the last century? What are the positives and negatives? What might we lose if we abolished it as has been tried relatively recently in Australia by the Liberal Party under John Howard.

Emeritus Professor of Politics at Monash University, Paul Strangio, co-edited the 2021 book Compulsory Voting in Australia : Genesis, Impact and Future. He speaks with Peter Clarke about the history, current status and potential future of compulsory voting in Australia.

RESOURCES

Compulsory voting in Australia is 100 years old. We should celebrate how special it makes our democracy by Paul Strangio

https://theconversation.com/compulsory-voting-in-australia-is-100-years-old-we-should-celebrate-how-special-it-makes-our-democracy-234801

Compulsory Voting in Australia : Genesis, Impact and Future

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-33-4025-1

From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting by Judith Brett

https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/from-secret-ballot-to-democracy-sausage-how-australia-got-compulsory-voting