Little Bryant. Little Bryant. Bad guy.

A high-profile feud gets pushed aside as the political map keeps shifting.

Leading both parties to believe they can pull Georgia onto their side of the electoral ledger. I'm Scott Simon.

I'm Ayesha Rosco, and this is Up First from NPR News. Donald Trump narrowly lost Georgia four years ago and blamed that in part on Georgia governor Brian Kemp. Now the two are campaigning together. We'll take you to Georgia for details.

Then to Mexico, where voters may soon be able to elect judges. Why experts urge caution today on the podcast.

Polio reappears in Gaza, but there's reason to hope.

So please stay with us. We have the news you need to start your weekend.

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Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walsh, took a bus tour this week through coastal Georgia, which the Democratic Party sees as a crucial battleground in the race to win the White House.

But Republican infighting has plagued the party since Trump's narrow loss there in 2020. Npr Stephen Fowler is our man in Georgia. He joins us now. Stephen, thanks so much for being with us.

Always a pleasure.

Donald Trump won Georgia decisively in 2016, lost by under 12,000 votes in 2020. How would he win there this November?

Well, getting more votes than Kamala Harris. But on a more serious note, here's a quick Georgia history lesson for you. For more than two decades, Republicans have dominated Georgia's politics at every level. They've enacted pro-business policies that have attracted tons of new residents and industries and voters that don't usually vote for Republicans. Things the film industry, the tech industry. As Georgia has purpled Scott, Republicans have been successful in recent years by minimizing culture war issues and appealing to more than just their conservative base. That's the type of message Trump needs to convey, but he's done the opposite of that. In fact, he spent most of the last four years attacking popular Republican governor Brian Kemp for not overturning the 2020 election. Case in point, here's Trump at an Atlanta rally earlier this month.

He's a bad guy He's a disloyal guy, and he's a very average governor. Little Brian, Little Brian Kemp. Bad guy. But they've made up, right?

Well, yes. I mean, there's a few things that happened, namely Kamala Harris happened, and the new Democratic enthusiasm has made Georgia a competitive state once more. There's been lots of behind-the-scenes wrangling, culminating in Kemp doing an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity that made its way in front of Donald Trump. I've been saying consistently for a long time we cannot not afford another four years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

I think Kamala Harris and Tim Walsh would be even worse.

Kemp went on to say it's imperative that Trump gets back into the White House and that the Republican Party keeps the House and flips the Senate. Republicans in Georgia know the stakes especially well, Scott. The 2020 election also saw run-offs that flipped both Senate seats to Democrats. While Kemp romped in the midterms, a Trumpy Senate candidate lost in a run-off to Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, once again cementing democratic control of the chamber because of Georgia. I mean, Scott, Georgia is truly a state that is split both demographically and ideologically along a knife's edge and shows it has an electorate that's willing to vote for a Republican in Brian Kemp and a Democrat in Raphael Warnock.

What is the Trump campaign plan? Can you tell?

Well, they have this Trump Force 47 strategy, and Georgia is ground zero for that. It uses volunteers at the local level to activate friends and neighbors with targeted messaging, reminding them to get out the vote. This is especially important after some of those people stayed home in previous elections because of Trump's false fraud claims. The campaign says they've held hundreds of events and signed up thousands of volunteers in just the last few weeks. Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, Trump's VP pick, was just campaigning in Georgia, showing that there's an army of surrogates, both inside and outside the state, that can more effectively reach beyond the base and expand that tent. Ultimately, Republicans hope the specter of four more years of Democratic policies is also enough of a motivator for people to show up and vote.

And Pierre Stephen Fowler in Atlanta. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

There's polio now in the Gaza Strip after decades of absence, but there may soon be good news.

Beginning tomorrow, the United Nations will start vaccinating children in Gaza against the preventable and highly contagious virus. It will be an enormous effort that NPR international correspondent, Eia Buitraoui, will follow from her base in Dubai. She joins us now. Eia, thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you, Scott.

Tell us about how this vaccination campaign is being rolled out.

Well, the UN has really big aims here. They want to reach more than 640,000 children across Gaza to give them two courses of the polio vaccine. It will be given orally in droplets, but it needs refrigeration at every step. And pretty much, Gaza has no electricity. They're just running on generators and fuel that's in short supply. Another logistical challenge here is that the whole population is displaced. And so it's not easy for them to reach UN run clinics. But the UN groups leading this vaccination effort, which is UNICEF and the World Health Organization, they say the most critical factor is a pause in airstrikes so that the vaccines can reach all these children. Now, Israel says it's agreed to short pauses. Basically, it won't attack for about eight hours a day in specific parts of Gaza for the few days that this campaign is being rolled out, and Hamez says they'll also cooperate.

How did the polio spread there in the first place?

Doctors tell me this was a combination of factors. You have children, Scott, that haven't had access to vaccines, but also most of Gaza's hospitals have been destroyed or closed. You also have wastewater treatment plants and desalination plans that have been bombed. So people have been drinking dirty water to survive. We We know from the Gaza Health Ministry that more than 40,000 people have been killed by Israeli fire in this war, but we don't have a tally for people who've died from illness. However, we know there's been a huge spike in kids with infections and diarrhea. Children are hungry, they are malnourished. They're living in these overcrowded shelters or in the open in tents and with weak immune systems.

Do we know how widespread polio could now be in Gaza?

Well, there's already been a case confirmed in a 10-month-old baby boy who was active and crawling, and now paralyzed in one leg after contracting polio. And he is the first case of polio in a quarter century in Gaza. Now, it comes after the Gaza Health Ministry and the World Health Organization. They sounded the alarm on this in July when they announced that the polio virus had been found in sewage water flowing in the streets around the tents of displaced people. And there are now at least two other suspected cases as well. Now, the symptoms for polio show in one out of every 100 to a thousand people. So the doctors I spoke with They say this means thousands of people in Gaza likely already have contracted polio. It is spreading, and one doctor called it a powder keg.

That powder keg would present a risk to other neighboring countries, wouldn't it?

Extremely so. I mean, for weeks now, you have Israel's military vaccinating its own soldiers, even if they've already been vaccinated against polio before. Because polio spreads through water systems, aquifers, and in droplets in the air. And so not only could the virus spread to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, it could also reach Europe and the US. Two years ago, an unvaccinated Orthodox Jewish man in upstate New York contracted polio, and the virus spread there. And the strain of that virus was traced to Jerusalem and London, where there's frequent travel back and forth. And so to try to understand more about this, I reached out to Dr. Jeffrey Goldhagen. He is a pediatric professor at the University of Florida and a global health expert.

There is no reason not to expect the disease to spread from God Gaza, to the surrounding countries, the unvaccinated communities in Israel, and from there to Europe, the UK, United States. And the only way of stopping the spread is by a successful, rigorous polio vaccine campaign. The only way that that can happen is if there is a pause in hostilities.

So Dr. Goldhagen says the UN has succeeded in polio vaccinations in other war zones like Syria, like Yemen, Sudan. And so there is hope that the UN and the Palestinian health workers this weekend will be able to start doing this in Gaza, too.

And Pierzé Buitrawe. Thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you, Scott.

Lastly, today, what sounds at first like a pretty good idea, giving voters a say in the courts. That's a reform underway in Mexico. It's popular and the President and supports it.

But it will completely remake the judicial branch, and experts in Mexico and around the world say it's actually a terrible idea. And Pierre's Eader Poralta joins us now from Mexico City. Eader, thanks for being with us. Hey there, Scott. This is a constitutional amendment that would allow the entire judiciary, including the Supreme Court, to be elected?

That's right. I mean, and this is a big change. This is as epic a fight as it gets between the branches of governments. And just a bit of background before we get into the details of it. All of this is happening because President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his party won huge these past elections. They won the presidency, they won a super-majority in Congress. One of the things that they ran on was this judicial reform. Now, the legislative branch and the executive branch are taking on the judicial branch. One of the big changes they want to make, as you mentioned, is that federal judges of all stripes, from the Supreme Court, all all the way down to the district courts, would no longer be appointed. Instead, they would be directly elected by the people. President López Obrador and incoming President Claudio Sheimbam say that this would deal with corruption in the federal courts, that this would make judges accountable to the Mexican people in not big business or special interests or organized crime. They say that this will put an end to nepotism, and that is rampant in the federal judiciary. It is worth noting that the polls show that Mexicans, by and large, to support this reform.

I mean, electing all judges, democracy to fight corruption, doesn't sound like a drawback. What's the issue?

I mean, on the surface, it doesn't sound like a drawback, right? But the vast majority of legal scholars and academics and intellectuals say that this isn't just a bad idea. They say it's a terrible one. The International Association of Judges, which represents judges in some 90 countries, put out an analysis of the proposed reform, and they said, Please don't do this, Mexico. The US, Canada, the Senate Foreign Relations Human Rights Watch, they've all said this is a bad idea. I spoke to Julio Rios, who studies judiciaries at the ITAM, the Autonomous Technological Institute here in Mexico. He says this has only been tried at the federal level in Bolivia. It did not end corruption. Instead, it opened up the judiciary to the whims of politics.

The people in government respond to a specific electoral mandate, and they are going to be held accountable in the next election day on that, on that electoral mandate. But judges could be looking at a longer, broader horizon. They are in charge of enforcing the Constitution over the laws and the government that come and go.

What's more, he says that this reform would end career civil service in the judiciary. Right now, Mexicans have to work their way up. They have to learn the ropes in some lower-level jobs before they become federal judges. That would end with this reform.

How do judges feel? They're on strike.

They're not working in opposition to this reform. The President of Mexico's Supreme Court, Norma Piña, has essentially said this is all a power struggle. She says the President of Mexico is angry that some of his big legislative proposals have been found unconstitutional. She says that this came to a head when the federal courts in Mexico said he couldn't put the National Guard under military command. What the court said here is that this huge security force, which the President had created and deployed across the country, had to be run under civilian control. She says once that decision was made, the President decided that the only way forward was to destroy the judiciary. But it's worth pausing on that. Some analysts I've spoken to say they don't really believe that this reform will completely destroy Mexico's judicial independence. They point out, for example, that there's still an opposition in the country and that they could very well vote for judges that could balance out the legislative and executive branches.

The vote's in a few days, right?

Well, it It might be in a few days. The new Congress takes power September first, and that's tomorrow. This piece of legislation will be its first order of business. If the ruling party has its way, they say that this should be the law of the land by latest mid-September.

And Vyárezé de Parol, to thank much.

Thank you, Scott.

And that's up first for Saturday, August 31st. I'm Ayesha Rosco.

And I'm Scott Simon. Fernando Naro, Martin Patience, and Gabe O'Connor produce today's podcast, Andrew Craig, directed.

Our editors were Ed Magnotti, Dee Parvez, Megan Pratz, James Hyder, and Tara Neill.

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Tomorrow on the podcast, a group of friends determined to avenge a murder. Sounds intriguing. What could possibly go wrong?

And for more intrigue and the latest on the biggest stories of the day, go to stations. Npr. Org to find your local NPR station so that you can tune in to Weekend Edition every Saturday and Sunday morning. It's very thrilling, I might add.

Yeah. Ayesha, do you think we can start taking over the weekly shows, too? We might need to get on that. Weekend Edition Monday. Great.

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