Two months after ousting Natalie Darwitz as its general manager, Minnesota’s PWHL team has hired a new GM, longtime AHL executive Melissa Caruso.

A St. Paul resident, Caruso most recently spent five years as vice president of hockey operations and governance at the American Hockey League, the top minor league for the NHL.

Melissa Caruso (Courtesy PWHL)

“Melissa stood out as the ideal candidate,” PWHL senior vice president for hockey operations Jayna Hefford said in a statement.

Caruso and Hefford are scheduled to speak to reporters on Wednesday.

“It’s an exciting time for women’s sports, and I thank leadership for trusting me with the opportunity to lead PWHL Minnesota during these crucial formative years for the league,” Caruso said in a statement. “I can’t wait to get started on the journey to defend the Walter Cup in Season Two.”

Minnesota, which plays at Xcel Energy Center, won the Walter Cup as champion of the PWHL’s season, rallying past regular-season champion Toronto by winning the last two games of the five-game finals series.

The team was built by Darwitz, the former Gophers star, U.S. Olympian and Hamline head coach who used the first pick in the first PWHL draft to take Patty Kazmaier Award-winner Taylor Heise, whom she coached as an assistant at Minnesota. Heise was the leading scorer in the PWHL postseason with five goals and eight points.

But Darwitz was fired a month later after what Hefford called a lengthy internal and external review.

“The feedback to us was pretty direct and pretty clear that there wasn’t a path forward with the current personnel in place,” Hefford said during a June 8 Zoom interview with select members of the media that did not include the Pioneer Press. “It was with the work we did throughout the year, and it was clear that a change needed to be made.”

At the time, Darwitz said she was proud of what the team had accomplished but declined to address her exit.

Caruso started at the AHL as an intern in 2009 and worked her way through a handful of positions before becoming a vice president in 2015.

“Her strong background in operations and governance, combined with her extensive hockey knowledge and leadership experience, make her a great fit for the role,” Hefford said. “Additionally, Melissa’s passion for the game, along with her ties to the local community, positions her perfectly to lead the team both on and off the ice.”

The PWHL will release its 2024-25 schedule at a later date.

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The surging enthusiasm for Vice President Kamala Harris in Georgia and North Carolina is convincing local Democratic leaders that she can score the first double win in the Southern swing states since Jimmy Carter.

More than 52,000 volunteers have joined the Harris campaign there since she announced her presidential bid — so many that county party heads barely know what to do with them. One official in the Greensboro, North Carolina, area described her headquarters as a “madhouse,” with up to 30 people showing up every day to help and a deep-pocketed donor shelling out to pay neighborhood canvassers.

Harris, a Californian, has opened up an electoral path in two traditionally Republican states in the South that no Democrat has won together since Georgia native Carter in 1976. In the latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of registered voters in seven swing states, she’s now leading Donald Trump in both states by 2 percentage points.

That’s within the margin of error, meaning the two are essentially in a toss-up election. But it’s an improvement from her showing in July, when she lagged Trump by 2 points in North Carolina and was even with him in Georgia — and it’s much better than President Joe Biden’s numbers before he exited the race.

Harris, 59, is pulling in people like Kameryn Taylor, 25, who said she was struggling to rouse up the energy to turn out for the 81-year-old Biden. Now she’s all in.

“I’m pretty pro-Kamala,” Taylor said in a recent interview in Greensboro. “I like that she is a fresh face, and I like that’s she’s willing to take on women’s rights when it comes to abortion.”

Potential voters in both states praised the Democratic candidate’s relative youth and vigor, her identity as the first Black and Asian woman to lead a major-party ticket and her commitment to reproductive rights. In the August poll, Harris posted double-digit gains in support among women, those aged 18-34 and seniors 65 and older in North Carolina and smaller but notable increases among such groups in Georgia compared to Biden. Her share of Black voters in each state exceeded Biden’s as well.

Barely considered a swing state, North Carolina was moved to a “toss up” last week by the Cook Political Report. Neighboring Georgia became a toss up recently, potentially relieving some of the pressure for Harris to win the so-called blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“This race turned on a dime,” said Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College in North Carolina. “It’s a whole new dynamic.”

To be sure, the GOP remains powerful in North Carolina and Georgia, and Trump still draws adoring crowds. North Carolinians last elected a Democrat president in 2008, while Biden’s squeaker of a win in Georgia in 2020 was the first Democratic victory there since Bill Clinton’s first term.

Trump’s campaign has cast Harris’ surge as a sugar high that is leveling off. “We believe, internally, based on the data, that the plateau’s been reached,” Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes said.

But Harris has been able to pull some of the voters who dislike both Trump and Biden, said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University and author of the forthcoming Anatomy of a Purple State: A North Carolina Politics Primer.

In Georgia, the Harris camp said it has the largest in-state operation of any Democratic presidential campaign cycle, with more than 190 staff members in 24 offices. In Fayetteville, a bustling Atlanta suburb, Democratic Party Chair Joe Clark said he’s never seen so much investment from headquarters, with new 65-inch television monitors installed in some offices and full-time security.

On Friday, the cramped Fayetteville office was cluttered with Harris yard signs and a jumbo dry erase calendar full of Young Democrat socials and Saturday canvassing events. A local congressional candidate, Maura Keller, popped in and said that since Harris became the nominee, far more people are paying attention to her race against Trump-endorsed Republican Brian Jack and taking her campaign signs. And at the monthly Pancakes & Politics breakfast, which used to get a decent crowd, lately “it’s standing room only,” said county membership chair Bertha Regans.

Over in Greensboro, Guilford County Democratic Party Chair Kathy Kirkpatrick is fielding scores of volunteers energized from the Democratic National Convention in August, particularly after former first lady Michelle Obama’s speech exhorting people to “do something.”

The office the day after “was a madhouse,” Kirkpatrick said. “They’re all there to do something, which was fun.”

Harris’s pick of Minnesota Tim Governor Tim Walz as her running mate has also cheered some North Carolinians.

“Kamala and Tim really support people to be who they are, and there’s this absence of division and absence of hate,” said Sarah McDavid, 53, owner of a metaphysical shop in downtown Greensboro. “They really are bringing in a little more happiness to politics.”

Just up the sidewalk, though, Clayton Sturdivant, 52, said he remained undecided. The United Parcel Service driver is deeply religious and some of the Democratic Party’s positions, such as support for abortion rights, bother him. But the Republican Party seems to ignore Black people altogether, he said.

Said Sturdivant, “We should trust in God.”

In August, seemingly the bulk of Asheboro, North Carolina – population 28,000 – turned out for a Trump rally at a tiny airport and aviation museum amid pastures and forests. Vendors sold full-size cardboard cut-outs of the former president, and fans proudly wore ball caps reading, “I’m voting for the felon.”

Trump during his speech blasted Biden and Harris for elevated inflation and illegal immigration, themes he’s hit on for months. But the latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll showed that Harris is faring better than Biden when it comes to pocketbook issues. When voters were asked who they trust more on the economy, Harris trailed Trump by just single digits in Georgia and North Carolina, while Biden had lagged by over 10 percentage points in each state before he exited the race.

In Leland, a boomtown off the North Carolina coast, Barry Meyer has grown more comfortable with Harris in the past month after initially having his doubts.

“I’m very confident that she could do a great job, because I like the enthusiasm,” Meyer, 71, said. “Because with Biden, Democrats were like, ‘God, is that the best we can come up with?’”

——-

(With assistance from Gregory Korte.)

___

By DAVID KLEPPER Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — When he first emerged on social media, the user known as Harlan claimed to be a New Yorker and an Army veteran who supported Donald Trump for president. Harlan said he was 29, and his profile picture showed a smiling, handsome young man.

A few months later, Harlan underwent a transformation. Now, he claimed to be 31 and from Florida.

New research into Chinese disinformation networks targeting American voters shows Harlan’s claims were as fictitious as his profile picture, which analysts think was created using artificial intelligence.

As voters prepare to cast their ballots this fall, China has been making its own plans, cultivating networks of fake social media users designed to mimic Americans. Whoever or wherever he really is, Harlan is a small part of a larger effort by U.S. adversaries to use social media to influence and upend America’s political debate.

The account was traced back to Spamouflage, a Chinese disinformation group, by analysts at Graphika, a New York-based firm that tracks online networks. Known to online researchers for several years, Spamouflage earned its moniker through its habit of spreading large amounts of seemingly unrelated content alongside disinformation.

“One of the world’s largest covert online influence operations — an operation run by Chinese state actors — has become more aggressive in its efforts to infiltrate and to sway U.S. political conversations ahead of the election,” Jack Stubbs, Graphika’s chief intelligence officer, told The Associated Press.

Intelligence and national security officials have said that Russia, China and Iran have all mounted online influence operations targeting U.S. voters ahead of the November election. Russia remains the top threat, intelligence officials say, even as Iran has become more aggressive in recent months, covertly supporting U.S. protests against the war in Gaza and attempting to hack into the email systems of the two presidential candidates.

China, however, has taken a more cautious, nuanced approach. Beijing sees little advantage in supporting one presidential candidate over the other, intelligence analysts say. Instead, China’s disinformation efforts focus on campaign issues particularly important to Beijing — such as American policy toward Taiwan — while seeking to undermine confidence in elections, voting and the U.S. in general.

Officials have said it’s a longer-term effort that will continue well past Election Day as China and other authoritarian nations try to use the internet to erode support for democracy.

Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu rejected Graphika’s findings as full of “prejudice and malicious speculation” and said that “China has no intention and will not interfere” in the election.

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, suspended several of the accounts linked to the Spamouflage network after questions were raised about their authenticity. The company did not respond to questions about the reasons for the suspensions, or whether they were connected to Graphika’s report.

TikTok also removed accounts linked to Spamouflage, including Harlan’s.

“We will continue to remove deceptive accounts and harmful misinformation as we protect the integrity of our platform during the US elections,” a TikTok spokesperson wrote in a statement emailed on Tuesday.

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Compared with armed conflict or economic sanctions, online influence operations can be a low-cost, low-risk means of flexing geopolitical power. Given the increasing reliance on digital communications, the use of online disinformation and fake information networks is only likely to increase, said Max Lesser, senior analyst for emerging threats at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank in Washington.

“We’re going to see a widening of the playing field when it comes to influence operations, where it’s not just Russia, China and Iran but you also see smaller actors getting involved,” Lesser said.

That list could include not only nations but also criminal organizations, domestic extremist groups and terrorist organizations, Lesser said.

When analysts first noticed Spamouflage five years ago, the network tended to post generically pro-China, anti-American content. In recent years, the tone sharpened as Spamouflage expanded and began focusing on divisive political topics like gun control, crime, race relations and support for Israel during its war in Gaza. The network also began creating large numbers of fake accounts designed to mimic American users.

Spamouflage accounts don’t post much original content, instead using platforms like X or TikTok to recycle and repost content from far-right and far-left users. Some of the accounts seemed designed to appeal to Republicans, while others cater to Democrats.

While Harlan’s accounts succeeded in getting traction — one video mocking President Joe Biden was seen 1.5 million times — many of the accounts created by the Spamouflage campaign did not. It’s a reminder that online influence operations are often a numbers game: the more accounts, the more content, the better the chance that one specific post goes viral.

Many of the accounts newly linked to Spamouflage took pains to pose as Americans, sometimes in obvious ways. “I am an American,” one of the accounts proclaimed. Some of the accounts gave themselves away by using stilted English or strange word choices. Some were clumsier than others: “Broken English, brilliant brain, I love Trump,” read the biographical section of one account.

Harlan’s profile picture, which Graphika researchers believe was created using AI, was identical to one used in an earlier account linked to Spamouflage. Messages sent to the person operating Harlan’s accounts were not returned.