Closing summary
We’re ending our live coverage for the day, just two weeks out from election day. Here are some key events and stories from the day:
Barack Obama and Tim Walz baited the Trump campaign at a Wisconsin rally as part of an early voting push.
Kamala Harris told NBC that she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, insisting that Americans care more about what candidates can do to help them, rather than their gender.
Trump’s campaign has filed an extraordinary complaint against the UK’s Labour party for what it claims is “interference” in the US presidential election.
The US army has been ordered to release documents about the Trump campaign’s pugnacious visit to Arlington national cemetery.
Scrutiny is growing about the Montana aerial firefighting company once led by Tim Sheehy, the former Navy Seal and Republican Senate candidate who could oust the Democrat incumbent Jon Tester.
Arab Americans are slightly more likely to vote for Donald Trump than Kamala Harris, according to a new poll, in a worrying sign for the Democratic nominee’s chances of carrying the battleground state of Michigan.
Michigan’s top elections official defended the state’s elections after repeated attacks on Twitter/X from Elon Musk, who spread false claims about inactive voters.
Trump’s former chief of staff said the Republican candidate meets the definition of a “fascist” and reiterated that Trump previously praised Hitler.
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Kamala Harris promotes small business loans for Latinos
In an interview with Telemundo earlier today, Kamala Harris pledged to drive more funds to community banks to help Latino men access small business loans.
“We need to construct a strong economy that supports the working class, the vice-president said, AP reported. She continued:
I know that Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify … For that reason, I’m focused on seeing what we can do to bring more capital to community banks that better understand the community so we can give them that kind of loans.
In a Trump event in Florida courting Latino voters, the former president denigrated Harris as “lazy as hell” and “low IQ”.
Obama rallies in Michigan: 'She didn't pretend to work at McDonald's'
Barack Obama is rallying in Detroit after he was introduced by Eminem. The former president mocked Trump for his meandering rallies and inability to coherently answer questions:
Have you seen Mr Trump lately? … He’ll give two-and-a-half-hour speeches, just a word salad, you don’t know what the heck he’s saying. The other day he had a town hall meeting .. about 45 minutes into it, he says: ‘You know what? I don’t feel like taking questions no more,’ and then he just played music for half an hour.
Praising Kamala Harris, Obama took another swipe at Trump for his publicity stunt at a McDonald’s:
This is a leader who has spent her life fighting on behalf of people who need a voice, need a champion – somebody who was raised in the middle class. She worked at McDonald’s when she was in college to pay her expenses. She did not pretend to work at McDonald’s when it was closed.
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Kamala Harris: US is 'absolutely' ready for a female president
Kamala Harris said that she has no doubt the US is ready for a female president, insisting that Americans care more about what candidates can do to help them, rather than a presidential contender’s gender.
The vice-president’s statement came during an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson, who asked whether she thought the country was ready for a woman, and a woman of color, to be in the Oval Office. “Absolutely,” Harris said. “Absolutely.”
“In terms of every walk of life of our country,” Harris said, “part of what is important in this election is really, not really turning the page – closing a chapter, on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.
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Eminem rallies for Kamala Harris
Rapper Eminem took the stage at the Detroit rally for Kamala Harris:
It’s important to use your voice, so I’m encouraging everybody to get out and vote, please … I also think that people shouldn’t be afraid to express their opinions, and I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution … if you make your opinion known.
Vice-President Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld.
Eminem then introduced Barack Obama, who started his speech by reciting Eminem lyrics.
Rapper Eminem introduces former President Barack Obama at a Detroit rally for Vice President Kamala Harris. pic.twitter.com/SGURWEGAMw
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 23, 2024
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Trump's former chief of staff says he's a 'fascist'
John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, told the New York Times that he believes his former boss meets the definition of “fascist”.
NEW: In an interview with The New York Times -- the audio of which we have published online --- former White House chief of staff John Kelly answers the question of whether he thinks Trump is a fascist. https://t.co/RrSdanoNKz
— Michael S. Schmidt (@nytmike) October 22, 2024
Kelly, a retired Marine general who was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, has publicly condemned the former president over his contempt for wounded and killed soldiers. In a new interview with the Times, Kelly was asked whether he considered Trump a fascist. Kelly responded:
Looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy … Certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.
Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators – he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.
Kelly said Trump “prefers the dictator approach to government”.
Kelly also confirmed past reports that Trump privately made admiring comments about Hitler: “He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’”
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Donald Trump rallies in North Carolina
Donald Trump is now speaking at a rally in North Carolina, mocking Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Tim Walz and other Democrats.
“We’re close to a nuclear war, and we don’t know who the hell is running our country,” the former president said, before an audience member shouted: “Obama!” Trump continued: “Obama, that’s another beauty. Obama, he did great, didn’t he? He did great, if you like a divided country. He was a great, he was fabulous. Obama, he was a real beauty. But under the Trump administration, we’re going to take back what is ours.”
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Joe Biden on Donald Trump: 'We gotta lock him up ... politically'
Speaking at a Democratic campaign office in New Hampshire, Joe Biden outlined the threat posed by a second Donald Trump term:
“He is talking about doing away with the entire Department of Education. He means it, this is not a joke. This is a guy who also wants to replace every civil servant, every single one, [who] thinks he has a version of the supreme court ruling on immunity to be able ... to actually eliminate, physically eliminate, shoot, kill someone who is, he believes, to be the threat to him. I know this sounds bizarre. It sounds like, if I said this five years ago, you’d lock me up. We got to lock him up – politically lock him up.”
The president paused after he echoed the “lock him up” chants of Trump critics, and then added “politically”.
Biden in NH lists what Trump would do as president and says: “we gotta lock him up” and then, appearing to realize how his comments would be taken, adds: “politically, lock him up.” pic.twitter.com/cw3X8RzKn2
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) October 22, 2024
When Kamala Harris supporters have shouted “lock him up”, she has generally not encouraged the chants and said the courts will handle his criminal cases. “Here’s the thing about that. The courts are going to take care of that,” the vice-president recently said at a rally.
Trump has falsely claimed that Biden was behind his prosecution and conviction in his New York hush-money case and has repeatedly blamed Democrats for his various criminal cases.
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Kamala Harris talks Trump pardon and Elon Musk in new interview
In her NBC interview, Hallie Jackson asked Kamala Harris whether she would consider pardoning Donald Trump if she were elected, citing the argument some have made that clemency would “help unify the country and move on”. The vice-president responded:
I’m not going to get into those hypotheticals, I’m focused on the next 14 days … Let me tell you what’s gonna help us move on: I get elected president of the United States.
Harris also said the Democrats “have the resources and the expertise” in the case of Trump trying to subvert the election or declare early victory. She added:
This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo the free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people, who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol, and some 140 law enforcement officers were attacked. Some were killed. This is a very serious matter.
Asked about Elon Musk’s pledge to give away $1m to random voters as he campaigns for Trump, Harris said:
I’m not about doing gimmicks and all of that. I think that what we have to do, and what I’m going to continue to do, is to be out in the communities.
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JD Vance campaigns in Arizona
Two weeks out from election day, JD Vance told supporters at a rally in swing state Arizona that they need to pull their friends to the polls because the race could go either way.
“Here’s the scenario that I want you to consider, and I don’t mean to give you nightmare fuel here, but I’m going to do it,” Vance said to the crowd in Peoria, Arizona. “We wake up on November the sixth, and Kamala Harris is barely elected president of the United States by a 700-vote margin in the state of Arizona. Think about that. And ask yourself what you can do from now until then to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
Vance visited Arizona on Tuesday, stopping in Peoria, part of the suburban metro around Phoenix, and is scheduled to stop in Tucson, in southern Arizona, later in the day. Donald Trump plans to rally in the state on Thursday. Democrats have a host of campaign surrogates, including former president Bill Clinton and current president Joe Biden, on the schedule this week in the final stretch before 5 November .
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Kamala Harris to NBC: reproductive rights 'cannot be negotiable'
Kamala Harris has done an interview with NBC’s Hallie Jackson, as part of her ongoing media blitz. The interview is airing in full at 6.30 ET, but here are some initial highlights.
Jackson asked which concessions could be on the table on reproductive rights, such as religious exemptions. Harris responded: “I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.” She declined to entertain hypotheticals about possible compromises with Republicans, saying: “A basic freedom has been taken from the women of America, the freedom to make decisions about their own body. And that cannot be negotiable.”
Harris also said she is not concerned with sexism impacting the race:
My challenge is the challenge of making sure I can talk with and listen to as many voters as possible and earn their vote. And I will never assume that anyone in our country should elect a leader based on their gender or their race, instead that that leader needs to earn the vote based on substance.
Asked if the “country is ready for a woman and a woman of color to be president”, Harris responded: “Absolutely … Part of what is important in this election is really not only turning the page, but closing the page and the chapter on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.”
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Scrutiny is growing about the Montana aerial firefighting company once led by Tim Sheehy, the former Navy Seal and Republican Senate candidate who could oust the Democrat incumbent Jon Tester in next month’s election.
According to NBC News, Sheehy’s Bridger Aerospace, a company he founded in 2013, negotiated a deal with Gallatin county in eastern Montana to use its pristine credit rating to raise $160m in bonds. The county was meant to benefit from Bridger’s plans to hire more workers and build two new aircraft hangers.
But the company used most of the money, or $134m, from the 2022 bond issue to pay back previous investment from Blackstone, a New York-based investment giant.
Bridger’s finances have been complicated by the fact that there were fewer wildfires to fight this year and thus less revenue for Bridger. As of Tuesday, the National Interagency Fire Center reported 42,603 wildfires nationwide this year compared with the 10-year average of 48,689 for the same period.
In financial filings for the quarterly period that ended 30 June 2024, Bridger said it had “a substantial amount of debt” and that failure to service that debt “could prolong the substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern”.
A victory for Sheehy in November could hand Republicans control of the Senate, making his connections to Bridger a vital topic as voters head to the polls.
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Today so far
Election day is exactly two weeks away, and today has been a frenzy of campaign activity.
Eminem reportedly will introduce Barack Obama when he appears in Detroit tonight, and Bruce Springsteen will headline two concerts as part of a series that will hit every swing state.
Obama also campaigned with Tim Walz in Wisconsin.
JD Vance dodged a question about whether he would strip immigrants with legal authorization of their status, at an event in Arizona.
Donald Trump will be in North Carolina, where Walz is holding a second event this evening.
Trump held a roundtable with Latino leaders but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc.
Harris will campaign in Houston on Friday, with an eye towards picking up Texas’s Senate seat and highlighting how abortion bans have affected women in the Republican bastion.
The US economy is poised for stronger growth than many wealthy nations, the International Monetary Fund said in forecasts released today.
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Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Joe Biden appeared alongside Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to discuss his administration’s work on lowering prescription drug prices.
But the president also took a chance to issue a warning that Trump and Vance were extreme. “This is not your father’s Republican party,” Biden said, referencing Strom Thurmond, the late senator from South Carolina who famously conducted the longest speaking filibuster in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Thurmond later moderated his stance.
“People change, but these guys just keep getting worse,” Biden said of the party now. “Get to the vote. Because the nation’s democracy depends on it.”
He shared an embrace with Sanders.
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At an early voting pop-up location at the University of Minnesota, hundreds of students waited in line to cast ballots on Tuesday – a sign of youth enthusiasm for the presidential election.
The early voting location at the campus’ Weisman Art Museum, a one-day on-campus polling place for any Minneapolis voter, was a first-time occasion made possible by recent changes in state law to allow for pop-up polling places to help voters who can be harder to reach, like college students.
I’m out at the University of Minnesota today for a pop-up early voting site - tons of traffic among students to cast a ballot pic.twitter.com/7cnsPA4UFE
— Rachel Leingang (@rachelleingang) October 22, 2024
“We brought the polls to them,” said Riley Hetland, a sophomore and undergraduate student government civic engagement director who helped plan the event. Hetland said the group has been going to classrooms and hosting tables around campus for weeks to get people registered to vote and help them make a plan to cast ballots. So far, they have gotten 12,000 voters to pledge to vote, double their goal of 6,000.
Madelyn Ekstrand finished her class for the day and waited about an hour, all told, to cast her ballot. The 21-year-old senior said abortion access and climate change were important to her, so she was voting for Harris. She thought she’d vote early to get it done, but didn’t realize how popular the choice would be – she was glad it was so busy.
“I’m happy to see people my age getting out and voting and being proactive and not waiting till the last second,” she said.
Georgia's supreme court has rejected a Republican effort reinstate last-minute election rule changes
The ruling upholds another order by a Fulton county judge, who invalidated last-minute rules made by Georgia’s state election board this year.
The rules, which were approved by Trump-aligned members of the board, would have required all ballots to be counted by hand on election night – a feat that would probably yield results that are far less accurate than a count done by ballot scanners. The changes would also have allowed officials investigate discrepancies in vote totals and conduct “reasonable inquiries” into irregularities, without clarifying what such an inquiry entailed.
The unanimous ruling by the conservative-majority supreme court did not touch on the legality of the seven rules – rather, it dismissed a request to hold a decision issued by a lower-court judge.
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It’s an arresting split screen: Barack Obama, in Madison, tells voters that when Trump and Vance are pressed to elaborate on their policies, “they’ll fall back on one answer: blame immigrants”.
“He wants you to believe that if you let him round up whoever he wants and ships them out, all your problems will be solved,” Obama says.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, JD Vance dodges a question about whether he would strip immigrants of their legal status.
JD Vance on Arizona doesn't directly answer a question about if supports stripping legal status from some migrants who are here legally and deporting them but it is pretty clear that he's fine with it pic.twitter.com/rhAdsb7mQy
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 22, 2024
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Obama tells voters: 'Don't be nostalgic for Trump economy. It was mine'
Barack Obama is hitting on a key issue for voters: the economy.
“Don’t have nostalgia for what his economy was. Because it was mine,” Obama said.
Polls show voters tend to favor Trump on the economy, yearning for the time, early in Trump’s presidency, pre-pandemic, when housing and grocery costs were lower.
“I spent eight years cleaning up the mess that Republicans left,” Obama said.
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Tim Walz has wrapped up his speech, after introducing Barack Obama.
The Democratic former president apologized for being late, saying he had an issue with his plane that forced him to drive to Madison from Chicago.
“So we board the plane … and then the pilot comes in and says: ‘Sir, there’s a pile of oil leaking out of the back of the plane.’ Now, I do not know anything about planes, except for the fact that it should not leak oil. So we had a nice road trip instead, and I am glad I made it,” Obama said.
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Walz warns that Trump could retaliate against him, if elected
Tim Walz encouraged the crowd not to grow sanguine about the possibility of a second Trump term, saying the Republican could retaliate against him if he returns to the White House.
“Here’s another reason that the stakes are so high in this election, something that I don’t think many of us have seen. You hear some version of this from the people in your life, neighbors, relatives, brothers, in some cases, who said, look, we made it through the first Trump term, we’ll get through a second. This Donald Trump … is far more dangerous … He is not the 2016 Donald Trump. This is a brand-new version,” Walz said.
He elaborated on why he believes that:
As Kamala says, he is a very unserious person, but the consequences of putting him back in office are deadly serious. He’s talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names. Look, I recognize I’m going to be at the top of that list. You think he’s stopping with me? He’s talking about you. He’s talking about using the United States military to go after people who disagree with his idiotic ideas, his unpatriotic ideas, his traitorous ideas. And he’s talking about using the military. He talks about the enemy from within.
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Taking a page from Trump's book, Walz insults Elon Musk with vulgarity
After Donald Trump recently called Kamala Harris a “shit vice-president”, Tim Walz just used similar language to describe Elon Musk’s enthusiastic campaigning for the former president.
Musk bounded on stage and briefly got airborne at a Trump rally in the Pennsylvania town where the former president nearly lost his life in an assassination attempt in July.
Here’s what Walz had to say about that:
So look, Elon is on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit on these things. You know it. Think about it … that guy is literally the richest man in the world spending millions of dollars to help Donald Trump buy an election.
Now, look, they’re saying the quiet parts out loud now, because Donald Trump has already promised that he would put Elon in charge of government regulations that oversee the businesses that Elon runs.
That’s a hell of a buy. He could spend billions to make more than $10bn on the back end. So in other words, Donald Trump, in front of the eyes of the American public, is promising corruption. That’s what he’s promising you. And you know what? I don’t believe, I don’t believe he keeps many promises, but he’ll keep that one.
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Walz says Trump's McDonald's appearance nothing but a 'stunt'
Tim Walz then took Donald Trump to task for the staged campaign event he held at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s over the weekend, saying the appearance amounted to a “stunt”.
“He went to a McDonald’s and dressed up as the drive-thru worker. They found him an apron his size and put it on him. And I was thinking, it is possible he mixed up his weekends and thought that it was Halloween already. He’s been forgetting things lately, as you might have noticed,” Walz said.
Pressing the attack, the Minnesota governor continued:
That restaurant, that restaurant wasn’t even open. It was a stunt – fake orders for fake customers. They even staged the drive thru. We know that they won’t let you walk through the damn drive thru. We knew that. They saw that happening.
But look, everything about this guy is fake. Everything he does is fake. Next, he’s going to be telling you he’s a cop or a construction worker because he dances to the Village People, so he knows the YMCA. And I’ll tell you this: so that five minutes he stood next to the deep fryer, I’ll guarantee you that’s the hardest that guy’s ever worked in his life. And that’s not a joke.
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Walz attacks Trump for saying no to second debate with Harris, saying he 'does not have stamina'
Tim Walz laid into Donald Trump for the meandering tone of his recent speeches and for declining to debate Kamala Harris for a second time.
“It takes stamina to run for president. It takes stamina to be president, and Donald Trump does not have stamina,” Walz began. “He has been rambling more than the normal rambling.”
Noting that Trump has lately taken to describing his speaking style as “the weave”, Walz said: “We know there’s only one weave that you know anything about, and it is not this. It is not this … He’s ducks debates, but you can’t blame him. When you get your ass whipped that hard, you don’t come back for seconds.”
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After the customary playing of Beyoncé’s Freedom – the song used at just about every Harris campaign event – Tim Walz strolled on stage.
He shouted out all the Democrats who introduced him, as well as the rally attendees: “But each of you, huge thank-you. Took time out of your busy lives, you came here, you came here because you believe in the promise of America and you believe in the democracy. Thank you.”
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Next up was Tammy Baldwin, the state Democratic senator who is locked in an increasingly tight re-election battle against Republican Eric Hovde.
Like Tony Evers before her on the lineup, Baldwin centered her appeal to voters on her support for abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act.
“Just a little bragging here: I wrote the provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they turn 26 and I will never stop fighting until all Americans have the quality, affordable healthcare that they need and deserve,” she said.
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Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, one of the early speakers at the Walz-Obama rally in Madison, didn’t hold back when describing what a second Donald Trump presidency would mean.
“We know Trump and Vance will try to pass a national abortion ban, roll back access to birth control, emergency contraception and even fertility treatments. We know that they’re going to repeal the Affordable Care Act and deny coverage to folks like me and so many others here in the audience, and people you care about who have a pre-existing condition,” he said.
The governor continued:
What Trump said about that – he’s got the concept of a plan. Now you take that concept for a plan and go pay a bill, it ain’t going to work. And they’re going to give more tax breaks for the ultra-rich and the big corporations instead of helping working families get ahead. And we know that a second Trump term would mean unchecked power with no guardrails to hold them back. That’s just bullshit.
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Actor Bradley Whitford – you may remember him from The West Wing or the many movies and television shows he’s appeared in since that series concluded – is giving a lengthy introduction for Tim Walz and Barack Obama in his home town Madison, Wisconsin.
“Make sure five people who you may assume are with you, make sure they make a plan and make sure they vote,” Whitford told the crowd.
“Because I got news for you. If we spend the next two weeks knocking doors, manning phones, doing everything we can to get out every vote, with your help, we’re gonna win. We’re not, we’re not, we’re not moving back, we’re not going back, we’re moving forward. We’re gonna win with your help. We’re gonna hold this country up.”
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Obama and Walz to hold joint rally in Wisconsin
Tim Walz is soon to take the stage along with Barack Obama in Madison, Wisconsin.
It’s the only joint appearance the two men will make today, though Obama will head to Detroit this evening, while Walz will hold a second event in Racine, Wisconsin.
The rally comes as Obama steps up his campaigning for Kamala Harris, with the general election two weeks away. The vice-president is meanwhile in Washington DC, where she has taped interviews with NBC News and Noticias Telemundo that will air in the evening.
We’ll let you know what Walz and Obama have to say.
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Donald Trump has a small lead among likely voters in Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports in a new poll.
He leads Kamala Harris with 47% support to the vice-president’s 43%, just outside the survey’s 3.1 percentage point margin of error.
However, all signs point to a race that remains either candidate’s to win. Here’s more from the Journal-Constitution:
But with 8% of likely voters indicating they’re still undecided, the race could break either way as early voting enters its second week.
Among the most telling takeaways of the poll is the stability of the race. As both campaigns pour time and treasure into Georgia, Trump’s support remains virtually unchanged since the AJC’s last poll in September. Harris’ dropped a fraction of a percentage point. The number of undecided voters has hardly budged.
“It’s a really close race. Neither side has this in the bag,” said University of Georgia political scientist Trey Hood, who oversaw the poll. “And that makes the next two weeks even more important.”
The poll suggests that Harris may still be struggling to woo Black voters, the bulwark of the Democratic coalition. About three-quarters of Black voters say they’ll vote for her, far behind the 88% that Joe Biden won in 2020 when he narrowly flipped Georgia.
That doesn’t mean those voters are gravitating toward Trump. One in 5 Black voters are undecided, while only 8% say they will cast their ballot for Trump. It indicates that Harris’ campaign, which has stepped up efforts to bolster her Black support, should be more worried about apathy than losing those voters to the GOP.
In another sign of concern for Harris, 11% of Democrats say they’re undecided. While few back third-party candidates — the Green Party’s Jill Stein and others registered minimal support — the poll suggests she has more work to do to consolidate her base and little time to do so.
CBS News reports that Republican former prosecutors have asked the justice department to investigate Elon Musk’s effort to pay voters to cast ballots for Donald Trump:
NEW: Justice Dept confirms to @cbsnews that it has received inquiry from former federal prosecutors and GOP appointees to “request that (Justice Dept) review payments that are being made by the Elon Musk-founded America PAC to voters in Pennsylvania and other states that…
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) October 22, 2024
Justice Dept confirms receipt of the letter... but declines to comment further
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) October 22, 2024
The former GOP-appointed officials want a DOJ review of Musk's effort
Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro made a similar suggestion over the weekend:
Donald Trump’s freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness style of delivering speeches doesn’t always hit the mark. The latest example is the daughter of golf legend Arnold Palmer, who did not like the way the former president talked about her late father’s penis, the Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas reports:
Arnold Palmer’s daughter says Donald Trump disrespected her late father’s memory by fawning over the size of the champion golfer’s penis at a campaign rally over the weekend.
“Hackneyed anecdotes from the locker room … seemed disrespectful and inappropriate to me,” Peg Palmer Wears told ABC News on Monday, two days after the former president publicly suggested her father was well endowed.
Wears added that “people coming to these rallies” hosted by Trump as he seeks a second presidency “deserve substance about plans [he] has as a candidate”. She specifically called on him to address “some of the threats he’s made to people”, an apparent reference to how he recently suggested sending the US military against his political adversaries when voters go to the polls during the 5 November presidential election.
“These are important issues that should be discussed for people when they’re getting ready to vote, and using my dad to cover over the important things just seems unacceptable to me,” Wears said.
Trump was speaking to his supporters in Palmer’s home town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Saturday at a regional airport named after him when the former president suddenly invoked the genitals of the renowned golfer, an old acquaintance.
“Arnold Palmer was all man,” Trump remarked. “When he took showers with other pros, they came out of there – they said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Trump's McDonald's shift was 'making fun' of workers
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic representative from New York, did not hold back in criticizing Trump’s minutes-long stint as a fry cook at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Sunday, saying he was “making fun” of workers.
“You’ve got Donald Trump putting on a little McDonald’s costume because he thinks that’s what people do,” she said Monday at a United Auto Workers event, per the Hill. “They’re not trying to empathize with us. They are making fun of us.
“Donald Trump thinks that people who work at McDonald’s are a joke.”
Trump stopped by the fast-food restaurant for a staged campaign event where employees showed him how to make fries. He then served pre-approved customers at the drive-through window.
Trump used the event to needle Kamala Harris, whom he has claimed lied about her time working at McDonald’s during college. Trump has made these claims without providing any evidence whatsoever.
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Top Senate Democrats released a report today urging voters to cast their ballots as early as possible. The document also sought to answer questions about the election process.
The lawmakers – which include New York Senator Chuck Schumer, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar – reminded voters that the outcome might not be known on 5 November as different states have varying timelines for accepting and processing mail-in ballots.
Their document also emphasizes that voter intimidation, as well as violence, “is never acceptable and any attempts to suppress the vote will not be tolerated”. The report notes that under federal law, “it is illegal to intimidate, threaten, or coerce anyone in order to interfere with their right to vote”.
“In our democracy, every eligible citizen should be able to freely cast a ballot in the way that works best for them and should not face restrictions or barriers to voting,” the report says.
The document also appears to try addressing voters’ concerns about whether votes were safe from interference, noting that officials from both political parties have “confirmed the security of recent elections” and that the infrastructure “has never been more secure”.
These statements come as Donald Trump, who still makes the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, has said that election fraud is unfolding in this race. (There is no evidence of massive voter fraud, including alleged irregularities surrounding mail-in ballots or non-citizens casting votes.)
“There have been efforts to stoke fear and chaos about the election with false allegations of voter fraud,” the report said. “The American people should beware of election misinformation.”
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The day so far
Election day is exactly two weeks away. Gulp. While there’s no telling who is going to win, NBC News and CNN reported this morning that Kamala Harris’s campaign is bracing for a very close election that could potentially see the “blue wall” swing states not vote as a bloc for the first time in decades. They are deploying a variety of surrogates on the campaign trail to make the case for the vice-president in the final two weeks, with Eminem reportedly set to introduce Barack Obama when he appears in Detroit tonight, and Bruce Springsteen to headline two concerts as part of a series that will hit every swing state. Obama will also campaign with Tim Walz in Wisconsin later today, JD Vance will hold two events in Arizona, Donald Trump will campaign in North Carolina, and Walz will hold a second event in the Badger state before the evening is through.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Trump held a round table with Latino leaders but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc.
Harris will campaign in Houston on Friday, with an eye towards picking up Texas’s Senate seat and highlighting how abortion bans have affected women in the Republican bastion.
The US economy is poised for stronger growth than many wealthy nations, the IMF said in forecasts released today.
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Bruce Springsteen to appear with Harris, Obama as campaign launches battleground state concert series
Kamala Harris’s campaign will hold concerts in the seven swing states, with legendary performer Bruce Springsteen to appear alongside the vice-president and Barack Obama on Thursday in Georgia, a senior campaign official said.
The Atlanta concert is the first of what the campaign is calling the When We Vote We Win series, and is aimed at whipping up voter enthusiasm ahead of 5 November. It will continue on Monday of next week in Philadelphia, when Springsteen and Obama will appear together, and concerts in the five other swing states will be announced soon, the official said.
Springsteen has backed Democrats before, and endorsed Harris earlier this month:
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Donald Trump’s round table with Latino leaders in Doral, Miami, has just concluded. The audience livened a little as the former president turned his attention, briefly, to immigration.
He repeated baseless and often-aired claims that foreign countries, especially Venezuela, were opening their prisons to send “violent gang members” and drug dealers into the US with military weapons. He called Kamala Harris “a stupid person” as he falsely labeled her Joe Biden’s “border tsar”.
His remarks segued quickly into an attack on Democrats for allegedly allowing transgender women to play women’s sports and a somewhat fanciful tale of a “a man who transitioned into, congratulations, a woman” smashing a baseball so hard it hit a female player on the head and “these young ladies said they’d never seen anything like it”.
Perhaps sensing things were going off topic, event host Jennifer Korn, a former White House aide and executive director of the Hispanic Leadership Network, attempted to interrupt with a “Mr President … ”
“I’ll leave it at that,” Trump said. “Does anyone else have anything to say?”
Robert Unanue, the president of Goya Foods, the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the US, took the microphone for a lengthy speech praising Trump, then the event wound down with a prayer session.
Honduran televangelist Guillermo Maltonado, founder of Miami megachurch the King Jesus International Ministry, said Trump would be re-elected because “there’s a higher assignment for him to finish with this nation”:
God sets up kings. We’re praying for the will of God to make [Trump] the 47th president.
• This post was amended on 23 October 2024; an earlier version said “transgender men” instead of transgender women.
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Eminem to introduce Obama at Detroit rally tonight – report
Detroit’s own Eminem will introduce Barack Obama during his rally in support of Kamala Harris this evening in Michigan’s largest city, and likely weigh in on the presidential election, CNN reports.
It’s a rare public appearance by the rapper who has been synonymous with the Motor City throughout his career, and who has occasionally condemned Harris’s opponent, Donald Trump.
The vice-president is not scheduled to attend the event, which begins at 7.45pm and is one of two appearances Obama is making for her campaign today. The former president is also rallying with Tim Walz in Madison, Wisconsin, at 2.30pm.
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Donald Trump hasn’t yet turned his attention to issues affecting Latino voters at his round table in Miami.
Instead he’s on a tear about the Biden administration’s policies that encourage the use of electric vehicles:
They want to go to all-electric cars. A charging station is the equivalent of a gas pump … They spent $8b for nine charging stations. It’s so out of control. They don’t want to change.
He was referring to a slow-moving $7.5bn federal program that by May had yielded a small number of charging stations, but has ramped since with more than 1,000 new installations nationwide each week, according to government figures.
Trump is promising that if he is re-elected US businesses would continue to benefit from tax cuts he enacted in his first term:
We gave you the biggest cut in taxes in the history of the country. We have a great foundation to build on a lot of companies coming in very fast.
At one point Trump confused Kamala Harris, the vice-president and his Democratic opponent, with Hillary Clinton, whom he beat in 2016, calling the nonexistent Biden-Clinton administration “the worst ever”.
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Donald Trump is telling a roundtable of Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida, that he expects Hispanic voters to help sweep him to victory on 5 November.
He claimed falsely that “all the polls” show him ahead among Hispanic voters in swing states, despite surveys showing exactly the opposite.
He kicked off the event by addressing the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, where he was campaigning yesterday. It was a “horrible event” he said, repeating debunked claims about the federal government’s emergency response.
“Fema responded not well, the White House has done a poor job. They should be ashamed of themselves,” he said.
Numerous politicians, including some prominent Republicans, have praised the speed at which federal resources and help reached the hardest-hit areas.
Trump has yet to start answering questions, instead delivering a lengthy monologue with familiar attacks on Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, whom he beat in 2016.
It’s the second time in a week that the former president has addressed Latino voters in Miami.
In a town hall hosted by Univision, the largest US Spanish-language network, on Thursday, Trump mostly dodged awkward questions about immigration, and repeated debunked claims that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets and “other things too that they’re not supposed to”.
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Meanwhile, senator Ted Cruz’s campaign has hit out at Kamala Harris after it was announced she would visit Texas and appear alongside his opponent Colin Allred on Friday.
“Colin Allred is Kamala Harris. They have spent the last four years working hand-in-hand against Texans and the American people with their radical policies, whether those be pushing to allow boys in girls’ sports, allowing dangerous illegal aliens to come into our country or trying to destroy the oil and gas industry in Texas,” a Cruz campaign spokesperson said in a statement.
“Colin and Kamala share an agenda, and now they’ll share a stage for all Texans to see.”
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Trump to meet with Latino leaders in Florida
The first campaign event of the day is Donald Trump’s round table with Latino leaders, which is scheduled to begin now at his golf resort in Doral, Florida.
Latinos are a voting bloc whose support is expected to be crucial to deciding the election, both in swing states and in states and congressional districts that will determine which party controls the Senate and House of Representatives.
Ahead of the event, Miami’s Trump-supporting Republican mayor, Francis Suarez, told CNN in an interview that he does not believe the former president’s vows to carry out mass deportations and impose draconian policies against undocumented migrants will hurt his support with Hispanic voters:
Law-abiding Hispanics care more about having a prosperous future for themselves and their children than they do about people who are in this country illegally. And so I think there’s a misperception that all they care about is, you know, immigration. And I think … that is, frankly, somewhat racist.
You know, I think Hispanics care more about making sure that they have an opportunity to succeed, making sure that inflation doesn’t crush them every single day as it’s done under this administration. And they’re law-abiding people, like my parents are, who came to this country at 12 and seven from – from Cuba, which is a communist country and has – and has only produced misery and poverty for its people. And they see a lot of the same rhetoric being, unfortunately, espoused by the Democratic party and that’s something that concerns them.
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Harris campaign reportedly bracing for tight election, fears 'blue wall' could crumble
Kamala Harris’s campaign expects Donald Trump to put up a strong performance in the 5 November presidential election that could break apart the “blue wall” swing states for the first time in decades, according to two reports published this morning.
While neither story suggests that the vice-president’s campaign does not think it has a path to victory, the reports underscore the potency of Trump’s bid for office and the fact that the race remains essentially tied despite weeks of vigorous campaigning and fundraising by Harris and her surrogates.
Citing people with knowledge of Harris’s campaign strategy, NBC News reports that they are concerned that the blue wall of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania could, for the first time since 1988, not vote as a bloc in November, imperiling the vice-president’s path to the Oval Office.
The campaign is also concerned that Hurricane Helene’s ravages in North Carolina and the struggles of the controversial Republican candidates for governor are undermining Harris’s chances of winning that state. Here’s more:
Recent discussions have centered on the possibility of an anomaly happening this year with just part of the blue wall breaking its way. The conversations have focused on whether Michigan or Wisconsin “fall” to former president Donald Trump while the two other states go blue, according to three sources with knowledge of the campaign’s strategy.
Losing Wisconsin or Michigan would mean that even if Harris secures Pennsylvania – where both Harris and Trump have spent the most time and resources – she would not reach the necessary 270 electoral votes to win the White House without winning another battleground state or possibly two.
“There has been a thought that maybe Michigan or Wisconsin will fall off,” said a senior Harris campaign official, who stressed that the bigger concern is over Michigan. Two other people with knowledge of campaign strategy – who, like others in this article, were granted anonymity to speak candidly – also underscored deep concern about Michigan. Those people still believe that all the states are close and that there are alternative routes to victory.
A Harris campaign spokesperson pushed back against the notion about deep concerns over Michigan, pointing to recent public polling. A Detroit News poll conducted 1-4 October found Harris, who was campaigning in Michigan on Monday, holding a slight lead in the state, as did a Washington Post poll on Monday.
…
While North Carolina is still in the campaign’s sights and Democrats maintain strong organization and leadership there, the Harris team is far less bullish about victory, four people with knowledge of the dynamics said.
“Of all of the seven [states], that one seems to be a little bit slipping away,” the Harris campaign official said of North Carolina.
CNN, meanwhile, heard from top Harris adviser David Plouffe, who acknowledged that the race may very well remain tight right down to election day:
Historically, it would be unusual to have seven states come down to a point or less,” David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager who now serves as a senior adviser to Harris, said of the battleground landscape. “But I think at this point, you have to assume that’s a distinct possibility.”
Plouffe and other Harris advisers do not believe Trump’s largely outsourced door-knocking and other on-the-ground outreach operations can match what the national Democrats and the Harris campaign – which inherited some of the same team from President Joe Biden – spent a year putting together. But they believe this advantage can only take them so far.
“Democrats wish Donald Trump wouldn’t get more than 46% of the vote,” Plouffe said, referring to the national popular vote percentage the former president secured in his previous campaigns. But in the battleground states, “that’s not reality. He’s going to get up to 48% in all of these states. And so we just have to make sure we’re hitting our win number, which depending on the state, could be 50, could be 49.5.”
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The Harris campaign just announced that the vice-president will campaign in Philadelphia on Sunday.
The announcement was light on details, but needless to say it’s difficult for Harris to win the White House without carrying Pennsylvania, and many Democratic voters live in and around Philadelphia.
Harris to campaign in Texas with eye towards pulling off Senate surprise
Kamala Harris will return to Texas in the final days of the presidential campaign for an event that will highlight the stories of women harmed by the state’s strict abortion ban.
In Houston on Friday, she will appear alongside the Democratic nominee for Senate, Colin Allred, who is locked in an unexpectedly tight race with the Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz.
Democrats have turned their attention to the Texas Senate race, despite a long history of falling short in the Republican-dominated state. With Democrats poised to lose a seat in West Virginia and Montana appearing to slip away, their best opportunity to keep control of the Senate may run through the Lone Star state.
According to a senior campaign official, Harris will travel to Texas from Georgia, two states with the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. The Democrat has repeatedly assailed Donald Trump for appointing the three supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe v Wade and paved the way for a wave of new restrictions and near-total bans in Republican-led states.
Harris has made abortion rights the centerpiece of her short campaign for the White House. At campaign stops, and the party’s convention, she has shared the stories of women and families affected by abortion bans, among them Texas resident Amanda Zurawski, who nearly died after being denied an abortion under the state’s law.
Zurawski, along with the family of Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman who died after her medical care was delayed under the state’s abortion law, have become powerful surrogates for Harris’s campaign.
Abortion has been a central issue in the Texas Senate race. Allred has made Cruz’s staunch anti-abortion views a central plank of his campaign. Polls show Cruz with a steady lead, though the race has appeared to tighten in recent weeks.
While in Houston, Harris will also sit for an interview with academic turned Ted talks host and popular podcaster Brené Brown.
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Despite campaign rhetoric, IMF projections show US economy better than most
On the campaign trail, you’ll hear Donald Trump assail the state of the economy and say Kamala Harris is to blame. And you’ll hear Harris vow to lower prices for everything from housing to healthcare.
There is no doubt that Americans have suffered from the wave of inflation that racked the country over the past three years, but has recently subsided. What’s less discussed is that the US economy is, in fact, far healthier than many others.
Just-released forecasts from the IMF, the Washington-based crisis lender whose economic data is closely watched from Wall Street to the White House, shows that the US economy is poised for some of the strongest growth among wealthy nations in the years to come, beating out the United Kingdom, Japan and many European nations:
IMF Growth Forecast: 2024
— IMF (@IMFNews) October 22, 2024
🇺🇸US: 2.8%
🇩🇪Germany: 0.0%
🇫🇷France: 1.1%
🇮🇹Italy: 0.7%
🇪🇸Spain: 2.9%
🇬🇧UK: 1.1%
🇯🇵Japan: 0.3%
🇨🇦Canada: 1.3%
🇨🇳China: 4.8%
🇮🇳India: 7.0%
🇷🇺Russia: 3.6%
🇧🇷Brazil: 3.0%
🇲🇽 Mexico: 1.5%
🇸🇦KSA: 1.5%
🇳🇬Nigeria: 2.9%
🇿🇦RSA: 1.1%https://t.co/sDv9tK6YQb pic.twitter.com/epCi3VT13o
These are, of course, just projections, and as the Guardian’s Larry Elliott reports, various things could undercut them – including some of the policies Trump is campaigning on:
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The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino earlier this month took the political pulse of young voters nationwide, particularly when it came to the question of which presidential candidate to support. Here’s what she found:
It was the height of “brat summer”. Kamala Harris was a “femininomenon”, electrifying a high-stakes presidential race that many of the country’s youngest voters had been dreading: a rematch between the two oldest candidates in American history.
Chartreuse-blocked memes and coconut emojis filled social media feeds. The tidal wave of young “Kamalove” sparked a rush of small-dollar donations and volunteer sign-ups for her days-old campaign. For an extremely online generation of young Democrats, the vibes were so good.
On the ground in St Louis, a cadre of young progressives were gathering for an entirely different election – one with virtually no bearing on the balance of power in Washington, but one they believed mattered deeply. There in Missouri’s first congressional district, representative Cori Bush was fighting for her political survival.
Many of the twentysomethings had traveled from out of state, sacrificing summer jobs and sleeping on yoga mats to campaign for Bush in the sticky August heat. “We just stopped our lives and went to St Louis,” said John Paul Mejia, a 22-year-old student and climate activist.
Mejia was there as part of Protect Our Power (Pop), a youth coalition that came together earlier this year for what he described as a “David-and-Goliath” mission to defend leftwing members of Congress against a well-funded effort to unseat them.
To them, Bush, the nurse turned racial justice activist, was one of the few elected leaders who shared their sense of urgency about everything from the country’s affordability crisis to safeguarding abortion access.
As a newly elected member of Congress, Bush had slept on the steps of the US Capitol to protest against the expiration of a federal eviction moratorium. The action paid off: the Biden administration extended the pause. In warning about the threat to reproductive rights, Bush testified before a House panel that she had had an abortion at 18 after becoming pregnant by rape. In 2023, she emerged as one of the strongest critics of Israel’s war in Gaza, a stance that reflected a groundswell of youth dissent but ultimately imperiled her congressional career.
“There’s pretty much nobody else, even members of Congress who are closer to our age, in some instances, who actually represent what our generation cares about,” Vincent Vertuccio, a 21-year-old college student and an activist with Pop, said of the progressive Squad members. “If we lose these people, even one or two, it’s a direct diminishment of our power.”
Harris matching Biden's 2020 margin with young voters as support grows – poll
Kamala Harris has a significant advantage over Donald Trump among young voters, matching the lead Joe Biden ended up taking in the 2020 election, a new poll finds.
The survey from CNBC Generation Lab shows Harris up 20 percentage points with voters aged 18 to 34, with 60% support compared with Trump’s 40%. That’s about the same margin by which Biden won the group four years ago.
It’s also an improvement from July, when the vice-president was at 46%, Trump at 34% and independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr picking up 21%. Kennedy has since dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump.
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We’ll see Donald Trump around 11am, when he holds a round table with Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida.
Then he’ll head to battleground state of North Carolina for a rally in Greensboro at 7pm, making his second visit to the state in as many days.
His running mate, JD Vance, will be in Arizona, campaigning in Peoria, outside Phoenix, at 4pm, then again in Tucson at 7.30pm.
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Obama, Walz to stump for Harris in swing states
Democrats are deploying one of their best-known figures as they seek an edge against Donald Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, with Barack Obama holding two events today in swing states Kamala Harris’s campaign covets most.
The former president will at 2.30pm appear in Madison, Wisconsin, alongside Tim Walz, then hold a solo event in Detroit at 7.45pm. Walz will stay in Wisconsin, where he has an event in Racine at 7.30pm.
The pair’s visit to Wisconsin is to mark the start of early voting in the state, one of three in the Democrats’ “blue wall” along the Great Lakes that are crucial to Harris’s White House hopes.
Expect to see a lot more of both Barack and Michelle Obama before this election is through:
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After a busy day of campaigning with Liz Cheney on Monday, Kamala Harris is having a comparably quiet one today.
She has no public campaign events scheduled, but will sit for two interviews. The first is with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson and will air at 6.30pm ET, and the second with Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro, which will be broadcast at 7pm.
The vice-president has been doing a lot more interviews and media appearances lately as the election enters the home stretch. Here’s more on that:
Thomas Klingenstein, chairperson of the rightwing Claremont Institute, has cemented his place in the pantheon of Republican megadonors with a more than $10m spending spree so far in the 2024 election cycle, according to campaign contributions recorded by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Klingenstein has been one of Claremont’s largest donors for decades. As the institute has made its hard-right, pro-Trump drift in recent years, Klingenstein has continued to publicly describe US politics with extremist rhetoric, calling it a “cold civil war”, and has encouraged rightwingers to join the fight to defeat what he calls “the woke regime”.
His spending puts him at the forefront of a class of donors who are explicitly supporting more extreme and polarizing politics in Trump’s Republican party.
The largesse has already dwarfed his contributions in previous election seasons. The money has gone exclusively to Republicans, and has included seven-figure donations to at least four pro-Trump Pacs in recent months.
The Guardian emailed Klingenstein for comment on this reporting but received no reply.
In the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency, a young lawyer with crisply shorn blond hair approached the podium at a gathering for Texas members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that wields immense power in the US judicial system. As vice-president of the group’s Fort Worth chapter, Matthew Kacsmaryk had the honor of presenting the first speaker.
“We are blessed to have Judge Edith Jones,” Kacsmaryk announced. Jones, a longtime judge on the US fifth circuit court of appeals, stepped on stage to introduce the evening’s guest, her friend, the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. In her introduction, Jones also hailed the four new conservative judges Trump had appointed to join her on the appeals court.
“They’ve raised the bar for the fifth circuit since I got on,” she said. “And that’s thanks to the Federalist Society, to Leonard.”
Leonard Leo needed no last name in his introduction to this crowd as he took his seat in a black leather chair across from Thomas. The justice was the featured speaker but Leo may have been the most important person in the American legal system in that room – a conservative activist who had built the Federalist Society into a political powerhouse and helped Trump create the supreme court majority that, in 2022, erased federal protections for abortion.
His influence continues to be on display now in one of the most consequential cases moving through the American legal system – one that seeks to strike another blow to abortion rights and could possibly bankrupt Planned Parenthood, one of the nation’s leading providers of healthcare for women. It’s a lawsuit that has been filed by an anti-abortion activist tied to Leo and heard by judges – from the lower courts to the fifth circuit appeals court – who are also linked to Leo.
Dustin Guastella, research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623, writes:
The 2024 campaign has entered the final stretch and, as polls tighten, it seems Kamala Harris plans to lean into attacking Donald Trump as a threat to democracy.
Over the past week the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times and even the conservative National Review have all reported or commented on the messaging pivot. In a newly unveiled official campaign ad, a disembodied voice warns gravely that a second Trump term “would be worse. There would be no one to stop his worst instincts. No guard rails.”
At a recent rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris reminded her supporters of Project 2025, the “detailed and dangerous plan” that she believes an “increasingly unstable and unhinged” Trump will follow to cement “unchecked power”. She sounded the alarm about the dire threat Trump poses to “your fundamental freedoms” and how in his second term he would be “essentially immune” from oversight.
This is hair-raising stuff. And the campaign thinks that menacing warnings like these will motivate some urgency to march to the polls for Harris. The only problem is that voters, especially working-class voters, seem uniquely uninspired by the appeal.
Democratic US vice-president Kamala Harris held a marginal 46% to 43% lead over Republican former president Donald Trump, with a glum electorate saying the country is on the wrong track, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Harris’ lead in the six-day poll, which closed on Monday, differed little from her 45% to 42% advantage over Trump in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted a week earlier, reinforcing the view that the contest is extraordinarily tight with just two weeks left before the 5 November election.
Reuters reported:
Both polls showed Harris with a lead within the margin of error, with the latest poll showing her ahead just 2 percentage points when using unrounded figures.
The new poll showed that voters have a dim view of the state of the economy and immigration – and they generally favour Trump’s approach on these issues.
Some 70% of registered voters in the poll said their cost of living was on the wrong track, while 60% said the economy was heading in the wrong direction and 65% said the same of immigration policy.
Voters also said the economy and immigration, together with threats to democracy, were the country’s most important problems. Asked which candidate had the better approach on the issues, Trump led on the economy – 46% to 38% – and on immigration by 48% to 35%.
Immigration also ranked as the number one issue when respondents were asked what the next president should focus on most in their first 100 days in office. Some 35% picked immigration, with 11% citing income inequality and equal 10% shares citing healthcare and taxes.
But Trump fared poorly on the question of which candidate was better to address political extremism and threats to democracy, with Harris leading 42% to 35%. She also led on abortion policy and on healthcare policy.
Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, on Monday condemned Republican-imposed bans on the procedure and urged conservatives to support Democrat Kamala Harris for US president.
Cheney was speaking during three joint events with the vice-president in three swing states aimed at prising suburban Republican voters away from party nominee Donald Trump. She has become the Democrat’s most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumoured to be in contention for a seat in a potential Harris cabinet.
At the final event in Waukesha, Wisconsin, against a blue backdrop patterned with the words “country over party”, Cheney, 58, suggested that Republican-led states have overreached in restricting abortion since the supreme court’s 2022 Dobbs decision ended it as a constitutional right.
“I’m pro-life and I have been very troubled, deeply troubled by what I have watched happen in so many states since Dobbs,” said the former Wyoming congresswoman and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney. “I have been troubled by the extent to which you have women who – as the vice-president said, in some cases have died – who can’t get medical treatment that they need because providers are worried about criminal liability.”
Opening summary
Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest from the campaign trail, with polling day now just two weeks away.
We start with the news that Donald Trump has urged Christian voters on Monday to participate in the 2024 election, claiming that a Kamala Harris administration would restrict religious freedoms and casting himself as a protector of Christians.
During an event in North Carolina billed as an “11th-Hour Faith Leaders Meeting”, a series of conservative pastors warmed up for Trump, including Guillermo Maldonado, an “apostle” and longtime Trump ally who cast the election in perilous terms.
“You know, we’re now in spiritual warfare,” said Maldonado, alluding to the idea that Christians are at war on the supernatural plane against dark forces that affect the real world. “It’s beyond warfare between the left and the right. It’s between good and evil. There’s a big fight right now that is affecting our country and we need to take back our country.”
Introducing Trump, Ben Carson, the campaign’s National Faith Chairman for the 2024 election, openly rejected the idea of secular society.
“This election is about whether we are a secular nation or one nation under God,” said Carson, echoing the aims of Christian nationalists who view the US as a Christian nation that must return to God.
In other news:
Liz Cheney, former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, condemned Republican bans on the procedure and urged conservatives on Monday to support Kamala Harris.
Jill Biden acknowledged on Monday that her husband made “the right call” by stepping down from his run for re-election.
Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, said Elon Musk’s plan to give away $1m a day in support of Donald Trump is a reflection of a ticket with “no plan”.
The Central Park Five sued Trump for defamation after he falsely said during the presidential debate that they had pleaded guilty to a brutal rape 35 years ago, despite the fact that they had their convictions overturned.
A Republican county supervisor in Arizona who refused to certify the 2022 midterm election has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.
The politics writer Olivia Nuzzi and New York magazine have parted ways after she was placed on leave following the disclosure that she had engaged in a “personal” relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Key rightwing legal groups tied to Trump and his allies have banked millions of dollars from conservative foundations and filed multiple lawsuits challenging voting rules in swing states.
Trump doubled down on false claims about the federal government’s hurricane recovery efforts and promoted baseless conspiracy theories about immigration.
