Closing summary
That’s all from the live blog today, we’ll be back again on Monday with all the latest updates from the US election campaign. In the meantime, here are the key developments from Sunday, when Kamala Harris and Donald Trump hit the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina:
Kamala Harris pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population two days out from the election. Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Biden in 2020, helping him to a narrow victory over Donald Trump. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the vice-president’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza
Harris was making her fourth stop of the day in Michigan, having earlier spoken at a church in Detroit and stopped by a barber shop in Pontiac. Trump is holding his final rally of the campaign in Michigan on Monday night.
Donald Trump said he should never have left the White House after his defeat in 2020 and joked darkly he would be fine with reporters getting shot. “We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said at a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” he said before abruptly cutting himself off. In other comments, as he denigrated the media, he said: “To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through fake news, and I don’t mind that much, because, I don’t mind. I don’t mind.”
Donald Trump again suggested he would give a role on health policy to Robert F Kennedy Jr at a rally in Macon, Georgia. “I told a great guy, RFK Jr., Bobby — I said, ‘Bobby, you work on women’s health, you work on health, you work on what we eat. You work on pesticides. You work on everything,” he said. Kennedy, a well known vaccine sceptic, on Saturday said that the former president would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected.
Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for California’s Proposition 36, which would make it easier for prosecutors to send repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot. The measure would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanors.
The Trump campaign claimed that recent polling by the New York Times and the Des Moines Register is designed to suppress Trump voter turnout by presenting a bleak picture of Trump’s re-election prospects. The memo claims that the Times’s polls have biased samples and overrepresent Democratic voters compared with actual voter registration and turnout trends.
Trump also disputed a shock Iowa poll that found Kamala Harris leading the former president in the typically red state 47% to 44%. “No President has done more for FARMERS, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network on Sunday morning. “In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”
Trump has talked about a huge array of topics, from hurricane Helene (he claims there was no disaster aid for places like Georgia because it was spent on illegal immigrants) and Elon Musk and the economy again.
If he gets back in power, he says, he will “end the war in Ukraine”, “stop the chaos in the Middle East”, and “prevent World War III from happening.” He will also “crush violent crime” and give police more resources, “strengthen and modernise military” and build a missile defence shield made in the US. He also talks a lot about what he calls “transgender insanity”.
He says there should be one-day voting with paper ballots, with polls closing at 9pm and the result announced half an hour later. Then he talks about the “right to try” an act that allows people with life-threatening illnesses to try drugs that aren’t yet approved by the FDA.
He finally ends with some more on the theme of “making America great again” and YMCA blasts out with Trump doing his robot dance and fist pumps as he makes his exit.
Here’s our full report on Harris’ rally in Michigan:
Kamala Harris pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population two days out from the election.
Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Biden in 2020, helping him to a narrow victory over Donald Trump. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the vice-president’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza, and polling suggests that these voters are gravitating towards Jill Stein, the Green party candidate.
With Harris and the former president essentially tied in Michigan, a drop in voting numbers for either could be critical, and Harris made a clear appeal at the beginning of her speech.
“We are joined today by leaders of the Arab American community, which has deep and proud roots here in Michigan, and I want to say this year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon,” Harris said.
“It is devastating, and as president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.”
Speaking at the Michigan State University campus, Harris repeated her campaign promise to “turn the page on a decade of politics driven by fear and division”. Harris did not mention Trump by name in East Lansing, as she gave an address that struck a hopeful tone for the future.
“America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow American not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” she said.
Stepping away from Trump’s rally for a moment, a federal judge has ruled that Iowa can continue challenging the validity of hundreds of ballots from potential noncitizens even though critics said the effort threatens the voting rights of people who’ve recently become US citizens. Associated Press reports:
US district judge Stephen Locher, an appointee of President Joe Biden, sided with the state in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in the Iowa capital of Des Moines on behalf of the League of Latin American Citizens of Iowa and four recently naturalized citizens. The four were on the state’s list of questionable registrations to be challenged by local elections officials.
The state’s Republican attorney general and secretary of state argued that investigating and potentially removing 2,000 names would prevent illegal voting by noncitizens. GOP officials across the US have made possible voting by noncitizen immigrants a key election-year talking point even though it is rare. Their focus has come with former President Donald Trump falsely suggesting that his opponents already are committing fraud to prevent his return to the White House.
In his ruling Sunday, Locher pointed to a US Supreme Court decision four days prior that allowed Virginia to resume a similar purge of its voter registration rolls even though it was impacting some US citizens. He also cited the Supreme Court’s recent refusal to review a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision on state electoral laws surrounding provisional ballots. Those Supreme Court decisions advise lower courts to “act with great caution before awarding last-minute injunctive relief,” he wrote.
Locher also said the state’s effort does not remove anyone from the voter rolls, but rather requires some voters to use provisional ballots.
“I’m the only president in 82 years I had no wars,” Trump says. Then he starts talking about the latest jobs report, which he says is fake. This starts a rant on the issue of “fake jobs reports” in which he also castigates the “fake news media”.
“They hate me but ratings predominate over hate,” he says of the media. Then he again lays into illegal migrants, who he says have taken every single new job. Then he meanders into the problem of inflation and the Great Depression, saying: “I would not want to be Herbert Hoover, what a time that was, people jumping off buildings.”
He tells a short story about an “old woman goes into a grocery store and she takes three apples, that’s what she lives on.” But she can only afford to pay for two, he says. “We will make America affordable again,” he says.
Then he talks about his poll numbers.
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Trump spends some more time demonising migrants saying “the United States is now an occupied country” and claims November 4 will be “liberation day”. He says Harris has “imported” criminals and that he will expedite deportations of criminal gangs.
He once again says he will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the country to deport non-citizens during war time, and calls for the death penalty for any migrant who kills an American or a law enforcement officer. He also says he will immediately ban sanctuary cities.
He then pivots to talking about the economy. “We’ll handle inflation, you know how we’ll handle it, we’ll drill, drill, drill,” he says, repeating his line that Robert F Kennedy shouldn’t interfere with the “liquid gold”. Then he jumps to the terrorist group Isis, claiming he defeated it in four weeks.
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Trump next spoke a little about the case of Minelys Zoe Rodriguez-Ramirez, who was found dead last week after allegedly being murdered by an illegal immigrant, and invited her mother up to talk about her daughter.
Trump has repeatedly targeted immigrants in his campaign, blaming them for crime and stealing American jobs, and threatening to carry out the “largest deportation program in American history”, a phrase he repeats in Macon.
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Donald Trump starts by promising to “end inflation”, stop the “invasion of criminals” from across the border and bring back the “American Dream” and urges his supporters to vote on Tuesday.
“This will be the Golden Age of America,” he says.
Then he talks about how he has urged Robert F Kennedy Jr, who dropped his own presidential campaign to back Trump, to work on women’s health and pesticides.
“I told a great guy, RFK Jr., Bobby — I said, ‘Bobby, you work on women’s health, you work on health, you work on what we eat. You work on pesticides. You work on everything,” he says. Kennedy said on Saturday that the former president would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected.
It has been rumoured Kennedy, a vaccine-sceptic among other things, could take a role in leading health and food policy in a Trump administration.
However Trump adds that he won’t let Kennedy, also known as an environmental lawyer, interfere in drilling for oil. He says: “The one thing you have to let me do, Bobby, I gotta work the liquid gold,” Trump says.
Then he experiments with Kamala Harris’ name a bit, ending with: “When I says Harris nobody knows who the hell I’m talking about.”
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Donald Trump has finally made his way on to the stage in Macon, Georgia, 90 minutes late. He walks slowly, sways a bit to the music and points to the crowd. It’s his third rally of the day after previous stops in the other battleground states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina. When he starts speaking his voice sounds hoarse.
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And a few pics from the Trump campaign on Sunday:
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We’re still waiting for Trump in Georgia, where we’ve just had Stephen Miller, senior Trump advisor, on stage and now House majority leader Steven Scalise. Scalise promises Trump, who is now well over an hour late, will be out in a few minutes.
A few pics from the Harris campaign trail in Michigan on Sunday:
More than 77 million Americans have already voted ahead of Tuesday’s election, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. That’s almost half the total of 160 million votes cast in 2020, the highest turnout the US has seen in more than a century.
Of the votes so far returned, 42,195,018 were returned in person and 35,173,674 by mail.
MESA, Arizona — At 20 years old, Melissa Gutierrez has never voted in an election, but she’s not really sure that her vote matters all that much, anyway. She’s still baffled by the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote but won the presidency in 2016 due to, as Gutierrez recalled it, “the school thing”.
“The electoral college?” a reporter asked Gutierrez, who stood on the porch of her parents’ home in Mesa, Arizona.
“Yeah, there you go,” Gutierrez said. “I was like: what the fuck is the point?”
A single vote in Arizona, however, may be far more important to the future of the United States than the millions of votes cast in states like New York and California. Under the electoral college, candidates only win the White House by winning the popular votes within states and then tallying up each state’s electoral college votes – which are assigned based on a state’s population – until they hit the magic number of 270. (However, Maine and Nebraska can split their electoral college votes up to different candidates.)
In 2020, Joe Biden became the first Democrat since 1996 to win Arizona and its 11 electoral college votes. He eked out that victory with just over 10,000 votes – making Arizona one of the most prized swing states in the 2024 election.
Informed of Arizona’s importance in the election, Gutierrez said: “I honestly did not even know that.”
Gutierrez is far from the only American to be baffled by the electoral college system: just 40% can name the institution that chooses the president if the electoral college ends in a tie, the Pew Research Center has found. (It’s the House of Representatives, but the Senate plays a role, too.) In general, Americans have relatively low civics literacy. While 65% can name all three branches of government, 15% cannot name any, according to the 2024 version of the annual Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey. One in five Americans also cannot name a single right guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Many Americans also have a low view of the electoral college. More than 60% of Americans would like to see it abolished, according to Pew. “This is a very unique and bespoke system that I think nobody would create again today,” Wendy R Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, told the New York Times.
Gutierrez said she plans to vote for Kamala Harris on Tuesday. She wishes that Harris would take a more hardline approach to immigration, but she also finds Trump to be nonsensical.
“Honestly, I just want the abortion access,” Gutierrez said. “That’s it.”
We’re still waiting for Trump in Georgia, where lieutenant governor of Georgia, Burt Jones, earlier took to the stage followed by Herschel Walker, a former Republican Senate candidate in Georgia. Now we’re listening to a selection of pop and rock classics.
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At a Harris event in central Phoenix, actor Eva Longoria commented on the comedian who insulted Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” saying it was aligned with how Trump has talked about Latinos since the start.
He started his quest for president by calling Mexicans “rapists,” she said, and he ended it with the rally where Puerto Ricans were insulted.
“We were all Puerto Rican that day, and we were all Mexican on the first day,” she said. “As Latinos, we can decide who is the next President of the United States, because Latinos are Americans.”
I’m out in central Phoenix at a restaurant where a host of Latino actors, influencers and politicians are rallying for Kamala Harris and Ruben Gallego, the state’s Democratic senator nominee, in an event called “pachanga to the polls.”
Signs, pins and shirts around the venue show Harris and Gallego on loteria cards in the unexpectedly rainy day in the desert city.
Rosario Dawson, an actor and longtime activist, said she had been involved in political causes since childhood because of her family, and she had now just brought her daughter to the polls to vote for the first time.
“I have been walking in marches since Al Sharpton still wore tracksuits,” Dawson said.
The raucous crowd of ardent Harris supporters, wearing camo hats and holding blue Harris signs, cheered for Gallego and resoundingly answered yes when asked if they had already voted.
Democratic senator Mark Kelly introduced his wife, former representative Gabby Giffords, who was injured in an assassination attempt when she was a member of Congress. He said she was responsible for getting him into the business.
“Sometimes I think to myself, if I was the person who would have been injured, would Gabby have become an astronaut?” he joked.
Giffords spoke about how Joe Biden reached out to her during her recovery and called him a great man, and said Harris would defeat the gun lobby.
Senator Marco Rubio is now on the stage and is accusing the mainstream media of attempting to “undermine and prevent Trump from being elected”.
He’s also making fun of Harris’ laugh.
Observers have suggested the Trump campaign is trying to lay the foundation for claiming the election was stolen if he loses by planting the idea that the only way he could lose is because Democrats cheat.
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Next up we’re expecting Donald Trump to take the stage in Macon, Georgia, where Arkansas governor and former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is currently warming up the crowd.
Georgia is another swing state – it went for Biden in 2020 by 11,779 votes, out of 5m ballots cast, the first time since 1992 that the state turned blue.
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And that’s it from Harris, who wraps up her speech, waves to supporters and makes her exit to the familiar sound of Beyoncé’s Freedom.
Harris homes in on young people at Michigan rally
After talking about her history as a prosecutor, Harris also homes in on young people and first-time voters, proclaiming “I love Gen Z!”
“You are all rightly impatient for change,” she says, repeating remarks she has made recently about the younger generation having grown up only knowing the climate crisis, active shooter drills and with women having fewer rights than their mothers.
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She starts by making remarks on the Middle East, noting in particular the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. “This year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon, it is devastating,” she says.
As president I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.
Michigan is the swing state with the US’s largest Arab American population and many have been dismayed by the Biden administration’s response to the Gaza war. While calling for peace, it has also supplied Israel with billions of dollars worth of weapons.
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Kamala Harris has taken the stage in East Lansing, Michigan. We’ll bring you any standout moments as they happen. This is Helen Livingstone taking over from my colleague, Coral Murphy Marcos.
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The day so far
The Trump campaign claimed that recent polling by the New York Times and the Des Moines Register is designed to suppress Trump voter turnout by presenting a bleak picture of Trump’s re-election prospects. The memo claims that the Times’s polls have biased samples and overrepresent Democratic voters compared with actual voter registration and turnout trends.
Kamala Harris made several stops in Michigan today, delivering remarks at a church service in the morning and later visiting a chicken and waffles joint in Detroit. She’ll be holding a rally later today in East Lansing.
Donald Trump delivered a speech in Lancaster county, a sector that rarely ever switches parties, usually voting for the Republican nominee in presidential elections. The former president told supporters that he should have stayed in the White House, despite his losing the 2020 election, while at Lititz.
Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for California’s Proposition 36, which would make it easier for prosecutors to send repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot. The measure would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanors.
After a speech in Pennsylvania, Trump delivered his remarks in Kinston, North Carolina. He accused his opponent Kamala Harris of doing “the worst job ever on hurricane salvage and removal” and attacked Senate GOP minority leader Mitch McConnell.
That’s all from me, Coral Murphy Marcos, for today. My colleague Helen Livingstone will be along shortly to continue bringing you all the latest from the US election.
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Kamala Harris is scheduled to deliver remarks in about half an hour in East Lansing, Michigan, taking the stage at Michigan State University.
Harris landed at Detroit Metro airport at 1am this morning, and stopped in several locations in Detroit before heading to the Jenison Field House arena for her speech at 6pm ET.
This morning, Harris delivered remarks at a Sunday church service in Detroit and later visited Kuzzo’s Chicken & Waffles, joined by Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and Detroit mayor Mike Duggan.
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Donald Trump disputed an Iowa poll showing Kamala Harris ahead in red state.
The former president has passionately disputed a shock Iowa poll that found the vice-president leading Trump in the typically red state 47% to 44%.
“No President has done more for FARMERS, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network on Sunday morning. “In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”
Trump continued, in all caps: “I love the farmers, and they love me. And they trust me.” More than 85% of Iowa’s land is used for farming and it produces more corn, pigs, eggs, ethanol and biodiesel than any other state.
On Saturday, the Selzer poll carried out for the Des Moines Register newspaper showed Harris ahead of her Republican rival by three points. Selzer is a widely respected polling organisation with a good record in Iowa; she shot to polling fame in 2008 when she predicted that a virtually unknown senator, Barack Obama, would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses.
If Harris were even competitive in Iowa – which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 – it could radically reshape the race.
The pollster told MSNBC on Sunday that Harris was leading in early voting in Iowa “because of her strength with women generally, even stronger with women aged 65 and older. Her margin is more than 2-to-1 – and this is an age group that shows up to vote or votes early in disproportionately large numbers.”
Earlier on Sunday, Trump’s campaign released a memo from its chief pollster and its chief data consultant calling the Des Moines Register poll “a clear outlier” and saying that an Emerson College poll – also released Saturday – more closely reflected the state of the Iowa electorate.
The Emerson poll found 53% of likely voters support Trump and 43% support Harris, with 3% undecided and 1% planning to vote for a third-party candidate.
The Trump campaign, which many Democrats believe is setting the stage for a series of legal challenges to poll results, also said in an email that the Des Moines Register poll and a subsequent New York Times swing state poll that found Harris ahead in four of the seven states, is “being used to drive a voter suppression narrative against President Trump’s supporters”.
Here’s more context on the Selzer poll:
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Donald Trump kept his speech short in Kinston, North Carolina, sticking to most of the talking points he uses during his rallies.
He accused Kamala Harris of ruining the economy, delivered anti-immigrant remarks, promising to impose harsher measures on the southern border, and encouraged members of the crowd to “fight, fight fight”.
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FCC regulator claims Harris appearance on SNL violates ‘equal time’ rule
A US government communications regulator has claimed that Vice-President Kamala Harris’s surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live violates “equal time” rules that govern political programming.
Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the federal communications commission (FCC), claimed on the social platform X that Harris’s appearance on the show “is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule”.
Carr made the claim in response to an Associated Press alert to Harris being on the show that night.
“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election. Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns,” said Carr, who was nominated by both Trump and Biden and confirmed unanimously by the Senate three times.
FCC guidelines state: “Equal opportunities generally means providing comparable time and placement to opposing candidates; it does not require a station to provide opposing candidates with programs identical to the initiating candidate.”
A spokesperson for the FCC issued a statement: “The FCC has not made any determination regarding political programming rules, nor have we received a complaint from any interested parties.”
Harris joined comedian Maya Rudolph at the start of the show in a sketch that skewered Donald Trump for his recent rally speeches, including wearing an orange and yellow safety jacket, a riff on the ongoing garbage controversy, and pretending to fellate a broken microphone.
Harris began her “mirror image” sketch opposite Rudolph, the SNL cast member selected to impersonate her, on the other side of a mirror.
“I’m just here to remind you, you got this, because you can do something your opponent can’t do – you can open doors,” Harris told Rudolph, seemingly referring to a video from earlier in the week in which Trump had struggled to reach the handle of a garbage truck he briefly rode in to a Wisconsin rally.
Here’s more on the claim by the FCC regulator:
Senator Raphael Warnock condemned Donald Trump after saying that, whether women like it or not, he will “protect women”.
Warnock told NBC News that the comment ‘sounds rather ominous coming from the mouth of a convicted sexual predator. We don’t need a predator, we need a president in the Oval Office, and that person is clearly Kamala Harris.’
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Donald Trump holds rally in Kinston, North Carolina
Donald Trump started delivering his remarks in Kinston, North Carolina, about two hours behind schedule.
So far, he’s accused his opponent Kamala Harris of doing “the worst job ever on hurricane salvage and removal” and attacked Senate GOP minority leader Mitch McConnell.
“Hopefully we get rid of Mitch McConnell pretty soon,” Trump said. “Can you believe he endorsed me? Boy, that must’ve been a painful day in his life.”
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Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said he expects the winner of the presidential election to be declared on election day.
In an interview with ABC News, the former president was asked whether he thought there was any way he could lose.
“Yeah, I guess, you know,” Trump said. “I guess you could lose, can lose. I mean, that happens, right? But I think I have a pretty substantial lead … Bad things could happen. You know, things happen, but it’s going to be interesting.”
He also told the outlet’s chief Washington correspondent, Jonathan Karl, that he has “a substantial lead” in the presidential race.
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Kamala Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for California’s Proposition 36, which would make it easier for prosecutors to send repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot.
“I am not gonna talk about the vote on that because, honestly, it’s the Sunday before the election and I don’t intend to create an endorsement one way or the other,” Harris told reporters.
The measure would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanors.
Harris dodges if she voted for CA’s prop 36–a measure to up crime/drug penalties.
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) November 3, 2024
"I am not gonna talk about the vote on that because, honestly, it's the Sunday before the election and I don’t intend to create an endorsement one way or the other”
pic.twitter.com/00AHqRIt0K
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Trump says ‘I shouldn’t have left’ White House, despite losing 2020 election
Donald Trump told supporters that he should have stayed in the White House, despite his losing the 2020 election, while at Lititz in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Saturday.
The former president’s remarks were made during one of his final rallies of the campaign, where he also denounced public polls putting him behind his rival Kamala Harris and joked that reporters could take a bullet for him.
The comments were off script – an acknowledgment of how he has become increasingly uninhibited as the fatigue of doing multiple rallies a day has inexorably taken its toll.
Trump stayed on message for some of his remarks, saying illegal immigration was down and the economy was up when he was president. His team has noted with satisfaction for weeks that they remain the top two issues for undecided voters across the battleground states.
But Trump could not resist reverting to his most problematic impulses of describing Democrats as “demonic” and then lamenting about the 2020 election, an issue that polls poorly and his team had thought they had convinced him to let it go.
“We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” and then abruptly cut himself off.
The remark reflected what Trump told aides and allies in the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, a loss he has never conceded, and how he sat in at least one meeting at the end of his first term where he mused about refusing to leave the White House, a person familiar with the matter said.
Once Trump started on the 2020 election, he could not stop. He revived debunked conspiracy theories from 2020 and suggested anew that voting machines would be hacked, and efforts to extend polling hours in Pennsylvania – what his own team has pushed for – amounted to fraud.
Trump also spent time at the rally lashing out at a series of recent polls, notably a Des Moines Register poll in Iowa that put him four points behind Harris in the state of Iowa. Harris is universally not expected to win Iowa, but it could be indicative of her momentum in the final days.
Here’s more context on the rally:
The Harris campaign condemned former president Donald Trump’s comments at a rally in Pennsylvania earlier today, where he accused Democrats of stealing the elections from President Joe Biden and expressed it “should be illegal” to release polls that are bad for him.
“Trump is spending the closing days of his campaign angry and unhinged, lying about the election being stolen because he’s worried he will lose,” said Ammar Moussa, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign.
“The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth and will walk into the Oval Office focused on them – that’s Vice President Harris,” she added.
Donald Trump said Robert F Kennedy Jr’s proposal to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected “sounds OK to me”.
“Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump told NBC News. “You know, it’s possible.”
Trump was asked whether banning certain vaccines would be an option during a second term, and he said he would talk to Kennedy and others before making a decision.
“But he’s a very talented guy and has strong views,” Trump said of the former independent presidential candidate.
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Kamala Harris stopped by Kuzzo’s Chicken & Waffles in Michigan on Sunday, joined by the state’s governor Gretchen Whitmer and the mayor of Detroit Mike Duggan.
The visit comes as Harris campaigns around the Detroit area on Sunday, stopping by and delivering remarks at a church earlier today. A stop in East Lansing is also scheduled for later today.
VP Harris stopped by Kuzzo’s Chicken & Waffles on Sunday afternoon. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer & Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan joined her @VP @KamalaHarris pic.twitter.com/SlubHGRo5o
— Ebony Davis (@ebonyjdavis) November 3, 2024
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Kamala Harris will have a star-studded set of events a day before the presidential elections
DJ Cassidy, Fat Joe, Freeway and Just Blaze, Lady Gaga, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Ricky Martin, The Roots, Jazmine Sullivan, Adam Blackstone, and Oprah Winfrey are slated to make appearances in support for the vice-president at an event in Pennsylvania on Monday.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, Fantasia Barrino, James Taylor, Remi Wolf, and Sugarland will also perform at a campaign event on election day eve.
Meanwhile, performances by 2 Chainz, Anthony Hamilton, Ciara, and Joy of Jesse & Joy, with remarks by Usher, will take place in Atlanta, Georgia.
A spokesperson for the Trump campaign said that Trump’s comments about a potential assassin having to “shoot through” the press to get to him at a rally today had “nothing to do with the Media being harmed”.
“President Trump was brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life,” said Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign communications director.
“President Trump was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also,” Cheung said.
During a rally in Pennsylvania earlier, Trump said:
I have this glass here. But all we have really over here is the fake news. And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.
He did not mention that the media should also have protective glass.
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The Harris-Walz campaign announced a slew of election day Eve events, including rallies in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada.
In Arizona, Harris-Walz supporters will rally in Phoenix with a performance by the band La Original Banda El Limón. On Monday, the campaign will also hold an event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with D-Nice, Katy Perry and Andra Day slated to perform.
In Detroit, Michigan, the Detroit Youth Choir, Jon Bon Jovi, and The War and Treaty will take the stage in support of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Nevada, Eva Longoria is scheduled to make remarks at an event with performances by Christina Aguilera, Los Tigres Del Norte and SOFI TUKKER.
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Kamala Harris delivers remarks at a Sunday service in Detroit
Kamala Harris delivered remarks at the Greater Emmanuel Institutional church of God in Christ in Detroit, Michigan.
Harris is making several stops in Michigan and is slated to hold a rally in East Lansing later today.
“So church, in just two days we have the power to decide the fate of our nation, for generations to come,” Harris said at Sunday’s service.
Harris said that God’s plan is to “heal us and bring us together as nation”, but that it is not enough to believe in those plans, we “must act”.
“Not enough to only pray, not enough to just talk, we must act on the plans he has in store for us. And we must make them real through our works, in our daily choices, in service to our communities and yes, in our democracy,” the Democratic nominee said.
Kamala Harris quotes scripture and speaks on God’s plan for America at a church in Detroit. pic.twitter.com/ImlRkkexsJ
— Malachi Barrett (@PolarBarrett) November 3, 2024
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Former president Donald Trump concluded his remarks in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, home to the largest Amish community in the country.
Later today, Trump is scheduled to hold another rally in Kinston, North Carolina, at 2pm ET. Four-and-a-half hours later, he’s scheduled to deliver remarks in Macon, Georgia.
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More than 100 former US senators, members of Congress, governors, top-ranking military veterans, and White House officials released a bipartisan statement emphasizing the importance of American trust in elections and the peaceful transfer of power.
“Election workers must be supported, not threatened. Upholding public confidence in how elections work and in the members of our communities across the country who are working tirelessly to administer safe and secure elections strengthens us as a nation,” they wrote.
Some of the signatories include former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, former defense secretary Leon Panetta, former director of national intelligence Dan Coats, and retired Gen Stanley McChrystal.
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Donald Trump invited David McCormick, the Republican candidate in Pennsylvania for the US Senate, to the stage.
McCormick took a stab at his opponent Bob Casey, calling him a candidate “born with a silver political spoon in his mouth”.
Polls show the Democratic incumbent ahead in the race.
Former president Donald Trump told a crowd in Lititz, Pennsylvania, that he wouldn’t mind if a shooter were to “shoot through” the press.
“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much,” Trump said.
He also called the press “seriously corrupt people”.
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So far, during a rally in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump has questioned the validity of voting machines, claimed Democrats stole the elections for Joe Biden, and repeated unverifiable claims about the origin of Covid-19.
Regarding voting machines, the former president claimed that they can be hacked. “The machines are going to really hit me hard, because, you know, they never heard anybody hit them like this,” he said.
It’s worth mentioning states routinely test and certify their voting machines. Officials also conduct checks to make sure ballots are properly counted before election results are finalized.
Trump also claimed that the current economy is showing “depression-type numbers” before linking the economy with immigration through anti-immigrant comments.
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North Dakota governor Doug Burgum downplayed the offensive joke made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe about Puerto Rico at a Trump rally last week.
During an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Burgum said the joke doesn’t represent Trump supporters’ views. During a rally in New York City, Hinchcliffe called the U.S. territory “a floating island of garbage.”
“The crowd was groaning,” Burgum said. “I mean, there was not approval from a very supportive Trump audience.” He also called Hinchcliffe a “comic that no one’s ever heard of”.
The North Dakota governor also criticized President Biden’s response to the joke, accusing Biden of unfairly labeling Trump supporters.
The White House later clarified Biden’s intent was to condemn the rally’s rhetoric, not the supporters.
Former president Donald Trump accused recent polls of being “corrupt” and “fake", alluding to recent polling from The New York Times.
“We got all this crap going on with the press and with the fake stuff and fake polls,” Trump said. “The polls are just as corrupt as some of the writers back there.”
These comments come minutes after the Trump campaign released a memo accusing The New York Times of releasing a “voter suppression” poll designed to dampen their voters’s enthusiasm.
Former president Donald Trump began delivering his remarks in Lancaster County more than an hour behind schedule. He took the stage with an ominous walkout song before Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless The U.S.A.” started playing.
Lancaster County rarely ever switches parties, usually voting for the Republican nominee in presidential elections.
Pennsylvania has consistently voted for the Democratic nominee since 1992, with the exception of former President Donald Trump in 2016.
Trump campaign claims polls designed to suppress voter turnout
The Trump campaign claimed that recent polling by The New York Times and Des Moines Register is designed to suppress Trump voter turnout by presenting a bleak picture of Trump’s reelection prospects.
“Some in the media are choosing to amplify a mad dash to dampen and diminish voter enthusiasm,” reads the memo from Trump campaign pollsters, Tony Fabrizio and Tim Saler. “It has not worked. Our voters are like President Trump: they fight.”
The memo claims that the Times’s polls have biased samples and overrepresent Democratic voters compared to actual voter registration and turnout trends.
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Democratic senator Jon Fetterman from Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump is currently holding a rally, took a stab at the former president after his campaign launched ads doubling down on attacks on trans people.
'“It’s just a warped version of, it doesn’t make you tough,” he said during an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union”. “It doesn’t make you a man to pick on trans or gay kids. It just makes you an a-hole.”
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) on Trump's ads attacking trans kids in PA, "It's just a warp warped version of it doesn't make you tough. It doesn't make you man to pick on trans or gay kids. It just makes you an asshole." pic.twitter.com/15SgevSyHK
— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) November 3, 2024
Democratic senator Raphael Warnock from Georgia was confident Black voters would turn up at the polls in support of Kamala Harris.
In an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press”, Warnock said:
“I was in Michigan a couple weeks ago, in a Black fraternity house, my own fraternity. I’ve spent time in barber shops. I’ve been encountering folks, obviously in my church, and other churches. And there is momentum for Kamala Harris, and the more voters hear about her, including Black men, the more they they like her.”
His impression from these encounters is that former president Donald Trump will feel the hit from the lack of support from Black voters.
“Let me tell you something. Black men are not going to show up in droves and waves voting for Donald Trump,” the senator said. “They’re not, and it’s because they know who he is.”
Warnock pointed to Trump’s actions in the late 1980s against a group of Black and Latino men, known as the “Central Park Five”, who were accused of murdering a jogger. The five men have always denied the crime and were later exonerated.
Former president Donald Trump is expected to deliver his remarks soon in Lititz, Pennsylvania.
Trump will appear on stage at the Lancaster Airport on Sunday, with his speech scheduled for 10 a.m. ET. The Republican nominee will also hold events in Reading and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Monday.
We’ll be following the former president’s comments, so stick around.
Harris to visit Detroit and Pontiac
As well as her evening event in East Lansing, Kamala Harris is due to make two further stops in Michigan today, the Detroit Free Press reports.
A senior Harris campaign official, who declined to be identified, told the outlet that the Democratic nominee will attend church in Detroit on Sunday and visit the city’s Livernois area. Strong turnout in Detroit is generally crucial to Democratic success in Michigan.
Harris will then make a stop in Pontiac, another city with a significant Black population and historic ties to the auto industry, the official said.
Who would win in a fight between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hulk Hogan?
While the Terminator star and former Republican governor of California endorsed Kamala Harris just days ago, the ex-Obama supporting wrestler told the Republican national convention that: “We never had it better than the Trump years.”
So although, as far as I know, the two musclebound stars have never come to blows, if they were to meet soon there could be some heated disagreement over the presidential race!
You can see the full list of celeb endorsements here
We have already covered the presidential nominees’ schedules but what are their running mates up to?
Tim Walz will be in North Carolina this evening. The Queen City News says details are limited but according to a press release, Walz will hold an event in Gastonia to encourage voters to cast their ballots. Earlier in the day, former president Bill Clinton will hold a campaign rally at a church in Charlotte at 10am, it says.
Meanwhile, JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr will hold a rally in Derry, New Hampshire, at 7 pm ET at the New England Sports Center.
From the threat of mass deportation of migrants to the risk of military takeovers of American cities – here’s what’s at stake if Donald Trump wins the election.
Final NYT poll shows tight race in battleground states
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump remain in a tight race in the country’s seven battleground states, according to the final New York Times/Siena College poll.
It showed Harris with marginal leads in Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin and Trump just ahead in Arizona. The two are in close races in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania, according to the poll, which surveyed 7,879 likely voters in the seven states from Oct 24 to Nov 2.
In all seven states, the matchups were within the poll’s 3.5% margin of error.
About 40% of the respondents had already voted and Harris led among those voters by 8 percentage points, while Trump leads with voters who say they are very likely to vote but have not yet done so, the poll found.
The tied race in Pennsylvania shows Trump gaining momentum in a state Harris had led by four percentage points in all prior New York Times polls, the outlet said.
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Historians have weighed in with analysis that Donald Trump now heads a movement close to fascism, Trump himself has spoken of “enemies within”, he and his followers held a mass rally of racist rhetoric in a New York city venue known for an infamous Nazi gathering before the second world war and his language has been tinged with violent imagery.
Yet, in Trump’s world, and those of his followers and campaign surrogates, it is the Democrats who are to blame for the degraded discourse in American politics, their rhetoric a sign that they demonize the other side. It is Kamala Harris who is far outside the American mainstream. It is Joe Biden who is a Marxist. It is the Democratic party who plots a complete remaking of the American way of life. They are even, they argue, trying to take away Americans’ hamburgers.
Read the full story on Trump’s ‘mirror world’.
The results on Election Day will come down to seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Associated Press, which the Guardian uses as the benchmark for results, reports that it will be a game of hopscotch to keep up with key times in each of the states, which stretch across four different time zones.
It has a look at the Election Day timeline across the seven, with all listings in Eastern Standard Time:
Arizona Polls open at 8 am and close at 9 pm. AP first reported Arizona results at 10:02 pm ET on Nov 3 2020, Election Day, and declared Joe Biden the state’s winner at 2:51 am ET on Nov 4.
Georgia Polls open at 7 am and close at 7 pm. In 2020, the AP first reported Georgia results at 7:20 pm on Nov 3 and declared Biden the state’s winner at 7:58 pm ET on Nov 19, more than two weeks later.
Michigan Polls open at 7 am, most close at 8 pm, with the rest at 9 pm. In 2020, the AP first reported Michigan results at 8:08 pm on Nov 3 and declared Biden the winner at 5:58 pm on Nov 4.
Nevada Polls open at 10am and close at 10pm. In 2020, the AP first reported Nevada results at 11:41 pm on Nov 3 and declared Biden the winner at 12:13pm on Nov 7.
North Carolina Polls open at 6:30am and close at 7:30 pm. In 2020, the AP first reported results at 7:42 pm on Nov 3 and declared Donald Trump the winner at 3:49 pm ET on Nov 13.
Pennsylvania Polls open at 7 am and close at 8 pm. In 2020, the AP first reported results at 8:09 pm on Nov 3 and declared Biden the winner at 11:25am on Nov 7.
Wisconsin Polls open at 8 am and close at 9 pm. In 2020, the AP first reported Wisconsin results at 9:07 pm on No. 3 and declared Biden the winner at 2:16 pm on Nov 4.
Trump ally says Europe must rethink Ukraine support if he wins
Europe will need to rethink its support of Ukraine if Donald Trump is elected, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán said on Sunday, as the continent “will not be able to bear the burdens of the war alone”.
Orban opposes military aid to Ukraine and has made clear he thinks Trump shares his views and would negotiate a peace settlement for Ukraine.
The Trump ally said: “We (in Europe) need to realize that if there will be a pro-peace president in America, which I not only believe in but I also read the numbers that way, ... if what we expect happens and America becomes pro-peace, then Europe cannot remain pro-war,” Orban said.
“Europe cannot bear the burden of [the war] alone, and if Americans switch to peace, then we also need to adapt,” Orban said.
Europe is jittery about how the outcome of the US election will affect the war in Ukraine and the continent’s security.
Trump campaign calls Iowa poll 'an outlier'
Donald Trump’s campaign has hit out at a surprise poll which showed Kamala Harris three points ahead in Iowa, a state that was previously expected to be a safe state for the Republicans.
The Trump campaign released a memo from its chief pollster and its chief data consultant calling the Des Moines Register poll “a clear outlier,” and saying that an Emerson College poll – also released Saturday – more closely reflected the state of the Iowa electorate.
The Emerson College Polling/RealClearDefense survey of a similar number of likely voters on November 1-2 had a starkly different result, with Trump leading Harris by 10 points. This poll also has a 3.4 percentage point margin of error.
The Emerson College survey had Trump with strong leads over Harris among men and independents, while Harris was performing well with those under the age of 30.
Donald Trump and his many campaign surrogates have been engaged in a strategy of publicly raising expectations among their followers which may create a well-spring of discontent should Kamala Harris win, especially if her victory is narrow or propelled over the line by a late-breaking wave of Democratic ballots.
“If we could bring God down from heaven and he’d be the vote counter, we’d win this, we’d win California, we’d win a lot of states,” Trump said last week in a typical piece of bombast about his prospects.
But internal sources tell the Guardian they are universally jittery about the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, through which most of Trump’s paths to 270 electoral college votes run. Internal polls show Trump ahead but some of those numbers have been so rosy in recent weeks that aides have grown distrustful about their accuracy.
The Trump campaign has also been nervous about North Carolina – a state they really have to hold this year – evidenced by the multiple trips Trump is making to the state in the final weekend. Trump had two rallies in North Carolina yesterday, and will be there again today and tomorrow.
Read the full piece here
In the campaign’s final days, Kamala Harris has sought to convince voters that she will bring down the cost of living, Reuters reports. It a top concern after several years of inflation.
She has also portrayed Donald Trump as dangerous and erratic and urged Americans to move on from Trump’s divisive approach to politics.
We have an opportunity in this election to turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump trying to keep us divided and afraid of each other. We’re done with that,” she said in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Saturday.
Trump has argued that Harris, as the sitting vice president, should be held responsible for the rising prices and high levels of immigration of the past several years, which he has portrayed as an existential threat to the country.
The only free aid they are going to get is a free ride back home,” he said at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Saturday.
Frantic campaigning by Trump amid Iowa poll shock
Good morning and welcome to our coverage of the 2024 US presidential election as we move into the final hours before polls open on Tuesday.
It’s set to be a busy day for Donald Trump with appearances in three swing states and it comes amid a surprise setback in Iowa with a poll showing him trailing Kamala Harris in what was previously expected to be a safe state for the Republicans.
The Republican nominee will kick off this morning with a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, followed by an afternoon event in Kinston, North Carolina, and rounding the day off in Macon, Georgia.
Harris, meanwhile, will head to Michigan later today where the Democratic hopeful is due to speak at a campaign rally at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Last night, she broke from the campaign trail to embrace her reputation as a “joyful warrior” with a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live. Harris portrayed herself, appearing in a mirror opposite the actor Maya Rudolph, who first played her on the show in 2019 and has reprised the role this season.
If you missed it, you can read David Smith’s fun report here:
In other developments:
A Georgia judge rejected a Republican lawsuit trying to block counties from opening election offices on Saturday and Sunday to let voters hand in their mail ballots in person. The lawsuit only targeted Fulton county, a Democratic stronghold. Trump falsely blamed Fulton county workers for his loss of the 2020 election in Georgia.
Americans took to the streets in cities across the country for a day of women’s marches. Marches were planned in all 50 states for the eighth annual gathering, which began the day after Trump was inaugurated in 2017.
Vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr could assume some control over US health and food safety in a second Trump administration, according to reports on Saturday. Kennedy said in a social media post that he would remove fluoride from all public water.
