Closing Summary
This blog is closing now, thanks for following along. You can read our US elections coverage here. Here are the major developments from today:
Kamala Harris attended a CNN town hall with undecided voters in Pennsylvania while her opponent Donald Trump held a rally in Georgia after rejecting an offer to participate in the town hall. At the town hall, Harris repeatedly returned to news that Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly claimed his one-time boss “falls into the general definition of fascist”. Harris herself called Trump a fascist when asked if she believed the ex-president qualifies as one during the town hall. Speaking from her residence in Washington DC earlier in the day, Harris accused Trump of seeking to subvert the independence of the military.
A former model told the Guardian that Donald Trump groped her at his Manhattan tower in 1993, after she was introduced to the real estate mogul by notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Stacey Williams said Trump put his hands “all over my breasts” as well as her waist and buttocks in their brief meeting, unwanted touching that left her “deeply confused”.
The Harris-Walz campaign announced that Harris will deliver a major “closing argument” address next week in the same location that Donald Trump rallied January 6 rioters before they stormed the US Capitol in 2021. According to a senior campaign official, Harris will speak at the Ellipse on 29 October – exactly one week before the 5 November election.
The justice department warned Elon Musk’s Pac that paying people to register to vote violates federal law, just days after Musk pledged to give away $1m a day to registered voters in battleground states in the US who sign a petition by his America Pac in support of the first and second amendments.
A new report from Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center detailed steps that Chinese operatives have taken to discredit Republican members of Congress and that Russian agents are taking to undermine the Harris-Walz campaign. Meanwhile, the justice department announced updates in four cases brought by its Election Threats Task Force today, sending a stern message one week before the 5 November presidential election.
On the first day of early voting in Wisconsin, Tim Walz called Elon Musk a “dipshit” while Barack Obama said of Donald Trump: “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this.”
A campaign event that saw Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Lucas Kunce shoot an AR-15 went awry, after a reporter was hit by a bullet fragment.
Updated
Kamala Harris has concluded her appearance on CNN’s town hall. Over the course of the evening, Harris avoided giving direct answers to several questions (calling Donald Trump’s plan to build a border wall “stupid”, for example, but then declining to commit to not building any more wall herself) instead seeking to define her opponent as dangerous.
Immediately following the town hall, CNN commentators noted that “she focused a lot more on Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, than she did on many specifics in terms of what she would do as president.”
Updated
