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:
Barack Obama campaigned alongside Kamala Harris at a star-studded rally in Atlanta today. The ex-president and vice-president were joined on stage by Samuel L Jackson, Spike Lee, senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof, Bruce Springsteen and Tyler Perry. Over the course of the evening, speakers repeatedly criticized Donald Trump for comments made by past members of his administration who said Trump fits the definition of fascist.
The family of Amber Nicole Thurman, a Black 28-year-old mother who died just weeks after Georgia’s abortion ban went into effect, was in attendance at the rally. Tomorrow, Harris is expected to make another high profile appearance, this time alongside Beyoncé in Houston, where the vice-president hopes to rally support for Senate candidate Colin Allred.
Donald Trump rallied supporters in Tempe, Arizona, today, where he spoke alongside Senate candidate Kari Lake. Earlier in the day, Trump made news when he vowed that, if elected, he would immediately fire Jack Smith, the justice department special counsel who is prosecuting him for allegedly plotting to overturn the 2020 election and hide classified documents.
Phoenix police arrested a man suspected of setting fire to a mailbox there, damaging mail-in ballots. The news comes just days after Tempe police arrested another man in connection with three shootings at Democratic party campaign offices in Tempe. An Arizona prosecutor said the second man had more than 120 guns and more than 250,000 rounds of ammunition in his home, leading law enforcement to believe he may have been planning a mass casualty event.
Harris picked up the endorsement of two Republicans, one a former congressman from Michigan, the other a mayor in a pivotal county in Wisconsin.
Joe Biden announced he will issue an apology tomorrow for the US government’s role in forcing thousands of Indigenous American children to attend Indian boarding schools – a policy which has been widely recognized as an element of genocide. The news comes as Harris is trailing in the polls in Arizona, a state that Biden famously won in 2020, largely due to the support of Indigenous American voters.
More than 29 million people have voted already in the 2024 election, at least partly driven by Republicans embracing early voting at Donald Trump’s direction. So far, Republicans have cast 32% of ballots, up from 27% at this point in 2020. Whereas Democrats have cast 42% of the votes, down from 47% at this point in the last presidential election.
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JD Vance, who is currently speaking with Chris Cuomo on News Nation, called John Kelly a “disgrunted ex-employee” at a campaign event in Waterford, Michigan earlier today.
“John Kelly was fired by Donald Trump, and he’s pissed off about it and won’t stop talking about it,” Vance said. “You’ve got three or four people who were allegedly in the room when it happened saying he’s making it up. Even Mike Pence’s chief of staff said that John Kelly is making up a bunch of crap about Donald J. Trump.”
Kamala Harris has concluded her rally in Atlanta by evoking the legacy of the late Congressman John Lewis.
“As the great Congressman John Lewis reminded us, Democracy is not a state, it is an act,” Harris said. Georgia senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who spoke earlier in the evening, were close confidants of Lewis. Warnock was Lewis’ pastor and Ossoff served as an intern in Lewis’ office early in his career.
Lewis, who represented Georgia in the House, was a civil rights leader most famous for organizing the March on Washington.
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Family of Amber Nicole Thurman attends Harris's rally in Atlanta
The family of Amber Nicole Thurman is in attendance at Kamala Harris’ rally in Atlanta. Thurman, a Black 28-year-old mother to a young son, died just weeks after Georgia’s abortion ban went into effect. Thurman’s death was only recently identified as a result of the state’s abortion ban in September when ProPublica published an investigation into her death.
For more on Thurman’s death:
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Kamala Harris has praised ex-president Barack Obama throughout her speech in Atlanta, tapping into their close friendship and the Obamas’ casting of Harris as their political heir.
Early in her speech, Harris led the crowd in a chant of “Yes we can,” evoking Obama’s own campaign for presidency. Later, she began a chant of “We’re not going back.” She also noted the ex-president’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act. “Donald Trump intends to end the Affordable Care Act, or like we like to call it Obamacare,” she said.
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At a campaign event in North Carolina today, Tim Walz praised former vice-president Dick Cheney for endorsing Kamala Harris – while also acknowledging his own past criticism of Cheney.
“Trust me on this. I have expressed my opinions over the years very strongly toward former vice-president Cheney on where I felt. But when the time came to protect the constitution, he’s making the right decision,” Walz said. “And I have no illusion on this. Dick Cheney is protecting the Constitution, but the minute he gets to vote for a true Republican, he will vote for a true Republican. And we will welcome that. The minute that they do that – he will do that, and he will not vote for me – and I understand that.”
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Kamala Harris takes the stage after Barack Obama
Kamala Harris is now speaking at her rally in Atlanta. The vice-president was introduced by Barack Obama.
Harris has begun her remarks by recalling her early friendship with Obama. “It was over 17 years ago when I took a trip to Springfield. It was a cold February day, and I went there to support this brilliant young senator who was running for president of the United States,” she said.
Harris also thanked Samuel L Jackson, Spike Lee, Tyler Perry and “the great American poet Bruce Springsteen” before launching into a familiar version of her stump speech.
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Barack Obama has reiterated many of the points he has made in previous stump speeches for Kamala Harris – including denouncing Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic and economy – while also criticizing the ex-president’s comments following Hurricane Helene.
“Donald Trump lies about about hurricane aid,” Obama said, adding that Trump “deliberately circulate[d] rumors that that money is being given to illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, as opposed to people who are desperate”.
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New filings with the Federal Election Commission show that Elon Musk gave $10m to campaigns for Senate Republicans in October. Musk has donated millions to political action committees working to elect Republican candidates this election cycle, including about $75m to his pro-Trump America Pac. This latest filing shows that Musk donated $10m to the Senate Leadership Fund, a super Pac working to flip the Senate to Republican control. The fund has spent at least $210m supporting Repubican candidates for Senate this year.
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Barack Obama has referenced John Kelly’s comments about Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies.
“The other day, General John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, said that Trump told him he wanted his generals be like Hitler’s generals,” Obama said.
“In politics, a good rule of thumb is don’t say you want to do anything like Hitler.
“These are serious people,” Obama added, speaking of Kelly and Mark Meadows, who both served as Trump’s chiefs of staff. “They are not, quote, unquote, woke liberals. They are people who have never in the past even talked about politics, because they believe that the military should be above politics. But the reason they’re speaking up is because they have seen that in Donald Trump’s mind, the military does not exist to serve the constitution or the American people. He doesn’t see being commander in chief as a solemn, sacred responsibility, just like everything else. He thinks the military exists to do his bidding, to serve his interests.”
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Barack Obama takes the stage to encourage the crowd to vote
Barack Obama is now speaking at Kamala Harris’ rally in Atlanta. The ex-president acknowledged the line-up of celebrity guests that preceded him and then encouraged the crowd to go vote, before giving a version of the stump speech he has given at other Harris campaign events.
“Now we know this election is going to be tight because a lot of Americans are still struggling,” Obama said. “So I get why people are looking to shake things up. What I cannot understand is why anybody would think that Donald Trump will shake things up in a way that is good for you.”
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Speaking at Kamala Harris’ rally in Atlanta, actor Tyler Perry has denounced Donald Trump and says that today he voted for Harris.
“I watched [Trump] from the Central Park Five to Project 2025. What I realized is in this Donald Trump’s America, there is no dream that looks like me. We want a president who believes the American dream is for everyone. That president is Kamala Harris,” Perry said. Noting the close margin of votes in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, Perry added: “Every vote counts.”
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A star-studded line-up of politicians and celebrities have rallied attendees of Kamala Harris’s campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia, this evening. Harris and Barack Obama are expected to speak at 7.30 ET. Ahead of them, actor Samuel L Jackson, director Spike Lee, senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof, and actor Tyler Perry have spoken to voters.
“Let me say that I do not believe that significant numbers of Black men are going to vote for the likes of Donald Trump,” Warnock said, referencing data that has shown young Black men are increasingly leaning toward the ex-president. “I don’t believe that. Now, we are not a monolith. There will be some. But there won’t be this wave. After all, we know who Donald Trump is.”
Earlier, Bruce Springsteen – who has endorsed Harris - performed Land of Hope and Dreams and Dancing in the Dark. The musician warned the audience that Trump was running to become “an American tyrant”.
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Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren – whose grandmother was taken to an Indian boarding school in Riverside, California – has released a statement thanking President Joe Biden for his expected apology for the US government’s role in the boarding school system.
“For generations, Native children, including many from the Navajo Nation, were subjected to an education system that sought to erase our languages, cultures and identities,” Nygren said.
“By recognizing this tragic legacy, President Biden honors the resilience of the survivors and their families, many of whom carry the weight of these experiences. He sends a message that healing and truth are central to building a just future. The Navajo Nation stands ready to work with his administration, as well as the next administration, to continue uncovering the truth, honoring those who were lost, and ensuring that these atrocities are never repeated.”
More than 29 million people have voted already in the 2024 election, CNN reports, as Donald Trump calls for his supporters to vote ahead of election day. So far, Republicans have cast 32 percent of ballots, up from 27 percent at this point in 2020. Whereas Democrats have cast 42 percent of the votes, down from 47 percent at this point in the last presidential election. In recent weeks, Trump and his supporters have increasingly called for Republicans to vote early – a strategy Republicans have not typically embraced.
JD Vance published an essay in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today calling Kamala Harris “anti-Catholic”. The news comes just a day after Donald Trump attended a campaign event at a church in Zebulon, Georgia yesterday, where he claimed Catholics are “threated worse than anybody.” Later, at a CNN town hall yesterday evening, Harris spoke openly about her Christian faith, noting that she prays every day.
In the Post-Gazette essay, Vance argues that Harris and other Democrats have “mocked” Catholics and that her support of progressive policies – like same-sex marriage and gender-affirming healthcare – is anti-Catholic.
Kamala Harris is polling slightly ahead of Donald Trump in the swing state of Michigan, according to recently released survey results from Michigan State University. As of 17 October, our polling showed Trump leading the state by a narrow one-point margin.
According to Michigan State University, Harris is leading Trump at 52 percent to 48 percent among likely voters. Michigan, which holds 16 electoral votes, voted for Joe Biden in 2020 – but the state is hotly contested this year, in part as the state’s large Arab American community grapples with which candidate to support following the war in Gaza.
Celebrities rally at Kamala Harris event in Georgia
Actor Samuel L Jackson and director Spike Lee – two graduates of Atlanta’s Morehouse college – spoke to a crowd of thousands at a stadium in Clarkston, Georgia ahead of the appearance of vice-president Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama.
“Do not wait until election day to show your support,” Jackson said, exhorting voters to go to the polls early. “Showing up at the polls is the only way.”
Early voting totals have been breaking records in Georgia, with about 30% of the electorate having already cast a ballot.
“We’ve heard her favorite curse word is a favorite of mine too,” Jackson said, pointedly avoiding the use of the actual offensive term he is famous for. “That’s the kind of president I can stand behind.”
Spike Lee reminded people that he is a “Grady baby”, born at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial hospital and three generations deep in the city.
“Power is knowing your past,” he said. “Georgia is where the future is being written. Georgia is showing up and showing out, no matter what kind of shenanigans, skullduggery and subterfuge.”
Referring to Donald Trump as “agent orange”, Lee said that “today, we cannot be hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray”.
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Opening his rally in Tempe, Arizona, Donald Trump said he watched Kamala Harris’ town hall on CNN last night and called her performance “pathetic”. Later, he denounced reporters in the building for focusing their cameras on his face and not the charts he shows at his rallies. His comments that journalists are “bad people” and “the enemy of the people” spurred a chorus of chants from his supporters, who booed the reporters in the building.
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In the final days of the 2024 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris is gearing up for another podcast interview, this time with former NFL player Shannon Sharpe for his show Club Shay Shay. The interview, which will tape in Atlanta, will air on Monday, 28 October.
Harris has embraced podcast interviews in the final weeks of the election, with appearances on Call Her Daddy and All The Smoke. Guardian reporter Jesse Hassenger has more on Harris’ and Trump’s podcast appearances:
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Donald Trump’s rally in Tempe, Arizona, is starting late. Meanwhile, his running mate JD Vance is expected to take the stage shortly at a separate event in Waterford, Michigan. We’ll alert you of any developments as the events get underway. Trump is expected to hold another rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, this evening after Kamala Harris campaigns alongside ex-president Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen in Atlanta this afternoon.
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In a rare post on X, Donald Trump is denouncing his former chief of staff John Kelly, who recently made news for saying Trump meets the definition of a fascist. In the post, Trump calls Kelly a “bad general”, an apparent reference to a separate interview Kelly gave the Atlantic where he described Trump lamenting that he did not have generals who were loyal in the way he believed German military commanders had been to Hitler.
Thank you for your support against a total degenerate named John Kelly, who made up a story out of pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred! This guy had two qualities, which don’t work well together. He was tough and dumb. The problem is his toughness morphed into weakness,…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2024
Robert Tait has more on Kelly’s comments about Trump’s authoritarian leanings:
As Joe Biden travels to Arizona and Donald Trump prepares to take the stage at two rallies there today, Phoenix police have arrested a man suspected of setting fire to a mailbox there where mail-in ballots were damaged this morning. The news comes just days after Tempe police arrested a separate man in connection with three shootings at Democratic party campaign offices in Tempe.
The Arizona Republic reports that Phoenix police arrested Dieter Klofkorn, who told investigators he lit the fire because he wanted to be arrested, this morning. Before firefighters could extinguish the fire, the New York Times reports, approximately 20 ballots were damaged. Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes told the paper that voters whose ballots were damaged will receive a new ballot.
NEW: Phoenix PD says 35-year-old Dieter Klofkorn is in custody.
— Sasha Hupka 🌵 (@SashaHupka) October 24, 2024
"Klofkorn stated that he committed the arson because he wanted to be arrested and that his actions were not politically motivated and not related to anything involving the upcoming election." https://t.co/2TQUiRrTUC
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Donald Trump will be taking the stage at his rally in Tempe, Arizona, shortly, where he is expected to return to the issue that has defined his campaign: immigration. According to his prepared remarks, Trump will argue that Kamala Harris’s handling of the border should disqualify her from the presidency.
Trump will be joined on stage by Kari Lake, a former television news anchor and dedicated follower of Trump’s who is running for the state’s open Senate seat. Ahead of her appearance in Tempe, Lake told the Associated Press that she would use the CBP One app, which allows migrants to request asylum at the south-west border, to deport people if elected.
“That app works both ways,” Lake said. “In January 2025, we’re gonna control that app and we’re gonna find the people who invaded our country and we’re going to send them home.”
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Hilary Clinton will appear on CNN this evening in an interview with Kaitlan Collins, host of The Source. The interview comes just a day after the network aired its town hall with Kamala Harris, an event that Donald Trump declined to attend.
Coming up tonight at 9 p.m. ET. pic.twitter.com/VA6VWibhYE
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) October 24, 2024
Biden to issue apology for US government role in Native American boarding schools
Joe Biden will travel to Arizona today and is expected to formally apologize tomorrow for the US government’s role in forcing thousands of Native American children to attend Indian boarding schools – a policy which has been widely recognized as an element of genocide. The news comes as Kamala Harris is trailing in the polls in Arizona, a state that Biden famously won in 2020, largely due to the support of Native American voters.
.@POTUS tells reporters he is heading to Arizona to make a formal apology to Native Americans/Indian nation about how their children were treated. pic.twitter.com/siRpqYSV1G
— Jeff Mason (@jeffmason1) October 24, 2024
“I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” the secretary of interior, Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, told the Associated Press. “It’s a big deal to me. I’m sure it will be a big deal to all of Indian Country.”
As the first Native American to lead the Department of the Interior, Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system, which found that at least 18,000 children were removed from their parents and forced to attend the schools, which sought to assimilate them into white American culture. The investigation documented about 1,000 deaths of children that occurred at the boarding schools.
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the Democratic National Committee announced that it had launched a “six-figure ad campaign” aimed at turning out Native American voters in Arizona, North Carolina, Montana and Alaska. It is the party’s third Native-focused campaign this year, and “the most the DNC has ever spent on a campaign targeting Native voters”.
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Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego has announced the arrest of a suspect involved in setting a fire at a USPS mailbox that damaged a small number of mail-in ballots:
Thanks to swift action by @PhoenixPolice, @PHXFire and federal partners, we have arrested the suspect involved in this incident. https://t.co/DRkqz06All
— Mayor Kate Gallego (@MayorGallego) October 24, 2024
Phoenix is the largest city in swing state Arizona, and many residents are returning ballots by mail. Here’s more of what we know about the incident:
Things aren’t looking terrible everywhere for Democrats.
The party grew nervous earlier this year in Maryland when Republican former governor Larry Hogan jumped into the race for the open Senate seat in what is typically a Democratic bastion. Maryland voters had twice elected Hogan to the governor’s mansion, and he is viewed as perhaps the only Republican in the state with a shot at winning the Senate seat.
But a poll from the Washington Post and the University of Maryland released today shows the Democratic nominee, Prince George’s county executive Angela Alsobrooks, with a commanding lead of 52% among likely voters, and Hogan at a mere 40%. That’s sure to quell some jitters in the party, though winning the seat, which is currently occupied by Democrat Ben Cardin, is not enough to get the party the majority in the chamber.
Democratic senator Jon Tester’s bid for re-election in Montana is a mirror of the party’s wider struggles to maintain the support of voters in rural areas across the country, which have grown increasingly Republican in recent years, threatening the party’s ability to win races up and down the ballot. The Guardian’s David Smith traveled to Big Sky Country to see if Tester’s circumstances are as dire as they appear from afar:
He was a young and little-known underdog. So Max Baucus, candidate for Congress, decided to trek 630 miles across Montana and listen to people talk about their problems. “As luck would have it, on the first day, I walked into a blizzard,” he recalls, pointing to a photo of his young self caked in snow. “It was cold! But the blizzard didn’t last that long.”
Baucus shed 12lb during that two-and-a-half month journey in 1974. He also made friends. The Democrat defeated a Republican incumbent and would soon go on to serve as a Montana senator for 36 years. He never lost an election but saw his beloved home state undergo many changes. Among them is the prospect that Democrats like him are now facing political extinction.
Jon Tester, a moderate Democrat who is one of Montana’s current senators, is fighting for his political life in the 5 November election. Opinion polls suggest that he is trailing his Republican rival, Tim Sheehy. Control of the closely divided Senate, and the ability to enable or stymie the ambitions of a President Kamala Harris or President Donald Trump, could hinge on the outcome.
The Senate race in Montana is widely seen as a litmus test of whether Democrats can still win in largely rural states that have embraced Trump’s Republican party. It is also a study in whether the type of hyperlocal campaigning that Baucus practised half a century ago can outpace shifts in demographics, media and spending that have rendered all politics national.
Democrats are fighting to keep their majority in the Senate, and evidence continues to mount that Jon Tester, the Montana senator whose re-election is viewed as essential to doing that, is struggling.
The party has already conceded a seat in deep-red West Virginia, but is hoping Kamala Harris’s victory combined with those of Tester and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, along with several other incumbents, will renew its majority.
Polls have lately shown Tester trailing his Republican opponent, and the political advertising trackers at Medium Buying report a Republican group has cancelled television ads in Montana – a sign the party views the seat as theirs for the taking:
FLASH: R group American Crossroads is canceling TV ad schedules it had booked in Montana markets for 10/29-11/4 flight#MTSen
— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) October 24, 2024
Here’s more on the calculations behind the quest for control of Congress’s upper chamber:
Harris then took a few questions from the press, but didn’t make news.
Asked for more details of the Philadelphia concert scheduled for Monday where Bruce Springsteen will perform and Barack Obama will speak in support of her candidacy, Harris demurred.
“I have nothing to report at this moment. Stay tuned,” the vice-president said, after noting that Springsteen was “an American icon”.
She dodged a question about whether she would allow construction of a wall on the border with Mexico, and how she would vote on a California ballot proposition to heighten penalties for shoplifters and drug dealers.
Harris did share some thoughts on the gender divide pollsters say they are observing ahead of the election, with women breaking for Democrats and men for Republicans by increasingly wide margins:
It’s not what I see, in terms of my rallies, in terms of interactions I’m having with people in communities and on the ground. What I’m seeing is, in equal measure, men and women talking about their concerns about the future of our democracy, talking about the fact that they want a president who leads with optimism and takes on the challenges that we face, whether it be grocery prices or investing in small businesses or home ownership.
Harris calls Republican endorsements a sign that leaders 'understand what's at stake'
In brief remarks to the press in Philadelphia before departing for a campaign event in Georgia, Kamala Harris thanked the two Republican politicians who announced they would be voting for her.
Former congressman Fred Upton of Michigan and Waukesha, Wisconsin mayor Shawn Reilly both cited their concerns with Donald Trump in announcing their endorsement of Harris.
“This continues to be, I think, evidence of the fact that people who have been leaders in our country, regardless of their political party, understand what’s at stake. And they are weighing in courageously, in many cases, in support of what we need to have, which is a president of the United States who understands the obligation to uphold the constitution of the United States and our democracy,” Harris said.
She also hit out at Donald Trump, who declined to participate in a second debate with Harris hosted by CNN that would have happened last night. Instead, the vice-president to appeared solo at a town hall the network organized with undecided voters in Philadelphia.
Here’s what Harris said:
As for last night, yet again, Trump not showing up, refused to be a part of a CNN debate, and clearly his staff has been saying he’s exhausted. And the sad part about that is, he’s trying to be president of the United States, probably the toughest job in the world, and he’s exhausted.
I said last night what I mean, which is the American people are being presented with a very serious decision, and it includes what we must understand will happen starting on January 20, in this choice. Either you have the choice of a Donald Trump will sit in the Oval Office stewing, plotting revenge, retribution, writing out his enemies list, or what I will be doing, which is responding to folks like the folks last night with a to-do list, understanding the need to work on lifting up the American people, whether it be through the issue of grocery prices and bringing them down, or investing in our economy, investing in our small businesses, investing in our families.
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Voto Latino, a top civic engagement non-profit aimed at empowering Latino voters, has launched a new campaign to raise awareness about what Project 2025 means for Latinos.
The organization identified parts of Project 2025 that would have the most negative effect on the Latino community, and translated these portions into Spanish. Voto Latino is launching paid ads in Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan to publicize this initiative, in a $3.5m campaign.
Remember: Trump has tried to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation-backed initiative to overhaul the US government, which includes plans to outlaw abortion and fire civil servants en masse, as polling indicated it was a political liability for him. The Vera Institute for Justice said that provisions relating to immigration were “designed to initiate mass deportations.”
“As much as former President Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025, we will not be fooled: We know that he will implement this extremist agenda if he wins. It is clear that Project 2025 will set us back by dismantling the fabric of our country through extreme conservative efforts to impose a regressive vision for our nation,” Maria Teresa Kumar, Voto Latino President and Co-Founder, said in a press release announcing the campaign.
“The threats posed to our community by Project 2025 are clear and present. Latino voters and other voters of color will be affected the most by Project 2025.”
“We have the power to ensure that an extremist agenda does not go into place by making our voices heard at the ballot box in November,” Kumar also said. “In this election, over 36 million Latinos are eligible to vote. We have a responsibility to inform one another of the potential dangers related to Trump’s agenda as seen in Project 2025, and the impact that it will have on ourselves, our communities, and our families.”
Donald Trump has been working tirelessly to win over male voters and by some measures, his efforts appear effective.
Trump is besting Kamala Harris among men 53 to 37 percent, according to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll, while the vice president is winning women 53 percent to his 36 percent.
Trump’s far-right politics seem especially appealing to white male voters, and there have been various explanations for this trend. Some have opined that it’s sheer sexism; others believe that it’s due to a purported male loneliness epidemic and uncertainty about their role in American society.
The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone spoke with residents of Middletown, Ohio--GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s hometown-- in an effort to learn why gender is a watershed issue in this election.
Here is their eye-opening report.
With less than two weeks to go before election day, data indicates that early voting has hit massive numbers in several key swing states.
Some 25 million Americans have already cast their ballots. At least part of this surge was prompted by Republicans deciding to vote early due to Donald Trump’s direction.
In the battleground state of Georgia, which Trump lost by just 11,779 votes in 2020, more than 1.9 million Americans have either cast their votes via mail-in ballots or in person. North Carolina saw 1.7 million voting early in spite of the disastrous Hurricane Helene in September.
While Trump has emphatically urged his supporters to hit the polls, saying at a Georgia rally “just vote – whichever way you want to do it,” Democrats and progressives are also encouraging early voting. Senate Democrats on Tuesday released a report urging Americans to vote as early as possible, and to answer questions about why the results might not be known on election night.
On college campuses, advocates are working to increase early voting access for students. At the University of Minnesota on Tuesday, for example, the undergraduate student government organized a one-day pop-up polling site.
The day so far
Donald Trump made clear that he would end the effort to hold him legally accountable for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election and hide classified documents, saying in an interview that he would fire special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds”, if elected. The comment drew an uproar from Kamala Harris’s campaign, which is seeking to convince voters that Trump would govern as a dictator in a second term. Meanwhile, the vice-president is gearing up for her rally in Houston tomorrow, where she will reportedly be joined by Beyoncé. We will see her later today in Georgia at a campaign event scheduled for 7pm, while Trump holds a rally in Arizona at 4pm.
Here’s what else has been going on today:
Harris picked up the endorsement of two Republicans, one a former congressman from Michigan, the other a mayor in a pivotal county in Wisconsin.
Yet another former Trump administration official has reportedly warned of his dictatorial streak, specifically his “authoritarian tendencies”.
A thorough poll from Bloomberg News and Morning Consult finds the same thing many before it has: the race is too close to call.
Later on in Donald Trump’s interview with conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt, the former president attacked special counsel Jack Smith as “a scoundrel”, and says he does not think he would be impeached for firing him.
“Now, they will impeach you again on day one if you fire Jack Smith or you pardon yourself. Are you prepared to be impeached again and again and again if they have the House, because they just will?” Hewitt asked, referring to the Democrats who could recapture that majority in Congress’s lower chamber in the upcoming election.
Trump responded:
No, I don’t think they will impeach me if I fire Jack Smith. Jack Smith is a scoundrel, he’s a very dishonest man in my opinion, very dishonest man, and he’s a mean man, a mean man, but his problem is he’s so mean that he always goes too far, like the raid of Mar-a-Lago.
The latter part is a reference to the second case Smith brought against Trump, for allegedly hiding classified materials at his properties, including Mar-a-Lago in south Florida. Over the summer, Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed federal judge who was assigned to the case, threw out Smith’s indictment, which the special counsel is appealing.
In his interview with Hewitt, Trump said, “We had a brave, brilliant judge in Florida”, apparently a reference to Cannon. ABC News reports that his feelings go deeper than that: Cannon’s name is on a list of potential attorney general candidates for his second administration, and was added after she dismissed the classified documents indictment.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump for allegedly conspiring to overturn the 2020 election was delayed for months as the supreme court dealt with the former president’s claim of immunity, and is only now getting back on track. As the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported earlier this month, Smith’s team appears to want to center its case on how Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence handled the then-president’s effort to keep Joe Biden out of the White House. Here’s more:
Special counsel prosecutors intend to make Donald Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence and efforts to recruit fake Trump electors the centerpiece of the criminal prosecution against the former president, according to a sprawling legal brief that was partly unsealed on Wednesday.
The redacted brief, made public by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, shows prosecutors are relying extensively on Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to support the charge that Trump conspired to obstruct the January 6 certification of the election results.
And prosecutors used an equally voluminous portion of the 165-page brief to express their intent to use evidence of Trump trying to get officials in seven key swing states to reverse his defeat to support the charges that he conspired to disenfranchise American voters.
The brief’s principal mission was to convince Chutkan to allow the allegations and evidence buttressing the superseding indictment against Trump to proceed to trial, arguing that it complied with the US supreme court’s recent ruling that gave former presidents immunity for official acts.
As part of the ruling, the court ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could proceed to trial.
Democrats have been loudly condemning Donald Trump for rhetoric they call dictatorial, as well as steering voters’ attention to his former White House chief of staff John Kelly’s comment that he meets the definition of a fascist.
In an interview with the New Republic, Ben Wikler, who as chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party is hoping to deliver the electoral votes of one of the swingiest swing states to Kamala Harris, explains why he believes such allegations may tip the scales in the vice-president’s favor:
This is critical because this is the genuine article that stakes in this election. Now we’ve got Mark Milley, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Kelly, former President Trump’s chief of staff, who was a four-star general—and Harris amplifying it—making clear that the nation’s cameras are pointed directly at this reality. For the voters that are on the fence, who often feel deeply conflicted in the final weeks of this election, people who maybe have voted Republican in the past, but are not quite sure if they can vote for Trump again, this gives them a very clear reason to break against Trump. And that could be the entire ball game.
Wisconsin is a jump ball right now. There’s a poll today that finds 2 percent of Wisconsin, or 4 percent of Wisconsin voters, undecided, and 48-48 for Harris and for Trump. That means that the decisions made by those last 4 percent could tip the entire election here and probably, frankly, in all the other battleground states. There’s seven states that are jump balls in the final stretch. And what we know—I know this from directly knocking on doors and talking to voters; we know this from polls; we know this from models; we know this from focus groups; we know from every method of research that we have—is that there’s a share of the undecided electorate who have been traditionally Republican, who can’t stand the idea of Trump and are trying to decide for themselves whether they can overcome their aversion to Trump and still vote for him, or whether that is just so unacceptable that even if they disagree with Kamala Harris about a bunch of stuff, they’re going to vote for her in the final stretch. That is probably the election-defining question.
Harris campaign says latest Trump comments proof of his plans for dictatorship
A spokesman for Kamala Harris’s campaign said Donald Trump’s comment about firing Jack Smith and his brags about the supreme court giving presidents immunity is proof he would govern as a dictator.
“Donald Trump thinks he’s above the law, and these latest comments are right in line with the warnings made by Trump’s former Chief of Staff that he wants to rule as a dictator with unchecked power,” said Ammar Moussa, the campaign’s director of rapid response.
“A second Trump term, where a more unstable and unhinged Trump has essentially no guardrails and is surrounded by loyalists who will enable his worst instincts, is guaranteed to be more dangerous. America can’t risk a second Trump term.”
If elected, Trump says he will fire Jack Smith 'within two seconds'
Donald Trump has vowed that if he returns to the White House, he will swiftly fire Jack Smith, the justice department special counsel who is prosecuting him for allegedly plotting to overturn the 2020 election and hide classified documents.
In an interview today, conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt asked Trump if he would pardon himself or fire Smith. Trump meandered in his reply, before saying:
It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds.
Trump also noted that “we got immunity at the Supreme Court,” a reference to the ruling by the court’s conservative majority this summer finding that presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts. That complicated Smith’s election meddling case against the former president, and played a part in it not going to trial prior to the 5 November election.
Perhaps more interesting is this survey that the Guardian’s Robert Tait wrote up yesterday showing that Arab Americans are now narrowly leaning towards Donald Trump, after strongly backing Joe Biden in 2020. That shift is likely a consequence of Biden’s support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza following the 7 October attack, and could imperil Kamala Harris’s chances of winning the White House. Here’s more:
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, which is home to a large Arab American population.
The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows 43% supporting Trump compared with 41% for Harris, and 4% backing the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.
The figures are broadly in line with a previous poll carried out this month by the Arab American Institute. Together they suggest that Harris’s support in the community has been undermined by the Biden administration’s backing for Israel’s year-long war against Hamas in Gaza.
The latest poll also shows Trump leading Harris by 39% to 33% on the question of which candidate would be most likely resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the candidates were tied at 38% apiece on who would be “better for the Middle East in general”.
Support for Trump is particularly striking given that the same poll shows twice as many respondents – 46% to 23% – think anti-Arab racism and hate crimes are likely to increase under a Trump presidency compared with under Harris.
Yesterday, Bloomberg News and Morning Consult released polling that found, like so many before it have, an essentially tied race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
The survey heard from voters in all seven swing states, and found Trump leading by 1.5 percentage points in Georgia, 1.2 percentage points in North Carolina and 0.3 percentage points in Wisconsin.
Harris was up by 0.4 percentage points in Arizona, 3.1 percentage points in Michigan, 0.5 percentage points in Nevada and 1.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania.
Many of these findings are within the poll’s one percentage point margin of error.
Should the swing states end up voting the way they are leaning in this poll – and there’s no telling that they will – Harris would win.
For more of what polls are telling us, or not telling us, check out our tracker:
NBC News has a little more detail on Beyoncé’s event with Kamala Harris in Houston tomorrow, specifically that she will be performing:
.@NBCNews confirms: Beyoncé is expected to appear with Vice President Harris in Houston Friday evening, three sources familiar with the planning tell @KellyO, @Yamiche & myself. One of the people said Beyoncé plans to PERFORM as well. @tylerpager scooped the 🐝 news first.
— Monica Alba (@albamonica) October 24, 2024
Beyoncé to campaign with Harris in Houston on Friday - report
Beyoncé will appear with Kamala Harris in Houston on Friday, the Washington Post reports, when the vice-president visits the pop star’s hometown to rally with Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred and attack abortion bans passed by Republicans.
Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” is regularly played at Harris’s campaign events, though the singer has not appeared with the vice-president since she launched her campaign.
Harris has been picking up the endorsements of a number of prominent musicians in recent weeks, including Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, who will do concerts with the campaign starting today in Atlanta.
In addition to attempting to impeach Joe Biden, House Republicans have fixated on his legally troubled son Hunter Biden, looking for evidence of corruption by the president.
They have not turned up much, despite issuing a flurry of subpoenas to Biden administration officials that have led to lengthy and complex litigation. Yesterday, one of the last outstanding matters came before a federal judge who became so frustrated with the squabble she invoked her dog. The hearing led to an agreement that will likely delay the release of any new information the Republicans are seeking until next year – at which point, there will be a new Congress, and Biden will no longer be in the White House.
Politico was at the hearing, and explains more:
A highly unusual ultimatum from a frustrated judge caused House Republican investigators to postpone their demand for testimony from two Justice Department tax attorneys in a probe of Hunter Biden’s finances.
“I’m willing to bet everything I own, plus my dog Scout, that these two line attorneys are going to have zero information to confirm your suspicion,” U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes told a lawyer representing the House GOP on Wednesday.
Reyes threatened to order Attorney General Merrick Garland and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to show up next week in her Washington courtroom for legal arguments on the dispute.
“Don’t test me on this … I’m not bluffing,” said Reyes, an appointee of President Joe Biden who is often seen around the federal courthouse with her golden retriever.
The fight emerged from House Republicans’ long-running search for evidence that the White House exerted political pressure on officials who investigated the younger Biden’s failure to pay income taxes. As part of that inquiry, the House Judiciary Committee tried to obtain testimony from two Justice Department tax lawyers who worked on the case.
When the Justice Department resisted the House GOP’s subpoenas to the two lawyers, the fight ended up before Reyes, who has been refereeing the dispute for months with increasing exasperation.
During a two-hour hearing on Wednesday, she pressed lawyers for both sides to punt the dispute until next year. If they refused, she said, she would summon their bosses into court.
After a brief recess, the House’s top lawyer, Matthew Berry, and veteran Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Shapiro told the judge they had agreed to shelve the matter until early next year. By that point, a new Congress and a new president will have been sworn in — developments likely to diminish both sides’ appetite for a fight linked to an all-but-defunct effort to impeach Joe Biden.
You don’t hear so much about Congress these day, and there’s a good reason for that.
Both houses are in recess, and many lawmakers are back in their districts campaigning for re-election. But the Republican-led House judiciary committee will today convene in Milwaukee for a hearing titled “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Wisconsin Perspectives”.
It’s not an accident that they are focusing on one of the issues Donald Trump is campaigning on in one of the swing states he needs to win. Led by his ally Jim Jordan, the committee has been at the forefront of ultimately fruitless effort to impeach Joe Biden, and quickly shifted to attacking Kamala Harris when she became the Democratic candidate in July. Expect this hearing to be a continuation of that offensive.
Yesterday, another former Trump administration official told Politico that she agrees with John Kelly’s assessment that the former president is a fascist, and said he has “authoritarian tendencies”.
“Does he have authoritarian tendencies? Yes,” said Elizabeth Neumann, a former deputy chief of staff in the homeland security department.
“Is he kind of leaning towards that ultra-nationalism component? Absolutely. That is kind of his brand, right? He’s made nationalism the new definition of the Republican Party.”
Neumann has already endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris.
After ex-chief of staff call him 'fascist', Trump lobs insults at Harris
Donald Trump’s campaign spent yesterday hitting back at John Kelly, his former White House chief of staff who went public with his thoughts that his one-time boss was a fascist.
While the president angrily condemned Kelly as “a bad general” in a Truth Social post, he didn’t bring the subject up much at a Georgia rally in the evening, instead publicly insulting Kamala Harris.
“This woman is crazy,” he told an arena full of supporters in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth. “You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.”
And more:
She’s not a smart person. She’s a low IQ individual.
It was all part of a campaign speech that was, in typical Trump 2024 form, lengthy and meandering, touching on everything from Richard Nixon to McDonald’s. The Guardian’s Sam Levin watched the whole thing, so you don’t have to:
Harris picks up endorsement from Republican mayor in key Wisconsin county - report
A Republican city mayor in a Wisconsin county that has often swung elections in the battleground state has endorsed Kamala Harris, FOX6 News Milwaukee reports.
Shawn Reilly is the mayor of Waukesha, the largest city in the county of the same name, which is also the most-populous Republican-voting county in the state that is viewed as crucial to Harris’s hopes of winning the White House. He told the broadcaster that he’s voting for the vice-president because he does not want Donald Trump to return to the White House:
“It’s difficult. The easy thing to do is just not say anything and cast my vote the way I want, but I think we’re at a crossroads now,” Reilly said. “I feel in my heart that this is something that I need to come out and say: I am going to be voting for Vice President Harris to become our next president.”
Reilly voted third party in 2016 and for President Joe Biden in 2020 but kept that to himself. For other officers, he said he votes Republican “more often than not.”
Now this red city mayor is publicly endorsing blue for president.
“It is a vote against Trump,” he said. “I am terrified of Donald Trump becoming our next president for all the reasons I have indicated: he’s already been impeached twice. He’s been convicted of felonies and this is not what the United States needs.”
The chair of the state Democratic party, Ben Wikler, cheered Reilly’s break from the GOP:
This
— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) October 24, 2024
is
a
big
deal https://t.co/7eTwMlqkhI
Updated
Republican former Michigan congressman endorses Harris - report
Fred Upton, a Republican former congressman who represented a western Michigan district for 36 years, has endorsed Kamala Harris, the Detroit News reports.
Upton, who was one of 10 Republicans to vote for Donald Trump’s impeachment after January 6, said he had voted Democratic in a presidential election for the first time in his life because he is turned off by the former president’s extremism and believes Harris will be more successful at governing with bipartisan support.
“Watching Trump day after day, he’s ignored the advice of many senior, respected Republicans to stay on the issues,” Upton said in an interview with the Detroit News.
“Instead, he’s still talking about the election being stolen, trashing women left and right. He’s just totally unhinged. We don’t need this chaos. We need to move forward, and that’s why I’m where I am.”
The endorsement comes as Harris steps up her outreach to Republicans who she believes can be swayed against voting for Trump. Earlier this week, she campaigned alongside Liz Cheney, another Republican former congresswoman who lost her seat after breaking with the former president:
When he speaks in Tempe, Arizona later today, one wonders if Donald Trump will address the allegation made by former model Stacey Williams in an interview with the Guardian’s Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Lucy Osborne that he groped her in 1993. She’s the latest woman to come forward and say the then-real estate mogul put his hands on her without permission. Here’s more:
A former model who says she met Donald Trump through the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein has accused the former president of groping and sexually touching her in an incident in Trump Tower in 1993, in what she believed was a “twisted game” between the two men.
Stacey Williams, who worked as a professional model in the 1990s, said she first met Trump in 1992 at a Christmas party after being introduced to him by Epstein, who she believed was a good friend of the then New York real estate developer. Williams said Epstein was interested in her and the two casually dated for a period of a few months.
“It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams said.
The alleged groping occurred some months later, in the late winter or early spring of 1993, when Epstein suggested during a walk they were on that he and Williams stop by to visit Trump at Trump Tower. Epstein was later convicted on sex offenses and killed himself in prison in 2019.
Moments after they arrived, she alleges, Trump greeted Williams, pulled her toward him and started groping her. She said he put his hands “all over my breasts” as well as her waist and her buttocks. She said she froze because she was “deeply confused” about what was happening. At the same time, she said she believed she saw the two men smiling at each other.
Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary for Donald Trump’s campaign, provided a statement denying the allegations, which said in part: “These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false. It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”
Harris heads to Georgia, Trump to Arizona as campaign grinds to finish
The two lead actors in US politics (soon there will be only one) are scheduled to make a single appearance each today, as they look to clinch the support of swing state voters with little time left before the election.
Kamala Harris will head to Georgia for a campaign event in Clarkston, outside Atlanta, at 7pm ET. She flies from there to Houston, Texas, where tomorrow, she’s set to attack Donald Trump’s abortion policy in a state that is not a swing state, but which moved swiftly to ban the procedure after Roe v Wade was overturned. She will also campaign with Colin Allred, the Democratic Senate candidate whose victory could allow the party to maintain its control of Congress’s upper chamber, which the GOP is otherwise viewed as having a good shot at taking.
As for Trump, he’s having one of his usual rallies in a Tempe, Arizona arena at 4pm. Based on how his campaign advertised it, the former president will attack Harris and the Democrats over inflation, but Trump, of course, rarely stays on topic.
An Arizona prosecutor said the man arrested in the shooting of a Democratic national committee office in suburban Phoenix had more than 120 guns and more than 250,000 rounds of ammunition in his home, leading law enforcement to believe he may have been planning a mass casualty event.
The Associated Press (AP) reports that Maricopa county prosecutor Neha Bhatia said at Jeffrey Michael Kelly’s initial court appearance on Wednesday that federal agents told her about the large seizure made after Kelly’s arrest. Scopes, body armour and silencers were also found, she said. A machine gun was discovered in the car he was driving.
The sheer size of the cache led authorities to believe “this person was preparing to commit an act of mass casualty,” Bhatia said.
Police said Kelly, 60, allegedly fired BB pellets and then gunshots at the glass front door and a window of the Arizona Democrats’ field office in Tempe. Police found three .22-caliber bullet casings while searching Kelly’s trash, according to court documents, reports the AP.
Nobody was inside during the shootings in the early morning hours of 16 September, 23 September and 6 October.
The Tempe location was one of 18 Harris field offices in Arizona where Democrats gathered to organise Harris campaign efforts. It was shut down after the last shooting, police said.
Kelly is also accused of hanging several political signs lined with razor blades on Tuesday in Ahwatukee, an affluent suburb of Phoenix where most voters have chosen Democrats in recent elections. Authorities said he also hung plastic bags holding a white powder labeled “biohazard” from those signs.
The AP reports that authorities said the hand-painted signs were attached to palm trees and appeared to criticise Democrats and their presidential nominee, vice-president Kamala Harris.
Kelly was being held on three felony counts of acts of terrorism and four other counts related to the shootings, according to police. A $500,000 cash bond was set with a requirement for house arrest and an ankle monitor in the event he is able to raise that amount.
His attorney Jason Squires said Kelly was a retired aerospace engineer who at one time had top security clearance, had no criminal record and was not a flight risk. Kelly’s next appearance was set for the morning of 29 October in Maricopa county superior court.
Political violence has already marred the campaign season, with the Republican presidential nominee being targeted by assassination attempts at a campaign rally and at one of Trump’s Florida golf courses.
Updated
Harris praises John Kelly for sending ‘911 call’ to the US over Trump’s fitness to serve
Kamala Harris praised Donald Trump’s former chief of staff for sending a “911 call” to the nation about the former president’s unfitness to serve a second term, attacking her opponent as a “fascist” who would send the nation down a dangerous path.
Harris participated in a CNN town hall with undecided voters in Delaware county, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, as the battleground state appears poised to play a potentially decisive role in the presidential race. While taking voters’ questions on everything from the cost of living to abortion access, Harris repeatedly steered the conversation back to questions over Trump’s fitness for office.
The town hall came a day after the Atlantic published a story detailing former Trump advisers’ accounts of the then president expressing a wish for “the kind of generals that Hitler had”. The article quoted Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, who described the former president’s consistent pattern of demeaning members of the military. The Trump campaign has denied these accounts.
“I do believe that Donald Trump is unstable, increasingly unstable, and unfit to serve,” Harris told the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper at the town hall. She added:
The people who know Donald Trump best, the people who worked with him in the White House … they have said explicitly he has contempt for the constitution of the United States. They have said he should never again serve as president of the United States.”
Harris predicted that, if elected to a second term, Trump would not have advisers like Kelly who might help put guardrails around the former president’s behaviour in office.
“[Kelly] is just putting out a 911 call to the American people,” Harris said. “And this time, we must take very seriously, those folks who knew him best and were career people are not going to be there to hold him back.”
When asked explicitly by Cooper whether she considered Trump to be a fascist, Harris said, “Yes, I do.”
Here are some of the latest images on the newswires:
Project 2025 will ‘upend’ the lives of Black Americans, new report shows
Project 2025, the 900-page ultra-conservative roadmap that details how the former president Donald Trump and his allies would restructure the US government if he is elected, has specific implications for Black Americans, according to a new report.
The Legal Defense Fund (LDF), an organisation that fights for racial justice, recently released the most in-depth legal analysis of Project 2025’s impact on Black communities. It highlights how Black Americans would be harmed due to policies that would weaken anti-discrimination laws; dismantle the Department of Education; threaten Black political power; increase the use of the death penalty (which disproportionately affects Black people); and exacerbate health disparities caused by environmental racism.
Karla McKanders, the director of the LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI), the in-house research thinktank that produced the report, said she wanted people to understand the “larger impact that Project 2025 will have on our democracy and undermining our democracy”.
The report is written in plain language and has been shared on social media, McKanders said, as the organization wants it to be available to a wide audience. “The most important part of the report is how Project 2025 will have an impact on individual lives and how those individual lives will be upended through the policy proposals.”
Of note, she said, are the report’s chapters on education equity and political participation.
Donald Trump tells supporters to 'just vote' at Georgia rally organized by Charlie Kirk
Donald Trump implored supporters at a Georgia rally to vote for him – with an early ballot or in-person on election day – in a state that will be crucial in the presidential election.
“Just vote – whichever way you want to do it,” Trump said at the event on Wednesday organised by conservative provocateur Charlie Kirk and the group he founded, reports the Associated Press (AP).
But the rest of former president’s speech and the lineup that preceded him framed the 2024 presidential election in stark terms. The Republican nominee insulted Kamala Harris while Kirk and other speakers used religious references and described the vice-president and her Democratic party as evil, reports the AP.
Democrats “stand for everything God hates,” Kirk said, calling the Trump v Harris choice “a spiritual battle”.
“This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it stay that way,” Kirk told the 10,000 or so Georgians, who at one point, the AP reports, joined Kirk in a deafening chant of “Christ is King! Christ is King!”
Harris, who is a Baptist, used a CNN town hall in Philadelphia to describe Trump as fascistic, further crystallizing the nation’s polarized posture with less than two weeks before the 5 November election.
The Trump campaign strategy of encouraging supporters to consider every voting method is a turn from when blamed his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden on mail ballots; the number of people voting early has surged this year.
Over 1.9 million voters have cast early ballots in Georgia, where Trump lost by a mere 11,779 votes four years ago to Biden. Voters nationwide have returned more than 23 million advance ballots in the 2024 general election. That has broken records in multiple states, partly driven by Republicans embracing early voting at Trump’s direction.
“You need to go to every single person you know and say, ‘Are you voting for Trump?’” Kirk told the crowd.
The AP reports that the 31-year-old Kirk has an outsize role in this year’s election, using his online presence and the organisation he founded, Turning Point Action, to make himself one of the nation’s most recognisable conservatives and a central part of Trump’s operation. The former president has put a particular emphasis on courting younger men, the “bro vote,” trying to reach them through podcasts, social media and influencers such as Kirk.
The rally, at the Gas South arena in Duluth, was filled with Turning Point’s signature pyrotechnics, reports the AP. Trump used it to feature three figures who represent the populist coalition he is trying to assemble: Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ran his own campaign for president this year before endorsing Trump; former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who announced this week that she is joining the Republican Party; and Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News commentator who has attracted millions of followers with his bravado-heavy social media presence. He added country music singer Jason Aldean, whose Try That in a Small Town single was a reaction to urban protests.
Carlson whipped the crowd into a frenzy by reassuring them that liberals and political elites were the “bizarre minority” in US politics, while Trump’s “Make America Great Again” supporters comprise a “gentle, tolerant” movement.
According to the AP, Carlson cast Trump as America’s “Dad” and said a Trump victory over Harris would mean “Dad’s home! And he’s pissed!” – while also being a “big middle finger wagging” at “the worst people in the English-speaking world.”
Later in the night as Trump spoke, some in the crowd shouted out, “Daddy’s home!”
Updated
With less than two weeks until the US election, Madeleine Finlay speaks to climate activist and author Bill McKibben for the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast to find out what a win for Donald Trump could mean for the environment and the world’s climate goals.
You can listen to it here:
Keir Starmer’s hopes of meeting Kamala Harris before the US presidential election have faded, Downing Street has said.
The UK prime minister said last month he aimed to meet both presidential candidates before American voters go to the polls on 5 November.
He told reporters who had travelled with him to New York that it would be “very good to meet both [Trump and Harris] at some stage” before the US election. “We’ll just have to see what’s possible,” he said.
Starmer did secure a meeting with Donald Trump while in New York for the UN general assembly in September. He and the former US president had a two-hour dinner, where they were joined by David Lammy, the foreign secretary.
A government source said on Thursday that hopes of arranging a meeting between Starmer and Harris had faded. “We’re obviously a number of days out from the campaign and I suspect both candidates are focused on the election,” they said.
Updated
LA Times editor resigns after owner blocks presidential endorsement
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, refused to allow the newspaper’s editorial board to endorse Kamala Harris for president, the former editor of the paper’s opinion section told a media news outlet on Wednesday.
Mariel Garza, a veteran California journalist who has worked for the Times’ editorial board for nearly a decade, resigned from the paper in protest of Soon-Shiong’s decision, she told the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).
“In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up,” Garza told CJR.
Harris is the first presidential nominee from California in any political party since Ronald Reagan.
In a long social media post on X, apparently written in response to Garza’s comments, Soon-Shiong wrote that the Los Angeles Times editorial board had rejected a proposed alternative to a typical presidential endorsement editorial, which he described as “a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation”.
So many comments about the @latimes Editorial Board not providing a Presidential endorsement this year. Let me clarify how this decision came about.
— Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong (@DrPatSoonShiong) October 23, 2024
The Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH…
Soon-Shiong wrote that the paper’s opinion editors, who typically endorse one candidate each for a range of local and national offices and explains why each candidate is the best pick, were asked to instead present “clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, [so] our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.
“Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision,” Soon-Shiong wrote. He ended with the words: “Please #vote.”
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nearly 25 million Americans have already voted, less than two weeks out from the US election, with records broken in multiple battleground states, at least partly driven by Republicans embracing early voting at Donald Trump’s direction.
Either through in-person early voting or mail-in ballots, more than 1.9 million voters have cast early votes in Georgia, where Trump lost by a mere 11,779 votes four years ago to Democrat Joe Biden, while North Carolina also set a new record of more than 1.7m despite the chaos caused by Hurricane Helene last month.
At an event in Georgia, Trump celebrated the state’s record-breaking vote levels, and at a separate rally urged his supporters to “just vote – whichever way you want to do it.”
Donald Trump is expected to address Kamala Harris’s economic policy at an afternoon rally in Tempe, Arizona, his campaign announced in a statement that said the vice-president had “made the American Dream of home ownership unreachable for young Americans and families.”
According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), the pro-Trump Turning Point political action committee will then host the Republican ex-president at a Las Vegas rally aimed at recruiting volunteers and celebrating the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.
“These are voters whose values closely align with the conservative platform but have been given too little attention by our movement,” Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk said in a statement.
AFP reports that Trump told supporters in North Carolina on Tuesday that former president Barack Obama was “a real jerk” and shrugged off his support for Harris.
“Over the last couple of days I’ve watched him campaign,” said the Republican, who held a spate of stops across Georgia on Wednesday. Trump said:
What a divider he is. He divides this country. He couldn’t care less, him and his little group of people.”
Harris and former first lady Michelle Obama are set to hold a rally this Saturday in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Harris showcases Springsteen in star-studded swing state stop
Kamala Harris will stage a star-studded rally on Thursday alongside Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, as she launches a series of battleground state concerts to juice support in the final days of a nail-biting US presidential election.
The Atlanta rally, Harris’s first campaign stop with the only black president in US history, comes as an already bitter campaign is reaching new heights with the Democrat openly calling her Republican rival, Donald Trump, a “fascist” who presents a clear and present danger to US national security, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The contest remains a toss-up, with polling in all the swing states within the margin of error, and both campaigns have been pulling out the stops to win over undecided Americans and bank early votes ahead of 5 November.
According to AFP, the Harris campaign said it planned gigs in all seven of the swing states expected to determine who wins the White House, with Springsteen back out on the campaign trail Monday in Philadelphia with Obama.
The rock legend, whose socially conscious paeans to working-class struggle have made him one of the most popular artists in the US, has long lent his blue-collar appeal to Democratic campaigns.
Joe Biden walked out to the Springsteen song “We Take Care of Our Own” when he accepted victory in the 2020 election. The rocker – known as “The Boss” – has campaigned for John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Obama in the past.
Obama has been making his own headlining appearances in support of Harris and other Democrats in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, five of the country’s most closely-fought states.
Party officials hope the former president, still one of the most popular Democrats on the national stage eight years after leaving office, will reverse eroding support among black voters, which is behind where it was for Biden in 2020.
In other developments:
Nearly 25 million Americans have already voted, less than two weeks out from the US election, with records broken in multiple battleground states, at least partly driven by Republicans embracing early voting at Donald Trump’s direction.
Pennsylvania’s highest court allowed people whose mail ballots were rejected on technicalities to cast provisional ballots, likely affecting thousands of early voters. The decision was another defeat for the Republican National Committee’s legal campaign, after it argued some provisional ballots cast during the April primary should have been rejected.
A former model who says she met Donald Trump through the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein has accused the former president of groping and sexually touching her in an incident in Trump Tower in 1993, in what she believed was a “twisted game” between the two men. The Trump campaign called the allegations by Stacey Williams “unequivocally false”, calling it a fake story “contrived by the Harris campaign”.
Trump appeared in Zebulon, Georgia, with lieutenant governor and 2020 election denier Burt Jones, at a faith-focused event his campaign dubbed a “Believers and Ballots town hall”. Trump praised tech mogul Elon Musk, for providing hurricane relief where he claimed the federal government did not.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump assailed John Kelly as a “a bad general” gripped by “pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred”. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a retired Marine general, on Tuesday said he believed Trump met the definition of “fascist” and was “certainly an authoritarian”. Two retired army officers said they agreed with Kelly, while Republicans including the governor of New Hampshire dismissed the comments.
Kamala Harris denounced Trump as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power” and a military personally loyal to him. In a surprise speech from her Washington DC residence, the Democratic nominee jumped on Kelly’s claims. Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said the president also agreed with those calling Trump a fascist.
Harris repeated the fascist claim during a televised town hall with undecided voters in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In response to CNN moderator Anderson Cooper asking her: “Let me ask you tonight, do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?”, Harris answered: “Yes, I do.” Trump was invited to attend the same town hall but declined.
Trump stayed in Georgia for a rally in Duluth with guests Tucker Carlson, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. He escalated his personal insults against Kamala Harris, saying she was “crazy” and inviting voters to tell his opponent: “‘You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.’”
China-linked social media bots are targeting Republicans including Marco Rubio, according to new research from Microsoft, while a senior US intelligence official said groups in Russia created and helped spread viral disinformation targeting Tim Walz.
The US justice department warned Musk’s Super Pac that the billionaire and Tesla CEO’s $1m-a-day giveaways may violate federal law, according to multiple reports. Musk, who has thrown his support behind Trump, announced on Saturday while speaking before a crowd in Pennsylvania that he was giving away $1m each day until election day to someone who signs his online petition supporting the US constitution.
Harris’s campaign announced she 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.
Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz voted early along with his wife, Gwen, and son, Gus. Leaving the voting booth in St Paul, Minnesota, Walz said his vote was “an opportunity to turn the page on the chaos of Donald Trump and a new way forward”.
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, rallied Democrats in Florida, marking a break from his recent stumping in more competitive states including Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Both parties expect the Sunshine state to once more swing for Trump, but the Harris campaign’s rare foray drew attention to the close Senate race between the Republican incumbent and Democratic challenger.
The Los Angeles Times opinion editor resigned after the newspaper’s owner blocked the masthead from endorsing Kamala Harris for president. Mariel Garza said she was standing up against the decision by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s billionaire owner. In a social media post, Soon-Shiong wrote that the Los Angeles Times editorial board had rejected a proposed alternative to a typical presidential endorsement editorial, which he described as “a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House”.
