Closing summary
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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump spent Sunday trying to shore up political support among what they perceived to be must-have voting blocs with polls showing them locked in a tight 5 November presidential race.
Kamala Harris held a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, where she attacked her rival Donald Trump for spreading misinformation related to hurricanes Helene and Milton. Meanwhile, Trump delivered his remarks at Prescott Valley, Arizona.
A Las Vegas man was arrested for illegally possessing firearms near Trump’s rally. Deputies assigned to Donald Trump’s rally “contacted” the driver of a black SUV at a checkpoint near the intersection at around 5pm on Saturday, law enforcement said.
Speaker Mike Johnson said that passing additional hurricane aid for states impacted by hurricanes Helene and Milton “can wait” until Congress is back in session after the election.
Three major polls were released Sunday, showing Kamala Harris either ahead of Donald Trump or running a head-to-head race.
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Before concluding his speech, Donald Trump criticized critical race theory and made homophobic remarks about gender identity lessons at schools.
“Our cities are suffering,” Trump said. “We will get critical race theory and transgender insanity out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports.”
He later finished his speech at Prescott Valley, Arizona.
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Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, Kari Lake, took the stage, calling former president Donald Trump one of the “greatest leaders in human history”.
“I want to go to Washington DC and help President Trump secure our border, make our state safe again, make our state affordable again, and make our kids have access to the American dream,” Lake said before walking off the stage.
Trump then expressed his support for several Republican leaders, including Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, Utah congresswoman Celeste Maloy, and Arizona politician Paul Gosar.
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Donald Trump pivoted to the economy, delivering his usual remarks about Kamala Harris being a “tax queen”, his promise for no tax on tips, and his plans to impose an across-the-board tariff of either 10% or 20% on every import coming into the US.
The former president later criticized the New York Times for publishing a review of Trump’s rallies and other events that looked at the change since he first took the political stage in 2015, with some attributing his harsher and less-focused performance to his age. Others have accused him of being cognitively impaired.
“I’ll let you know when I will be, someday. We all will be someday, but I’ll be the first to let you know,” Trump said.
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Trump pledges to ask Congress to raise the wages of border patrol agents if he’s elected
Donald Trump said agents at the southern border are going “to save our country”, which is why he plans to ask Congress to approve a 10% raise and a $10,000 retention and signing bonus for each agent.
“We’re going to retain them, and they deserve it. They’ve been treated unbelievably badly,” he said.
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Donald Trump invited National Border Council president, Paul Perez, to the stage. He quickly attacked Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris, and condemned her stance on immigration and her handling of the US-Mexico border.
“[Trump] has always stood with the men and women who protect this border, who put their minds on the line for the country, a man who knows about putting his life on the line for what is right,” said Perez.
“On behalf of the 16,000 men and women represented by the National Board of Patrol Council, we strongly support Donald J Trump for president of the United States,” Perez said.
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Donald Trump expressed his support for Kari Lake, the Republican candidate in the Arizona Senate race, calling her a “tough one”.
Lake is running against the US Representative Ruben Gallego, with whom she debated on Wednesday.
“You destroyed that poor guy,” Trump said about her performance. “That was a destruction.”
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Donald Trump called the mayor of Aurora, Colorado, Mike Coffman, a “radical left Democrat”.
During his rally, Trump repeated his comments about Venezuelan gang activity at an apartment complex in the city.
Coffman previously said these remarks were “grossly exaggerated”, adding they “have unfairly hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety”.
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Donald Trump bragged about his list of endorsements, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk, former US representative Tulsi Gabbard, former third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, and former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien.
He also boasted about the harsh immigration policy undertaken during his presidency. Trump displayed a chart he usually presents during his rallies, showing a decline in people entering the US through the southern border while he was president.
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Trump takes the stage at campaign event in Prescott Valley, Arizona
He started his remarks by encouraging the crowd to vote “to take back our country”.
“With your help, 23 days from now – can you believe it? – we’re going to win Arizona and we’re going to defeat Kamala,” he said. “She shouldn’t even be running.”
He proceeded to use degrading language toward immigrants.
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“We are here together this Sunday afternoon because we love our country,” Kamala Harris said during her rally in North Carolina. The crowd cheered “USA, USA, USA!”
“I do believe it is one of the highest forms of patriotism to then fight for the ideals of our country and to fight to realize the promise of America,” Harris said before concluding her speech.
Kamala Harris said Donald Trump’s presidency resulted in more than one in three women living in states with abortion bans, including North Carolina.
“General Milley, former chairman of the joint chiefs under Donald Trump, said: ‘No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.’ Think about that,” the vice-president said during her rally.
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Kamala Harris holds a rally in Greenville, North Carolina
At a campaign stop in Greenville, North Carolina, the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris attacked her rival Donald Trump for spreading misinformation related to hurricanes Helene and Milton.
“We can already see the harm he’s up to as a candidate,” Harris said. “Most recently, spreading disinformation in the wake of natural disasters.”
“Donald Trump cares more about scaring people, creating fear, running on a problem instead of what real leaders do, which is to participate in fixing problems,” Harris added.
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JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential pick, attended Nascar’s Bank of America Roval 400 on Sunday at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina.
Vance attended the playoff race with his family and did not deliver any remarks during the event.
Senator @JDVance here at @CLTMotorSpdwy.
— Noah Lewis (@Noah_Lewis1) October 13, 2024
He and his son take a look at @Mc_Driver’s No. 34 car and ask the team questions about the car.
The 34 crew thought this was a very cool moment when speaking after.#NASCAR pic.twitter.com/4BjAknZXYy
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Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver his remarks soon at a rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona.
Before his speech, Trump’s former adviser Stephen Miller took the stage, attacking the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
“She not only annihilated our border, but she began using your tax dollars by the billions to smuggle, fly, bus, transport and, in every way possible, relocate illegal aliens en masse inside the United States,” Miller said.
He continued to make anti-immigrant comments and condemn the Biden administration’s border policy.
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Las Vegas man arrested for illegally possessing firearms near Trump’s rally – report
Deputies assigned to Donald Trump’s rally “contacted” the driver of a black SUV at a checkpoint near the intersection at around 5pm on Saturday, law enforcement said.
The man was identified as 49-year-old Vem Miller, who was taken into custody and was later released Saturday on $5,000 bail.
Miller illegally had a shotgun, a loaded handgun and a high-capacity magazine. The former president held a rally at the Calhoun Ranch in Riverside county, just outside Coachella on Saturday.
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Paulette Aniskoff, senior adviser for Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania and a former Obama aide, told NBC News that she sees “similarities” between the current Democratic presidential candidate and former president Barack Obama.
“The puzzle is how to make sure that we get enough votes out of everywhere, including the red counties,” said Aniskoff. “We can’t just run up the score in Philadelphia. That’s the old style of organizing – to just go into cities and mobilize.”
Aniskoff said that her current and former boss share a philosophy of “showing up everywhere” and listening to voters, including in not-so-friendly sectors.
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The Guardian’s Lloyd Green reviewed Melania Trump’s new 180-page memoir, which he describes as an “exercise in buck-passing and blame-dodging”.
In her new book, the former US first lady “blames staffers for plagiarizing Michelle Obama; repeatedly stresses her love for her husband despite professing to abhor lying liars who lie; and declares abortion a fundamental right, without pausing to consider Donald Trump’s role in attacking it via the US supreme court”.
Check out the full review of Melania here:
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Vance defends Trump’s lies that Venezuelan gangs have invaded Aurora, Colorado
Donald Trump has described an apartment complex in Aurora as a “war zone” overrun by Venezuelan gangs intent on taking over the city of about 400,000. He repeated the claim at a rally on Friday. Aurora’s mayor, Mike Coffman, said Trump’s claims are “grossly exaggerated” and that the problems were limited to a handful of apartment complexes and not enveloping the town.
“Well, … the mayor said they were exaggerated. That means there’s got to be some element of truth here,” JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said during an interview on ABC’s This Week.
“Unfortunately, when you let people in by the millions, most of whom are unvetted, most of whom you don’t know who they really are, you’re going to have problems like this,” Vance added.
He also tried to argue that there was no meaningful difference between an entire town and a handful of apartment complexex before This Week host Martha Raddatz ended the interview, saying: “Okay. … Let’s just end that with they did not invade or take over the city as Donald Trump said.”
Watch: JD Vance continues to lie and create a Trump & MAGA alternate reality about Aroura, Colorado when confronted with the facts by Martha Raddatz. JD Vance gets cocky and obstinate when he thinks he found a gotcha word game trap to push back on Raddatz with. pic.twitter.com/XGZsKU0Fm8
— Chris Borkowski (@cborkowski) October 13, 2024
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Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has apologized for feeding a Doritos chip to a social media influencer who dropped to her knees after Roman Catholic organizations accused the Democratic politician of insulting their religion by mocking the sacrament of communion.
“I would never do something to denigrate someone’s faith,” Whitmer said in a statement that her office provided to the Michigan television news station WJBK on Friday.
She explained that the stunt in question – captured on video with popular TikTok content creator Liz Plank – was meant to promote legislation signed by Joe Biden in 2022 that is colloquially known as the Chips Act and provided $280bn to research as well as manufacture semiconductors. But it was all “construed as something it was never intended to be, and I apologize for that”, Whitmer said.
On the video, Plank genuflects before Whitmer, who then places a Doritos chip in the podcaster and influencer’s mouth. The governor caps the scene off by gazing at the camera while she wears a hat supporting fellow Democrat Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz in November’s presidential election.
The Michigan Catholic Conference – which has clashed with Whitmer over her support of abortion rights – joined other church groups in condemning Whitmer’s video with Plank.
More on the controversial video here:
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Key event
Donald Trump called those who have opposed or investigated him “the enemy from within”.
“I always say, we have two enemies,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business’s Sunday Morning Futures. “We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”
He said that what a president might find hard to handle “are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff” referring to the California congressman and US Senate candidate who was part of a House committee that investigated the US Capitol attack carried out by Trump’s supporters after he lost the 2020 election to Biden.
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Tension between Kamala Harris’s team and Joe Biden’s White House has been on the rise in the last weeks before the elections, Axios reported.
Senior Biden aides told the news outlet that they’re still hurt over the president being pushed out of his re-election bid. Biden’s aides said they’re adjusting to being in a supporting role on the campaign trail.
“They’re too much in their feelings,” one Harris ally said of Biden’s team.
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Former President Bill Clinton visited Albany, Georgia, at an event for the Harris-Walz campaign. Clinton arrived at Mount Zion Baptist church and delivered remarks during the Sunday service.
“Experts in both parties say that this election is coming down to seven or eight states, one of which is Georgia,” Clinton said. “This whole election and the future of the country is turning out to be what people who are sort of on the fence about voting are going to do in the next three and a half weeks.”
Early voting in the state starts on Tuesday and will run over the next three weeks.
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Kamala Harris paid a visit to North Carolina, holding a rally in Greenville at East Carolina University a day after her stop in Raleigh.
Over the weekend, she has been meeting with faith leaders and volunteering to help prep supplies for Hurricane Helene victims, which ravaged western North Carolina a few weeks ago.
“I know Helene’s impact was further west, but I also know that the people of Greenville, like all Americans, have been inspired by the way communities are coming together,” Harris said on Sunday at the Koinonia Christian Center in Greenville.
“In a moment of crisis, isn’t it something when you know that often it is the people who have the least give the most,” she said.
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Republican representative Liz Cheney criticized House speaker Mike Johnson for saying there was a peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden after Donald Trump lost in 2020.
“I do not have confidence that Mike Johnson will fulfill his constitutional obligations,” Cheney said. “He has a record repeatedly of doing things that he knows to be wrong, that he knows to be unconstitutional, in order to placate Donald Trump. You saw that sycophancy just now.”
Earlier in the show, Johson said: “We have the peaceful transfer of power.”
“I believe President Trump’s going to win, and this will be taken care of,” he added.
Good for @Liz_Cheney raising the alarm now
— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) October 13, 2024
pic.twitter.com/KOevmtFyCr
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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump spent Sunday trying to shore up political support among what they perceived to be must-have voting blocs with polls showing them locked in a tight 5 November presidential race.
With election day less than a month away, the Democratic vice-president attended a Black church in Greenville, North Carolina, as part of her campaign’s “souls to the polls” push. Her Republican opponent was in Arizona, looking for Black and Latino support as he seeks a second presidency, after a rally in California a day earlier.
Both candidates are attempting to get a decisive edge among votes who have not yet decided who to support. Surveys show that early voting, which tends to favor Democrats, is down 45% from previous election years – a sign that there may be millions of undecided voters.
Trump has now switched from condemning early voting as a Democrat plot to engineer his defeat to Joe Biden in 2020 to urging people to vote early and by mail.
A recent ABC News-Ipsos poll showed that support was split down gender lines, with women voting 60-40 to Harris and men breaking for Trump by a similar margin.
Trump needs white women, who supported him in a greater numbers in 2020 than in 2016 – but also Black men. On Sunday, he argued that his fellow former president Barack Obama’s call last week for Black men to support Harris based “solely on her skin color, rather than her policies” as “deeply insulting”.
Here’s more on the candidates’ campaign events:
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Trump says he doesn't expect chaos on election day: 'Not from the side that votes for Trump'
Donald Trump on Sunday said he does not expect chaos from his supporters on the day of the 5 November election.
Asked on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures if he anticipated chaos from those who support him over Kamala Harris, the former president said: “No, I don’t think. Not from the side that votes for Trump.”
Supporters of Trump aimed a deadly attack on Congress weeks after he lost the presidency to Joe Biden in 2020. The US Capitol attack – launched after he told his supporters to fight like hell – was a desperate attempt to prevent congressional certification of the US president’s victory.
Hundreds of participants have been indicted on federal crimes pertaining to the violence. And Trump himself was criminally charged with illicitly trying to overturn his 2020 defeat in the lead-up to the attack, including by lying about how fraudsters robbed him of winning against Biden.
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Homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Sunday said the slew of misinformation online about the hurricanes devastating parts of the US is “extremely pernicious”.
During an interview with Face the Nation, Mayorkas called for officials to debunk the false claims because “we’re not seeing enough of that.”
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says he's "incredibly concerned" about disinformation around the government's hurricane response, and that some individuals are not seeking assistance because of it.
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) October 13, 2024
"We need individuals, elected officials, people who have the platform, to really… pic.twitter.com/pWbJqClaJH
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Democratic committee releases ads calling out Jill Stein as a 'vote for Trump'
The Democratic National Committee released a six-figure ad campaign in the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania calling out Jill Stein as a “vote for Trump”.
The ad opens with a photo of Stein morphing into the Republican presidential nominee.
“Why are Trump’s close allies helping her? Stein was key to Trump’s 2016 wins in battleground states,” says the ad. “She’s not sorry she helped Trump win. That’s why a vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump.”
Democratic party chair Jaime Harrison, California Senate candidate Adam Schiff, activist Jessica Craven, and others reacted to the ad on social.
With so much at stake in November, every vote will make a difference.
— Adam Schiff (@AdamSchiff) October 11, 2024
So let’s be clear:
A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump. https://t.co/TB1X3obRc8
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Media blitz to VP duties: on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris
The View, America’s most popular daytime talkshow, was on commercial break. Kamala Harris sat writing absence notes for students who were missing class to attend the live broadcast. “Is it just today, right?” the vice-president laughed.
She handed over the letters written on notepaper headed “The Vice President”. One said: “Dear teacher, please excuse Dani from class today. She was hanging out with us. Best and thank you for being an educator. Kamala.”
It was an unscripted moment that the studio audience loved but TV viewers wouldn’t see. Harris, running the shortest presidential campaign in modern US history after being unexpectedly plunged into the fight when Joe Biden dropped out, is exploring ways to reveal herself to a wary nation.
Still a relatively unknown quantity, the former California attorney general and US senator is trying to make the electorate feel comfortable about the prospect of President Kamala Harris.
In less than three months the vice-president has raised a record-breaking billion dollars. She has tried to put daylight between herself and the unpopular incumbent figure of Biden, and turn the election into a referendum on her opponent, former US president Donald Trump. She has sought to bring positive vibes to a country that seems to have anxiety in its bones.
She has set out to persuade America to do something that it has never done before in its 248-year existence: elect a woman to the White House – and a woman of colour to boot.
Here’s more on Harris’s media blitz:
Republican’s lies about immigrants eating cats in Ohio has led to swell of far-right extremism in Springfield – and beyond
For Denise Williams, the 70-year-old head of Springfield’s NAACP chapter, the past several weeks have been testing to say the least.
Last month, flyers calling for mass deportations of immigrants were distributed by the so-called Trinity White Knights, a group associated with the Ku Klux Klan, in Black-majority neighborhoods in south Springfield.
“I’m telling people: do nothing – don’t approach them. But it’s not easy for people to see this,” she said.
“I think that is what a lot of folks cannot understand – why do we have so much hate?”
About 22% of Springfield residents are African American, according to the US Census Bureau.
“People are mad. African Americans here don’t understand how this is allowed. We just have to take this for a minute. I know it’s hard.”
Trinity White Knights is headquartered in Kentucky, where flyers were also seen by residents of the Cincinnati suburb of Covington in July as part of an apparent recruitment effort. The flyers included a PO box address in Maysville, Kentucky, and a phone number.
Ever since Donald Trump claimed during a 10 September televised debate watched by 67 million people that immigrants in Springfield were eating people’s pets – a claim that has been found to be baseless – Springfield has seen a groundswell in far-right extremism.
Here’s more context on the rise in far-right extremism:
New polls show Harris either ahead of or head-to-head with Trump
Three major polls were released Sunday, showing Vice-President Kamala Harris either ahead of former president Donald Trump or running a head-to-head race.
Let’s start with the ABC News/Ipsos poll: Harris is ahead by two percentage points with 50% of the support. The poll, conducted between 4 to 8 October, found that 56% of Americans favor deporting all undocumented immigrants, helping Trump’s lead in trust to handle immigration at the US-Mexico border.
Meanwhile, NBC’s poll, conducted during the same time, shows Harris with support from 48% of registered voters, while Trump has the same percentage of support. Another 4% say they are undecided or wouldn’t vote for either option.
CBS also conducted a poll earlier this month, revealing a lead by Harris with 51% support compared to Trump’s 48%. The economy and policy surrounding the US-Mexico border are among the top issues voters are placing as top priorities when deciding on the next president.
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Mike Johnson: more hurricane aid for Helene and Milton 'can wait' until after election
Speaker Mike Johnson said that passing additional hurricane aid for states impacted by hurricanes Helene and Milton “can wait” until Congress is back in session after the election.
On Sunday, Johnson CBS’s Face the Nation, where host Margaret Brennan asked him why he thinks it’s fine to wait until November for Congress to pass more aid for Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton victims.
“Well, it can wait because, remember, the day before Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and then went up through the states and wound up in Senator Tillis’s state of North Carolina, Congress appropriated 20 billion additional dollars to FEMA so that they would have the necessary resources to address immediate needs,” Johnson said.
Tillis was part of a bipartisan group of senators that signed a letter urging lawmakers to think about bringing Congress members back into session this month to pass disaster legislation before the year’s end.
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Democratic senator Raphael Warnock from Georgia said he does not believe Black men will show up for former President Trump in large numbers.
During CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Bash, Warnock said:
Black men are not going to vote for Donald Trump in any significant numbers. There will be some. We’re not a monolith.
He was responding to a New York Times polling that placed Kamala Harris behind Joe Biden among Black voters. Warnock alluded to the late 80s case of the Central Park Five, where the brutal assault of a New York jogger in Central Park led to Trump taking out full-page ads in the city’s major newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty for those responsible.
“When it was proven that the Exonerated 5, the Central Park 5, were actually innocent, Donald Trump has shown no deal of concern about what they went through, no deal, no bit of contrition about it,” Warnock said.
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Good morning, US politics blog readers. There’s another busy news day ahead of us and we’ll keep up with all the developments as they happen.
Donald Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona, later today. Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, will head to a Get Out the Jewish Vote campaign event in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. He will later deliver remarks at a Girl Dads for Harris-Walz phone bank in Delaware County.
Several polls released on Sunday show Vice-President Kamala Harris in the lead or in a tight race with former president Donald Trump. An ABC News/Ipsos poll shows 50% support for Harris and 48% for Trump, while the latest national NBC News poll shows Trump and Harris are deadlocked.
Here’s what else is happening:
Kamala Harris on Saturday released a report on her health and medical history, which found that “she possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency” if voters elect her in November. A senior aide to Harris, 59, said the vice-president’s advisers viewed the publication of the health report and medical history as an opportunity to call attention to questions about Donald Trump’s physical fitness and mental acuity.
Tightening poll figures have triggered nervousness and anxiety in Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, with Donald Trump making gains in the states where it matters most as the election race enters its climactic final phase, according to The Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker.
Several former Trump administration officials have warned that the former president deliberately withheld disaster aid to states he deemed politically hostile to him as US president and will do so again unimpeded if he returns to the White House.
