With 10 days left to go until Election Day, the race to the White House between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump remains very tight across the nation’s battleground states.
Candidates Harris, Trump and their surrogates hit the campaign trail in full force.
Singer Beyonce Knowles, her former Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland and country singer Willie Nelson all tried to use their star power to turn out voters for Harris in Texas.
Trump, meanwhile, sat down with podcaster Joe Rogan for a three-hour interview. He then travelled to Michigan, where he belatedly addressed a thinned crowd due to the delay.
What are the latest updates from the polls?
The latest national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College from October 20 to 23, 2024 showed that Harris and Trump are tied nationally at 48 percent. The remaining 4 percent are undecided.
Among likely female voters, Harris holds an advantage of 54 percent to 42 percent against Trump. But the former president is making up for that among male voters with 55 percent against 41 percent supporting Harris.
Harris received the highest support from voters aged between 18 to 29 with 55 percent against Trump’s 43 percent, while Trump is ahead 51 percent to 44 percent among voters aged 45 to 64.
Worryingly for Harris, 61 percent of respondents said the country was headed down the wrong track while 27 percent said it was on the right track.
Meanwhile, the FiveThirtyEight poll tracker, which calculates the average of several national polls, shows Harris holding on to a razor-thin lead of 48 percent to Trump’s 46.6 percent. But her 1.4 percent point lead is lower than the 1.8 percent earlier this week.
While national surveys provide valuable insights into voter sentiment, the ultimate winner will be decided by the Electoral College, which reflects the outcomes in individual states.
The seven key swing states that could determine the election are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Together, these states account for 93 – or a third – of the 270 Electoral College required to win the election.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s latest poll average, Trump has a 1 percent advantage in North Carolina and 2 percent edge in Arizona and Georgia. And there’s less than half a percentage point separating Harris and Trump in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, with Trump marginally ahead in Pennsylvania and Nevada, and Harris with a razor-thin edge in Michigan and Wisconsin.
All results are within margin of error and the outcome of the voting could swing either way.
What was Kamala Harris up to on Friday?
Harris campaigned with musicians Beyonce Knowles, Kelly Rowland and Willie Nelson in Houston, Texas.
During the stop, Harris highlighted her support for abortion rights as she sought to strike a contrast with Trump and make gains with female voters.
Texas has not backed a Democratic president since 1976, and Republican Trump is almost certain to win the state’s 40 Electoral College votes.
But Democrats are betting it will provide a powerful backdrop for Harris to talk about abortion rights in the final days before the November 5 election. The state, under Republican Governor Greg Abbott, has adopted some of the nation’s toughest anti-abortion regulations.
What was Donald Trump up to on Friday?
Trump was also campaigning in Texas on Friday, making a stop in Austin to record an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,”. Rogan is arguably the most popular podcaster in the United States, with tens of millions of social media followers, most of them men. Rogan’s podcast has 17.5 million subscribers on YouTube alone, and 14 million on Spotify. The average age of his listeners is 24, according to Media Monitors.
In his interview with Rogan, Trump again suggested he favoured eliminating income tax and replacing the lost revenue with tariffs.
Trump then travelled to a rally at Traverse City, Michigan, where he turned to Harris’s struggles with the state’s large Arab American population, which could determine the outcome of a very close race.
Trump leads Harris 45 percent to 43 percent among Arab Americans with two weeks to go until voters choose the next US president, according to the Arab News/YouGov poll released on Monday, with large sections of the community angry with the Biden administration that Harris is a part of, for its unflinching support for Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon.
“Kamala is also in total free fall with the Arab and Muslim population in Michigan. She’s in a free fall,” Trump said. “She sent their jobs overseas, brought crime to their cities, and tonight in the Middle East, it’s like a tinderbox that’s ready to explode. People are being killed at levels we’ve never seen before.”
He also referred to Harris’s unlikely alliance with former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who is campaigning for the vice president. Cheney, who has had a long-running feud with Trump, is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, a central figure in the Iraq invasion of 2003. “And why would Muslims support Kamala when she embraces Muslim-hating Liz Cheney?” Trump asked, speaking to the crowd.
What’s next for the Harris and Trump campaigns?
Harris will be campaigning in the city of Kalamazoo in Michigan on Saturday with former First Lady Michelle Obama.
The get-out-the-vote rally will be Michelle Obama’s first event on the campaign trail for Harris.
Saturday is the first day of early voting statewide in Michigan.
Meanwhile, Trump is scheduled to hold several events in Pennsylvania on Saturday but will start his day with a rally in Michigan.
Trump’s running mate JD Vance will make a campaign stop in Atlanta, Georgia, before heading to Erie and Harrisburg in Pennsylvania.
