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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Cecilia Nowell (now) and Tom Ambrose (earlier)

US politics live: Women’s marches hit the streets in support of Harris as both candidates target east coast – as it happened

Donald Trump Kamala Harris Robert F. Kennedy Jr United States Michelle Obama Tim Walz Alicia Keys Iowa Virginia Joe Biden
Protest with signs amid high rise buildings.
A Women's march in Chicago, Illinois, on 2 November 2024. Photograph: Nam Y Huh/AP

Closing summary

Thanks for joining us today. This has been Cecilia Nowell reporting on the latest US elections headlines this Saturday.

Here’s a summary of the day:

  • In a startling reversal, a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll shows Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters as the presidential race comes down to its final days.

  • Vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr – who was recently reported to be up for a role in US health and food safety in Trump’s administration – said in a social media post that he would remove fluoride from all public water if Trump wins the election.

  • Harris and Trump criss-crossed the country today, as both candidates tried to drum up support in the final weekend ahead of the presidential election. Both candidates began the day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before Harris departed for Atlanta and then Charlotte, North Carolina. Trump also traveled to North Carolina, before heading to a rally in Virginia.

  • Both candidates’ running mates appeared at events in Nevada and Arizona. Tim Walz knocked on doors in Henderson, Nevada, before speaking alongside Indigenous leaders in Flagstaff and then courting Latino voters in Tucson. Meanwhile, JD Vance spoke in Las Vegas before heading to a gun store in Scottsdale.

  • Americans took to the streets in cities across the country for a day of women’s marches. Marches were planned in all 50 states for the eighth annual gathering, which began the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017.

  • Joe Biden spoke at a carpenters’ union in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was joined by his granddaughter, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania.

  • The national guard is on standby in at least three states – Washington, Oregon and Nevada – and Washington DC as the election approaches, as fears of civil unrest grow.

  • A record number of wealthy Americans are planning to leave the country as election day approaches, NBC News reports, citing fears that the election could spur political and social unrest regardless of its outcome.

Updated

In Tucson, Arizona, Tim Walz has pulled out his “mind your own damn business” mantra again.

“This guy is not John McCain’s Republican party,” he said, referring to Trump’s policies. “He means government should have the freedom to be in your exam room, to be in your bedroom, to tell you what books to read and make those decisions. If they just mind their own damn business, we’ll mind our own damn business and we’ll all be better.”

Updated

Harris now leads Trump in new Iowa poll

The latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll shows Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump, a startling reversal for political analysts who had all but written off the state as a win for Republicans.

The poll shows Harris ahead of Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters as the presidential race comes down to its final days.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” pollster J Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co, said to the Des Moines Register. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

The poll of 808 likely Iowa voters, which include those who have already voted as well as those who say they definitely plan to vote, was conducted by Selzer & Co from 28-31 October. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

Updated

Michelle Obama has taken the stage at a rally in Montgomery county in Pennsylvania.

She was preceded by musician Alicia Keys, who encouraged the crowd to keep fighting for feminist causes. “This is not some dystopian Netflix show I’m talking about. This is the platform the other side is running on. They want to turn back the clock,” Keys said, hinting at the points in Project 2025.

Updated

Michelle Obama is campaigning again for Kamala Harris this afternoon alongside singer Alicia Keys at an event in Norristown, Pennsylvania.

Earlier today, supporters were gathered outside the local high school where Obama will appear.

Updated

Trump has wrapped up his speech in Salem, Virginia, in his usual manner, reciting his Maga chants that have come to mark the ends of his rallies: “We will make America great again … we will make America strong again!”

This time, he has pointedly added a new chant before leaving the stage: “We will make America healthy again!”, perhaps in reference to recent reports that Robert F Kennedy Jr could assume some control over US health and food safety in a second Trump administration.

According to the Washington Post, Kennedy has met with Trump transition officials to help draw up an agenda for a new administration and could take a broad “health tsar” position that would not require confirmation by the Senate.

Updated

Tim Walz has made his fifth visit to Arizona for a final campaign pitch for Kamala Harris as the US 2024 presidential race enters its final days.

Harris and Trump are locked in a fierce battle for the swing state and have made several trips to court voters. According to the website FiveThirtyEight, Trump leads Harris by 2.2 points in the state. More than 1.2 million Arizonans have already cast their ballots in this election.

Updated

As the candidates continue a busy day of events, Donald Trump and Tim Walz are still expected to make at least one more appearance each this evening. Trump is returning to North Carolina, where he’ll speak at a rally in Greensboro at 7.30pm ET while Walz heads to Tucson, Arizona.

RFK Jr vows to remove fluoride from public water

In a post on X, Robert F Kennedy Jr has said that he would remove fluoride from all public water if Donald Trump is elected and gives him responsibility over the nation’s health agencies.

“Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease,” Kennedy wrote.

Although fluoride is associated with some health issues, dentists strongly recommend adding it to public water to prevent tooth decay. Fluoride is naturally occurring in drinking water at varying levels.

US district judge Edward Chen ruled on 24 September that the Environmental Protection Agency must take action regarding fluoride in drinking water, claiming his finding does not “conclude with certainty” any harmful effects but that there is evidence of the risk of cognitive decline.

The ruling stems from an August report from the Department of Health and Human Service’s National Toxicology Program, which found that drinking water that contained more than twice the recommended limit of fluoride was “consistently associated” with lower IQ in children.

Despite this ruling, the American Dental Association said in a statement in September that it remains “staunchly in support” of adding fluoride to community drinking water to help prevent tooth decay.

Updated

Speaking to the crowd in Virginia, Trump is once again fixated on his hair. “I’m having a bad hair day! I have to have a bad hair day in front of Virginia? That’s not good,” Trump said, turning around presumably to look into a monitor that shows the back of his head.

Trump’s hair – and his appearance, in general – has lately become a standard talking point during his long and rambling campaign speeches – although he insists he does not ramble but employs a style of speech he calls “the weave”.

Updated

Donald Trump has implied that elections are rigged in blue states such as California and New York, falsely claiming that election officials will be executed if they ask to see voter ID.

“If we had an honest election in California, we would win California,” he said.

Updated

Speaking at his rally in Salem, Virginia, Donald Trump has denounced a trans woman who was allowed to join Roanoke College’s women’s swim team last year. He said that seven members of the college’s swim team had joined him backstage, before welcoming the teammates to the stage.

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have advocated for and pushed for this anti-woman sex-based discrimination to continue all over this country,” swimmer Lily Mullens said. “We are so lucky to have a leader like Donald Trump with common sense,” she said, thanking the ex-president for “standing with women”.

Updated

Donald Trump takes the stage at a rally in Virginia

Donald Trump has taken the stage at his second rally of the day, this time in Salem, Virginia – a state that his rival Kamala Harris is leading by a wide margin.

“We win Virginia, we win the whole thing without question,” Trump said. “It’s very possible that without winning Virginia we’re going to win the whole thing too.”

Trump was introduced by Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, who led attendees in a prayer before the ex-president began speaking.

Updated

Campaigning in Scottsdale, Arizona, JD Vance has called on voters to “make this thing too big to rig”. He focused much of his remarks on immigration, an issue that is central to many Arizona voters.

Updated

In a new video, actor Harrison Ford has endorsed Kamala Harris.

“Look, I’ve been voting for 64 years. Never wanted to talk about it very much,” Ford said, before referencing the former Trump administration officials who’ve denounced the ex-president.

“I’ve got one vote – same as anyone else – and I’m going to use it to move forward. I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris.”

Updated

Donald Trump Jr has concluded speaking ahead of JD Vance in Scottsdale, Arizona. In his remarks, the ex-president’s son echoed misinformation his father has spread regarding Fema relief efforts following hurricanes Helene and Milton, Haitian immigrants, Hunter Biden and the media. He also implied that Democrats had tried to assassinate his father in July, and encouraged attendees to make sure their friends voted Republican down-ballot.

Updated

Kamala Harris’ rally in Charlotte, North Carolina has otherwise proceeded much like her other campaign events, with the vice-president delivering a familiar version of her stump speech. She’s encouraged attendees to make a plan for voting if they haven’t done so already.

“We need everyone to vote, North Carolina. You all will make the difference in this election.”

JD Vance is currently campaigning at a gun store in Scottsdale, Arizona alongside Donald Trump Jr.

“We have the opportunity to put not just my father in the White House, but have you seen the team around him,” Trump said from the stage at Dillon Precision, touting roles his father has promised Robert F Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk.

Pro-Palestine protestors interrupt Harris's rally in Charlotte

Kamala Harris’s rally in Charlotte was briefly interrupted by pro-Palestine protestors.

“One of the reasons we are here is because we are fighting for a democracy, and the right of people to speak their mind, but right now I am speaking,” Harris said. “Democracy can be complicated, it’s all right. This is what democracy looks like.”

Updated

Kamala Harris is speaking at her second rally of the day, this time in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Ahead of her appearance, Roy Cooper, the state’s governor, urged Republicans and independents to vote for the vice-president.

“Listen to the ultraconservative, well-respected leaders who worked with Donald Trump,” Cooper said, referencing longtime Republicans like Liz Cheney who’ve endorsed Harris. “He is a danger to our country, and he should never be president again.”

Updated

National guard on standby across the country – report

Preparing for potential social unrest ahead of Tuesday’s election, the national guard is on standby in at least three states and Washington DC, CNN reports.

In Washington, governor Jay Inslee has announced that the national guard is on standby following recent ballot box fires there. Meanwhile, in neighboring Oregon, governor Tina Kotek says the national guard is prepared to respond to potential uncertainty, following another ballot box fire in Portland. And in Nevada, governor Joe Lombardo says 60 troops are prepared to oversee a “safe and smooth election day”.

Meanwhile, law enforcement is preparing for election day in Washington DC, where more than 3,000 police officers will work in 12-hour shifts.

Updated

Tim Walz is campaigning this afternoon in Flagstaff, Arizona, alongside interior secretary Deb Haaland. The city, which is located just outside the borders of the Navajo Nation, is also home to Northern Arizona University. Walz, whose lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, will become the first female Indigenous governor in the United States if he and Harris are elected Tuesday, has focused many of his campaign stops on Native voters in Arizona, including by visiting the capital of the Navajo Nation last week.

Speaking ahead of Walz, Haaland evoked her childhood growing up in a pueblo household and encouraged attendees to “as Coach would say, leave it all on the field”. Navajo Nation president Jonathan Nez was also in attendance.

“The sovereignty of our Indigenous tribes is paramount,” Walz said, noting his recent visit to Window Rock, Arizona, before encouraging voters to get to the polls. “We get to shape not just the next four years, but generations to come.”

Updated

Women's march begins in Washington DC

As the Women’s March in Washington DC kicks off, women and supporters are gathering across the country in the 8th annual march since the 21 January 2017 march spurred by Donald Trump’s inauguration and the Access Hollywood tapes.

Here’s the latest from around the country:

Updated

After starting the morning side by side on the tarmac in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s planes are now lined up once again in Charlotte, North Carolina. Both candidates are criss-crossing the country in a final blitz of campaign stops before Tuesday’s election.

Updated

Visiting the carpenter’s union in Scranton this afternoon, Joe Biden used some of the unvarnished language that has come to endear him to many Americans (and gotten him in some hot water lately).

Speaking about Republicans who want to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the Chips Act, as well as cut social security, Biden said: “These are the kinds of guys you like to smack in the ass,” according to a White House pool report.

Updated

This week, Florida will be one of 10 states where voters will weigh in on measures to expand abortion rights. The debate in Florida – which has turned from purple to red in recent years – has been particularly intense as Republican party leadership campaigns against Amendment 4.

Here’s Carter Sherman with more:

As she stood in the parking lot of an auto supply store on Friday evening, Brittany Robinson was practically vibrating. With just a few days left before the 2024 presidential election, the 32-year-old Floridian needed an outlet for her anxiety.

So Robinson decided to go knock on strangers’ doors in support of Amendment 4, a ballot measure that, if passed, would enshrine abortion rights into Florida’s constitution and overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban.

“I wish I started earlier,” said Robinson, a native of the Tampa Bay area who had never before canvassed for a political campaign. Living under Florida’s ban, she said, is “terrifying”. When she was a freshman in college 13 years ago, Robinson discovered she was seven weeks pregnant and had an abortion a week later.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do that now,” Robinson said.

Marches planned as presidential candidates make final push to earn women's votes

As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump make their closing arguments ahead of Tuesday’s election, Americans are preparing to take to the streets in cities across the country for a day of Women’s marches. Marches are planned in all 50 states.

“No matter where you’re voting, we are in a choice between freedom and fascism,” Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of Women’s March, told ABC News Live today.

Harris and Trump have taken different approaches to earning female voters’ support, with Harris campaigning largely on issues of reproductive freedom and abortion access, while Trump says he will be a “protector” of women.

Here are some photos from marches across the country – we’ll keep you updated on any developments as the largest march in Washington DC kicks off:

Updated

In the final days of the election, Taylor Swift’s fans are trying to get out the vote among “low propensity Swiftie voters across Pennsylvania”. The pop star endorsed Kamala Harris shortly after the September presidential debate.

“Swifties for Kamala (S4K) sent over 250,000 mail pieces encouraging Pennsylvania voters to vote for Kamala Harris for President and take a pledge to vote. Included in 50,000 of the mailers was an exclusive ‘Voting Era’ friendship bracelet,” the press release reads. “As of this release, over 4,600 pledges to vote have been submitted because of the mailer.”

Updated

The FBI is working to dispel misinformation about the election, saying today that two videos circulating on social media are false. One claims that the bureau had “apprehended three linked groups committing ballot fraud” and another concerns second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

“These videos are not authentic, are not from the FBI, and the content they depict is false,” the FBI said in a statement.

Updated

While Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaign on the east coast today, their running mates are hosting events out west.

JD Vance spoke at a rally in Las Vegas this morning while Tim Walz campaigned in Henderson, Nevada. This afternoon, both candidates will travel to Arizona, where Vance will speak in Scottsdale and Walz will attend events in Flagstaff and Tucson.

Speaking in Atlanta this afternoon, Kamala Harris delivered a familiar version of her stump speech, addressing the future of the Affordable Care Act, Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs, abortion and contraception, Project 2025 and bipartisanship.

“I pledge to you to listen to experts and to listen to people who disagree with me, because unlike Donald Trump I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy,” Harris said. “He wants to put them in jail, I will give them a seat at the table. That’s what real leaders do. That’s what strong leaders do.

“I pledge to you to always put country above party and self and I pledge to you to be a president for all Americans.”

Harris will speak again in North Carolina later this afternoon – where Trump is currently holding a rally.

Updated

Jen O’Malley Dillon, chair of the Harris-Walz campaign, said the team was “feeling very good about where we are right now”.

She pointed to the release of a new ad that draws from Harris’s interactions with voters she met on the trail during her 100-day campaign, as an opportunity to create a “high impact moment” in the final days of the election.

“We are continuing to operate on this very broad map of the battleground states, where all seven of our battleground states are within the margin of error, completely in play,” she told reporters on Saturday.

O’Malley Dillon repeated what the campaign has been saying for days, that late-deciding voters have been “breaking” decisively in Harris’s favor. Her campaign has pointed to Trump’s vitriol-filled Madison Square Garden rally as a key factor.

“These undecided voters, we believe, over the course of the last week, have been breaking in our direction,” she said.

The campaign also said that Harris was planning to vote by mail but were not sure if she had submitted her ballot yet.

Updated

Kamala Harris has been introduced by Justin Martinez Posadas, a first-time voter and high school senior, at her Atlanta rally.

“I’m the son of a factory worker and the child of immigrants. Vice-President Harris is the daughter of a single mother from a middle-class family,” Martinez Posadas said. “That’s why I was honored to cast my first ever ballot for Vice-President Kamala Harris.” He added that his grandparents, who recently became US citizens, also cast their first ballots for Harris.

Updated

Joe Biden is speaking in his home town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he has been joined by his granddaughter Natalie, who is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania and the daughter of his deceased son, Beau.

Addressing members of the carpenters union, Biden said: “A lot of politicians have trouble saying the word union, but I’m not one of them.” Following a chorus of cheers, the president added: “By the way, neither does Kamala.”

Updated

Trump addresses North Carolina as Harris prepares to take stage in Atlanta

Director Spike Lee and Georgia senator Jon Ossoff have begun speaking at Kamala Harris’s rally in Atlanta, as Donald Trump addresses supporters at a rally in Gastonia, North Carolina.

Tapping into current fears that there will be voter suppression in this election, Ossoff told attendees in Atlanta: “[Trump] tried to throw out your votes. You all remember the phone call.”

“You know what has been given for the struggle for voting rights in the state of Georgia, and across the American south,” Ossoff added.

Meanwhile, Trump is speaking about the support he’s received from customs and border patrol agents (saying agents have told him “he’s the greatest president in the history of our country”), the economy and the election (“we’re just three days away from the greatest political victory in world history”).

JD Vance is expected to begin speaking soon in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Joe Biden will be addressing a carpenters union in his home town of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Updated

The Harris campaign has released a new closing ad titled “Brighter Future” that will air tomorrow afternoon during NFL games on CBS and Fox. In the two-minute ad, Harris pledges to be “a president for all Americans” and promises to “build a brighter future for our nation” as her campaign seeks to draw out the differences between the vice-president and her opponent in the final days of the election cycle.

Updated

Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declined to endorse Kamala Harris at a United Auto Workers union rally yesterday. The only Palestinian American in Congress, Tlaib has criticized the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the war in Gaza. Her non-endorsement comes as a voter survey published on Friday suggested that 43% of Muslim American voters support the Green party candidate, Jill Stein.

Here’s Edward Helmore with more on Tlaib:

And here’s Erum Salam with more on the Arab and Muslim Americans campaigning for Harris despite the Biden administration’s support for Israel:

As election day approaches, state and federal officials are preparing for social unrest and political upheaval that could suppress votes. Yesterday, the justice department announced it will send election monitors to 86 jurisdictions, the most in two decades. Meanwhile, Washington state governor Jay Inslee announced that the state will put national guard members on standby this week to support law enforcement and protect key infrastructure in the event of social unrest. The Washington state announcement comes just days after someone set fire to a ballot drop box there and in neighboring Portland, Oregon, damaging hundreds of ballots.

Updated

Trump campaign struggled to balance chaos and discipline - report

A deep dive inside Donald Trump’s campaign published today in the Atlantic shows how the ex-president has struggled to balance his chaotic tendencies with running a disciplined campaign. The report notes that after Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket, Trump’s advisers encouraged him to stick to planned criticism of the Biden-Harris administration while the ex-president instead longed to attack Harris personally. As a result, Trump began communicating with two of his 2016 campaign managers, Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski, citing fears that he was being overly “managed” by his current advisors.

The report includes two other notable asides: Trump wanted to start calling the current president “Retarded Joe Biden” but was dissuaded by current aides, and broke ties with far-right activist Laura Loomer when he learned she’d had significant plastic surgery.

Updated

Donald Trump’s campaign has filed a complaint against the Washington Post with the Federal Election Commission, alleging that the paper made illegal in-kind contributions to the Harris-Walz campaign through its advertising, the Post reports.

A copy of the complaint released by the Trump campaign cites a Semafor article that suggests the Post purchased ads to increase readership of articles it had published that were critical of the ex-president – after the newspaper’s announcement that it would not endorse a candidate sparked backlash and a wave of unsubscriptions.

In the complaint, the Trump campaign calls the advertising a “dark money corporate campaign in opposition to President Donald Trump”. In response, a Washington Post spokesperson said the allegations were “without merit” and that “promoted posts across social media platforms reflect high-performing content across all verticals and subjects”.

Updated

A rally for Kamala Harris is filling Atlanta Civic Center on Saturday, “three days before we remind the world that the south has something to say”, said US representative Nikema Williams, quoting the iconic Atlanta hip-hop group OutKast.

“This election is too important to sit out,” she said. “This is battleground Georgia.”

Just over 4 million Georgia voters have already cast a ballot, about 80% of the 2020 figure and 55.3% of registered voters in the state, according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office. Fulton and DeKalb counties, the two counties with the largest number of Democratic voters in Georgia, are slightly ahead of state averages for early turnout, but the election remains too close to call judging by early voting turnout. Errors in polling models are likely to be larger than the ultimate margin.

Harris is expected to appear at 1pm. Donald Trump today announced a rally in Macon for Sunday.

Morehouse College graduate Spike Lee and recording artist Pastor Troy opened the rally, with Troy performing Vice Versa.

Updated

A record number of wealthy Americans are planning to leave the country as election day approaches, NBC News reports, citing fears that the election could spur political and social unrest regardless of its outcome.

Immigration attorneys at high-powered firms such as Lesperance and Associates and Henley & Partners told NBC that they’re seeing greater demand for services regarding possible moves overseas than ever before.

“A survey by Arton Capital, which advises the wealthy on immigration programs, found that 53% of American millionaires say they’re more likely to leave the US after the election, no matter who wins,” the outlet added.

Updated

President Biden is set to land in Scranton, the city where he was born, for a visit shortly and I spotted this truck parked on Biden street downtown.

Scranton is a key piece in Democratic hopes to win Pennsylvania, a key battleground state this election. Hillary Clinton lost tremendous ground here in 2016 when she lost the state, but Joe Biden improved on that in 2020. Democrats are hoping to build even further on those gains this year, or at least not lose ground.

Updated

Trump grows anxious as election approaches

In the final days before the 2024 election, Donald Trump is growing increasingly anxious, Axios reports. Although the former president’s campaign is projecting confidence, a campaign official close to Trump tells Axios that the ex-president is asking more questions about polling and demanding more work from his aides in late-night and early morning calls.

Updated

Before heading to North Carolina today, Kamala Harris will rally voters in Atlanta alongside director Spike Lee, rapper Monica and singer Victoria Monét. The vice-president will also be joined by senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, and will be introduced by a first-time voter, according to the campaign.

Then Harris will head to Charlotte, North Carolina – a state that both she and Donald Trump are visiting today. It’s the fourth day in a row that both candidates will appear in the same state on the same day, as they attempt to swing through the most important battleground states one last time before Tuesday.

At Harris’s rally in Charlotte, her campaign says, Harris will be joined by actor Kerry Washington and again introduced by a first-time voter. The event will also feature performances by Brittney Spencer, Jon Bon Jovi, Khalid and the War and Treaty.

Updated

Good morning, Cecilia Nowell here taking over from my colleague Tom Ambrose.

As the final weekend before election day gets under way, Donald Trump called into Fox & Friends Weekend to comment on the state of the race – and criticize a recent Harris campaign ad telling women they don’t have to tell their husbands whom they vote for.

“Can you imagine a wife not telling a husband who she’s voting for? Did you ever hear anything like that? Even if you have a … bad relationship, you’re going to tell your husband. That’s a ridiculous ad. So stupid,” Trump said.

During the call, Trump also critiqued Mark Cuban’s recent comments that the ex-president avoids “strong, intelligent women”, said he didn’t know the comedian who made an offensive joke about Puerto Rico at the Madison Square Garden rally last week and responded to concerns regarding his comments about shooting former congresswoman Liz Cheney.

He also shared that he has sued CBS’s “60 Minutes” and thought the outlet should lose its broadcasting license.

Updated

The day so far

  • Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump head to North Carolina on Saturday to try to clinch support in the south-eastern battleground state just three days before Tuesday’s US presidential election. It will be the fourth day in a row that vice-president Harris and former president Trump visit the same state on the same day, underlining the critical importance of the seven states likely to decide the race, which opinion polls show to be on a knife’s edge, Reuters reported.

  • Trump and Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch. Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin. At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.

  • At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.

  • Top Republicans have called on the White House to produce all documents and internal communications regarding president Joe Biden’s statement earlier this week in which he appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump. White House press officials altered the official transcript of Biden’s statement, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.

  • The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight. “The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”

  • Officials in the US battleground state of Michigan said they worry that the Democratic-leaning city of Warren could lag behind the rest of the state in reporting the results of Tuesday’s presidential election, raising early doubts about the state’s vote count. Warren, unlike Detroit and most other cities in Michigan, opted not to take advantage of changes enacted in a 2022 state law allowing for up to eight days of pre-processing of absentee ballots, Reuters reported. Instead, the city of 135,000 people will wait until election day to verify and tabulate more than 20,000 mail-in ballots.

  • Elon Musk’s troubled canvassing operation on behalf of Donald Trump and the Republican party is now facing a lawsuit in southern California filed by two women who say they were cheated out of wages and expenses as they knocked on doors for an embattled Republican congresswoman. The suit accuses Musk’s America PAC, which has poured more than $100m into this year’s election campaign, of “willful violations of the California labor code” by paying the plaintiffs less than it promised and refusing to make up the difference.

  • The US presidential election campaign enters its final weekend with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in seemingly permanent deadlock and few clues as to which of them will prevail on Tuesday. At the end of another unruly week that began with Trump’s racially charged rally in New York’s Madison Square Guardian and was punctuated by celebrity endorsements, misogynistic comments and insults about “garbage” being levelled left and right, the Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker showed little change from seven days earlier, with voter loyalty to their chosen candidate appearing relatively impervious to campaign events, however seismic.

That’s all from me, Tom Ambrose, for today. My colleague Cecilia Nowell will be along shortly to continue bringing you all the latest from the US election.

On the second to last Sunday in July, Kamala Harris had just finished making pancakes and bacon for her grandnieces at the vice-president’s residence in Washington, and was sitting down with them to work on a jigsaw puzzle when Joe Biden called.

“I got up to take the call, and then life changed,” Harris recounted later. Biden, isolating with Covid at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and facing calls from all corners of his party to step aside, had reached the history-altering decision to end his bid for re-election.

“Are you sure?” Harris said she asked the US president. “Because what a big decision.”

With Biden’s endorsement, Harris, still wearing her workout clothes and hooded sweatshirt from her alma mater, Howard University, leapt into action. Time was of the essence. Over the next 10 hours, with pizza boxes littered around her, she placed 100 calls to Democrats whose support she would need to secure the nomination.

A year punctuated by two assassination attempts, high levels of threats and harassment, and a number of troubling, violent incidents in the lead-up to election day will culminate on Tuesday with an election deemed existential by all sides.

It’s the first presidential election since the January 6 insurrection, a reminder of the ways political violence can manifest that leaves Americans with a fear that such an attack could happen again. Those who study the attack and its participants say they aren’t convinced criminal convictions against them will fully deter those involved on January 6 from future political violence, but that the biggest threat is a lone actor, not a large, coordinated event.

In the last few weeks, a man in Arizona was allegedly stockpiling weapons and plotting a “mass casualty” event, according to police who arrested him for shooting at Democratic party offices. The person behind explosive devices that burned hundreds of ballots in two drop boxes in Oregon and Washington is suspected to be a metalworker who could be planning more attacks. Arguments at polling places over political paraphernalia, banned at the polls in some places, have become physical. A young man waved a machete at a polling place in Florida.

The risk of political violence only increases after election day, experts say, once races are called. Certain places could become targets of people or groups upset about results or who claim fraud.

In the last week, the US saw numerous attacks on the voting process and threats of violence, and extremism experts are bracing for what comes after voting has ended.

The goal of people committing these acts is often to create fear and distrust around voting or to sabotage the functioning of democracy. Still, election officials stress that voting is safe, and voters should not be deterred from voting because of any threats to the process, which are rare.

Here is a timeline of the political violence seen so far during the voting period in the US.

Musk’s canvassing operation sued in California for alleged labor law violations

Elon Musk’s troubled canvassing operation on behalf of Donald Trump and the Republican party is now facing a lawsuit in southern California filed by two women who say they were cheated out of wages and expenses as they knocked on doors for an embattled Republican congresswoman.

The suit accuses Musk’s America PAC, which has poured more than $100m into this year’s election campaign, of “willful violations of the California labor code” by paying the plaintiffs less than it promised and refusing to make up the difference.

The women, Tamiko Anderson and Patricia Kelly, say they were hired last month and promised an hourly wage – about $25, according to their lead lawyer – to help turn out votes for Michelle Steel, who represents a closely contested swing district in Orange county, south of Los Angeles.

It was only once the women started working, the suit alleges, that they found out they were being paid instead by the number of houses they visited. The suit further alleges that they were not reimbursed for work-related expenses, including the use of personal cellphones to track their movements along their designated routes.

Musk’s ground-game operation has come under repeated scrutiny in recent days following a report in the Guardian that canvassers may have skipped as many as a quarter of the houses they claimed to have visited in Arizona and Nevada, and a second report in Wired that revealed hired canvassers in Michigan were not told which campaign they were working for until they had already signed on.

If Donald Trump re-enters the White House on 20 January he will do so emboldened by a power that no previous incoming president has ever enjoyed: immunity from criminal prosecution for any act carried out in his official capacity.

The protection, awarded in a July ruling from the far-right supermajority of the US supreme court, changes fundamentally the dynamics of the Oval Office.

“The justices wrote a how-to guide for a president who wants to break the law,” said Michael Waldman, president of the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice. “In practical terms, if you are a president who wants to break the law, make sure your co-conspirators are also government employees – then you’re off the hook.”

The immunity ruling, in Trump v United States, is the clearest example yet of the judicial feedback loop that the former president established during his 2017 to 2021 presidency. With the active support of Republicans in the US Senate, then President Trump appointed three new hard-right justices to the country’s top court, creating a 6-3 conservative-to-liberal supermajority.

Is it any surprise that “photo op” is a phrase imported into British English from the United States? Of course it came from there, the land where the visual image sits right at the centre of the culture, with politics no exception.

It was the Nixon White House that came up with it, specifically a press aide by the name of Bruce Whelihan. According to Washington legend, whenever the president was meeting a visiting dignitary, Richard Nixon’s hardball press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would turn to his underling with an order to summon the snappers. “Get ’em in for a picture,” Ziegler would say.

Too polite to put it that way himself, Whelilan would clear his throat and announce to the ladies and gentlemen of the Washington press corps, “There will be a photo opportunity in the Oval Office.”) The photo op was born.

Joe Biden promised a “recovery for everybody” as he prepared to take over an economy ravaged by the pandemic four years ago. Few predicted what would follow.

One of two candidates – Kamala Harris, his vice-president, and Donald Trump, his predecessor – will succeed Biden in January. As millions prepare to elect the next US president, here is how the world’s largest economy fared under Biden.

The shock waves unleashed by Covid-19 were still rippling across the world when Biden took office in January 2021. In the US, and many other economies, they set the stage for an extraordinary rise in inflation.

For months, the White House and Federal Reserve insisted the factors driving this surging price growth were “transitory”. By the time the consumer price index peaked, reaching its highest level in a generation in June 2022, officials had changed their minds.

The Fed embarked upon an aggressive campaign to tackle inflation in March 2022. Interest rates – cut to close to zero at the outset of the pandemic – were increased at 11 meetings, to a two-decade high.

Suddenly the central fear looming over the US economy was not runaway inflation, but the specter of recession. As the Fed scrambled to cool activity in an attempt to tackle prices, warnings of a prolonged downturn cast a shadow.

There’s one story of the 2024 presidential contest that says that this election is all about men, and their anger.

Men, in this account, have gotten a raw deal: the decline of the industrial economy in the years since the postwar boom means that many of the jobs that gave dignity, structure, and steady paychecks to their fathers are now gone, and some men, especially those without college degrees, have fallen into a cycle of desperation and despair, unable to make the kind of living for which they could respect themselves.

This economic argument about men is usually followed by a cultural one: that women aren’t as nice to men as they should be, or maybe not as nice to men as they used to be. On one end of this conversation, there are paeans to male loneliness and discussions of the male suicide rate, quasi-poetic odes to their depths of despair and acute feeling: women just don’t understand what it’s like to be sad the way that men are sad.

On the other end, writers and commentators point to more recent cultural trends that they say have alienated men, making them feel attacked or unnecessary. They point, apparently seriously, to the fact that some young feminists online have used the term “toxic masculinity,” which they say makes men feel bad, bad enough that their feelings are an emergency for the nation. They point to those t-shirts that were popular in 2017 that said, “The Future Is Female.” This, too, is reflective of a great social pathology, a sign that we as a nation have failed men and boys. Why, they plead, can’t the future be male?

Trump and Harris head to North Carolina in campaign's final weekend

Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump head to North Carolina on Saturday to try to clinch support in the south-eastern battleground state just three days before Tuesday’s US presidential election.

It will be the fourth day in a row that vice-president Harris and former president Trump visit the same state on the same day, underlining the critical importance of the seven states likely to decide the race, which opinion polls show to be on a knife’s edge, Reuters reported.

More than 70 million Americans have already cast ballots, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida, below the record early-voting pace in 2020 during Covid-19, but still indicating a high level of voter enthusiasm.

Saturday also marks the last day of early voting in North Carolina, where over 3.8m votes have been cast, while the state’s western reaches are still recovering from Hurricane Helene’s deadly flooding.

Harris plans appearances with rock star Jon Bon Jovi in Charlotte, the biggest city in North Carolina, which is tied with Georgia for the second-biggest prize of the swing states. Each has 16 votes in the Electoral College, where 270 are needed to secure the presidency.

North Carolina backed Trump in 2020 but elected a Democratic governor on the same day, giving hope to both parties.

Losing an election for the highest office is a crushing blow that no candidate forgets. But when the American electorate delivers its verdict next week, the personal stakes for Donald Trump will be uniquely high. His fate will hover between the presidency and the threat of prison.

If he claims victory, Trump will be the first convicted criminal to win the White House and gain access to the nuclear codes. If he falls short, the 78-year-old faces more humiliating courtroom trials and potentially even time behind bars. It would be the end of a charmed life in which he has somehow always managed to outrun the law and duck accountability.

For Trump, Tuesday is judgment day.

“He branded himself as the guy who gets away with it,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, adding that, should he lose, “he is facing a lot of moments of reckoning. He could go to jail. He could end up considerably less wealthy than he is. No matter what happens, and no matter whether he wins or loses, there will be a reckoning over his health. Death, ill health, dementia – those are things even he can’t escape.”

The property developer and reality TV star has spent his career pushing ethical and legal boundaries to the limit, facing countless investigations, court battles and hefty fines. Worthy of a novel, his has been a life of scandal on a gargantuan scale.

Michigan city of Warren in focus amid worries about delayed election results

Officials in the US battleground state of Michigan said they worry that the Democratic-leaning city of Warren could lag behind the rest of the state in reporting the results of Tuesday’s presidential election, raising early doubts about the state’s vote count.

Warren, unlike Detroit and most other cities in Michigan, opted not to take advantage of changes enacted in a 2022 state law allowing for up to eight days of pre-processing of absentee ballots, Reuters reported. Instead, the city of 135,000 people will wait until election day to verify and tabulate more than 20,000 mail-in ballots.

The potential delay from Warren has worried some Democratic leaders that it could leave the results appearing artificially high for Republican Donald Trump on Tuesday evening, and that the former president would seek to exploit the situation by falsely declaring victory in the state before all votes were in.

“If the state is close at all and we don’t have returns from Warren, which is our third-largest city, it’s going to create all kinds of concerns,” said Mark Brewer, an attorney and the former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party. “It’s very, very worrisome.”

Are the polls 'improbably tight'? Some experts think so

The US presidential election campaign enters its final weekend with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in seemingly permanent deadlock and few clues as to which of them will prevail on Tuesday.

At the end of another unruly week that began with Trump’s racially charged rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden and was punctuated by celebrity endorsements, misogynistic comments and insults about “garbage” being levelled left and right, the Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker showed little change from seven days earlier, with voter loyalty to their chosen candidate appearing relatively impervious to campaign events, however seismic.

Nationally, Harris, the Democratic nominee, has a one-point advantage, 48% to 47%, over her Republican opponent, virtually identical to last week. Such an advantage is well with the margin of error of most polls.

The battleground states, too, remain in a dead heat. The candidates are evenly tied at 48% in Pennsylvania, often seen as the most important swing state because it has the most electoral votes (19). Harris has single-point leads in the two other blue-wall states, Michigan and Wisconsin, while Trump is marginally ahead in the Sun belt: up by 1% in North Carolina and 2% in Georgia and Arizona. In Nevada, his average advantage in the polls is less than a percentage point.

Writing on NBC’s website, Josh Clinton, a politics professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, the network’s director of elections, pondered whether the tied race reflected not the sentiments of the voters, but rather risk-averse decision-making by pollsters. Some, they suggested, may be wary of findings indicating unusually large leads for one candidate and introduce corrective weighting.

Of the last 321 polls in the battlegrounds, 124 – nearly 40% – showed margins of a single point or less, the pair wrote. Pennsylvania was the most “troubling” case, with 20 out of 59 polls showing an exact tie, while another 26 showed margins of less than 1%.

This indicated “not just an astonishingly tight race, but also an improbably tight race”, according to Clinton and Lapinski.

Read the full piece here:

Updated

Around a month before the US elections, in the Kharkiv region, I sat down with a group of Ukrainian infantry soldiers together with the American historian Timothy Snyder. I suggested they ask questions of him not only as an American historian, but also as an American citizen.

The servicemen were curious about the upcoming election, but mainly the chances of receiving significant military aid any time soon. They expressed pity that many Americans still don’t understand that the Ukrainian fight is not just about us. It’s in the world’s interests to support the fight against blatant breaches of the international order.

The anxiety of the American elections is felt more strongly in Kyiv among Ukrainian officials and civil society leaders because Ukraine has become a partisan issue, and part of US domestic politics. These groups have been trying for years to be on good terms with both Democrats and Republicans in the US. This was especially true during the long delays in Congress over the vote for security assistance to Ukraine.

But engaging with the Maga camp has become difficult. This only got worse when it was revealed what Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said in 2022: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” During the race, Vance has characterised Vladimir Putin as an “adversary” and “competitor”, rather than an enemy, and has generally argued that the US should be focusing on China, not Russia.

This is what happens when successive US governments fail to tackle inequality. While millions of people live in poverty, a handful grow unimaginably rich. Wealth begets wealth, and they acquire political power to match. It was inevitable that one of them – now the richest man on Earth – would launch what looks like a bid for world domination.

A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield. Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin, reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that could be even more alarming than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.

Trump, if he wins, will do to the nation what Musk did to Twitter: the US will be e-Muskulated. What this means is that those with the power to swarm, harass and crush people who do not share their noxious ideology will be unleashed.

Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Republicans want documents released in Biden 'garbage' comment row

Top Republicans have called on the White House to produce all documents and internal communications regarding president Joe Biden’s statement earlier this week in which he appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump.

White House press officials altered the official transcript of Biden’s statement, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.

The Republican lawmakers said they question whether the decision to create “a false transcript and manipulate or alter the accurate transcript” produced for the National Archives and Records Administration was a violation of federal law.

Representative James Comer, Republican chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and House Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik demanded the White House produce the records.

They also called on the White House to make available for a briefing the top supervisor of its stenography office.

Comer and Stefanik said:

The White House cannot simply rewrite president Biden’s rhetoric.

We are concerned with the latest reporting of the White House’s apparent political decision to protect the Biden-Harris administration, instead of following longstanding and proper protocols.

Donald Trump repeats anti-immigrant threads at Milwaukee rally

At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style.

“I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”.

“Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.

On immigration, Trump’s message was characteristically dark. The campaign played a painful video of a mother describing her daughter’s murder and blaming Harris for allowing the accused to enter the US without authorization. Studies overwhelmingly refute Trump’s claim that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime in the US, but such claims are a feature of his campaign.

“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” said Trump. He vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history” and said cities and towns had been “conquered” by immigrants, whom he referred to as “animals”.

Since his Madison Square Garden rally – which showcased racist and misogynistic comments from a lineup of speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Trump and his allies have sought to recast the former president and his Maga base as unfairly maligned.

“Kamala has spent the final week of her campaign comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history,” said Trump at the Wisconsin rally.

“Vice-president Harris thinks you are Nazis, fascists,” said the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who spoke at the rally.

Johnson praised Trump for bringing into his campaign Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ended his presidential bid as a third party candidate in August; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who announced she had left the party in 2022. Johnson accused Democrats of “destroying America” and credited Trump with making “the Republican Party the party of the working men and women of America.”

Arizona officials probing whether Trump broke the law after Cheney remarks

The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.

“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”

Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.

“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”

He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.

“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.

“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.

In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”

“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.

“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.

Opening summary

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest from the campaign trail throughout this morning.

We start with news that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch.

Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin.

At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.

He repeated his aggressive attack on Liz Cheney, one day after he first said the former Republican US representative should be under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.

Harris meanwhile sought to draw a contrast, emphasizing at a rally in Wisconsin in the afternoon that she is looking to be a political consensus builder.

“Here is my pledge to you. Here is my pledge to you as president. I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris said. “I pledge to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. I will listen to experts. I will listen to the people who disagree with me. Because, you see, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy.”

“He wants to put them in jail,” Harris said, repeating a line she’s has frequently invoked of late. “I’ll give them a seat at the table.”

During his appearance in Warren in the afternoon and in Milwaukee in the evening, Trump repeatedly stoked fears about immigrants. In Warren, he said: “every state is a border state” and falsely claim immigrants were being flown into the south-west.

He repeated some of his most racist tropes, saying: “All of our jobs are being taken by the migrants that come into our country illegally and many of those migrants happen to be criminals, and some of them happen to be murderers.”

For more on last night’s events, see our full report here:

In other news:

  • Harris told her crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Exposition Center that with four days to go, there was still work to do, but “we like hard work”. Minutes beforehand, during a raucous warmup, the rapper Cardi B referred to Trump as “Donnie Dunk” and told the crowd: “Trump says he’s going to protect women whether they like it or not. Well, if his definition of protection is not the freedom of choice, if his definition of protection is making sure our daughters have fewer rights than our mothers, then I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I don’t want it!”

  • Earlier, Harris said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” as far as his suitability for the presidency is concerned. “Representative Cheney is a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.” Cheney for her part warned the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.

  • Republicans’ latest offensive and misogynistic comments have boosted Democratic hopes of turning out women on election day in a contest where the rights of women have been a central issue for the Harris campaign.

  • At his Milwaukee rally on Friday, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5-hour-long meandering speech that touched on the economy and foreign policy but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929-style depression.”

  • Trump’s supporters are laying the ground for rejecting the result of the election if he loses, according to warnings from Democrats as well as anti-Maga Republicans. As well as baseless and/or failed lawsuits, suspicions have been voiced over partisan polls run by groups with Republican links in battleground states that mainly show Trump leading – the idea being that if Trump loses, the polls can be proferred as “evidence” that he was cheated out of the win.

  • The New York author and journalist Michael Wolff has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied. Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Trump’s campaign said the claims, made on Wolff’s podcast Fire and Fury, amounted to “outlandish false smears”.

  • A federal judge rejected an attempt by Elon Musk’s America Pac to have charges of running an illegal lottery heard in federal court, instead of the courts of Pennsylvania, where Musk is running the sweepstakes to help Trump get re-elected. The case has been sent back to the Pennsylvania state court for a further hearing on Monday.

  • Racism and misogyny; a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman; the Republican candidate for president dressing up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck. Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre – Richard Luscombe sums it up.

  • A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift of its members towards Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Trump slightly ahead. That bloc is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons.

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