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The comments by Trump come as he has struggled to connect with female voters and as Harris courts women in both parties with a message centered on freedom. She’s making the pitch that women should be free to make their own decisions about their bodies and that if Trump is elected, more restrictions will follow as both campaigns sprint toward Tuesday’s presidential election.
At a rally Wednesday evening near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump told his supporters that aides had urged him to stop using the term protector because it was “inappropriate.”
Then he added a new bit to the protector line. He said he told his aides: “Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.”
Those comments shaped much of Harris’ Thursday as the two campaigns jostled over the remarks.
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More detail on Harris’s remarks: she said that Donald Trump’s comment that he would protect women whether they “like it or not” shows that the Republican presidential nominee does not understand women’s rights “to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies.”
“I think it’s offensive to everybody, by the way,” Harris said before she set out to spend the day campaigning in the western battleground states of Arizona and Nevada.
She followed up those remarks at her rally in Phoenix: “He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what’s in their own best interests and make decisions accordingly. But we trust women.”
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Meanwhile in Arizona, we’re now taking quite the trip down political memory lane, as Trump recounts his opposition to the Iraq war, and takes a swipe at George W Bush, the last Republican to occupy the White House before he got in.
“Anybody that went into the Middle East, I thought was stupid,” Trump said.
“Bush, oh, he was just, he was another beauty,” he continued, appearing to hold himself back from insulting the ex-president.
There are five days left, and “no one can sit on the sidelines” Harris says.
People should reach out to friends and family and neighbours and co-workers.
“In these next days let us please be intentional about building community,” she says
Harris reminds supporters in Las Vegas that she has spent her life fighting for people who “have been hurt”.
She has lived the promise of America, she says, and sees it in everyone there tonight.
Donald Trump, in Arizona, is now insulting Kamala Harris, saying she isn’t as smart as Hillary Clinton.
The invective came as he recounted his path to the White House in 2016, saying, “All of a sudden I’m fighting against crooked Hillary Clinton, who’s a smart woman, much smarter than Kamala, but doesn’t lie as much. Hillary was a liar, a horrible scoundrel, but this one lies so much, and she’s a low IQ individual.”
Another one about Harris, from Trump: “She’s dumb as a rock. And you can’t have that.”
At the Harris event, the crowd is chanting “We’re not going back! We’re not going back!”
“We’re not going back because ours is a fight for the future, and a fight for freedom. The freedom for a woman to make decisions about her own body.”
She reminds voters that changes to abortion laws under Trump mean that one in three women now lives in a state with an abortion ban.
Tucker Carlson then teed-up a question about the CIA and FBI conspiring against Trump, but the former president didn’t seem interested in answering it.
Instead, he proposed firing anyone involved in the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“You mentioned the enemy within. . … It’s a fact that the CIA and the FBI, which are absolutely not allowed by law to have any influence in American politics, because that’s the end of democracy. Both of them and a bunch of other intel agencies worked against you on behalf of the Democratic Party from the minute you got elected in 2016 and they’re still doing it. They’re working against you. Now, what will you do about that?” Carlson asked.
Trump didn’t quite say, instead talking about how succeeding in Washington was all about finding the right people. Then he brought up the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the point at which Joe Biden’s approval ratings began dropping to levels from which they have not recovered.
“By the way, every one of those people having to do with Afghanistan should be fired immediately. Every general should be fired immediately. You know, Biden doesn’t fire anybody,” Trump said.
Meanwhile at Trump’s event:
Donald Trump doubled down on his insistence that “the enemy from within”, as he called his political opponents, are a true threat to the country.
Kamala Harris has seized on his remarks to argue that he is a fascist looking for “unchecked power”, but Trump doesn’t appear bothered.
“We do have an enemy from within. We have some very bad people, and those people are also very dangerous. They would like to take down our country. They’d like to have our country be a nice communist country or fascist in any way they can, and we have to be careful of that. But they’re the greatest con artists, because [as] soon as I said an enemy from within, they said … oh, he’s saying an enemy from within. These are sick puppies, I’m telling you.”
More detail on J Lo’s appearance a few moments ago, from the press pool report:
Jennifer Lopez took to the stage at 9.02, wearing a long olive-colored dress. The crowd sounded very pleased.
The event is being livestreamed but here are a couple of quotes:
“You are the ones who are going to send a message – that Las Vegas is Harris country
“Kamala Harris gets it …. As president of the United States Kamala will fight for us … And the freedom to choose to do what we do with our bodies.”
On Trump and Madison Square Garden:
“It wasn’t just Puerto Ricans who were offended that day. It was every Latino”
Shouts of ‘thank you’ and ‘we love you J-Lo’
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Harris takes to the stage and, smiling, says what she has said before: She’s not afraid of hard work, and nor are those present, she is a new generation of leadership, she has a record of being tough on criminals, and if elected, “there is nothing that will stand in my way.”
“Let’s do this Las Vegas,” J Lo says, and introduces Harris.
“Let’s get loud,” J Lo says, using a line from the chorus of one of her hits.
Then she says she promised herself she wouldn’t get emotional, but that “we should get emotional.”
She calls on voters to encourage their loved ones to vote.
“They love it when you do nothing,” J Lo says, and that a non-vote is an agreement.
It wasn’t just Puerto Ricans who were offended by the comments made at Trump’s Madison Square Garden event, J Lo says, “It was every Latino in this country. It was humanity and anyone of decent character.”
Harris has “shown up every day” for the people, and it is time for them to “show up for” Harris.
J Lo reminds the audience that her parents are children of Puerto Rico.
She says she likes Hollywood endings, she likes it when the good girl or good guy wins.
And she’ll be voting for Harris.
“You can’t even spell American without ‘Rican’,” J Lo says.
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Meanwhile at the Trump event in Arizona:
At least once per rally, Donald Trump tries to give his supporters the opportunity to boo reporters in attendance.
This evening’s moment just came as he complained about how news outlets had pursued stories about his potential ties to Russia following his 2016 election victory: “It was a hoax. It was made up to justify why Hillary Clinton lost the election, which he wasn’t supposed to lose … it was made up by [congressman Adam] Schiff and Hillary and some … just total sleaze balls. And what happened is, the fake news media, which is back there, you do know that, they’re always around someplace.”
And at that, the crowd got their moment to boo.
Harris has “only ever had one client: you, the people,” J Lo says.
“There is no candidate in the history of the presidency that is more qualified, and there is no job that Kamala Harris can’t do,” J Lo says, somewhat hyperbolically.
She repeats: “Kamala Harris gets it.”
“I believe in the power of women,” J Lo says. “Women have the power to make the difference in this election. I believe in the power if Latinos,” she says.
“I believe in the power of all our votes.”
J Lo is on stage now at the Kamala Harris event in Las Vegas, Nevada.
She says that America faces a choice between “divided and united”
And that if you believe that any child in America, if they “work their ass off”, will be able to make it in America, the choice is clear.
“Not just some Americans, but all Americans,” she says.
When she started in TV and film, she could get roles playing “the maid or the loud-mouthed Latina,” but she knew she could do more.
A lot of Americans have had that experience, she says.
“Kamala Harris gets it.”
Should Trump lose, it’s widely expected that he will claim fraud, as he did in 2020.
To that effect, he says: “I think we’re leading by a lot, and … we can keep that cheating down, because there are a bunch of cheats. If we can keep that cheating down, we’re going to have a tremendous victory … I think it’ll go down as one of the greatest victories of all time.”
More now from the start of the Trump portion of the Carlson-Trump event in Arizona:
After Carlson’s introduction, Donald Trump arrived onstage to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”, his customary entry music.
First question from Tucker Carlson: “What motivates you to keep going?”
Trump’s supporters often point to the fact that he’s rich, thus doesn’t stand to benefit from being president, and therefore must be running for some altruistic reason.
This is a friendly crowd, and Trump gave them the answer they wanted to hear: “hell knows. I don’t know … I just want to be with people like this … so much love in this room, so much love, right? It’s pretty easy … I have a lot of alternatives. [I] could be in a beautiful beach with the waves hitting me in the face and all that boring stuff. And I’ve been there, and you get very bored pretty easily. I have one thing in mind: It’s called Make America Great Again.”
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Trump is now in stage with Tucker Carlson. He repeats his very well-worn line that he could be doing anything right now – he could be on the beach, he says this time –but has instead chosen to do this.
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In addition to praising Trump, Tucker Carlson is also swiping at his enemies.
He just took aim at congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an influential progressive who conservatives like Carlson have no time for.
“AOC, that would be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I love that she’s this revolutionary who’s named after a Conquistador and doesn’t even know it. Your last name is Cortez, honey, sit this one out,” Carlson said. “Like, Larry Mussolini shows up and is, like, no, I’m against fascism, really. All right, got it. What a moron.”
He segued into an attack on second gentleman Doug Emhoff: “She was at a rally in Vegas yesterday, and she goes, Doug emhoff is the model of masculinity. Oh man, yeah, memo to any unmarried women here, do not date a feminist man. They’ll smack you around.”
Here is the full report from the Associated Press on the Biden apostrophe question:
No sign of Donald Trump yet, but Tucker Carlson is now onstage at the Republican candidate’s Arizona event, singing the former president’s praises.
Carlson is set to sit down with Trump in what has been billed as a fundraiser for Hurricane Helene relief, but is now giving something of a warm-up speech.
Referring back to how Trump was received when he launched his campaign in 2015, Carlson said: “Everything he said was kind of moderate and sensible, like, I don’t know, we should have a border, and if we’re going to have Nato, maybe that countries in Nato should help pay for it. If we’re going to defend Europe, maybe they could, you know, pony up a little bit. Why are we paying the entire bill? That didn’t seem crazy to me, boy, they treated Trump like he was a dangerous freak, like he just escaped from the state mental institution, shackles on his arm and a butcher knife in his hand, stop this man.”
He left out the part about how, as he launched his campaign, Trump called Mexicans rapists – the sort of offensive comment that turned off swathes of the electorate, but didn’t prevent him from winning in 2016.
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The former independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr is speaking now at the Trump rally in Arizona, and appeared to describe a conversation with Donald Trump where he asked him to play a role in his administration.
Kennedy, a conspiracy theorist known for his opposition to vaccines, dropped out of the presidential race in August and endorsed the former president, and there’s lately been talk of Trump appointing him to lead an agency or department, if re-elected.
“As soon as Donald Trump started talking about giving me the power, he asked me to do three things. He asked me to root out the corruption, and end the conflicts of interest in our regulatory agencies, and end this corporate capture that has turned our regulatory agencies into sock puppets [of] the industries they’re supposed to regulate. And he asked me to restore the tradition of gold-standard, empirically based, evidence-based science in medicine in our regulatory agencies, and to restore the transparency so that these agencies have to must stop hiding science from us when it clashes with the commercial ambitions of the pharmaceutical industry,” Kennedy said, adding that Trump “doesn’t want me to take vaccines away from people”.
“He asked me to do that, and then he asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic in this country. And he said, and he said, I want to see results, measurable results, in the diminishment of chronic disease within two years. And I said, Mr President, I will do that.”
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Employees for Arizona’s most populous county are taking on extra shifts to help election workers with an around-the-clock operation to process early ballots that are an unusually long two pages, the Associated Press reports.
Election officials in Maricopa County must verify each voter’s signature on early ballot envelopes and then remove the ballot pages so they can be prepared for actual counting. The county was unsure how long it would need to keep up the 24-hour operation, which kicked off Thursday night.
“As predicted, the first two-page ballot since 2006 has affected election administration, especially for the hard-working bipartisan boards who are separating the ballot pages from the affidavit envelopes,” said Jennifer Liewer, Maricopa County deputy elections director for communications.
“In addition to election workers already on staff, county workers are stepping up to assist with the process,” she said.
Liewer said early Thursday evening that the number of people helping out would fluctuate as they are trained, but that eventually between 150 and 200 people are expected to be used for the additional shifts.
“The county employees who are assisting with the night shifts are doing so outside of their normal job responsibilities,” she said. “We are also utilizing Maricopa County Public Health Medical Reserve Corps members.”
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said earlier this week that ballots have been received from 1 million voters, a number approaching 40% of the nearly 2.6 million people registered.
Election officials in the presidential battleground state have urged people to vote early, or make a plan if they opt to cast their ballots in person on Election Day, which is Tuesday.
Early voting, particularly by mail, has long been popular in Arizona, where nearly 80% of voters submitted their ballots before Election Day in 2020, according to the secretary of state’s Office.
Arizona was the first of the presidential battleground states to open early in-person voting sites on Oct. 9, with a scattering of traditional voting centers.
Just spotted at Tucker Carlson‘s Hurricane Helene fundraiser in Phoenix with Donald Trump: a man wearing a garbage bag.
He had cut holes in it so it fit sort of like a vest over his shirt. The costume is plainly a reference to Joe Biden‘s statement, which he says was misinterpreted, that people who vote for Trump are “garbage”.
Trump has seized on Biden’s gaffe to argue that Democrats are insincere when they say they want to unify the country, holding a rally in Wisconsin yesterday where he was dressed in an orange reflective vest, like a garbage man would wear.
It does happen to be Halloween night, but costumes aren’t unusual at Trump campaign events, no matter the time of year. At the Republican national convention in July, there were people wearing brick-patterned suits to represent the wall Trump wants to build along the Mexican border, and fake bandages on their ears, as Trump’s was at the time after the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt.
Donald Trump will soon take the stage at a Hurricane Helene relief fundraiser in Phoenix, Arizona, where he’s billed to chat with star conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson.
The former president hasn’t been sighted yet, but the crowd did get a pep talk from Charlie Kirk, founder of conservative youth group Turning Point USA.
In 2020, Joe Biden won Arizona, and Kirk entreated the crowd to do everything they can to prevent Kamala Harris from winning the swing state again.
“I want you to recreate the anger that you felt, I want you to recreate that pit of the stomach for those you that lived through your whole life and you thought this state would never, ever, ever send its votes to a Democrat as president,” Kirk said.
“We can all do more to make sure that will never happen again, and in the coming days that will be determined.”
Kirk told the crowd: “There are hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters right now in the valley that have received mail-in ballots that have not yet submitted them. We need to find those people and get them the system. There are hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters that may or may not show up. These are plumbers, electricians and welders. These are people that we love and that we cherish might say, oh, my vote won’t matter. You need to convince them to go to the polls and get their vote in and bring two friends with them.”
He also noted that Republicans have improved their early voting response rate since 2020. However, early voting is not predictive of election results, and the Trump campaign is this year encouraging voters to submit ballots early, after downplaying it in 2020.
Nerves are particularly stretched in Maricopa, the Arizona county in which Phoenix sits, and which will probably decide whether Harris or Trump, who has a narrow lead in recent polls, wins Arizona.
After Trump’s loss in the state in 2020, his supporters staged demonstrations in Phoenix’s streets. This time around, election officials in Maricopa county plan to have a Swat team and mounted sheriff’s deputies ready at the building where they tabulate ballots. Last week, Phoenix police arrested a man for setting fire at a postal box that damaged some mail-in ballots, though said the suspect said his actions were not politically motivated.
At Harris’s speech in Phoenix on Thursday, the vice-president told voters to prepare for “one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime” and criticized the former president for saying he’d protect women “whether the women like it or not”. But the question of what the former president’s supporters would do if he loses was on attendees’ mind.
“I would say that I definitely worry about that since he hasn’t conceded the last election,” said Bethany Hagen, 34, as she waited for a ride in the parking lot of the amphitheater where Harris spoke.
While no one the Guardian spoke to predicted imminent violence, many acknowledged that life in a swing state made participating in, or even discussing, politics a fraught experience.
“It is hard to talk to people here,” said Hagen, a Colorado native who had moved to the state.
Pearl Hubbard picked up some yard signs for Kamala Harris at the vice-president’s speech in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday afternoon, but wasn’t yet sure whether she’d risk displaying them outside her home in a city that sits in some of the most hotly contested political territory in the country.
“I’m scared to put them up,” Hubbard said. “As I drive … I only saw one place that had a [Harris] sign. Just don’t see them. I think people are scared to put them up.”
After Joe Biden became the first Democrat since 1996 to win the state four years ago, Arizona’s capital and most-populous city, Phoenix, saw tense confrontations between local officials and Trump supporters who believed his baseless claims that the election was stolen from him.
With the 5 November presidential election days away, Trump still refuses to publicly acknowledge his defeat in 2020, and has already suggested that if he loses this year, he will once again claim fraud. The allegations have changed life for formerly low-key election offices and secretaries of state nationwide, as they regularly face threats, hoaxes and harassment, especially in the seven swing states that are expected to decide the election:
The AP story goes on to say that according to the email the news organisation obtained, the press office had asked the stenographers to quickly produce a transcript of the call amid the firestorm:
Biden himself took to social media to say that he was not calling all Trump supporters garbage and that he was referring specifically to the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally.”
The stenographers office is charged with preparing accurate transcripts of public and private remarks of the president for preservation by the National Archives and distribution to the public.
The two-person stenography team on duty that evening – a “typer” and “proofer” – said any edit to the transcript would have to be approved by their supervisor, the head of stenographers’ office.
The supervisor was not immediately available to review the audio, but the press office went ahead and published the altered transcript on the White House website and distributed it to press and on social media in an effort to tamp down the story.
White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates that evening also posted on X the edited version of the quote and wrote that Biden was referring ”to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as ‘garbage.’”
The supervisor, a career employee of the White House, raised the concerns about the press office action – but did not weigh in on the accuracy of the edit – in an email to White House communications director Ben LaBolt, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and other press and communications officials.
“Regardless of urgency, it is essential to our transcripts’ authenticity and legitimacy that we adhere to consistent protocol for requesting edits, approval, and release,” the supervisor wrote.
The supervisor declined to comment to The AP and referred questions about the matter to the White House press office.
AP reports White House officials altered official transcript of Biden's 'garbage' remarks
The Associated Press reports, citing two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday, that White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity:
Biden created an uproar earlier this week with his remarks to Latino activists responding to racist comments at a Trump rally made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to the US island territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
Biden, according to a transcript prepared by the official White House stenographers, told the Latino group on a Tuesday evening video call, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters – his – his demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
The transcript released by the White House press office, however, rendered the quote with an apostrophe, reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters,” which aides said pointed to Biden criticizing Hinchcliffe, not the millions of Americans who are supporting Trump for president.
The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”
“If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” the supervisor wrote, adding, “Our Stenography Office transcript – released to our distro, which includes the National Archives – is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.”
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Donald Trump has wrapped up a rally in Henderson, near Las Vegas in Nevada, a swing state where Latino people make up about 30% of the population.
“We’re especially excited to have the support of record numbers of Hispanic Americans,” he said, “and right here in Nevada we’re going to win a record share of the Hispanic American vote at a level that nobody’s ever seen before for the party.”
The Trump campaign was forced into damage control mode over the weekend when a comedian speaking at his big New York rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”, prompting criticism from Latino activists.
But the Republican nominee argued that he has a winning agenda. He said: “It’s pretty simple: Hispanics want great jobs, they want rising wages and they want safe communities. They’re great people. Energy – they’re very entrepreneurial. I know’em well, they’re really hard workers, they’re great people.
“You don’t want vicious gang members getting dumped into your state and you don’t want Kamala teaching your children that they can change their gender anytime they’d like.”
Trump also used the rally to recycle election lies, promise that Robert Kennedy Jr is “going to work on women’s health” and lavish praise on Elon Musk for space rockets and campaigning in Pennsylvania.
He hurled insults at Kamala Harris as lacking “intellect” or “stamina”, a “train wreck” and incapable of running a kindergarten. And in a bizarre riff against Democrats, Trump said: “They don’t want windows. They don’t want cows. They don’t want anything. They don’t know what they want, actually.”
Historian Simon Schama responded on Twitter/X: “‘they dont want windows, they dont want cows’ how moronically dumb do you have to be to think this creature is fit to be President?”
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The cast of Marvel’s Avengers movies have come out in support of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris less than a week before the US election.
In a video posted first on Vanity Fair on Thursday evening, actors Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, Chris Evans, Danai Gurira and Paul Bettany playfully riffed on their respective characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe while encouraging viewers to vote for Harris.
The video, which runs for just over 90 seconds, opens with the actors taking an incoming video call from Johansson. On screen, they brainstorm ideas for a catchphrase for Harris, landing on the dubious “Down with Democracy”, which they spin into a brief Marvel-style Harris-Walz campaign video with dramatic music and comic-style graphics. The final frame of the video encourages viewers to vote on 5 November.
Sharing the video on Twitter/X, Ruffalo, a vocal Democratic supporter who is best known for his role as the Hulk, wrote: “Don’t sit this one out. It’s the one where we will lose big: Project 2025, women’s reproductive rights, climate change, LGBTQIA+ rights, public education, student debt relief, Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and as of today, life saving vaccines. This shit is real and it’s going to come for you.”
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Trump will be campaigning with far-right personality Tucker Carlson in about 90 minutes’ time in Phoenix, Arizona.
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Here is the pool report on Harris’s speech in Reno:
VP Harris wrapped up at 5.46pm and did a bit of ropeline.
Her comments were similar to her earlier speech although targeted to Nevada at the start. There was a lot of placard waving, stamping of feet, booing at mentions of Trump, and chants of Kamala. “We need you to vote, Nevada, you are going to make the difference in this election and I thank you,” she said.
Protesters interrupted Harris again at least three times, by pool’s count. At least one could be heard shouting about Gaza. Harris drowned out the most vocal protesters when she said “Let me say something about this – we are here because we’re fighting for a democracy”, drawing loud cheers from the crowd.
Pool was rushed back at motorcade and now about to roll as of 5.54pm.
Pop icon Jennifer Lopez and the Mexican band Maná are performing at Harris’s event in Las Vegas, in about two hours’ time.
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Harris ends her speech with the call: “When we fight, we win!”
She is shortly heading to Las Vegas, where she will appear at a campaign rally and concert.
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Georgia secretary of state addresses false election video
Cutting away from the rally for a moment, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has released a statement in which he says that a video that claimed to show a Haitian immigrant claiming to have voted multiple times is “false” and “targeted disinformation”.
He said:
Earlier today, our office became aware of a video purporting to show a Haitian immigrant with multiple Georgia ID’s claiming to have voted multiple times.
This is false, and is an example of targeted disinformation we’ve seen this election. It is likely foreign interference attempting to sow discord and chaos on the eve of the election.
We are working to combat this and identify the origin of it with our state and federal partners. CISA is currently investigating. In the meantime, we ask Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to take this down. This is obviously fake and part of a disinformation effort. Likely it is a production of Russian troll farms.
As Americans we can’t let our enemies use lies to divide us and undermine our faith in our institutions – or each other.
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“So, Nevada, I am here asking for your vote. I am asking for your vote. And here is my pledge to you,” she says.
Someone yells: “We got your back,” and Harris responds: “And I got your back.”
She promises to find commonsense solutions, reach common ground, listen to experts and to those who disagree with her.
She repeats her line that Trump wants to put those who disagree with him in jail, and that she wants to give them a seat at the table.
She promises to be a president for all Americans.
“Because we love our country. And when you love something, you fight for it,” she says, to loud cheers.
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Harris: 'We're here because we're fighting for a democracy'
Harris says forcefully, and with seriousness: “We’re here because we’re fighting for a democracy!”
She gets huge cheers.
Then she appears to be heckled, though I could not make it out. She says: “It’s OK. It’s OK. You know what, democracy can be complicated.
“We’re fighting for the right for people to be heard and not jailed because they speak their mind.”
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Harris talks about her plans for small business owners, and asks any small business owners to make some noise: there is a lot of enthusiastic noise in response.
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From the pool report at the event:
Motorcade stopped at 5pm and pool was ushered into a packed Reno Expo Center, an indoor arena with tiered seating and with crowds standing in the middle, in front of the VP’s lectern. There’s a large red sign saying Reno Votes Harris-Walz with two large US flags above one tier and a blue one saying When We Vote We Win. Uplifting music is booming – the crowd waved their signs in time to Katy Perry’s ‘Firework.’
At 5.21pm VP Harris emerged from behind a curtain in a doorway beneath a large sign saying ‘Reno Votes’, and walked 50 yards or so along a runway to the lectern.
Harris tells Nevada: 'Make no mistake – we will win'
“Make no mistake: we will win,” she says.
“It is time for a new generation of leadership in America,” says Harris. “And I am ready to offer that leadership.”
Harris, who recently turned 60, is a generation younger than Donald Trump, her opponent, who is 78, and Joe Biden, 81, who she replaced on the Democratic ticket.
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Harris starts by saying: “Happy Nevada day!”
“We need you to vote, Nevada: you are going to make the difference in the outcome of this election and I thank you, I thank you.”
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Harris has taken to the stage now in Reno, Nevada. She and Trump are tied in the state according to the latest polling:
Kamala Harris’s event in Reno, Nevada has started. She is not yet on stage.
Trump is still speaking in Nevada:
Trump on Elon Musk: “In terms of computer, I would say he’s probably about as good as you get” pic.twitter.com/5GJKDdETr7
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 1, 2024
Speaking at a rally in Arizona earlier on Thursday, Kamala Harris said Donald Trump doesn’t believe women should “make decisions over their own bodies”.
Harris made the comment after Trump’s appearance in Wisconsin, when he declared he would protect them “whether the women like it or not”. Harris said: “There’s a saying that you gotta listen to people when they tell you who they are. He does not believe women should have the agency and authority to make decisions about their own bodies.”
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Stormy Daniels honored at witches’ ceremony in Salem, Massachusetts
Practising witches from around the world gathered in Salem by the hundreds on Thursday night to honour Stormy Daniels at their annual “magic circle” ceremony recognizing loved ones who have died.
Daniels – the adult film actor who allegedly had an affair with Donald Trump and was at the center of his May criminal trial that led to the former president’s conviction on 34 felonies – was chosen to be honored in the Halloween ceremony as the organisers believe that she has been the victim of a modern-day witch-hunt.
The event, which started at 5pm at Salem Common in Salem, Massachusetts, was part of the Festival of the Dead, an annual event series exploring “death’s macabre customs, heretical histories and strange rituals”.
The magic circle ceremony is intended to be a time to “renew connections, mourn those you miss and to celebrate all that these cherished souls brought to your life”, according to the event details:
Donald Trump is talking again about Biden’s “garbage” gaffe, saying he thinks it is “worse than ‘deplorables’ – am I right?”
“And how did that go for Hillary?” he asks.
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Donald Trump has taken the stage in Henderson, Nevada, to the familiar strains of Lee Greenwood’s song God Bless the USA as supporters snap pictures on their phones. Big screens say “Better off with Trump” and “Trump will fix it!”
“I’d like to start with a very simple question: are you better off now than you were four years ago?” the Republican nominee asked. “No!” roared the crowd.
Trump was quick to lambast his opponent Kamala Harris. “She is the worst vice-president in the history of our country. Kamala, you’re fired! Get the hell out of here. She is horrible. And she lies. Every time she gets up she tells a lie.”
He added: “She lies about everything. She’s worse than Crooked Hillary, actually.”
Trump trotted out his familiar lines, accusing Harris of violating her oath, eradicating the border and unleashing an army of gangs and criminals from prisons, jails, “insane asylums and mental institutions from all around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo”.
He is now playing a video about the murder of a 12-year-old girl, allegedly by undocumented immigrants. The crowd is lapping it up.
Some fans are wearing yellow vests to resemble garbage collectors, a reference to Joe Biden’s recent alleged gaffe. When Trump asked who had already voted, a big cheer went up. But he has failed to draw a capacity crowd: there are a few rows of empty seats behind me.
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The Guardian’s David Smith is at the Trump rally in Nevada, where the Republican nominee asked the crowd if they felt they were better off now than they were four years ago.
The crowd yelled: “No!”
At Donald Trump campaign rally in Henderson, Nevada. Trump: “Five days!… We’re doing great in Nevada… I’d like to start with a very simple question: are you better off now than you were four years ago?” (Crowd yells, “No!”) pic.twitter.com/xqNmQyAcJQ
— David Smith (@SmithInAmerica) October 31, 2024
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Coming up
Here’s what’s coming up over the next few hours:
Kamala Harris will hold a campaign rally in Reno, Nevada in the early evening.
Harris will also a campaign rally and concert in Las Vegas.
Trump will attend a Tucker Carlson tour event in Glendale, Arizona.
This is Helen Sullivan taking over the Guardian’s live US politics coverage – my colleagues and I will bring you the latest from those events, and any other breaking news.
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Summary
There are five days left until the US election. Here are the key recent developments:
Kamala Harris has taken the stage in Phoenix, telling supporters: “We have five days left in one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime.” She emphasized the threats a Trump administration would pose to reproductive rights. “Did everyone hear what he just said yesterday, that he will do what he wants, whether the women like it or not?” she said, referencing his appearance in Wisconsin, when he declared he would protect them “whether the women like it or not”.
Tim Keller, the mayor of Albuquerque, where Trump is holding a rally, said last Friday that the Republican presidential candidate owes the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills from his last visit. The Trump campaign owed the city $200,000 for when he hosted his last rally at its convention center in 2019, which has climbed to almost $445,000 with interest. The costs covered police coverage, barricades and other expenses. Trump is banned from rallying in the city over the unpaid bill – his event is being held instead at a private hangar owned by CSI Aviation near the Albuquerque international sunport.
Billionaires have flushed the election with cash – roughly $1.9b to be exact, largely to the benefit of republican candidates like Trump. “Billionaire campaign spending on this scale drowns out the voices and concerns of ordinary Americans. It is one of the most obvious and disturbing consequences of the growth of billionaire fortunes, as well as being a prime indicator that the system regulating campaign finance has collapsed,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director.
Voter enthusiasm is at a historical high for a presidential election, a Gallup poll found. Similar to November 2020, 70% of registered voters nationwide said that they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting now compared to March, when only 56% expressed enthusiasm.
Trump’s former attorney Kenneth Chesebro has been suspended from practicing law in New York. Chesboro was indicted on state racketeering and conspiracy charges over efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election in Georgia.
Harris has received more endorsements today. Former New York mayor and 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg and the Economist have publicly expressed their support.
Harris said on Thursday that Trump’s comment that he would protect women “whether the women like it or not” showed that the Republican presidential nominee does not understand women’s “agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies”. “I think it’s offensive to everybody, by the way,” Harris said before she set out to spend the day campaigning in the western swing states of Arizona and Nevada.
Harris will be joined by Jennifer Lopez for her rally in Las Vegas, Nevada - a critical swing state.
Ex-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson will interview Trump in Arizona before the former president heads to his own rally in Nevada.
Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, was ordered to turn over a list of 98,000 voters who may not have provided proof of citizenship.
The list was sought by a group called Stronger Communities Foundation. A county judge ordered Fontes to hand over the list of voters by Monday.
Fontes argued that he was entitled to withhold the information to protect the safety of the voters, which includes a small group of people who may hold pre-1996 drivers licenses and, due to some complex bureaucracy, may not have been asked to provide proof of citizenship at voter registration as required by a later, 2004 law.
The judge who made the order said there was “lack of any evidence that any individual life was in danger,” but also forbade Stronger Communities from using the list to contact voters before Election day.
Hannah Fried, executive director of All Voting Is Local, wrote that the order to release the list got her attention, but that laws protect voters from intimidation, regardless.
Ordering election officials to release a list of voters' names gets my attention this close to Nov 5 - and not in a good way. But state & federal law protects against intimidation, + impacted voters can cast a full ballot without concern in this election. https://t.co/yTurFmxnG5
— Hannah Fried (@HannahKFried) October 31, 2024
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Elon Musk launched an ‘election integrity community’ on X, full of baseless claims
While Elon Musk faces his own election integrity questions offline, the X owner has deputized his followers to spot and report any “potential instances of voter fraud and irregularities”. The community he spawned is rife with unfounded claims passed off as evidence of voter fraud.
Musk opted not to show up to a required court appearance Thursday in Philadelphia to respond to a lawsuit challenging his political action committee’s daily $1m voter giveaway. Meanwhile, online, he has started a dedicated community space on X, formerly Twitter, where he’s asked users to share any issues they see while voting. Users posting on the self-contained feed, the “election integrity community”, quickly began pointing out what they deemed as evidence of fraud and election interference.
Tweets showing everything from ballots that arrived ripped, an ABC news system test, a postal worker doing his job and dropping off mail-in ballots were all presented as evidence that the upcoming presidential election had been compromised. Some users posted videos of individuals they deemed suspicious, despite providing little or no proof of suspicious activity and asked others in the community to help identify them.
Among the tweets are attempts at doxxing and identifying people who users falsely accuse of ballot box stuffing or preventing Trump supporters from voting. In one case, a post with 14,000 shares and 31,000 likes includes a video of a postal worker bringing ballots into a polling location in Northampton county, Pennsylvania.
Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James has endorsed Kamala Harris, writing: “When I think about my kids and my family and how they will grow up, the choice is clear to me.”
What are we even talking about here?? When I think about my kids and my family and how they will grow up, the choice is clear to me. VOTE KAMALA HARRIS!!! pic.twitter.com/tYYlTmQS6e
— LeBron James (@KingJames) October 31, 2024
The endorsement isn’t a surprise – James has supported Democrats before, and been critical of Donald Trump.
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Supporters of Donald Trump, gathering for a campaign rally in Henderson, near Las Vegas in Nevada, are confident that he will win next week’s presidential election – and some refuse to contemplate defeat.
Bob Diaz, 69, who is Latino and teaches at a college, said Trump is doing “a lot better” with Latino voters this time. “People will be blown away about how much he actually won by,” he said. “He’s going to get the electoral votes and the popular vote as well.”
His wife, Audrey, also 69, a homemaker and mediator, added: “Polls are just polls. I believe he’s going to win. I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve been involved with other campaigns. I’ve never seen so many age groups, so many cultures, so many countries, so many languages. I’ve never, ever seen this before.”
She believes that border security is a winning issue for the Republican nominee. “I wish he didn’t cuss, I wish he didn’t say weird things, but he’s going to protect our borders and clean it up from the inside and protect it from the outside. Bottom line.”
Some here say they would not accept a Trump defeat. Kathy Holesapple, 56, an entrepreneu, pilot and aircraft mechanic, said: “We won’t. None of us will. We know he didn’t lose in 2020 either.
“God’s going to bring it in and take down the wicked. The righteous will be lifted up and the wicked will fall and those who support the death of innocent children in America and around the world will not survive in this nation. They will not be in power for much longer.”
Enrique Lopez, 32, a physical therapy student and military veteran, warned: “No matter what happens, there’s going to be a lot of chaos on both sides. Whether Trump wins or loses, there’s going to be so much chaos.”
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Harris says Trump doesn't believe women should 'make decisions over their own bodies'
Kamala Harris has taken the stage in Phoenix, telling supporters: “We have five days left in one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime.”
She emphasized the threats a Trump administration would pose to reproductive rights. “Did everyone hear what he just said yesterday, that he will do what he wants, whether the women like it or not?” she said, referencing his appearance in Wisconsin, when he declared he would protect them “whether the women like it or not”.
“There’s a saying that you gotta listen to people when they tell you who they are,” she said. “He does not believe women should have the agency and authority to make decisions about their own bodies.”
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Donald Trump has baselessly claimed that Democrats are acting like the “gestapo” in forcing people to adopt electric vehicles, during a rally in New Mexico today.
In his latest broadside against electric cars, the former president said that trucks made 50 years ago are better than electric versions today but that people are being forced to switch by a Joe Biden administration that is using tactics he likened to Nazi Germany.
“So, I said, did you explain that to the authorities as they burst into your office to demand that you go all electric?” Trump said, in reference to a conversation he’d had with someone. “He said: ‘I explained it.’ ‘What did they say?’ ‘We don’t give a damn. We want you to go all electric.’
“This is what we’re dealing with. It’s like gestapo stuff, OK? They use that term. It’s like gestapo stuff. What they’re doing to our country is unbelievable.”
Trump’s accusation is based on a falsehood – there is no obligation to switch to electric cars nor any ban on gasoline or diesel cars. Despite this, Trump’s campaign has repeatedly claimed otherwise, assailing Kamala Harris in TV adverts for adopting an “EV mandate”.
Electric cars have long stirred antipathy in Trump, who has said incentives to buy them are “lunacy” and that their supporters should “rot in hell” even as Elon Musk, the billionaire chief of electric car giant Tesla, has become one of Trump’s most prominent backers.
The president acknowledged this incongruity in August when he said: “I’m for electric cars, I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”
The ceasefire against electric vehicles now appears to be over, however. Should he win next week’s election, Trump is expected to roll back vehicle pollution standards that nudge people to buy electric alternatives, as well as repeal tax rebates for people to buy electric models.
Gasoline cars, trucks and other forms of transport are the largest sectoral contributor of planet-heating gases in the US, as well as a major source of the air pollution that routinely causes tens of thousands of respiratory and cardiovascular health problems, and deaths, among Americans each year.
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Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is quite present at this Quakertown voting location, where there’s a long line of people waiting to vote.
They have a table set up with coffee and donuts, and volunteers are going up and down the line giving voters the forms they need to fill out to request their mail-in ballots on demand.
I chatted with Betsy Cross, a Trump campaign volunteer from New Jersey who was handing out forms to people in line to request their mail-in ballots on demand. She had been there since 2.30 and estimated people were waiting two hours to vote. Was she surprised that so many people were there? “No,” she said. “People want to bank their vote for president Trump.”
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I just stopped by a voting location in Bucks county, a Pennsylvania battleground where a local judge extended the deadline for voters to cast ballots after a Trump campaign lawsuit.
Voters here can request and return an absentee ballot on the spot – Pennsylvania’s clunky version of early, in-person voting – until Friday. The deadline for the rest of the state was Tuesday, but the Trump campaign successfully sued the county to get voting extended until Friday. Residents had been blocked from voting even though they were in line by 5pm, the daily cutoff.
I arrived a little after 3pm at the government offices in Quakertown and saw that there was a pretty long line stretching around the corner. Just before he went into vote, a man at the front of the line told me he had been waiting about an hour.
One of the people in the back of the line was Phil Haegele, a 47-year-old plumber who was celebrating his sixth wedding anniversary. He said he was supporting Donald Trump and that he’d heard about voting being extended on the radio yesterday and got “probably 50 text messages” encouraging him and his wife to come vote.
Haegele usually votes on election day but said that he had decided to come out and cast his ballot early.
“We had saw that on a lot of the news agencies that we follow, they were saying that they were trying to get as many Trump supporters to vote early to try and ward off as much fraud as they could,” he said.
He predicted that the election would be a “blowout”, even though the polls show an extremely tight race in Pennsylvania and across the country.
“If they call the election on election day, it’s gonna be a blowout,” he said. “If they need to take a week to print more ballots, then yes, it’s gonna be tough.”
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Trump voters unmoved by controversy over protecting women remarks
Supporters of Donald Trump in Henderson, near Las Vegas in Nevada, are giving short shrift to a controversy over his remark on Wednesday that he would protect women “whether the women like it or not”.
Awaiting a Trump campaign rally, Patty Periva, 74, a retired education worker, said: “I don’t care. The Democrats do not protect women. They allow abortions. How many of those abortions are women? They’re killing women and they don’t protect women. It’s a lie.”
Lisa Consigilo, 60, a retired personal trainer, added: “My family’s from New York. Some things he says people take literally but I know how he speaks: it’s how my dad spoke. You don’t need to take stuff so literally.
“All their campaign is running on lies. He’s not going to ban abortion across the country. You can’t: it’s impossible. He’s not for that. Everything that they’re running on is not true about Project 2025. He’s a dad, he’s a grandfather, it wasn’t literal like: ‘I’m going to protect women.’”
Opinion polls suggest a historic gender gap in the presidential election, with women supporting Kamala Harris by a wide margin. But Kathy Holesapple, 56, an entrepreneur, pilot and aircraft mechanic, said: “They’ve weaponised the women against this party but the truth is that they’ve also held down the women in this nation by calling us Karens.
“We’re not allowed to stand up and speak for our beliefs. They call us a Karen every time we speak up. So the American woman needs to stand up – and they will – and they’re going to realise that Trump is for American women. He’s for women all over the world.”
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The Stakes: mass deportations
Raids and mass deportations lie at the heart of the former president’s second-term vision – a web of policies so vast that critics say their collective implementation would challenge the very ideal of the United States as a nation of immigrants.
Should he win in November, the Republican nominee has vowed not only to restore many of his most controversial immigration policies, but to go even further. While a number of his first-term plans were stymied by the courts and Congress, immigration rights leaders believe a second Trump administration would likely be more sophisticated and strategic.
“It is different this time. There’s a plan. There is a sense of urgency that they’ve created around this issue,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice. “And they know how to use the levers of government in a way they didn’t in 2016.”
Donald Trump would also be operating in a changed political landscape. Since leaving office, the political center of gravity has shifted rightward, amid a post-pandemic rise in global migration that saw a record number of people arriving at the southern border and claiming asylum. Americans have become less tolerant of illegal immigration while a growing minority is increasingly concerned about its impact on the country’s economy and national identity.
Though border crossings have plummeted this year following the president’s asylum clampdown, a sense of disorder persists. Voters continue to broadly disapprove of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the situation. Trump and his team are confident immigration remains a potent political issue for voters – and one that he has long played to his advantage.
When Trump first descended a golden escalator in 2015, he pledged to construct a “great wall” along the south-west border with Mexico to keep out immigrants he disparaged as “rapists” and drug dealers. Now, in the final weeks of his third presidential race, Trump has again escalated his threats against immigrants, but this time he is turning his vitriol inward toward those already here.
“The United States is now an occupied country,” Trump claimed recently at a rally in Atlanta. “But on November 5, 2024, that will be liberation day in America.”
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Harris to rally voters in Phoenix and Las Vegas
The vice-president will be appearing in Phoenix alongside the musical group Los Tigres del Norte.
Then, she’ll be heading to Las Vegas, where she will be campaigning alongside Jennifer Lopez and Maná.
In both cities, Harris will seek to energize Latino voters, who could help decide the outcome of the race in the key swing states of Arizona and Nevada.
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Summary of the day so far
Happy Halloween! There are barely five days left in the 2024 US presidential election and polls show the candidates – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – remain neck and neck in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina. More than 60 million Americans have cast ballots so far.
Harris and Trump are traveling across the western half of the country in states like New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona in the final days of their campaigns.
Here’s a summary of the day so far:
Tim Keller, the mayor of Albuquerque, where Trump is holding a rally, said last Friday that the Republican presidential candidate owes the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills from his last visit. The Trump campaign owed the city $200,000 for when he hosted his last rally at its convention center in 2019, which has climbed to almost $445,000 with interest. The costs covered police coverage, barricades and other expenses. Trump is banned from rallying in the city over the unpaid bill – his event is being held instead at a private hangar owned by CSI Aviation near the Albuquerque international sunport.
Billionaires have flushed the election with cash – roughly $1.9b to be exact, largely to the benefit of republican candidates like Trump. “Billionaire campaign spending on this scale drowns out the voices and concerns of ordinary Americans. It is one of the most obvious and disturbing consequences of the growth of billionaire fortunes, as well as being a prime indicator that the system regulating campaign finance has collapsed,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director.
Voter enthusiasm is at a historical high for a presidential election, a Gallup poll found. Similar to November 2020, 70% of registered voters nationwide said that they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting now compared to March, when only 56% expressed enthusiasm.
Trump’s former attorney Kenneth Chesebro has been suspended from practicing law in New York. Chesboro was indicted on state racketeering and conspiracy charges over efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election in Georgia.
Harris has received more endorsements today. Former New York mayor and 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg and the Economist have publicly expressed their support.
Harris said on Thursday that Trump’s comment that he would protect women “whether the women like it or not” showed that the Republican presidential nominee does not understand women’s “agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies”. “I think it’s offensive to everybody, by the way,” Harris said before she set out to spend the day campaigning in the western swing states of Arizona and Nevada.
Harris will be joined by Jennifer Lopez for her rally in Las Vegas, Nevada - a critical swing state.
Ex-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson will interview Trump in Arizona before the former president heads to his own rally in Nevada.
Of the more than 60 million Americans who have gone to the polls early – some 32 million and counting did so in person. Here are some of the best pictures of early voting from the newswires:
Albuquerque mayor says Trump owes town where he is holding rally nearly $500,000
Tim Keller, the mayor of Albuquerque, where Trump is holding a rally, said last Friday that the Republican presidential candidate owes the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills from his last visit.
“Trump now owes almost a half a million dollars to the city of Albuquerque … We’ve had collection agencies calling and so forth for about two years now,” Keller said.
The Trump campaign owed the city $200,000 for when he hosted his last rally at its convention center in 2019, which has climbed to almost $445,000 with interest. The costs covered police coverage, barricades and other expenses. Since the Trump campaign still allegedly hasn’t paid its bills, he was banned from rallying there. Instead, the rally is being held at a private hangar owned by CSI Aviation near the Albuquerque international sunport.
The general manager for the Albuquerque convention center, Ray Roa, confirmed to the Albuquerque Journal on Monday that members of the Trump campaign contacted them to try to rent the convention center but were denied.
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Trump called his supporters smarter than “crooked Joe’s or lyin’ Kamala’s” and denounced Joe Biden over his “garbage” remark.
Trump took several digs at his opponent, telling his crowd that Harris “doesn’t have the stamina, the intellect or that special quality” that certain leaders have.
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Trump called the US “an occupied country” of illegal immigrants.
“On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history,” he told the crowd. “We will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell out of our country, and fast.”
Trump also promised to end sanctuary cities across the country.
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Donald Trump has been holding a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a region he said “has some of the worst border problems”.
”If you voted against me, shame on you,” Trump told his crowd.
In addition to calling Kamala Harris “grossly incompetent”, Trump falsely said Harris imports criminals and mental institute patients into the US. He said “rough and tough hombres” were coming across the border, a callback to a comment he made in 2016 during a debate with the then Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton about male drug dealers allegedly crossing the southern border illegally: “We have some bad hombres here and we’re gonna to get ‘em out.”
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The Trump campaign has rebuked Harris-Walz surrogate Mark Cuban for comments he made about women on Thursday during an appearance on The View.
“Donald Trump – you never see him around strong, intelligent women ever,” Cuban said when discussing Trump’s former primary opponent Nikki Haley and the women working Trump’s campaign and in his former administration. “It’s just that simple: they’re intimidating to him. He doesn’t like to be challenged by them.”
The Trump campaign said in a statement in response: “Joe Biden called Trump supporters garbage, and now, Kamala’s top surrogate Mark Cuban insinuated female Trump supporters are ‘weak and dumb.’ This is extremely insulting to the thousands of women who work for President Trump, and the tens of millions of women who are voting for him. These women are mothers, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders and they are, indeed, strong AND intelligent, despite what Mark Cuban and Kamala Harris say.”
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Michael Bloomberg, former New York mayor, endorses Harris
Michael Bloomberg has announced he voted for Kamala Harris.
The former New York City mayor, who governed as a Republican and as an independent, and who was also a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, wrote in an article for his own news media company, Bloomberg News, that he voted for Harris “without hesitation”. Bloomberg said that although he disagreed with Harris on some issues, he applauded a number of her policies including women’s reproductive rights, immigration, gun safety, and the climate crisis.
Bloomberg called the US “the world’s greatest nation” and said Trump made it “look like a banana republic” when he tried to overturn the results of the election and incite violence on 6 January at the Capitol.
Bloomberg added: “Most Americans never thought we’d witness such a shameful episode. Trump, rather than apologizing for it – as some of those convicted of January 6-related crimes have done – celebrates it.”
Bloomberg concluded with an ask to “undecided voters of all political stripes” to join him in voting for Harris.
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Where are the presidential and vice-presidential candidates campaigning today?
Kamala Harris is campaigning in Nevada and Arizona, with rallies planned in Reno, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, according to her campaign.
Governor Tim Walz delivered remarks at a campaign event in Bucks County, Pennsylvania this morning and then will make a local stop in Erie, Pennsylvania, per the campaign.
Donald Trump will be hosting rallies in New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona today, per his campaign.
Senator JD Vance attended a town hall at High Point University in North Carolina this morning.
The Economist endorses Kamala Harris
The Economist magazine announced their endorsement of Kamala Harris on Thursday.
In the statement, editors at the Economist wrote:
Tens of millions of Americans will vote for Mr Trump next week. Some will be true believers. But many will take a calculated risk that in office his worst instincts would be constrained. We see that as recklessly complacent.
By making Mr Trump leader of the free world, Americans would be gambling with the economy, the rule of law and international peace.
Ms Harris’s shortcomings, by contrast, are ordinary. And none of them are disqualifying. If The Economist had a vote, we would cast it for her.
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New poll shows presidential race pretty much deadlocked in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
The surveys, conducted by UMass Lowell/YouGov and released today, found that in North Carolina Donald Trump was leading Kamala Harris 47% to 45%.
In Pennsylvania, Harris is leading Trump, 48% to 47%, and in Michigan, Harris received 49% of the support among likely voters surveyed compared with 45% for Trump, well within the survey’s margin of error.
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Former Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro suspended from practicing law in New York
A state appeals court in New York ruled on Thursday that Kenneth Chesebro – the attorney who allegedly devised the “fake electors” plan to prevent Joe Biden from winning the 2020 election – will have his law license suspended.
Last year, in August, Chesebro was indicted, along with Trump and 17 others in Georgia on state racketeering and conspiracy charges over efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election there.
In October, Chesebro accepted a plea deal.
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With just days before the US presidential election, Guardian reporters Oliver Laughland and Joel Van Haren visited communities in Pennsylvania with the most on the line.
Watch here:
Election enthusiasm up from 56% to 70% among registered voters, poll says
Voter enthusiasm is high for this presidential election, according to a new Gallup poll.
The poll, released on Thursday, found that 70% of registered voters nationwide said that they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting, up from 56% in March.
The increase was largely a result of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents expressing heightened enthusiasm for Kamala Harris after Joe Biden dropped out of the race, the survey states.
70% enthusiasm is also one percentage point higher than what Gallup measured at the close of the 2020 election.
Americans’ attention to the election is also relatively high, the poll writes, with 83% of registered voters and 77% of US adults saying they have given “quite a lot of thought” to the election.
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More than 60m Americans have voted already
More than 60 million Americans have already voted in the 2024 election.
With just five days until election day, 60.9 million people in the US have voted early as of Thursday at noon, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida.
Of the nearly 61 million, just over 32 million voted early in person and about 28 million voted early by mail.
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Cardi B will join Kamala Harris at a rally in Wisconsin on Friday.
The Harris campaign announced today that rapper Cardi B will be delivering remarks to voters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, tomorrow. It is unclear whether she will perform, or just talk.
The rally in Milwaukee will also feature performances by GloRilla, Flo Milli, MC Lyte, the Isley Brothers and DJ Gemini Gilly.
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Donald Trump is hitting back at Kamala Harris after she said that he wanted to end the Affordable Care Act, also known as ‘“Obamacare”
.
On Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said that he “never mentioned” ending the Affordable Care Act, adding that he has “never even thought about such a thing”.
But, during his presidency, Trump repeatedly tried to terminate and replace the Affordable Care Act.
In 2017, Trump tweeted to “let ObamaCare implode” after the Senate failed to pass a trimmed-down Affordable Care Act repeal bill that Trump had supported.
In 2020, Trump’s administration asked for the supreme court to terminate the Affordable Care Act, and in 2019, the justice department under Trump’s administration backed a Texas judge’s ruling that Obamacare was unconstitutional.
And more recently, during the presidential debate with Harris, Trump called Obamacare “lousy” adding: “We are going to replace it.”
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Kamala Harris hit back at Donald Trump’s comments last night about how he will “protect” women, “whether the women like it or not”.
Harris told reporters: “It actually is, I think, very offensive to women in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies.
Harris said Trump’s comments were “just the latest on a series of reveals by the former president on how he thinks about women and their agency”.
She added: “Whether he has said, as he has, that women should be punished for their choices, whether he has talked about his pride is taking away a fundamental right of women, whether it be how he has actually created a situation in America where one in three women lives in a Trump abortion ban state.”
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It’s a Saturday afternoon at Al Madina Halal market and restaurant in Norcross, Georgia, and the line is four people deep for shawarma sandwiches or leg of lamb with saffron rice and two sides.
A television on the wall by a group of tables has Al Jazeera correspondents reporting from several countries on a split screen about Israel’s attack on Iranian military targets the day before.
Mohammad Hejja is drinking yogurt, surveying the bustle in the store he bought in 2012. There are shoppers and employees from Sudan, Ethiopia, Iran, Pakistan, Morocco and other countries – a clear sign of what makes surrounding Gwinnett county, with nearly a million residents, the most diverse in the south-east.
Hejja has Jordanian and US citizenship, but his family is Palestinian. Soldiers of the nascent nation of Israel drove his grandparents out of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba – the Palestinian catastrophe caused by Israel’s creation.
Asked about how he expects his community to vote when Americans head to the polls next week, he says: “Everybody is confused about this election.” His No 1 concern is to “stop the war”, referring to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza and recent attacks on Lebanon.
The issue is top of mind for Arab American voters nationwide. Some polls suggest Arab Americans could abandon the Democrats in droves over the Biden administration’s support for Israel; elsewhere, advocates and community leaders are urgently organizing to prevent a Donald Trump victory, warning about impacts in the Middle East and on domestic issues such as immigration if the GOP candidate is re-elected.
Abdullah Hammoud, mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, wrote on X in response to Clinton’s speech: “Do us a favor – stop sending surrogates who have no respect or regard for this community. You’re only inflicting more damage.”
Rumor has it the Dems want to send Bill Clinton to Dearborn to rally the Arab vote this weekend.
— Abdullah H. Hammoud (@AHammoudMI) October 31, 2024
Do us a favor - stop sending surrogates who have no respect or regard for this community. You’re only inflicting more damage. https://t.co/UYcJOOo9Gi
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Georgia state representative and Palestinian American Ruwa Romman said in response to Clinton’s speech she was “so ready for this generation to step aside”.
Romman hoped to speak at the Democratic national convention this summer as a representative of the Palestinian American community but that request was ultimately denied, a move that upset Arab and Muslim American political groups. Shortly after Romman was denied a speaking slot, Muslim Women for Harris-Walz withdrew their support for Harris and disbanded.
For no reason whatsoever randomly remembering Bill Clinton speaking at Georgetown and telling Muslims to “stay here and fight” as if we were just here for vacation. Anyway, I’m so ready for this generation to step aside. https://t.co/Uh8U3Uz8np
— Rep. Ruwa Romman (@Ruwa4Georgia) October 31, 2024
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Polls show Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are neck and neck in Michigan, a state home to the one of the US’s largest Arab populations, many of whom are mourning the losses of family members killed by Israeli forces abroad in Palestine and Lebanon.
Former president Bill Clinton made a speech in support of Harris in the key swing state last night addressing these voters, and said: “I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died – I get that,” Clinton said before adding: “Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians. They’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself.”
One recent poll showed Arabs favor Trump slightly more than Harris, a likely reaction to the Biden administration’s Middle East policy and “rock solid”, “unwavering” and “ironclad” support for Israel.
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Pictures of the ballots that were set on fire in Washington and Oregon earlier this week have been released. Election staff in Washington’s Clark county identified the 488 voters with damaged ballots, 345 of whom have requested new ballots. The remaining 143 replacement ballots will be mailed out today.
@ClarkCoWA Auditor Greg Kimsey has released photos and updated information on the damaged ballots from the Oct. 28 drop box fire. Elections staff have been able to identify 488 damaged ballots retrieved from the ballot box. pic.twitter.com/53cyLFNFqK
— Clark County WA (@ClarkCoWA) October 30, 2024
Officials fear the suspect, a white man of medium or thin build between 30 and 40 years old, who is balding or has very short hair, may intend to strike again. Bob Day, the police chief of Portland, Oregon, said the said the welding on the incendiary devices found inside the ballot boxes is “very detailed … it’s really quality, so this person obviously has some skills in that area”.
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Elon Musk is one of the billionaires who shelled out large sums of money in support of the Republican party.
The tech billionaire known for SpaceX and Tesla gave $133m to America Pac, a Super Pac he created to support Donald Trump. But Musk’s campaign tactics have gotten him into trouble.
The America Pac has been giving a $1m cash prize away each day until election day on 5 November to a person in a swing state if they pledged to support the first and second amendments.
The justice department warned Musk that offering a monetary incentive to voters was illegal and he might be breaking the law. Larry Krasner, the Democratic district attorney of Philadelphia, brought the first legal action against Musk, arguing it is an illegal lottery which violates state consumer protection laws.
Musk on Wednesday night sought to have the case brought to federal court.
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Billionaires spent $1.9bn on US election contributions
A lot of money has been spent on this year’s elections.
Only 150 billionaire families have contributed $1.9bn in support of presidential and congressional candidates, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness.
Of this giant figure 72% went to support Republicans compared with the 22% spent on Democrats.
“Billionaire campaign spending on this scale drowns out the voices and concerns of ordinary Americans. It is one of the most obvious and disturbing consequences of the growth of billionaire fortunes, as well as being a prime indicator that the system regulating campaign finance has collapsed,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director.
“We need to rein in the political power of billionaire families by better taxing them and by effectively limiting their campaign donations. Until we do both, we can only expect the influence of the super-rich over our politics and government to escalate.”
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Harris and Trump deadlocked in swing state Michigan – Washington Post poll
A new Washington Post poll has found that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are tied in toss-up state Michigan. Harris has 47% support among likely voters while Trump has 46% support.
”Both margins are within the poll’s margin of error of 3.7 percentage points, indicating either candidate could hold a lead,” the newspaper said.
With 50.6% of the vote, Joe Biden won the midwest state in 2020 compared to the 47.8% who voted for Trump. Trump narrowly won Michigan in 2016 by a little less than 11,000 votes.
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After the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, America’s business leaders came out strongly in their criticism of Donald Trump. Now – as the Harris campaign brands Trump a “fascist” and Trump threatens retribution against “the enemy within” – there appears to be a conspiracy of silence.
In fact, as the nation heads to the polls in an election that is too close to call, some of America’s most powerful chief executives appear to be cozying up to Trump again.
In public, only a small handful of business leaders are backing Trump. In private it’s a different story. At least, that’s how Trump is telling it.
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Most gamblers might want to sit out the US election. It’s too close to call with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump neck and neck, according to official polls. But the former president’s campaign has latched on to signs he says prove he’s actually “leading”.
In a close race, Trump and his allies claim some “gambling polls”, as he described them last week, put him significantly ahead of Harris. “Like, 65 to 35, or something like that.”
The irony of touting an apparent lead in betting markets at a Believers and Ballots campaign event in Georgia aimed at Christian voters was not lost on Trump. “But nobody here gambles,” he continued. “Does anybody here gamble? No, no, no, no. Great Christians don’t gamble, do they? Oh no.”
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Lots of memes and tweets and posts and videos are popping up, assuring women that they can keep their votes secret from their husbands and boyfriends. The unspoken assumption is that lots of women are bullied, intimidated or controlled by their partners, specifically in straight couples when she wants to vote for Harris and he supports Trump. The messages assure these intimidated voters that they can vote in peace and privacy at a polling place. But a lot of Americans now vote by mail, which generally means they fill out their ballots at home, where that privacy may not be available.
On the one hand, I’m glad there’s outreach to those voters. On the other, the way these messages are framed seem to regard the grim reality that a lot of women live in fear of their spouses as a given hardly worth stating outright, let alone decrying …
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Donald Trump says he will “protect women” if he wins power, but previous remarks and behaviour suggest otherwise:
Since the 1970s, about 26 women have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. The allegations include: rape, intruding on naked teenage pageant contestants, kissing and groping without consent, and looking under women’s skirts.
Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E Jean Carroll. Trump’s counterclaim was rejected by a judge in New York, Lewis A Kaplan, who said that the allegation that Trump raped Carroll was “substantially true”.
As well as being an adjudicated rapist, Trump has made a litany of sexist comments throughout his public life. In an interview with Esquire Magazine in 1991, Trump said: “It doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
In a leaked recording from 2005, Trump told Billy Bush that, “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” He adds seconds later: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
On a 2013 episode of Celebrity Apprentice, Trump said: “It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees” to a female contestant.
His tendency to make misogynistic remarks does not seem to be abating. Only in August did the former president suggest Harris had traded sexual favours to advance her political career.
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Harris and Trump to campaign in western swing states days before election
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will travel out west in the US election race on Thursday, as opportunities to edge ahead are running out.
Both candidates are trying to get Latino voters to support them. Harris has secured the star power of Jennifer Lopez for her rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, a critical swing state. Meanwhile, ex-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson will interview Trump in Arizona before the former president heads to his own rally in Nevada.
A stand-up comedy set performed at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden is still reverberating throughout this campaign. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe likened Puerto Rico to a floating island of garbage, which Harris’ campaign has seized upon, claiming that it reveals the racism of Trump supporters.
This was gaining traction, but President Joe Biden still managed to make it backfire on his party when he appeared to describe all Trump supporters as “garbage.” This prompted Trump, who has also branded Harris’ supporters as garbage, to use a garbage truck in a publicity stunt in Wisconsin.
Trump is due to deviate slightly from campaigning in battleground states with a trip to New Mexico on Thursday, a state pollsters forecast will go to Harris.
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The concept of “elite overproduction” was developed by social scientist Peter Turchin around the turn of this century to describe something specific: too many rich people for not enough rich-person jobs. It’s a byproduct of inequality: a ton of poor people, sure, but also a superfluity of the wealthy, without enough positions to house them in the influence and status to which they think themselves entitled. In a modern context, that would mean senior positions in the government and civil service, along with the top tier of finance and law, but Turchin tested the hypothesis from ancient Rome to 19th-century Britain. The names and nature of the contested jobs and titles changed; the pattern remained. Turchin predicted in 2010 that by the 2020s it would be destabilising US politics …
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Kamala Harris may never have visited Thulasendrapuram, a sleepy village in south India, but its residents claim to be some of her most devoted fans.
It was here, in among the verdant rice paddies and groundnut farms of rural Tamil Nadu, that Harris’s grandfather PV Gopalan was born. Though more than a century has passed since then, residents have proudly claimed Harris as a “daughter of the land”.
The outcome of the US election next week, where Harris is running as the Democrat party’s presidential nominee, has the community on edge. At the local tea shop, gossip has been pushed to one side to make way for chatter over the challenges posed by Harris’s opponent Donald Trump and the trends from crucial swing states.
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Harris and Trump make final pitches to voters as millions vote early
Good morning. It is less than a week before polls close at the 2024 US election and more than 57.5 million Americans have already checked their ballots, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida.
Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are still hot on the campaign trail in a fiercely contested race that is too close to call.
Trump made an appearance in a high-vis vest at the wheel of a garbage truck before heading off to a rally in Wisconsin, a key battleground state. Trump promised to protect women “whether they liked it or not”.
Harris was also in Wisconsin offering platitudes on climate change, gun control and abortion. She said those issues were “not political” but one’s “lived experience”. She was speaking shortly after the latest CNN poll showed her six points ahead of Trump in the state.
Harris and Trump take their nail-biting White House race west later, seeking supremacy on border security and aiming to woo crucial Latino voters days ahead of the US election. Pop singer Jennifer Lopez will bring her star power to the stage for Harris in Las Vegas, as the candidates battle through the seven swing states expected to decide the next president. Meanwhile, Trump has scheduled an interview in Arizona with ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson and a rally in Nevada.
On Wednesday, Harris spoke in Harrisburg, the Pennsylvania state capital, one of few counties that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Polls show a tied race in Pennsylvania.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he is backing Harris in next week’s election. Schwarzenegger, 77, said that while he doesn’t “really do endorsements”, he felt compelled to formally endorse Harris and her pick for vice-president, Tim Walz.
Trump refused to apologise for the comments made about Puerto Rico at his Madison Square Garden rally. “He’s a comedian, what can I tell you? I know nothing about him. I don’t know why he’s there.”
A Pennsylvania judge on Wednesday sided with Trump’s campaign and agreed to extend an in-person voting option in suburban Philadelphia, where long lines on the final day led to complaints voters were being disfranchised by an unprepared election office.
A majority of voters in swing states do not believe Trump will accept defeat if he loses next week’s presidential election and fear that his supporters will turn to violence in an attempt to install him in power, a new poll suggests.
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