US election 2024 live: Harris and Trump converge on rust belt as final day of campaigning begins

In the 60th US presidential election, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs along with 34 of the 100 seats in the Senate, which together will decide the membership of the 119th Congress.

Republicans hold a majority in the House, while Democrats control the Senate, both by narrow margins. But the polls – if to be believed – suggest Democrats could win back the House and Republicans retake the Senate.

The Republican House majority leader, Steve Scalise, has told Axios that multiple GOP members have been “angling” for senior posts in a potential administration led by Donald Trump.

Scalise, a hardline conservative representing Louisiana, told the outlet:

I’ve heard from a number of members that have been having conversations whether they’re on a short list or a long-short list.

And we saw it in 2017 where a number of House colleagues got pulled into Cabinet secretary positions and other positions, and so I wouldn’t expect anything different this time.

Hopefully we have a large enough majority where that option is available to them, but that’s going to be up to President Trump.

Scalise said he is “very confident” House Republicans will hold or grow their majority, adding that a margin of 8-12 seats would be a good one for the party (Democrats need to flip only four seats to win back a House majority this year).

“You know, with the way redistricting is, these aren’t the days we can get a 30-seat majority anymore. So whatever majority we have is going to be slim,” Scalise told Axios.

Donald Trump said with two days until the presidential election that he should never have left the White House after his defeat in 2020 and joked darkly he would be fine with reporters getting shot, dredging up grievances that overshadowed his attack lines against Kamala Harris.

The closing themes of the former president’s campaign at a rally in Lititz in the battleground state of Pennsylvania brought him full circle with his 2016 campaign that went after the news media and his 2020 campaign that was defined by his attempts to overturn the result.

Trump stayed on message for the first part of his remarks but could not resist reverting to resentments he has held on to for years, describing Democrats as demonic and lamenting the 2020 election – an issue that polls badly and his aides privately said they thought he had been convinced to drop.

“We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” he said before abruptly cutting himself off.

The remark reflected what Trump told aides and allies in the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, a loss he has never conceded, and how he sat in at least one meeting at the end of his first term where he mused about refusing to leave the White House, a person familiar with the matter said.

You can read the full story by my colleague, Hugo Lowell, here:

As we mentioned in the opening summary, the US vice president and Democratic presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris, pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday.

Many Democratic voters, including Michigan’s large Arab American and Muslim American population, have expressed anger at the Biden administration over its support for Israel’s war on Gaza (and now Lebanon).

The US continues to be the biggest arms supplier to Israel and is its most powerful diplomatic ally. Harris has not signalled a significant shift from Biden’s policy. Both have condemned the high civilian death toll (according to Gaza’s health ministry over 43,000 Palestinian people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes since last October) but continue to insist on Israel’s right “to defend itself”.

Harris said at the Michigan rally:

We are joined today by leaders of the Arab American community, which has deep and proud roots here in Michigan, and I want to say this year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon.

It is devastating, and as president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.

Election Day in the US is now often considered election week as each state follows its own rules and practices for counting ballots that can delay the results. There is also the possibility of legal challenges to counts that could cause delays.

In 2020, The Associated Press declared Joe Biden the winner on Saturday afternoon — four days after polls closed. But even then, The AP called North Carolina for Donald Trump 10 days after Election Day and Georgia for Biden 16 days later after hand recounts.

Four years earlier, the 2016 election was decided just hours after most polls closed. The Associated Press declared Trump the winner on election night at 2:29 a.m.

The tightness of the race this year makes it hard to predict when a winner could be declared – but North Carolina and Georgia could give an early indication as results in these swing states come in relatively quickly.

The Associated Press has pinpointed areas in swing states that could give us a clue on how the race will unfold:

In North Carolina, Harris’ margins in Wake and Mecklenburg counties, home to the state capital of Raleigh and the state’s largest city, Charlotte, respectively, will reveal how much Trump will need to squeeze out of the less-populated rural areas he has dominated.

In Pennsylvania, Harris needs heavy turnout in deep blue Philadelphia, but she’s also looking to boost the Democrats’ advantage in the arc of suburban counties to the north and west of the city.

She has campaigned aggressively in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, where Biden improved on Clinton’s 2016 winning margins. The Philadelphia metro area, including the four collar counties, accounts for 43 percent of Pennsylvania’s vote.

Elsewhere in the Blue Wall, Trump needs to blunt Democratic growth in Michigan’s key suburban counties outside of Detroit, especially Oakland County. He faces the same challenge in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County outside of Milwaukee.

The Guardian US has been averaging national and state polls to see how the two candidates are faring. Nationally, Kamala Harris has a one-point advantage, 48% to 47%, over Donald Trump, virtually identical to last week.

The election will be decided in the seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In these states, the polls are too close to call.

Harris has an 8% lead among those who have already voted, while Trump is ahead among those who say they are very likely to vote but have not yet done so. The poll, from the New York Times and Siena College, also found Harris was slightly ahead in Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin, with Trump up in Arizona and the other three too close to call.

Many Democrats are worried Trump is setting the stage for a series of legal challenges to poll results, in a sign the former president thinks Harris may win on election day tomorrow.

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the 2024 US presidential election.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will begin a blitz of rallies and media appearances across the vital battleground states in the rust belt, as the final day of campaigning gets under way.

Harris is set to appear in the Pennsylvania cities of Allentown, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, in a sign of how crucial the state will be to securing victory. Trump will start his day in North Carolina before making appearances in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Opinion polls show the pair locked in a tight race. More than 78m Americans have already voted, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, approaching half the total 160 million votes cast in 2020, in which US voter turnout was the highest in more than a century.

Here are some of the latest developments:

• Kamala Harris pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population two days out from the election. Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Joe Biden in 2020, helping him to a narrow victory over Donald Trump. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the vice-president’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza.

• Harris was making her fourth stop of the day in Michigan, having earlier spoken at a church in Detroit and stopped by a barber shop in Pontiac. Trump is holding his final rally of the campaign in Michigan on Monday night.

• Donald Trump said he should never have left the White House after his defeat in 2020 and joked darkly he would be fine with reporters getting shot. “We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said at a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” he said before abruptly cutting himself off. In other comments, as he denigrated the media, he said: “To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through fake news, and I don’t mind that much, because, I don’t mind. I don’t mind.”

• Donald Trump again suggested he would give a role on health policy to Robert F Kennedy Jr at a rally in Macon, Georgia. “I told a great guy, RFK Jr., Bobby — I said, ‘Bobby, you work on women’s health, you work on health, you work on what we eat. You work on pesticides. You work on everything,” he said. Kennedy, a well known vaccine sceptic, on Saturday said that the former president would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected.

• Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for California’s Proposition 36, which would make it easier for prosecutors to send repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot. The measure would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanors.

• The Trump campaign claimed that recent polling by the New York Times and the Des Moines Register is designed to suppress Trump voter turnout by presenting a bleak picture of his re-election prospects. The memo claims that the Times’s polls have biased samples and overrepresent Democratic voters compared with actual voter registration and turnout trends.

• Trump also disputed a shock Iowa poll that found Kamala Harris leading the former president in the typically red state 47% to 44%. “No President has done more for farmers, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump,” Trump said in a post on the Truth Social network on Sunday morning. “In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, by a lot”.