Harris hails Republican endorsements as campaign condemns Trump’s threat to fire Jack Smith – US elections live

Donald Trump’s rally in Tempe, Arizona is starting late. Meanwhile, his running mate JD Vance is expected to take the stage shortly at a separate event in Waterford, Michigan. We’ll alert you of any developments as the events get underway. Trump is expected to hold another rally in Las Vegas, Nevada this evening after Kamala Harris campaigns alongside ex-President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen in Atlanta this afternoon.

In a rare post on X, Donald Trump is denouncing his former chief of staff John Kelly, who recently made news for saying Trump meets the definition of a fascist. In the post, Trump calls Kelly a “bad general”, an apparent reference to a separate interview Kelly gave the Atlantic where he described Trump lamenting that he did not have generals who were loyal in the way he believed German military commanders had been to Hitler.

Robert Tait has more on Kelly’s comments about Trump’s authoritarian leanings:

As Joe Biden travels to Arizona and Donald Trump prepares to take the stage at two rallies there today, Phoenix police have arrested a man suspected of setting fire to a mailbox there where mail-in ballots were damaged this morning. The news comes just days after Tempe police arrested a separate man in connection with three shootings at Democratic party campaign offices in Tempe.

The Arizona Republic reports that Phoenix police arrested Dieter Klofkorn, who told investigators he lit the fire because he wanted to be arrested, this morning. Before firefighters could extinguish the fire, the New York Times reports, approximately 20 ballots were damaged. Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes told the paper that voters whose ballots were damaged will receive a new ballot.

Donald Trump will be taking the stage at his rally in Tempe, Arizona, shortly, where he is expected to return to the issue that has defined his campaign: immigration. According to his prepared remarks, Trump will argue that Kamala Harris’s handling of the border should disqualify her from the presidency.

Trump will be joined on stage by Kari Lake, a former television news anchor and dedicated follower of Trump’s who is running for the state’s open Senate seat. Ahead of her appearance in Tempe, Lake told the Associated Press that she would use the CBP One app, which allows migrants to request asylum at the south-west border, to deport people if elected.

“That app works both ways,” Lake said. “In January 2025, we’re gonna control that app and we’re gonna find the people who invaded our country and we’re going to send them home.”

Hilary Clinton will appear on CNN this evening in an interview with Kaitlan Collins, host of The Source. The interview comes just a day after the network aired its town hall with Kamala Harris, an event that Donald Trump declined to attend.

Joe Biden will travel to Arizona today and is expected to formally apologize tomorrow for the US government’s role in forcing thousands of Native American children to attend Indian boarding schools – a policy which has been widely recognized as an element of genocide. The news comes as Kamala Harris is trailing in the polls in Arizona, a state that Biden famously won in 2020, largely due to the support of Native American voters.

“I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” the secretary of interior, Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, told the Associated Press. “It’s a big deal to me. I’m sure it will be a big deal to all of Indian Country.”

As the first Native American to lead the Department of the Interior, Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system, which found that at least 18,000 children were removed from their parents and forced to attend the schools, which sought to assimilate them into white American culture. The investigation documented about 1,000 deaths of children that occurred at the boarding schools.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the Democratic National Committee announced that it had launched a “six-figure ad campaign” aimed at turning out Native American voters in Arizona, North Carolina, Montana and Alaska. It is the party’s third Native-focused campaign this year, and “the most the DNC has ever spent on a campaign targeting Native voters”.

Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego has announced the arrest of a suspect involved in setting a fire at a USPS mailbox that damaged a small number of mail-in ballots:

Phoenix is the largest city in swing state Arizona, and many residents are returning ballots by mail. Here’s more of what we know about the incident:

Things aren’t looking terrible everywhere for Democrats.

The party grew nervous earlier this year in Maryland when Republican former governor Larry Hogan jumped into the race for the open Senate seat in what is typically a Democratic bastion. Maryland voters had twice elected Hogan to the governor’s mansion, and he is viewed as perhaps the only Republican in the state with a shot at winning the Senate seat.

But a poll from the Washington Post and the University of Maryland released today shows the Democratic nominee, Prince George’s county executive Angela Alsobrooks, with a commanding lead of 52% among likely voters, and Hogan at a mere 40%. That’s sure to quell some jitters in the party, though winning the seat, which is currently occupied by Democrat Ben Cardin, is not enough to get the party the majority in the chamber.

Democratic senator Jon Tester’s bid for re-election in Montana is a mirror of the party’s wider struggles to maintain the support of voters in rural areas across the country, which have grown increasingly Republican in recent years, threatening the party’s ability to win races up and down the ballot. The Guardian’s David Smith traveled to Big Sky Country to see if Tester’s circumstances are as dire as they appear from afar:

He was a young and little-known underdog. So Max Baucus, candidate for Congress, decided to trek 630 miles across Montana and listen to people talk about their problems. “As luck would have it, on the first day, I walked into a blizzard,” he recalls, pointing to a photo of his young self caked in snow. “It was cold! But the blizzard didn’t last that long.”

Baucus shed 12lb during that two-and-a-half month journey in 1974. He also made friends. The Democrat defeated a Republican incumbent and would soon go on to serve as a Montana senator for 36 years. He never lost an election but saw his beloved home state undergo many changes. Among them is the prospect that Democrats like him are now facing political extinction.

Jon Tester, a moderate Democrat who is one of Montana’s current senators, is fighting for his political life in the 5 November election. Opinion polls suggest that he is trailing his Republican rival, Tim Sheehy. Control of the closely divided Senate, and the ability to enable or stymie the ambitions of a President Kamala Harris or President Donald Trump, could hinge on the outcome.

The Senate race in Montana is widely seen as a litmus test of whether Democrats can still win in largely rural states that have embraced Trump’s Republican party. It is also a study in whether the type of hyperlocal campaigning that Baucus practised half a century ago can outpace shifts in demographics, media and spending that have rendered all politics national.

Democrats are fighting to keep their majority in the Senate, and evidence continues to mount that Jon Tester, the Montana senator whose re-election is viewed as essential to doing that, is struggling.

The party has already conceded a seat in deep-red West Virginia, but is hoping Kamala Harris’s victory combined with those of Tester and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, along with several other incumbents, will renew its majority.

Polls have lately shown Tester trailing his Republican opponent, and the political advertising trackers at Medium Buying report a Republican group has cancelled television ads in Montana – a sign the party views the seat as theirs for the taking:

Here’s more on the calculations behind the quest for control of Congress’s upper chamber:

Harris then took a few questions from the press, but didn’t make news.

Asked for more details of the Philadelphia concert scheduled for Monday where Bruce Springsteen will perform and Barack Obama will speak in support of her candidacy, Harris demurred.

“I have nothing to report at this moment. Stay tuned,” the vice-president said, after noting that Springsteen was “an American icon”.

She dodged a question about whether she would allow construction of a wall on the border with Mexico, and how she would vote on a California ballot proposition to heighten penalties for shoplifters and drug dealers.

Harris did share some thoughts on the gender divide pollsters say they are observing ahead of the election, with women breaking for Democrats and men for Republicans by increasingly wide margins:

It’s not what I see, in terms of my rallies, in terms of interactions I’m having with people in communities and on the ground. What I’m seeing is, in equal measure, men and women talking about their concerns about the future of our democracy, talking about the fact that they want a president who leads with optimism and takes on the challenges that we face, whether it be grocery prices or investing in small businesses or home ownership.

In brief remarks to the press in Philadelphia before departing for a campaign event in Georgia, Kamala Harris thanked the two Republican politicians who announced they would be voting for her.

Former congressman Fred Upton of Michigan and Waukesha, Wisconsin mayor Shawn Reilly both cited their concerns with Donald Trump in announcing their endorsement of Harris.

“This continues to be, I think, evidence of the fact that people who have been leaders in our country, regardless of their political party, understand what’s at stake. And they are weighing in courageously, in many cases, in support of what we need to have, which is a president of the United States who understands the obligation to uphold the constitution of the United States and our democracy,” Harris said.

She also hit out at Donald Trump, who declined to participate in a second debate with Harris hosted by CNN that would have happened last night. Instead, the vice-president to appeared solo at a town hall the network organized with undecided voters in Philadelphia.

Here’s what Harris said:

As for last night, yet again, Trump not showing up, refused to be a part of a CNN debate, and clearly his staff has been saying he’s exhausted. And the sad part about that is, he’s trying to be president of the United States, probably the toughest job in the world, and he’s exhausted.

I said last night what I mean, which is the American people are being presented with a very serious decision, and it includes what we must understand will happen starting on January 20, in this choice. Either you have the choice of a Donald Trump will sit in the Oval Office stewing, plotting revenge, retribution, writing out his enemies list, or what I will be doing, which is responding to folks like the folks last night with a to-do list, understanding the need to work on lifting up the American people, whether it be through the issue of grocery prices and bringing them down, or investing in our economy, investing in our small businesses, investing in our families.

Voto Latino, a top civic engagement non-profit aimed at empowering Latino voters, has launched a new campaign to raise awareness about what Project 2025 means for Latinos.

The organization identified parts of Project 2025 that would have the most negative effect on the Latino community, and translated these portions into Spanish. Voto Latino is launching paid ads in Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan to publicize this initiative, in a $3.5m campaign.

Remember: Trump has tried to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation-backed initiative to overhaul the US government, which includes plans to outlaw abortion and fire civil servants en masse, as polling indicated it was a political liability for him. The Vera Institute for Justice said that provisions relating to immigration were “designed to initiate mass deportations.”

“As much as former President Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025, we will not be fooled: We know that he will implement this extremist agenda if he wins. It is clear that Project 2025 will set us back by dismantling the fabric of our country through extreme conservative efforts to impose a regressive vision for our nation,” Maria Teresa Kumar, Voto Latino President and Co-Founder, said in a press release announcing the campaign.

“The threats posed to our community by Project 2025 are clear and present. Latino voters and other voters of color will be affected the most by Project 2025.”

“We have the power to ensure that an extremist agenda does not go into place by making our voices heard at the ballot box in November,” Kumar also said. “In this election, over 36 million Latinos are eligible to vote. We have a responsibility to inform one another of the potential dangers related to Trump’s agenda as seen in Project 2025, and the impact that it will have on ourselves, our communities, and our families.”

Donald Trump has been working tirelessly to win over male voters and by some measures, his efforts appear effective.

Trump is besting Kamala Harris among men 53 to 37 percent, according to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll, while the vice president is winning women 53 percent to his 36 percent.

Trump’s far-right politics seem especially appealing to white male voters, and there have been various explanations for this trend. Some have opined that it’s sheer sexism; others believe that it’s due to a purported male loneliness epidemic and uncertainty about their role in American society.

The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone spoke with residents of Middletown, Ohio–GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s hometown– in an effort to learn why gender is a watershed issue in this election.

Here is their eye-opening report.