Donald Trump
Asked by host Savannah Guthrie if he would ‘just say it’s crazy and not true’, Trump says: ‘I don’t know about QAnon’
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Rudy Giuliani’s daughter has endorsed Joe Biden for president in an essay for Vanity Fair, writing that in this historic election “none of us can afford to be silent”.“My father is Rudy Giuliani,” Caroline Rose Giuliani said in the magazine. “We are multiverses apart, politically and otherwise. I’ve spent a lifetime forging an identity in the arts separate from my last name, so publicly declaring myself as a ‘Giuliani’ feels counterintuitive, but I’ve come to realize that none of us can afford to be silent right now.”The younger Giuliani, a director, actor and writer who lives in Los Angeles, endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and voted for Barack Obama in 2012. She writes that since childhood she has engaged in debates with her father about LGBTQ rights, policing and other issues.“It felt important to speak my mind, and I’m glad we at least managed to communicate at all. But the chasm was painful nonetheless, and has gotten exponentially more so in Trump’s era of chest-thumping partisan tribalism. I imagine many Americans can relate to the helpless feeling this confrontation cycle created in me, but we are not helpless. I may not be able to change my father’s mind, but together, we can vote this toxic administration out of office.”Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is a personal lawyer to Donald Trump and has been one of the president’s loudest endorsers, whether during the Russian investigation, the president’s impeachment or the coronavirus crisis.With less than a month before the 3 November election, Giuliani is back in the spotlight with claims to have found incriminating evidence on a discarded computer of Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Twitter and Facebook have been restricting the dissemination of the New York Post’s article reporting the unlikely and unsubstantiated claim.“If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president’s personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with ‘yes-men’ and women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power,” his daughter writes.“We have to stand and fight,” she argues. “The only way to end this nightmare is to vote. There is hope on the horizon, but we’ll only grasp it if we elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.” More
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Trump and Biden to hold town halls tonight
Civil rights and Qanon candidates: the fight for facts in Georgia
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The fight to vote
US elections 2020
With millions of Americans casting their ballots by mail during the pandemic, The Guardian and ProPublica are tracking the votes in critical states to determine how many are counted, rejected and delayed
This piece is published in partnership with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
An unprecedented number of Americans are voting by mail this year to avoid Covid-19 risk. Joe Biden’s supporters have said they are more likely to vote by mail while Donald Trump’s supporters say they are more likely to vote in person. With postal delays, rejected ballots and a dearth of funding, the process isn’t always smooth – ballots can be rejected for multiple reasons, and due to court challenges, election rules are changing even while voting is underway. Meanwhile, Trump and other Republican officials have spent the last months casting doubt on the mail-in voting process, paving the way for legal battles during the vote count.
With data from University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald, The Guardian and ProPublica are tracking votes in politically competitive states through the election to find out how many people are voting by mail, how their votes are counted, and what it means for the 2020 election. Our tracker will be updated as we obtain updated information, as well as other state data. We will also be investigating any aberrations and issues in the mail-in voting process as we find them, and telling the stories of the people and communities affected most.
Propublica
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Swing state breakdown
The following bar chart shows the information for the states of: North Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
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Methodology: The data displayed is obtained from state election agencies and analyzed by Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida and maintainer of the U.S. Elections Project. Data on mail ballot requests, returns and rejections is updated regularly by the states, although not on the same schedule. Mail ballot figures do not include in-person early voting totals, except in Minnnesota, where the state does not separate the two.
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Anywhere but Washington
Republicans
Angela Stanton King, who is working to help the president win Black voters, confirmed her views to the Guardian
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2:47
Trump ally running for Congress says she believes baseless QAnon-linked conspiracy theory – video
A Republican congressional candidate and high-profile ally in Donald Trump’s fight to win over Black voters has admitted to believing a baseless QAnon-related conspiracy theory that the online furniture retailer Wayfair is secretly selling trafficked children over the internet as part of a deep-state plot.
Angela Stanton King, who is running in Atlanta, Georgia, for the congressional seat once held by the late civil rights icon John Lewis, told the Guardian in an on-camera interview she believed the debunked conspiracy theory while continuing to deny she was a follower of QAnon.
When asked if she believed the retailer was involved in a global pedophilia conspiracy, she replied: “You know they are. You saw it. You watch the news just like I did.” The candidate then ended the interview, being taped as part of the Guardian’s Anywhere But Washington series.
“I don’t know anything about QAnon. You know more than I know,” King said as she walked away.
Stanton King is one of a number of Republican congressional candidates with ties to the far right, antisemitic conspiracy theory. She has almost no chance of winning her race in Georgia’s fifth congressional district, which has been held by Democrats with overwhelming margins for decades. But elsewhere in the state, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican candidate for the 14th congressional district and an outspoken promoter of QAnon, looks set to win a seat in Congress.
Donald Trump has himself praised QAnon followers as patriots who “love America” and declined opportunities to debunk the false theories.
Play Video
11:08
Civil rights and QAnon candidates: the fight for facts in Georgia – video
Stanton King has used her social media presence to push false theories linked to Qanon, including suggesting that the Black Lives Matter movement is “a major cover up for PEDOPHILIA and HUMAN TRAFFICKING”. She also reiterated a QAnon rallying cry related to the so-called “Storm”, a day of reckoning when, followers believe, Donald Trump will reveal the malefactors in the deep state. “THE STORM IS HERE,” she tweeted on 6 August this year.
When asked to explain this post, Stanton King once again denied being a follower of the movement and stated: “It was raining that day.”
Weather reports on 6 August in Atlanta indicate it was hot with no precipitation.
Advocates on the ground in Georgia and elsewhere have reported an uptick in disinformation associated with the conspiracy theory movement during this election cycle. More
Millions of Americans have already cast their vote in America’s presidential election, underscoring unprecedented enthusiasm in the 2020 race that could lead to record-shattering turnout.Election day is still weeks away, but a staggering 17.1 million voters have already cast their ballots either by mail or in person, according to data collected by Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who closely tracks voter turnout. Overall, the US has already surpassed 12% of its total vote from the 2016 presidential election. Democrats appear to be disproportionately responsible for driving the early vote turnout and observers say this could be the first election in US history where a majority of voters cast their ballots before election day.Several states, including battlegrounds like Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida have already surpassed 20% of their total 2016 vote, a sign of strong enthusiasm. (The Guardian and ProPublica are tracking these vote-by-mail ballots here.)“That’s nuts,” McDonald said in an interview. “This is orders of magnitude larger number[s] of people voting.”The United States may be heading for record turnout in a presidential election, experts say. McDonald estimates that about 150 million people will vote this year of the approximately 239.2 million eligible voters, the highest turnout in a presidential election since 1908. And Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm that closely tracks voter data, said he thought as many as 160 million voters could cast a ballot. 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 general election.The early enthusiasm comes as voters in Virginia, Ohio, Georgia and Texas have all seen huge lines on the first day of in-person early voting – some counties in those states said they saw record turnout on the first day. For months, election administrators have been trying to figure out how to predict and accommodate an influx of in-person voters as they face a shortage of personnel and locations.Democrats have encouraged their supporters to cast their votes as early as possible either in person or by mail. The push to vote early, both by mail and in person, has also come amid fears about the capacity of the United States Postal Service (USPS) to deliver mail-in ballots on time.“We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can. We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow up to make sure they’re received,” Michelle Obama said at the Democratic national convention in August.So far, Democrats are heeding that advice and crushing Republicans when it comes to both requesting and returning mail-in ballots. In North Carolina, a key battleground state, Democratic voters have returned 269,844 ballots, 42.9% of the more than 628,000 they requested. Republicans have returned just 96,051 out of a little over 258,413 requests (roughly 37%).In Pennsylvania, another key state, Democrats have returned more than 22% of the 1.7m ballots they requested, a significant advantage over Republicans, who have returned just over 12% of their 652,516 requested ballots. In Dane county, a liberal stronghold in Wisconsin, more than 62% of the more than 200,000 voters who requested ballots have already returned them, the highest return rate in the state.“It’s like a double advantage for Democrats – not only are there advantages for Democrats for the number of ballot requests, but they’re also adding on to that advantage by having their voters return their ballots at a higher rate than Republicans,” McDonald said.The surge has been enough to cause Republicans to concede privately at the very least that the advantage right now is with Democrats, both in terms of the presidential race and winning a majority of seats in the Senate.“If I’m in Vegas I’d bet on Biden,” said one Republican strategist who specializes in data analytics and asked to remain anonymous. That sentiment is increasingly shared by Republican operatives and top staffers in the Senate who are beginning to plot out life in the minority.But the enthusiasm spans both Democratic and Republican voters. “Look, I’d rather be down 710,000 [registered voters] than 1.4 million. But I don’t want to oversell it. We still have a lot of work to do,” said Republican strategist Mark Harris.The data is so drastically different from previous years that McDonald said it was difficult to predict what it portends for the eventual election outcome. In a typical election, there is usually a spike in voting around the start of early voting, which then falls off until near election day, when it climbs again.“There could be two plausible explanations. One is that Democrats are more enthused and want to vote as soon as they can. The other is that Republicans, even those who have requested mail ballots, are deciding that they want to vote in person and they may wait and then when in-person early voting or election day comes around, go vote then,” he said. More
The Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, on Thursday abruptly canceled her travel for the coming few days after two people associated with the Joe Biden-Harris election campaign tested positive for coronavirus.Harris was on a flight with both individuals two days before their positive Covid-19 tests. The individuals were Harris’s communications director, Liz Allen, and a “non-staff flight crew member”.Because Harris and these contacts wore medical-grade N95 face masks during the flight and they were not within 6ft of the vice-presidential nominee for more than 15 minutes, they do not meet the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’ (CDC) definition of “close contact”.For that reason, Harris does not meet full quarantine criteria, which would normally require an individual to be in isolation for two weeks.But “out of an abundance of caution” the campaign has canceled her events through Sunday. She will still attend virtual campaign events.The individuals were not in contact with the Democratic president nominee, Joe Biden.The Harris campaign put out a statement saying the news of the positive tests came in late on Wednesday.NEWS: Sen. Harris’s campaign communications director and a non staff flight member have tested positive for COVID-19. The Biden campaign is canceling some of Harris’s planned travel. pic.twitter.com/TBme8kjFv4— Daniel Strauss (@DanielStrauss4) October 15, 2020
It added that the California senator and vice-presidential candidate would “deep a robust and aggressive schedule of virtual campaign activities to reach voters all across the country” and that she intended to return to in-person campaigning on Monday.The precautions, the statement noted, are “the sort of conduct we have continuously modeled in this campaign”.The campaign said that Harris last tested negative for coronavirus on Wednesday and she will be tested again.More details soon … More
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