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      Contested state supreme court seats are site of hidden battle for abortion access

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      Abortion will be on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and it’s one of the top issues in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But it is also key to less publicized but increasingly contested races for seats on state supreme courts, which often have the last word on whether a state will ban or protect access to the procedure.This year, voters in 33 states have the chance to decide who sits on their state supreme courts. Judges will be on the ballot in Arizona and Florida, where supreme courts have recently ruled to uphold abortion bans. They are also up for election in Montana, where the supreme court has backed abortion rights in the face of a deeply abortion-hostile state legislature.In addition, supreme court judges are on the ballot in Maryland, Nebraska and Nevada – all of which are holding votes on measures that could enshrine access to abortion in their state constitutions. Should those measures pass, state supreme courts will almost certainly determine how to interpret them.Indeed, anti-abortion groups are already gearing up for lawsuits.“We’re all going to end up in court, because they’re going to take vague language from these ballot initiatives to ask for specific things like funding for all abortions, abortion for minors without parental consent,” said Kristi Hamrick, chief media and policy strategist for the powerful anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, which is currently campaigning around state supreme court races in Arizona and Oklahoma. “Judges have become a very big, important step in how abortion law is actually realized.”In Michigan and Ohio, which voted in 2022 and 2023 respectively to amend their state constitution to include abortion rights, advocates are still fighting in court over whether those amendments can be used to strike down abortion restrictions. Come November, however, the ideological makeup of both courts may flip.Spending in state supreme court races has surged since Roe fell. In the 2021-2022 election cycle, candidates, interest groups and political parties spent more than $100m, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. After adjusting for inflation, that’s almost double the amount spent in any previous midterm cycle.View image in fullscreenIn 2023, a race for a single seat on the Wisconsin supreme court alone cost $51m – and hinged on abortion rights, as the liberal-leaning candidate talked up her support for the procedure. (As in many other – but not all – state supreme court races, the candidates in Wisconsin were technically non-partisan.) After that election, liberals assumed a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court. The court is now set to hear a case involving the state’s 19th-century abortion ban, which is not currently being enforced but is still on the books.It’s too early to tally up the money that has been dumped into these races this year, especially because much of it is usually spent in the final days of the election. But the spending is all but guaranteed to shatter records.In May, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and Planned Parenthood Votes announced that they were teaming up this cycle to devote $5m to ads, canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts in supreme court races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. Meanwhile, the ACLU and its Pac, the ACLU Voter Education Fund, has this year spent $5.4m on non-partisan advertising and door-knocking efforts in supreme court races in Michigan, Montana, North Carolina and Ohio. The scale of these investments was unprecedented for both Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, according to Douglas Keith, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Judiciary Program who tracks supreme court races.

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      “For a long time, judicial campaign ads often were just judges saying that they were fair and independent and had family values, and that was about it. Now, you’re seeing judges talk about abortion rights or voting rights or environmental rights in their campaign ads,” Keith said. By contrast, rightwing judicial candidates are largely avoiding talk of abortion, Keith said, as the issue has become ballot box poison for Republicans in the years since Roe fell. Still, the Judicial Fairness Initiative, the court-focused arm of the Republican State Leadership Committee, announced in August that it would make a “seven-figure investment” in judicial races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.Balancing the federal benchAbortion is far from the only issue over which state courts hold enormous sway. They also play a key role in redistricting, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and more. And with the US Congress so gridlocked, state-level legislation and its legality has only grown in importance.For years, conservative operatives have focused on remaking the federal judiciary in their ideological image – an effort that culminated in Donald Trump’s appointments of three US supreme court justices and has made federal courts generally more hostile to progressive causes. Now, the ACLU hopes to make state supreme courts into what Deirdre Schifeling, its chief political and advocacy officer, calls a “counterbalance” to this federal bench.“We have a plan through 2030 to work to build a more representative court,” said Schifeling, who has a spreadsheet of the supreme court races that will take place across eight states for years to come. (As a non-partisan organization, the ACLU focuses on voter education and candidates’ “civil rights and civil liberties” records.) This cycle, the organization’s messaging has centered on abortion.“Nationally, you’re seeing polling that shows the top thing that voters are voting on is the economy. But these judges don’t really influence the economy,” Schifeling said. “Of the issues that they can actually influence and have power over, reproductive rights is by far the most important to voters.”Abortion rights supporters are testing out this strategy even in some of the United States’ most anti-abortion states. In Texas, where ProPublica this week reported two women died after being denied emergency care due to the state’s abortion ban, former US air force undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones has launched the Find Out Pac, which aims to unseat three state supreme court justices.Justices Jane Bland, Jimmy Blacklock and John Devine, the Pac has declared, “fucked around with our reproductive freedom” in cases upholding Texas’s abortion restrictions. Now, Jones wants them out.“Why would we not try to hold some folks accountable?” Jones said. “This is the most direct way in which Texas voters can have their voices heard on this issue.” (There is no way for citizens to initiate a ballot measure in Texas.) The Pac has been running digital ads statewide on how the Texas ban has imperiled access to medically necessary care.However, since state supreme court races have long languished in relative obscurity, voters don’t always know much about them and may very well default to voting on party lines in the seven states where the ballots list the affiliations of nominees for the bench. Although the majority of Texans believe abortions should be legal in all or some cases, nearly half of Texans don’t recall seeing or hearing anything about their supreme court in the last year, according to Find Out Pac’s own polling.“This conversation that we’re having in Texas, around the importance of judicial races, is new for us as Democrats,” Jones said. “It’s not for the Republicans.” More

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      Play: Election-Night Bingo

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      Listen up for these terms as the votes roll in. Find them on the board to be the night’s big winner.This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.After months and months and months of hearing about it, the election is finally here! Every four years, millions of Americans cast their ballots for president. Then, they wait and watch for the results on election night. It’s exciting! But also kind of … a lot.The news is a jumble of numbers, some very intense maps and a bunch of politics wonks talking a mile a minute about “exit polls” and “returns.” Not the most kid-friendly introduction to participatory democracy. But like most things, the more kids understand what’s going on, the more interesting it can be.That’s where this game comes in. Think of it as a mash-up of bingo and a language scavenger hunt. LINGO!InstructionsPrint out the bingo board and the definitions of the terms on it. Skim the terms to familiarize yourself.Set a timer for 30 minutes and settle in for an evening of election excitement.Anytime you read or hear one of phrases from the board, check it off. Check your printout (or scroll below) to read the explanation, too!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mormons were once reliably Republican – but they could tip Arizona Harris’s way

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      A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift from members towards Kamala Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Donald Trump slightly ahead in the swing state.With nearly 450,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as LDS or Mormons, living in Arizona, they make up about 6% of the state’s population and both the Harris and Trump campaigns have been going all out to woo them.While the church’s home base of Utah is one of the deepest red states, in neighboring Arizona there is a growing partisan rift.Mormons in Arizona are now “poised to support Kamala Harris more than any other presidential Democratic ticket in 60 years”, Jacob Rugh, an associate professor in the department of sociology at the LDS church-run Brigham Young University, said in a Harris-Walz campaign call in August.In the 2020 election, Joe Biden delivered the first Democratic win in Arizona in a presidential election in 24 years. He garnered an estimated 18,000 votes from the LDS community, double Hillary Clinton’s share of LDS voters there – and won the state by just 10,457 votes.“The 18,000 votes was more than the margin of victory, and it showed the significance of the LDS vote,” said Robert Taber, the national director of LDS for Harris-Walz.“Where Biden got 18% of the LDS vote in 2020, I think Harris could hit 25-30% of the LDS vote,” Taber added, citing the increased Democratic campaign efforts there this cycle, as well as the “post-January 6” environment.“I think there’s a decent chance that Harris does a little bit better than Biden,” he said, which, if it happens, could help the Democrats to “hold on to Nevada and Arizona”, he added.In the United States, members of the LDS church make up a relatively small, predominantly white voting bloc – about 2% of the population – and have traditionally been among the most loyal voting blocs for the Republicans over the last several decades, historically aligning on traditional conservative values such as religious freedoms, pro-life stances and small government.But in 2016, when Trump was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, some in the community felt conflicted. That year, after the Hollywood Access tape was published, Deseret News website, which is owned by the LDS church, called on Trump to resign, stating that he did not align with the community’s ideals and values.A small but increasing number of LDS voters continue to shift away from him.Julie Spilsbury, a Republican council member in Mesa, Arizona, and an LDS church member, recently endorsed Harris .“I think the character of our leaders matter,” Spilsbury, 47, said. “And when I hear him talk about – women, immigrants, refugees, people who disagree with him – I cannot, in good conscience, vote for someone like that.”Spilsbury voted for Trump in 2016 but later abandoned him due to his character, divisiveness and rhetoric, she said. She voted for Biden four years later – but quietly. Now she’s publicly supporting Harris.In 2020, about half of LDS voters under the age of 40 voted for Biden, and in Utah, he performed the best of any Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.While most LDS voters nationwide are expected to vote for Trump, if Harris can better the Biden numbers among the group, it could make a crucial difference in Arizona – and Nevada, where Mormon numbers are also strong, although there is less data available about their voting history in that state from 2020.View image in fullscreenThe Harris campaign launched an LDS advisory committee in Arizona in September and in Nevada in early October to canvas Mormon voters and hold events.The Republicans launched a Latter-day Saints for Trump coalition in early October, and Trump called in to an LDS for Trump video call as the campaign tried to shore up the vote.But in Arizona, John Giles, a lifelong Republican, LDS member and the mayor of Mesa – once dubbed the most conservative city in America – publicly backed Harris just eight days after Biden dropped out of his re-election campaign.He wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Republican saying Harris “is fighting to make sure Americans can get ahead and be safe from gun violence and to restore and protect the rights of women”, while Trump stood for the far right, “crudeness and vulgarity”.And at a recent Harris-Walz rally in Arizona, Giles said the GOP had been “taken over by extremists”, and described Trump as “morally and ethically bankrupt”.In recent years, Trump has also clashed with prominent LDS members, including Mitt Romney, Utah’s retiring US senator and past presidential nominee, who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol; Rusty Bowers, the former speaker of the Arizona house who resisted Trump’s demands to undermine the 2020 election in Arizona; and former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, who recently endorsed Harris.“I saw a lot of people really upset about the way that he attacked very well-respected Arizona politicians like Rusty Bowers,” said Lacy Chaffee, a member of the LDS church and a candidate for school board in Mesa.“Rusty campaigned for Trump, but he wasn’t willing to lie,” she added. “So I think that that’s something that speaks very deeply to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We hold very deeply the sense of integrity and truth, and I think that, for a lot of people, was the breaking point.”The Mormon church itself maintains political neutrality, but it encourages civic participation and for members to elect politicians who are “honest, wise and good”.Rugh, the sociology expert, said his analysis showed that candidates who denied that Biden won the 2020 election lost substantial LDS votes.Meanwhile, the church teaches members that the principles in the US constitution are divinely inspired, said Taber, the director of LDS for Harris-Walz. . But Trump has said the constitution should be “terminated”.The LDS youth vote is also shifting significantly. Brittany Romanello, an anthropologist and faculty associate at Arizona State University, said that Harris and the Democrats “have a very big opening” with young LDS voters because of greater diversity both of people and opinions in their ranks, and agreater willingness to disagree with the church majority.“Gen Z is the most politically, ethnically, sexually and romantically diverse generation, and they’re a huge part of the voting bloc, and this includes Mormons,” Romanello said.Rugh’s analysis also found that more than 50% of gen Z LDS members voted for Biden in 2020.View image in fullscreenIn terms of more LDS voters being willing to buck the norm, and be open about it, Spilsbury said:“If me speaking out helps some others, specifically LDS women, know that there’s another choice and that we don’t have to vote Republican just because it’s the thing we think we’re supposed to do, then that’s really important to me.”She said a lot of the reaction from her community to her choice had been “rough” but that she received some positive messages, too.Meanwhile, Mormonism is a conservative, pro-life religion but known as less fiercely anti-abortion than some, generally supporting exceptions for rape, incest and the health of the mother or child. Harris has zeroed in on reproductive rights since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, after Trump’s three appointees tipped the bench to the right.LDS Arizona resident Monica Chabot, 28, had a miscarriage last year and elected to have the fetus removed rather than wait for it to pass naturally. Her experience changed her perspective on the Republican party and its anti-choice stance, she said. She believes theprocedure would probably not have been allowed under an extreme ban dating from 1864 that briefly took effect in Arizona after Roe was overturned, before some Republicans crossed the aisle to repeal it, which the state’s Democratic governor signed off on, leaving a less harsh ban.“It made me realize how little Trump and other Republicans seem to care about me and my experiences and my body,” she said. “And hearing Kamala talk about it and fighting for that is a big reason why I’ve been involved in the Harris campaign.”Arizona voters have a ballot measure this November that would enshrine in the state constitution the right to abortion until viability, or around 24 weeks. It remains to be seen whether it will encourage split tickets as conservatives who want reproductive choice vote for the measure but also for Trump, or whether it boosts women’s turnout in a huge windfall for Harris.Chabot said that while she would never choose to get an abortion, or encourage others to get an abortion, she doesn’t believe in the government making that decision for a woman.She said: “We talk a lot about agency in the church, and how it’s one of our greatest gifts from God – the ability to choose.” More

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      How a Tiny Panel, Up for Election, Could Steer Arizona Away From Clean Power

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      The vote, in a sunny state with huge solar potential, reflects a growing nationwide fight over America’s energy transition.As Arizona voters go the polls, they have more control over their state’s power plants and climate policies than they might realize.This year three of the five seats are up for grabs on the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates electric utilities. The commission has authority over how electricity is generated, among other things, and what customers pay.In recent years, it has taken steps toward rolling back a clean-energy mandate passed by a previous Republican-led board. It has also made it harder to build community solar in a state renowned for its sunniness, its critics say, and easier to build new fossil-fuel-burning power plants.These boards exist in states nationwide, and while most are appointed, similarly contentious races playing out in states like Louisiana and Montana, where they’re debating the future of coal power, which is particularly dirty, and what role natural gas, another fossil fuel, should have.“It’s a fourth branch of government that nobody knows about who’s in your pocket every day,” said Robert Burns, a Republican who served on Arizona’s commission for eight years.Starting two decades ago, the Republican-controlled commission had encouraged a transition to renewable energy based on simple economics: Renewables were getting cheaper than fossil fuels. It initially required utilities it regulates to become 15-percent renewable by 2025 and later, during Mr. Burns’s tenure, he sought to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants by 2050.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Five days out, Arab Americans are split on Harris v Trump: vote ‘strategically’ or ‘morally’?

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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.Less than a week from 5 November, one thing is certain: “You cannot assess Arabs as a coherent voting bloc,” says Kareem Rifai, a Syrian-American graduate student at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Rifai, who co-founded the University of Michigan Students for Biden chapter in 2020, calls himself a “foreign policy voter”, and is sticking with the Democratic candidate this cycle due to the party’s “strong stance on Russia”.Rifai weighed in on the Arab American vote on X recently, saying he was “pulling out my Arab Muslim from Metro-Detroit card” to let non-Arabs know that people hailing from across the Arab world have differing takes on the upcoming election.“Pro-Hezbollah socially conservative Arab community leaders … are not representative of Arab Americans in the same way that secular liberal Arabs or Christian anti-Hezbollah Arabs, etc, etc, are not representative of all Arab Americans,” Rifai wrote.At the same time, before this year, Arab Americans were clearer in their preference for Democrats – at this time in 2020, Joe Biden led Trump by 24 points, and exit polls showed that more than 85% of Arab American voters backed Democrats in 2004 and 2008.Today, Arab American voters seem more willing to look past Trump’s ban on travel from certain Muslim-majority countries – and his vow to reimpose a ban if re-elected – as well as his staunch support for Israel.Michigan, Rifai’s home state, is home to an estimated 392,000-plus Arab Americans – one of 12 states in which 75% of the nation’s estimated 3.7 million Arab Americans live.But as if to underscore its swing state status, dueling endorsements of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have come from Michigan in the last week alone. Over the weekend, a Yemeni-American organization upheld Trump as capable of “restoring stability in the Middle East”. The following day, a group assembled at the American Arab Chamber of Commerce in Dearborn, Michigan, to back Harris, calling her “the first to call for a ceasefire and also to call for Palestinian self-determination”. (The statement also noted that “Arab Americans are not a single-issue people, we care about the environment, an existential issue for families and children, workers, rights and a fair wage, civil rights, women’s rights and so much more.”)Also in the last week, dozens of “Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Progressive” leaders in Arizona issued a statement backing Harris, underlining that support for an arms embargo on Israel and a ceasefire in Gaza has mainly come from Democrats. “In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement,” the statement says.Arizona is home to an estimated 77,000 Arab Americans, according to the Arab American Institute.Meanwhile, back in swing state Georgia – with its estimated 58,000 Arab Americans – the staterepresentative Ruwa Romman spoke about her choice to vote for Kamala Harris.Romman is the first Muslim woman elected to the Georgia statehouse and the first Palestinian to hold public office in the state’s history. Speaking with fellow Muslims and Arabs about this election “feels like talking about politics at a funeral”, she wrote in a recent article for Rolling Stone.She believes that organizing for a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo would be easier under a Harris administration. “I don’t know how advocating for Palestine would survive under Trump,” she said, adding that many of her constituents – including immigrants – would suffer if he were re-elected.Over at Al Madina, owner Hejja was arriving at a different conclusion. His wife has aunts in Gaza; she had not been able to reach them in three weeks. “The minimum thing we can do is pray five times a day,” he said.As for the election, he said: “If the president of the United States wants to stop the war, he can – with one phone call to Israel. He has the power.” Hejja believes “if Trump wins, Netanyahu will stop the war … [Trump] said he wants peace, and I believe him.”About 12 miles south-west, at Emory University – site of some of the harshest police responses to pro-Palestinian protests early this year – the Syrian-American senior Ibrahim had already sent an absentee ballot to his home state of Kentucky, marked for the Green party’s Jill Stein. “I see it as an ethical decision,” he said of his first time voting for president.“Voting for an administration that is supporting genocide crosses an ethical red line,” he added, referring to Harris.Fellow student Michael Krayyem, whose father is Palestinian, said he would “probably be voting down-ballot” on 5 November, but not for president. “I can’t support Kamala Harris because of what her administration has done to my people,” he said.Romman says she feels this dilemma facing fellow Arab Americans deeply. At the same time, she says: “Ultimately, in this election, I view voting as a strategic choice, and no longer a moral one.” More

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      ‘Why isn’t Trump doing a little better here?’: Arizona election on a knife-edge

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      Mark Kelly removed his sport coat and leveled with a crowd of Democrats gathered at an Indigenous-owned art collaborative in downtown Phoenix on a sweltering afternoon, days before early voting opened.In 2020, Joe Biden had won the state by just more than 10,000 votes – his narrowest margin of victory – “way less than 1%”, the Arizona senator stressed for emphasis.“This entire election could come down to Arizona,” he said. “I am not overstating this: it could come down to your friends, your neighbors, your community, your tribal members.”As the clock ticked down to yet another exceedingly close presidential contest, Kelly urged everyone in the room to redouble their efforts – to knock on one more door, attend one more phone bank, register one more voter. This, he said, was how Democrats prevail in once ruby-red Arizona.A former astronaut who flipped and defended his Senate seat in back-to-back statewide races, Kelly added wryly: “It’s not rocket science. If it was, I could help.”The senator’s call to action underlined a message both parties have been stressing for months, and especially in the final weeks before election day, on 5 November: even if Republicans hold the advantage on paper, Arizona could tip in either direction.Arizona is one of seven swing states that will probably determine who wins what White House in November. While Donald Trump has a narrow edge over Kamala Harris in the state, the Cook Political Report, the non-partisan election handicapper, has rated the presidential race a “toss up”.“Arizona is not a blue state,” said Samara Klar, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona. “A Republican candidate should be cleaning up in Arizona. So the question is – why isn’t Trump doing a little better here?”The Trump era has seen a remarkable winning streak for Arizona Democrats. They claimed the state’s open Senate seat in the 2018 midterm cycle. Two years later, they won the state’s other open Senate seat and its 11 electoral college votes, when Biden became the first Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton to win the state in 1996. (Before that it was Truman, in 1948.) In 2022, Democrats narrowly swept the top three statewide offices.Their success in the birthplace of Barry Goldwater’s conservative movement is something of a political paradox. Republicans hold a solid advantage in voter registration, with about 35% of voters registering as Republican, 34% as unaffiliated and 29% as Democrats, according to data from the Arizona secretary of state. Arizona was hard hit by inflation and rising housing costs, while immigration is top of mind in the border state – both issues that favor Republicans.View image in fullscreenYet Ruben Gallego, a Democratic congressman, has maintained a stable lead over his opponent, Trump ally Kari Lake, in the US Senate contest to replace the Democrat turned independent Kyrsten Sinema. Two congressional races are seen as coin-flips. And Democrats could turn the state legislature, a long-sought prize after Republican dominance in the modern era.Underlining the sometimes-conflicting impulses of the purple state, Arizona voters are poised to approve a ballot initiative that would empower local and state officials to enforce immigration law, while choosing to enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution, months after a ban that would have outlawed the procedure from the moment of conception.Klar, the political scientist, says long-term demographic changes – rapid urbanization around Phoenix, an economic boom that’s brought an influx of tech jobs and college-educated transplants, and the rising political clout of a relatively young Latino electorate – have made the once Republican stronghold more competitive over time. Even if Trump prevails in Arizona, there is a growing sense that Trumpism will have cost his party.Trump’s rise electrified a segment of Arizona’s conservative base that has long had an appetite for his brand of anti-immigrant populism. But he also shattered old GOP alliances – disparaging the venerated Arizona senator, John McCain, even after his 2018 death from brain cancer, and feuding with the state’s then governor, Doug Ducey, over his refusal to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat in the state.That tension has exploded in the party primaries, where Republican voters keep nominating candidates in Trump’s image – far-right extremists like Lake who parrot his election denialism. But these Republicans have struggled to broaden their appeal to the state’s moderate and independent voters.“Arizonans view themselves as free-spirited, non-partisan, independent – that kind of Goldwater-McCain thing,” Klar said, adding that voters here like “centrist, moderate candidates”. In the Trump years, it has been Democrats, not Republicans, reaching for McCain’s “maverick” mantle.Among those disillusioned by their party’s turn are Lynn and Roger Seeley, self-described “McCain Republicans” who recently attended a Gallego event in a suburb east of Phoenix last month.“The Arizona Republican party is not the same Republican party,” said Lynn Seeley, who plans to vote for Gallego and Harris in November. “It just doesn’t represent me any more.”Yolanda Bejarano, the chair of the Arizona Democratic party, said Democrats have steadily chipped away at Republicans’ dominance in the state by building a coalition that, she predicts, will achieve their perennial dream of winning control of the state legislature.“I’m confident that we’re going to see a bluer Arizona come November,” she said.With voting under way, there is an edge of violence. The final weeks before election day saw a man arrested for planning an “act of mass casualty” and shooting at a Democratic office on multiple occasions, while a mailbox with ballots inside was set on fire and threats were made against Republicans visiting the state.Arizonans get the pitchAcross the sprawling Phoenix region, one of the fastest-growing in America, rival Trump and Harris campaign signs dot xeriscaped yards – a mark of Arizona’s true battleground status.In the final months, a who’s who of presidential candidates and high-profile surrogates have blanketed the state. Both Harris and Trump and their running mates have made multiple swings through the state in the contest’s final weeks.With the state on a razor’s edge, the search for votes has reached new heights – and descended to new depths. Kelly, the US senator, piloted his own plane to visit rural parts of the state, while Gallego hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon as part of his outreach to Native voters.Harris is courting traditionally Republican Mormon voters who believe Trump’s conduct and rhetoric are at odds with that church’s values. She has racked up a collection of endorsements from some high-profile members of the church, including Jeff Flake, the conservative Arizona senator who was driven from office over his criticism of Trump and recently served as Biden’s ambassador to Turkey.Trump, meanwhile, has sought to peel away support from Native voters, who have tended to favor Democrats in Arizona elections.View image in fullscreen“We’ve had historic Native vote turnout for the last two years, for the last four years, and the Native vote has been literally the margin in some of these past races,” Stephen Roe Lewis, governor of the Gila River Indian Community, said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen asked about the outreach to Native voters, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said at a rally in Peoria this month that many of these voters hadn’t ever voted Republican, but issues like border security and unaffordability hit Indigenous nations hard, too.Republicans have also made inroads with Latinos, who make up about one-quarter of the state’s electorate and were a critical part of Biden’s winning coalition in 2020.But since then, one in three voters who switched their party affiliation from Democratic to Republican were Hispanic, according to an Arizona Republic analysis of the state’s voter registration data. Only 40% of Arizona’s Hispanic voters are currently registered Democrats, compared with 47% four years ago.Lea Marquez Peterson, a Republican and member of the Arizona Corporation Commission, has been a part of that effort. Through the Hispanic Leadership Pac, which she launched to help elect more conservative Latino politicians to office, Marquez Peterson has been hosting cafecitos with voters across southern Arizona.They keep telling her the same thing: Arizonans are fed up with the high cost of housing and food.“You hear a lot about inflation numbers dropping and that things are easing, but I think among the community, among my own family, we still see the high price of grocery store items and, as a business person, certainly the high cost of steel and lumber,” she said. “I don’t think we’re feeling any change yet.”Harris trails Trump but Republicans see warning signsUnderlining the sometimes-conflicting impulses of the purple state, it appears likely that Arizonans will approve the measure to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution, overturning the current 15-week ban. But Arizonas are also predicted to vote for an anti-immigration ballot measure that would empower local and state officials to arrest and deport border-crossers.Republicans believe Harris is especially vulnerable on immigration in Arizona, a border state that has grappled with the impact of record migration.On a campaign swing in late September, Harris paced a scrubby stretch of border wall in an attempt to confront what Republicans believe is her biggest political vulnerability: immigration. At an event after the visit, in the border town of Douglas, she was introduced by a mother who lost her son to fentanyl and a Republican who touted her record of taking on transnational criminal gangs as the attorney general of California. When Harris spoke, she pledged to further restrict asylum and blamed Trump for derailing a bipartisan border deal earlier this year.“I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane,” Harris said. “We can and we must do both.”The border visit was aimed at winning the moderate-leaning Republicans who could defect from their party but rank immigration as a top consideration. It will only become clear next week whether Harris has managed to persuade them.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Democrats here hope a ballot initiative to protect abortion rights will help drive out the very voters who have powered their wins in this desert battleground – young people, suburban women and independents.Under pressure, and amid much drama, the Republican-controlled legislature voted earlier this year to repeal an 1864 ban on abortion that dated from before Arizona was even a state, opting for a prohibition on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.Polls suggest it is entirely possible that voters here will act to protect abortion rights and also elect Trump, the man who claims credit for overturning Roe.The abortion rights initiative is “not a silver bullet for any one political party”, said Athena Salman, the director of Arizona campaigns for Reproductive Freedom for All and a former Democratic state legislator.If Harris wins Arizona’s 11 electoral votes, it could renew questions about whether the Republican party is on the right course in Arizona. Voters there seem to be more comfortable with traditional Republicanism over Maga Republicanism, though Trump is the exception.Trump seems to have some quality, some “rogue’s charm”, that those in his image can’t seem to replicate, said Kirk Adams, a Republican consultant for former Arizona House speaker who served as chief of staff to the last Republican governor.The firebrand Lake, who lost her run for Arizona governor in 2022, differs little on policy from the former president, but can’t capture his appeal with voters.“Sometimes I have actually questioned if winning is even their goal,” Adams said of candidates like Lake. “You can run a race and be successful, because now you become a social media star. You have lots of followers. You can monetize it. You don’t necessarily have to win elections to have a following.”Trump’s team, at least, is taking nothing for granted.“Here’s the scenario that I want you to consider, and I don’t mean to give you nightmare fuel here, but I’m going to do it,” Vance said at a recent rally in the state. “We wake up on November 6, and Kamala Harris is barely elected president of the United States by a 700-vote margin in the state of Arizona. Think about that. And ask yourself what you can do from now until then to make sure it doesn’t happen.” More

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      ‘Expect war’: leaked chats reveal influence of rightwing media on militia group

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      Leaked and public chats from Arizona-based “poll watching” activists aligned with a far-right militia group show how their election paranoia has been fueled by a steady drumbeat of conspiracy theories and disinformation from rightwing media outlets and influencers, including Elon Musk.The materials come from two overlapping election-denial groups whose activists are mostly based in Arizona, one of seven key swing states that will decide the US election and possibly end up at the center of any disputed results in the post-election period.Chat records from a public-facing channel for the America First Polling Project (AFPP) were made available to reporters by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets). The activist who leaked those materials to DDOSecrets provided the Guardian directly with an archive of the Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch (A22) chat channel.The materials offer a window into the way in which the rightwing information environment – and the unverified, distorted or false information it proffers – erode faith in elections, and encourage those who would violently disrupt them.From the media to far-right conspiracyThe materials underline previously reported links between poll watching groups and the American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) militia, such that the militia provided “paramilitary heft to ballot box monitoring operations”.At least half a dozen pseudonymous activist accounts are present across all of the chats, and early posts in the AFPP chat show activists at “tailgate parties” that brought together election denial groups and militia members ahead of the 2022 midterms election.They also show the broad cooperative effort among a range of election denial groups, whose activities were fueled by disinformation from high-profile conservative activists.On 6 October 2022, in one of the first archived messages on the semi-private A22 chat, a user with the same name as the channel (Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch) announced to the group that they had “heard back from the cleanelectionsusa.org so I might try to coordinate between the two efforts”. They added: “In any case I will schedule a couple of zoom calls so we can connect.”Two days later, the same account updated: “There are 13 drop box only locations in Maricopa county of which only 2 are 24 hour locations,” adding: “We will need help with getting these watched. I have also been able to connect with cleanelectionsusa and am coordinating with those folks.”View image in fullscreenClean Elections USA, founded by Oklahoman Melody Jennings, is one of a number of election denial groups that sprang up in the wake of the 2020 election, after Trump and his allies mounted a campaign to reverse that year’s election result on the basis of false claims that the vote was stolen.During the 2022 election season, the organization was slapped with a restraining order over its ballot monitoring – some of it carried out by armed activists – that the federal Department of Justice described in its filing as “vigilante ballot security efforts” that may have violated the Voting Rights Act. That lawsuit was settled in 2023.The organization’s website has shuttered; however, archived snapshots indicate that the organizers were motivated by discredited information from long-running election denial organization True the Vote and 2000 Mules, the title of a conspiracy-minded book and accompanying documentary by rightwing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza.The book and film repeated True the Vote’s allegations that paid “mules” had carried illegal ballots to drop boxes in swing states in 2020. D’Souza’s publisher in June withdrew the book and film from distribution and apologized to a man whom D’Souza falsely accused of criminal election fraud.The “mules” falsehoods were treated as baseline reality in the A22 chat. On 9 November, a user named “trooper” sought to account for Republicans’ unexpectedly poor showing with the claim “275k drop-off ballots – meaning the mules flooded the system on election day while the disaster distraction was in play”, adding that “they swarmed the election day drop boxes like fucking locusts”.The pro-democracy Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University recently published research indicating elevated worries about harassment on the part of local officials, including election officials. BDI’s research backed up findings from the Brennan Center indicating that 70% of election officials said that threats had increased in 2024, and 38% had personally experienced threats, up from 30% last year.Shannon Hiller, BDI’s executive director, said: “We continue to face elevated threats and risk to local officials across the board,” however in 2024, “there’s been a lot more preparation and there’s a clearer understanding about how to address those threats now.”Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) said that talk of election fraud using drop boxes had returned in 2024. “I can’t think of an election-denying organization, whether it’s Mike Lindell, True the Vote or more local outfits in various states that aren’t talking about patrolling drop boxes and watching voters while they’re voting,” she said.From disinformation to violent threatsBeirich’s warnings are reflected in ongoing AFPP Telegram chats, where any prospect of a Harris victory is met with conspiracy theories, apocalyptic narratives, and sometimes threats.The Guardian’s review of the materials found many instances in which disinformation or exaggerated claims in the media or from rightwing public figures led directly to violent rhetoric from members of the chat.On 13 March, a user linked to a story in the Federalist which uncritically covered a claim by the Mississippi secretary of state, Michael Watson, that the Department of Justice was “using taxpayer dollars to have jails and the US Marshals Service encourage incarcerated felons and noncitizens to register to vote” on the basis of Joe Biden’s March 2021 executive order aimed at expanding access to voting.A user, “@Wilbo17AZ”, replied: “If we don’t fight this with our every waking breath, we are done. Expect war.”On 24 June, a user posted an article from conspiracy-minded, Falun Gong-linked news website Epoch Times, which reported on the supreme court’s rejection of appeals from a Robert F Kennedy-founded anti-vaccine non-profit.The court declined to hear the appeals over lower court’s determinations that the non-profit had no standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over its emergency authorization of Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic.In response, another user, “cybercav”, wrote: “I do not see any path forward for our Republic that doesn’t include ‘Purge and Eradicate’ being the general orders for both sides of the next civil war.”In January, the @AFPP_US account posted a link to an opinion column on the Gateway Pundit by conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root. Root characterized cross-border immigration as an invasion in the piece, and concluded by telling readers to “Pray to God. Pray for a miracle. Pray for the election in November of President Donald J Trump.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFueling paranoiaOver the summer, overseas events fueled the paranoia of chat members.On 6 August the @AFPP_US account posted a link to Guardian reporting on anti-immigrant riots that took place in the UK over the summer.The article described the riots as “far-right violence”; @AFPP_US captioned the link “‘Far Right’ = ‘Stop raping women and stabbing children’”.The next day, the same account apparently attempted to link the riots to UK gun laws, which are more restrictive than the US.The stimulus was a story on the riots by conspiracy broadcaster Owen Shroyer, an employee of Alex Jones who was sentenced to two months in prison for entering a restricted area at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.View image in fullscreen@AFPP_US wrote: “UK is a failed state and possession of the Calaphite [sic]. The imperialists have become the Imperiled. This is what just a few generations of disarmament and pussification hath wrought.”One major vector of bad information in the A22 chats is the Gateway Pundit, a pro-Maga website operated by Jim Hoft. That website has been a noted source of election disinformation for years. Earlier this month Hoft’s organization settled a defamation suit with two election workers that it had falsely accused of election fraud. Accountability non-profit Advance Democracy Inc reported in August that in the first nine months of 2024 Hoft had published at least 128 articles referencing election fraud and election workers.Gateway Pundit articles were shared many times in the chat.On 21 January, the @AFPP_US account shared a Gateway Pundit story by Hoft in which he claimed that liberal philanthropist and chair of the Open Society Foundation, Alexander Soros, had posted a coded message advocating the assassination of a re-elected President Trump.The basis was that Soros’s post carried a picture of a bullet hole and a hand holding $47. But those pictures came from a story in the Atlantic, about falling crime rates, that Soros was linking to in the post.‘Millions of illegals’On at least one occasion, the Gateway Pundit was quoted in the group because it was amplifying the claims of another major source of disinformation for A22: Elon Musk.The Gateway Pundit article posted to the chat in January was titled “JUST IN … Elon Musk Rips Mark Zuckerberg for Funding Illegal Voting Vans in 2020 Election”. It highlighted Musk’s false claim that Zuckerberg’s funding of county-level voting apparatuses in 2020 was illegal.As elections approached, AFPP members added more of Musk’s pronouncements into the stew of disinformation on the site, with a particular emphasis on anti-immigrant material.On 7 September, as rightwing actors stoked panic about Haitian immigrants, @AFPP_US posted a link to a Musk post quote-posting a video of Harris addressing the need to support Haitian migrants with the comment: “Vote for Kamala if you want this to happen to your neighborhood!”On 29 September, the AFPP lead account linked to a Musk post that claimed “Millions of illegals being provided by the government with money for housing using your tax dollars is a major part of what’s driving up costs”.On 1 October, the @AFPP_US account shared an X post in which Musk asserted that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election”, and wove that claim into a narrative resembling the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming that “Democrats are expediting” the conversion of “illegals” to citizens in an attempt to make America a “one-party state”.The Guardian reported in 2021 that a separate AP3 website leak, which exposed the paramilitary organization’s membership list, showed that at that time members included serving military and law enforcement officers.In August, ProPublica reported on an earlier leak of AP3 materials from the same source, showing that AP3 had carried out vigilante operations on the Texas border, and had forged close ties with law enforcement officers around the country.Beirich said that chatter monitored by the organization has obsessively focused on the narrative of illegal immigrants voting in a “rigged” election. “Non-citizens voting is the big fraud that they’re talking up,” she said.Earlier this month, Wired reported that the current leak showed evidence of plans to carry out operations “coordinated with election denial groups as part of a plan to conduct paramilitary surveillance of ballot boxes during the midterm elections in 2022”. More

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      These seven states will decide the election. Here’s what we learned reporting on the ground

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      Spare a thought for beleaguered Pennsylvanians. During the past few weeks, they have been pummeled with $280m worth of election ads blazing on their TV and computer screens, part of an eye-popping $2.1bn spent so far on the US presidential election.Pennsylvania is one of the seven battleground states that, when it comes to choosing presidents, can seem as revered as the seven wonders of the world. Forget Democratic California, ditch reliably Republican Texas – it is these seven states that, come 5 November, will decide the outcome of one of the most consequential elections in modern times.Their names are seared into the minds of politically aware Americans: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Under America’s arcane electoral system, the occupant of the Oval Office is elected not through the popular vote but by electoral college votes harvested state by state.Among them, the seven states control 93 electoral college votes (Pennsylvania has the largest number, 19, which is why its residents are so bombarded). In the final days, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and their running mates, JD Vance and Tim Walz, will be scrambling all over them in a bid to reach the magic number: 270 electoral college votes to win.The states are called battlegrounds for a reason – their loyalty cannot be taken for granted by either side. This year, though, their unpredictability has reached dizzying heights. The Guardian’s presidential poll tracker shows five of them essentially tied within a three-point margin of error, with only Arizona (where Trump is up four points) and Wisconsin (where Harris is up five) pulling away. Nate Cohn, the New York Times’ polling expert, has drily noted that the presidential polls are “starting to run out of room to get any closer”.Guardian reporters are on the ground in each of the seven battlegrounds to test these confounding waters.– Ed PilkingtonArizona‘Why isn’t Trump doing a little better here?’View image in fullscreenOn a stiflingly hot afternoon last month, Lynn and Roger Seeley relaxed into an air-conditioned co-working space in a suburb east of Phoenix. They had come to hear the Democratic candidate for US Senate, Ruben Gallego, make his pitch to a roomful of small-business owners. Lifelong Republicans, they might have felt out of place at a Democratic campaign event in the pre-Trump era. But not now.“The Arizona Republican party is not the same Republican party,” said Lynn Seeley, who plans to vote for Kamala Harris in November. “It just doesn’t represent me anymore.”The Seeleys are among a group of disaffected Arizonans known as “McCain Republicans” – moderates and independents who prefer the “maverick” brand of politics of the late Arizona Senator John McCain to Trump’s Maga movement.The Trumpification of the state GOP, as well as rapid population growth, a large number of young Latino voters and a suburban shift away from the Republican party have created an opening for Democrats in recent election cycles, turning once ruby-red Arizona into a desert battleground.View image in fullscreenPolling shows Donald Trump with a narrow edge over Harris in the presidential race. The Senate race, which is critical to the party’s slim hope of maintaining control of the chamber, appears to trend in Gallego’s favor. The state also features two of the most competitive House races in the country, both key to winning the speaker’s gavel. Arizonans are also voting on an initiative to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution.Across the sprawling Phoenix region, one of the fastest-growing in America, Trump and Harris signs dot xeriscaped yards. But roughly a third of Arizonans are unaffiliated, and since Trump’s election in 2016 they have broken for Democrats in key statewide races.In 2020, Trump lost the state by fewer than 11,000 votes, the narrowest of any margin. It was the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had won Arizona since Bill Clinton in 1996, and before then, it was Harry Truman in 1948.“Arizona is not a blue state,” said Samara Klar, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona. “Arizona has had very high inflation rates, very high increases in the cost of living, and an increase in the cost of gas. It’s a border state during a border crisis. A Republican candidate should be cleaning up in Arizona. So the question is: why isn’t Trump doing a little better here?”Lauren Gambino | Chandler, ArizonaGeorgiaEarly voting hits records – but offers few cluesView image in fullscreenMary Holewinski lives in Carrollton, Georgia, which is home turf for the far-right representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. But Holewinski is a Kamala Harris supporter and has a sign in her yard. It draws nasty looks, she said: “I’ve lost neighbor friends.”Those tensions are ratcheting up, because the presidential election is already well under way in Georgia. More than 2 million Georgians – a quarter of its electorate – have already gone to the polls, setting early voting records each day.Both Harris and Trump consider Georgia – no longer a stereotypical “deep south” state but one propelled by the economic and cultural clout of Atlanta – a crucial pickup. In 2020, the state went for Joe Biden by 11,780 votes– and Trump has since been charged in an election interference case after calling Georgia’s secretary of state and asking him to “find” those 11,780 votes. A Georgia victory would represent belated validation for the former president.The candidates may as well have leased apartments in Atlanta, for all the time they’re spending here. The difference between a Democrat winning 80% and 90% of their votes could be larger than the overall margin of victory.But Georgia is no longer a state defined by Black and white voters. Asian and Latino population growth has changed the political landscape in suburban Atlanta, which helped drive the Biden victory here in 2020. And the conflict between conventional conservative Republicans and the Maga insurgency may also be determinative: suburban moderates in the Atlanta region turned against Trump in 2020, and he has done little since to win them back.Still, while historically Democrats in Georgia have been more likely to vote early than Republicans, Trump has pointedly instructed his supporters to vote early in person in Georgia, and many appear to be doing just that.“I could care less about whether you like him or not. It’s not a popularity contest,” said Justin Thompson, a retired air force engineer from Macon. “It’s what you got done. And he did get things done before the pandemic hit. And the only reason why he didn’t get re-elected was because the pandemic hit.”George Chidi | Atlanta, GeorgiaMichiganTurnout is key in state where many are angry over GazaView image in fullscreenThe trade union official had much to say, but he wasn’t going to say it in public.The leader of a union branch at a Michigan factory, he was embarrassed to admit that most of its members support Donald Trump – even though he’s also disparaging about what he saw as the Democratic party elite’s failure to put the interests of working people ahead of powerful corporations.“I don’t want to disagree with the members in public because they have their reasons to do what they think is good for protecting their jobs,” he said. “I’ve tried to explain that they’re wrong but they don’t want to hear it.”Like many in Michigan, he found himself torn: despairing of Trump yet not greatly enthused by Harris. A Rust belt state that once prospered from making cars, steel and other industrial products, Michigan lost many jobs to Mexico after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) by Bill Clinton, an enduring source of resentment against the Democrats for some voters that helped Trump to power.That goes some way to explain why opinion polls continue to have the two candidates neck-and-neck in Michigan, even though the Harris campaign is heavily outspending Trump here and appears to have a better ground game with more volunteers.Turnout will be key: Trump won here by just 10,704 votes in 2016, then lost narrowly to Biden four years later. High on the list of demographic targets are Black voters in Michigan’s largest city, Detroit, whose low turnout in 2016 was a factor in Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the state. Harris is also targeting white suburban women, many of whom previously supported Trump but have cooled on him over abortion rights, his continued false claims of election fraud and his criminal convictions.For all of that, the election in Michigan may be decided by events far away.More than 100,000 Michigan Democrats, many of them from the state’s Arab American community around Detroit, abstained from supporting Biden in the Democratic primaries earlier this year because of his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. So far, Harris has not significantly wavered from Biden on the issue. With polls this close, it could be decisive if Harris loses a fraction of these voters.Chris McGreal | Saginaw, MichiganNevadaIs Harris or Trump better for the working class?View image in fullscreenUrbin Gonzalez could have been working inside, in the air conditioning, at his regular job as a porter on the Las Vegas Strip. Instead, in the final days before the US election, he had chosen to go door-knocking in the 104F (40C) heat.“I don’t care because I’m fighting for my situation,” said Gonzalez, dabbing the sweat from his neck. “All Trump wants to do is cut taxes for his buddies, for his rich friends, not for us. Not for workers … This is personal.”While the US economy broadly bounced back from the pandemic, Nevada has lagged behind. Nearly a quarter of jobs here are in leisure or hospitality, and although the Las Vegas Strip, where Gonzalez works, is back to booming with tourists, unemployment in Nevada remains the highest of any US state, and housing costs have skyrocketed.Both Trump and Harris have promised to turn things around: both have promised to eliminate federal income taxes on workers’ tips, and both have vowed to expand tax credits for parents – though their plans widely differ when it comes to the finer points.Although Nevada has leaned Democratic in every presidential election since 2008, winning candidates have scraped by with slim margins. About 40% of voters don’t identify with either Democrats or Republicans, and although a growing number of Latino voters – who now make up 20% of the electorate – have traditionally backed Democrats, the party’s popularity is slipping.The state, which has just six electoral votes, is notoriously difficult to accurately poll – in large part because the big cities, Reno and Las Vegas, are home to a transient population, many of whom work unpredictable shifts in the state’s 24/7 entertainment and hospitality industries. But many voters remember the days early in the Trump administration when costs were lower. “I think the economy was just better when Trump was president,” said Magaly Rodas, 32, while shopping at her local Latin market. Her husband, an electrician, has struggled to find work since the pandemic, while rent and other expenses have continued to climb. “What have the Democrats done for us in four years?”Maanvi Singh | Las Vegas, NevadaNorth CarolinaA hurricane is a wild card that could depress turnoutView image in fullscreenKim Blevins, 55, knows what it’s like to survive a disaster. She was locked inside her home without power for eight days when Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina last month.So when she uses the experience as a frame through which to view the impending election, she is not being frivolous. “If Trump doesn’t get in, it’s going to be worse than the hurricane,” she said.“It’ll be world war three. Kamala Harris wants to make us a communist country and we can’t survive that. The illegals coming over the border, the inflation of food and gas prices, we can’t do that.”Hurricane Helene has raised a critical challenge for Donald Trump.It affected a rural mountainous region that is Trump’s natural base – some 23 out of the 25 stricken counties are majority-Maga. So any decline in turnout would most likely hurt him.Trump needs to win North Carolina if he is to have an easy shot at returning to the White House. The state veers Republican, only voting for a Democratic president twice in recent times (Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008). Trump took it in 2020 by just 75,000 votes.Yet Harris has succeeded since she took over the Democratic mantle from Joe Biden in making this race neck-and-neck.In the final stretch, Trump is focusing on getting his base of largely white rural voters to the polls, hurricane be damned. His campaign has been heartened by the first week of early voting, which has smashed all records, with Republicans almost matching Democrats in turnout. (In 2020 and 2016, Republicans lagged behind.)On her side, Harris is waging an intense ground game, with hundreds of staffers fanning out across the state to squeeze out every vote. The thinking is that if Trump can be blocked in North Carolina, he can be stopped from regaining power.For that to happen, Harris has to mobilize her broad tent of support, with special emphasis on women in the suburbs of Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. She is also trying to shore up the male African American vote, which has shown some softness.Not least, she is trying to tie Trump to Mark Robinson, the state’s Republican gubernatorial candidate. Robinson has described himself as a “Black Nazi”, and has been revealed to have made extreme racist remarks.Ed Pilkington | Creston, North CarolinaPennsylvania‘If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing’View image in fullscreenPennsylvania provided one of the most enduring images of the fraught US election cycle: Donald Trump raising his fist to a crowd of supporters after a gunman attempted to end his life at a campaign rally in July. As Trump left the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, with blood dripping from his ear, his supporters chanted: “Fight! Fight!”Days later, Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, clearing the way for Kamala Harris to ascend to the Democratic nomination.Both Trump and Harris have returned to Pennsylvania dozens of times since, confirming that the Keystone state could play a definitive role in the presidential race. “If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania last month. “It’s very simple.”As the fifth-most-populous US state, Pennsylvania has the most electoral votes of any of the battlegrounds. Much of the population is clustered around Philadelphia and smaller cities like Pittsburgh and Scranton, where Biden showed strength in 2020, but the more rural regions could play an outsized role in the election. White, blue-collar voters in these rural areas have sharply shifted away from Democrats in recent elections.Some Democrats expected Harris to choose the popular governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate, given his impressive ability to secure consistent victories in such a closely-contested state. Harris instead chose Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, a decision that could come back to haunt her depending on the results in Pennsylvania.In her bid to sway undecided voters, Harris has walked back some of her most progressive proposals from her 2020 presidential campaign – such as a ban on fracking, a major industry in Pennsylvania, on which she has now reversed her stance.It could all come down to Pennsylvania. Tom Morrissey, a 67-year-old voter from Harleysville attending a Democratic campaign event last month, was optimistic . “We love the enthusiasm. It’s so important at this time,” Morrissey said. “We have to save democracy.”Joan E Greve | Ambler, PennsylvaniaWisconsin‘Let the anxiety wash over you and then refocus’View image in fullscreenWearing matching hats emblazoned with the words “Sauk County Democrats”, Deb and Rod Merritt, a retired couple from southern Wisconsin, joined the crowd to hear Barack Obama stump for Kamala Harris.“We’re so apprehensive that the polls say they’re close,” said Rod Merritt.Sauk county is one of a handful of Wisconsin counties that has flipped from Democrats to Republicans and back. It’s exactly the kind of place – a swing county in a swing state – that the campaigns are fighting over.A midwestern state in the Great Lakes region known for dairy production, manufacturing and healthcare, Wisconsin is considered to be part of the “blue wall” – the states Democrats consistently won in the 1990s and early 2000s.Trade unions historically helped drive voter turnout for Democrats, but a series of anti-labor laws passed under the Republican-controlled state government in 2011 dealt them a blow. Rural areas have increasingly turned to Republican candidates, leaving cities like Milwaukee – Wisconsin’s most racially diverse – and the liberal stronghold of Madison as Democratic bastions.With the economy the top issue, it all comes down to turnout, with Republicans focusing on rural voters and young men, who have increasingly looked to conservative politics.The Democrats, meanwhile, hope the closeness of the race – in which a half-million people have already voted – will mobilize volunteers. “In some ways, the most important thing is learning some breathing exercises so that you can let the anxiety wash through you – and then refocus on knocking on the next door,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic party of Wisconsin.Alice Herman | Madison, Wisconsin More