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      ‘There’s vomit on my sweater already!’ Barack Obama raps Eminem’s Lose Yourself at Detroit rally

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      Barack Obama rapped Eminem’s signature hit Lose Yourself to a crowd in Detroit during a campaign rally for Kamala Harris.He was preceded by Eminem himself, who told the crowd in his home city: “It’s important to use your voice, I’m encouraging everyone to get out and vote, please … I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution of what people will do if you make your opinion known. I think vice-president Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld.”Obama opened his ensuing speech by saying: “I gotta say, I have done a lot of rallies, so I don’t usually get nervous, but I was feeling some kind of way following Eminem,” before segueing into Lose Yourself’s opening lines: “I notice my palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already, mom’s spaghetti, I’m nervous but on the surface I look calm and ready to drop bombs but I keep on forgetting …”He joked that he thought Eminem would be performing and he would be a guest star, adding: “Love me some Eminem.”The former president is an avowed music fan, sharing his favourite songs twice a year in official posts on his social media. Summer 2024’s selections included songs by contemporary pop names such as Beyoncé, Tyla and Rema alongside older tracks by Nick Drake, the Supremes and cosmic jazz musician Pharoah Sanders.Obama went on to excoriate Donald Trump in his speech, recalling how Trump expressed doubt about the election results in 2020. “Because Donald Trump was willing to spread lies about voter fraud in Michigan, protesters came down, banged on the windows, shouting, ‘Let us in. Stop the count.’ Poll workers inside being intimidated … all because Donald Trump couldn’t accept losing … there is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anybody but himself.”He questioned Trump’s mental fitness for the role of president, saying: “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this. But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”He also made reference to Trump’s stunt earlier this week, where he worked in a McDonald’s kitchen and drive-thru counter that was closed to the public. Harris, he said, “worked at McDonald’s when in college to pay her expenses. She did not pretend to work at McDonald’s when it was closed.”Tim Walz, also speaking at the rally, decried the stunt as “cosplaying … Fake orders for fake customers”. He also appealed to freedom of speech, saying Trump was “talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names.” More

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      Obama and Walz excoriate Trump at Wisconsin rally in early voting push

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      On the first day of early voting in Wisconsin, Tim Walz called Elon Musk a “dipshit” while Barack Obama said of Donald Trump: “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this.”Both were speaking at a rally in Madison, a growing Democratic party stronghold, to encourage early voting and warn of the perils of a second Trump presidency. Obama went on to campaign for Kamala Harris in Detroit on Tuesday evening, alongside rapper Eminem, in an effort to drum up support in Michigan where polls suggest Harris and Trump are in a virtual deadlock.The Democratic vice-presidential candidate ripped into Trump ally and Silicon Valley billionaire Musk, warning that he could be charged with regulating his own businesses if Trump were elected. Musk has also promised the chance to win $1m to voters in swing states who sign a petition linked to efforts to return Trump to power.Walz also slammed Trump, who this week served meals at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, accusing him of “cosplaying” as a working-class person and noting that the restaurant had closed to accommodate the presidential candidate. “It was a stunt,” said Walz. “Fake orders for fake customers.”“He is not the 2016 Donald Trump,” said Walz, describing Trump’s promise to prosecute his political enemies. “He’s talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names.”Obama, who won in Wisconsin in 2008 and 2012, urged his Madison audience to get to the polls and spent much of his speech attacking Trump.“I wouldn’t be offended if you just walk out right now and go vote,” he said.“When he’s not complaining, he’s trying to sell you stuff,” he added, referring to Trump, who has raised funds by selling gold-colored sneakers, bibles and $100,000 watches. “Who does that? You’re running for president, and you’re hawking merchandise.”He compared Trump’s meandering rhetorical style with that of Fidel Castro, the former Cuban head of state who was known to deliver hours-long speeches.“He calls himself the father of IVF. I have no idea what that means – you don’t either,” said Obama, casting Trump’s rambling speeches and sometimes confounding remarks as a sign of mental deterioration.“You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”Obama also acknowledged that while his signature healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act, did not fix American healthcare, its passage meant people with pre-existing conditions are more able to access health insurance.He spoke about efforts by his administration to implement a pandemic-preparedness plan and accused Trump of abandoning the effort, resulting in more Covid-19 deaths.“Most of you know somebody whose life was touched,” said Obama, urging voters who are fed up with politics to participate in the November election anyway.Before Walz and Obama spoke, Madison mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, Representative Mark Pocan, Governor Tony Evers and Senator Tammy Baldwin – herself up for re-election on 5 November – encouraged voters to return their absentee ballots or vote absentee in person.“Don’t take the risk of forgetting to vote– vote early,” said Pocan. “With the Packers game on the Sunday afternoon before the election, you can have a two-day hangover and not worry about missing the vote.”More than 18 million people in the US have voted early so far in the 2024 election, with a little more than 326,000 of those coming from Wisconsin as of 21 October, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Those numbers will increase dramatically now that Wisconsin’s early voting period has begun.Since the 2020 election, when Trump cast doubts on the integrity of absentee voting amid the Covid-19 pandemic, early voting has been a source of consternation in the Republican party. After Trump lost the 2020 election and Republicans failed to generate a red wave during the 2022 midterm elections, GOP leaders have sought to encourage their base to cast ballots before election day.Trump, who discouraged absentee voting before the 2020 election, has struggled to stay on message about early voting, alternately urging supporters to vote early and casting aspersions on the voting method – sometimes during the same speech.With polls showing Harris and Trump in a dead heat across the swing states, including Wisconsin, the last-minute push to turn out voters could determine the outcome of the election. In 2020, Joe Biden won in Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes; in 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin with a similarly slim majority. With 10 votes in the electoral college, Wisconsin will play a critical role in determining the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.Deb and Rod Merritt, a retired couple from Sauk county, Wisconsin, who attended the rally on Tuesday, said the pressure of Wisconsin’s close margins and the extra time afforded by retirement drove them to volunteer for the Harris campaign.“I’m definitely nervous,” said Deb Merritt, who said knocking on doors in the bellwether county – Sauk county voters have aligned with the winner repeatedly in presidential elections – was gratifying.“We saw a few [undecided voters], mostly leaning Democrat,” said Rod Merritt. “Some people would say: ‘I’m voting for Kamala and my husband was for Trump, but he’s not going to vote.”In both 2016 and 2020, Trump performed better in Wisconsin than polling suggested.“We don’t know if that’s going to happen again this time, or which direction it’ll be or how big the error will be, but we have to expect that we need to overshoot to be able to win by a hair,” Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic party chair, told the Guardian. “For anyone who’s knocking on doors, if you think for a second you’ve got it in the bag, then go and sign up for another volunteer shift to drive it even higher.”In Detroit, an energetic Obama performed part of an Eminem rap when he took the stage and then praised Harris as “a leader who has spent her life fighting on behalf of people who need a voice, need a champion – somebody who was raised in the middle class”. Reviving earlier jabs against Trump, he noted Harris “did not pretend to work at McDonald’s when it was closed”, but actually held a fast-food job in college to help with her expenses.For his Michigan audience, Obama recounted the chaos Trump helped cause in the state after the 2020 election: “Because Donald Trump was willing to spread lies about voter fraud in Michigan, protesters came down, banged on the windows, shouting, ‘Let us in. Stop the count.’ Poll workers inside being intimidated … all because Donald Trump couldn’t accept losing.” More

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      If Kamala Harris is trying to show she can meet the needs of Black America, she has gaps to fill | Shamira Ibrahim

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      As we enter the final 21 days of the 2024 presidential election, the euphoric sheen from the summer’s “Kamala is Brat” phenomenon, which resonated with large swaths of gen Z voters, has waned. The Harris campaign is scrambling to communicate its case for selection at the polls, with the vice-president hurriedly pushing out platforms that address lingering skepticism amongst various demographic groups. On Tuesday night, during a broadcast conversation with the radio host Charlamagne tha God, Harris turned her attention to Black men.Harris’s concern is not completely unfounded – several notable Black male celebrities, such as the rapper 50 Cent and the sports personality Stephen A Smith, have expressed their receptiveness to the Trump campaign. On the aggregate, there has been a dip in support: a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely Black voters reported that 78% of all Black voters expressed an interest in voting for Harris, which would be a significantly smaller turnout than the 90% of Black people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. The most pronounced drop comes from Black men, 85% of whom turned out for the US president in the last election and just 70% of whom now say they would vote for Harris.In the hour-long interview, Charlamagne, whose daily morning show The Breakfast Club reaches a predominantly Black audience of 8 million listeners monthly, prodded Harris on topics spanning reparations, criminal justice reform, economic inequality and the fearmongering of the Trump campaign. Harris homed in on her consistent talking points about the necessity of voter participation, a proposed influx of capital for the middle class and misinformation, responses that felt stale and limited. But at other times, her replies landed with impact: when asked about issues specific to Black people that she would prioritize, Harris stressed initiatives around Black maternal mortality and the child tax credit as long neglected needs.In a few cases, Harris’s answers felt like fitting a square peg into a round hole. When asked by a caller how she intends to address the homelessness crisis in the US when the current administration seems to overemphasize foreign interests such as the Israel-Gaza war, the Democratic nominee deflected, punting back to her well-tread lines on home ownership and small business loans.The full exchange, which aired on iHeartRadio’s podcast platform and was simulcast on CNN, both reflected Harris’s best assets and underscored her biggest flaws as a candidate. She remains unflappable on her key points – including the idea that Trump is an existential threat to democracy and Black advancement – and she’s deft at articulating the possibilities and limitations of the government.But her inability to veer away from her entrenched positions or to adequately explain how they could substantively apply to the poor and working class, where Black communities are disproportionately represented, leaves much to be desired. If Harris’s aim is to squash the nagging perspective that she will be unable to meet the needs of Black America, then she still has a gap to fill. Her insistence that “we can do it all” is undercut by the reality that a large part of the Black working class is struggling with unemployment, homelessness, and other critical issues that prevent successful class migration.Yesterday, Harris’s campaign released the Opportunity Agenda for Black Men, a five-point platform focused on Black entrepreneurship, mentorship, marijuana legislation, and cryptocurrency. The platform came on the heels of a contentious lecture from Barack Obama to Black men in Pittsburgh, where the former president alleged that they “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that”.Whether misogyny is a factor in Harris’s current polling numbers or it isn’t, the emphasis on Black men feels overstated. The Black population accounts for barely 13% of the country, with high distribution in metropolitan areas that skew predominantly Democratic, while white and non-Black populations have voted for Trump at significantly higher rates.Despite this disconnect, the Harris campaign has responded with an aggressive media blitz of interviews and campaign stops directly targeted at Black communities. As a result many Black voters are ultimately left with the idea of voting as a means of harm reduction and not one of enthusiasm. For all of Harris’s insistence that the Trump campaign thrives on driving fear, the most animating influence on her campaign’s push to get Black voters to the polls seems to be fear as well. More

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      Harris reveals ‘opportunity agenda for Black men’ in efforts to shore up support

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      Kamala Harris has revealed a plan to give Black men more economic opportunities, as anxiety mounts among her supporters that some in the Black community are less enthused by the Democratic presidential ticket than in recent elections, and may sit this one out – or support Donald Trump.The vice-president’s plan includes forgivable business loans for Black entrepreneurs, creating more apprenticeships, and studying sickle cell and other diseases that disproportionately affect African American men. It also includes ensuring that Black men have more access to shaping a national cannabis industry and to invest in cryptocurrency.Harris presented the so-called “opportunity agenda for Black men” on Monday, before speaking in the north-west corner of Erie, Pennsylvania, the country’s largest battleground state. It will be Harris’s 10th visit to Pennsylvania this election season.Political support among Black men for the Harris-Walz campaign has been wavering somewhat. Last week, Barack Obama suggested that some Black men “aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president”.The former president’s comments were later condemned by the Florida Republican representative Byron Donalds and Texas’s Wesley Hunt, members of Black Men for Trump, which posted a letter accusing Obama of being “insulting” and “demeaning”.“President Obama’s recent call for Black men to support Kamala Harris based solely on her skin color, rather than her policies, is deeply insulting,” the letter states. “Black Americans are not a monolith, and we don’t owe our votes to any candidate just because they ‘look like us’.”Over the weekend, the former president Bill Clinton was drafted in to speak to worshippers at a Zion Baptist church in Albany, Georgia, in support of Harris.“Uniting people and building, being repairers of the breach, as Isaiah says, those are the things that work,” Clinton said. “Blaming, dividing, demeaning – they get you a bunch of votes at election time, but they don’t work.”A poll in the New York Times placed Harris slightly behind Joe Biden among Black likely voters and showed one in five Black men support Trump. Despite alarm at the poll, the figures still show strong Black support for Democrats – but while the president won 87% of the Black vote in 2020, Harris’s numbers are lower. Seventy-eight per cent of Black voters in key battleground states polled in September said they would support the Democrat.Raphael Warnock, a Democratic senator from Georgia, warned against overestimating the shift. “Black men are not going to vote for Donald Trump in any significant numbers,” he told CNN on Sunday. “There will be some. We’re not a monolith.”Warnock predicted Black voters would remember that Trump had personally taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times in 1989 calling for the state to bring back the death penalty and to strengthen policing after the brutal beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park.The so-called “Central Park Five” – five Black teenagers – were falsely accused of the crime and imprisoned for several years, before finally being exonerated in 2002. “Donald Trump has shown no deal of concern about what they went through, no deal, no bit of contrition about it,” Warnock added.But the South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, who helped secure Biden’s Democratic nomination in 2020, told the network he is “concerned about the Black men staying home or voting for Trump”.“Black men, like everybody else, want to know exactly what I can expect from a Harris administration. And I have been very direct with them. And I have also contrasted that with what they can expect from a Trump administration,” Clyburn said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocrats have previously been accused of taking the Black vote for granted. In 2020, Biden was forced to apologize for telling the popular radio host Charlamagne Tha God that if African Americans “have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black”.Trump has sought to capitalize on wavering Black male support for Democrats who may sympathize with his “America First” policies around employment and immigration.As well as Harris’s new policy outreach to Black men, she is also reaching out to Hispanic men who might also be cool to her candidacy, via an “Hombres con Harris” outreach featuring ad buys and Hispanic celebrity events in battleground states.Three weeks out from polling day, there is some Democratic concern that Harris’s support among men broadly needs attention. Polls have found that there is roughly a 60-40 split between men and women, with men favoring Republicans and women Democrats.A Pew Research Center study released last year asked Americans how important it is to them that a woman be elected president in their lifetime. It found that only 18% of US adults said this is extremely or very important to them, with some 64% saying it was not too important or not at all, or that the president’s gender did not matter. More

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      US election briefing: Democrats unleash powerhouse surrogates as Trump insults Detroit in Detroit

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      Thursday saw Democrat powerhouse surrogates unleashed on the campaign trail. The Harris campaign announced that Bill Clinton would campaign for Harris in southern battleground states, starting this weekend, while Barack Obama began his swing state tour in Pennsylvania – the battleground with the highest number of electoral college votes.Appearing at the University of Pittsburgh, Obama sought to encourage young people to get their friends and relatives to vote. He said Trump saw power “as a means to an end” and took aim at his “concept of a plan” for healthcare.“The good news is Kamala Harris has an actual plan,” Obama said.“They’ve got to release the kraken,” veteran Democrat campaign strategist James Carville told the New York Times, adding that the Harris campaign should be using Obama and other surrogates “more aggressively”.Inflation, meanwhile, weakened to its slowest pace in more than three years in September, as price growth continued to fall back from its highest levels in a generation. With concerns over the heightened cost of living at the heart of the presidential election campaign, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its final monthly inflation reading before voters head to the polls.Here is what else happened on Thursday:

      Obama questioned Black men’s unwillingness to vote for Harris. Speaking at an event in Pennsylvania before his campaign speech at the University of Pittsburgh, he said: “We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighbourhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. Now, I also want to say that that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.” And: “You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses. I’ve got a problem with that.” A September NAACP poll showed that more than a quarter of Black men under 50 say they will vote for Donald Trump.

      Trump disparagingly compared Detroit, Michigan, to a developing nation. Pointing to the city’s recent history of economic decline from its heyday as the home of American car production, he said: “Well, we’re a developing nation too, just take a look at Detroit. Detroit’s a developing area more than most places in China.” Later in his speech, he said of Harris: “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”

      Harris held events in Nevada and Arizona. The Democratic candidate spoke at a town hall in Las Vegas, hosted by Spanish language station Univision. She was questioned on Trump’s claims that the administration had not done enough to support people after Hurricane Helene, and whether people in Hurricane Milton’s path would have access to aid – a sign that Trump’s messaging is breaking through with some potential voters. “I have to stress that this is not a time for people to play politics,” Harris said in reply.

      Later, at a campaign event in Phoenix, Harris called on Arizonans to vote yes to Proposition 139, which protects the right to abortion. Talking about Project 2025, Harris said: “I can’t believe they put that in writing,” to loud, sustained boos from the crowd. “They’re out of their minds.” The swing state has 11 electoral college votes.

      A Quinnipiac university poll published on Wednesday showed Harris trailing Trump by two and three points respectively in Wisconsin and Michigan – states which, along with Pennsylvania, Democrats have labelled the “blue wall”.

      America’s top broadcasting regulatory body, the Federal Communications Commission, denounced Trump after the former president demanded that CBS be stripped of its licence for airing an edited answer in a primetime interview with Harris. He also called the network a “threat to democracy” and targeted other broadcasters for having their licences revoked also.

      The Kremlin confirmed that Trump sent Vladimir Putin Covid tests when they were scarce during the early stages of the pandemic, as reported this week in a book by veteran US political journalist Bob Woodward.

      The legal brawl between Georgia’s Trump-oriented state board of elections and Fulton county’s election office continues to intensify, in what’s being seen as a warm-up for the post-election cavalcade of 2020 redux lawsuits expected in November. Fulton county filed a lawsuit on Monday to prevent the board from placing 2020 election denialists on a monitoring team for the November election. In response, state board members voted to subpoena a wide range of records from the 2020 election in Fulton county. More

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      Harris embarks on media blitz and tries to edge out Trump in key swing states

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      Kamala Harris has embarked on a week-long media blitz, hurtling from TV studios and late-night shows to podcast interviews as she seeks to gain an edge over Donald Trump in the US election’s key battleground states that remain nail-bitingly close.The vice-president’s decision to face a raft of largely friendly media outlets came as the campaigns entered the final 30 days. More than 1.4 million Americans have already cast their ballots in early voting across 30 states.The Democratic nominee’s whirlwind media tour has been carefully crafted for maximum reach and minimum risk. Harris has talked to the CBS News show 60 Minutes, along with the popular podcast Call Her Daddy.On Tuesday she hits the media capital, New York, for appearances on ABC News’s daytime behemoth The View and the Howard Stern Show, followed by a recording with late-night host Stephen Colbert.The first of a flurry of comments from Harris was put out by 60 Minutes on Sunday before a full broadcast on Monday. Harris will appear alone, after Trump declined to be interviewed by the election special which has been a staple of US election coverage for more than half a century.In a short clip released by 60 Minutes, Harris was asked whether the Biden-Harris administration had any sway over the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu, the hardline prime minister of Israel who appears not to listen to Washington. Asked whether the US had a “real close ally” in Netanyahu, she replied: “With all due respect, the better question is: do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people? And the answer to that question is yes.”Since Harris’s meteoric propulsion as Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden stepped aside, her relative avoidance of press or TV interviews has become a point of contention on the campaign trail. Republican leaders and pundits on Fox News routinely accuse her of being media-shy.This week’s blitz is designed to counter that impression, while reaching large audiences focused on demographic groups which will be central to Harris’s chances of winning in November. Call Her Daddy is Spotify’s most-listened to podcast among women, while The View is the number one ranked daytime talk show with 2.5 million average viewers, again heavily weighted towards women.Meanwhile Colbert’s show on CBS is the highest rated late-night talk show attracting large numbers of younger viewers aged 18 to 49 – another critical demographic on Harris’s target list.Harris’s running mate, the Democratic governor of Minnesota Tim Walz, is also making his own media scramble which began on Sunday, with him entering less comfortable territory on Fox News Sunday. He was questioned about the pro-abortion law that he signed in his state, and also asked to clarify the occasions on which he has misrepresented his record.That included a comment that he had carried weapons in war when he had not, and his classifying the treatment that he and his wife received to have a child as IVF when it was in fact a different type of fertility treatment.At last week’s vice-presidential debate Walz recognised his missteps, calling himself a “knucklehead”.Walz told Fox News Sunday: “To be honest with you, I don’t think American people care whether I used IUI or IVF, what they understand is that Donald Trump would resist these things. I speak passionately … I will own up when I misspeak and when I make a mistake.”As the contest enters its final month, the Guardian’s latest tracker of opinion polls shows Harris up on Trump by three percentage points nationally. In the more telling test of the seven battleground states that will decide the outcome, though Harris is ahead in five of them, the margin remains essentially too close to call.Both candidates and their running mates are speeding up their frantic dash around the seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Harris and Walz will be in Arizona this weeks, where early voting begins on Wednesday.On Thursday, the Democratic ticket will gain extra ballast when former president and campaigning superstar Barack Obama kicks off a round of stump appearances in the all-important swing state, Pennsylvania. He will begin in Pittsburgh, and will then travel across the country on Harris’s behalf, campaign aides have said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump was scheduled to hold a rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, on Sunday afternoon, a day after he made a pointed return to the fairgrounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he came close to being assassinated on 13 July. Trump and his younger son Eric used the occasion to spread the baseless claim that the Democrats had been behind the attempt on his life.“They tried to kill him, it’s because the Democratic party can’t do anything right,” Eric Trump said. Billionaire Elon Musk also appeared on stage.On Sunday, Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the US House, was asked by ABC News’s This Week whether such comments were responsible amid mounting fears of political violence in the build up to the 5 November election. Johnson sidestepped the question, saying he had not heard the full speeches.The speaker also notably refused to answer whether Trump had lost the 2020 election, in the wake of Trump’s ongoing lies that he was the actual victor. “This is the game that is always played by the media with leading Republicans, it’s a gotcha game, and I’m not going to engage in it,” Johnson said.The former president’s wife, Melania Trump, sat down for an interview with the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. She was asked given how close her husband had come to being shot in Butler whether she trusted the top officials of the FBI, CIA and other federal agencies who “appeared to be against President Trump and yourself from day one”.Melania Trump replied: “It’s hard to say who you really trust. You want to, but it’s always a question mark.”Melania Trump, who is promoting her book, Melania, also spoke about her pro-abortion stance which she revealed in the volume. She said her husband had always known her convictions.“He knew my position and my beliefs since the day we met, and I believe in individual freedom. I want to decide what I want to do with my body. I don’t want government in my personal business,” she said. More

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      Barack Obama to hit campaign trail for Kamala Harris to woo swing-state voters – US elections live

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      On Thursday evening, Kamala Harris enlisted the help of Republican former senator Liz Cheney for a campaign event in Wisconsin. The pair focused their speeches on Trump’s 2020 election lie.The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino reports this from the event:Liz Cheney, one of Donald Trump’s most prominent conservative critics, appealed to the millions of undecided Americans who could decide the outcome of the 2024 election, asking them to “reject the depraved cruelty” of the former president.The daughter of Dick Cheney, the Republican former vice-president, said she had never voted for a Democrat before, but would do so “proudly” to ensure Trump never holds a position of public trust again. Her father will join her in casting his ballot for Harris.“I know that the most conservative of conservative values is fidelity to our constitution,” Cheney said, speaking from a podium adorned with the vice presidential seal. The crowd broke into a chant: “Thank you, Liz!” A large sign looming over them declared: “Country over party.”Cheney and Harris agree on little politically – only that Trump should not be allowed to serve a second term. But their union is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to win over Republican voters who, like Cheney, believe in “limited government” and “low taxes” but are repelled by Trump and his Maga movement.“No matter your political party, there is a place for you with us and in this campaign,” Harris said. “I take seriously my pledge to be a president for all Americans.”Good morning US politics readers.Former US president Barack Obama will crisscross the battleground states for Kamala Harris, with a kickoff in all-important Pennsylvania next week.According to a senior Harris campaign official, Obama will hold his first event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania next Thursday, the beginning of blitz across the handful of rust belt and Sun belt states that will likely decide the 2024 election.Obama remains one of the Democrats’ most powerful surrogates, second perhaps only to his wife, Michelle Obama. His return to the campaign trail follows a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, where he cast Harris as a forward-looking figure and a natural heir to his diverse, youth-powered political coalition. Harris was one of Obama’s earliest supporters of what seemed like a long-shot presidential bid against Hillary Clinton. She knocked doors for him ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2008. More than 15 years later, he will return the favor.With just 32 days away to the election, here’s what else is happening today:

      Kamala Harris will hold a rally in Flint, Michigan, this evening – one of the swing states critical to her winning the presidency. Her event comes a day after Donald Trump promised to make Michigan the “car capital of the world again”.

      Trump and Georgia governor Brian Kemp will visit Evans, Georgia, to receive a briefing on the devastation of Hurricane Helene. They’ll give a press conference at 3.45pm ET.

      JD Vance is in Lindale, Georgia, and will deliver remarks at 1 pm.

      Trump hosts a town hall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at 7 pm. More