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      Candidates try to divine trends as nearly 70m Americans have cast early votes

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      Almost 70 million Americans have already voted in the historic US election which comes to a head on Tuesday, prompting furious arguments over what early voting trends might mean as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris prepare for their final showdown.As both candidates and their top surrogates crisscrossed the country in a furious bout of last-minute campaigning, the race remains in a virtual dead heat – both in the head-to-head national polls and in the crucial seven battleground states that will actually decide the race for the White House.But as Trump and Harris made their pitches for what must now be a vanishingly small number of still undecided voters, tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots in the election through the various processes in the US that allow early voting.With so much at stake in the election, that huge number has triggered intense speculation as to what it might that mean with both Republicans and Democrats attempting to glean information that shows their side might already have the edge as voting day nears.Harris’s campaign is latching on to some key information from the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. The giant state – which stretches from New Jersey in the east to Ohio in the west – is a part of the “rust belt” dominated by former manufacturing cities that is seen as probably the most crucial region in the election.Nearly all the most likely paths to victory for both candidates involve picking up rust belt states with Pennsylvania as the biggest prize.In that state, voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots and registered Democrats account for about 58% of votes cast by seniors, compared with 35% for Republicans. That is a big lead in a demographic that usually trends towards Trump.At the same time, women have a 10-point gap over men when it comes to the early vote in Pennsylvania, according to analysis by the Politico website, using data from the University of Florida’s United States Election Project. Another analysis, by NBC, showed an even larger gap in favor of women in the state of 13 points.Harris and her team are hoping for a large showing of women in the election as they have made the loss of reproductive rights central to their campaign after the supreme court overturned federal abortion rights. Women have trended strongly Democratic in the election, while men have leaned more Republican and thus any signs of a strong turnout by women is potentially good news for the vice-president.“The gender gap is a key reason for hope among Democrats and concern among Republicans, especially when many states have abortion rights amendments on their ballots in the 2024 election,” Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University, told Newsweek.But Republicans too are seeing signs of hope in the early voting trends – a sign that America’s divisive election is still proving impossible to predict even after almost two years of furious campaigning by both parties.In Arizona, a crucial swing state in the so-called “sun belt” on electoral battlegrounds, male voters have been turning out in increased numbers – a sign that Republican strategies of turning out men who have not voted before might be working. In Arizona last week, the number of new voters in Arizona was 86,000 – far more than the tiny margin by which Joe Biden beat Trump in the state in 2020 – and the biggest share of those new voters were male Republicans.Overall, Republicans have traditionally been outnumbered in early voting with more Democrats choosing to go to the polls. In part, that has been because Trump and some of his allies have assailed early voting with baseless claims of fraud and conspiracy, despite Republican professional campaigners exhorting their supporters to get to the polls before election day.In 2024, there are signs that Republicans are indeed heading to the polls early in large numbers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Georgia – another key sun belt battleground in the deep south – there are strong signs of a significant early Republican turnout. More than 700,000 people who voted already in 2024 did not vote at all in 2020, according to Georgia Votes, and that is seen as a sign that many of them might be Republicans as the campaign has focused on that demographic. At the same time, the top three counties for voter turnout rates in Georgia are rural areas won easily by Trump in 2020.“We’ve got a lot of voters that voted in 2016 but didn’t vote in 2020 … What makes me believe that they are Trump voters is that most of them are … from parts of the state that are pretty strong Republican strongholds,” Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, told Fox News.Of course, as voting patterns shift for both sides, it could also be that an advantage in early voting for either Democrats or Republicans is quickly overwhelmed on election day itself when tens of millions of voters go to the polls in person.In the end, the 2024 race remains entirely unpredictable. The Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker has shown little change over the past week, after a slight erosion in Harris support over October, Harris retains a one-point advantage in national polls of 48% to Trump’s 47%, virtually identical to last week and well with the margin of error of most polls.The battleground states, too, remain in a dead heat. The candidates are evenly tied at 48% in Pennsylvania while Harris has single-point leads in the two other rust belt states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Trump is marginally ahead in the sun belt, where he is up by 1% in North Carolina, 2% in Georgia and Arizona, and ahead in Nevada by less than a percentage point.But one wildcard for both campaigns is the Muslim vote, angered by US support for Israel in its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. A poll released on Friday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations showed that 42% of the country’s 2.5 million Muslim voters favor Green party nominee Jill Stein for president while 41% favor Harris. Trump registered 10% support.In theory, those margins of support for Stein, as in 2016, could swing some key swing states, such as Michigan, to Trump if the contest there is very close. More

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      Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declines to endorse Kamala Harris

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      Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declined to endorse Kamala Harris at a union rally in Detroit, where the war in Gaza is the top issue for the largest block of Arab American voters in the country.Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, is the only one of the so-called leftist “Squad” that has not endorsed the Democrat candidate. The other three members – Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York – endorsed Harris in July.“Don’t underestimate the power you all have,” Tlaib told a get-out-the-vote United Auto Workers rallygoers. “More than those ads, those lawn signs, those billboards, you all have more power to turn out people that understand we’ve got to fight back against corporate greed in our country.”Tlaib’s non-endorsement of Harris comes as a voter survey published on Friday suggested that 43% of Muslim American voters support the Green party candidate, Jill Stein.After Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, Democrats blamed Stein voters for the loss of Michigan and Wisconsin to the Republican candidate. Some Democrats fear that the same scenario could play out again next week.Earlier this year, during the presidential primary campaigns, about 100,000 Michigan voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” as a mark of protest against the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza after the cross -border Hamas attack in October last year that killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages, mostly civilians.Israel’s attack on Gaza has since killed more than 40,000 people, with many of them women and children. In Lebanon, where Israel has now invaded to fight with Iran-backed Hezbollah, more than 2,897 people have been killed and 13,150 wounded, the country’s health ministry reports. A quarter of those killed were women and children.The US has been a staunch ally of Israel during the fighting, continuing to send arms to the country and limiting its public criticism of Israeli actions.Tlaib has been critical of the Democratic party’s position on the growing and bloody conflict, saying it was “hard not to feel invisible” after the party did not include a Palestinian American speaker at its convention in Chicago in August.In an interview with Zeteo, the news organization founded by former MSNBC host (and Guardian contributor) Mehdi Hasan, Tlaib said the omission “made it clear with their speakers that they value Israeli children more than Palestinian children”.“Our trauma and pain feel unseen and ignored by both parties,” she added. “One party uses our identity as a slur, and the other refuses to hear from us. Where is the shared humanity? Ignoring us won’t stop the genocide.”Harris has faced continued protests on the trail, as demonstrators call for her to break with President Joe Biden and support an arms embargo on Israel. Harris has said Israel “has right to defend itself”, and that Palestinians need “dignity, security”.Confronted by a protester in Wisconsin two weeks ago who accused the Jewish state of genocide, Harris said: “I know what you’re speaking of. I want a ceasefire. I want the hostage deal done. I want the war to end.”At a rally in Dearborn earlier on Friday, Tlaib the criticized Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who has been endorsed by the Muslim mayors of Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck.“Trump is a proud Islamophobe + serial liar who doesn’t stand for peace,” Tlaib posted on X. “The reality is that the Biden admin’s unconditional support for genocide is what got us here. This should be a wake-up call for those who continue to support genocide. This election didn’t have to be close.” More

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      Harris pitches self as a unifier with a ‘to-do list’ – is it enough for knife-edge race?

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      On the second to last Sunday in July, Kamala Harris had just finished making pancakes and bacon for her grandnieces at the vice-president’s residence in Washington, and was sitting down with them to work on a jigsaw puzzle when Joe Biden called.“I got up to take the call, and then life changed,” Harris recounted later. Biden, isolating with Covid at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and facing calls from all corners of his party to step aside, had reached the history-altering decision to end his bid for re-election.“Are you sure?” Harris said she asked the US president. “Because what a big decision.”With Biden’s endorsement, Harris, still wearing her workout clothes and hooded sweatshirt from her alma mater, Howard University, leapt into action. Time was of the essence. Over the next 10 hours, with pizza boxes littered around her, she placed 100 calls to Democrats whose support she would need to secure the nomination.By the time Harris walked into her inherited campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, to the strains of Beyoncé’s hard-charging anthem Freedom, her ascension seemed suddenly – and unexpectedly – inevitable.In the roughly 100 days since, Harris has enthralled her party, which had been all but resigned to defeat with Biden as its nominee. She selected a running mate, the affable Minnesota governor, Tim Walz; accepted the nomination at a joy-filled convention; supercharged volunteer sign-ups and on-the-ground organizing; raised a staggering billion dollars; dominated the contest’s only presidential debate against her opponent, Donald Trump. She secured endorsements from a host of his former advisers and aides, as well as several of the planet’s biggest stars. She appeared on popular podcasts, daytime TV and news networks and delivered a closing argument that blended the economic and the existential anxieties driving Americans’ choice in November.But has it all been enough? The race has built to a deadlocked finale, with each of the seven battleground states – and the nation – virtually tied just days before the final votes of the 2024 election are cast. Along the way, some of that early shine has worn off. Trump has crept back in the polls. Critics have carped at the Harris campaign’s traditionalism, and a perception among some that she has focused too much on Trump’s threat and not offered enough of a vision of her own for Americans to be inspired by.On Tuesday, she delivered her last major speech of the campaign from the Ellipse in Washington, a direct appeal to the vanishingly small slice of Americans who have yet to make up their minds.The significance of the site, an oval-shaped park south of the White House, was twofold. It was intended as a stark reminder of the violent forces Trump inflamed from that very spot nearly four years ago, when he implored supporters to “fight like hell” before a mob of them stormed the US Capitol.And it was meant to underline the possibility of a Harris presidency.

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      With the White House illuminated behind her, Harris declared: “For too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos and mutual distrust. And it can be easy to forget a simple truth: it doesn’t have to be this way.”She cast the election as a contest between herself, a unifier with a “to-do list” and Trump, a “petty tyrant” seeking a return to “unchecked power”. In 90 days, one of them would take the oath of office. “Kamala! Kamala!” chanted the crowd, her largest to date with an estimated 75,000 people who spilled beyond the park, toward the Washington Monument.Harris is running the shortest presidential campaign in modern US history. If she wins, she will have persuaded Americans to do something unprecedented in the country’s 248-year history: elect a woman and woman of color to the presidency.At 18, could she have ever imagined this would be her life, Pro Football Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe asked the 60-year-old during a recent appearance on his podcast. “Never,” Harris said, shaking her head. “Never.”View image in fullscreenThe daughter of an endocrinologist from India and an economist from Jamaica, Harris said an “instinct to protect” propelled her career as a prosecutor, and was central to her opening pitch against Trump. From the courtroom, Harris took on “predators”, “fraudsters” and “scammers”, she would begin, building to the line: “So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”In an election defined by a striking gender gap – with women powering Harris and men turning toward Trump – the central question may be who Americans trust to protect them – and what they believe they need protecting from.Harris has vowed to protect Americans’ “fundamental freedoms” – abortion rights, clean air, decades-old alliances, and democracy itself. Trump has cast himself, by contrast, as the protector of a nation under “invasion”, overrun by illegal immigration and crime. At a recent rally, he crassly suggested he would protect women, whether they “like it or not”.Harris’s critics – even those who will begrudgingly vote for her – knock her as a maddeningly scripted politician who lacks an ideological core and who has struggled to articulate a serious policy agenda.At a CNN town hall, she hewed closely to a set of talking points, offering circular responses to pointed questions. And yet, during the 80-minute segment, she delivered her most forceful warning about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. Yes, she agreed, her opponent was a fascist.Harris has waved off any criticism, calling herself disciplined.At a rally with Harris, Michelle Obama defended her further by suggesting critics were holding the nation’s first female and first Black vice-president to a “higher standard” than Trump, who often rambles incoherently, had threatened to jail his political opponents, and would be the first convicted felon elected to the White House if he wins.“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn,” Obama said in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “Preach!” a woman shouted from the audience.Over the course of her abbreviated campaign, Harris has laid out a broad strokes economic agenda with proposals for first-time homebuyers, caregivers, new parents, and the “sandwich” generation of adults caring for their children and their parents. She has, meanwhile, backed away from her past support for progressives policies on immigration and fracking, which helped fuel the San Francisco liberal caricature, though it never quite suited the former “top cop” of California. Drawing on support from anti-Trump Republicans, she has vowed to put a Republican in her cabinet, and insisted she would be a president for “all Americans”, including Trump’s supporters.Along the way, many stars have aligned for her. Oprah sang her praise – “Kamaaaaala” – in a DNC speech. Taylor Swift endorsed Harris after her debate performance against Trump. Beyoncé embraced Harris at an abortion-rights focused event in Texas. Bad Bunny urged support for her after a shock jock disparaged Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage” at a Trump rally. She has also won support from the billionaire Mark Cuban, who has traveled the country making the case that Harris would be better for business than the man who made his name as a Manhattan builder.Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win, a hub for liberal donors and organizers, likened Harris’s dizzying “everything, everywhere, all at once” campaign to the Wizard of Oz. The vice-president was thrust to the forefront of American politics and quickly assembled an unlikely coalition that includes gen Z meme-makers and the former Republican vice-president Dick Cheney.“Now here we are. This is the end of the road,” she said. “I just can’t imagine it having been done any other way.”Although Harris has served as the vice-president for nearly four years, she nevertheless arrived at the top of the Democratic ticket relatively unknown. But in stark reversal of fortunes, she defied skeptics of her political skill, and her popularity soared.“She has not put a foot wrong,” said Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic strategist and former adviser to Bill Clinton. If he had to identify a misstep, it would be during an appearance on ABC’s The View, where, when asked how she would distinguish herself from Biden, Harris responded: “Not a thing that comes to mind.” The Trump campaign seized on the line, tying Harris to the unpopular president.Begala marveled at the way Harris has “squared the circle” between Democrats who believed her closing message should be centered around Trump’s threats to democracy – as the party did in the 2022 midterms when they blunted the anticipated red wave – and those who argued she should conclude with an economic-focused message, highlighting Americans’ top voting issue. Trump would arrive in office “obsessed with revenge” against an ever-growing enemies list, Harris says, while she would focused on her “to-do” list: lowering costs and fighting to protect what’s left of abortion access in America.Since the supreme court overturned Roe in 2022, Harris has been a powerful messenger on abortion rights, framing it as a matter of bodily autonomy. On the campaign trail, she has been joined by women whose lives have been put a risk by their state’s abortion bans, as well as by the family of Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old mother from Georgia who died of sepsis in 2022 after being denied timely medical care to treat a medication abortion.“We need to make sure that we know who is responsible for those deaths, and that is Donald Trump, his supreme court, and all of the Maga Republicans who have voted for legislation up and down the ballot across the country,” said Silvina Alarcón, political director at Reproductive Freedom for All.Harris has also had to navigate, as she has her entire career, a torrent of racist and sexist abuse, including from her opponent, who has insulted her intelligence, calling her “dumb as a rock” and an “extremely low IQ person”. During a live interview with members of the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump attacked her racial identity and asked when she “happened to turn Black”. The remark drew gasps in the room.Christina Reynolds, a senior vice-president of communications for Emily’s List, the influential political group that backs female candidates who support abortion rights, said Harris has faced all of the obstacles that have long burdened women, and especially women of color, who seek high political office. But she has also helped blaze her own trail, demonstrating leadership as the vice-president.“She’s had to stack up to the division and hate and lies, while building the plane,” Reynolds said. “I think that when she wins, it will be historic and epic and truly a testament to her and the people around her and the work that they’ve done.”Support for Harris has slightly fallen as the Trump campaign sharpened its attacks. Looming over a race that appears to be teetering on a razor’s edge is whether Harris can stitch together her own diverse coalition, similar to the one that elevated Biden in 2020, while polls show Trump making inroads with voters of color and young people, especially men.Democrats are closely watching places such as Dearborn, Michigan, where Democratic emissaries from Barack Obama and the independent senator Bernie Sanders are working to stave off a mass defection of Arab and Muslim American voters furious at the administration over the deadly war in Gaza. At nearly every stop, Harris is heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters, many of whom have said they plan to vote for a third party candidate or not at all.John Zogby, an author and pollster who studies the Arab American electorate, said the scale of the devastation in Gaza and now Lebanon, and the depth of these voters’ discontent, have reached a “point of almost no return”.“It really is different this time,” he said.In the final days, Harris will circle between all seven battleground states, searching for any last wells of support that might tip the balance. Until the end, she is attempting to make the affirmative case for herself, while arguing that Trump’s vilification of his most prominent critics, using increasingly violence rhetoric, “must be disqualifying”.Election eve will be spent in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral college votes are seen as a must-win for Harris. On Tuesday, the Harris campaign will host an election night party at Howard, the historically Black college where the vice-president won her first election: freshman class representative.While Democrats remain fearful a second Trump presidency will usher in a dark era for American democracy, and of the former president’s pre-emptive efforts to deny an election loss, those on the ground say they see signs that Harris’s “joyful warrior” campaign will prevail. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the gen Z congressman from Florida, told reporters on Friday: “A bellwether for me in an election is when you’re going to events and you’re seeing people who are not political, who don’t like politics but are there because – sometimes they can’t even articulate it – they’re there because they felt like they needed to be there.“That’s the difference between a political candidate and a movement candidate. And we have a movement candidate, and this is a movement right now.”David Smith contributed reporting More

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      US election live: Trump repeats attack on Liz Cheney as campaign enters final days

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      The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Top Republicans have called on the White House to produce all documents and internal communications regarding president Joe Biden’s statement earlier this week in which he appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump.White House press officials altered the official transcript of Biden’s statement, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.The Republican lawmakers said they question whether the decision to create “a false transcript and manipulate or alter the accurate transcript” produced for the National Archives and Records Administration was a violation of federal law.Representative James Comer, Republican chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and House Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik demanded the White House produce the records.They also called on the White House to make available for a briefing the top supervisor of its stenography office.Comer and Stefanik said:
      The White House cannot simply rewrite president Biden’s rhetoric.
      We are concerned with the latest reporting of the White House’s apparent political decision to protect the Biden-Harris administration, instead of following longstanding and proper protocols.
      At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style.“I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”.“Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.On immigration, Trump’s message was characteristically dark. The campaign played a painful video of a mother describing her daughter’s murder and blaming Harris for allowing the accused to enter the US without authorization. Studies overwhelmingly refute Trump’s claim that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime in the US, but such claims are a feature of his campaign.“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” said Trump. He vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history” and said cities and towns had been “conquered” by immigrants, whom he referred to as “animals”.Since his Madison Square Garden rally – which showcased racist and misogynistic comments from a lineup of speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Trump and his allies have sought to recast the former president and his Maga base as unfairly maligned.“Kamala has spent the final week of her campaign comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history,” said Trump at the Wisconsin rally.“Vice-president Harris thinks you are Nazis, fascists,” said the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who spoke at the rally.Johnson praised Trump for bringing into his campaign Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ended his presidential bid as a third party candidate in August; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who announced she had left the party in 2022. Johnson accused Democrats of “destroying America” and credited Trump with making “the Republican Party the party of the working men and women of America.”The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest from the campaign trail throughout this morning.We start with news that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch.Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin.At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.He repeated his aggressive attack on Liz Cheney, one day after he first said the former Republican US representative should be under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.Harris meanwhile sought to draw a contrast, emphasizing at a rally in Wisconsin in the afternoon that she is looking to be a political consensus builder.“Here is my pledge to you. Here is my pledge to you as president. I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris said. “I pledge to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. I will listen to experts. I will listen to the people who disagree with me. Because, you see, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy.”“He wants to put them in jail,” Harris said, repeating a line she’s has frequently invoked of late. “I’ll give them a seat at the table.”During his appearance in Warren in the afternoon and in Milwaukee in the evening, Trump repeatedly stoked fears about immigrants. In Warren, he said: “every state is a border state” and falsely claim immigrants were being flown into the south-west.He repeated some of his most racist tropes, saying: “All of our jobs are being taken by the migrants that come into our country illegally and many of those migrants happen to be criminals, and some of them happen to be murderers.”For more on last night’s events, see our full report here:In other news:

      Harris told her crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Exposition Center that with four days to go, there was still work to do, but “we like hard work”. Minutes beforehand, during a raucous warmup, the rapper Cardi B referred to Trump as “Donnie Dunk” and told the crowd: “Trump says he’s going to protect women whether they like it or not. Well, if his definition of protection is not the freedom of choice, if his definition of protection is making sure our daughters have fewer rights than our mothers, then I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I don’t want it!”

      Earlier, Harris said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” as far as his suitability for the presidency is concerned. “Representative Cheney is a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.” Cheney for her part warned the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.

      Republicans’ latest offensive and misogynistic comments have boosted Democratic hopes of turning out women on election day in a contest where the rights of women have been a central issue for the Harris campaign.

      At his Milwaukee rally on Friday, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5-hour-long meandering speech that touched on the economy and foreign policy but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929-style depression.”

      Trump’s supporters are laying the ground for rejecting the result of the election if he loses, according to warnings from Democrats as well as anti-Maga Republicans. As well as baseless and/or failed lawsuits, suspicions have been voiced over partisan polls run by groups with Republican links in battleground states that mainly show Trump leading – the idea being that if Trump loses, the polls can be proferred as “evidence” that he was cheated out of the win.

      The New York author and journalist Michael Wolff has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied. Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Trump’s campaign said the claims, made on Wolff’s podcast Fire and Fury, amounted to “outlandish false smears”.

      A federal judge rejected an attempt by Elon Musk’s America Pac to have charges of running an illegal lottery heard in federal court, instead of the courts of Pennsylvania, where Musk is running the sweepstakes to help Trump get re-elected. The case has been sent back to the Pennsylvania state court for a further hearing on Monday.

      Racism and misogyny; a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman; the Republican candidate for president dressing up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck. Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre – Richard Luscombe sums it up.

      A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift of its members towards Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Trump slightly ahead. That bloc is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons. More

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      Ukrainians ask what I’m hearing about our country on the US campaign trail. The truth? We’re all but forgotten | Nataliya Gumenyuk

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      Around a month before the US elections, in the Kharkiv region, I sat down with a group of Ukrainian infantry soldiers together with the American historian Timothy Snyder. I suggested they ask questions of him not only as an American historian, but also as an American citizen.The servicemen were curious about the upcoming election, but mainly the chances of receiving significant military aid any time soon. They expressed pity that many Americans still don’t understand that the Ukrainian fight is not just about us. It’s in the world’s interests to support the fight against blatant breaches of the international order.The anxiety of the American elections is felt more strongly in Kyiv among Ukrainian officials and civil society leaders because Ukraine has become a partisan issue, and part of US domestic politics. These groups have been trying for years to be on good terms with both Democrats and Republicans in the US. This was especially true during the long delays in Congress over the vote for security assistance to Ukraine. But engaging with the Maga camp has become difficult. This only got worse when it was revealed what Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said in 2022: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” During the race, Vance has characterised Vladimir Putin as an “adversary” and “competitor”, rather than an enemy, and has generally argued that the US should be focusing on China, not Russia.Then there are the claims from Trump that he could end the war in “24 hours”, presumably with a phone call to Putin. To be honest, these sort of statements don’t worry Ukrainians that much since they don’t sound remotely realistic. There are no signs the Russian president is changing his goal to destroy Ukraine as a state. What people are really worried about is the slowing down, or even stopping, of US military assistance.In Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, one of the most important battleground states, I had a chance to talk to various Ukrainian Americans, including those from the older, more conservative diaspora, who have traditionally voted Republican. They shared strong anti-communist sentiment in the past but today are more united around ideas of faith and family values. Some of them told me they were worried by Vance’s remarks. Still, their arguments would alight elsewhere: it was the Democrat Barack Obama who didn’t firmly react to the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 and refused to provide military aid. Some of those narratives can be heard among conservative Ukrainians back home, too.Ukrainians often ask me what exactly the candidates are saying about our country on the campaign trail. I had to reply that, honestly, Ukraine wasn’t being explicitly mentioned at the rallies, at least the ones I attended. In Saginaw, Michigan, a manufacturing town, Vance didn’t mention Ukraine even once, mainly warning about the risks of local workers losing their jobs because of Chinese electric vehicles. Kamala Harris, at a campaign rally in the university town of Ann Arbor, spoke of Trump’s fascination with authoritarian leaders like Putin.Trump himself, speaking in Pennsylvania, did say at least three times that he wouldn’t spend taxpayers’ money on wars “in countries you have never heard of and don’t want to hear of”. The audience loudly cheered.After Joe Biden dropped out of the race, some people in Kyiv hoped that he could now afford to be less cautious and use his remaining time in office to accelerate support for Ukraine. The speculation was that he would want a positive foreign policy legacy to leave behind, amid the retreat from Afghanistan and tragedy unfolding in the Middle East. By October, it became clear that the current US administration wasn’t planning on doing anything big before the election.Some measures were taken. On 23 October, Washington finalised its $20bn portion of a $50bn loan to Ukraine backed by frozen Russian assets. This will be placed alongside a separate $20bn EU commitment and $10bn split between Britain, Japan and Canada. It is supposed to be repaid with the earnings from the more than $300bn in sovereign Russian assets that were immobilised in February 2022 and are mostly held in Europe.But in the long run, the lives of Ukrainian soldiers depend not just on the funds for military aid but on specific types of weapons. President Zelenskyy has spent recent months lobbying in the west for his “victory plan”, which would involve the US providing long-range missiles to Ukraine, which could strike deep inside Russia – something western powers have been reluctant to approve. His argument is that this may not just turn the tide on the battlefield, but take away the burden from those suffering the most – Ukrainian infantry. Without that, the Ukrainian army is left to rely on exhausted footsoldiers. Whether or not this plan has any chance of progressing will depend in large part on who wins next week.Right after landing in New York, a US colleague asked me if “it was all over for Ukraine if it didn’t receive US assistance after the elections”. I was puzzled by the way the question was asked. I explained that it might be extremely difficult to preserve the lives of Ukrainians if, say, Trump is elected, but it wouldn’t mean the Ukrainian army will stop trying to defend its fellow citizens or simply give up.Travelling from one swing state to another, I detected an extreme sense of anxiety among many Americans. It was so palpable, I felt the need to comfort them. Whatever happens, on the morning of 6 November, life in Ukraine will go on. The same will be true in the US. But it doesn’t mean things will be easy. Ukrainians have learned in recent years that worrying can be a luxury; the best option is to commit yourself to working hard to avoid the worst-case scenario, and fighting for what’s right.

      Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist and CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Lab

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      Threats, racism, misogyny: Trump’s disturbing final week of campaigning

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      There was racism and misogyny by the bucketload. There was a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman. And there was the extraordinary sight of a Republican candidate for president of the United States playing dress-up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck.Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre.With his vitriolic rants and threats of violent revenge against political enemies increasing in intensity, it was hard to set aside Democratic rival Kamala Harris’s closing argument that the former president is “unstable and unhinged”.The former president’s extremist promise to unleash the military against those he considers “the enemy from within” – he named leading Democrats including ex-speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Adam Schiff among them – was unprecedented.And yet it was swiftly eclipsed by this week’s other developments.It will be up to voters next week to decide whether any of it ultimately matters, at least in terms of who occupies the White House for the next four years. But history will record the waning days of the 2024 presidential campaign to be like no previous election, with one candidate leaning so heavily into an agenda of hate and menace, and his acolytes attempting variously to deny, distract from or clean up his remarks.The carousel began spinning on Sunday when Trump hosted a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where 85 years earlier American Nazis wearing swastikas had gathered months ahead of the outbreak of the second world war. Before Trump even took the stage there was controversy when a comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, delivered a line that was to become the dominant theme of the following days.“There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” he said, failing to elicit laughs from an audience of 20,000.The backlash was immediate and ferocious. Republicans joined Democrats in condemning the racist “joke”, while Trump embarked on a mission to try to turn the situation to his advantage.There was no apology, of course. Though, at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Trump insisted “nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do”, and that the Madison Square Garden event, notable for its deluge of anger, profanity and racism directed at immigrants and Democrats by a succession of speakers, was “a love fest”, and that “the love was unbelievable”.Pennsylvania’s 472,000 Puerto Ricans, many of whom recall Trump withholding disaster relief funds and patronizingly tossing paper towels at desperate citizens after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, saw it differently.View image in fullscreen“This is not the first time that our Puerto Rican community feels disrespected,” Philadelphia voter Yemele Ayala, told the Guardian. “We’re not taking that lightly.”Joe Biden became caught in the maelstrom the same day when a comment he made about “garbage” was construed by the Trump camp as an attack on their candidate’s supporters. What the president intended to say was still under scrutiny on Friday as it emerged the White House had altered the official transcript of his remarks.But the episode also gave rise to the stunt that would provide the defining image of the week, and probably its most ludicrous: Trump in a DayGlo safety vest, demanding of reporters, “Do you like my garbage truck?” before the vehicle emblazoned with his campaign logo was driven in circles around a Wisconsin parking lot in an apparent attempt to show it would be its passenger “taking out the trash” on 5 November, and not his Democratic opponent.Other examples of Trump’s bitter disdain for those who stand up to him, as well as his flagrant misogyny, came to the fore as the week wore on.In Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Wednesday night, addressing reproductive rights, he attempted to portray himself as a “protector” of women, despite dozens of claims of sexual assault against him, and a judge’s ruling adjudicating him a rapist.“Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them,” he said, drawing an instant rebuke from Harris.The vice-president, meanwhile, became Trump’s target in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the rightwing extremist and disgraced former Fox News host, in Glendale, Arizona, on Thursday night. Harris, he insisted, was “a low-IQ individual”, and “dumb as a rock”, as he repeated previous slurs against his opponent.The biggest talking point from the Carlson interview, however, was Trump declaring the Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney a “radical war hawk” and saying he would like to see multiple guns pointed at her.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said of a politician who has campaigned with and for Harris. Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, said on Friday she was investigating the comments to see if they amounted to a death threat.In response to Trump, Cheney warned the public of the dangers of a dictatorship and said he “wants to be a tyrant”. Not for the first time this week, his representatives spent much of the day insisting to the media that Trump’s meaning was different from what he said.Trump’s post to his Truth Social network later in the day repeated the same criticisms of Cheney but, conspicuously, omitted any reference to weapons being pointed at her.Harris will make her own closing pitches over the weekend, but left no doubt about her position on Trump’s behavior as she addressed reporters in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday afternoon.“Anyone who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly disqualified and unqualified to be president,” she said.“Donald Trump is someone who considers his political opponents the enemy, is permanently out for revenge, and is increasingly unstable and unhinged.” More

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      US election live: Harris says Trump’s violent rhetoric about Liz Cheney ‘must be disqualifying’

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      Kamala Harris spoke of Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric about Liz Cheney in which he suggested Cheney be shot with “guns trained on her face”.Harris said:
      “He has increased his violent rhetoric, Donald Trump has, about political opponents and in great detail suggested rifles should be trained on former representative Liz Cheney. This must be disqualifying.”
      Hailing Cheney as a “courageous” and “incredible American”, Harris added:
      “I will tell you, I know Liz Cheney well enough to know that she is tough, she is incredibly courageous, and has shown herself to be a true patriot at a very difficult time in our country …
      We see this kind of rhetoric that is violent in nature, where we see this kind of spirit coming from Donald Trump that is so laden with the desire for revenge and retribution … I think that Liz Cheney is courageous and that we will always make sure that we are all fighting against and speaking out against any form of political violence.”
      Trump is now criticizing “Shawn Fain or whatever the hell his name is,” the president of the United Auto Workers, who is campaigning or Kamala Harris. The crowd boos.Trump says he can’t sleep easily and that he’s “always tossing and turning” thinking about China and the “Russia hoax” and how to make money for the American people.“I don’t feel like a senior. Does anybody feel like a senior?” Trump, 78, says, to some cheers. “I feel better – I think I’m sharper and better now than I was 25, 30 years ago. I do, I swear. I’ll let you know when I don’t.”Trump gives an update on sales of “Dark Maga” merchandise: Trump was talking about Elon Musk, and what role the billionaire will play in cutting government spending in a Trump administration. “You know where he is right now? He’s campaigning in Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. How cool is that,” Trump said.At one rally, Musk appeared and wore a “Dark Maga” black hat, Trump said, that the Republican candidate hadn’t even been aware his campaign made. That hat hadn’t sold well, maybe two hats, Trump said, until Musk wore it. Then the campaign sales of those hats took off.“They sold 71,000 black hats, can you believe it?” Trump says. “You make money with money, that’s how it is.”“But now that very low-IQ person who wants to be – have we ever had a low-IQ president before?” Trump asks of Kamala Harris.“It’s like your high school football team playing … what’s a good team today … oh, the Detroit Lions,” Trump tells his Michigan audience. He tells them Kamala Harris wouldn’t have been able to figure out which local sports team to reference.In a post on Truth Social, Trump appeared to be trying to walk back his comments about how Liz Cheney, one of his most prominent Republican critics, should face having rifles “shooting at her”.His comments yesterday have been widely condemned, including by Cheney and Kamala Harris, and are also under investigation by Arizona’s attorney general.“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said of Liz Cheney at an event in Arizona. Then said: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”“We love everybody right?” Trump says. He drops his voice. “No, we don’t.”Then Trump launches into an attack on Kamala Harris’s message of unity, a central part of her approach.“What about her, she’s always talking about, ‘You know I want to bring the country together, Trump is Hitler, ah, excuse me I shouldn’t have said that,’” Trump says, in a voice imitating Harris.He goes on with the imitation. “‘We want to get together as a country,’ ‘They’re all racists, they’re all this, they’re all that, but we want to have peace, and we want to get along.’”Trump tells his supporters that “the fake news” won’t even report on the bad jobs numbers. If you’re curious how just how false that claim is, you can Google it:Trump is now discussing the underwhelming economic numbers for last month.“This is not good news for them,” he says, of Harris and the Democrats. “How would you like to have an election in four days?”Some experts agree with Trump on this one:“You know, there are those that say that if we don’t win this election you may never have another election in this country … with these radical left lunatics that we’re dealing with,” Trump says.As you recall, Trump himself actually sparked this conversation over whether there might not be elections in the future, because of what he said to Christian voters earlier this year:Trump is now talking about the 2020 Democratic primary, talking about how early Kamala Harris dropped out and revisiting his rude nicknames for various Democratic presidential candidates from the previous election cycle, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.“This will be America’s new golden age,” Trump pledges. “Every problem facing us can be solved, and it’s going to be solved quickly.”Abortion rights advocates are mourning the loss of Nevaeh Crain, an 18-year-old pregnant teenager from Texas who died in October 2023 after three emergency room visits as she sought care for intense abdominal pain.ProPublica’s reporting on Crain, who would have turned 20 today, underscored the potentially fatal threat posed by abortion bans, argued Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All.“Pregnancy should not be a death sentence. Nevaeh Crain should be here, celebrating her 20th birthday today,” Timmaraju said in a statement.Timmaraju placed the blame for abortion bans on the shoulders of Republican politicians like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the incumbent senator who is facing a tough re-election fight against Democrat Collin Allred in Texas.“This has to stop,” she said. “And our best chance to do that is to vote for reproductive freedom, from vice-president Harris to Colin Allred and all the way down the ticket, so we can restore the right to abortion and end these bans.”“It seems so poignant,” Trump says, of the question he keeps asking, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The crowd roars: “No!”“We’re going to miss these rallies aren’t we?” Trump says onstage in Michigan, but promises his supporters that when he is back in the White House, the spirit of the rallies will continue in a different form.His supporters will someday look back and realize, “there was something very, very, special about what we all did together,” Trump says, speaking of his rallies. He also speculates about few people future presidential candidates will draw to their rallies.“This has been the thrill of a lifetime for me, and for you, and for everybody,” Trump says.The White House pool report has an amusing detail from Janesville for the punctuation nerds: Someone behind Harris on the stage was holding a “,la” sign (comma “la”), which is the proper pronunciation of her name. More

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      What to know about early voting and mail-in ballots

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      The US election is under way across the country, and so far more than 68.3 million people have voted early, according to the University of Florida’s election lab.In numerous states, the push to vote before election day, whether by mail or in-person, has amounted to an unprecedented wave of early voting.More than 97,000 voted on Wisconsin’s first day of early, in-person voting – an “unheard of” level of turnout, wrote the state elections commissioner, Ann Jacobs, on Twitter/X. On 15 October, Georgia’s first day of early voting, the state “shattered records”, according to the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. By 23 October, more than 1.9 million people had cast a ballot there in-person or by mail. And in North Carolina, which had been devastated by Hurricane Helene just weeks earlier, more than 353,000 voters turned out to cast a ballot early on 18 October – another state record. By 23 October, more than 1.7 million had voted in the election.Voting early in-person or absentee allows voters some flexibility in their schedule – by casting a ballot early, they can avoid contending with bad weather, long lines or unexpected scheduling conflicts on election day.What is early voting?States – with the exception of Mississippi, New Hampshire and Alabama – offer all voters the opportunity to cast a ballot in person at a polling place ahead of election day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In those places, registered voters can head to their polling location within the early voting time frame and cast a ballot early. Most states begin counting those ballots on election day, and some require officials to wait until polls are closed to begin counting. Some states offer a version of early voting called “in-person absentee” voting, in which a voter can obtain and submit an absentee ballot in person at a polling place before election day.What about absentee voting?Most states allow for some form of absentee voting, in which a voter requests a ballot ahead of time, which officials then send to them in the mail to fill out and return by mail. Some jurisdictions offer voters the option of returning absentee ballots to a secured dropbox. Fourteen states require an excuse for voters to cast a ballot by mail, such as an illness or work scheduling conflict. Eight states practice “all-mail” elections – in those places, all registered voters receive a ballot in the mail, whether or not they plan to use it.Federal law requires states to send absentee ballots to military voters and voters overseas.States regulate the “processing” and counting of absentee ballots; most states allow officials to immediately process ballots, which typically entails verifying the signature on the ballot with the voter’s signature from when they registered to vote. Other states require officials to wait until election day to begin processing ballots – which can slow the release of election results.When does early and absentee voting start this year, and how do I do it?The first ballots of the general election have already been sent to voters in states including Wisconsin and Maryland, and to some eligible voters in Alabama. Mail voting has stalled in North Carolina, where a legal battle over whether or not Robert F Kennedy Jr can appear on the ballot has slowed the process. By 21 September, election officials in many states will have begun sending out absentee ballots. The specific dates, locations and rules surrounding early and absentee voting vary by state, county and even municipality. First confirm that you are registered to vote and then contact your local election office or check their website for details about early and absentee voting.Who votes early and by mail, and does it benefit one party over the other?Research suggests that before 2020, implementing voting by mail did not benefit one party more than another. But in 2020, with the pandemic raging, Democrats urged people to vote by mail to avoid exposure to Covid, and fought legal battles to expand absentee voting in states where the practice had not already been widely adopted. Meanwhile, in the months ahead of the election, Donald Trump claimed falsely that the process was rife with fraud, probably scaring Republican voters away from the remote option. In the end, Democrats saw gains during the 2020 general election in counties that used mail-in voting, according to data from the Guardian and ProPublica. In the wake of the 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats outperformed expectations and maintained control of the Senate, Republicans began to reverse course on voting early – and have continued to advocate for voters to embrace the process since then. The reversal appears to have had an impact: in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, Republicans had outpaced Democrats slightly in early voting turnout by 23 October, according to data collected by the Associated Press.Is it safe to vote by mail?Mail voting is considered extremely secure in the US, and instances of fraud in mail voting are vanishingly rare. In a 2020 column, the elections expert Rick Hasen noted that between 2000 and 2012, there were fewer than 500 examples of vote-by-mail fraud, out of billions of votes cast. (As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, this makes mail-in voting fraud less likely than being struck by lightning). While mail-in voting fraud is extremely rare, election officials across the country have raised concerns about postal delays that could result in eligible voters’ ballots reaching election clerks after the deadline to count their ballots. More