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      US 2020 election could have the highest rate of voter turnout since 1908

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      More than 50 million Americans have cast ballots in the US presidential election with 11 days to go in the campaign, a pace that could lead to the highest voter turnout in over a century, according to data from the US Elections Project on Friday.The eye-popping figure is a sign of intense interest in the contest between Republican Donald Trump and Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger, as well as Americans’ desire to reduce their risk of exposure to Covid-19, which has killed more than 221,000 people across the United States.Many states have expanded in-person early voting and mail-in ballots ahead of election day on 3 November, as a safer way to vote during the coronavirus pandemic.The high level of early voting has led Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who administers the US Elections Project, to predict a record turnout of about 150 million, representing 65% of eligible voters, the highest rate since 1908.In Texas, the level of voting has already surpassed 70% of the total turnout in 2016. In Georgia, some have waited in line for more than 10 hours to cast their ballots. And Wisconsin has seen a record number of early votes, with 1.1 million people having returned their ballots as of this week. Voters in Virginia, Ohio and Georgia have also seen long lines at early voting sites. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden’s pledge to ‘transition’ from oil draws praise – and Republicans’ anger

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      Conservatives say Biden’s comments likely to lose support from Democratic supporters in oil-producing areasJoe Biden’s promise to “transition” away from the oil industry during Thursday’s presidential debate has caused uproar among conservatives while being praised by environmentalists as being a candid acknowledgment of the scale of the climate crisis. Related: Mitch McConnell says he has no health concerns after photos show bruising Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      Trump v Biden: the key moments of the final presidential debate – video highlights

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      Joe Biden and Donald Trump have gone head-to-head for the last time before the US election on 3 November in the final television debate, helped by a mute button on the candidates’ microphones that prevented interruptions.
      Squaring off in Nashville, Biden had to field aggressive questioning about his son’s business dealings and when Trump compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, the challenger branded his opponent ‘one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history’. Here is a look back at the key moments
      The final presidential debate – as it happened
      Troubled Florida, divided America: will Donald Trump hold this vital swing state? – video
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      in US Politics

      ‘What did we all do?’: why women who voted for Trump could decide the 2020 election

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      When Sandy Orth reads 2 Timothy 3 in the Bible, which advises good Christians to steer clear of “lovers of themselves, lovers of money, [the] boastful, proud, abusive”, the first person she is reminded of is the US president.Orth, an evangelical Christian from the suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but will be voting for his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, in 2020.“As a lifelong Republican I was willing to give him a chance and was hoping he would be humbled by the position, but that didn’t happen,” Orth told the Guardian.The 77-year-old could help fuel what is expected to be the largest gender gap in any presidential election in US history. White women in particular appear to be moving away from Trump, while men seem to be sticking by him.Orth’s vote will also have an outsized importance because she is in a state which Trump flipped in 2016 after it twice elected Barack Obama. It was assumed Trump would carry Iowa again this time around, but recent polls have showed a much closer race than anticipated.Trump is specifically struggling with Iowa’s women. In a CBS News/YouGov poll of 1,048 Iowa voters conducted on 6-9 October, Biden had an 11-percentage-point advantage among women compared with Trump. In a Quinnipiac University poll of 1,205 Iowa voters conducted on 1-5 October Biden had a 26-point advantage among women compared with Trump – one of the biggest differences found in any state.The president, meanwhile, has responded to the polls by both bullying and begging suburban women to support him.Nationally, CNN’s Harry Enten said Biden was up by 25 points among female voters based on an analysis last week of five live interview polls. That is the largest lead a candidate has ever had among women voters in the polling era.In Pennsylvania on 13 October, Trump asked: “Suburban women, will you please like me?” On 17 October in Michigan, he implored: “I saved your suburbs – women – suburban women, you’re supposed to love Trump.” And the next day in Nevada, Trump begged: “Suburban women, please vote for me. I’m saving your house. I’m saving your community. I’m keeping your crime way down.”These half-hearted pleas are about three years too late for voters like Becky, who lives in a suburb of Des Moines and asked for her last name not to be used because she was worried about being targeted for her opinions.It didn’t take the 63-year-old long to regret her vote for Donald Trump, who she wanted out of office within weeks of him becoming president.As a lifelong Republican I was willing to give him a chance and was hoping he would be humbled by the position, but that didn’t happen“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, what did I do? What did we all do? What would’ve been so bad about Hillary?’” Becky said. “He’s so good with his lies. He made you believe she was hiding her emails, doing all these things she shouldn’t be doing.”At this point, Becky can’t stand the president and laughed before calling him the antichrist.“That’s how badly I feel about him,” she said. “If we don’t get him out, we’re in a load of trouble here.”Becky, who is registered independent but usually votes Democrat, is not a huge Joe Biden fan either though she likes his vice-president nominee, Kamala Harris. A yard sign tucked away in her garage out of fear it will make her family the target of harassment or violence spells out her position for this election: “Anyone but Trump.”“Five years ago, you wouldn’t be afraid to say who you support,” she said. “It didn’t mean that you could get hurt or have your family hurt, but the divisiveness that he’s created, it’s crazy.”She has seen the divisiveness in her own family, where people have stopped speaking to each other because their support, or lack of, for Trump. Though one close female relative is also changing their vote from Trump to Biden.For Orth, it didn’t take long for her to make her decision about 2020. She reluctantly voted for Trump in 2016, deciding he was narrowly preferable to his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton.But Orth was soon upset with his behavior, which she said reminded her of a school bully. “It wasn’t just one thing that happened one day, it was kind of almost from the beginning that things weren’t looking good,” Orth said.Her list of problems with the president has since grown to include his disregard for the country’s relationship with its allies and the high number of his associates who are convicted criminals.A few months ago, she and a couple of friends tried to determine one good thing the president had done for the country – she still doesn’t have an answer.Her friends who do support Trump point to his unprecedented number of conservative judicial appointments, which could have the longest and most far-reaching impacts on people’s daily lives of any of his policies. “The fact that he appoints conservative judges doesn’t give him a pass in my mind for all the negative things,” Orth said.But Trump is not the only subject of Orth’s ire – she also feels betrayed by the Republican party she has supported for decades.“I am very upset and angry at how they have enabled Donald Trump to be such a bad president,” Orth said. “I blame them for a lot of things that are happening in this country too.”That’s another frustration she will be channeling at the ballot box. Orth plans to vote for the Democratic challenger in Iowa’s Senate race – one of the most closely contested Senate elections in the country in an election year that could see the chamber flip from red to blue.The incumbent Republican senator Joni Ernst’s run for re-election in Iowa is now considered a bellwether to see if Democrats can take the Senate despite Trump’s unpopularity. In the final weeks before the election, Republicans fearful of polling in Biden’s favor are trying to master the balance between keeping Trump supporters close while reeling back in the moderates drifting away.Ernst, the first woman Iowa sent to Congress, has largely stood by Trump through his first term and is in a closely contested race. Ernst polled one percentage point ahead of her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield, in a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Wednesday. But in the month before, Ernst trailed Greenfield in every poll.As Ernst’s predicament shows, no matter the result of the presidential election, Trump’s unpopularity presents a bigger question for the future of the Republican party.Biotech consultant Leslie Dow usually votes Republican and travels in conservative circles but she is so frustrated with the party for enabling Trump that she is also now the Democratic precinct chair in LeClaire, a small town on the Mississippi River.I want solutions that have a chance of doing somethingDow, 63, has always been engaged with specific issues, as a teenager fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, which would change the US constitution to ban discrimination on the basis of sex, and in support of Planned Parenthood. But it was the sexist treatment of Clinton in the 2016 election which galvanized her participation in electoral politics.“I don’t think I ever felt so alone as when I watched her go through that stuff,” Dow said. “I lost friends over it because they thought I was just being silly.”She doesn’t plan on sticking with the party, but is proud to support Biden.“I want solutions that have a chance of doing something,” Dow said. “And I feel like Biden has those because he’s a moderate and I am a moderate.”If the Democrats take the presidency and the Senate, Dow may remain involved with local party politics in the hopes of moderating some of their more liberal positions, but ultimately she hopes to be a part of rebuilding the Republican party.“I don’t think that’s the Republican party any more,” Dow said. “It’s the party of Trump.” More

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      in US Politics

      The final Trump-Biden presidential debate: five key takeaways

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      Trump tried to show he’s learned a few thingsIn the days leading up to the debate, Donald Trump’s advisers urged the president to stay calmer than he was at the first presidential debate in Cleveland last month, when he was widely criticized for repeatedly and aggressively interrupting his Democratic presidential rival, Joe Biden.The president, who trails his rival in national polls, accomplished that, though it was a low bar. He interrupted the former vice-president less and he didn’t feud with the moderator, the NBC journalist Kristen Welker, as much. He even followed the debate rules of letting Biden talk when it was Biden’s turn – for the most part.Much of the credit for that control went to Welker herself. Trump, who has been attempting to appeal to female voters who have been turning away from his campaign, praised Welker’s moderation (saying “thank you” and “I appreciate that”) despite spending the days leading up to the debate disparaging her.Trump also wanted to appeal to voters by applying his own experience contracting Covid-19 after the first debate, but with mixed results. He said he “learned a lot” about the disease when he contracted it, said – without evidence and contrary to the statements of public health experts – that a vaccine should be available in the coming weeks.“I take full responsibility. It’s not my fault that it came here, it’s China’s fault,” Trump said. More than 220,000 people have died in the US during the pandemic, and more than 8 million people have been affected – far more than any other country in the world.Foreign policy dominated the debateWhen Welker announced the debate topics, both Biden and Trump wanted to weigh in on foreign policy. But that’s where the common ground ended. Trump wanted to highlight unverified reports that Biden’s son Hunter was using his father’s influence to benefit himself and the Biden family. Biden was eager to talk about a secret bank account the president has kept in China.The attacks at moments mirrored each other.“You were getting a lot of money from Russia. They were paying you a lot of money and they probably still are,” Trump said at one point, without evidence.“What are you hiding? Why are you hiding?” Biden said at another point. “The foreign countries are paying you a lot.”Biden also wanted to frame Trump as a crony of strongmen dictators such as the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.BidencareFor most of the 2020 presidential campaign Biden has portrayed himself as a defender of his former boss’s signature legislation – Obamacare. But during Thursday night’s debate that changed. Biden advocated Obamacare “with a public option” – offering an expansion of existing public programs. “Call it ‘Bidencare’,” he said.Trump meanwhile refrained from offering what his own healthcare replacement plan would be, simply repeating that “Obamacare is no good”. Trump’s main argument on healthcare was to suggest – without evidence – that any alternative to gutting Obamacare, including anything Biden proposed, would “destroy” Medicare and social security, two wildly popular programs.Biden accuses Trump of fueling racismThe most heated exchanges of the night came when Welker steered the discussion toward racism in the US, which has become a key voting issue following the police killing of George Floyd, which sparked mass protests over the summer.Trump, as he often does, claimed that his record on race relations tops almost any other politician’s in American history, except for Abraham Lincoln. He ticked off his favorite points on how the Trump administration passed a criminal justice reform bill, increased funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and how African American unemployment had dipped under his leadership.But he said all of that in response to a question from Welker on racism in America, without directly answering the question. He also conspicuously never used the phrase “institutional racism” or pulled back from his previous criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.He was eager to attack Biden on the former vice-president’s support for a crime bill from two decades ago.Biden meanwhile went on the attack, mocking Trump by sarcastically calling him “Abraham Lincoln” before saying he’s “one of the most racist presidents in American history. He pours fuel on every single racist fire.”Family separationsTrump was most defensive when Welker asked both candidates about recent reports on family separations of undocumented immigrants. Specifically, Welker asked the candidates about more than 500 children who had been separated from their parents as part of the Trump administration’s push to deter immigration along the southern border. The United States has been unable to reunite those children with their parents.Trump didn’t offer a direct answer. Instead he claimed – wrongly – that many of the children were illegally brought into the country through cartels. He also said the Obama-Biden administration was to blame.“They built cages. They used to say I built the cages,” Trump said. He went on to say “we’re trying very hard” to reunite the children with their parents.Biden, on the other hand, called the practice “criminal” and said “they separated them at the border to make it a disincentive to come to begin with”.The former vice-president added: “It makes us a laughing stock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”Moving the dial?Trump’s response to the pandemic and its economic fallout has seen his poll numbers drop, and the president needed to reset his appeal with the coalition of supporters who propelled him to the White House in 2016. But, despite his slightly calmer demeanor, it’s unclear whether he achieved that.Biden was perceived as the winner of the final debate, according to a quick CNN poll of debate viewers and a panel of undecided North Carolina voters. More

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      in US Politics

      A much calmer affair – so who won US presidential debate night?: Politics Weekly Extra

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      As the two US presidential candidates left the stage in Tennessee after the final debate of the campaign, Jonathan Freedland and Richard Wolffe talk through the biggest moments of the night

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off for the final time before the US presidential election, in a debate where the mute button was very much the deciding factor. The stage was set in Nashville, Tennessee, and many wondered, hoped, and maybe prayed that we would see a kinder, more civilised approach to debating in comparison with the chaos-fest many of us endured first time around three weeks ago … but did we get it? With Jonathan Freedland to talk through it all, once again, is fellow Guardian columnist from across the Atlantic, Richard Wolffe. Let us know what you think of the podcast. Send your feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      in Elections

      Humanity has eight years to get climate crisis under control – and Trump's plan won't fix it

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      In Donald Trump’s world – laid bare during Thursday night’s final presidential debate with his Democratic rival Joe Biden in Nashville – fossil fuels are “very clean”, the US has the best air and water despite his administration’s extensive regulatory rollbacks, and the country can fix climate change by planting trees.
      But according to the harsh realities being laid out by climate scientists, Trump’s world does not exist.
      Humanity has just eight years to figure out how to get climate change under control before the future starts to look drastically worse – multiple-degree temperature increases, global sea-level rise, and increasingly disastrous wildfires, hurricanes, floods and droughts. Doing so will mean that unless there is a technological miracle, humans will at some point have to stop burning oil, gas and coal.
      “We’re told by all the leading scientists in the world we don’t have much time,” Biden said. “We’re going to pass the point of no return within the next eight to 10 years. Four more years of this man … will put us in a position where we’ll be in real trouble,” the former vice-president said.
      Much of the media coverage of the exchange – which as usual didn’t come until the end of the debate as time was running out – will probably focus on Trump’s attacks on Biden. He called his plan job-killing, argued it would cost $100tn and not $6tn, and accused Biden of flip-flopping on fracking. The drilling method has fueled a natural gas boom in swing states such as Pennsylvania, which both candidates see as critically important to winning the election. At one point, Biden dared Trump to publish evidence of him ever saying he would end fracking, and Trump promised he would.
      Stories might quote Trump, who has denied the human-made climate crisis in a variety of strange ways, telling Biden “I know more about wind than you,” despite previously wrongly claiming wind power causes cancer. “They want to take buildings down because they want to make bigger windows into smaller windows. As far as they’re concerned if you had no window it would be a lovely thing,” Trump accused in another tangent. “This is the craziest plan that anyone has ever seen. It wasn’t done by smart people. Frankly, I don’t know how it could be good politically.”
      But perhaps the most interesting point was when the candidates were asked what they would do for people – often people of color – who are living next to polluting gasoline refineries and petrochemical plants.
      Trump pressed Biden: “Would you close down the oil industry?”
      And Biden, who might typically steer clear of such a politically controversial question, said he would.
      “I would transition from the oil industry, yes,” Biden said.
      “The oil industry pollutes significantly,” he added. “It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time.”
      Trump shot back that Biden “is saying is he would destroy the oil industry”.
      “Would you remember that Texas? Would you remember that Pennsylvania? Oklahoma? Ohio?”

      The moment was notable, including because it was the opposite of what he said about natural gas. He would not commit to any kind of end to the second half of the industry which has a fast-growing role in causing climate change.
      “We need other industries to transition to get to ultimately a complete zero-emissions,” Biden said. “What I will do with fracking over time is to make sure we will capture the emissions from the fracking, capture the emissions from gas. We can do that by investing money.”
      Speaking to reporters after the debate, Biden insisted the fossil fuel industry wouldn’t “be gone” until 2050.
      “We’re not getting rid of fossil fuels. We’re getting rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels, but we’re not getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time,” Biden said.
      Those kinds of statements illuminate why American environmental advocates have quietly worried whether Biden will do enough on climate, even as they have endorsed him and backed his plan.
      While Biden is pitching large-scale spending to both help the economy recover and put people to work in green jobs, some fear climate could get lost among his priorities or that the political roadblocks to working with Congress and getting climate efforts past a conservative supreme court would prove too difficult.
      A Trump win could be devastating to both US and global climate action, but a Biden win is not assured to significantly address the challenge either. More

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      in Elections

      Biden and Trump diverge sharply on major issues in final presidential debate

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      The Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden assailed Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic during Thursday night’s final presidential debate, as the president attempted to reset a race that shows him trailing his opponent in opinion polls less than two weeks before election day.
      The evening in Nashville began relatively calmly, with the rivals making their closing arguments to the nation amid a pandemic that has killed more than 220,000 Americans and infected millions more, including the president. In part due to the pandemic, more than 40 million Americans have already cast their ballot, shattering records and leaving Trump an increasingly narrow window to reset the debate around his handling of the coronavirus crisis and its economic fallout.
      But Trump continued to downplay the severity of the public health crisis, defending his response and predicting that a vaccine was imminent, even though his own public health experts have said one would likely not be widely available to the American public until next summer.
      “It will go away,” Trump said, offering a rosy assessment of the pandemic’s trajectory even as cases have started rising again across the US and public health experts warn that the US is on the precipice of a dangerous new wave.
      “We’re rounding the corner,” he added.
      “We can’t keep this country closed. This is a massive country with a massive economy,” Trump said. “There’s depression, alcohol, drugs at a level nobody’s ever seen before. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”
      In contrast, Biden opened his remarks by acknowledging the grim toll of the coronavirus pandemic and warned that the nation must prepare for “a dark winter”.
      Biden said: “220,000 deaths. If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States.”

      The 90-minute debate was a far more coherent and civil affair than the first presidential debate last month, which devolved into a chaotic brawl with Trump incessantly hectoring his opponent and sparring with the moderator. The shift in tone was probably due to a rule change that required a candidate’s microphone to be muted while his rival delivered a two-minute response to the opening question on each of the six debate topics.
      On Thursday, Trump largely abided by the rules, allowing Biden to speak uninterrupted, and even complimenting the moderator, the NBC News correspondent Kristen Welker, who he spent the last week criticizing.
      Biden, too, was more restrained. When Trump made a false claim about his opponent, Biden looked skyward, as if calling on a higher power to keep him from reacting. But it didn’t always stop him.
      When Trump said Biden called his decision to impose Covid-19 related travel restrictions on China “xenophobic”, the Democrat shot back: “He is xenophobic, but not because he cut off access from China.”
      The stakes were high for both candidates, even if the debate was unlikely to dramatically redefine the contours of the presidential race. Despite the cascading public health and economic crises, Biden has maintained a steady lead over the incumbent, according to public opinion polls, while Trump has struggled to outline his vision for a second term and grapple with voters’ disapproval of his response to the pandemic.
      Despite the increasingly ugly and personal nature of the campaign, the evening featured a substantive policy debate as the candidates diverged sharply on the issues of race, immigration and climate.

      They were asked to speak directly to the black and brown Americans about racism in America. Biden said plainly that institutional racism exists and that combatting racial inequality would be a priority of his administration. Trump, ignoring the prompt, assailed his opponent for playing a central role writing the 1994 crime bill that many experts and critics say laid the groundwork for mass incarceration that disproportionately affected Black communities. Shielding his eyes to peer into the audience and concluding it was too dark to see properly, Trump was nonetheless confident that he was the “least racist person in this room”.
      Biden was incredulous. “This guy has a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn,” he said, accusing Trump of being “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history” and a leader who intentionally “pours fuel on every single racist fire”.
      In an exchange on immigration, Trump attempted to defend his administration’s decision to separate thousands of immigrant families at the southern border, even after revelations that 545 children have still not been reunited with their parents after two years apart. The president said the White House was working on a plan to reunite the children and their parents but insisted the blame lay with the Obama administration, which enforced a record number of deportations.
      Biden forcefully denied that the previous administration was responsible for Trump’s family separation policy, decrying the situation as “criminal”.
      But pressed on why voters should trust him to deliver immigration reform when the Obama administration failed to deliver on this promise, he conceded: “we made a mistake. It took too long to get it right.”

      The final moments of the debate were devoted to a discussion on climate change. Biden stressed the need to expand sources of renewable energy – while again disputing Trump’s claim that he intended to ban fracking, which he does not.
      “I know more about wind than you do,” Trump retorted, drawing an exasperated laugh from Biden. “It’s extremely expensive. Kills all the birds.”
      But at one point Biden said he would “transition from the oil industry” and replace it with renewable energy over the next several years. “That’s a big statement,” Trump said.
      Departing Nashville after the debate, Biden sought to clarify the remark: “We’re not getting rid of fossil fuels. We’re getting rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels.”

      The candidates also clashed sharply on their finances and family business entanglements.
      Citing revelations in the New York Times that Trump only paid $750 a year in federal income taxes while maintaining an undisclosed bank account in China, Biden implored Trump to “release your tax returns or stop talking about corruption”. Trump, who has not yet released his tax returns, claimed his accountants told him that he had “prepaid tens of millions of dollars” in taxes.
      In turn, Trump repeatedly leveled unsubstantiated claims about the former vice-president’s son Hunter Biden. The Democratic nominee defended his son and categorically denied the accusations as he sought to turn the conversation back to policy.
      “There’s a reason why he’s bringing up all this malarkey,” Biden said, speaking directly to the camera. “He doesn’t want to talk about the substantive issues. It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family.” More