Kamala Harris

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      Which celebrities have endorsed Kamala Harris and Donald Trump? Here are the biggest names

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      It is debatable what effect celebrity endorsements have on voters, but candidates always welcome them. Here are the highly contrasting groups of A-listers who have endorsed Kamala Harris and Donald Trump:Kamala HarrisBeyoncéView image in fullscreenThe music megastar spoke at a Harris rally in her hometown of Houston just days ago. To the 30,000-strong crowd, Beyoncé said: “I’m not here as a celebrity, I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother … Imagine our daughters growing up seeing what’s possible with no ceilings, no limitations. …We must vote, and we need you.”Taylor SwiftView image in fullscreenThe pop phenom endorsed the Democratic nominee just minutes after the presidential debate in September between Harris and Trump. In an Instagram post published to her 283 million followers, Swift said: “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election … I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”Bruce SpringsteenView image in fullscreenAt a Harris rally last month in Philadelphia, “the Boss” performed his 1978 The Promised Land and said: “Now, I understand folks have different opinions about things, but this election is about a group of folks who want to fundamentally undermine our American way of life … On November 5, I’m casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – and I urge all of you who believe in the American dream to join me.”Stevie WonderView image in fullscreenThe legendary singer endorsed Harris at the Democratic national convention (DNC), saying: “This is a moment to tell your children where you were and what you did. … When we stand between history’s pain and tomorrow’s promises, we must choose courage over complacency.” The 74-year old also appeared in a Harris ad alongside filmdirector Spike Lee.Willie NelsonView image in fullscreenCountry-music original “outlaw” Nelson, 91, performed at Harris’s Houston rally where Beyoncé spoke. Wearing a colorful Harris-Walz shirt, Nelson rallied the crowd with: “Are we ready to say Madame President?”Oprah WinfreyView image in fullscreenThe billionaire multimedia executive and former talkshow host was a star of the DNC. Winfrey, who previously endorsed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, swooped in, saying: “Soon, and very soon, we’re going to be teaching our daughters and sons about how this child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, two idealistic, energetic immigrants … grew up to become the 47th president of the United States.”Julia RobertsView image in fullscreenIn a new ad last month, the enduring Hollywood A-lister urged the spouses of male supporters of Donald Trump to vote for Harris, saying: “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know … Remember, what happens in the booth, stays in the booth. Vote Harris-Walz.” Kerry WashingtonView image in fullscreenWashington once played the White House communications director on the ABC TV show Scandal. She campaigned for Harris last month in Wisconsin. “You here in Wisconsin have the capacity to save the soul of this country, to really stand between us and a man who has said that he wants to be a dictator on day one, to stand between us and a man who said he wants generals more like Hitler’s generals,” Washington said to a gathering of Black women.Julia Louis-DreyfusView image in fullscreenThe Veep star endorsed Harris by making a distinction between her fictional vice-presidential character, Selina Meyer, and Harris. Dreyfus said to MSNBC: “Now, I do want to say one thing about the character I play on Veep… I play a very, shall we say, almost narcissistic, sociopathic, mega-maniacal type of person … I am not a Kamala Harris type. I am possibly much more like someone from the other party whose name I shall not even utter.”Jennifer LopezView image in fullscreenJennifer Lopez took to the rally stage in Las Vegas on Thursday to endorse Harris. In a 13-minute speech, Lopez, who is Puerto Rican, railed against comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist remarks about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally last weekend in New York. She said: “It wasn’t just Puerto Ricans that were offended that day, it was every Latino in this country, it was humanity and anyone of decent character … There is no candidate in the history of the presidency that is more qualified and there is no job that Kamala Harris can’t do.”EminemView image in fullscreenThe Detroit rapper and longtime critic of Donald Trump told a Harris rally in his home town: “I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution, of what people will do if you make your opinion known. I think Vice-President Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld.”Megan Thee StallionView image in fullscreenAn early endorser, the rapper spoke in Atlantain July, saying: “I want to start off by saying: hotties for Harris.” Performing a compilation of hit songs, the 29-year-old singer said: “We about to make history with the first female president, the first Black female president.”Bad BunnyView image in fullscreenThe Puerto Rican music star leapt onto Instagram straight after Hinchcliffe’s racist remarks.He posted about Harris criticizing Trump over his handling of relief efforts after Hurricanes Irma and Maria that devastated the island territory in 2017, where she said: “I will never forget what Donald Trump did and what he did not do when Puerto Rico needed a caring and a competent leader.”Samuel L JacksonView image in fullscreenAddressing a rally of more than 20,000 people in Atlanta last month, the Hollywood A-lister said that Harris is “running on a proven track record of fighting for the people, standing up to bullies, protecting the most vulnerable and taking on the toughest fights… That’s the kind of president I can stand behind.”Magic JohnsonView image in fullscreenThe former basketball star rallied for Harris in Flint, Michigan, saying: “I’m here because I’ve known Kamala for over 20 years. Cookie [his wife] and I supported her run for attorney general back in the state of California, her run for senator, and now we support her as the vice-president but now the biggest moment for all of us, November 5, we have to do all we can to elect Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States.”UsherView image in fullscreenThe rapper said in Atlanta that he is endorsing Harris “because she fights for everyone’s rights, for freedom, and it doesn’t matter where you [are] from … She has a vision for our country that includes everyone, a vision that supports small businesses, invests in our health, in our communities, and gives everyone a chance to get ahead.”LizzoView image in fullscreenAnother Detroit native, the music star joined Harris there last month, jabbing at Trump’s comment that if Harris wins, the “whole country will end up being like Detroit”. Lizzo fired back: “Proud like Detroit; resilient like Detroit. We’re talking about the same Detroit that innovated the auto industry and the music industry, so put some respect on Detroit’s name.”Tyler PerryView image in fullscreenThe producer and actor endorsed Harris in Atlanta, Georgia last month, saying: “I stand here, full-throated, with my full chest, begging you, imploring you: let’s get out and make Kamala Harris the 47th president of the United States.” Perry also spoke of the exonerated Central Park Five men whom Donald Trump once urged to be executed, saying: “I’ve watched him, from the Central Park Five to Project 2025 … and what I realized is that in this Donald Trump America, there is no dream that looks like me.”Arnold SchwarzeneggerView image in fullscreenThe Terminator actor and former Republican governor of California endorsed Harris just days ago, saying: “I will always be an American before I am a Republican.” He said that if Trump wins, “it will just be four more years of bullshit with no results that makes us angrier and angrier, more divided, and more hateful”.LeBron JamesView image in fullscreenThe four-time NBA champion endorsed Kamala Harris just days ago by posting a video showing racist, anti-Hispanic comments made by both Trump and Hinchcliffe. In his caption, the Los Angeles Laker wrote: “What are we even talking about here?? When I think about my kids and my family and how they will grow up, the choice is clear to me. VOTE KAMALA HARRIS!!!”Cardi BView image in fullscreenCardi B, who previously defended Harris from political misogyny, spoke at her rally in Milwaukee on Friday. She revealed that she wasn’t going to vote – until Harris leapt in. “She changed my mind completely. I did not have faith in any candidate until she joined the race,” she said, adding of her own story: “Just like Kamala Harris, I too have been the underdog. I’ve been underestimated, my success belittled and discredited…Women have to work 10 times harder, perform 10 times better, and still, people question us, how we got to the top.” She called Trump a business “hustler” who doesn’t “believe women deserve rights.”Donald TrumpHulk HoganView image in fullscreenThe former wrestler who once endorsed Barack Obama has thrown his support behind Trump. Hogan told the Republican national convention that “as an entertainer”, he tried to stay detached from politics but he could “no longer stay silent” due to “everything that’s happened to our country over the past four years”, adding: “We never had it better than the Trump years.”Elon MuskView image in fullscreenThe world’s richest man has been something of an “October surprise”, jumping up and down at Trump rallies and, allegedly illegally, handing out $1m checks to supporters. The owner of X, Tesla and SpaceX is donating $75m to America Pac, his pro-Trump political action committee. At one rally, Musk said: “I’m dark, gothic Maga” – Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan.Kid RockView image in fullscreenIn an interview with Rolling Stone in May, the singer expressed his support for Trump, saying: “You think I like Trump because he’s a nice guy? … I’m not electing the deacon of a church. That motherfucker likes to win. He likes to cheat in his fucking golf game. I want that guy on my team. I want the guy who goes: “I’m going to fight with you.”YeView image in fullscreenIn February, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who visited Trump in the Oval Office during his presidency, was asked by paparazzi whether he still supports Trump. The rapper, who endorsed Trump in 2016, said: “Yeah, of course, it’s Trump all day.”Jon VoightView image in fullscreenThe 85-year-old actor, who was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2019 by Trump, has long expressed his support for the former president. “I’ve been the most outspoken supporter of Donald Trump in Hollywood,” Voight said in an interview with Variety in July. “I’ve been saying he’s the answer, the only answer,.”Mel GibsonView image in fullscreenLast month, the Braveheart actor was asked by a camera operator about who he was voting for, and he replied that Trump was “a good guess”. He said of Harris: “I know what it’ll be like if we let herin. And that ain’t good. Miserable track record. No policies to speak of. She’s got the IQ of a fence post.”Dr PhilView image in fullscreenThe television personality Phil McGraw appeared at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. He said: “Lord knows he doesn’t need me to stand up for him. He’s tough as an old army boot. He’s got lots of enemies, different groups that are scared, and between them, they have impeached him, indicted him, raided him, railroaded him, shot him and sued him. And where is he? He is still standing.”Dennis QuaidView image in fullscreenThe actor campaigned for Trump in Coachella valley, California, last month. Quaid, who played Ronald Reagan in a recent eponymous biopic as well as Bill Clinton in the 2010 film The Special Relationship, said that Trump is “my favorite president of the 21st century.”Roseanne BarrView image in fullscreenThe comedian endorsed Trump by describing him in 2013 as someone who “wraps his arms around us”, as well as a “mother bear”. In April, Barr posted a skit online in which she appeared to mock E Jean Carroll, the writer whom Trump was found liable by a New York civil court of sexually abusing. In the skit, Barr pretended to accuse Joe Biden of raping her 26 years ago in Bergdorf Goodman, in a parody of Carroll’s claim against Trump.Russell BrandView image in fullscreenIn an episode of his Stay Free with Russell Brand podcast in June, the actor and comedian expressed his support for the former president by saying: “They act as if a vote for Donald Trump is almost like you’re directly voting for Armageddon … But I’m starting to think that no, a greater threat to democracy is this kind of technological feudalism, that tells you that it cares about you and that it’s protecting vulnerable people, all the while increasing censorship, increasing the funding of wars, increasing the division between ordinary Americans.”Buzz AldrinView image in fullscreenThe second man to walk on the moon, the 94-year old former astronaut announced his endorsement for Trump last month, saying: “Under the first Trump administration, I was impressed to see how human space exploration was elevated, made a policy of high importance again…I believe the nation is best served by voting for Donald J Trump.” More

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      Trump’s alternate-reality ‘mirror world’, where only he can save America

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      For many observers of the coming presidential election, especially those overseas, Donald Trump and his Maga-infused Republican party represent a foreboding stress test for American democracy.Historians have weighed in with analysis that Trump now heads a movement close to fascism, Trump himself has spoken of “enemies within”, he and his followers held a mass rally of racist rhetoric in a New York city venue known for an infamous Nazi gathering before the second world war and his language has been tinged with violent imagery.Yet, in Trump’s world, and those of his followers and campaign surrogates, it is the Democrats who are to blame for the degraded discourse in American politics, their rhetoric a sign that they demonize the other side. It is Kamala Harris who is far outside the American mainstream. It is Joe Biden who is a Marxist. It is the Democratic party who plots a complete remaking of the American way of life. They are even, they argue, trying to take away Americans’ hamburgers.When millions of American Republicans vote on Tuesday they will believe that it is they – by casting their vote for Trump – who are the ones saving American democracy.The alternate reality “mirror world” that Trump has built for himself and his followers features them as the victims of their political opponents, despite Trump’s rampant use of insults and heated comments. And he casts himself as the savior from this persecution, again framing his election in the final days as he only able to fix the country that Democrats have broken, a retread of his 2016 slogan of “I alone can fix it”.The mirror world effect is a feature of the 2024 campaign – a place where Trump’s liabilities are twisted to become his opponents’, a place where he can call people names but it’s an outrage when others do, a place where Trump is saving democracy despite his attempts to overthrow an election.Perhaps no incident more clearly shows the way the same word can be twisted differently in this flipside America than the way a “garbage” gaffe played out this week.At a rally in Arizona last Thursday, Trump called the US a “garbage can” because of migrants, noting how he’d never used the term before to describe the country but that it was accurate, though he had previously said the people around Harris were “scum” and “absolute garbage.” Days later, at a Madison Square Garden rally filled with opening acts that lobbed insults and diatribes at perceived enemies, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”.Trump sought to distance himself from the comedian by saying he didn’t know him and by claiming that Puerto Ricans love him. “Every time I go outside I see somebody from Puerto Rico. They give me a hug and a kiss,” he told Fox host Sean Hannity. He hasn’t walked back his own comments on the whole country being garbage.President Joe Biden then said Trump supporters were “garbage”, though then clarified he specifically meant Hinchliffe, the comedian, and that a critical apostrophe should be added: that Trump supporter is garbage, not the lot of them. Kamala Harris also said she disagrees with calling Trump supporters names, focusing instead on the former president himself in her comments.Sensing an opportunity for a campaign stunt akin to manning the fryer at McDonald’s, Trump donned an orange vest and jumped into a Trump-branded garbage truck for a brief ride, then wore the vest throughout a speech, joking that the outfit made him look thinner.View image in fullscreen“Joe Biden’s comments were the direct result of Kamala’s decision to portray everyone who isn’t voting for her as evil and sub-human,” Trump said. “And we know it’s what they believe because look how they’ve treated you, like garbage.”Since then, he has called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ individual” and a “sleaze bag” and claimed she is “dumb as a rock”. He called Biden a “stupid bastard”. At a later rally, with some supporters on stage behind him in bright construction vests, Trump again brought up the “garbage” comment and said his supporters were “far higher quality” than Harris’ or Biden’s.Yet, in Trump’s words, he is simultaneously “running a campaign of positive solutions” while Harris is “running a campaign of hate.”Trump, talking to rightwing media personality Tucker Carlson on Thursday, explicitly laid out how one of his political opponents, former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, was a radical war hawk and should face rifles herself to see the consequences of US involvement in conflict abroad.“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,” he said.Cheney said the comments were indicative of how dictators destroy free countries. “They threaten those who speak against them with death,” Cheney said. “We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”It’s exactly the line of attack on Trump that Trump has twisted to say his opponents are using harsh language and calling him extreme names.“For the past nine years, Kamala and her party have called us racists, bigots, fascists, deplorable, irredeemables, and they call me Hitler … They’ve taken your money, they’ve thrown open our borders to criminals … They’ve sent our blood and treasure to fight in stupid foreign wars – This Tuesday is your chance to stand up and declare you are not going to take it anymore – VOTE!” he posted on Truth Social this week.Trump has also continued to claim the Democrats are a threat to democracy, a strategy he picked up this year as he faced a barrage of criminal charges related to his actions to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He has said these charges are the work of the Biden administration to hobble their political opponent during an election year, calling it “election interference”.This line of thinking is now a feature of his speeches, and his allies and supporters now often parrot it – that a vote for Trump is a vote to secure democracy. Despite these proclamations in his speeches, he is expected to declare victory whether he wins or not, and he and his allies are laying groundwork to challenge election results. He has called his political opponents the “enemy within” and threatened to prosecute them or use military force against them for nonspecific crimes, which has led even some of his former staffers to say he is a fascist. He and his allies have instead said comments about the existential threat Trump poses have led to assassination attempts against him. More

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      Everything you need to know about the 2024 US presidential election

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      The 60th US presidential election and will decide the 47th president – widely held to be the most powerful job in the world – and 50th vice-president. The candidates and their supporters are describing it as the most important election of their lifetimes with democracy and the American way of life are at stake. Record amounts of money have been raised and spent on campaign ads and ground games. Media coverage in print, on TV, online and on podcasts has never been more intense – or more polarised.All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs along with 34 of the 100 seats in the Senate, which together will decide the membership of the 119th Congress. Thirteen state and territorial governorships and numerous other state and local elections will take place.Voters in 41 states will consider a total of 159 ballot initiatives. Ten states including Arizona, Colorado and Florida have abortion-related measures on the ballot. 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      It no longer makes sense to talk solely about “election day”. Tens of millions of people have voted early by mail or in-person, thereby avoiding long queues, potential bad weather or other inconveniences. Georgia’s first day of early voting “shattered records”, according to state officials, while an “unheard of” 97,000-plus voted on day one in Wisconsin.Democrats encouraged people to vote by mail in 2020 to avoid exposure to Covid-19 during the pandemic and fought legal battles to expand absentee voting. Trump, by contrast, falsely claimed that the practice was rife with fraud (it is extremely rare), although Republicans have since changed their messaging and increasingly embraced it.With the exception of Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire, all states give voters the chance to cast a ballot in person at a polling place ahead of election day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.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.Most states offer some form of absentee voting, in which a voter requests a ballot in advance and returns it by mail. Some offer voters the option of returning absentee ballots to a secure dropbox. Eight states practice “all-mail” elections in which 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. Most states allow officials to immediately process absentee ballots but some require them to wait until election day to begin processing ballots – which can slow the release of election results.On election day, which is 5 November this year, everyone else goes to polling places to cast their vote. 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      Kamala Harris, 60, the current vice-president, won the Democratic party’s nomination after Joe Biden ended his re-election bid. She is a former senator, California attorney general and San Francisco prosecutor and is bidding to make history as the first woman and first woman of colour to be elected president in America’s 248-year history.Donald Trump, 78, the Republican nominee, is making make his third consecutive run for the White House. The businessman and reality TV star continues to repeat his false claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him. He is the first president to be impeached twice and convicted of a crime. Trump is also the oldest major party nominee in history and this summer survived two assassination attempts.Chase Oliver, 39, is the little-known candidate for the Libertarian party. Oliver ran for a Georgia state senate seat in 2022 and garnered 2% of the vote. The party, which prioritises small government and individual freedoms, typically gains 3% or less of the national vote but its members could yet prove crucial in swing states.Jill Stein, 74, a physician who ran under the Green party in 2016, is running again in 2024. She launched her current campaign accusing Democrats of betraying their promises “for working people, youth and the climate again and again – while Republicans don’t even make such promises in the first place”.Cornel West, 71, is running as an independent candidate. The political activist, philosopher and academic is making an effort to attract more progressive, Democratic-leaning voters.What are the paths to victory?@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) 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      Democrats have won the national popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections. But the Republicans George W Bush and Donald Trump won the White House by gaining more than 270 votes in the all-important electoral college.Each state counts its votes separately. With two exceptions – Nebraska and Maine – the winner of a state gets all of its electoral votes. Each state has a number of electors based on the number of congressional districts it has, plus two additional votes representing the state’s Senate seats. Washington DC has three electoral votes, despite having no voting representation in Congress.This year the electoral college will probably come down to seven crucial battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Harris and Trump campaigns are eyeing multiple combinations that could put them over the top.Pennsylvania, which carries 19 electoral college votes, is the ultimate prize and has been the focus of much campaigning. Along with Michigan and Wisconsin, it forms a “blue wall” won by Barack Obama, lost by Hillary Clinton and won by Joe Biden. Trump is targeting rural blue-collar voters; Harris is aiming to turn out Black voters in big cities.Losses in these states might be offset by victories in Arizona, where Trump has made gains among Latino voters; Nevada, the most diverse swing state; and Georgia, long a red state which Biden narrowly flipped in 2020. Republicans have won North Carolina in every election since 2012 but Democrats are running close this time.Democrats currently control the Senate but face a tough map this year. Democrats and senators who caucus with them currently occupy seven of the eight most competitive seats, including Montana and Ohio, which generally lean Republican.The House is likely to hinge on 42 of the most competitive elections. Republicans could retain control by winning just 12 of the 26 seats rated as toss-ups by the Cook Political Report if they also win seats deemed “likely” or “lean” Republican.What are the main issues that will decide the White House?@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) 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      Abortion. This is the first presidential election since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that enshrined the constitutional right to abortion. Many Republican-led states have since imposed total or near-total bans on the procedure. Harris has made reproductive rights and personal freedoms a rallying cry and backs a national law codifying access to safe abortion. Trump has struggled to find his footing on the issue, insisting that it is a state matter and belatedly ruling out a national ban. Constitutional amendments that would protect or expand abortion rights will appear on the ballot in 10 states, which Democrats hope will drive higher turnout.Democracy. Democrats have warned that Trump poses an existential threat to democratic norms, citing the 6 January 2021 insurrection, when a mob of his supporters attempted to overturn his election defeat. Harris has described her opponent as a fascist who has said he would be a dictator on day one and who would yield to foreign autocrats such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. Trump has sought to turn the tables by claiming – without evidence – that Harris is the true threat to democracy, citing alleged online censorship and the criminal cases against him. He has refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. A recent a Washington Post-Schar School survey of voters in seven swing states found that slightly more trust Trump to handle threats to democracy than Harris.Economy. The Economist magazine describes the US economy as the envy of the world, contending: “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust.” But despite strong growth, low unemployment and stabilising inflation, Biden and Harris have consistently trailed Trump in opinion polls. Harris’s economic plans include tax cuts for most Americans, price-gouging bans, more affordable housing and a new child tax credit as well as efforts to boost domestic manufacturing. Trump has vowed to cut taxes, impose sweeping tariffs on imported goods and protect social security and Medicare.Immigration. This has been Trump’s signature issue since he trundled down an escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to launch his presidential bid. This time, even as border crossings drop to 2020 levels, he has pledged what he calls the biggest deportation operation in US history. He has also used dehumanising language reminiscent of the Nazis to claim that undocumented immigrants are “animals”, have “bad genes” and are “poisoning the blood of our country”. Harris has shifted to the centre on the issue, underlining her support for a bipartisan proposal in Congress that would have hired thousands of new border security agents and closed the border if crossings hit an average of more than 5,000 people a day over a week.What is the state of the race?@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) 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      Excruciatingly close. Harris and Trump are tied at 48% each for the popular vote, according to the final New York Times/Siena College national poll published on 25 October.After Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the 27 June debate, Trump held a four-percentage-point lead over Biden among registered voters, according to the Pew Research Center. Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris, who then surged to parity and a small lead over Trump amid a wave of energy and enthusiasm.In recent weeks the race has stabilised and an equilibrium has been restored.The national race is less important than swing states that will decide the electoral college. These too are tantalisingly close. As of 17 October, for example, the Guardian’s poll tracker showed Trump narrowly leading in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, Harris ahead in Nevada and Pennsylvania and a dead heat in North Carolina – but all could still go one way or the other.The election will provide another test for a polling industry battered by the 2016 and 2020 elections when it seemed to underestimate Trump’s strength. Conversely, in the 2022 midterms, Democrats overperformed the polls and headed off the predicted “red wave”.Political analysts and commentators are understandably reluctant to stick out their necks and guess the outcome. Frank Luntz, a consultant and pollster, said: “You can’t call it. Anyone who calls it is an idiot.” But Allan Lichtman, a historian with a predictive method that has been right nine times out of 10, has declared he thinks Harris will win.Does the US have exit polls?@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) 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      Exit polls are surveys conducted with voters immediately after they have cast their ballots. Major news networks such as CNN, ABC and Fox News use them to make early projections about who is likely to win, though these are subject to revisions as actual vote counts come in. Traditionally, media outlets agree not to release exit poll data before all polls have closed to avoid influencing people still voting.Exit pollsters position interviewers at selected polling stations, chosen to represent a cross-section of the voting population. Voters leaving polling stations are asked to voluntarily complete anonymous questionnaires covering the candidate they voted for, key issues and demographic information. Interviewers typically phone in the results three times during the day.Exit poll data is analysed quickly to generate insights about the voter base such as who is winning certain demographic groups. Dearborn, Michigan, for example, will be studied closely for any evidence that the war in Gaza affected turnout of Arab and Muslim Americans.Exit polls include absentee voters by conducting phone, text and email surveys. In states with a high level of early in-person voters, exit polls are carried out weeks before election day as these voters leave the polling place. The results are then combined with data from election day.There is a strict embargo on exit poll data until 5pm ET on election day. Within the next hour some initial demographic information about voters and their policy views begins to emerge. Networks are not allowed to project a winner while voting is still taking place. 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      If the polls are wrong and one candidate has a clear lead over the other – think Ronald Reagan’s 49-state landslide victory in 1984 – the result will be obvious within hours. But given the closeness of the elections in 2016 and 2020, a nail-biter that runs through the night and possibly days beyond is more likely. Prolonged court cases are also possible: Republican donors and conservative billionaires have given $140m to 50 “election integrity” groups ready to do battle.News organisations such the Associated Press (AP) often project a winner on election night based on an analysis of votes already counted, the number of outstanding votes and the margin between the candidates. (The AP says its accuracy rate for the past several general elections is above 99.9%.) The losing candidate typically concedes in the early hours of the next morning, signalling that the contest is in effect over.Officially, however, there is still work to do. Local officials finish counting ballots in the days after the election and send their results to state officials. They approve the results and send them to federal officials. Every state must name individuals known as electors by 11 December; they must meet in their respective state capitols to cast their votes for president and vice-president on 17 December.On 6 January the House and Senate will count and tally the electoral certificates in a joint session. The vice-president serves as the president of the Senate and formally presides over the receiving and counting of electoral ballots cast and announces the result. In this case, Harris will proclaim her own victory or defeat on the fourth anniversary of the insurrection at the US Capitol.The election could be a big payday for lawyers. In 2000, when the Republican George W Bush and the Democrat Al Gore were the candidates, polling day fell on 7 November but the result was not called until 12 December. All eyes were on Florida, where votes were subject to an automatic recount because of Bush’s gossamer-thin margin of victory. The dispute went all the way to the supreme court, where justices voted to terminate the recount, prompting Gore to concede.In 2020 the AP declared Joe Biden the winner four days after election day – at 11.26am ET on Saturday 7 November. Trump had declared victory three days earlier, even as more than 1m ballots remained uncounted, and went on to lose more than 60 legal challenges. Few would bet against him mounting a similar effort this time.What happens after the race is decided?@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) 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      The president-elect forms a transition team to plan for the transfer of power. This works on setting up policy priorities, vetting candidates for key administration positions and coordinating with the outgoing administration. The president-elect and key members of their team begin receiving classified national security briefings to prepare for handling ongoing or emerging global threats.The 47th president will be inaugurated at 12 noon on 20 January at the US Capitol. Big crowds will be expected to return next year after Biden’s scaled-down pandemic version. The outgoing president typically attends the inauguration as a symbol of the peaceful transfer of power, although Trump boycotted in 2020. The new president begins work immediately, often signing a series of executive orders to reverse or continue certain policies and holding meetings with their team.Design, development and production: Rich Cousins, Pip Burkett and Bruno Haward. More

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      in US Politics

      Fur and loathing: do America’s ‘childless cat ladies’ hold the key to the US election?

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      When writer and artist Alice Maddicott’s beloved rescue cat died, she was understandably bereft. Dylan was a proper character, she says, the kind of gregarious cat that follows you to the pub or for a walk. But mourning him made Alice, who was then in her late 30s and single, feel faintly self-conscious. What if people thought she was a mad cat lady, weeping spinsterish tears for her pet?“If I’d had a dog, there would be no stereotype. But as a single woman approaching 40, it could be seen very differently,” says Maddicott. Curious about the origins of such a kneejerk prejudice, she started digging into its history. The research became a book, Cat Women, reclaiming an insult long used to belittle older women (especially non-compliant ones) or frighten younger women into settling down, lest they end up like the crazy cat lady from The Simpsons: once a high achiever, now a burnt-out drunk.But as Maddicott points out, it’s an objectively ridiculous insult. There’s no such thing as a “crazy cat man” and single hamster owners aren’t considered a threat to the patriarchal order. Only cat ladies touch a nerve, because only cat ladies immediately conjure up the idea of witches.In medieval times, the devil was believed to give cats as gifts to women inducted into witchcraft, Maddicott explains: so strong was the association that at the Bideford witch trials in 17th-century Devon, one woman was accused after a cat was seen slipping in through her window. “Probably an eccentric older woman feeding a stray, but that was used to condemn her.” Single women, unrestrained and also undefended by any man, made dangerously easy scapegoats if sickness came or the crops failed. Thankfully, people no longer believe in witches ruining lives out of spite. Or do they?Three years ago, the then aspiring Republican senator (and now vice-presidential candidate) JD Vance complained on Fox News that America was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He named then vice-president Kamala Harris, secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg (who is gay) and the young New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as politicians who supposedly had no stake in the future they were legislating for.The idea that if you haven’t given birth, you don’t count, was hurtful to many doting stepmothers (as Harris is) or adoptive parents (like Buttigieg). But most incendiary of all was the idea that not having children renders a person a bitter, vengeful husk, desperate to drag everyone else down with them. Polling this summer, after those comments were dug up and recirculated, found two-thirds of Americans disagreed that not having biological children was a hindrance in a president; even among Republicans, only 15% agreed.View image in fullscreenThough Vance now insists he was merely being sarcastic, for many women on both sides of the Atlantic, those words summed up a strand of politics that seemingly values them mainly for their ability to procreate and views their right to choose with suspicion. Though powerful women have long been shamed for not being mothers – “deliberately barren”, the former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard’s opponents called her – in the current climate, attacks on childless cat ladies have a sharper edge.In both the US and Europe, rightwing parties are weaponising female fertility as a political issue, tapping into a potent mix of misogyny, economic anxiety and overtly racist angst about being “replaced” as the dominant culture if white women don’t start breeding more enthusiastically. Though falling birth rates across the developed world are an undeniable economic headache – shrinking populations mean fewer young workers to fund pensions for the old and, typically, lower growth – populists focus on the way a dwindling workforce leads to more imported labour. Hungary’s populist leader Viktor Orbán has claimed the west is “committing suicide” by not making babies; in Germany, the far right AfD called in its manifesto for “larger families instead of mass immigration”. Elon Musk, the X owner and Donald Trump donor, tweets in apocalyptic terms about impending “population collapse”.Yet still, the baby drought persists. Around one in five British women don’t have children by the end of their fertile years – the Office for National Statistics doesn’t keep equivalent statistics for men – and this year deaths overtook births for the first time (outside a pandemic) since the 1970s. Almost half of Americans under 50, meanwhile, are childless. Or should that be childfree? For this year of shaming women has also been a year of women refusing to be shamed: older women reclaiming witchy insults like “hag” and “crone”, while younger ones resist what they see as a Handmaid’s Tale future of curtailed rights over their own bodies.Like the cat-eared pink hats that anti-Trump marchers wore in 2017, referencing his boasts about grabbing women “by the pussy”, in 2024 a “Childless Cat Lady for Kamala” T-shirt or sticker is now a gleeful statement of defiance. When Taylor Swift identified as one in her Instagram post formally endorsing Harris, it felt like something of a Spartacus moment – arguably even more so when Elon Musk responded with a creepy tweet offering to get her pregnant.What’s different about Swift isn’t merely that she, too, is unmarried, childfree and a cat owner at 34; it’s that she makes it look like a blast. Rich, powerful and taking her pick of trophy boyfriends, she lives closer to what would once have been called a rakish bachelor’s life than a spinster’s – though these days spinsterdom is a story told very differently.In Kate Winslet’s recent feminist biopic Lee, about the pioneering Second World War photographer Lee Miller, there is a scene in which Winslet’s Miller and Vogue magazine editor Audrey Withers ask each other if they’re planning to have children. “God no,” says Withers, cheerfully. “Oh God no,” echoes Winslet’s Miller. It’s a bonding moment in the film which implies neither could have done what they did – in Miller’s case following the US army’s advance across Europe and documenting newly liberated concentration camps; and in Withers’s case battling the censors to publish her images – if they’d had families at home. Though Miller did eventually have a son after the war, the film doesn’t duck the fact their relationship was difficult and ultimately lets her work take centre stage. It’s how great men’s stories are often told, drawing a veil over domestic shortcomings, but more rarely women’s.View image in fullscreenOnce upon a time in Hollywood, childless women could be mad, murderous bunny boilers – in films like Single White Female and Fatal Attraction – or at a push Bridget Jones, terrified of dying “fat and alone”. Now they can be Carrie Bradshaw, reimagined in And Just Like That… as a sexy fiftysomething widow with a fluffy rescue cat, or even Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the eternally childless doll who (according to her creator Ruth Handler) “always represented the fact that a woman has choices”. Though the film has a darker side, with the Kens’ angry revolt against the Barbie matriarchy echoing a backlash many young women say they’re experiencing in real life, the Barbieland both sides seek to control is a hedonistic land of parties and beach days where nobody is spending their Saturdays bleary-eyed at soft play. The toymaker Mattel has always resisted pleas to give Barbie and Ken children; instead they stayed forever aspirational Dinks, an 80s acronym for Dual Income No Kids now gleefully revived by millennials.“We’re DINKs. Of course we are already planning our European vacation next year,” says TikToker @johnefinance, in a chirpy post last December that racked up over 290,000 likes. “We’re DINKs; we spend our discretionary income on $8 lattes,” his partner giggles. Social media is still awash with #dinkcouple posts bragging about how much more money, sex and sleep they get compared to haggard new parents, recasting childless life as the opposite of sad and empty. Unusually, the trend brings young men’s perspectives into a debate normally (and exhaustingly) focused on women. But it also reflects polling released by the Pew Center thinktank earlier this year showing the most common reason childless Americans under 50 give for not being parents is that they just don’t want to.TikTok’s Dinks are young, and maybe not ruling parenthood out forever. But for now their lives arguably look a lot more fun than being a tradwife, those sourdough-baking, God-fearing, home-schooling mothers of multiple children whose retro social media content is – depending on your view – either a bit of guilty escapist fantasy for tired working women or a sinister attempt to drag women back into the kitchen. This summer a British newspaper interview with uber-tradwife Hannah Neeleman (aka @ballerinafarm), in which the writer wondered how exactly she’d ended up sacrificing a ballet career to have eight children and why her husband kept answering questions for her, triggered days of debate about whether she was being secretly oppressed or whether (as Neeleman’s fans argued) this was a hit piece by a writer who doesn’t have kids.Cut through all the noise, however, and there is one clear signal: neither the tradwife nor the Dink camp seem to think having it all is an option any more. You can’t have kids and a career in ballet; you can’t have a thrilling social life and children. You have to choose, with the implication that either way, something is lost. If there is a sadness to Neeleman talking about giving up on her professional ambitions, there is a faint whiff of financial distress around some of those Dink reels, too; a sense they’re blowing their cash on bucket-list travel destinations because the idea of buying a family home (while paying nursery bills that cost more than a mortgage) seems wildly out of reach.The second most common reason childless Britons aged 35-44 gave for not having children (after thinking they were too old) was a split between “I don’t want the impact on my lifestyle” and “the cost is too high”, according to YouGov. But for those on tight budgets, the two are related. It may be no accident that Britain’s last mini-baby boom was in the early Noughties – fuelled by cheaper childcare, longer maternity leave and rising prosperity – or that it fizzled out with the 2009 recession.On both sides of the Atlantic, women who do want kids some day are tired of being blamed for their childlessness by politicians who seemingly won’t meet them halfway: who instead of building cheap houses for first-time buyers or slashing their nursery bills, suggest (in Vance’s case) that grandparents could help out for free. But for some women, there’s an added worry that politicians cajoling or shaming women into having children may eventually turn to forcing them.For American women under 30, abortion is now the number one election issue, according to an October poll by the health policy researchers KFF. Two years ago, the overturning of Roe v Wade – the landmark ruling underpinning legal abortion in America – left the way open for an all-out assault on reproductive rights. At campaign rally after rally, Harris has hammered away at fears of what a Republican administration might do. She often quotes Project 2025, the infamous leaked wishlist for a second Trump term drawn up by a rightwing thinktank, which argues for giving foetuses legal rights and scrapping funding for contraceptive services.In Europe, too, rightwing governments in Hungary, Italy and Poland have tightened abortion law, though furious female voters helped propel a pro-liberalisation Polish government into power last year.For now, Britain seems to be on a much more progressive path. The prospect of curbs on abortion in this parliament looks at first glance remote, though the Labour MP Stella Creasy – who has been aggressively targeted in her constituency by anti-abortion activists – argues complacency is dangerous. “If the election hadn’t been called, it’s not clear that we wouldn’t have seen the first rollback on rights in 50 years,” she says, pointing to a backbench attempt to reduce the legal time limit from 24 to 22 weeks in the dying months of the last Conservative government.But the Tory MP Miriam Cates – who once argued that dwindling fertility rates are “the one overarching threat” to western society – lost her seat in July, while the Tory leadership favourite Kemi Badenoch says she isn’t convinced governments can make women have babies.America’s fate, however, still hangs by a thread, with a stark divide emerging particularly among the young: women for Harris, angry young men for Trump.Whether she wins or whether she loses in the coming election, it almost certainly won’t be because (along with every other occupant of the Oval Office in history) Kamala Harris hasn’t physically given birth. Most Americans say this election is still about the economy, stupid. But what is clear from months of arguing about childless cat ladies is that being one is just another American story now.When the pollsters Ipsos went looking this summer for female voters with no kids at home, but with a feline companion, the surprise was all the ways in which they were pretty much like everyone else: mostly suburban, disproportionately white, mostly with some college education, no richer or poorer than average – and in almost a third of cases, Republicans. They’re living behind the same white-picket fences as everyone else, shopping at Target, working nine to five, just getting on with life. And the clearer that becomes, the harder it is to pretend that every childless cat lady is a witch.View image in fullscreenFeline friendshipCat lover and author Britt Collins on her furry companionsI never imagined that childless cat ladies would become a political force and a whole new demographic. Over the years, I’ve heard all the snarks: mad, lonely, obsessive – the old witch-hunting slurs that have dogged outlier women forever. Am I miserable by the choices I made? Hell, no. Here’s the thing, cats rock and I don’t have to defend my choices. If I wanted kids, I’d have adopted one.The only time I felt lonely was in the last year of my marriage when I lost my sense of self. I’ve had boyfriends since I was 15, always cat men, and I still adore my two long-term exes with whom I spent my 20s and 30s. I’ve raised dozens of strays with them and had the best of times. However, these days, my ideal man is a gay vet. I’m happy with my mogs, enjoying the deep, uncomplicated love and pure joy of feline friendship.Still, I’ve had strangers tell me that giving up on relationships, as I moved into my 50s, is no way to live. Women and the cats they love have long been maligned, somehow seen as lesser-than or unfulfilled. Carving out my own little universe, I’ve filled it with cats and creativity. I’ve travelled to more than 35 countries, looked after big cats, baboons, bats and various wild orphans, written two books, ghostwritten and edited others, edited and created magazines, run a sell-out cat festival, directed pop videos and completed the screenplay adaption for my book, Strays, that has sparked interest from Hollywood producers. I do what I want, when I want – enjoying the privileges historically afforded to men.Journalist and activist Gloria Steinem, who’s had many felines over the decades, credits them as her teachers ‘when it comes to a strong will and self-authority’. When Steinem was asked how to raise the next generation of feminists, she said: ‘Like cats. They tell you what they’re going to do, and that’s that.’Cats, with their punky attitudes, have taught me defiance and everything else worth knowing. They are sensualists, things of beauty, who’ve inspired artists for centuries. Lennon, McCartney, Bowie, Dylan and many of the greatest rock stars were all crazy-cat ladies. Us cat people of all political stripes may not agree on everything, but we don’t let it get in the way of what matters most.Strays: A Lost Cat, A Homeless Man and Their Journey Across America by Britt Collins is published by Simon & Schuster More

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      in US Politics

      US presidential election updates: Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live, Iowa polling puts Donald Trump behind

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump criss-crossed the United States on Saturday as both candidates tried to drum up support on the final weekend before the 5 November presidential election. Both candidates began the day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before Democratic nominee Harris departed for Atlanta and then Charlotte, North Carolina. Trump, the Republican nominee, also travelled to North Carolina, before heading to a rally in Virginia. Almost 70 million Americans have already voted in the historic US election that comes to a head on Tuesday, prompting furious arguments over what early voting trends might mean as Trump and Harris prepare for their final showdown.A Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll on Saturday unexpectedly showed Harris ahead of Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters. Broadly though, the polls have remained deadlocked. The Guardian’s Robert Tait writes that some experts think such a tight race is improbable. Josh Clinton, a politics professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, NBC’s director of elections, write on the network’s website: “Some of the tools pollsters are using in 2024 to address the polling problems of 2020, such as weighting by partisanship, past vote or other factors, may be flattening out the differences and reducing the variation in reported poll results … [This] raises the possibility that the results of the election could be unexpectedly different than the razor-close narrative the cluster of state polls and the polling averages suggest.”Here’s what else happened on Saturday:Donald Trump election news and updates

      A Georgia judge rejected a Republican lawsuit trying to block counties from opening election offices on Saturday and Sunday to let voters hand in their mail ballots in person. The lawsuit only targeted Fulton county, a Democratic stronghold. Trump falsely blamed Fulton county workers for his loss of the 2020 election in Georgia.

      Ed Pilkington writes that if Trump re-enters the White House he will do so emboldened by a power that no previous incoming president has ever enjoyed: immunity from criminal prosecution for any act carried out in his official capacity. Whereas losing the election, writes David Smith, could mean he ends up in jail.
      Kamala Harris election news and updates

      Harris made a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live, playing herself as the mirror-image double of Maya Rudolph’s version of her. “It is nice to see you Kamala,” Harris told Rudolph, “and I’m just here to remind you, you got this.” In sync, the two said supporters needed to “Keep Kamala and carry-on-ala”, declared that they shared each other’s “belief in the promise of America”, and delivered the signature “Live from New York it’s Saturday night!”.

      Harris struck a contrast between her work as a prosecutor and a Trump campaign “obsessed with revenge and consumed with grievance” on Saturday in Atlanta. “In less than 90 days it’s either going to be him or me in the Oval Office,” Harris said. The vice-president filled the fields at the Atlanta Civic Center, attracting thousands on little notice in the crucial swing state of Georgia, which Joe Biden won in 2020.
      Elsewhere on the campaign trail

      Americans took to the streets in cities across the country for a day ofwomen’s marches. Marches were planned in all 50 states for the eighth annual gathering, which began the day after Trump was inaugurated in 2017.

      Vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr could assume some control over US health and food safety in a second Trump administration, according to reports on Saturday. Kennedy said in a social media post that he would remove fluoride from all public water.
      Read more about the 2024 US election:

      Presidential poll tracker

      Harris and Trump policies

      What to know about early voting More

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      Can democracy work without journalism? With the US election upon us, we may be about to find out | Margaret Simons

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      It is commonly claimed that democracy can’t work unless you have journalism, and a free media at that. How are people to decide how to cast a vote if they don’t access independent, reliable information?With the US election upon us, we may be about to find out.Because, more than ever before, the people who decide the election will be those who are least engaged with professional news media – the kind of researched, fact-checked content that you are likely to find in the New York Times or, for that matter, the Guardian.Forty-three per cent of US citizens avoid the news, according to the latest Digital News Report – a worldwide survey of media use conducted by the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford University.Most of these people nevertheless encounter some news – not because of loyalty to a brand or because they actively seek out a preferred outlet, but because it comes at them, so to speak.And what comes for free is either partisanly motivated, or funded by advertising – which means heavy with content pitched to draw eyeballs – sensationalism and clickbait.It is the low news consumers on which the campaigning candidates are concentrating, and on which the result of the election depends.There are significant things about news consumption that are different, this time around, from the last US election.But before I get to how things have changed since 2020, the facts I have already given mean that all the controversies, among the politically engaged, about whether mainstream media are “sanewashing” Trump, or whether or not outlets such as the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times publish editorial endorsements of a candidate, won’t affect the election result.It is a debate of principal and morality, playing out among people who, overwhelmingly, have already made up their minds on how to vote. The citizens who will decide the election probably don’t even know about these controversies, and if they did they probably wouldn’t care.The researchers at the Reuters Institute report that once disengaged from the news, people struggle to get back in, even if they want to.Benjamin Toff, the author of a book on news avoidance, writes: “It’s like trying to tune into the fourth episode season of Game of Thrones without knowing who these people are, or what difference any of this makes. For a lot of people, that’s their feeling about the news.”Traditionally, the journalistic mission has included making the important understandable, seeking to engage the disengaged. But while this still forms part of the rhetoric of the profession, the truth is that most serious news organisations publishing political news are not serving the politically disengaged.Instead, with so much advertising having disappeared from media outlets to online platforms, the path to financial sustainability for serious journalism outlets lies in trying to get people who already read the news to spend more time with the outlet, and to convert them into paying subscribers.This is essential to survival, for serious media. Yet also represents a failure of the journalistic mission.All this challenges our conventional ideas about the connections between democracy and journalism.It is true that democracy and journalism grew up together, and that each strengthens the other, but they are not as indivisible as the journalism profession suggests. Ancient Greece had democracy (though not for slaves) but no journalism. Al Jazeera provides journalism, but has its headquarters in non-democratic Qatar.And, in today’s western democracies, we now have political journalism that risks no longer being mass media, but elite media.And then on top of that, playing to the mass, we have content. All kinds of content, much of it partisan, distorted and sometimes straight-out lies.In the last US election in 2020, we worried about misinformation and conspiracy theories spread through social media, and Facebook in particular.Four years later, news consumption on Facebook is in decline across the world, largely because owner Meta has actively discouraged it. TikTok is on the rise as a source of news, overtaking X (formerly Twitter). Facebook and Twitter, for all their faults, did carry content from mainstream media outlets to new audiences.But now, increasingly, it is podcasters and vodcasters and influencers who reach new audiences on social media. And they have at least some chance of reaching the disengaged and persuadable. That is why both Trump and Harris have been spending time with them.It is fashionable to blame all our current societal ills on social media. Blocking access to social media for the young is now bipartisan – if ill-defined – policy in Australia. It is, after all, so much easier as a response to the mental health crises among the young than tackling the climate change crisis, which makes depression and anxiety almost inevitable.Likewise, traditional news media outlets tend to blame social media for the spread of misinformation and the undermining of quality journalism.But that is only partly right.Surveys in Australia and the USA have shown that mainstream news media was in a crisis of trust from at least the 1970s, long before the internet, let alone Facebook and TikTok. It was therefore in rotten shape to respond to the challenges of the means of publication being in many more hands.Meanwhile, a recent research paper published in Nature suggests, based on a survey, that fake news and misinformation is not as influential as we may think.The survey showed that most people have low exposure to false and inflammatory content, and they tend to distrust it. However a narrow, partisan fringe seeks it out, believing content that confirms already hard-set views.This suggests that political partisanship drives consumption of misinformation at least as much as the other way round.There are a few bright spots in all this. The Reuters Digital News Media survey shows that countries that have strong investment in public service media – such as the public broadcasters of the BBC in Britain and the ABC in Australia – have much higher rates of engagement with news and more political engagement.But that doesn’t apply to the USA, where public broadcasting is tiny.Solutions? I don’t have any easy answers, and the problems are fast-moving targets. By the time of the next US election, many citizens may be consuming news written by artificial intelligence. If we are lucky, or if governments have been smart with their regulatory responses, the robots will be aggregating reliable sources.But we have been neither smart nor lucky so far.In the meantime, with the sands shifting beneath us, if we want voters to be well informed, we have to find a way of financially supporting and reinvigorating the journalistic mission – beyond internal chatter among an elite.

      Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and author. She is an honorary principal fellow of the Centre for Advancing Journalism and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group More

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      Harris grabs unexpected last-minute lead over Trump in Iowa poll

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      A poll in Iowa that has unexpectedly put Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in what was previously expected to be a safe state for the Republicans has sent shockwaves through America’s poll-watchers.The Selzer poll carried out for the Des Moines Register newspaper showed Harris ahead of her Republican rival by three points.Midwestern Iowa is not one of the seven battleground states of the 2024 election, which have consisted of the Rust belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and the Sun belt states of Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona.While political experts and pollsters are very wary of putting too much store in any one single poll, Selzer is a widely respected polling organisation with a good record in Iowa. If Harris were even competitive in Iowa – which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 – it could radically reshape the race.The Selzer poll has Harris over Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters. A September poll showed Trump with a four-point lead over Harris and a June survey showed him with an 18-point lead over then-candidate Joe Biden.“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” pollster J Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co, told the Register. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”The poll showed that women are driving the late shift toward Harris in the state. If true and borne out more widely, that would also be significant as the Harris campaign has focused on turning out women amid a broad gender gap with Republican-trending male voters. Harris and her campaign have focused on the overturning of federal abortion rights by the conservative-dominated US supreme court.The reaction among pundits and pollsters was largely one of shock and surprise, though it was also pointed out that a rival polling group still had Trump leading in Iowa.“This is a stunning poll. But Ann Seltzer [sic] has as stellar a record as any pollster of forecasting election outcomes in her state. Women are powering this surge. Portents for the country?” said David Axelrod, a former top aide to Barack Obama.“I mean, margins of error exist and polls can be outliers and I doubt Harris will win Iowa, but Selzer is extremely well-regarded and a within-the-margin race in Iowa is not impossible particularly if the reported late shifts to Harris were real,” said Washington Post columnist Philip Bump.Selzer is the highest-rated pollster on the national US survey done by polling guru Nate Silver, one of the most closely watched polling experts in the US.“In the world where Harris wins Iowa, she is probably also cleaning up elsewhere in the midwest, particularly in Michigan and Wisconsin, in which case she’s already almost certain to win the electoral college,” Silver said on his website.However, he also cautioned that another survey had been published on Saturday in Iowa that still had Trump ahead. The Emerson poll put the former US president up by nine points in the state compared with Harris.“It is incredibly gutsy to release this poll. It won’t put Harris ahead in our forecast because there was also another Iowa poll out today that was good for Trump. But wouldn’t want to play poker against Ann Selzer,” Silver said.That seemed to prevent any premature celebrations on behalf of many Democrats.“Celebrate the Selzer poll for 90 seconds and get back to work. We have an election to win,” said Christopher Hale, a former Democrat congressional candidate in Tennessee. More

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      Republicans and Democrats search for unicorns in crucial Wisconsin: undecided voters

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      On a warm October morning in Madison, Wisconsin, Ty Schanhofer found a unicorn: an undecided voter.Schanhofer, an organizer with the University of Wisconsin student Democratic party, had unfolded a plastic table on campus and was trying to encourage people to register in the key swing state.View image in fullscreenWhen Arin Mahapatra, a 21-year-old student from Illinois, stopped by, Schanhofer – who takes an English class with Mahapatra – jumped into action, peppering him with questions and offering reasons to support Harris.“I’m not necessarily [leaning] in a certain direction, I’m just trying to find out who exactly falls in the same line with what I value most,” said Mahapatra, who cited economic issues like the price of gas and cost of student housing as his top concerns.Truly undecided voters are rare in Wisconsin, where presidential elections hinge on the narrowest of margins.“I feel like it’s probably 2% of the voters who are undecided,” said Schanhofer. “It’s not many at all.”Winning the support of young voters like Mahapatra will be crucial for Harris or Trump to pull off a victory in Wisconsin, where students and voters under 30 have turned out in record numbers in recent elections. In 2023, students on college campuses across the state rallied to elect a liberal judge to the Wisconsin supreme court, helping shift the ideological leaning of the bench in hopes that the court would help establish abortion rights in the state.View image in fullscreenPeople like Schanhofer hope that by generating this kind of turnout among young voters, they’ll be able to turn the Wisconsin electorate in Harris’s favor.The Badger state is considered to be part of the “blue wall” – the states Democrats consistently won in the 1990s and early 2000s.But vanishingly narrow margins in the state decided the 2016 and 2020 elections, and today Wisconsin is a virtual toss-up in the polls, as are many of the other six swing states.Trade unions historically helped drive voter turnout for Democrats, but a series of anti-labor laws passed under the Republican-controlled state government in 2011 dealt them a blow. Rural areas have increasingly turned to Republican candidates, leaving cities like Milwaukee – Wisconsin’s most racially diverse – and the liberal stronghold of Madison as Democratic bastions.View image in fullscreenThis election will probably come down to turnout, with the Trump and Harris campaigns attempting to shear away voters from each other’s respective bases. For Trump, that means drawing in young men, who have increasingly drifted to the right.On 26 October, some of those voters could be found queueing up around the corner for an event at the Kollege Klub, a bar just blocks from where the campus Democrats have been tabling for Harris.For hours, the bar was only admitting ticketed attendees, who had spent $150 to see the rightwing Nelk Boys, YouTube pranksters whose podcast has featured the self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate and Trump himself. The Nelk Boys promised to feature Charlie Kirk, the founder of the Maga organizing hub Turning Point USA (TPUSA), as a special guest.Eric Davis, a 29-year-old who lives and works in Madison, waited in line with his friends for more than two hours in front of the bar. Davis voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but said he’s reversing course this year.“I switched over to Trump because I just think, honestly, our economy right now is not going the way that it should,” said Davis. “I don’t believe in everything he says, but a majority of the stuff he goes with – I’m with it.”View image in fullscreenDavis, who is Black, doesn’t always like how Trump talks about immigrants, thinks the ex-president can be crass and understands why he rubs people the wrong way. But the way Davis sees it, that’s just Trump being Trump.“I don’t think he’s racist at all,” said Davis.“My whole family, they’re all liberals,” added Davis, who has not yet told his family how he planned to vote.Despite the night’s political theme, the actual gathering featured little by way of political mobilization. The Nelk Boys stood on a raised platform in the venue, throwing Trump merchandise into the crowd, but Kirk was nowhere to be seen. A stack of cards with voter registration information sat forgotten on a table crowded with beer bottles.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBut for Brandon Maly, the chair of the Republican party of Dane county, the night was a success.“I’ve never seen a bar in Madison packed with Maga hats, it was just incredible. I love to see it – it’s part of that psychology in Dane county, that people need to be given a permission structure,” said Maly. “You may not think it translates to votes, but it does in the sense that they’re given permission to support Trump.”Maly has no illusions about turning Dane county red.But given its status as the second most populous county in the state, he sees the area as a rich source of Republican voters – no matter how marginal their political views may be locally.View image in fullscreenHis goal, of chipping away at Democratic party margins in liberal hubs, is mirrored in Democrats’ push to fight back Republican party majorities in rural and suburban parts of the state that have historically leaned red.One of those Democratic party organizers is Deb Dassow, the chair of the Ozaukee county Democratic party, who says she feels she has the shifting political winds at her back. In Ozaukee county, which stretches north of Milwaukee along Lake Michigan, Democrats have begun to make gains in the last several election cycles. In 2012, Barack Obama claimed 34% of the vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton took 37%, and in 2020 Biden pulled 43% of the vote there.Since 2019, when the Ozaukee county Democrats opened a permanent office in the county, the local party chapter has poured resources into organizing local Democrats.“Since April, we’ve knocked 25,000 doors – we knocked 5,000 just last weekend,” said Dassow on 25 October. The local Democrats have facilitated food drives, held parties and hosted beading parties, crafting red, white and blue bracelets emblazoned with the letters K-A-M-A-L-A.Since jumping into the race in July, the vice-president and her allies have raised more than $1bn to fuel her campaign; much of those funds have poured into a broad campaign to knock on thousands of doors across the country.And not least, they are trying to turn out young people: according to a source familiar with the Harris-Walz campaign in Wisconsin, the Democratic coordinating campaign hired seven full-time campus organizers across the state and a youth-organizing coordinator before the election.View image in fullscreenThe Republican party, meanwhile, has farmed off most of its ground game to outside groups – including TPUSA and the tech billionaire Elon Musk’s America Pac. Those groups allied with the Trump campaign have sought to turn out “low-propensity” voters for Trump, in particular, targeting rural would-be Trump voters who might otherwise neglect to cast a ballot at all.The Trump campaign touts the strategy as innovative, but neither TPUSA nor America PAC boast the kinds of detailed voter lists that parties traditionally maintain to target supporters.“There’s suspicion as to whether or not this is an actual ground game,” said Brandon Scholz, a former Republican party operative who left the GOP on 7 January 2021 – the day after Trump supporters contesting the 2020 election results stormed the US Capitol. Even as an independent, Scholz maintains close relationships in the party and has followed the 2024 campaigns with keen interest.“Are these folks really here?” said Scholz. “Are they really beating the hell out of the doors? Are they really identifying and getting ready to turn out voters, or getting them out to vote early, or getting them absentee ballots?”The answers to these questions – is Trump’s ground strategy as haphazard as it seems in Wisconsin, and is the Harris turnout machine as effective as Democrats claim? – could very well determine the outcome of the election. More