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      Kamala Harris to hold town hall with undecided voters after Donald Trump rejects second debate offer – US politics live

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      US vice-president Kamala Harris will hold a town hall with undecided voters on CNN on Wednesday, after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump rejected an offer to debate the Democratic nominee for a second time, reports Reuters.Trump will headline a rally Wednesday in Duluth, Georgia with guests Tucker Carlson and Robert F Kennedy Jr, as the race for the White House counts down to less than two weeks.Pennsylvania and Georgia are among seven battleground states that will decide who wins the presidency. Both candidates are likely to spend much of the rest of their campaigns in those states, trying to persuade the small sliver of voters who are still undecided to back them in the 5 November election.Harris tried and failed to push Trump to agree to a second presidential debate on CNN after she was considered to have won the first and only presidential debate between the two candidates, which took place in September on ABC News.Reuters reports that Hariss’s televised town hall will take place before a live audience of undecided voters from Pennsylvania in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia.Harris held a marginal 46% to 43% lead over the former president, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.More on this story in a moment, but first, here are the latest updates:

      Surrogates campaigning for Trump and Harris are fanning out across the US this week. Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, will travel to North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Trump’s running mate JD Vance will head to Reno, Nevada on Wednesday.

      UK prime minister Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election. The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.

      Harris herself said she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, in an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. “I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”.

      Harris courted Hispanic voters promoting small business loans for Latino men, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Harris pledged to drive more funds to community banks to help Latino men access small business loans. “Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify,” she said.

      Trump also pitched to Hispanic voters, holding a morning round table with Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. Trump hit familiar talking points but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc. The event concluded with a group of prominent evangelists praying as they stood around Trump with their hands on his shoulders, while he sat with his eyes closed.

      At the same event, the former president hurled a series of personal attacks at his opponent, calling Harris “lazy as hell” and “low IQ”. He was referring to Harris holding no public campaign events on Tuesday, instead recording the two interviews after a busy day of campaigning with Liz Cheney on Monday. At a later rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump continued the invective: “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”

      Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz held a rally with former president Barack Obama in Madison, Wisconsin, where he slammed Trump’s staged campaign event at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s as a “stunt” and mocked Elon Musk for “jumping around, skipping like a dipshit” before holding another rally in Wisconsin that evening.

      Obama, meanwhile, ridiculed Trump’s boasts on the economy and cast his rambling speeches as a sign of mental deterioration. “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”

      JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, dodged a question about whether he would strip immigrants with legal authorisation of their status while campaigning in Peoria, outside Phoenix, Arizona. Vance urged supporters to “work our rear ends off for the next two weeks” to turn the swing state red.

      Despite some setbacks, Republicans vowed to press ahead in bids to block some overseas ballots. Court rulings rejected Republic National Committee efforts to block some Americans living abroad from voting in North Carolina and Michigan but the party will keep up its aggressive legal campaign.

      Arab Americans slightly favour Trump over Harris, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows a deadlock in Michigan, a key battleground state with a large Arab American population.
      Barack Obama rapped Eminem’s signature hit Lose Yourself to a crowd in Detroit during a campaign rally for Kamala Harris.He was preceded by Eminem himself, who told the crowd in his home city:
      It’s important to use your voice, I’m encouraging everyone to get out and vote, please … I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution of what people will do if you make your opinion known. I think vice-president Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld.”
      Obama opened his ensuing speech by saying: “I gotta say, I have done a lot of rallies, so I don’t usually get nervous, but I was feeling some kind of way following Eminem,” before segueing into Lose Yourself’s opening lines: “I notice my palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already, mom’s spaghetti, I’m nervous but on the surface I look calm and ready to drop bombs but I keep on forgetting …”He joked that he thought Eminem would be performing and he would be a guest star, adding: “Love me some Eminem.”The former president is an avowed music fan, sharing his favourite songs twice a year in official posts on his social media. Summer 2024’s selections included songs by contemporary pop names such as Beyoncé, Tyla and Rema alongside older tracks by Nick Drake, the Supremes and cosmic jazz musician Pharoah Sanders.Obama went on to excoriate Donald Trump in his speech, recalling how Trump expressed doubt about the election results in 2020:
      Because Donald Trump was willing to spread lies about voter fraud in Michigan, protesters came down, banged on the windows, shouting, ‘Let us in. Stop the count.’ Poll workers inside being intimidated … all because Donald Trump couldn’t accept losing … there is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anybody but himself.”
      He questioned Trump’s mental fitness for the role of president, saying:
      You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this. But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”
      Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election.The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.The letter, which was sent to the US Federal Election Commission, said that these volunteering efforts and reports of contact between Labour and the Harris campaign amounted to “illegal foreign national contributions”.A statement on DonaldJTrump.com on Tuesday night claimed that the “far-left” Labour party has “inspired Kamala’s dangerously liberal policies and rhetoric”.In response Starmer insisted he had a “good relationship” with Trump which would not be jeopardised by the complaint.The prime minister said that party officials volunteering for Harris ahead of the US presidential election on 5 November were “doing it in their spare time” rather than in their capacity working for Labour.Speaking to reporters travelling with him to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, Starmer said:
      The Labour party … volunteers, have gone over pretty much every election. They’re doing it in their spare time, they’re doing it as volunteers, they’re staying I think with other volunteers over there.
      That’s what they’ve done in previous elections, that’s what they’re doing in this election and that’s really straightforward.”
      Asked if the complaint risked jeopardising his relationship with Trump if he becomes president again, the UK prime minister said:
      No. I spent time in New York with President Trump, had dinner with him and my purpose in doing that was to make sure that between the two of us we established a good relationship, which we did, and we’re grateful for him for making the time.”
      We had a good, constructive discussion and, of course as prime minister of the United Kingdom I will work with whoever the American people return as their president in their elections which are very close now.”
      US vice-president Kamala Harris will hold a town hall with undecided voters on CNN on Wednesday, after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump rejected an offer to debate the Democratic nominee for a second time, reports Reuters.Trump will headline a rally Wednesday in Duluth, Georgia with guests Tucker Carlson and Robert F Kennedy Jr, as the race for the White House counts down to less than two weeks.Pennsylvania and Georgia are among seven battleground states that will decide who wins the presidency. Both candidates are likely to spend much of the rest of their campaigns in those states, trying to persuade the small sliver of voters who are still undecided to back them in the 5 November election.Harris tried and failed to push Trump to agree to a second presidential debate on CNN after she was considered to have won the first and only presidential debate between the two candidates, which took place in September on ABC News.Reuters reports that Hariss’s televised town hall will take place before a live audience of undecided voters from Pennsylvania in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia.Harris held a marginal 46% to 43% lead over the former president, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.More on this story in a moment, but first, here are the latest updates:

      Surrogates campaigning for Trump and Harris are fanning out across the US this week. Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, will travel to North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Trump’s running mate JD Vance will head to Reno, Nevada on Wednesday.

      UK prime minister Keir Starmer has insisted he can maintain a “good relationship” with Donald Trump after the Republican candidate’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” in the US election. The Trump campaign filed a legal complaint overnight against Labour officials travelling to US battleground states to volunteer for his Democrat rival Kamala Harris.

      Harris herself said she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, in an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. “I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”.

      Harris courted Hispanic voters promoting small business loans for Latino men, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Harris pledged to drive more funds to community banks to help Latino men access small business loans. “Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify,” she said.

      Trump also pitched to Hispanic voters, holding a morning round table with Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. Trump hit familiar talking points but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc. The event concluded with a group of prominent evangelists praying as they stood around Trump with their hands on his shoulders, while he sat with his eyes closed.

      At the same event, the former president hurled a series of personal attacks at his opponent, calling Harris “lazy as hell” and “low IQ”. He was referring to Harris holding no public campaign events on Tuesday, instead recording the two interviews after a busy day of campaigning with Liz Cheney on Monday. At a later rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump continued the invective: “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”

      Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz held a rally with former president Barack Obama in Madison, Wisconsin, where he slammed Trump’s staged campaign event at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s as a “stunt” and mocked Elon Musk for “jumping around, skipping like a dipshit” before holding another rally in Wisconsin that evening.

      Obama, meanwhile, ridiculed Trump’s boasts on the economy and cast his rambling speeches as a sign of mental deterioration. “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”

      JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, dodged a question about whether he would strip immigrants with legal authorisation of their status while campaigning in Peoria, outside Phoenix, Arizona. Vance urged supporters to “work our rear ends off for the next two weeks” to turn the swing state red.

      Despite some setbacks, Republicans vowed to press ahead in bids to block some overseas ballots. Court rulings rejected Republic National Committee efforts to block some Americans living abroad from voting in North Carolina and Michigan but the party will keep up its aggressive legal campaign.

      Arab Americans slightly favour Trump over Harris, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows a deadlock in Michigan, a key battleground state with a large Arab American population. More

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

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

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      US presidential election briefing: Trump fits the ‘definition of fascist’, says former chief of staff John Kelly

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      Two weeks out from election day, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff has claimed his one-time boss “falls into the general definition of fascist”.John Kelly, a former Marine general and presidential aide from 2017 to 2019, made the extraordinary intervention on Tuesday in a series of coordinated interviews. Speaking to the New York Times, he said the former Republican president “prefers the dictator approach to government” and is the “only president that has all but rejected what America is all about”. Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, told the Times that Kelly’s accounts were “debunked stories” and that Kelly had “beclowned” himself.Speaking to the Atlantic, Kelly recounted Trump saying he wished his military personnel showed him the same deference Nazi generals showed Adolf Hitler. Trump’s campaign denied the exchange, with an adviser telling CNN: “This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this.”Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz said the reported comments about Hitler’s generals “makes me sick as hell”. “Folks, the guardrails are gone,” Walz told a rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday. “Trump is descending into this madness.”Here’s what else happened on Tuesday:Kamala Harris campaign updates

      Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz held a rally with former president Barack Obama in Madison, Wisconsin, where he slammed Trump’s staged campaign event at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s as a “stunt” and mocked Elon Musk for “jumping around, skipping like a dipshit” before holding another rally in Wisconsin that evening.

      Obama, meanwhile, ridiculed Trump’s boasts on the economy and cast his rambling speeches as a sign of mental deterioration. “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”

      Eminem introduced Obama at a rally in Detroit later on Tuesday, where the Democratic powerhouse began his remarks with the opening lines of the rapper’s hit track Lose Yourself. Bruce Springsteen will headline two concerts as part of a series that will hit every swing state, the Harris campaign confirmed.

      Harris herself said she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, in an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. “I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”.

      Harris courted Hispanic voters promoting small business loans for Latino men, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Harris pledged to drive more funds to community banks to help Latino men access small business loans. “Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because of their connections and the fact that things aren’t necessarily set up so that they will qualify,” she said.
      Donald Trump campaign updates

      Trump also pitched to Hispanic voters, holding a morning round table with Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. Trump hit familiar talking points but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc. The event concluded with a group of prominent evangelists praying as they stood around Trump with their hands on his shoulders, while he sat with his eyes closed.

      At the same event, the former president hurled a series of personal attacks at his opponent, calling Harris “lazy as hell” and “low IQ”. He was referring to Harris holding no public campaign events on Tuesday, instead recording the two interviews after a busy day of campaigning with Liz Cheney on Monday. At a later rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump continued the invective: “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”

      JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, dodged a question about whether he would strip immigrants with legal authorisation of their status while campaigning in Peoria, outside Phoenix, Arizona. Vance urged supporters to “work our rear ends off for the next two weeks” to turn the swing state red.

      The Republican campaign filed an extraordinary complaint claiming the UK Labour party is interfering in the presidential election by recruiting and sending party members to campaign for Harris. It is understood that volunteers are campaigning in the US in their own personal time, rather in their capacity working for the Labour party.
      Elsewhere on the campaign trail

      Despite some setbacks, Republicans vowed to press ahead in bids to block some overseas ballots. Court rulings rejected Republic National Committee efforts to block some Americans living abroad from voting in North Carolina and Michigan but the party will keep up its aggressive legal campaign.

      The US economy is poised for stronger growth than many wealthy nations, the International Monetary Fund said in forecast. While not mentioning Trump by name, the IMF estimates that a shift towards “undesirable” industrial and trade policies could reduce global GDP by 0.5 percentage points in 2026.

      Arab Americans slightly favour Trump over Harris, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows a deadlock in Michigan, a key battleground state with a large Arab American population.
      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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      The US is ‘absolutely’ ready for a female president, Harris says in NBC interview

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      Kamala Harris said that she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, insisting that Americans care more about what candidates can do to help them, rather than presidential contenders’ gender.The vice-president’s statement came during an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson, who asked whether she thought the country was ready for a woman, and a woman of color, to be in the Oval Office. “Absolutely,” Harris said. “Absolutely.”“In terms of every walk of life of our country,” Harris said, “part of what is important in this election is really, not really turning the page – closing a chapter, on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.“The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us and what the American people want in their president is a president for all Americans,” she said.Harris was asked why she hasn’t leaned into the historic nature of her candidacy – that she is a woman of color running for the presidency.“I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”“That is why I spend the majority of my time listening and then addressing the concerns, the challenges, the dreams, the ambitions and the aspirations of the American people,” Harris continued, saying that Americans deserve a president focused on them, “as opposed to a Donald Trump, who is constantly focused on himself”.Harris also said she was aware that Trump might potentially try thwarting the presidential election results, noting that her team “will deal with election night and the days after as they come”.Harris said that she is focused on campaigning over the next two weeks while noting “we have the resources and the expertise and the focus” on any potential threats to election results. Jackson noted that Trump declared victory before all the votes were tallied in 2020.Trump, who has refused to accept the 2020 election results and claimed the race was stolen, has been stoking fears with unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud in the 2024 cycle. “This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo the free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol, and 140 law enforcement officers were attacked, some who were killed. This is a serious matter,” Harris told Jackson.Trump supporters on 6 January 2021 stormed the US Capitol in an effort to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s victory. That day, four people died at the Capitol and a police officer working during the insurrection died several days later; four other police officers posted at the building on 6 January 2021 committed suicide, according to CBS News.“The American people are, at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country,” Harris also said.Jackson also asked about voters’ concerns about the economy, noting that many blame the US president for rising prices.Harris said her policies “will not be a continuation of the Biden administration” and with inflation, “I bring my own experiences, my own ideas to it.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJackson noted that if Harris won, her victory might coincide with Republican control of Congress, which would thwart protecting abortion at the national level.“What concessions would be on the table?” Jackson asked.“I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” Harris said.Harris said she would not “get into those hypotheticals” when asked if a pardon might be on the table for Trump.“I’m focused on the next 14 days.”Harris was pressed on the pardon topic, asked if she thought it could help the country move forward together and be less divisive.“Let me tell you what’s going to help us move on: I get elected to president of the United States.” More

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      US elections live: Obama ridicules Trump’s boasts on economy as Walz dismisses Republican nominee’s McDonald’s ‘stunt’

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      Barack Obama is hitting on a key issue for voters: the economy.“Don’t have nostalgia for what his economy was. Because it was mine,” Obama said.Polls show voters tend to favor Trump on the economy, yearning for the time, early in Trump’s presidency, pre-pandemic, when housing and grocery costs were lower.“I spent eight years cleaning up the mess that Republicans left,” Obama said.Scrutiny is growing about the Montana aerial firefighting company once led by Tim Sheehy, the former Navy Seal and Republican Senate candidate who could oust the Democrat incumbent Jon Tester in next month’s election.According to NBC News, Sheehy’s Bridger Aerospace, a company he founded in 2013, negotiated a deal with Gallatin county in eastern Montana to use its pristine credit rating to raise $160m in bonds. The county was meant to benefit from Bridger’s plans to hire more workers and build two new aircraft hangers.But the company used most of the money, or $134m, from the 2022 bond issue to pay back previous investment from Blackstone, a New York-based investment giant.Bridger’s finances have been complicated by the fact that there were fewer wildfires to fight this year and thus less revenue for Bridger. As of Tuesday, the National Interagency Fire Center reported 42,603 wildfires nationwide this year compared to the 10-year average of 48,689 for the same period.In financial filings for the quarterly period that ended 30 June 2024, Bridger said it had “a substantial amount of debt” and that failure to service that debt “could prolong the substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern”.A victory for Sheehy in November could hand Republicans control of the Senate, making his connections to Bridger a vital topic as voters head to the polls.Election day is exactly two weeks away. And today has been a frenzy of campaign activity.

      Eminem reportedly set to introduce Barack Obama when he appears in Detroit tonight, and Bruce Springsteen to headline two concerts as part of a series that will hit every swing state.

      Obama also campaign with Tim Walz in Wisconsin.

      JD Vance dodged a question about whether he would strip migrants with legal authorization of their status, at an event in Arizona.

      Donald Trump will be in in North Carolina, where Walz is holdind a second event this evening.

      Trump held a round table with Latino leaders but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc.

      Harris will campaign in Houston on Friday, with an eye towards picking up Texas’s Senate seat and highlighting how abortion bans have affected women in the Republican bastion.

      The US economy is poised for stronger growth than many wealthy nations, the IMF said in forecasts released today.
      Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Joe Biden appeared alongside Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. to discuss his administration’s work on lowering prescription drug prices.But the president also took a chance to issue a warning that Trump and Vance were extreme. “This is not your father’s Republican Party,” Biden said, referencing Strom Thurmond, the late senator from South Carolina who famously conducted the longest speaking filibuster in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. But Thurmond later moderated his stance/“People change, but these guys just keep getting worse,” Biden of the party now. “Get to the vote. Because the nation’s democracy depends on it.”He shared an embrace with Sanders.At an early voting pop-up location at the University of Minnesota, hundreds of students waited in line to cast ballots on Tuesday – a sign of youth enthusiasm for the presidential election.The early voting location at the campus’ Weisman Art Museum, a one-day on-campus polling place for any Minneapolis voter, was a first-time occasion made possible by recent changes in state law to allow for pop-up polling places to help voters who can be harder to reach, like college students.“We brought the polls to them,” said Riley Hetland, a sophomore and undergraduate student government civic engagement director who helped plan the event. Hetland said the group has been going to classrooms and hosting tables around campus for weeks to get people registered to vote and help them make a plan to cast ballots. So far, they have gotten 12,000 voters to pledge to vote, double their goal of 6,000.Madelyn Ekstrand finished her class for the day and waited about an hour, all told, to cast her ballot. The 21-year-old senior said abortion access and climate change were important to her, so she was voting for Harris. She thought she’d vote early to get it done, but didn’t realize how popular the choice would be – she was glad it was so busy.“I’m happy to see people my age getting out and voting and being proactive and not waiting till the last second,” she said.The ruling upholds another order by a Fulton county judge, who invalidated last-minute rules made by Georgia’s state election board this year.The rules, which were approved by Trump-aligned members of the board, would have required all ballots to be counted by hand on election night – a feat that would probably yield results that are far less accurate than a count done by ballot scanners. The changes would also have allowed officials investigate discrepancies in vote totals and conduct “reasonable inquiries” into irregularities, without clarifying what such an inquiry entailed.The unanimous ruling by the conservative-majority supreme court did not touch on the legality of the seven rules – rather, it dismissed a request to hold a decision issued by a lower-court judge.It’s an arresting split screen: Barack Obama, in Madison, tells voters that when Trump and Vance are pressed to elaborate on their policies, “they’ll fall back on one answer: blame immigrants”.“He wants you to believe that if you let him round up whoever he wants and ships them out, all your problems will be solved,” Obama says.Meanwhile, in Arizona, JD Vance dodges a question about whether he would strip immigrants of their legal status.Barack Obama is hitting on a key issue for voters: the economy.“Don’t have nostalgia for what his economy was. Because it was mine,” Obama said.Polls show voters tend to favor Trump on the economy, yearning for the time, early in Trump’s presidency, pre-pandemic, when housing and grocery costs were lower.“I spent eight years cleaning up the mess that Republicans left,” Obama said.Tim Walz has wrapped up his speech, after introducing Barack Obama.The Democratic former president apologized for being late, saying he had an issue with his plane that forced him to drive to Madison from Chicago.“So we board the plane … and then the pilot comes in and says: ‘Sir, there’s a pile of oil leaking out of the back of the plane.’ Now, I do not know anything about planes, except for the fact that it should not leak oil. So we had a nice road trip instead, and I am glad I made it,” Obama said.Tim Walz encouraged the crowd not to grow sanguine about the possibility of a second Trump term, saying the Republican could retaliate against him if he returns to the White House.“Here’s another reason that the stakes are so high in this election, something that I don’t think many of us have seen. You hear some version of this from the people in your life, neighbors, relatives, brothers, in some cases, who said, look, we made it through the first Trump term, we’ll get through a second. This Donald Trump … is far more dangerous … He is not the 2016 Donald Trump. This is a brand-new version,” Walz said.He elaborated on why he believes that:
      As Kamala says, he is a very unserious person, but the consequences of putting him back in office are deadly serious. He’s talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names. Look, I recognize I’m going to be at the top of that list. You think he’s stopping with me? He’s talking about you. He’s talking about using the United States military to go after people who disagree with his idiotic ideas, his unpatriotic ideas, his traitorous ideas. And he’s talking about using the military. He talks about the enemy from within.
      After Donald Trump recently called Kamala Harris a “shit vice-president”, Tim Walz just used similar language to describe Elon Musk’s enthusiastic campaigning for the former president.Musk bounded on stage and briefly got airborne at a Trump rally in the Pennsylvania town where the former president nearly lost his life in an assassination attempt in July.Here’s what Walz had to say about that:
      So look, Elon is on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit on these things. You know it. Think about it … that guy is literally the richest man in the world spending millions of dollars to help Donald Trump buy an election.
      Now, look, they’re saying the quiet parts out loud now, because Donald Trump has already promised that he would put Elon in charge of government regulations that oversee the businesses that Elon runs.
      That’s a hell of a buy. He could spend billions to make more than $10bn on the back end. So in other words, Donald Trump, in front of the eyes of the American public, is promising corruption. That’s what he’s promising you. And you know what? I don’t believe, I don’t believe he keeps many promises, but he’ll keep that one.
      Tim Walz then took Donald Trump to task for the staged campaign event he held at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s over the weekend, saying the appearance amounted to a “stunt”.“He went to a McDonald’s and dressed up as the drive-thru worker. They found him an apron his size and put it on him. And I was thinking, it is possible he mixed up his weekends and thought that it was Halloween already. He’s been forgetting things lately, as you might have noticed,” Walz said.Pressing the attack, the Minnesota governor continued:
      That restaurant, that restaurant wasn’t even open. It was a stunt – fake orders for fake customers. They even staged the drive thru. We know that they won’t let you walk through the damn drive thru. We knew that. They saw that happening.
      But look, everything about this guy is fake. Everything he does is fake. Next, he’s going to be telling you he’s a cop or a construction worker because he dances to the Village People, so he knows the YMCA. And I’ll tell you this: so that five minutes he stood next to the deep fryer, I’ll guarantee you that’s the hardest that guy’s ever worked in his life. And that’s not a joke.
      Tim Walz laid into Donald Trump for the meandering tone of his recent speeches and for declining to debate Kamala Harris for a second time.“It takes stamina to run for president. It takes stamina to be president, and Donald Trump does not have stamina,” Walz began. “He has been rambling more than the normal rambling.”Noting that Trump has lately taken to describing his speaking style as “the weave”, Walz said: “We know there’s only one weave that you know anything about, and it is not this. It is not this … He’s ducks debates, but you can’t blame him. When you get your ass whipped that hard, you don’t come back for seconds.”After the customary playing of Beyoncé’s Freedom – the song used at just about every Harris campaign event – Tim Walz strolled on stage.He shouted out all the Democrats who introduced him, as well as the rally attendees: “But each of you, huge thank-you. Took time out of your busy lives, you came here, you came here because you believe in the promise of America and you believe in the democracy. Thank you.”Next up was Tammy Baldwin, the state Democratic senator who is locked in an increasingly tight re-election battle against Republican Eric Hovde.Like Tony Evers before her on the lineup, Baldwin centered her appeal to voters on her support for abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act.“Just a little bragging here: I wrote the provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they turn 26 and I will never stop fighting until all Americans have the quality, affordable healthcare that they need and deserve,” she said.Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, one of the early speakers at the Walz-Obama rally in Madison, didn’t hold back when describing what a second Donald Trump presidency would mean.“We know Trump and Vance will try to pass a national abortion ban, roll back access to birth control, emergency contraception and even fertility treatments. We know that they’re going to repeal the Affordable Care Act and deny coverage to folks like me and so many others here in the audience, and people you care about who have a pre-existing condition,” he said.The governor continued:
      What Trump said about that – he’s got the concept of a plan. Now you take that concept for a plan and go pay a bill, it ain’t going to work. And they’re going to give more tax breaks for the ultra-rich and the big corporations instead of helping working families get ahead. And we know that a second Trump term would mean unchecked power with no guardrails to hold them back. That’s just bullshit. More

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      Arab Americans slightly favor Trump over Harris, says new poll

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      Arab Americans are slightly more likely to vote for Donald Trump than Kamala Harris, according to a new poll, in a worrying sign for the Democratic nominee’s chances of carrying the battleground state of Michigan, which is home to a large Arab American population.The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows 43% supporting Trump compared with 41% for Harris, and 4% backing the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.The figures are broadly in line with a previous poll carried out this month by the Arab American Institute. Together they suggest that Harris’s support in the community has been undermined by the Biden administration’s backing for Israel’s year-long war against Hamas in Gaza.The latest poll also shows Trump leading Harris by 39% to 33% on the question of which candidate would be most likely resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the candidates were tied at 38% apiece on who would be “better for the Middle East in general”.Support for Trump is particularly striking given that the same poll shows twice as many respondents – 46% to 23% – think anti-Arab racism and hate crimes are likely to increase under a Trump presidency compared with under Harris.The former president has repeatedly used the term “Palestinian” as an insult against his Democratic opponents, and derided them as insufficiently supportive of Israel.The findings are also surprising given that Trump’s presidency was characterised by a strong pro-Israel policy tilt. He was responsible for a historic decision to move the US embassy in the country from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the status of which is hotly disputed by Israelis and Palestinians.The perception of him as ardently pro-Israel is reflected in the poll, which shows 69% of respondents believe he is the most supportive of the country’s interests, compared with 60% for Harris.The vice-president – whose husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish – has trod a delicate course while attempting to claw back the support of Arab voters forfeited by Biden.She has repeatedly affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself, while also voicing concern over the escalating casualties and worsening situation in Gaza. She greeted last week’s death of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by saying it offered a chance to end the war.Trump has claimed that last October’s deadly attack by Hamas would not have happened on his watch. He appealed explicitly to Arab voters on Monday as Harris campaigned in Michigan with Liz Cheney, the former Republican member of Congress whose father, Dick Cheney, played a key role in the invasion of Iraq as George W Bush’s vice-president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf Harris were elected, Trump wrote on his Truth Social site, “the Middle East will spend the next four decades going up in flames, and your kids will be going off to War, maybe even a Third World War”.The earlier Arab American Institute survey also showed Harris with 41% support, compared with 42% for Trump and 12% for third-party candidates.It concluded that while Harris had recovered some support ceded by Biden, she was still far behind the 59% of the Arab vote captured by the US president in his 2020 election win over Trump.Polls show Harris and Trump in a virtual deadlock in Michigan, which Trump narrowly won in 2016 but lost to Biden four years later. More

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      ‘Is it going to be safe?’: suspicions and fear dominate a crucial swing county in lead-up to US election

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      Vanessa Guerra is resigned to questions from Donald Trump’s supporters about the many ways in which American voters imagine next month’s presidential election might be rigged against him.But more recently the Saginaw county clerk, who is overseeing the ballot in a highly contested patch of central Michigan, has faced a new line of questioning at meetings called to reassure distrustful voters.“I did a presentation last week and, as usual, we had a lot of questions about the validity of election results. But now they’re also asking: Is it going to be safe to go to the polls on election day? Is something going to happen? That’s something new,” said Guerra.The most consequential US presidential election of recent times is also likely to be the most disputed, particularly if the results are as close as opinion polls suggest.Republican officials are gearing up to stall and overturn the count if it goes against Trump. Meanwhile, the former US president has warned of a bloodbath if he loses again next month, which voters have reason to take seriously in the wake of the January 6 storming of the US Capitol after he lost the last election.Trump’s continued insistence that the 2020 vote was rigged against him – including at a rally in Saginaw earlier this month – and that Democrats are plotting to steal next month’s election, has left its mark.View image in fullscreenIn Michigan, a key swing state that Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2016 and then lost to Joe Biden four years later, one in five people say they do not have confidence that votes will be counted accurately.Across the US, just 8% of Trump supporters say they have a great deal of confidence there will be a fair election and only 16% are very confident that their own vote will be counted accurately, according to YouGov. Kamala Harris’s supporters are much more trusting, with 72% having a great deal of confidence in the conduct of the election, although that still leaves large numbers of Democrats also questioning the process.Perhaps most disturbing of all, a majority of both Harris and Trump supporters expect mass protests against the result if their candidate wins. Michigan has ramped up security at election centres across the state after Trump voters attempted to storm a counting centre in Detroit in 2020 as the election swung away from him.Guerra, like county clerks in other jurisdictions, has sought to counter Trump’s claims by holding public sessions to explain the election counting process. She has also encouraged sceptics to become election inspectors, or poll workers, so they can reassure themselves and others that the process is fair.But concerns about safety are harder to address. Guerra, who was elected to be county clerk as a Democrat but makes clear the nonpartisan requirements of her office, picks her words carefully.“It worries me that he makes voters less at ease. So when I started hearing the concerns about ‘Can I go to the polls on election day?’, that’s when I realised that people were feeling alarmed,” she said.“We’re always concerned about security here, whether or not Donald Trump existed. Elections, they need to be secure, and we need to be transparent about what we do, regardless of who’s running for office. But the rhetoric that voters are hearing and digesting and then asking me about their safety, I’m seeing that more now, and that does concern me.”View image in fullscreenMichigan’s Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said her office receives threats “every day” over the election. She has twice been the target of swatting recently, in which false emergency calls sent armed police to her home.“Swatting is a form of political violence that is horrific, dangerous and intended to terrify its victims. But hear me clearly: I will not be intimidated,” she said at the time.In 2020, dozens of protesters, some armed, descended on Benson’s house to demand she overturn the election count in Michigan.Guerra said she has not been threatened as county clerk but she was the target of repeated intimidation when she was a member of the Michigan legislature in 2020, including when armed Trump supporters stormed the state capitol building over the coronavirus lockdown in what was widely seen as a dress rehearsal for January 6 in Washington.Guerra said that the rising atmosphere of intimidation has led to a marked increase in people requesting an absentee vote, some out of fear.“I have seen a lot more people asking me: Should I early vote or should I absentee? Is something going to happen on election day?” she said.View image in fullscreenMore than one-quarter of Saginaw county’s registered voters have already requested an absentee ballot. But postal voting is itself a focus of conspiracy theories after Trump repeatedly alleged it was used to rig the count four years ago because absentee ballots in Michigan and other states were counted only after in-person votes, causing delays in final results that shifted Biden’s way.Michigan has changed its election laws since 2020 in response to the allegations of rigging and threats, including to allow absentee ballots to be counted before election day.The former president has shifted away from opposition to postal voting more recently after he realised that discouraging his supporters from casting absentee ballots might mean they don’t vote at all. But in Saginaw, Republican officials continue to push doubts.Debra Ell, who led a takeover of Saginaw’s Republican party by Trump supporters, stands by a claim that fraudulent postal votes were used to steal the last election for Biden.“I was on the ground. We walked out of our office in 2020 at about 10 o’clock at night and [Trump] was 75% ahead in Saginaw county, and we were just on a cloud. There’s no way that that could change. I think they cheated,” she said.Ell does not blame local officials but said she has no more confidence in the electoral process this year.View image in fullscreen“Between the drop boxes and the mail-in voting, the system is corrupted. A lot of this is absentee voting. You can vote absentee for any reason, and there were a lot of people that got absentee ballots for dead people or people who don’t live here any more, stuff like that. They refuse to clean up their voter rolls,” she said.Andrea Paschall, a Republican who founded Latinos for Trump of Saginaw county, said she has no doubt the last election was rigged although she is uncertain if there was tampering in Saginaw.“I haven’t found proof for Saginaw county in particular, but I have seen proof that the election was stolen and read the documentations, and I’ve talked to the people who’ve conducted those studies,” she said.Paschall said she was not confident this year’s election would be clean.“I have very little faith. There are too many ways to cheat the system. We are trying to find those ways but the problem is, if everybody doesn’t agree that there’s a problem, then you can’t solve the problem,” she said.Guerra said there is no evidence for these or other claims that the casting and counting of ballots was manipulated. She said her office has met with local Republican officials, including Ell, to reassure sceptics that nothing untoward is going on in Saginaw county, where she works with 30 local clerks administering the election on the ground, many of them also Republicans.But Guerra recognised that there was only so much she could do and that probably the only way the election was going to remain undisputed was if there is a clear winner.“I would prefer a large margin between the two major candidates,” she said. More

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      To win, Harris should talk more about working-class needs and less about Trump | Dustin Guastella

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      The 2024 campaign has entered the final stretch and, as polls tighten, it seems Kamala Harris plans to lean into attacking Donald Trump as a threat to democracy.Over the past week the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times and even the conservative National Review have all reported or commented on the messaging pivot. In a newly unveiled official campaign ad, a disembodied voice warns gravely that a second Trump term “would be worse. There would be no one to stop his worst instincts. No guard rails.” At a recent rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris reminded her supporters of Project 2025, the “detailed and dangerous plan” that she believes an “increasingly unstable and unhinged” Trump will follow to cement “unchecked power”. She sounded the alarm about the dire threat Trump poses to “your fundamental freedoms” and how in his second term he would be “essentially immune” from oversight.This is hair-raising stuff. And the campaign thinks that menacing warnings like these will motivate some urgency to march to the polls for Harris. The only problem is that voters, especially working-class voters, seem uniquely uninspired by the appeal.The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) recently tested a variety of political messages on voters in Pennsylvania, a key battleground for both campaigns, to determine what kind of rhetoric is working to nudge blue-collar voters toward Harris. In collaboration with the polling firm YouGov, we polled a representative sample of 1,000 eligible voters in Pennsylvania between 24 September and 2 October 2024. We asked respondents to evaluate different political messages that they might hear from Harris and Trump, and to score them on a scale of favorability.In line with our past research, we found that economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative fared best relative to Trump-style messages about Biden’s competence, immigration, corrupt elites, critical race theory, inflation, election integrity and tariffs. No surprise there. Meanwhile, Harris’s messages on abortion and immigration fared worse than any of the economic or populist messages we tested.Yet no message was as unpopular as the one we call the “democratic threat” message.Much like Harris’s recent rhetoric, this message called on voters to “defend our freedom and our democracy” against a would-be dictator in the form of Trump. It named Trump as “a criminal” and “a convicted felon” and warned of his plans to punish his political enemies. Of the seven messages we tested, each relating to a major theme of the Harris campaign, the “democratic threat” message polled dead last.It was the least popular message relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And it was the least popular message among the working-class constituencies Harris and the Democrats need most.Among blue-collar voters, a group that leans Republican, the democratic threat message was a whopping 14.4 points underwater relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And among more liberal-leaning service and clerical workers, it was also the least popular message, finishing only 1.6 percentage points ahead of the Trump average. Even among professionals, the most liberal of the bunch and the group that liked the message the best, the message barely outperformed Trump’s messages.The exact opposite is true for the “strong populist” message we tested. This message, which combined progressive economic policy suggestions with a strong condemnation of “billionaires”, “big corporations” and the “politicians in Washington who serve them”, tested best with blue-collar workers, service and clerical workers and professionals.If we break down the results by party we find much the same story. Republicans – who didn’t prefer any of Harris’s messages over Trump’s messages – preferred the strong populist message the most. And they overwhelmingly rejected the democratic threat message, on average preferring Trump’s messages over this by over 75 points. Among independents – an imperfect proxy for nonpartisan voters – the strong populist message was best received, while the democratic threat message was least favored. Only Democrats strongly preferred the democratic threat message, and even then it was among their least favorite.All of this suggests that the messaging pivot is a big mistake.Why voters aren’t responding to messages like these is anyone’s guess, though the fable of the boy who cried wolf comes to mind. Trump was already president. And while Democrats warned about the danger he posed to democracy, we did actually have an election to get rid of him. Remember, the moral of the fable isn’t that, in the end, there wasn’t a wolf. It’s that no one believed the boy.Moreover, the distaste for the democratic threat message among working people, and the total obliviousness to that distaste among campaign officials, is evidence itself of the huge disconnect between Harris and the working-class voters she desperately needs to win. Worse, every ad or speech spent hectoring about the Trumpian threat is one less opportunity for Harris to focus on her popular economic policies; one less opportunity to lean into a populist “people v plutocrats” narrative that actually does resonate with the working class.If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people – a party that has given up on mobilizing working people around shared class frustrations and aspirations. A party incapable of communicating a simple, direct, progressive economic policy agenda. A party so beholden to a contradictory mix of interests that, in the effort to appease everyone and offend no one, top strategists have rolled out a vague, unpopular and uninspiring pitch seemingly designed to help them replay the results of the 2016 election.Ironically, if Democrats are keen to defend democracy they would do well to stop talking about it. Instead, they should try to persuade voters on an economic vision that seeks to end offshoring and mass layoffs, revitalize manufacturing, cap prescription drug prices and put working families first.In other words, they should sound less like Democrats and more like populists.

      Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 More