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      Jane Fonda rallies disaffected young US voters: ‘Do not sit this election out’

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      Young people’s understandable unhappiness with the Biden administration’s record on oil and gas drilling and the war in Gaza should not deter them from voting to block Donald Trump from again becoming president of the United States, the Hollywood actor and activist Jane Fonda has warned.“I understand why young people are really angry, and really hurting,” Fonda said. “What I want to say to them is: ‘Do not sit this election out, no matter how angry you are. Do not vote for a third party, no matter how angry you are. Because that will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States … If you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice, so you can do something about it. And then, be ready to turn out into the streets, in the millions, and fight for it.’”View image in fullscreenFonda’s remarks came in a wide-ranging interview organized by the global media collaborative Covering Climate Now and conducted by the Guardian, CBS News and Rolling Stone magazine.Making major social change requires massive, non-violent street protests as well as shrewd electoral organizing, Fonda argued. Drawing on more than 50 years of activism, from her anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s to later agitating for economic democracy, women’s rights and, today, for climate action, Fonda said that: “History shows us that … you need millions of people in the streets, but you [also] need people in the halls of power with ears and a heart to hear the protests, to hear the demands.”During the Great Depression, she said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed with helping the masses of unemployed. But FDR said the public had to “make him do it”, or he could not overcome resistance from the status quo. “There is a chance for us to make them do it if it’s Kamala Harris and Tim Walz [in the White House],” she said. “There is no chance if Trump and Vance win this election.”View image in fullscreenScientists have repeatedly warned that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by half by the next decade, Fonda noted, so a President Harris would have to be pushed “to stop drilling, and fracking, and mining. No new development of fossil fuels.” Trump, on the other hand, has promised to “‘drill, baby, drill.’ For once, let’s believe him. The choice is very clear: do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?”Fonda launched the Jane Fonda Climate political action committee three years ago to elect “climate champions” at all levels of government: national, state and local. “The Pac focuses down ballot – on mayors, state legislators, county councils,” she said. “It’s incredible how much effect people in these positions can have on climate issues.”Forty-two of the 60 candidates the Pac endorsed in 2022 won their races. In 2024, the Pac is providing money, voter outreach and publicity to more than 100 candidates in key battleground states and in California, Fonda’s home state. California is “the fifth-biggest economy in the world, and an oil-producing state”, she explained, “so what happens here has an impact far broader than California”.Fonda is also, for the first time in her life, “very involved” in this year’s presidential campaign, “because of the climate emergency”. She plans to visit each battleground state, she said: “And when I’m there, we give our schedule to the Harris campaign. Then they fold in Harris campaign [get-out-the-vote events], volunteer recruitment, things like that … and then I do them for our Pac candidates” as well.View image in fullscreenHer Pac has a strict rule: it endorses only candidates who do not accept money from the fossil fuel industry. The industry’s “stranglehold over our government” explains a crucial disconnect, Fonda said:polls show that most Americans want climate action, yet their elected officials often don’t deliver it. In California, she said, “we’ve had so many moderate Democrats that blocked the climate solutions we need because they take money from the fossil fuel industry … It’s very hard to stand up to the people that are supporting your candidacy.”Fonda also faulted the mainstream news media for not doing a better job of informing the public about the climate emergency and the abundance of solutions. Watching the Harris-Trump debate, she thought that “Kamala did very well”. But she “was very disturbed that the No 1 crisis facing humanity right now took an hour-and-a-half to come up and was not really addressed”, she added. “People don’t understand what we are facing! The news media has to be more vigilant about tying extreme weather events to climate change. It’s starting to happen, but not enough.”Given her years of anti-nuclear activism – including producing and starring in a hit Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, released days before the Three Mile Island reactor accident in 1979 – it’s perhaps no surprise that Fonda rejects the increasingly fashionable idea that nuclear power is a climate solution.“Every time I speak [in public], someone asks me if these small modular reactors are a solution,” she said. “So I’ve spent time researching it, and there’s one unavoidable problem: no nuclear reactor of any kind – the traditional or the smaller or the modular, none of them – has been built in less than 10 to 20 years. We don’t have that kind of time. We have to deal with the climate crisis by the 2030s. So just on the timeline, nuclear is not a solution.” By contrast, she said: “Solar takes about four years to develop, and pretty soon it’s going to be 30% of the electricity in the world.”The reason that solar – and wind and geothermal – energy are not prioritized over fossil fuels and nuclear, she argued, is that “big companies don’t make as much money on it”. Noting that air pollution from fossil fuels kills 9 million people a year globally, she added: “We’re being poisoned to death because of petrochemicals and the fossil fuel industry. And we [taxpayers] pay for it! We pay $20bn a year [in government subsidies] to the fossil fuel industry, and we’re dying … We need that industry out of our lives, off of our planet – but they run the world.”The two-time Academy Award winner’s decades as one of the world’s biggest movie stars has given her an appreciation of the power of celebrity, and she applauds Taylor Swift for exercising that power with her endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket.“I think she’s awesome, amazing and very smart,” Fonda said of Swift. “I’m very grateful and excited that she did it, and … I think it’s going to have a big impact.”“My metaphor for myself, and other celebrities, is a repeater,” Fonda added. “When you look at a big, tall mountain, and you see these antennas on the top, those are repeaters. They pick up the signals from the valley that are weak and distribute them so that they have a larger audience … When I’m doing the work I’m doing, I’m picking up the signals from the people who live in Wilmington and the Central valley and Kern county and are really suffering, and the animals that can’t speak, and trying to lift them up and send [their stories] out to a broader audience. We’re repeaters. It’s a very valid thing to do.”View image in fullscreenClimate activism is also “so much fun”, she said, and it does wonders for her mental health.“I don’t get depressed anymore,” she said. “You know, Greta Thunberg said something really great: ‘Everybody goes looking for hope. Hope is where there’s action, so look for action and hope will come.’” Hope, Fonda added, is “very different than optimism. Optimism is ‘everything’s gonna be fine’, but you don’t do anything to make sure that that’s true. Hope is: I’m hopeful, and I’m gonna work like hell to make it true.”

      Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent for the Nation and the executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now More

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      As the election looms, can Harris’s campaign juggle joy with a sense of gravity? | Osita Nwanevu

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      While presidential campaigns always distort and distend time in strange ways, this election already feels like it’s stretched on surreally for eons – long enough that several distinct and quite different feeling periods have been pressed into the fossil record.Recall for instance, if you can, the Republican primary. For many months, Republican insiders who should have known better and were paid handsomely to know better pushed the idea that Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, or even one of his lesser-known and lesser-resourced rivals, stood a real chance of defeating Donald Trump for the nomination – even as the former president remained firmly at the top of the polls and his challengers struggled to articulate a rationale for their campaigns to a still staunchly pro-Trump base. There were never any real grounds for this, but the press mocked up a race for DeSantis and his fellow also-rans anyway, complete with the most irrelevant series of debates in the history of American presidential politics.Then there were the doldrums of July, after a debate that wound up being extraordinarily consequential. Joe Biden’s shockingly poor performance finally made his age unignorable as an issue in the race – despite the best efforts of many Democrats and their unhinged hangers-on to ignore it. They manufactured an impressive amount of nonsense in his defense – their baseless warnings about Republican ballot shenanigans that never materialized, for instance, or the insistence that wanting Biden off the ticket was an expression of white male privilege, a glittering idiocy that should be long remembered.All that gave way predictably and immediately to unbridled enthusiasm for Kamala Harris once Biden stepped away, of course. And already in the brief and bewildering time she’s been on the ticket, Harris has essentially run two different campaigns.The first campaign, in those early days and weeks after she stepped into the race, was defined by relief and exuberance, bundled up into the repeated invocations of “joy” – a word that established an immediate contrast between Harris and both Biden and Trump. Both had staked their campaigns on a sense of gravity – Trump’s morbid and ludicrous vision of an America being undermined and invaded by dangerous foreigners and Biden’s well-founded warnings that Trump remained an existential threat to the American republic.The first Harris campaign didn’t depart from Biden there, but it did begin communicating with voters in a different register – Trump was to be feared, yes, but could also be mocked jovially. “You know it, you feel it,” Walz told a Philadelphia crowd in early August. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell.” There was something thrillingly barbed underneath that folksiness and his avuncular affect – a hostility towards the Republican party beyond Trump that turned the page from Biden’s forlorn appeals to the right of the past and was grounded by invocations of Project 2025, surely by now the most infamous policy document the conservative movement has ever produced.Project 2025 still figures heavily in Harris’s messaging, and Oprah Winfrey herself talked up the merits of political joy in an appearance with Harris this week, but the campaign overall has plainly changed – the affective contrasts with the right are being replaced with affective and substantive moves in its direction. Consider Harris’s references to her gun ownership – “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot, sorry,” she told Oprah with a laugh – or her promises, before national audiences at the Democratic national convention and during this month’s debate, that she’ll command “the most lethal” military in the world as commander-in-chief. More substantively, the predictable backtracks from positions on energy, criminal justice and other issues she took during the 2020 Democratic primary have been joined by a departure from the Biden administration’s own tax policy – she’s pointedly proposing a smaller increase in the capital gains tax rate – and more criticisms of Trump’s sabotage of the Republican senator James Lankford’s bipartisan but remarkably conservative border bill.Obviously, to win the election, Harris will have to spend the next several weeks convincing the voters who matter most in this country – swing state swing voters who might loosely be described as center-right to the extent that they have coherent and categorizable views at all – to see her as something other than the generically liberal Democratic woman of color from California she’s been on most issues for most of her career. But she needn’t throw everything her campaign can think up at the wall to that end. It’s doubtful that many votes – or more relevantly, that many donations – are going to hinge on the difference between Harris’s capital gains tax increase and Biden’s; appealingly tough talk on hypothetical home invaders does not have to be paired with a substantive retreat from, say, eliminating the death penalty.Moreover, ridicule should remain an important part of the campaign’s playbook – ideally, the more time Harris spends framing the right as bizarre and culturally alien, the less time she’ll spend implicitly, and wrongly, conceding that they might be right on an issue like immigration, where a panic over immigrants stoked by the mainstream and conservative press alike has finally and inevitably curdled into the execrable campaign against the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio. The garbage about barbecued cats isn’t something to be laughed off. The immigration discourse of the last several years has already produced multiple massacres and promises still more violence; polls show most Americans have now been frightened into nativism. All the talk and positioning of the moment aside, what would Harris do to pull those numbers back down? How much courage can we expect from Harris and the party she now leads, more broadly, should she win? At the moment, the campaign is doing everything it can to ensure only time will tell.

      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Harris calls out Trump again for ‘looking for an excuse’ to avoid a second debate

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      Kamala Harris laid down another challenge to Republican rival Donald Trump to meet her for a second debate before November’s presidential election, telling supporters in New York that her opponent “seems to be looking for an excuse” to avoid a second confrontation.On Saturday, the vice-president and Democratic nominee said she had accepted an invitation from CNN to debate the former president, but Trump said it was already “too late”.In her remarks at a New York fundraiser, Harris doubled down in her taunting of Trump over the issue, saying: “I think we should have another debate.”“I accepted an invitation to debate in October, which my opponent seems to be looking for an excuse to avoid when he should accept,” she added. “He should accept because I feel very strongly that we owe it to the American people, to the voters, to meet once more before election day.”The question of the US’s high stakes presidential debates has hung over the candidates since Joe Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous performance in June. The single scheduled debate between Trump and Harris, earlier this month, was widely viewed to have gone Harris’s way and been a serious blow to Trump.But it did not move the polls as much as the Harris campaign hoped and her campaign is still tasked with introducing her to US voters. Last week, Harris went on Oprah to help smooth the introduction along.This week Harris is due to reveal a set of new economic policies. Polls show she is steadily gaining trust on the key issue of the economy, which often favors Trump and the Republican party.On Sunday, Harris returned to the key themes of the message Democrats wish to underline – a threat to democracy they perceive a second Trump terms represents and the knife-edge that polls suggest the race remains balanced upon.“This is a man who said he would be a dictator on day one … just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris said in New York. “This race is as close as it could be. This is a margin of error race … and I am running and we are running as the underdog.”Harris called Trump an “unserious man”, but said the consequences of putting him back in the White House were “very serious”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHead-to-head polls tend to show Harris with a narrow but solid lead over Trump, though the situation is more mixed in the crucial swing states that will decide the race to the White House. That is a reverse of the situation when Biden was in the race, where Trump had established a firm lead over the US president. More

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      ‘This isn’t the real Oprah’: Trump lashes out at talkshow host over Harris support

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      Just over a week ago, it was the pop superstar Taylor Swift. Now Donald Trump is taking aim at Oprah Winfrey over her support of Kamala Harris.Whether or not attacking some of the most popular and powerful entertainment figures in US history will prove a solid campaign strategy is yet to be proven, but the former president has not held back.In a rant on Truth Social, Trump said he “couldn’t help but think this isn’t the real Oprah”.“This isn’t a person that wants millions of people, from prisons and mental institutions, and terrorists, drug dealers, and human traffickers from all over the world pouring into our country,” he wrote.In the post, Trump noted that the TV show host Winfrey had invited him and his family on to her talkshow the final week of the show’s finale.“It was my honor, with my family, to do it,” he wrote.The episode with his family actually aired in February, three months before the series finale in May 2011. At the time, Winfrey’s show billed it as the first Trump family interview with his wife, Melania, who he had married six years earlier.Winfrey hosted a livestreamed interview with Kamala Harris on 19 September that served as a virtual rally with other celebrity guests, including Tracee Ellis Ross, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Chris Rock and Ben Stiller.“There’s a real feeling of optimism and hope making a comeback … for this new day that is no longer on the horizon but is here,” Winfrey said during the event, which had 400 in-person attendees and 200,000 live viewers.The live stream gave Harris a viral and somewhat controversial clip when Winfrey said she was surprised that the Democratic nominee was a gun owner.“If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris said, laughing. She immediately brushed off the comment, saying: “Sorry. Probably shouldn’t have said that. But my staff will deal with that later.”Winfrey is just the latest in a slate of high-profile celebrities Trump has slammed in recent months.When George Clooney became the first major celebrity to voice concern over Joe Biden’s age, Trump called Clooney “a fake movie actor who should get out of politics”.Then in September, after the first presidential debate between Harris and Trump, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris. Trump went on to say on his social media site: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.” More

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      Gretchen Whitmer calls Trump ‘deranged’ after comments on abortion

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      Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, called Donald Trump “just deranged” on Sunday after he said women would no longer be thinking about abortion if he is elected as president in November.“This guy just doesn’t understand what the average woman is confronting in her life in this country, and how could he? He’s not lived a normal life,” Whitmer said in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.Whitmer also reaffirmed her support for Kamala Harris, describing her as a person “who has worked hourly jobs, who knows how important it is that women have healthcare and access to the medical care that they need”.Whitmer was asked to comment about a speech the former president delivered on Saturday, saying women “will be happy, healthy, confident, and free” if he is elected president.“He’s just deranged,” the governor of Michigan said.On Friday, Trump made similar comments about women on his Truth Social platform.“WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO … AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO!” Trump said.Harris is a staunch supporter of abortion rights. The vice-president delivered two speeches on Friday, first in Georgia and then Wisconsin, highlighting the case of Amber Thurman, who died in Georgia due to a strict abortion ban.Whitmer’s comments on Sunday come a week after participating in an online campaign event with TV host, producer and author Oprah Winfrey, which was livestreamed nationally from Michigan.The Michigan governor was previously named as a possible candidate for the Democratic nomination for president before ruling herself out in July. Michigan is a must-win prize for candidates, a state that has voted for the presidential winner in the last four national elections.Joe Biden took Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020. Two years later, Whitmer defeated a Trump-backed candidate and Democrats took full control for the first time in 45 years. More

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      More than 700 national security officials endorse Kamala Harris for president

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      More than 700 national security leaders and former military officials publicly endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a letter released on Sunday, calling her a candidate who “defends America’s democratic ideals”.They also said her Republican rival, Donald Trump, was “unfit” for the job.The letter, signed by retired US navy R Adm Michael Smith and hundreds of others, criticized the former president’s remarks about “terminating” the US constitution over his lie that the 2020 election was stolen and his suggestion of becoming a “dictator” if re-elected.The group also condemned Trump’s lack of remorse for the January 6 Capitol attack.The letter is a further boost to the vice-president and her bid for the White House. Since Joe Biden dropped his bid for re-election in July, Harris has opened up a narrow lead over Trump and performed more strongly in the crucial swing states needed for victory. She has also secured the endorsement of some key anti-Trump Republicans.The security and military officials wrote in the latter that Harris “grasps the reality of American military deterrence, promising to preserve the American military’s status as the most ‘lethal’ force in the world”.“The contrast with Mr Trump is clear: where Vice President Harris is prepared and strategic, he is impulsive and ill-informed,” the letter reads.Among those signing the letter is the former secretary of state and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Jeff Bleich, who served as the US ambassador to Australia under Barack Obama, and the former CIA director John Deutch.In her new book, Clinton expressed her excitement of the prospect of a woman becoming president.“When I imagine Kamala standing before the Capitol next January, taking the oath of office as our first woman president, my heart leaps,” she said. “After hard years of division, it will prove that our best days are still ahead and that we are making progress on our long journey toward a more perfect union.”The letter made public also criticized Trump’s relationship with leaders overseas, including China’s president, Xi Jinping, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe national security leaders also slammed Trump’s decision to criticize leaders in the UK, Israel, Australia, Canada and Germany.“Mr Trump denigrates our great country and does not believe in the American ideal that our leaders should reflect the will of the people,” says the letter. “Mr Trump is the first president in American history to actively undermine the peaceful transfer of power, the bedrock of American democracy.”The pro-Harris letter comes on the heels of another endorsement earlier this month by a group of 10 retired top US military officials, including retired Gen Larry Ellis, condemning Trump’s comments disparaging members of the military.Last month, Trump was pictured giving a thumbs up with family members at a ceremony to mark the deaths of US soldiers in Afghanistan. The army accused two campaign officials of pushing aside a worker at the cemetery who told them that it was not permitted to take photographs at the graves of recently deceased soldiers. More

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      Trump rejects Harris call for second debate, saying ‘it’s too late’

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      Kamala Harris has accepted an invitation from CNN to participate in another debate with Donald Trump, on 23 October, her campaign said on Saturday.“Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate. It is the same format and setup as the CNN debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised CNN’s moderators, rules and ratings,” the Harris campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement.“I will gladly accept a second presidential debate on October 23,” Harris later posted on X. “I hope Donald Trump will join me.”Trump debated Joe Biden in June when the US president was still running for re-election. Biden performed so badly that he ended up dropping out of the race in July, and Harris, his vice-president, ascended to the nomination.Asked about Harris’s acceptance of the CNN invitation, a Trump spokesperson pointed to the former president’s prior statements that there would be no more debates.Shortly afterwards, Trump spoke at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, and said that Harris only wants a rematch because she is losing.“She’s done one debate, I’ve done two. It’s too late to do another, I’d love to in many ways but it’s too late, the voting is cast, the voters are out there, immediately – is everybody voting, please? Get out and vote,” Trump said.The first in-person voting began in Minnesota, Virginia and South Dakota on Friday and some postal ballots were sent out a few days earlier.Harris and Trump held their first presidential debate in Philadelphia on 10 September, with Harris, the Democratic nominee for the White House, widely deemed to have won – a judgment rejected by Trump.The lead-up to that event was touch-and-go, scheduled originally when Biden had been at the top of the Democratic ticket, but Trump eventually acquiesced to appear, while the Harris campaign eventually agreed to the original rules of muted microphones when it was not the candidate’s turn to speak.Two days after the debate, when Trump had said he wouldn’t do another, he cited Harris’s invitation for a rematch then as proof he’d won the first.“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,’” he wrote.This prompted the Harris campaign to taunt Trump as a chicken, and Saturday’s ostentatious acceptance of another debate invitation also seemed designed to needle her opponent.The vice-presidential debate is on 1 October between Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate and the governor of Minnesota, and JD Vance, a US senator for Ohio.Debate scheduling and platforming have become almost as contentious as the election campaign itself. The Harris and Trump campaigns repeatedly clashed over where, on what TV network, with which moderators and in what format they should debate, such as with muted or unmuted microphones, or whether with an audience or not.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter the debate hosted by ABC News earlier this month, Trump criticized the network’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for what he claimed was a biased approach.“They are the most dishonest, in my opinion, the most dishonest news organization,” he grumbled on Fox News.But a post-debate YouGov poll found that registered voters who responded said, by double digits, that the moderators had been “fair and unbiased”.While 43% said they had been fair, 29% said they had been biased in Harris’s favor and 4% said they had been biased in Trump’s favor. There was a big partisan split, with 55% of Republicans saying the moderators had been biased in Harris’s favor.But Trump praised, in comparative terms, the debate he’d had with Biden in June, saying the cable network was “more honorable” than ABC.CNN moderators did not live-fact-check the candidates, while ABC’s moderators did, including, most memorably, David Muir debunking as baseless the racist rightwing conspiracy theory repeated by Trump that the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, had been eating other residents’ pets.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Harris campaign raised triple the funds in August that Trump team took in

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      Kamala Harris’s presidential election campaign raised more than triple the funds that Donald Trump’s did in August, according to the latest figures released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).The US vice-president and the Democratic National Committee saw $257m (£193m) flow into their coffers, compared with $85m (£64m) raised by the former president and the Republican National Committee, continuing a towering financial fundraising advantage that has been leveraged since Joe Biden stepped away from his re-election bid in July and Harris became the party’s nominee for the White House.The FEC’s release on Friday showed that the Democratic campaign of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, and the Democratic National Committee have $286m (£215m) to play with in the final two months before the election on 5 November, compared with Trump’s $214m (£161m).Harris’s cash advantage translated into significantly more spending: FEC disclosures show spending on the Harris-Walz campaign reached $174m (£131m) last month, almost three times as much as the Trump campaign outlays of $61m (£47m).Campaign and national committee combined spending shows a less extreme split. Harris and the Democrats splurged with $258m (£194m) last month into her sprint for the presidency, with Trump and the Republicans dropping $121m (£91m) on campaign advertising and costs, $36m (£27m) more than they raised that month.Meanwhile, tech mogul Elon Musk also made his largest federal political contribution to date, giving a total of $289,100 (£217,090) to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), a committee dedicated to supporting Republican candidates in the US House of Representatives. The party narrowly controls the lower chamber of Congress, while Democrats have a wafer-thin majority in the US Senate and both parties are battling fiercely for control.Despite the Harris campaign cash advantage, allowing her to blanket the airwaves with ads, opinion polls both nationally and in swing states show an extremely tight race. Both campaigns have said most of their spending was on ads, with smaller sums paying for rallies, travel and campaign staff salaries.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Harris campaign spent more than $135m (£101m) on media buys and ad production in August, FEC records showed; more than $6m (£4.5m) on air travel; about $4.9m (£3.7m) on payroll and related taxes; and $4.5m (£3.4m) on text messaging. Harris’s campaign has assembled at least 2,000 aides and 312 campaign field offices across the battleground states.The Trump campaign has not disclosed comparative details about the size of its operation. In August, it spent more than $47m (£35m) on ads, alongside $10.2m (£7.7m) on direct mail to potential voters and about $670,000 (£503,000) on air travel.The financial disclosures come as an intriguing interpretation of how each candidate might get to the winning threshold of 270 electoral college votes has emerged: if Harris wins the northern swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and North Carolina, but loses the Sun belt swing states of Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, then the 2024 election could come down to Nebraska, where five electoral college votes are assigned proportionally but there is a push by Republicans to change that to a winner-take-all system. More