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      US elections live: Harris and Trump deadlocked in polls on eve of debate, new report suggests

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      A new report published by Pew Research Center on Monday, shows the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump deadlocked.According to the Pew report, 49% of registered voters surveyed said that if the election were held today, they would vote for Harris and an identical share said they would vote for Trump.One takeaway from the new poll is that Pew states: “Trump’s advantage on ‘mental sharpness’ has disappeared.”In the survey, 61% of voters said the phrase “mentally sharp” described Harris “very or fairly well”, compared with 52% who described Trump this way.This is a decrease from an earlier Pew survey published in July, where 58% of voters said that they viewed Trump as “mentally sharp” compared with 24% who said that about president Joe Biden at the time.Amid efforts to purge voters in Republican-led states, the Department of Justice released a fact-sheet on Monday reminding states of the restrictions on removing voters ahead of the voter rolls on the eve of a federal election.The document essentially serves as a warning to states that systematically removing voters within 90 days of a federal election is illegal under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Any effort to remove voters, according to the law, must also be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory.”The document is notable because it comes as Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, and Ohio have all touted efforts to remove people from the voter rolls in recent months. Many of those efforts have been misleading and have targeted people suspected of being non-citizens and have raised scrutiny from civil rights groups who are concerned the efforts may be unlawfully targeting naturalized citizens.“Examples of list maintenance activities that may violate the NVRA include comparing voter files to outdated or inaccurate records or databases, taking action that erroneously affects a particular class of voters (such as newly naturalized citizens), or matching records based solely on first name, last name, and date of birth,” the fact sheet says.There have also been reports of activists in Georgia and Florida using unreliable software to challenge the voting eligibility of people it believes may have moved. The DOJ guidance issued on Monday reminds states that those efforts are also illegal within 90 days of a federal election.The 90-day blackout period, the document says, “also applies to list maintenance programs based on third-party challenges derived from any large, computerized datamatching process.”Kristen Clarke, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, released a video urging voters to contact DoJ if they believe they have been wrongfully removed from the rolls.“As we approach Election Day, it is important that states adhere to all aspects of federal law that safeguard the rights of eligible voters to remain on the active voter lists and to vote free from discrimination and intimidation,” she said in a statement.Speaking at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, a key swing state, Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband, talked about the intense impact of the conservative Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade on all the women in his life, including Harris.He said he heard the news directly from Harris herself. “I had never actually heard her more upset. And she called to say, ‘Dougie, they actually did it, they actually did it.’”Emhoff said Harris had personally grilled Trump’s rightwing supreme court nominees, who had claimed in their confirmation hearings that they would respect precedent when it came to abortion.Emhoff’s remarks come as Democrats focus on abortion rights, which is seen as Harris’ strongest issue.Advocacy groups are continuing to weigh in on the outline of Kamala Harris’s policy priorities, posted on her website today.It’s no surprise that Giffords, a leading gun violence prevention group headed by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived a mass shooting in 2011, praised Harris’s policy outline on gun violence prevention, which comes in the wake of two new high-profile mass shootings in Georgia and in Kentucky.Harris, a former prosecutor who secured the first-ever political endorsement from March for Our Lives, the youth gun violence prevention group formed in response to the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, has a long track record on responding to daily community gun violence, and she served as the head of the Biden administration’s newly created Office of Gun Violence Prevention, an office advocates had pushed for.The gun control measures Harris endorses are standard for Democratic politicians: she supports legislation banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring universal background checks, and supporting red flag laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.Harris’ policy overview touts her record as a prosecutor “getting illegal guns and violent criminals off California streets,” but it also highlights the Biden administration’s big investment in community-based gun violence prevention efforts, which advocates called a significant improvement from the Obama administration. Harris’ platform notes that, after a big increase in gun violence in 2020, during the early pandemic, there appears to have been a historic drop in murders in 2023. (How much decisions at the White House level had to do with either the rise or the fall in murders is deeply unclear, but the decrease in violence that Harris is pointing to is real.)She also makes very clear that she does not support defunding the police, but instead “continue to invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers and people to support them.”This is Lois Beckett, picking up our US politics coverage from Los Angeles.Oprah Winfrey will host a digital rally for Kamala Harris next week, multiple news outlets reported.The event will bring together different affinity groups that have mobilized for the Harris campaign, Variety reported.United We Dream Action, the political and electoral arm of United We Dream, the largest immigrant rights group led by young activists in the US, has endorsed Kamala Harris for president, they announced on Monday.Bruna Sollod, the group’s senior political director, said in a statement:
      We choose to block the pain and violence Trump will carry out against our people. We choose Harris as our next organizing target and are ready to hold her accountable these next four years to meet the demands of our generation.
      The Michigan supreme court has ruled that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s name will appear on Michigan’s ballot this fall, the Detroit Free Press is reporting.Despite suspending his presidential campaign last month and endorsing the former president Donald Trump, the Michigan supreme court ruled on Monday that Kennedy’s name would remain on the state’s ballot.This comes just days after an appellate court in Michigan ruled that Kennedy’s name must be stricken from ballots.The Michigan secretary of state’s office said last week that it would appeal to the state supreme court. The new ruling from the state’s high court on Monday overturns the lower court’s decision, the Detroit Free Press reported.Ever since he dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump, Kennedy has been fighting to remove his name from ballots in swing states.A new report published by Pew Research Center on Monday, shows the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump deadlocked.According to the Pew report, 49% of registered voters surveyed said that if the election were held today, they would vote for Harris and an identical share said they would vote for Trump.One takeaway from the new poll is that Pew states: “Trump’s advantage on ‘mental sharpness’ has disappeared.”In the survey, 61% of voters said the phrase “mentally sharp” described Harris “very or fairly well”, compared with 52% who described Trump this way.This is a decrease from an earlier Pew survey published in July, where 58% of voters said that they viewed Trump as “mentally sharp” compared with 24% who said that about president Joe Biden at the time.On Monday, president Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate the several individuals to serve as “key leaders in his administration” in a news release.The nominees include Senator Ben Cardin and Senator Dan Sullivan to be Representatives of the US to the 79th session of the General Assembly of the UN, among others.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, also told reporters on Monday that Joe Biden would be watching the Tuesday debate between the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and the former president Donald Trump.“The president is going to watch the debate, he’s looking forward to watching the debate” Jean-Pierre said. “The president is incredibly proud of the vice-president,” she added.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters on Monday that president Joe Biden agreed with Kamala Harris’s leadership and policy decisions.During the White House press briefing on Monday, Jean-Pierre was asked by a reporter why Vice-President Harris was “spending so much time trying to define Trump and link him to Project 2025, rather than define herself?”Jean-Pierre responded and directed the question to the Harris campaign, but said that the contrast between Trump and Harris could not be “more clear” and said that Biden “agrees with her leadership, her policy decisions.”This comes as the Harris campaign released a list of her policy proposals on Sunday evening.In an interview with Fox & Friends on Monday, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who dropped out of the Republican primary earlier this year, said that former president Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, need to change the way they speak about women, when asked why she thinks Kamala Harris has a 14-point lead among women.“Donald Trump and JD Vance need to change the way they speak about women,” Haley, who has previously said she would be voting for Trump in November, said on Monday. “You don’t need to call Kamala dumb. She didn’t get this far just by accident … she’s a prosecutor.”She continued:
      You don’t need to go and talk about intelligence or looks or anything else. Just focus on the policies. When you call even a Democrat woman dumb, Republican women get their backs up too. The bottom line is, we win on policies, stick to the policies, leave all the other stuff. That’s how he can win.
      Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign posted a list of her policy positions on its website this weekend, after critics have called her vague and thin on policy since the Democratic nominee launched her run for the White House in July.The list of policies on the Harris campaign website are organized into four main sections focused on the economy, “fundamental freedoms”, safety and crime, and national security.Among the proposals, Harris has said she would implement tax cuts for the middle class, reduce healthcare costs, increase the minimum wage, bring back the bipartisan border security bill and more.

      Kamala Harris warned that Donald Trump is “probably going to speak a lot of untruths” during their debate tomorrow night. “There’s no floor for him in terms of how low he will go,” Harris said in an interview with Rickey Smiley that aired on Monday.

      Ten retired top military officials announced their endorsement of Kamala Harris in a letter warning that Donald Trump is “a danger to our national security and democracy”. The letter by National Security Leaders for America also sought to defend Harris against Republican attacks over the Biden administration’s chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal.

      A 250-page Republican-led congressional report on Monday attempted to implicate Kamala Harris in the chaotic 2021 pullout of western forces from Afghanistan. Democrats accused Republicans of inflating Harris’s part in the incident simply because she had replaced Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee.

      Donald Trump threatened in a Truth Social post over the weekend that he would jail those “involved in unscrupulous behavior” during this year’s election. He indicated that lawyers, political operatives, donors, voters and election officials could all be targeted with prosecution.

      Donald Trump confirmed he will vote in support of a ballot measure in Florida that would legalize recreational marijuana. Trump’s support contrasts with Florida’s governor and fellow Republican, Ron DeSantis, who has been a vocal opponent of the ballot measure.

      Kamala Harris’s campaign will air a new TV ad featuring former officials in Donald’s Trump administration warning about the threat he poses to the country, in what looks like an attempt to goad the former president ahead of tomorrow’s debate.

      The Harris campaign also released three new TV ads targeting Donald Trump on abortion ahead of Tuesday’s debate that includes comments from the Republican nominee claiming credit for helping overturn Roe v Wade.

      The leaders of two major left-leaning women’s organizations said the issue of reproductive rights would offer the “starkest possible contrast” between Harris and Trump at Tuesday night’s debate.

      Republican officials are raising the alarm that Trump campaign has invested far fewer resources for its voter turnout operation in battleground states than previous presidential election races.

      Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, postponed a rally he was scheduled to speak on Monday evening in Reno, Nevada due to wildfires in the region, his campaign said.

      Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman, called Donald Trump an “unrecoverable catastrophe” on Sunday and urged fellow Republicans to vote for Kamala Harris in November’s election.
      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will arrive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday for their first (and potentially only) presidential debate.The event will mark the first time that Harris and Trump have ever met face to face, and it comes less than two months after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race following his own fateful debate performance in June.The change at the top of the Democratic ticket appears to have unnerved Trump and his campaign advisers, who have struggled to land attacks against Harris. The debate will present Trump with his most significant opportunity yet to negatively define Harris in voters’ minds, as polls show a neck-and-neck race in key battleground states.For Harris, the debate could allow her to deliver on her oft-repeated promise to voters: that she will prosecute the case against Trump. Her political history – both on the debate stage and in Senate hearings – suggest she is well-positioned to make that case. But Harris is not without her vulnerabilities either.Here are five key moments from Harris’s career that could offer a preview of her debate strategy. More

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      US House clashes over Harris’s role in 2021 Afghanistan troop withdrawal

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      Partisan divisions over the chaotic 2021 pullout of western forces from Afghanistan have burst into the open ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia after a Republican-led congressional report attempted to implicate Kamala Harris in the episode.A 250-page report from the House of Representatives’ foreign affairs committee castigated the Biden administration for failing to anticipate the Taliban’s rapid takeover and neglecting to prepare for the orderly departure of non-combatant personnel.The decision led to a shambolic evacuation effort and numerous American civilians and US-allied Afghans being left stranded as the country fell to hardline Islamist forces that America and its Nato allies had spent 20 years trying to defeat.The report, written by the committee’s Republican chairman, Michael McCaul, zeroes in on the supposed role played by the US vice-president – mentioning her name 251 times, although no evidence has emerged that she was directly involved in the decisions leading to one of the most damaging foreign policy chapters of Joe Biden’s presidency.By contrast, a 115-page interim report issued by McCaul on the committee’s investigation on 2022 name-checked Harris just twice.Democrats seized on the contrast, accusing McCaul of inflating Harris’s part in the incident simply because she had replaced Biden as the party’s presidential nominee.“Vice President Kamala Harris was the last person in the room when President Biden made the decision to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan; a fact she boasted about shortly after President Biden issued his go-to-zero order,” states the latest report, titled Wilful Blindness: An assessment of the Biden-Harris administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the chaos that followed.The report’s front page carries a picture of Harris prominently displayed below that of Biden, and above an image of Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, who played a more prominent role in the withdrawal.“Despite warnings against withdrawing by senior leaders, Vice President Harris’ aide disclosed the vice president ‘strongly supported’ President Biden’s decision,” McCaul’s report goes on. “President Biden’s former Chief of Staff Ron Klain affirmed Vice President Harris was entrenched in the president’s Afghanistan policy.”Democrats accused the Republicans of trying to exploit the withdrawal for election purposes while overlooking the fact that the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, took the original decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan when he was president.“Republicans now claim [Harris] was the architect of the US withdrawal though she is referenced only three times in 3,288 pages of the Committee’s interview transcripts,” wrote Gregory Meeks, the Democrats’ ranking member on the committee in a 59-page rebuttal to McCaul’s report.Harris’s alleged role in the withdrawal seems likely to arise when she meets Trump for their only scheduled televised debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday.Sharon Yan, a spokesperson for the White House national security council, said the the report was “based on cherry-picked facts, inaccurate characterizations and pre-existing biases”.She added: “Ending our longest war was the right thing to do and our nation is stronger today as a result.”Harris’s campaign has tried to promote her role in Biden’s foreign policy decisions since she replaced at the top of the Democratic ticket. But she has said little about the Afghan withdrawal. The House report notes that she was on a trip to Singapore and Vietnam at the time and publicly pledged that the administration would protect Afghan women and children.It concludes: “Her promise has clearly not been fulfilled.”Democrats’ accusation of using the Afghan pull-out for campaign purposes echoes criticisms of Trump’s now notorious visit to Arlington national cemetery last month to mark the third anniversary of the event.The former US president’s campaign was rebuked by the US army after its staffers reportedly became embroiled in a confrontation with a cemetery worker when she tried to enforce rules against filming and photographing in a section reserved for service members killed in the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts.Pictures and footage subsequently emerged of Trump posing at the graveside of personnel killed in a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate, near Kabul airport – which resulted in the deaths of 13 US personnel and roughly 170 Afghans. Trump denied that his visit was a campaign event, pointing out that he had been invited by families of the fallen servicemen. More

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      Harris campaign lists policies on eve of debate after criticism of vagueness

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      Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has posted a list of her policy positions on its website, less than 48 hours before her debate against Donald Trump on Tuesday, after critics have called her vague and thin on proposed policies since the Democratic nominee launched her run for the White House in July.The Harris campaign’s move came as she and the Republican former president enter the final weeks of the 5 November election – and as new polling published on Sunday showed the candidates are locked in a tight race. The vice-president had initially gained significant momentum over Trump after she replaced Joe Biden at the top of her party’s presidential ticket.A national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College released on Sunday found that Trump was up one percentage point over Harris, noting that many voters wanted to know more about the vice-president’s policies.Another poll, conducted by CBS/YouGov, indicated a close race in key swing states, with Harris narrowly leading in Michigan and Wisconsin – but tied in Pennsylvania.By Sunday evening, the Harris campaign had posted a list of policy positions on her website, organized into four main sections focused on the economy, “fundamental freedoms”, safety and crime, and national security.The campaign promised to build “an opportunity economy and lower costs for families” and to implement economic proposals such as tax cuts for the middle class as well as making rent more affordable and home ownership more attainable by providing first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 to help with down payments.In the list of proposals, Harris also said that she would work to make childcare more affordable, strengthen social security and support small businesses by expanding the startup expense tax deduction for new businesses from $5,000 to $50,000.Harris pledged to reduce the healthcare costs, increase the minimum wage, remove taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers, and address competitive practices by big corporations.Her campaign said that she would block any national abortion bans, and if Congress were to pass a bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide, Harris would sign it into law. She also plans to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Americans in healthcare, housing, education and more into law, the website reads.On the border, the campaign stated that Harris would bring back a bipartisan border security bill and sign it into law after it was blocked by Republicans earlier this year to deny Biden a legislative victory when he was still planning to run for re-election. Harris understands the need for “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship”, the website reads.When it comes to gun violence and crime, the campaign said that – if elected president – Harris would ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require universal background checks, and support red flag laws. She will also continue to “invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers and people to support them”, it added.Harris is committed to ending the opioid epidemic and tackling fentanyl, the campaign stated, adding that the bipartisan border bill she intends to sign would fund detection technology to intercept even more illicit drugs.On foreign policy and national security, Harris pledged to stand with US allies, stand up to dictators, “lead on the world stage” and make sure that “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership”. She added a promise to invest in American workers, innovation and industry.The policy proposal list also mentions Israel’s war in Gaza, where Harris stated that she would “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and she will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself”.The website stated that she and Biden – who ended his re-election campaign on 21 July – were “working to end the war in Gaza, such that Israel is secure, … hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination”.At the end of each of the policy sections on the website, the Harris campaign compared and contrasted her positions with Project 2025 – a conservative roadmap for a second Trump term written by the Heritage Foundation, a powerful conservative thinktank.Among other things, Project 2025 has called for the elimination of the education department along with the reductions of environmental protections as well as LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, amid criticism and backlash regarding the group’s proposals as being too far right. But many of the authors and groups behind the project have Trump ties – and that many of the policy goals align with things that Trump has said he intends to do if he wins in November. More

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      How will Harris debate Trump? Six key moments offer insight

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will arrive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday for their first (and potentially only) presidential debate. The event will mark the first time that Harris and Trump have ever met face to face, and it comes less than two months after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race following his own fateful debate performance in June.The change at the top of the Democratic ticket appears to have unnerved Trump and his campaign advisers, who have struggled to land attacks against Harris. The debate will present Trump with his most significant opportunity yet to negatively define Harris in voters’ minds, as polls show a neck-and-neck race in key battleground states.For Harris, the debate could allow her to deliver on her oft-repeated promise to voters: that she will prosecute the case against Trump. Her political history – both on the debate stage and in Senate hearings – suggest she is well-positioned to make that case. But Harris is not without her vulnerabilities either.Here are five key moments from Harris’s career that could offer a preview of her debate strategy:Sense of humorBefore Harris became vice-president, she served as the attorney general of California and then the state’s junior senator. When Harris ran for her Senate seat in 2016, her top opponent was Democratic congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. The two candidates faced off in an hour-long debate in October 2016, and despite the robust conversation around policy, the event is best remembered for Sanchez’s bizarre closing statement.Sanchez chose to punctuate her final comments with a dance move: the dab. For those who were not extremely online in 2016, a dab involves stretching out an arm and lowering one’s head into the crook of the other arm.Harris reacted to the move with baffled amusement, tightly pressing her lips together, in an apparent attempt to hold back laughter, before she said with a chuckle: “So there’s a clear difference between the candidates in this race.”The simple retort effectively undercut Sanchez and bolstered Harris’s pitch. And it worked; Harris defeated Sanchez by 23 points a month later. Harris has already deployed her sense of humor to undercut Trump, who has shown no tolerance for mockery, and she may be looking to do so again on Tuesday.Prosecutorial skillsAfter taking her seat in the Senate, Harris quickly made a name for herself as a tough questioner who could put witnesses on the spot as she dissected their political records. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general, experienced this first-hand in June 2017.When he appeared before the Senate intelligence committee, Harris pressed Sessions on his contact with Russian nationals during the 2016 campaign, as he was serving as a surrogate for Trump. Harris rattled off a series of questions to Sessions, who grew frustrated as he struggled to give clear, concise answers.As Sessions tried to further elaborate on one of his answers, Harris told him: “Sir, I have just a few minutes …”Sessions then interrupted, saying, “Will you let me qualify it? If I don’t qualify it, you’ll accuse me of lying, so I need to be correct as best I can … I’m not able to be rushed this fast. It makes me nervous.”The exchange cast even more scrutiny on the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russian officials and showcased Harris’s prosecutorial skills. A clash with KavanaughHarris’s questioning of Brett Kavanaugh went viral in 2018, when she pressed the supreme court nominee on his conversations about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and his views on abortion access.Harris asked Kavanaugh whether he had discussed Mueller’s investigation with anyone at a law firm founded by Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz. “Be sure about your answer, sir,” Harris told Kavanaugh.The nominee fumbled for a moment before saying, “I would like to know the person you’re thinking of.”Harris replied: “I think you’re thinking of someone, and you don’t want to tell us.”A Republican senator interjected to relieve the pressure on Kavanaugh, but Harris’s questioning raised questions about the nominee’s credibility.An even more telling exchange came when Harris asked Kavanuagh, “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?”Kavanaugh replied: “I’m happy to answer a more specific question.” When pressed, he conceded: “I’m not thinking of any right now, senator.”That comment gained renewed attention in 2022, when Kavanaugh became one of the supreme court justices who ruled to overturn Roe v Wade, ending federal protections for abortion access. Harris has blamed Trump for that decision, as he nominated three of the justices who issued the ruling, and she is sure to uplift the fight over abortion access on Tuesday.A challenge on busingHarris launched her first presidential campaign in January 2019, but she and other Democratic candidates found it difficult to overtake Biden’s early polling advantage.At a primary debate in June 2019, Harris decided to confront Biden head-on. Biden had recently attracted controversy for praising the past “civility” of politics, citing his cordial relationships with two late segregationist senators as examples. Harris attacked Biden over the comments and connected them to his past opposition to busing, the practice of transporting children to schools outside their local neighborhood to help achieve racial equity in classrooms.“You know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day. And that little girl was me,” Harris told Biden. “So I will tell you that, on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats. We have to take it seriously.”The attack line increased Harris’s national profile, boosting her standing in the polls. But that surge became the high-water mark for Harris’s campaign, and she was forced to withdraw from the race in December.‘Mr Vice-President, I’m speaking’Despite their earlier clash, Biden selected Harris as his running mate after winning the nomination, and the new vice-presidential candidate immediately got to work promoting their campaign.In her debate against Mike Pence in October 2020, Harris had to push back against the then vice-president as he attempted to talk over her.In what became a viral moment, Harris told Pence, “Mr Vice-President, I’m speaking.”The catchphrase inspired campaign merchandise and painted Pence as out of touch. The success of that moment might explain why Harris’s campaign fought to have the candidates’ mics unmuted at all times during the debate on Tuesday, as that could create an opportunity to establish a similar dynamic against Trump. But Trump’s team successfully fought that rule change, so mics will only be unmuted when moderators cue a candidate to speak.Regardless, the pushback against Pence might still teach Trump a lesson going into the debate: Harris refuses to be steamrolled.An imprecise answerTrump has reason for concern as he plans for Tuesday. But Harris has also displayed vulnerabilities that could help Trump in the debate.In Harris’s first major interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, CNN host Dana Bash started off with a rather obvious question: what were her plans for day one of her administration?“Well, there are a number of things,” Harris said. “I will tell you first and foremost one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class. When I look at the aspirations, the goals, the ambitions of the American people, I think that people are ready for a new way forward.”The vague answer prompted Bash to follow up by reiterating, “So what would you do day one?”Harris then described her plans to implement an “opportunity economy”, including expanding the child tax credit, but the exchange underscored the nominee’s penchant for avoiding specifics when discussing policy. Trump is not exactly known for his detailed policy positions either, but voters will be looking for Harris to outline a more precise vision for her presidency when she takes the debate stage on Tuesday. More

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      Trial begins in alleged ‘Trump Train’ ambush of Biden-Harris bus in 2020

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      A jury trial opening in Austin, Texas, on Monday will seek to hold Trump supporters accountable for allegedly ambushing a Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign bus on the state’s main highway in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.Plaintiffs in the lawsuit allege they were terrorised and intimidated for more than 90 minutes as they took a bus tour canvassing for the Democratic ticket in the final days of the election.At least 40 vehicles flying Make America great again flags formed themselves into a so-called “Trump Train” and encircled the bus, trying to run it off the road and playing what the suit claims was a “madcap game of highway ‘chicken’”.The plaintiffs, who include the bus driver, a Biden campaign staffer and Wendy Davis, the former Texas senator and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, say they were forced to cancel campaign events for fear that the intimidation would be repeated. They are pursuing punitive damages under both Texas law and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a federal statute from the Reconstruction period designed to end political violence and voter intimidation.Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the trial is a test of modern democratic safeguards.“The violence and intimidation that our plaintiffs endured on the highway for simply supporting the candidate of their choice is an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans,” said co-counsel John Paredes, a litigator for Protect Democracy, one of the groups bringing the case.Monday’s case, Cervini v Cisneros, is one of the most substantial legal battles arising from acts of alleged political intimidation by Trump supporters in the 2020 election besides the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. Hundreds of criminal prosecutions have been brought around the events of January 6; by contrast, the Texas trial is a civil lawsuit brought in pursuit of damages by the plaintiffs.But it is extensive in scale, with five named defendants and an unknown number of additional unidentified John and Jane Does alleged to have been involved in a conspiracy to terrorise the Biden-Harris campaigners.The suit accuses the defendants of using force to intimidate a political opponent, claims they engaged in civil assault as well as civil conspiracy designed to stifle the political voice of the Biden-Harris campaign, and calls for punitive damages and compensation.Trouble began almost immediately after the Biden-Harris campaign announced it was staging a three-day “soul of the nation” bus tour through Texas on 27 October 2020. The tour was to take Biden surrogates to a number of featured rallies and gatherings.By 28 October, chatter had begun on social media platforms among Trump supporters calling for the formation of “Trump trains” – gatherings of trucks and other vehicles to demonstrate support for the re-election of the then Republican president. One Trump train member in Alamo posted that day that they should “flood the hell out of them”, in a reference to the Biden-Harris bus.That afternoon the then president’s son, Don Trump Jr, posted on Twitter (now X) an invitation to Trump supporters to assemble. He wrote: “It would be great if you guys would all get together and head down to McAllen and give Kamala Harris a nice Trump Train welcome. Get out there. Have some fun. Enjoy it.”Flag-waving trucks driven by Trump supporters began to follow the Biden-Harris bus on 28 and 29 October. One of the vehicles was decked out as a “Trump hearse”, and said on its bodywork that it was “collecting Democratic votes one dead stiff at a time”.Larger numbers of cars convened on Friday 30 October, with some Trump supporters attracted to the melee because they thought, wrongly, that Kamala Harris would be onboard the Democratic bus that day (she was in fact campaigning in McAllen and Fort Worth). The suit claims a group of Trump supporters conspired to ambush the bus on a stretch of Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe vehicles in the Trump train swarmed around the tour bus, coming within inches of it and forcing the driver to slow to a crawl. Several of the participants livestreamed their actions on social media, bragging about their aggressive driving, the plaintiffs allege.One of the defendants, Eliazar Cisneros, is accused of side-swiping an SUV being driven by a Biden-Harris campaign staffer behind the bus. The complaint says that Cisneros later boasted about “slamming that fucker”.The occupants of the bus pleaded with police to provide an escort but none appeared. A separate case, Cervini v Stapp, was settled in October with local law enforcement admitting that they had fallen short of their standards and agreeing to pay compensation to those whose safety they failed to protect.The suit claims that the plaintiffs have suffered “ongoing psychological and emotional injury”. The bus driver, Timothy Holloway, was so traumatised that he gave up his tour bus business and has stopped driving buses.Wendy Davis, who is best known for the 11-hour speech she made in the Texas senate in 2013 to filibuster an anti-abortion bill, said she suffered “substantial emotional distress”. She feared speaking publicly about her experiences in the bus as it might put her at risk of physical harm from Trump supporters.At the trial, lawyers for the plaintiffs will make the case that while free speech is protected under the first amendment of the US constitution, intimidation and threats against people with different political beliefs is not. “Where groups are permitted to terrorize those with whom they disagree into forgoing their constitutional rights, the functioning of our democracy demands accountability,” the lawsuit says. More

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      Election outcome may depend on whether Harris or Trump can rebrand themselves as ‘new’

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      When Kamala Harris sat down for her first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee, she praised Joe Biden for his intelligence, commitment, judgment and disposition. But twice she used the phrase “turn the page”. And twice she used the phrase “a new way forward”.This was no accident. US voters are yearning for a shift in direction, with two in three saying the next president should represent a major change from Joe Biden, according to a national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College. Yet in November they face a choice between two known quantities: Harris, the sitting vice-president, and Donald Trump, a former president with an inescapable four-year record.Just 25% of voters think Harris signifies a major change, the poll found, while 56% believe she represents “more of the same”. When it comes to Trump, 51% think he would offer major change, whereas 35% consider him more of the same. Victory in the race for the White House might be decided by which of these quasi-incumbents can rebrand themselves as a breath of fresh air for a weary, divided nation.Despite the polling, Democrats are convinced that Harris has the momentum. “The American people are looking for not just new faces but a new message,” said Donna Brazile, a former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee. “They’re looking for somebody who can heal our divisions and close our partisan divides. To the extent she’s running on a message of bringing the American people together, it helps her become a change agent.”Since 1836, just one sitting vice-president, George HW Bush in 1988, has been elected to the White House. Those who tried and failed include Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000. Gore’s decision to distance himself from his popular but scandal-plagued boss, Bill Clinton, may have proved costly in his narrow defeat by George W Bush.Harris, a former senator, California attorney general and local prosecutor, became the first woman and person of colour to serve as vice-president after Biden selected her as his running mate in the 2020 election. Like most vice-presidents, she gained relatively little public attention for three and a half years.And when she did, some of the headlines were negative, for example those regarding her role in tackling the root causes of immigration and apparent discontent in her office. Axios reports that of the 47 Harris staff publicly disclosed to the Senate in 2021, only five still worked for her as of this spring.But after the president’s feeble debate performance against Trump on 27 June, everything changed. Biden bowed to pressure, dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris. The Democratic party quickly rallied around her with a combination of relief and energy bordering on ecstasy.Speakers at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago dutifully paid tribute to Biden’s service but then pivoted to looking forward to a new era under Harris. Her acceptance speech, and a biographical video, did not dwell on her vice-presidency but rather introduced her life story as if for the first time.Brazile, a Democratic strategist, said: “People see don’t see her as vice-president in large part because they rarely see the vice-president as leading the country. But she’s campaigning on a platform that includes bringing people together, ensuring that most Americans can make ends meet.“Donald Trump is a prisoner of the past. She’s a pioneer of a future. That’s the message that brings people in line with her values versus what he campaigns on every day, which is all about attacks, insults and derogatory statements.”On the campaign trail, Harris has been walking a political tightrope, embracing her boss’s achievements while keeping his unpopular baggage at arm’s length. Whereas Biden touted jobs and growth numbers, Harris has acknowledged the rising cost of living and proposed a federal ban on grocery price-gouging.Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “She wants it both ways. She wants to take credit for the improvement in the economy, the number of jobs, the successes of bringing inflation down. But she doesn’t want to be blamed for voters’ continuing frustration that they’ve been hurt because of inflation.He added: “She’s been trying to run as the change candidate, which is very strange because the change motif is for the challenger, not the incumbent party.”The switch from Biden, 81, to 59-year-old Harris instantly removed the Democrats’ biggest vulnerability – age – and weaponised it against Trump who, at 78, is the oldest major party nominee in US history.At the first debate in June, he came over as more engaged and vital than Biden, who stumbled over answers and stared into the distance with mouth agape. At the next debate on Tuesday, it is Trump whose age will be thrown into sharp relief by a rival nearly two decades younger – who would become the first female president in the country’s 248-year history if she wins.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “We went from a generic where we had two candidates who were pushing 80, so anytime that you add in a new element and someone who is generationally younger, that’s a change without even having to say a word. The fact that we are going from two old white men to a woman of colour – that screams change. It creates the tangible illustration of past versus future.”Trump has been wrongfooted by the Democrats’ abrupt change of nominee and still complains bitterly about it. Nicknames such as “Crooked Joe” and “Sleepy Joe”, as well as criticism of alleged Biden family corruption, now ring hollow. He has continued to repeat his false claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election as he makes his third bid for the White House. Still promising to “Make America great again”, he has lost the mantle of a disrupter taking on the status quo.Bardella, a former spokesperson and senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee, added: “Any time that you’re the candidate whose slogan uses the word ‘again’, that doesn’t scream change. That screams going backwards. Clearly voters want something that’s more forward-facing and, frankly, more optimistic as well. I don’t think we can overestimate the tone difference.“One campaign is saying, it’s a disaster, everything is terrible, America will be destroyed if Kamala Harris is president. The other campaign is saying we can do better, we can be better, our best days lie ahead. It’s much more optimistic and for voters coming out of Covid, January 6, the sense of weariness they have with both Biden and with Trump, that idea of turning the page and having a fresh start is a very appealing sentiment.”The Trump campaign has unleashed countless attacks tying Harris to Biden’s record on immigration, inflation and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan but with little tangible effect, at least so far. Instead, Harris continues to wear her vice-presidency lightly and cast herself as the candidate of the future.Whit Ayres, a political consultant and pollster, said: “She’s not pulling it off because of particular policy positions, but her race and gender create an image of change without ever stressing it or mentioning it.“The idea that a Black, Asian American woman could be president of the United States says change all by itself. That’s how she has created this impression that she is the change candidate in a change election, even though she’s the incumbent vice-president.”Trump would be wise to contrast his White House record with that of the Biden-Harris administration, Ayres argues. “Emphasising the economy and immigration is an obvious place for him to go. And then painting Harris as a San Francisco liberal – and there are plenty of issue positions that she has taken, in the past at any rate, that allow him to do that. If he could actually focus on that rather than using schoolyard bullying name-calling, he could win the thing.”Trump represented the shock of the new in 2016, running as an anti-establishment outsider, rattling the foundations of the Republican party and defeating the Democratic stalwart Hillary Clinton. But eight years, four criminal cases and two impeachments later, many Americans say the act has gone stale and the novelty has worn off.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “He feels diminished to me. He feels smaller, less relevant, he’s not breaking through. In part it’s because she’s rising above and talking about where she wants to take the country; she’s not engaging him. He’s using this old formula of creating chaos and fighting with his opponents and she’s not playing, and it’s hurting him.”He added: “There’s only one Trump. This Trump isn’t working the way it used to and they don’t have a plan B, and the Trump campaign’s in trouble. He’s singing the same songs and they’re not connecting the way they used to. It’s a real problem for him.”But the latest New York Times and Siena College poll – in which Trump is up by one percentage point at 48% to Harris’s 47% – makes Republicans sceptical of the notion that she has become synonymous with change in the minds of the electorate.Lanhee Chen, who was the policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, said: “There’s no question that if you look at the media narrative, that’s how she’s been framed. But with voters it could be a very different picture. As we get a little bit more data, we’ll be able to get a firmer sense of whether this framing is one that’s taken hold or if it’s just an inside-the-Beltway creation. Hard to say at this point.” More

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      Harris and Trump tied in latest US election polls, as Tuesday’s debate nears

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      Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are in effect tied heading into the final weeks of the election campaign, according to a national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College, raising the stakes of Tuesday’s presidential debate.Trump is up one percentage point, 48%-47%, over Harris, according to the survey released on Sunday, a difference that is within the survey’s three-percentage point margin of error, meaning a win for either candidate in the election on 5 November is well within reach.Separately, a CBS/YouGov poll on Sunday showed a similarly tight race in key swing states, with Harris leading narrowly in Michigan (50%-49%) and Wisconsin (51%-49) and tied in Pennsylvania.While the Trump campaign endured a relatively rocky stretch in the weeks after Democratic President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, the most recent polling indicates his core support base is not going anywhere.The NYT poll notably showed that voters feel they need to learn more about Harris, while their opinions on Trump are largely set. In the survey, 28% of likely voters said they needed more information about the Democratic nominee, while only 9% said the same about Trump.The poll indicates that Tuesday’s presidential debate could be a crucial moment.Harris will have the opportunity to give more detail of her planned policies as she spars with Trump over the course of 90 minutes. The race is so close that even a marginal boost for either candidate would be significant.In the wake of the latest polling, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s re-election campaign chair, said in an email to supporters on Sunday: “As vice-president Harris has said since day one, we are the underdogs in this race. We have a lot of work to do to make sure we win this November, and that will require us to continue aggressively raising money.“The electoral college benefits the Republican ticket. Even in 2020, when the Biden-Harris ticket won more votes than any ticket in history, the election came down to about 45,000 votes across the battleground states. This November, we anticipate margins to be similarly razor-thin. Every single vote will count.”In the CBS poll, Harris enjoyed a double-digit lead over Trump when voters were asked who had the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, and 71% did not like Trump’s comments about the vice-president, finding them insulting.However, the economy and inflation were shown to be major factor in voters’ intention to back Trump over Harris. Among white, non-college educated voters, Trump was widely favoured to provide economic opportunities for working-class people (53%-27%).The key figures from the latest NYT poll are similar to its last comparable survey, released in late July, just after Biden decided not to seek re-election. In that poll, Trump was also up one percentage point, a difference well within the margin of error.Polls in the seven key swing states likely to determine the winner of the election have also consistently shown a razor-thin race. In the latest poll, Harris narrowly leads Trump in Wisconsin (50%-47%), Michigan (49%-47%) and Pennsylvania (49%-48%).A separate NYT/Siena poll focusing only on those key swing states last month showed Harris leading Trump by four percentage points, 50% to 46%.Since Harris replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket over the summer, she has hit the campaign trail hard, but has limited her unscripted appearances and kept interviews with the news media to a minimum.With Reuters More

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      Liz Cheney calls Trump a ‘catastrophe’ and urges Republicans to vote for Harris

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      The former congresswoman Liz Cheney called Donald Trump an “unrecoverable catastrophe” on Sunday and urged fellow Republicans to vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in November’s election.“We see it on a daily basis – somebody who was willing to use violence in order to attempt to seize power, to stay in power, someone who represents unrecoverable catastrophe, frankly, in my view, and we have to do everything possible to ensure that he’s not re-elected,” Cheney said in an interview on ABC News This Week, a show on the network that is hosting Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Harris.Cheney also reaffirmed her endorsement of Harris and urged other prominent Republicans who have stated they plan on writing in a third option rather than vote for Trump to cast their ballots for the Democrat instead.“At the end of the day, you just have to wrestle with your own conscience when you’re there in the voting booth. And I would expect that you will see far more Republicans and independents, you know, when the time comes, and they’ve got to make that decision, make the right decision,” said Cheney. “Given the closeness of this election, particularly if you’re going to find yourself voting in a swing state, you’ve got to take the extra step if you really do recognize the threat that Donald Trump poses. Then it’s not enough to simply say, ‘I’m not going to vote for him.’”Asked whether she is still a Republican, Cheney claimed she is still a conservative. She said she hopes to “rebuild” the Republican party after the 5 November presidential election.A number of other Republicans have stopped short of endorsing Trump, who has been convicted of criminally falsifying business records while also facing other charges in connection with his attempts to reverse his defeat to Joe Biden while running for re-election in the 2020 presidential race.They include George W Bush, Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence, US senator Mitt Romney and Maryland governor Larry Hogan.On Sunday, Nikki Haley – who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations and later challenged him unsuccessfully in the Republican presidential primary – refused to answer when asked on a CBS Face the Nation interview if Trump was a good candidate.But unlike Cheney, they have not lent their support to Harris.Cheney fell out of favor with many in the Republican party after criticizing Trump and serving on the congressional committee which investigated the attack that his supporters aimed at the US Capitol in early January 2021. She lost re-election in Wyoming in 2022 to a Republican primary challenger backed by Trump.On Friday, her father and Bush vice-president Dick Cheney announced he plans on voting for Kamala Harris in November, rebuking his own party. A statement from Dick Cheney cited Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.Harris told reporters covering a campaign stop in Wisconsin on Saturday that she was “honored” to have the Cheneys’ endorsement and credited them for putting “country above party”. More