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      These seven states will decide the election. Here’s what we learned reporting on the ground

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      Spare a thought for beleaguered Pennsylvanians. During the past few weeks, they have been pummeled with $280m worth of election ads blazing on their TV and computer screens, part of an eye-popping $2.1bn spent so far on the US presidential election.Pennsylvania is one of the seven battleground states that, when it comes to choosing presidents, can seem as revered as the seven wonders of the world. Forget Democratic California, ditch reliably Republican Texas – it is these seven states that, come 5 November, will decide the outcome of one of the most consequential elections in modern times.Their names are seared into the minds of politically aware Americans: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Under America’s arcane electoral system, the occupant of the Oval Office is elected not through the popular vote but by electoral college votes harvested state by state.Among them, the seven states control 93 electoral college votes (Pennsylvania has the largest number, 19, which is why its residents are so bombarded). In the final days, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and their running mates, JD Vance and Tim Walz, will be scrambling all over them in a bid to reach the magic number: 270 electoral college votes to win.The states are called battlegrounds for a reason – their loyalty cannot be taken for granted by either side. This year, though, their unpredictability has reached dizzying heights. The Guardian’s presidential poll tracker shows five of them essentially tied within a three-point margin of error, with only Arizona (where Trump is up four points) and Wisconsin (where Harris is up five) pulling away. Nate Cohn, the New York Times’ polling expert, has drily noted that the presidential polls are “starting to run out of room to get any closer”.Guardian reporters are on the ground in each of the seven battlegrounds to test these confounding waters.– Ed PilkingtonArizona‘Why isn’t Trump doing a little better here?’View image in fullscreenOn a stiflingly hot afternoon last month, Lynn and Roger Seeley relaxed into an air-conditioned co-working space in a suburb east of Phoenix. They had come to hear the Democratic candidate for US Senate, Ruben Gallego, make his pitch to a roomful of small-business owners. Lifelong Republicans, they might have felt out of place at a Democratic campaign event in the pre-Trump era. But not now.“The Arizona Republican party is not the same Republican party,” said Lynn Seeley, who plans to vote for Kamala Harris in November. “It just doesn’t represent me anymore.”The Seeleys are among a group of disaffected Arizonans known as “McCain Republicans” – moderates and independents who prefer the “maverick” brand of politics of the late Arizona Senator John McCain to Trump’s Maga movement.The Trumpification of the state GOP, as well as rapid population growth, a large number of young Latino voters and a suburban shift away from the Republican party have created an opening for Democrats in recent election cycles, turning once ruby-red Arizona into a desert battleground.View image in fullscreenPolling shows Donald Trump with a narrow edge over Harris in the presidential race. The Senate race, which is critical to the party’s slim hope of maintaining control of the chamber, appears to trend in Gallego’s favor. The state also features two of the most competitive House races in the country, both key to winning the speaker’s gavel. Arizonans are also voting on an initiative to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution.Across the sprawling Phoenix region, one of the fastest-growing in America, Trump and Harris signs dot xeriscaped yards. But roughly a third of Arizonans are unaffiliated, and since Trump’s election in 2016 they have broken for Democrats in key statewide races.In 2020, Trump lost the state by fewer than 11,000 votes, the narrowest of any margin. It was the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had won Arizona since Bill Clinton in 1996, and before then, it was Harry Truman in 1948.“Arizona is not a blue state,” said Samara Klar, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona. “Arizona has had very high inflation rates, very high increases in the cost of living, and an increase in the cost of gas. It’s a border state during a border crisis. A Republican candidate should be cleaning up in Arizona. So the question is: why isn’t Trump doing a little better here?”Lauren Gambino | Chandler, ArizonaGeorgiaEarly voting hits records – but offers few cluesView image in fullscreenMary Holewinski lives in Carrollton, Georgia, which is home turf for the far-right representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. But Holewinski is a Kamala Harris supporter and has a sign in her yard. It draws nasty looks, she said: “I’ve lost neighbor friends.”Those tensions are ratcheting up, because the presidential election is already well under way in Georgia. More than 2 million Georgians – a quarter of its electorate – have already gone to the polls, setting early voting records each day.Both Harris and Trump consider Georgia – no longer a stereotypical “deep south” state but one propelled by the economic and cultural clout of Atlanta – a crucial pickup. In 2020, the state went for Joe Biden by 11,780 votes– and Trump has since been charged in an election interference case after calling Georgia’s secretary of state and asking him to “find” those 11,780 votes. A Georgia victory would represent belated validation for the former president.The candidates may as well have leased apartments in Atlanta, for all the time they’re spending here. The difference between a Democrat winning 80% and 90% of their votes could be larger than the overall margin of victory.But Georgia is no longer a state defined by Black and white voters. Asian and Latino population growth has changed the political landscape in suburban Atlanta, which helped drive the Biden victory here in 2020. And the conflict between conventional conservative Republicans and the Maga insurgency may also be determinative: suburban moderates in the Atlanta region turned against Trump in 2020, and he has done little since to win them back.Still, while historically Democrats in Georgia have been more likely to vote early than Republicans, Trump has pointedly instructed his supporters to vote early in person in Georgia, and many appear to be doing just that.“I could care less about whether you like him or not. It’s not a popularity contest,” said Justin Thompson, a retired air force engineer from Macon. “It’s what you got done. And he did get things done before the pandemic hit. And the only reason why he didn’t get re-elected was because the pandemic hit.”George Chidi | Atlanta, GeorgiaMichiganTurnout is key in state where many are angry over GazaView image in fullscreenThe trade union official had much to say, but he wasn’t going to say it in public.The leader of a union branch at a Michigan factory, he was embarrassed to admit that most of its members support Donald Trump – even though he’s also disparaging about what he saw as the Democratic party elite’s failure to put the interests of working people ahead of powerful corporations.“I don’t want to disagree with the members in public because they have their reasons to do what they think is good for protecting their jobs,” he said. “I’ve tried to explain that they’re wrong but they don’t want to hear it.”Like many in Michigan, he found himself torn: despairing of Trump yet not greatly enthused by Harris. A Rust belt state that once prospered from making cars, steel and other industrial products, Michigan lost many jobs to Mexico after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) by Bill Clinton, an enduring source of resentment against the Democrats for some voters that helped Trump to power.That goes some way to explain why opinion polls continue to have the two candidates neck-and-neck in Michigan, even though the Harris campaign is heavily outspending Trump here and appears to have a better ground game with more volunteers.Turnout will be key: Trump won here by just 10,704 votes in 2016, then lost narrowly to Biden four years later. High on the list of demographic targets are Black voters in Michigan’s largest city, Detroit, whose low turnout in 2016 was a factor in Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the state. Harris is also targeting white suburban women, many of whom previously supported Trump but have cooled on him over abortion rights, his continued false claims of election fraud and his criminal convictions.For all of that, the election in Michigan may be decided by events far away.More than 100,000 Michigan Democrats, many of them from the state’s Arab American community around Detroit, abstained from supporting Biden in the Democratic primaries earlier this year because of his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. So far, Harris has not significantly wavered from Biden on the issue. With polls this close, it could be decisive if Harris loses a fraction of these voters.Chris McGreal | Saginaw, MichiganNevadaIs Harris or Trump better for the working class?View image in fullscreenUrbin Gonzalez could have been working inside, in the air conditioning, at his regular job as a porter on the Las Vegas Strip. Instead, in the final days before the US election, he had chosen to go door-knocking in the 104F (40C) heat.“I don’t care because I’m fighting for my situation,” said Gonzalez, dabbing the sweat from his neck. “All Trump wants to do is cut taxes for his buddies, for his rich friends, not for us. Not for workers … This is personal.”While the US economy broadly bounced back from the pandemic, Nevada has lagged behind. Nearly a quarter of jobs here are in leisure or hospitality, and although the Las Vegas Strip, where Gonzalez works, is back to booming with tourists, unemployment in Nevada remains the highest of any US state, and housing costs have skyrocketed.Both Trump and Harris have promised to turn things around: both have promised to eliminate federal income taxes on workers’ tips, and both have vowed to expand tax credits for parents – though their plans widely differ when it comes to the finer points.Although Nevada has leaned Democratic in every presidential election since 2008, winning candidates have scraped by with slim margins. About 40% of voters don’t identify with either Democrats or Republicans, and although a growing number of Latino voters – who now make up 20% of the electorate – have traditionally backed Democrats, the party’s popularity is slipping.The state, which has just six electoral votes, is notoriously difficult to accurately poll – in large part because the big cities, Reno and Las Vegas, are home to a transient population, many of whom work unpredictable shifts in the state’s 24/7 entertainment and hospitality industries. But many voters remember the days early in the Trump administration when costs were lower. “I think the economy was just better when Trump was president,” said Magaly Rodas, 32, while shopping at her local Latin market. Her husband, an electrician, has struggled to find work since the pandemic, while rent and other expenses have continued to climb. “What have the Democrats done for us in four years?”Maanvi Singh | Las Vegas, NevadaNorth CarolinaA hurricane is a wild card that could depress turnoutView image in fullscreenKim Blevins, 55, knows what it’s like to survive a disaster. She was locked inside her home without power for eight days when Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina last month.So when she uses the experience as a frame through which to view the impending election, she is not being frivolous. “If Trump doesn’t get in, it’s going to be worse than the hurricane,” she said.“It’ll be world war three. Kamala Harris wants to make us a communist country and we can’t survive that. The illegals coming over the border, the inflation of food and gas prices, we can’t do that.”Hurricane Helene has raised a critical challenge for Donald Trump.It affected a rural mountainous region that is Trump’s natural base – some 23 out of the 25 stricken counties are majority-Maga. So any decline in turnout would most likely hurt him.Trump needs to win North Carolina if he is to have an easy shot at returning to the White House. The state veers Republican, only voting for a Democratic president twice in recent times (Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008). Trump took it in 2020 by just 75,000 votes.Yet Harris has succeeded since she took over the Democratic mantle from Joe Biden in making this race neck-and-neck.In the final stretch, Trump is focusing on getting his base of largely white rural voters to the polls, hurricane be damned. His campaign has been heartened by the first week of early voting, which has smashed all records, with Republicans almost matching Democrats in turnout. (In 2020 and 2016, Republicans lagged behind.)On her side, Harris is waging an intense ground game, with hundreds of staffers fanning out across the state to squeeze out every vote. The thinking is that if Trump can be blocked in North Carolina, he can be stopped from regaining power.For that to happen, Harris has to mobilize her broad tent of support, with special emphasis on women in the suburbs of Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. She is also trying to shore up the male African American vote, which has shown some softness.Not least, she is trying to tie Trump to Mark Robinson, the state’s Republican gubernatorial candidate. Robinson has described himself as a “Black Nazi”, and has been revealed to have made extreme racist remarks.Ed Pilkington | Creston, North CarolinaPennsylvania‘If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing’View image in fullscreenPennsylvania provided one of the most enduring images of the fraught US election cycle: Donald Trump raising his fist to a crowd of supporters after a gunman attempted to end his life at a campaign rally in July. As Trump left the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, with blood dripping from his ear, his supporters chanted: “Fight! Fight!”Days later, Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, clearing the way for Kamala Harris to ascend to the Democratic nomination.Both Trump and Harris have returned to Pennsylvania dozens of times since, confirming that the Keystone state could play a definitive role in the presidential race. “If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania last month. “It’s very simple.”As the fifth-most-populous US state, Pennsylvania has the most electoral votes of any of the battlegrounds. Much of the population is clustered around Philadelphia and smaller cities like Pittsburgh and Scranton, where Biden showed strength in 2020, but the more rural regions could play an outsized role in the election. White, blue-collar voters in these rural areas have sharply shifted away from Democrats in recent elections.Some Democrats expected Harris to choose the popular governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate, given his impressive ability to secure consistent victories in such a closely-contested state. Harris instead chose Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, a decision that could come back to haunt her depending on the results in Pennsylvania.In her bid to sway undecided voters, Harris has walked back some of her most progressive proposals from her 2020 presidential campaign – such as a ban on fracking, a major industry in Pennsylvania, on which she has now reversed her stance.It could all come down to Pennsylvania. Tom Morrissey, a 67-year-old voter from Harleysville attending a Democratic campaign event last month, was optimistic . “We love the enthusiasm. It’s so important at this time,” Morrissey said. “We have to save democracy.”Joan E Greve | Ambler, PennsylvaniaWisconsin‘Let the anxiety wash over you and then refocus’View image in fullscreenWearing matching hats emblazoned with the words “Sauk County Democrats”, Deb and Rod Merritt, a retired couple from southern Wisconsin, joined the crowd to hear Barack Obama stump for Kamala Harris.“We’re so apprehensive that the polls say they’re close,” said Rod Merritt.Sauk county is one of a handful of Wisconsin counties that has flipped from Democrats to Republicans and back. It’s exactly the kind of place – a swing county in a swing state – that the campaigns are fighting over.A midwestern state in the Great Lakes region known for dairy production, manufacturing and healthcare, Wisconsin is considered to be part of the “blue wall” – the states Democrats consistently won in the 1990s and early 2000s.Trade unions historically helped drive voter turnout for Democrats, but a series of anti-labor laws passed under the Republican-controlled state government in 2011 dealt them a blow. Rural areas have increasingly turned to Republican candidates, leaving cities like Milwaukee – Wisconsin’s most racially diverse – and the liberal stronghold of Madison as Democratic bastions.With the economy the top issue, it all comes down to turnout, with Republicans focusing on rural voters and young men, who have increasingly looked to conservative politics.The Democrats, meanwhile, hope the closeness of the race – in which a half-million people have already voted – will mobilize volunteers. “In some ways, the most important thing is learning some breathing exercises so that you can let the anxiety wash through you – and then refocus on knocking on the next door,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic party of Wisconsin.Alice Herman | Madison, Wisconsin More

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      in US Politics

      In Michigan, these US veterans call Trump ‘the devil’ – and phone-bank for Harris

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      Like so many military veterans, the ageing group of men and women adorned with badges of fighting forces and theaters of war hesitated to talk about their past lives. But after one finally spoke up to denounce the man they called “the devil”, the floodgates opened to an anger and alarm that went far beyond normal political discourse.The veterans turned out on a warm evening to phone-bank for Kamala Harris in Saginaw, Michigan – a swing county in a key battleground state. But first they got to tell each other about where they served and the ways in which that shapes how they see next week’s presidential election.Most enlisted decades ago, some for only a few years. But that was long enough when fighting in Korea or Vietnam to have marked out the course of their lives and shaped their views of the world. From that vantage point, the veterans look upon Donald Trump with undisguised disgust.Some refused to even speak his name, including former air force electrician Josie Couch.“This man here, that Kamala is running against, he’s like the devil and, you know, he ain’t even trying to hide it,” she told her fellow veterans.A younger generation of Americans is fearful that another Trump presidency will further erode the rights they thought were set in stone, particularly in the wake of the supreme court striking down the constitutional right to abortion.The veterans bring a longer view shaped by early lives without many of the rights now under threat, not least greater racial and gender equality, and after having to fight for them in the first place. Couch, a Black woman, remembers her service and working life in the 1970s as a time of sexism, harassment and hostility that she and others struggled against.View image in fullscreenNow, she said, Trump wants “to take away everything that we done work hard for, our parents worked hard for”.“We all didn’t have a great service life because the men, they didn’t really want us to be there. I was called everything but Josie. I kind of forgot what my name was,” she said.“It’s going to be terrible if we take steps back because we don’t know how to go back.”Others in the hall shouted out: “We’re not going back.”Couch continued.“For them to take away women’s rights, come on now. How did we get here? If we didn’t stand up for our rights, we wouldn’t be here today,” she said.“Men can’t tell you what to do with your body. I haven’t heard yet what they’re gonna do with the men’s bodies, so why do they want to keep pushing us down?”Trump divides veterans in the same way he polarises other Americans. Some who served in the most senior positions in the military are now denouncing him openly.Trump’s ex-chief of staff, retired marine corps general John Kelly, has warned that his former boss meets the definition of a fascist and would rule like a dictator if he were to return to the White House.Other former generals and intelligence officials have joined in denouncing Trump, including the ex chair of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley, former CIA director John Brennan and Trump’s defence secretary Mark Esper.But for the veterans in Saginaw, their anger is more visceral. They speak with unusual passion as their contempt for Trump spills out about the former president’s repeated disparaging of those who have served in the military and his targeting of some of the most vulnerable in society.Dave Salogar stepped up to speak wearing a cap marking him as a veteran of the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. He began by telling the story of his grandparents, who fled the collapsing Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918 for Canada and then crossed the border illegally into the US.Salogar’s grandfather was killed in a mining accident in Michigan in 1924 and his grandmother raised her children as a single mother while working in a cannery.“So technically I’m the grandchild of illegal immigrants, and I hear the way immigrants are being beat up for all the ills when they’re the people that make America great. My grandmother, the illegal immigrant, eventually became a citizen at the age of 80. She sent two of her sons to fight in world war two. She sent a third son to Korea to fight and he was wounded,” said Salogar.View image in fullscreen“Myself and two of my cousins, this illegal immigrant’s grandchildren, went off to Vietnam.”Salogar joined a combat unit in 1968 at the age of 19 and served for nearly two years. He told the Guardian that the trauma of that war defined his life and cost him a series of jobs in the transportation industry after he sought refuge in alcohol for a decade. It’s one of the reasons he’s so contemptuous of Trump’s claim to have been unfit for military duty because of bone spurs.But Salogar reserves his real ire for how the former president talks about other veterans. Several of those in the room expressed disgust at Trump’s 2015 attack on Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.“He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured? I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said.As president, Trump also derided American war dead as “suckers” and “losers” after refusing to visit a second world war US military cemetery in Normandy in 2020. In August, the US army publicly rebuked Trump campaign officials for turning a ceremony at Arlington national cemetery to mark the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan into a photo opportunity for the Republican presidential candidate.Salogar does not hide his contempt.“He said we’re suckers and losers. The man could not go to Normandy on June 6 to go to the cemetery because it was raining and he was going to mess his hair. What kind of man is that?” he said.“I wasn’t old enough to vote when I was in Vietnam. Now I’m 76. This will probably be the last election I vote in, but it is the most important one.”Jerry and Dale Blunk met and married while serving on a now-defunct US military base in Iceland. He was in the navy for nearly 24 years and she was in the air force.Speaking to the Guardian, Jerry Blunk said he was supporting Harris because “it’s about time a woman became president of the United States”. Dale interrupted him.View image in fullscreen“Well, that’s not the only reason because both of us agree that Trump can’t be allowed into office again. He has no respect for anyone except himself. He has no respect for the constitution. He has no respect for veterans. He doesn’t have any respect for anyone. So he can’t go back to the White House,” she said.They, too, were infuriated by Trump’s disparaging of other veterans.“The minute he said McCain wasn’t a warrior, it was an insult to everyone who fought and died,” said Dale.But she is concerned about more than insults. Like others in the room, she questioned whether US democracy could survive another bout of Trump in the White House.“I don’t think the rule of law will prevail. The supreme court has already given him unlimited power. You give that to an egotist and a fascist, then we’ve lost our country. Literally, we’ll lose our country,” she said.Still, for all his anger at the former president’s failure to serve while disparaging those who did, Salogar pauses and reflects that Trump would have been a liability as a soldier.“When I was 19, I learned you’re white, Black, brown, you all bleed red,” he said.“I’m glad he wasn’t beside me, because I’ve witnessed unbelievable acts of courage, unbelievable acts of compassion and unbelievable acts of sacrifice by other 19- or 20-year-olds like myself.” More

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      in Elections

      Republican Legal Challenges to Voting Rules Hit a Rough Patch

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      The legal wars over election rules are raging even as voters around the country cast ballots. And several recent efforts by groups aligned with former President Donald J. Trump to challenge voting rules have been coming up short in federal and state courts.Judges in a number of political battlegrounds and other states have rejected legal challenges this month to voter rolls and procedures by Republicans and their allies.The Nebraska State Supreme Court ruled that election officials cannot bar people with felony convictions from voting after their sentences are served.A Michigan state judge rejected a Republican attempt to prevent certain citizens living abroad, including military members, from being eligible to cast an absentee ballot in that swing state.And a federal judge in Arizona rejected a last-minute push by a conservative group to run citizenship checks on tens of thousands of voters.“They are hitting quite a losing streak,” said David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who advises both Democratic and Republican election officials on rules and procedures and has been tracking election-related litigation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      US students rally college voters on campus: ‘We brought the polls to them’

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      College students formed a steady line outside a campus art museum to vote early on Tuesday at a pop-up polling place at the University of Minnesota.The one-day site, enabled by new state laws that allow for pop-up early voting, helps populations like student voters, who may not have access to transportation to get off campus, easily access the polls.“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 students to pledge to vote, double their goal of 6,000, a sign of the enthusiasm young people have to perform their civic duty in the presidential election, she said. More than 600 people voted during the seven hours the pop-up site was open on Tuesday, organizers said.Across the country, college campuses and campaigns have ramped up efforts to register and energize college voters, especially in critical swing states. The Democratic party is counting on high turnout on college campuses, which tend to lean Democratic..Kamala Harris’s campaign on Wednesday announced it was launching an early voting push targeting students on campuses in battleground states, including a seven-figure ad buy to primarily target students on social media.College campuses are also organizing their own get-out-thevote efforts. At the University of California Berkeley, hundreds of students came together recently for an event called Votechella, which featured music and on-site voter registration, the state university system said. The name is a nod to Coachella, the popular music festival held annually in southern California.At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, students have reacted positively to outreach efforts on campus, where a second voting hub opened on Monday, according to CBS News.Nevaeh McVey, a student, told CBS: “I come from a place where I wasn’t really educated about how to vote or who to vote for, and I think getting the younger population to vote is extremely important in times like these. I just think [this initiative] makes it really easy and accessible for us students to do.”The push to mobilize young voters comes as some students are facing challenges in casting their ballot. Leaders of some Republican-controlled states have worked to limit student voting, writing legislation to limit the use of student identification cards as an ID at polls and shuttering on-campus polling precincts.Proponents of these measures claim that they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, while others have railed that voting is too easy for university students.The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin has urged the US justice department to investigate text messages they believe targeted young people to dissuade them from voting. The organization received complaints from voters who received a text that read: “WARNING: Violating WI Statutes 12.13 & 6.18 may result in fines up to $10,000 or 3.5 years in prison. Don’t vote in a state where you’re not eligible.”College students could prove integral in tipping swing states, as they are traditionally permitted to vote either in their home state or where they attend school. Some students have registered in the state where they believe their vote might have the most impact.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’ve seen dozens of elections up and down the ballot over the course of the last few years that have been decided by as close as one vote,” Clarissa Unger, co-founder and executive director of Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, told ABC News.“Every single college student’s vote can be consequential.”Throughout the day on Tuesday, the line for the pop-up site in Minnesota held dozens of people who passed by between classes, came to campus specifically for the voting site or walked over from their dorms. A 30ft inflatable eagle helped set a fun atmosphere for voting – and the free pizza didn’t hurt.There are election day polling places on campus, but the pop-up site is the only on-campus early voting opportunity. And it doesn’t require voters to live in any specific precinct – any Minneapolis voter could cast a ballot there on Tuesday. Joslyn Blass, a senior and undergraduate student government director of government and legislative affairs, said the group has pushed for early voting because there could be various obstacles – like an exam or getting sick – that can get in the way of voting solely on 5 November. “We really prioritize the early voting site, just because you never know what’s gonna happen,” she said.Madelyn Ekstrand finished her class for the day and waited about an hour to cast her ballot. The 21-year-old senior said abortion access and the climate crisis were important to her, so she was voting for Harris.“I’m happy to see people my age getting out and voting and being proactive and not waiting till the last second,” she said. More

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      in US Politics

      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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      in US Politics

      ‘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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      Liz Cheney urges conservatives to back Kamala Harris over abortion

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      Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, condemned Republican-imposed bans on the procedure and urged conservatives on Monday to support Kamala Harris for president.Cheney was speaking at the first of three joint events with Harris in the suburbs of three swing states aimed at prising moderate Republican voters away from party nominee Donald Trump. She has become the Democrat’s most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumoured to be under consideration for a seat in a potential Harris cabinet.At the first event in Malvern, a Philadelphia suburb, against a blue backdrop that said “a new way forward” and red one that said “country over party”, Cheney suggested that Republican-led states have overreached in restricting abortion since the supreme court’s 2022 Dobbs decision ended it as a constitutional right.“I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life, but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need,” said Cheney, a former Wyoming congresswoman and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney.“I think this is not an issue that we’re seeing break down across party lines, but I think we’re seeing people come together to say: what has happened to women, when women are facing situations where they can’t get the care they need, where in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing, is suing, to get access to women’s medical records … that’s not sustainable for us as a country and it has to change.”Harris nodded repeatedly and applauded in response. The audience also clapped warmly.It was a striking attempt to build a permission structure for conservatives to back Harris, who has made reproductive freedom a centrepiece of her campaign and vowed to restore the protections of Roe v Wade if authorised by Congress. Cheney, by contrast, has an A rating from Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a group that grades members of Congress based on their anti-abortion credentials.Monday’s three events in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were being held in counties won by Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, had sought to neutralise abortion as an election issue by supporting states’ autonomy and rejecting calls for a national ban.Cheney has vocally opposed Trump since the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and was vice-chair of a congressional committee investigating the attack. Her recent endorsement of Harris fuelled speculation that she could play a part in a future Harris administration.

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      Earlier this month, appearing on the popular daytime talkshow The View, Harris said she would differ from Joe Biden by including a Republican in her cabinet. She was asked by radio host Howard Stern if that might be Cheney but avoided a direct answer. Appointing Cheney would carry considerable political risks given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war.Trump has frequently tried to paint Harris, who is from deep blue California, as a radical liberal but she struck a moderate tone during her appearance with Cheney, who lost her House seat after she co-chaired a congressional committee that investigated the January 6 attack.She promised to “invite good ideas from wherever they come” and “cut red tape,” and she said “there should be a healthy two party system” in the country. “We need to be able to have these good intense debates about issues that are grounded in fact,” she said.“Imagine!” Cheney responded.“Let’s start there!” Harris said as the audience clapped. “Can you believe that’s an applause line?”View image in fullscreenVoters in Chester county, which includes Malvern, narrowly voted for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 but the county was won by Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points in 2016 and Biden by 17 points in 2020.The discussion was chaired by Sarah Longwell, who runs the group Republican Voters Against Trump, and lasted 40 minutes including two questions from the audience.Harris said Trump “has been using the power of the presidency to demean and to divide us” and “people are exhausted with that”. The vice-president added: “People around the world are watching. And sometimes I do fret a bit about whether we as Americans truly understand how important we are to the world.”Cheney praised Harris, saying: “I’m a conservative. I know that the most conservative of all conservative principles is being faithful to the constitution. You have to choose in this race between someone who has been faithful to the constitution, who will be faithful, and Donald Trump.”Cheney said she was concerned about allowing a “totally erratic, completely unstable” Trump to run foreign policy. “Our adversaries know that they can play Donald Trump,” she said. “And we cannot afford to take that risk.”But some observers questioned the wisdom of campaigning with Cheney in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war. Many such voters are now wavering or abstaining because of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the crisis in Gaza.Trump weighed in on Monday, writing on his Truth Social platform: “Arab Voters are very upset that Comrade Kamala Harris, the Worst Vice President in the History of the United States and a Low IQ individual, is campaigning with ‘dumb as a rock’ War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man that pushed Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to War with every Muslim Country known to mankind.”More than a hundred former Republican officeholders and officials joined Harris last week in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, not far from where general George Washington led hundreds of troops across the Delaware River to a major victory in the revolutionary war. At a rally there, Cheney told Republican voters that the patriotic choice was to vote for Democrats. More

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      Kamala Harris questions Trump’s stamina: ‘Is he fit to do the job?’

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      Kamala Harris used a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Friday to seize on reports that Donald Trump had been canceling media interviews to question whether he has the stamina for a second presidency if voters choose him over her in November’s election.“If he can’t handle the rigors of the campaign trail, is he fit to do the job?” the Democratic vice-president, 59, told rallygoers about the 78-year-old Trump.She said: “Trump is unfit for office.”Harris and her Republican opponent were in Michigan as the weekend began while trying to shore up support in a battleground state that could decide their 5 November race. Polling suggests Michigan as well as its fellow “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin remained in play for both candidates as the campaign’s waning days arrived.“This is the place that is going to decide the election, right here,” Democratic congresswoman Hillary Scholten told Friday’s audience as she opened the event.Among the crowd, some Harris supporters struck a hopeful tone. “It’s about time for a woman to lead,” said Jenifer Lake, who took her daughter Adeline Butts to the rally for a chance to “see history in the making”.Butts, who will be old enough to vote for the first time this election, described herself mostly concerned about the cost of living, tuition and housing affordability. And her fellow attender Bill Bray, who came to the rally from Adrian, Michigan, said he believed Harris would better promote economic opportunity for those situated like him than Trump would.Bray grew up “in a poor neighborhood” but said he is doing well thanks to benefits from his prior military service as well as his long career at Ford Motor Company. He said he wants other people to have a chance at that same trajectory.“Trump doesn’t understand equality,” said Bray, a veteran of the Vietnam war who also accused the former president of dodging the military draft that would have sent him to the same conflict.Bray also said he supports stronger federal gun control after seeing “what guns to do to people” and has no faith in Trump – who is widely supported by the firearms industry – taking that issue seriously.Other attenders said abortion access was at the top of their mind. Harris has campaigned on preserving abortion access while three of Trump’s appointees to the US supreme court helped eliminate federal abortion rights in 2022.“It’d be nice to have control of my body back, and then I’ll think about listening to the other side,” Kim Osborn said.Lauren Rockel said she would like to see Harris fight to reinstate the Roe v Wade protections that Trump’s supreme court appointees helped strip away.“There are people dying” as a result of abortion restrictions that have since gone into effect in many states, Rockel said. “It’s awful.”To them, Harris said it was “time to turn the page” on Trump.The Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, spoke before Harris took the stage. Four other Democratic state governors joined her.Her presence and that of the other governors “shows how important you are, Michigan,” Whitmer said. She told the crowd that they would be the ones to “take our country forward” if they helped send Harris to the White House.Michigan’s Democratic US senator Debbie Stabenow also spoke before Harris, alluding to how it got “scarier and scarier” the more she thought about the proposed policies of Trump’s supporters. The former president has sought to distance himself from the far-right Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 plan calls for the mass firings of civil servants and exalts the idea outlawing abortion altogether during a second Trump presidency.But he has struggled to effectively do that, with Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, having written the foreword for a book by the Heritage Foundation’s president. And, echoing Stabenow, many attenders said they were fearful and terrified of what a return to the Oval Office for Trump may produce.The Democratic nominee’s message resonated with Richard Bandstra, who described himself as a “former Republican”. Bandstra said he came to the rally to hear a message of hope – and, as he saw it, to fight for what he called the most important issue of the race: preserving American democracy. More