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      Trump disputes Iowa poll showing Harris ahead in red state: ‘It’s not even close!’

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      Donald Trump has passionately disputed a shock Iowa poll that found Kamala Harris leading the former president in the typically red state 47% to 44%.“No President has done more for FARMERS, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network on Sunday morning. “In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”Trump continued, in all caps: “I love the farmers, and they love me. And they trust me.” More than 85% of Iowa’s land is used for farming and it produces more corn, pigs, eggs, ethanol and biodiesel than any other state.On Saturday, the Selzer poll carried out for the Des Moines Register newspaper showed the vice-president ahead of her Republican rival by three points. Selzer is a widely respected polling organisation with a good record in Iowa; she shot to polling fame in 2008 when she predicted that a virtually unknown senator, Barack Obama, would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses.If Harris were even competitive in Iowa – which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 – it could radically reshape the race.The pollster told MSNBC on Sunday that Harris was leading in early voting in Iowa “because of her strength with women generally, even stronger with women aged 65 and older. Her margin is more than 2-to-1 – and this is an age group that shows up to vote or votes early in disproportionately large numbers.”Earlier on Sunday, Trump’s campaign released a memo from its chief pollster and its chief data consultant calling the Des Moines Register poll “a clear outlier” and saying that an Emerson College poll – also released Saturday – more closely reflected the state of the Iowa electorate.

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      The Emerson poll found 53% of likely voters support Trump and 43% support Harris, with 3% undecided and 1% planning to vote for a third-party candidate.The Trump campaign, which many Democrats believe is setting the stage for a series of legal challenges to poll results, also said in an email that the Des Moines Register poll and a subsequent New York Times swing state poll that found Harris ahead in four of the seven states, is “being used to drive a voter suppression narrative against President Trump’s supporters.“Some in the media are choosing to amplify a mad dash to dampen and diminish voter enthusiasm,” the statement added.Last week, Trump said: “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before” but did not provide evidence for the claim. A Harris campaign official said that the “cheating” claim was an example of how Trump was trying to sow doubt in the electoral system because he was afraid he would lose.The claims come as a federal judge plans to rule on whether Iowa officials can continuing trying to remove hundreds of potential noncitizens from its voting rolls despite critics saying the effort could keep recently naturalized citizens from voting.North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, a Republican, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he is confident that Trump is “going to confidently win Iowa”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAsked if Trump has a problem winning over women voters, Burgum said: “I’d be surprised, completely shocked if that comes anywhere close to being the fact in Iowa.”Burgum pointed to national polling which shows Harris and Trump tied.“I think that’s the feeling that I get on the ground. It’s a very tight race. It’s going to be decided on Tuesday,” Burgum added.But speaking to MSNBC, Maryland governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, said the Des Moines Register poll putting Harris ahead Iowa, but still within margins of error, “lines up with what we’re seeing on the ground”, particularly among women voters.Moore continued: “We’re watching an energy that I think has not been there for a while, where we continue to see where women understand firsthand, what is at stake, that they understand the dynamics and the distinctions between these two candidates literally could not be more stark about when you’re talking about a future vision for the country.” More

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      Mass production of genetically selected humans: inside a Pennsylvania pronatalist candidate’s fantasy city-state

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      When Simone Collins, a Republican running for a seat in Pennsylvania’s state legislature, and her husband, Malcolm, were privately asked last year about their ideas for the model “pronatalist” city-state, they sensed an opportunity.With their own YouTube channel, online education platform and foundation, the couple are among the most high-profile and outspoken proponents of the pronatalist cause, which is centered on the belief that the developed world is facing a demographic collapse and that birthrates must rise to stave off disaster.The couple, who have four children, were approached last year by an individual posing as a wealthy donor willing to finance their work. In response to his request, they created a 15-page slide deck entitled The Next Empire: Leveraging a Changing World to Save Civilization. It contained ideas that seem plucked out of a dystopian science fiction movie. According to their presentation, the city-state they envisaged would become a magnet for “no-holds-barred” medical research, which in turn would open the door to the “mass production of genetically selected humans”.The voting rights of citizens of the city-state would be linked to their value to society, according to the Collinses’ presentation. The proposed city-state government would have “incentive systems that grant more voting power to creators of economically productive agents” and would be run by a single “executor” – which the proposal also called a “dictator” – with full control of the government’s laws and operational structure. The executor would be replaced every four years by three “wards”, according to the slide deck. Wards would be elected by previous executors.It may appear that the Collinses’ views are so far outside the mainstream that one could shrug off pronouncements as eccentric and alarmist. But the Collinses are part of a movement they call the “new right”, which rejects some aspects of traditional conservatism and bills itself as pragmatic, family-oriented and anti-bureaucratic. They staunchly support the Republican ticket, Donald Trump and JD Vance, and billionaire Elon Musk.Last year, Malcolm Collins said he thought the Isle of Man would be the best place to begin.“I actually think that’s the most viable place to do it. You’re near the center of Europe, you’re in a rapidly depopulating area, you can tell them look, this will obviously bring a lot of technology and investment to your country. But the great thing about a proposal like this is even if they turn it down, you can take it to other countries,” Malcolm told the man purporting to be an investor at the time.The funding never materialized and the proposal was never pitched to the Isle of Man, a British crown dependency located in the Irish Sea, because the man who claimed to be a wealthy investor was actually an undercover researcher with Hope Not Hate, a UK-based anti-racism group. It shared video recordings of the encounters with the Collinses – and a copy of their presentation – with the Guardian.Asked about the slide deck in an interview with the Guardian last week in their home in Audubon, Pennsylvania, Simone and Malcolm, who work together and appear rarely to be apart, acknowledged that their proposal “wasn’t supposed to be public”. But Simone Collins nevertheless said she stood by its core tenets “100%”, including the idea of mass-producing embryos, and of giving people who they deem to be less productive members of society less voting power.“If you are draining resources, you should have less influence,” she said.Asked about how it felt to be the subject of undercover research, Malcolm Collins said: “The experience was quite validating for both us and our movement.” He added: “Now I think it is pretty clear that despite us not socially isolating people with toxic views, the worst views we actually have are being slightly elitist and weird eccentrics (which isn’t exactly surprising to anyone).”The couple say their ideas were meant to be experimental and fit for a city-state, not a democracy such as the US. But the views are not dissimilar to ones expressed by one of Simone and Malcolm’s political heroes, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance. In a July 2021 speech, Vance said parents should be given “an advantage” and “more power” in the voting process than those who don’t have children.Simone Collins previously worked as managing director of Dialog, which she describes as an exclusive secret society, co-founded by Peter Thiel. Thiel, the PayPal founder, helped launch and fund Vance’s political career, and has supported the rightwing blogger Curtis Yarvin, who in 2012 said he believed the US should install a monarchy and “get over their dictator phobia”.‘We do target the elites’The Collinses often describe their pronatalist agenda in humanitarian terms – part of a wider bid to save the developed world from impending social and economic catastrophe. Their website outlines their desire to work with “any person or organization that shares our goal to preserve as much of civilization and as many cultures as possible”.But in the recordings made by Hope Not Hate, Malcolm describes their pronatalist agenda as being principally designed to transform the current socioeconomic elite into a future biological elite.“It’s easy to forget how small the population of people in the world who actually impacts anything or matters is,” he said. “When we do our campaigns we work really aggressively on how do we spread ideas within that narrow network, because also they are the people we want having kids and we want in the future.”View image in fullscreen“When we talk to reporters we’re very ‘Oh, this isn’t just for the elites’, but, in truth, we do target the elites – ha ha – unfortunately.”Malcolm said he and his wife are working to create a network of other pronatalist families, with whom their children can go to summer camp, grow up alongside “knowing this isn’t weird, what we’re doing” and, ultimately, marry. But this goes beyond the average desire to find family friends with shared values and be part of a community. “What I’m really trying to do is ensure that my kids have an isolated and differential breeding network,” he said.The so-called “elites” appear to be a central preoccupation for the Collinses and it is a theme they return to repeatedly and unprompted. “The very few families – and I think we might be talking about a hundred, 500 families in the world today – who are high fertility and really technologically engaged and economically engaged … own the future of our species,” Malcolm said.When the Guardian asked the Collinses about the remarks, Malcolm said they were “not incongruent with our other messaging”, and that they were better off “convincing Taylor Swift to have kids than John Doe on the street if we want to create ripple effects society-wide leading to more kids”.Race for the statehouseSimone Collins’s run to represent Pennsylvania’s 150th district in the state’s house of representatives was born, she said, out of frustration with traditional political campaigns. She acknowledges that her odds of success are low and that she has eschewed traditional local campaign tactics, like investing in ads or mailers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut she is a big supporter of Donald Trump’s run for the presidency and has sought through her own candidacy, which has mostly been self-funded by what she calls the family’s “what the hell” savings account, to encourage so-called low propensity voters in her Pennsylvania district to boost the former president’s chances.“We are very interested in tipping the election [in Trump’s favor] and one of the most meaningful ways I can do so is as a Republican candidate running in a key, key swing spot,” she said. The Collinses have done this, she said, by printing out “hundreds and hundreds” of mail-in ballot applications, filling them out, and sending them to potential Republican voters to sign and send back so that they can be sent mail-in ballots. She said it is part of an effort to examine whether there are “low-cost and highly effective ways” to sway election results, even in Democratic-leaning districts like hers, where incumbent Democrat Joe Webster was first elected in 2018. Records show Webster has spent about $80,000 on his campaign, while Collins has spent just under $5,000.“I didn’t have enough money to send mail-in ballot applications to every low-propensity voter, but we’ll look after the election of what percent of those people voted,” she said.Asked whether there are aspects of Trump’s candidacy that trouble her – from his criminal convictions to being found liable for sexual assault – Collins said she is no more troubled by the Republican nominee’s record than that of Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee.“Nobody elects a president. You elect a team,” she said. “So many smart people I know are tapped into who his team is going to be.”She is most excited about billionaire Elon Musk’s high-profile involvement in the Trump campaign, and the Republican nominee’s promise that Musk would lead a cost cutting and “efficiency” drive in government spending. Musk has admitted it would lead to “temporary hardship” for Americans.Musk is reportedly a father of “at least” 11 children, according to a recent New York Times report that detailed the Tesla co-founder’s effort to fill a compound full of his own children and their mothers. Although he has been open about his pronatalist views, the New York Times reported that Musk likes to keep details about his own growing family a secret.It is the emergence of Silicon Valley as key partners in “the new right” that has the couple most excited about Republicans today. The Skype co-founder and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn (a father of five) donated just under half a million dollars to the Collinses’ pronatalist foundation in 2022.The issues“I’m very pro-gun. If you walk around this house you’ll find guns all over the place,” Simone Collins said, pointing to an old musket that is mounted on the wall. She said the guns are locked up and not loaded, and that ammunition is kept in proximity. While others might not like the constant sound of gunfire from a nearby gun club and shooting range, Collins said she loved the sound.Child protective services (CPS), the state agency people can call if they fear a child is being abused or neglected, has visited the Collinses at home on two occasions. Asked what prompted the first visit, Malcolm told the Guardian in a written statement that it “was supposedly because our kids were wearing used clothing, played outside in our fenced-in yard (with us watching from inside), and got sick frequently (this was before we took them out of preschool and during a time when sickness in preschools post-pandemic was brutal as kids returned from isolation)”.The second visit by CPS, Simone Collins said, followed the publication of the last Guardian article about the couple, published in May, which included a description of how Malcolm had slapped their then two-year-old on the face for nearly knocking over a table in a restaurant. Slapping a child is legal in Pennsylvania if it doesn’t cause serious pain or injury.View image in fullscreen“After the Guardian piece came out, CPS was here again. They walked through every room of this house because the internet decided that we were abusive, terrible people. They came again. I feel bad wasting their time. They’re like, ‘Please don’t beat your infants, or whatever. But no, you’re obviously fine,’” she said.Some voters in her district have called her directly to ask about her stance on issues, including abortion. Abortion is legal in Pennsylvania up until 24 weeks, though there are some restrictions in place. Simone Collins said she would support what in effect would amount to an abortion ban in the state after 12 to 15 weeks, with exceptions if a woman’s life was in danger or the fetus had an anomaly. Any abortion performed after 15 weeks, she said, would have to include giving the fetus pain medication.Collins is, however, an unabashed advocate for IVF, which is opposed by many conservative and anti-abortion Republicans. Simone and Malcolm have used IVF themselves and plan to continue having more children. They also are “huge early supporters” of embryo selection based on a “polygenic score” related to intelligence. In other words, selecting embryos based on IQ.Collins is planning for her next embryo transfer in January. More

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      Everything you need to know about the 2024 US presidential election

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

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      Today’s populism is informed by bigotry, but its roots lie in the promise of equality | Kenan Malik

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      ‘American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” Not a comment on this year’s presidential campaign but an observation on another US presidential race, that of 1964. It is the opening line to one of the most influential political essays of the postwar era, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, first published 60 years ago this month.The very title of Richard Hofstadter’s essay is redolent of contemporary fears. As Donald Trump has, over the past decade, built a movement out of anger and disaffection, old copies of Hofstadter have been dusted off and op-eds written with titles such as “The paranoid style in American politics is back” and “Donald Trump’s style perfectly embodies the theories of renowned historian”.Not just Hofstadter’s analysis of the paranoid style but his evisceration of populism, too, has found a new generation of readers. Yet, as brilliant and influential as Hofstadter was, he was often wrong on both issues, and it is his wrongness that has shaped much subsequent debate.One of America’s most celebrated historians, Hofstadter moved from Marxist leanings in the 1930s into a cold war liberal who regarded social consensus rather than class conflict as the defining feature of American history. His 1964 essay, an abridged version of a lecture he had given in Oxford (the full version appearing later in book form), was an attempt to confront a new, belligerent form of rightwing reactionary politics that had emerged, displayed in Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunt, in the creation of the ultraconservative John Birch Society, and in the success of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in routing the Republican establishment to secure the party’s 1964 presidential nomination.The mainstream response to Goldwater in the 1960s prefigured in many ways the hostility to Trump half a century later. Some saw Goldwater’s rise as portending fascism. Fact magazine published a special edition on “The Mind of Barry Goldwater” in which more than 1,100 psychiatrists, none of whom had ever met the would-be president, diagnosed him as “psychologically unfit” for office. If he consolidated his Republican “party coup” by winning the election, Hofstadter warned, he would “put the democratic process in this country in jeopardy”. Goldwater lost to Lyndon Baines Johnson by a landslide.For Hofstadter, the new right was a potent expression of the “paranoid style”, a way of thinking that cast conspiracy not as a singular occurrence, but as “the motive force” in history. “The paranoid spokesman”, Hofstadter wrote, “always speaks in apocalyptic terms”, and is “always manning the barricades of civilization” in the existential struggle between good and evil.Hofstadter insisted he was not using “paranoia” in a clinical sense, but “borrowing a clinical term for other purposes”. Yet, he also believed “the recurrence of the paranoid style” across history “suggests that a mentality disposed to see the world in the paranoid’s way may always be present in some considerable minority of the population”. In other words, it is an ineradicable pathology lying latent within the population, and activated by the emergence of particular social movements or political organisations.It is an argument that many find appealing because it gives licence to dismiss alternative viewpoints as a form of mental illness. It is also a perspective that wrenches political responses out of a historical frame. Even “millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century”, Hofstadter wrote, exhibited a “psychological complex that closely resembles” that of the reactionary right in postwar America. “The paranoid style as described by Hofstadter,” the historian Andrew McKenzie-McHarg wryly observes, “is present throughout history yet does not itself appear to have any real history of which to speak.” It is a perspective, too, that allows liberals to be oblivious to the presence of such traits within their own ranks. Rightwing populists certainly trade heavily on conspiracy theories, whether about immigration or the elites. Liberal panics about the coming of “fascism” and the “end of democracy” often exhibit, though, an equally apocalyptic view and present the fight against populism in black and white terms.This takes us to the second key theme in Hofstadter’s work in the 1950s and 60s – his critique of populism. As Hofstadter moved from early radicalism to midlife centrism, he became increasingly wary of the masses and their impact on culture and intellectual life. His growing distrust of working-class movements led him to be sceptical of democracy itself. “Intellect,” he wrote in his 1963 book Anti-intellectualism in American Life, “is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis political transformation shaped his reading of history. Until Hofstadter, most historians had viewed the rise of Populist movements in 1890s America in positive terms. These original populists were driven by a hatred of the inequalities and injustices of the so-called Gilded Age. They sought to forge cross-racial coalitions of farmers and workers to demand democratic reforms, progressive taxation and government ownership of utilities.Hofstadter, in his 1955 book The Age of Reform, questioned this narrative, portraying the movement as a racist insurgency with a conspiratorial view of the world that “seems very strongly to foreshadow” McCarthyism and postwar reactionary conservatism. Strands of bigotry were certainly on display, especially as the movement disintegrated in the face of a ferocious assault from the established order. But the Populists’ democratic and egalitarian promise cannot be gainsaid.A host of historians, including C Vann Woodward, Lawrence Goodwyn and Walter Nugent, challenged and largely rebutted Hofstadter’s revisionism. The political substance of his argument, however, became entrenched. After Hofstadter, Nugent wrote in a 2013 preface to his 1963 book The Tolerant Populists, “populism” began “to carry the connotation of demagogic, unreasoning, narrow-minded, conspiratorial, fearful attitudes toward society and politics”. It still does, shaping our view not just of the past but of the present, too.“Having come of age in a political culture that glorified ‘the people’ as the wellspring of democracy and decency in American life,” Eric Foner, perhaps the most distinguished living historian of the American tradition, observed of his mentor’s trajectory, “he came to portray politics as a realm of fears, symbols and nostalgia, and ordinary Americans as beset by bigotry, xenophobia and paranoid delusions”.The loss of hope, the sense of betrayal, disillusionment with fellow Americans – that might describe not just Hofstadter’s trajectory but America’s too. The tragedy is that whoever wins on Tuesday, that will not change. More

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

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

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      Candidates try to divine trends as nearly 70m Americans have cast early votes

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      Almost 70 million Americans have already voted in the historic US election which comes to a head on Tuesday, prompting furious arguments over what early voting trends might mean as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris prepare for their final showdown.As both candidates and their top surrogates crisscrossed the country in a furious bout of last-minute campaigning, the race remains in a virtual dead heat – both in the head-to-head national polls and in the crucial seven battleground states that will actually decide the race for the White House.But as Trump and Harris made their pitches for what must now be a vanishingly small number of still undecided voters, tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots in the election through the various processes in the US that allow early voting.With so much at stake in the election, that huge number has triggered intense speculation as to what it might that mean with both Republicans and Democrats attempting to glean information that shows their side might already have the edge as voting day nears.Harris’s campaign is latching on to some key information from the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. The giant state – which stretches from New Jersey in the east to Ohio in the west – is a part of the “rust belt” dominated by former manufacturing cities that is seen as probably the most crucial region in the election.Nearly all the most likely paths to victory for both candidates involve picking up rust belt states with Pennsylvania as the biggest prize.In that state, voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots and registered Democrats account for about 58% of votes cast by seniors, compared with 35% for Republicans. That is a big lead in a demographic that usually trends towards Trump.At the same time, women have a 10-point gap over men when it comes to the early vote in Pennsylvania, according to analysis by the Politico website, using data from the University of Florida’s United States Election Project. Another analysis, by NBC, showed an even larger gap in favor of women in the state of 13 points.Harris and her team are hoping for a large showing of women in the election as they have made the loss of reproductive rights central to their campaign after the supreme court overturned federal abortion rights. Women have trended strongly Democratic in the election, while men have leaned more Republican and thus any signs of a strong turnout by women is potentially good news for the vice-president.“The gender gap is a key reason for hope among Democrats and concern among Republicans, especially when many states have abortion rights amendments on their ballots in the 2024 election,” Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University, told Newsweek.But Republicans too are seeing signs of hope in the early voting trends – a sign that America’s divisive election is still proving impossible to predict even after almost two years of furious campaigning by both parties.In Arizona, a crucial swing state in the so-called “sun belt” on electoral battlegrounds, male voters have been turning out in increased numbers – a sign that Republican strategies of turning out men who have not voted before might be working. In Arizona last week, the number of new voters in Arizona was 86,000 – far more than the tiny margin by which Joe Biden beat Trump in the state in 2020 – and the biggest share of those new voters were male Republicans.Overall, Republicans have traditionally been outnumbered in early voting with more Democrats choosing to go to the polls. In part, that has been because Trump and some of his allies have assailed early voting with baseless claims of fraud and conspiracy, despite Republican professional campaigners exhorting their supporters to get to the polls before election day.In 2024, there are signs that Republicans are indeed heading to the polls early in large numbers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Georgia – another key sun belt battleground in the deep south – there are strong signs of a significant early Republican turnout. More than 700,000 people who voted already in 2024 did not vote at all in 2020, according to Georgia Votes, and that is seen as a sign that many of them might be Republicans as the campaign has focused on that demographic. At the same time, the top three counties for voter turnout rates in Georgia are rural areas won easily by Trump in 2020.“We’ve got a lot of voters that voted in 2016 but didn’t vote in 2020 … What makes me believe that they are Trump voters is that most of them are … from parts of the state that are pretty strong Republican strongholds,” Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, told Fox News.Of course, as voting patterns shift for both sides, it could also be that an advantage in early voting for either Democrats or Republicans is quickly overwhelmed on election day itself when tens of millions of voters go to the polls in person.In the end, the 2024 race remains entirely unpredictable. The Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker has shown little change over the past week, after a slight erosion in Harris support over October, Harris retains a one-point advantage in national polls of 48% to Trump’s 47%, virtually identical to last week and well with the margin of error of most polls.The battleground states, too, remain in a dead heat. The candidates are evenly tied at 48% in Pennsylvania while Harris has single-point leads in the two other rust belt states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Trump is marginally ahead in the sun belt, where he is up by 1% in North Carolina, 2% in Georgia and Arizona, and ahead in Nevada by less than a percentage point.But one wildcard for both campaigns is the Muslim vote, angered by US support for Israel in its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. A poll released on Friday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations showed that 42% of the country’s 2.5 million Muslim voters favor Green party nominee Jill Stein for president while 41% favor Harris. Trump registered 10% support.In theory, those margins of support for Stein, as in 2016, could swing some key swing states, such as Michigan, to Trump if the contest there is very close. More

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      ‘Take these attacks seriously’: journalist Imara Jones on the dangerous rise of anti-trans political ads

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      Imara Jones was filming a documentary on a road trip in California when she took a break to scroll the news. A story about state lawmakers in Idaho banning transgender girls from playing on female sports teams at public schools caught her attention; it was the second anti-trans legislation that Jones had seen passed in 2020. She turned to her producer and told her that they needed to look into “this anti-trans stuff”. Dozens of similar bills were introduced in statehouses throughout the nation soon after.A year later, Jones launched her podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality to look into the religious extremists, conservative political groups and billionaires pushing an anti-trans agenda.Since then, the urgency of her work has only grown. Republicans have spent more than $65m on anti-trans television ads in recent months, according to the New York Times, despite the negative impact that they have on trans people’s safety and wellbeing, and scant evidence of its effectiveness in swaying voters. And in 2023 and 2024, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced each year.On her podcast, Jones – a Black trans journalist and founder of the platform TransLash Media – investigates the anti-trans industry with a conversational tone, all while centering the voices and experiences of trans people. “I have a belief that when you see the same thing happening in different parts of the country at the same time, that that’s something to look into,” Jones said. “I think that coincidence is always great as a fertile ground for journalism and for looking under the hood about what’s going on.”In the first episode of this year’s season, Jones looks at how the paramilitary group Proud Boys uses anti-trans rhetoric to stoke political upheaval. Far-right militia groups have grown at unprecedented numbers in recent years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), while political violence in general has also increased.For trans people, such rhetoric can lead to increased violence against them, as well as suicidal ideation. A recent report from the LGBTQ+ advocacy group The Trevor Project found that suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth increased by up to 72% in states that enacted anti-trans laws.“We know that trans people overall have been facing more violence since there’s been an uptick in anti-trans rhetoric in terms of hate crimes,” Jones said. “So we know that there is an impact on people’s safety and wellbeing solely because of the [public] conversation.”Jones hopes that through her work, that the press and political leaders will begin to see anti-trans rhetoric as a serious threat to democracy and community safety.“The biggest solution is to take these attacks seriously,” Jones said, “to understand the way in which they are being deployed for paramilitary violence, for political violence, to destabilize communities, to undermine democratic conversations politically, to take votes away”.A ‘trans moral panic’Anti-trans ads are being deployed by the Republican party now due to the tightness of the presidential election, according to Jones. During their September debate, for instance, Trump attacked Kamala Harris’s 2019 comments about her support of gender-affirming surgery for imcarcerated trans people. “Anti-trans issues work the best in really tight elections where the margins are really close and you’re just trying to convert one or two votes per precinct, and that’s enough to help you win,” Jones said.Another reason why anti-trans ads are particularly salient now is because the GOP is using them to court voters who supported the Republican candidate Nikki Haley, who ran on an anti-trans platform, she added. Many of those voters are suburban women who lean Republican, but sometimes vote Democrat in local elections. Both parties are now vying for their votes. “Harris is making a play for the Nikki Haley voter, and there’s some indication that she is gaining enough ground to maybe get her over the top,” said Jones. “That’s exactly the type of population that would be receptive to anti-trans messages.”Christian nationalists and rightwing politicians view trans people as collateral damage as they strive for political wins, according to Jones. And bundled in with anti-trans rhetoric is opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. A “trans moral panic” among the far-right has led to an uptick in legislation that bans both DEI policies and trans protections, said Emerson Hodges, a research analyst for the intelligence project at the SPLC. At the Intelligence Project, Hodges tracks hate and extremism through in-person and online monitoring.“Anti-LGBT groups that are in alliances with trans-exclusionary groups also push what they call ‘viewpoint diversity’ to roll back DEI protections in state houses and in corporations,” said Hodges. Billed as the inclusion of various perspectives in an argument, viewpoint diversity is problematic because it promotes this false narrative that DEI is a threat to white Christian men,” he said, “and they utilize that to push these anti-trans, anti-LGBT bills”.Along with an increase in suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary people, anti-trans legislation can lead to violence against trans people of color, said Hodges. Twenty-seven trans people have been killed this year, according to HRC, with 74% of them being people of color and 48% being Black. “When we look at these trends of violence towards trans people,” Hodges said, “it’s important to remember that those trends of violence are affected by legislation and the politicization of trans affirmation.”While Jones began her podcast in 2019 to highlight the dangers of anti-trans legislation, she hopes to one day celebrate the lives of trans people. But first, political leaders must work toward creating a society where trans and gender nonconforming people can live without the fear of violence.“We would love to focus on telling all of the good news and the positive stories that surround trans people from all walks of life and all backgrounds,” Jones said. “But the world’s gonna have to cooperate a little bit to allow us to do that.” More

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      US election live: Trump repeats attack on Liz Cheney as campaign enters final days

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      The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Top Republicans have called on the White House to produce all documents and internal communications regarding president Joe Biden’s statement earlier this week in which he appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump.White House press officials altered the official transcript of Biden’s statement, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.The Republican lawmakers said they question whether the decision to create “a false transcript and manipulate or alter the accurate transcript” produced for the National Archives and Records Administration was a violation of federal law.Representative James Comer, Republican chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and House Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik demanded the White House produce the records.They also called on the White House to make available for a briefing the top supervisor of its stenography office.Comer and Stefanik said:
      The White House cannot simply rewrite president Biden’s rhetoric.
      We are concerned with the latest reporting of the White House’s apparent political decision to protect the Biden-Harris administration, instead of following longstanding and proper protocols.
      At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style.“I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”.“Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.On immigration, Trump’s message was characteristically dark. The campaign played a painful video of a mother describing her daughter’s murder and blaming Harris for allowing the accused to enter the US without authorization. Studies overwhelmingly refute Trump’s claim that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime in the US, but such claims are a feature of his campaign.“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” said Trump. He vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history” and said cities and towns had been “conquered” by immigrants, whom he referred to as “animals”.Since his Madison Square Garden rally – which showcased racist and misogynistic comments from a lineup of speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Trump and his allies have sought to recast the former president and his Maga base as unfairly maligned.“Kamala has spent the final week of her campaign comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history,” said Trump at the Wisconsin rally.“Vice-president Harris thinks you are Nazis, fascists,” said the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who spoke at the rally.Johnson praised Trump for bringing into his campaign Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ended his presidential bid as a third party candidate in August; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who announced she had left the party in 2022. Johnson accused Democrats of “destroying America” and credited Trump with making “the Republican Party the party of the working men and women of America.”The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest from the campaign trail throughout this morning.We start with news that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch.Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin.At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.He repeated his aggressive attack on Liz Cheney, one day after he first said the former Republican US representative should be under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.Harris meanwhile sought to draw a contrast, emphasizing at a rally in Wisconsin in the afternoon that she is looking to be a political consensus builder.“Here is my pledge to you. Here is my pledge to you as president. I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris said. “I pledge to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. I will listen to experts. I will listen to the people who disagree with me. Because, you see, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy.”“He wants to put them in jail,” Harris said, repeating a line she’s has frequently invoked of late. “I’ll give them a seat at the table.”During his appearance in Warren in the afternoon and in Milwaukee in the evening, Trump repeatedly stoked fears about immigrants. In Warren, he said: “every state is a border state” and falsely claim immigrants were being flown into the south-west.He repeated some of his most racist tropes, saying: “All of our jobs are being taken by the migrants that come into our country illegally and many of those migrants happen to be criminals, and some of them happen to be murderers.”For more on last night’s events, see our full report here:In other news:

      Harris told her crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Exposition Center that with four days to go, there was still work to do, but “we like hard work”. Minutes beforehand, during a raucous warmup, the rapper Cardi B referred to Trump as “Donnie Dunk” and told the crowd: “Trump says he’s going to protect women whether they like it or not. Well, if his definition of protection is not the freedom of choice, if his definition of protection is making sure our daughters have fewer rights than our mothers, then I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I don’t want it!”

      Earlier, Harris said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” as far as his suitability for the presidency is concerned. “Representative Cheney is a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.” Cheney for her part warned the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.

      Republicans’ latest offensive and misogynistic comments have boosted Democratic hopes of turning out women on election day in a contest where the rights of women have been a central issue for the Harris campaign.

      At his Milwaukee rally on Friday, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5-hour-long meandering speech that touched on the economy and foreign policy but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929-style depression.”

      Trump’s supporters are laying the ground for rejecting the result of the election if he loses, according to warnings from Democrats as well as anti-Maga Republicans. As well as baseless and/or failed lawsuits, suspicions have been voiced over partisan polls run by groups with Republican links in battleground states that mainly show Trump leading – the idea being that if Trump loses, the polls can be proferred as “evidence” that he was cheated out of the win.

      The New York author and journalist Michael Wolff has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied. Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Trump’s campaign said the claims, made on Wolff’s podcast Fire and Fury, amounted to “outlandish false smears”.

      A federal judge rejected an attempt by Elon Musk’s America Pac to have charges of running an illegal lottery heard in federal court, instead of the courts of Pennsylvania, where Musk is running the sweepstakes to help Trump get re-elected. The case has been sent back to the Pennsylvania state court for a further hearing on Monday.

      Racism and misogyny; a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman; the Republican candidate for president dressing up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck. Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre – Richard Luscombe sums it up.

      A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift of its members towards Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Trump slightly ahead. That bloc is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons. More