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      US presidential election updates: Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live, Iowa polling puts Donald Trump behind

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump criss-crossed the United States on Saturday as both candidates tried to drum up support on the final weekend before the 5 November presidential election. Both candidates began the day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before Democratic nominee Harris departed for Atlanta and then Charlotte, North Carolina. Trump, the Republican nominee, also travelled to North Carolina, before heading to a rally in Virginia. Almost 70 million Americans have already voted in the historic US election that comes to a head on Tuesday, prompting furious arguments over what early voting trends might mean as Trump and Harris prepare for their final showdown.A Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll on Saturday unexpectedly showed Harris ahead of Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters. Broadly though, the polls have remained deadlocked. The Guardian’s Robert Tait writes that some experts think such a tight race is improbable. Josh Clinton, a politics professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, NBC’s director of elections, write on the network’s website: “Some of the tools pollsters are using in 2024 to address the polling problems of 2020, such as weighting by partisanship, past vote or other factors, may be flattening out the differences and reducing the variation in reported poll results … [This] raises the possibility that the results of the election could be unexpectedly different than the razor-close narrative the cluster of state polls and the polling averages suggest.”Here’s what else happened on Saturday:Donald Trump election news and updates

      A Georgia judge rejected a Republican lawsuit trying to block counties from opening election offices on Saturday and Sunday to let voters hand in their mail ballots in person. The lawsuit only targeted Fulton county, a Democratic stronghold. Trump falsely blamed Fulton county workers for his loss of the 2020 election in Georgia.

      Ed Pilkington writes that if Trump re-enters the White House he will do so emboldened by a power that no previous incoming president has ever enjoyed: immunity from criminal prosecution for any act carried out in his official capacity. Whereas losing the election, writes David Smith, could mean he ends up in jail.
      Kamala Harris election news and updates

      Harris made a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live, playing herself as the mirror-image double of Maya Rudolph’s version of her. “It is nice to see you Kamala,” Harris told Rudolph, “and I’m just here to remind you, you got this.” In sync, the two said supporters needed to “Keep Kamala and carry-on-ala”, declared that they shared each other’s “belief in the promise of America”, and delivered the signature “Live from New York it’s Saturday night!”.

      Harris struck a contrast between her work as a prosecutor and a Trump campaign “obsessed with revenge and consumed with grievance” on Saturday in Atlanta. “In less than 90 days it’s either going to be him or me in the Oval Office,” Harris said. The vice-president filled the fields at the Atlanta Civic Center, attracting thousands on little notice in the crucial swing state of Georgia, which Joe Biden won in 2020.
      Elsewhere on the campaign trail

      Americans took to the streets in cities across the country for a day ofwomen’s marches. Marches were planned in all 50 states for the eighth annual gathering, which began the day after Trump was inaugurated in 2017.

      Vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr could assume some control over US health and food safety in a second Trump administration, according to reports on Saturday. Kennedy said in a social media post that he would remove fluoride from all public water.
      Read more about the 2024 US election:

      Presidential poll tracker

      Harris and Trump policies

      What to know about early voting More

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      Can democracy work without journalism? With the US election upon us, we may be about to find out | Margaret Simons

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      It is commonly claimed that democracy can’t work unless you have journalism, and a free media at that. How are people to decide how to cast a vote if they don’t access independent, reliable information?With the US election upon us, we may be about to find out.Because, more than ever before, the people who decide the election will be those who are least engaged with professional news media – the kind of researched, fact-checked content that you are likely to find in the New York Times or, for that matter, the Guardian.Forty-three per cent of US citizens avoid the news, according to the latest Digital News Report – a worldwide survey of media use conducted by the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford University.Most of these people nevertheless encounter some news – not because of loyalty to a brand or because they actively seek out a preferred outlet, but because it comes at them, so to speak.And what comes for free is either partisanly motivated, or funded by advertising – which means heavy with content pitched to draw eyeballs – sensationalism and clickbait.It is the low news consumers on which the campaigning candidates are concentrating, and on which the result of the election depends.There are significant things about news consumption that are different, this time around, from the last US election.But before I get to how things have changed since 2020, the facts I have already given mean that all the controversies, among the politically engaged, about whether mainstream media are “sanewashing” Trump, or whether or not outlets such as the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times publish editorial endorsements of a candidate, won’t affect the election result.It is a debate of principal and morality, playing out among people who, overwhelmingly, have already made up their minds on how to vote. The citizens who will decide the election probably don’t even know about these controversies, and if they did they probably wouldn’t care.The researchers at the Reuters Institute report that once disengaged from the news, people struggle to get back in, even if they want to.Benjamin Toff, the author of a book on news avoidance, writes: “It’s like trying to tune into the fourth episode season of Game of Thrones without knowing who these people are, or what difference any of this makes. For a lot of people, that’s their feeling about the news.”Traditionally, the journalistic mission has included making the important understandable, seeking to engage the disengaged. But while this still forms part of the rhetoric of the profession, the truth is that most serious news organisations publishing political news are not serving the politically disengaged.Instead, with so much advertising having disappeared from media outlets to online platforms, the path to financial sustainability for serious journalism outlets lies in trying to get people who already read the news to spend more time with the outlet, and to convert them into paying subscribers.This is essential to survival, for serious media. Yet also represents a failure of the journalistic mission.All this challenges our conventional ideas about the connections between democracy and journalism.It is true that democracy and journalism grew up together, and that each strengthens the other, but they are not as indivisible as the journalism profession suggests. Ancient Greece had democracy (though not for slaves) but no journalism. Al Jazeera provides journalism, but has its headquarters in non-democratic Qatar.And, in today’s western democracies, we now have political journalism that risks no longer being mass media, but elite media.And then on top of that, playing to the mass, we have content. All kinds of content, much of it partisan, distorted and sometimes straight-out lies.In the last US election in 2020, we worried about misinformation and conspiracy theories spread through social media, and Facebook in particular.Four years later, news consumption on Facebook is in decline across the world, largely because owner Meta has actively discouraged it. TikTok is on the rise as a source of news, overtaking X (formerly Twitter). Facebook and Twitter, for all their faults, did carry content from mainstream media outlets to new audiences.But now, increasingly, it is podcasters and vodcasters and influencers who reach new audiences on social media. And they have at least some chance of reaching the disengaged and persuadable. That is why both Trump and Harris have been spending time with them.It is fashionable to blame all our current societal ills on social media. Blocking access to social media for the young is now bipartisan – if ill-defined – policy in Australia. It is, after all, so much easier as a response to the mental health crises among the young than tackling the climate change crisis, which makes depression and anxiety almost inevitable.Likewise, traditional news media outlets tend to blame social media for the spread of misinformation and the undermining of quality journalism.But that is only partly right.Surveys in Australia and the USA have shown that mainstream news media was in a crisis of trust from at least the 1970s, long before the internet, let alone Facebook and TikTok. It was therefore in rotten shape to respond to the challenges of the means of publication being in many more hands.Meanwhile, a recent research paper published in Nature suggests, based on a survey, that fake news and misinformation is not as influential as we may think.The survey showed that most people have low exposure to false and inflammatory content, and they tend to distrust it. However a narrow, partisan fringe seeks it out, believing content that confirms already hard-set views.This suggests that political partisanship drives consumption of misinformation at least as much as the other way round.There are a few bright spots in all this. The Reuters Digital News Media survey shows that countries that have strong investment in public service media – such as the public broadcasters of the BBC in Britain and the ABC in Australia – have much higher rates of engagement with news and more political engagement.But that doesn’t apply to the USA, where public broadcasting is tiny.Solutions? I don’t have any easy answers, and the problems are fast-moving targets. By the time of the next US election, many citizens may be consuming news written by artificial intelligence. If we are lucky, or if governments have been smart with their regulatory responses, the robots will be aggregating reliable sources.But we have been neither smart nor lucky so far.In the meantime, with the sands shifting beneath us, if we want voters to be well informed, we have to find a way of financially supporting and reinvigorating the journalistic mission – beyond internal chatter among an elite.

      Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and author. She is an honorary principal fellow of the Centre for Advancing Journalism and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group 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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      RFK Jr could lead US health and food safety in a second Trump term

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr could assume some control over US health and food safety in a second Trump administration, according to reports on Saturday, alarming Democrats who believe the former environmental lawyer and independent presidential candidate could be empowered to act on his vaccine-sceptical views.According to the Washington Post, Kennedy has met with Trump transition officials to help draw up an agenda for a new administration and could take a broad “health tsar” position that would not require confirmation by the Senate.Kennedy, who ended his White House bid and endorsed Trump, and his advisers have also been drafting 30-, 60- and 90-day plans for a second Trump term, the outlet reported, citing a source “familiar” with the planning process.Kamala Harris slammed the idea, saying Friday that Kennedy is “the exact last person in America who should be setting healthcare policy for America’s families and children”.The Democratic candidate further described Kennedy as “someone who has routinely promoted junk science and crazy conspiracy theories”.Last week, Kennedy warned in a post on X that the “FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”He added: “If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1 Preserve your records, and 2 Pack your bags.”Ted Kennedy Jr, a cousin of RFK Jr and a healthcare lawyer, said he was “deeply concerned” about Trump’s choice.“We can’t put anyone in charge of healthcare who doesn’t understand how doctors and scientists develop best practices and keep us safe, and has no medical background and no knowledge about how health care is organized, delivered and paid for,” he told Stat.But Trump seems determined. He told rightwing figure Tucker Carlson last week that Kennedy was “going to work on health and women’s health”.“He really wants to with the pesticides and the, you know, all the different things. I said, he can do it,” Trump said. “He can do anything he wants. He wants to look at the vaccines. He wants – everything. I think it’s great. I think it’s great.”“He’s a great guy. I’ve known him a long time. And all he wants to do – it’s very simple – he wants to make people healthy,” Trump told NBC News on Friday. Campaign officials previously told the outlet that Kennedy might spearhead an “Operation Warp Speed for childhood chronic disease”, a reference to the Trump administration’s $20bn Covid vaccine development program.But the discussion over a potential role for Kennedy in a new Trump administration has also raised the topic of the response to the 2020-21 Covid-19 pandemic that has been largely absent from the campaign trail.JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, expressed scepticism about the Covid vaccine during a sit-down with podcaster Joe Rogan released on Thursday.“I took the vax, and you know, I haven’t been boosted or anything, but the moment where I really started to get red-pilled on the whole vax thing was the sickest that I have been in the last 15 years by far was when I took the vaccine,” the Ohio senator told Rogan.Kennedy, who has also expressed doubts about Covid vaccines, told a rally last week that Trump had promised him “control” of public health agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture.Howard Lutnick, the Trump transition team co-chair, confirmed to CNN this week that he’d spent two-and-a-half hours with Kennedy “and it was the most extraordinary thing”.“I said: ‘So, tell me. How’s it going to go?’ And he said: ‘Why don’t you just listen to me explain things,’” Lutnick said. He did not deny that Kennedy was correct to say he would lead public health agencies in a Trump administration.“I think it’ll be pretty cool to give him the data. Let’s see what he comes up with,” Lutnick added.In a statement, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said there were “no formal decisions” about potential Trump administration appointments. But she added that the former president “has said he will work alongside passionate voices like RFK Jr to make America healthy again by providing families with safe food and ending the chronic disease epidemic plaguing our children”, referring to type 2 diabetes. More

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      Donald Trump is a superspreader of a craziness that has split America in two | Simon Tisdall

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      Is Donald Trump going mad? It depends how you define the word. But since he’s hoping to be elected US president on Tuesday, it would be handy to know. Democrats describe him as “weird” and “unhinged”. His rival, Kamala Harris, raised the “M” question again last week. “This is someone who is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power,” she warned.Harris, to her credit, was being relatively polite, though goodness knows why, given the way he disses and demeans her. So let’s pose the question in more colloquial, idiomatic terms. Has stark raving Trump finally lost his marbles? Are there bats in the belfry? If he’s off his rocker, not playing with a full deck and away with the fairies, the world and the voters have a right to know.Harris’s assessment is obviously not an objective medical diagnosis of mental disorder. It’s a normal person’s reaction to the abnormal things Trump says and does. Crazy-strange campaign speeches by him and his supporters, notably at Madison Square Garden last weekend – a gathering akin to a Nazi Nuremberg rally – are reviving the debate about his sanity that began during his first term.In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, published in 2017, a group of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals raised numerous red flags. One contributor suggested he was clearly off his chump: “Trump is now the most powerful head of state in the world, and one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganised, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving.”That professional opinion, made seven years ago, still rings true. Yet is the madness of “King” Trump, like the madness of King George (whose tyrannical rule Trump seeks to emulate), getting worse?By one measure – his wild, deranged language – the deterioration is marked. “His speeches have grown coarser and coarser,” wrote veteran White House watcher Peter Baker, who dubs him “the profanity president”.“Counting tamer four-letter words like ‘damn’ and ‘hell,’ he has cursed in public at least 1,787 times in 2024,” Baker wrote. His analysis shows Trump is using such language 69% more often than when he ran in 2016. It’s shocking, even by today’s tawdry standards. Trump calls Harris a “shit vice-president” who is “mentally impaired”. Doubtless he knows of what he speaks.Vulgarity, however gross, is not proof of madness. But it may be symptomatic. The Merriam-Webster dictionary, America’s oldest, defines a mad person as one “completely unrestrained by reason and judgment; unable to think in a clear or sensible way”. Trump aces this definition every time he opens his mouth. It fits him to a tee. Exhibit A: his oddball musings about golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis.Bizarre Trump traits, such as compulsive, blatant lying, meet another dictionary definition of madness – behaviour that is “incapable of being explained or accounted for”.A third definition, rooted in US rather than British usage, suggests that Trump is indisputably bananas, in the sense that he is constantly “intensely angry or displeased”. Always feeling furious, feeling “mad as hell”, must be exhausting. It’s enough to drive anyone round the bend. Older people often get irritable, of course; and screw-loose Trump is 78. So is incipient senility, or cognitive decline, another cause of his exceptional looney-ness?Trump stumbles, mispronounces words, forgets where he is and loses his train of thought. Just like Joe Biden, in fact. But Biden is merely old. Trump is nuts.Trump has refused to take credible mental acuity tests or release his medical records. Last month, more than 230 healthcare specialists urged him to be more transparent. “As we all age, we lose sharpness and revert to base instincts,” they noted. “We are seeing that from Trump as he uses his rallies… to crudely lash out.”It may go back to childhood. One theory is that Trump, bullied and bullier, was driven up the wall by maternal love denied. Another theory is that he suffers from “disinhibition”. This is when people become less restrained, the older they get.But the Atlantic journalist McKay Coppins, who interviewed Trump 10 years ago, says he’s always been this way. His “depthless vanity, his brittle ego, his tragic craving for elite approval” haven’t changed one bit, Coppins wrote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNarcissism, hedonism, obsession, a need to provoke, scare, shock and scandalise, and chronic, paranoid feelings of victimhood are all indicators of worsening mental imbalance, if not early-onset imbecility. Recent Trump lunacies include claims that flies are buzzing round his head for “suspicious” reasons, North Korea is trying to kill him, the 6 January riot was a “lovefest”, pet-eating migrants are akin to Hannibal Lecter, and that God saved him in the assassination attempt on his life.If Trump were to go mad on his own time, no problem. Unfortunately, by publicly projecting and displaying mental dysfunction daily on a national stage, he is driving America nuts, too – fans and foes alike. He brings out the worst in everyone, right and left. It could be termed national derangement syndrome (NDS).The poisonous effect of NDS was on show at Madison Square Garden, where “comedians” amplified Trump’s sexist, racist, hate-filled messages. This superspreader craziness destroys reasoned debate, splits the country into opposing camps (hence the dead-heat opinion polls) and sends blood pressure soaring. Many Americans fear civil violence. That’s bonkers.This collective madness, akin to mass hysteria, is all-consuming and universally destructive. Like much that happens in America, it reverberates around the globe. Trump’s fascistic Mad Hatter world is also the world of sicko revanchist dictators like Russia’s Putin, Europe’s far-right ultra-nationalist fruitcases, Iran’s manic mullahs and off-their-heads Israeli génocidaires.It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world – to hijack the title of Stanley Kramer’s 1963 comedy classic – but it’s no laughing matter. It may be about to get madder still. Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator More

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      Republicans and Democrats search for unicorns in crucial Wisconsin: undecided voters

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      On a warm October morning in Madison, Wisconsin, Ty Schanhofer found a unicorn: an undecided voter.Schanhofer, an organizer with the University of Wisconsin student Democratic party, had unfolded a plastic table on campus and was trying to encourage people to register in the key swing state.View image in fullscreenWhen Arin Mahapatra, a 21-year-old student from Illinois, stopped by, Schanhofer – who takes an English class with Mahapatra – jumped into action, peppering him with questions and offering reasons to support Harris.“I’m not necessarily [leaning] in a certain direction, I’m just trying to find out who exactly falls in the same line with what I value most,” said Mahapatra, who cited economic issues like the price of gas and cost of student housing as his top concerns.Truly undecided voters are rare in Wisconsin, where presidential elections hinge on the narrowest of margins.“I feel like it’s probably 2% of the voters who are undecided,” said Schanhofer. “It’s not many at all.”Winning the support of young voters like Mahapatra will be crucial for Harris or Trump to pull off a victory in Wisconsin, where students and voters under 30 have turned out in record numbers in recent elections. In 2023, students on college campuses across the state rallied to elect a liberal judge to the Wisconsin supreme court, helping shift the ideological leaning of the bench in hopes that the court would help establish abortion rights in the state.View image in fullscreenPeople like Schanhofer hope that by generating this kind of turnout among young voters, they’ll be able to turn the Wisconsin electorate in Harris’s favor.The Badger state is considered to be part of the “blue wall” – the states Democrats consistently won in the 1990s and early 2000s.But vanishingly narrow margins in the state decided the 2016 and 2020 elections, and today Wisconsin is a virtual toss-up in the polls, as are many of the other six swing states.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.View image in fullscreenThis election will probably come down to turnout, with the Trump and Harris campaigns attempting to shear away voters from each other’s respective bases. For Trump, that means drawing in young men, who have increasingly drifted to the right.On 26 October, some of those voters could be found queueing up around the corner for an event at the Kollege Klub, a bar just blocks from where the campus Democrats have been tabling for Harris.For hours, the bar was only admitting ticketed attendees, who had spent $150 to see the rightwing Nelk Boys, YouTube pranksters whose podcast has featured the self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate and Trump himself. The Nelk Boys promised to feature Charlie Kirk, the founder of the Maga organizing hub Turning Point USA (TPUSA), as a special guest.Eric Davis, a 29-year-old who lives and works in Madison, waited in line with his friends for more than two hours in front of the bar. Davis voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but said he’s reversing course this year.“I switched over to Trump because I just think, honestly, our economy right now is not going the way that it should,” said Davis. “I don’t believe in everything he says, but a majority of the stuff he goes with – I’m with it.”View image in fullscreenDavis, who is Black, doesn’t always like how Trump talks about immigrants, thinks the ex-president can be crass and understands why he rubs people the wrong way. But the way Davis sees it, that’s just Trump being Trump.“I don’t think he’s racist at all,” said Davis.“My whole family, they’re all liberals,” added Davis, who has not yet told his family how he planned to vote.Despite the night’s political theme, the actual gathering featured little by way of political mobilization. The Nelk Boys stood on a raised platform in the venue, throwing Trump merchandise into the crowd, but Kirk was nowhere to be seen. A stack of cards with voter registration information sat forgotten on a table crowded with beer bottles.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBut for Brandon Maly, the chair of the Republican party of Dane county, the night was a success.“I’ve never seen a bar in Madison packed with Maga hats, it was just incredible. I love to see it – it’s part of that psychology in Dane county, that people need to be given a permission structure,” said Maly. “You may not think it translates to votes, but it does in the sense that they’re given permission to support Trump.”Maly has no illusions about turning Dane county red.But given its status as the second most populous county in the state, he sees the area as a rich source of Republican voters – no matter how marginal their political views may be locally.View image in fullscreenHis goal, of chipping away at Democratic party margins in liberal hubs, is mirrored in Democrats’ push to fight back Republican party majorities in rural and suburban parts of the state that have historically leaned red.One of those Democratic party organizers is Deb Dassow, the chair of the Ozaukee county Democratic party, who says she feels she has the shifting political winds at her back. In Ozaukee county, which stretches north of Milwaukee along Lake Michigan, Democrats have begun to make gains in the last several election cycles. In 2012, Barack Obama claimed 34% of the vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton took 37%, and in 2020 Biden pulled 43% of the vote there.Since 2019, when the Ozaukee county Democrats opened a permanent office in the county, the local party chapter has poured resources into organizing local Democrats.“Since April, we’ve knocked 25,000 doors – we knocked 5,000 just last weekend,” said Dassow on 25 October. The local Democrats have facilitated food drives, held parties and hosted beading parties, crafting red, white and blue bracelets emblazoned with the letters K-A-M-A-L-A.Since jumping into the race in July, the vice-president and her allies have raised more than $1bn to fuel her campaign; much of those funds have poured into a broad campaign to knock on thousands of doors across the country.And not least, they are trying to turn out young people: according to a source familiar with the Harris-Walz campaign in Wisconsin, the Democratic coordinating campaign hired seven full-time campus organizers across the state and a youth-organizing coordinator before the election.View image in fullscreenThe Republican party, meanwhile, has farmed off most of its ground game to outside groups – including TPUSA and the tech billionaire Elon Musk’s America Pac. Those groups allied with the Trump campaign have sought to turn out “low-propensity” voters for Trump, in particular, targeting rural would-be Trump voters who might otherwise neglect to cast a ballot at all.The Trump campaign touts the strategy as innovative, but neither TPUSA nor America PAC boast the kinds of detailed voter lists that parties traditionally maintain to target supporters.“There’s suspicion as to whether or not this is an actual ground game,” said Brandon Scholz, a former Republican party operative who left the GOP on 7 January 2021 – the day after Trump supporters contesting the 2020 election results stormed the US Capitol. Even as an independent, Scholz maintains close relationships in the party and has followed the 2024 campaigns with keen interest.“Are these folks really here?” said Scholz. “Are they really beating the hell out of the doors? Are they really identifying and getting ready to turn out voters, or getting them out to vote early, or getting them absentee ballots?”The answers to these questions – is Trump’s ground strategy as haphazard as it seems in Wisconsin, and is the Harris turnout machine as effective as Democrats claim? – could very well determine the outcome of the election. 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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      Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declines to endorse Kamala Harris

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      Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declined to endorse Kamala Harris at a union rally in Detroit, where the war in Gaza is the top issue for the largest block of Arab American voters in the country.Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, is the only one of the so-called leftist “Squad” that has not endorsed the Democrat candidate. The other three members – Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York – endorsed Harris in July.“Don’t underestimate the power you all have,” Tlaib told a get-out-the-vote United Auto Workers rallygoers. “More than those ads, those lawn signs, those billboards, you all have more power to turn out people that understand we’ve got to fight back against corporate greed in our country.”Tlaib’s non-endorsement of Harris comes as a voter survey published on Friday suggested that 43% of Muslim American voters support the Green party candidate, Jill Stein.After Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, Democrats blamed Stein voters for the loss of Michigan and Wisconsin to the Republican candidate. Some Democrats fear that the same scenario could play out again next week.Earlier this year, during the presidential primary campaigns, about 100,000 Michigan voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” as a mark of protest against the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza after the cross -border Hamas attack in October last year that killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages, mostly civilians.Israel’s attack on Gaza has since killed more than 40,000 people, with many of them women and children. In Lebanon, where Israel has now invaded to fight with Iran-backed Hezbollah, more than 2,897 people have been killed and 13,150 wounded, the country’s health ministry reports. A quarter of those killed were women and children.The US has been a staunch ally of Israel during the fighting, continuing to send arms to the country and limiting its public criticism of Israeli actions.Tlaib has been critical of the Democratic party’s position on the growing and bloody conflict, saying it was “hard not to feel invisible” after the party did not include a Palestinian American speaker at its convention in Chicago in August.In an interview with Zeteo, the news organization founded by former MSNBC host (and Guardian contributor) Mehdi Hasan, Tlaib said the omission “made it clear with their speakers that they value Israeli children more than Palestinian children”.“Our trauma and pain feel unseen and ignored by both parties,” she added. “One party uses our identity as a slur, and the other refuses to hear from us. Where is the shared humanity? Ignoring us won’t stop the genocide.”Harris has faced continued protests on the trail, as demonstrators call for her to break with President Joe Biden and support an arms embargo on Israel. Harris has said Israel “has right to defend itself”, and that Palestinians need “dignity, security”.Confronted by a protester in Wisconsin two weeks ago who accused the Jewish state of genocide, Harris said: “I know what you’re speaking of. I want a ceasefire. I want the hostage deal done. I want the war to end.”At a rally in Dearborn earlier on Friday, Tlaib the criticized Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who has been endorsed by the Muslim mayors of Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck.“Trump is a proud Islamophobe + serial liar who doesn’t stand for peace,” Tlaib posted on X. “The reality is that the Biden admin’s unconditional support for genocide is what got us here. This should be a wake-up call for those who continue to support genocide. This election didn’t have to be close.” More