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At a campaign stop in Greenville, North Carolina, the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris attacked her rival Donald Trump for spreading misinformation related to hurricanes Helene and Milton.“We can already see the harm he’s up to as a candidate,” Harris said. “Most recently, spreading disinformation in the wake of natural disasters.”“Donald Trump cares more about scaring people, creating fear, running on a problem instead of what real leaders do, which is to participate in fixing problems,” Harris added.Donald Trump invited National Border Council President, Paul Perez, to the stage. He quickly attacked Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris, and condemned her stance on immigration and her handling of the US-Mexico border.“[Trump] has always stood with the men and women who protect this border, who put their minds on the line for the country, a man who knows about putting his life on the line for what is right,” said Perez.“On behalf of the 16,000 men and women represented by the National Board of Patrol Council, we strongly support Donald J. Trump for President of the United States,” Perez said.Donald Trump expressed his support for Kari Lake, the Republican candidate in the Arizona Senate race, calling her a “tough one”.Lake is running against the US Representative Ruben Gallego, with whom she debated on Wednesday.“You destroyed that poor guy,” Trump said about her performance. “That was a destruction.”Donald Trump called the mayor of Aurora, Colorado, Mike Coffman, a “radical left Democrat”.During his rally, Trump repeated his comments about Venezuelan gang activity at an apartment complex in the city.Coffman previously said these remarks were “grossly exaggerated”, adding they “have unfairly hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety”.Donald Trump bragged about his list of endorsements, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk, former US representative Tulsi Gabbard, former third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, and former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien.He also boasted about the harsh immigration policy undertaken during his presidency. Trump displayed a chart he usually presents during his rallies, showing a decline in people entering the US through the southern border while he was president.He started his remarks by encouraging the crowd to vote “to take back our country”.“With your help, 23 days from now – can you believe it? – we’re going to win Arizona and we’re going to defeat Kamala,” he said. “She shouldn’t even be running.”He proceeded to use degrading language toward immigrants.“We are here together this Sunday afternoon because we love our country,” Kamala Harris said during her rally in North Carolina. The crowd cheered “USA, USA, USA!”“I do believe it is one of the highest forms of patriotism to then fight for the ideals of our country and to fight to realize the promise of America,” Harris said before concluding her speech.Kamala Harris said Donald Trump’s presidency resulted in more than one in three women living in states with abortion bans, including North Carolina.“General Milley, former chairman of the joint chiefs under Donald Trump, said: ‘No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.’ Think about that,” the vice-president said during her rally.At a campaign stop in Greenville, North Carolina, the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris attacked her rival Donald Trump for spreading misinformation related to hurricanes Helene and Milton.“We can already see the harm he’s up to as a candidate,” Harris said. “Most recently, spreading disinformation in the wake of natural disasters.”“Donald Trump cares more about scaring people, creating fear, running on a problem instead of what real leaders do, which is to participate in fixing problems,” Harris added.JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential pick, attended Nascar’s Bank of America Roval 400 on Sunday at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina.Vance attended the playoff race with his family and did not deliver any remarks during the event.Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver his remarks soon at a rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona.Before his speech, Trump’s former adviser Stephen Miller took the stage, attacking the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.“She not only annihilated our border, but she began using your tax dollars by the billions to smuggle, fly, bus, transport and, in every way possible, relocate illegal aliens en masse inside the United States,” Miller said.He continued to make anti-immigrant comments and condemn the Biden administration’s border policy. More

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump spent Sunday trying to shore up political support among what they perceived to be must-have voting blocs with polls showing them locked in a tight 5 November presidential race.With election day less than a month away, the Democratic vice-president attended a Black church in Greenville, North Carolina, as part of her campaign’s “souls to the polls” push. She later exalted the way communities – especially in the western part of the state – were coming together after damage from Hurricane Helene in late September, especially the way “people who have the least give the most”.Her Republican opponent, meanwhile, was in Arizona – looking for Black and Latino support as he seeks a second presidency, after a rally in California a day earlier.Both candidates are attempting to get a decisive edge among votes who have not yet decided who to support. Surveys show that early voting, which tends to favor Democrats, is down 45% from previous election years – a sign that there may be millions of undecided voters.Trump has now switched from condemning early voting as a Democrat plot to engineer his defeat to Joe Biden in 2020 to urging people to vote early and by mail.A recent ABC News-Ipsos poll showed that support was split down gender lines, with women voting 60-40 to Harris and men breaking for Trump by a similar margin.Trump needs white women, who supported him in a greater numbers in 2020 than in 2016 – but also Black men. On Sunday, he argued that his fellow former president Barack Obama’s call last week for Black men to support Harris based “solely on her skin color, rather than her policies” as “deeply insulting”.View image in fullscreenDemocratic Georgia senator Ralph Warnock on Sunday told CNN, “Black men are not going to vote for Donald Trump in any significant numbers.” But his fellow Black Democrat Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina congressman, told CNN, “Yes, I am concerned,” about Black men voting for Trump. Separately, former president Bill Clinton was urging voters in rural Georgia to get behind the Democratic ticket.A New York Times poll published Sunday found that Harris is underperforming the last three Democratic candidates for the White House among Latino voters.The election may come down to fractional increases in support for each. An NBC News poll released Sunday showed the candidates in a “dead heat” nationally at 48% support. The poll found that voters are reassessing Trump’s first term more favorably – but also that voters view reproductive rights as a top motivating issue, which could hurt the former president after three of his US supreme court appointees eliminated the federal right to abortion.A CBS News poll, also released Sunday, found that the presidential race is more than just two conflicting ideologies – but about a fundamental disconnection.For instance, most Trump supporters said relief for victims of Hurricanes Helene and Milton wasn’t reaching affected people – while Harris supporters indicated it was. Trump supporters said the economy was bad; Harris supporters said it was good. Trump’s voters said US-Mexico border crossings were increasing; Harris’s voters said they were down.Trump’s voters, especially the men, said gender equality efforts had gone too far; Harris voters said not far enough. But both agreed that social media was untrustworthy and had made it harder to find things to agree on and to tell fact from fiction.Each poll contained positive signs for Harris, including a five-point advantage on “looking out for middle class” (ABC); abortion being “#1 motivating issue” (NBC), with Democrat up 19 points on the issue over Trump (New York Times); Trump’s Latino support at the same level from 2020 (CBS), and also Harris matching Biden in 2020 with Black voters.But the response to the two hurricanes that the south-eastern US recently continued to dominate Democrats’ campaign. On Sunday, Biden was scheduled to survey damage inflicted on Florida’s Gulf coast by Milton, where he would announce $600m in funding for damaged electrical grids.Response to hurricanes remains Democrats’ political preoccupation. Harris’s rally Sunday came amid the intense politicization of the speed of federal disaster response to Helene.In North Carolina, Harris appeared to be looking to defuse hurricane politics while also calling out false information that spread after Helene.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCrises, she said, “have a way of revealing the heroes among us, the angels among us, and of showing us all the best of who we are … heroes who do not ask the injured or stranded whether they are a Republican or a Democrat, but who simply ask: ‘Are you OK?’”And yet, Harris said: “There are some who are not acting in the spirit of community, and I am speaking of these who have been literally not telling the truth, lying about people who are working hard to help the folks in need, spreading disinformation when the truth and facts are required.”That came as the Wall Street Journal reported that some of the earlier response to Helene had come in the form of Patriot Front, an organization that the Anti-Defamation League has concluded is a white-supremacist group – and that was using misinformation as a recruiting tool.With Arizona, Nevada and Georgia potentially leaning for Trump, and Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin potentially leaning for Harris, the loss of North Carolina would cost Trump 16 electoral college votes needed to reach the winning threshold of 270. The state narrowly voted for Trump in 2020.The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that he would deny Harris and Biden’s call to bring Congress back to Washington to approve more disaster relief funding after the hurricane.“It can wait,” Johnson said, pointing to $20bn in additional disaster funding that had recently been approved. He claimed only 2% of that funding had been distributed. As soon as states have assessed and calculate their “actual needs”, and submitted them, “Congress will meet and in bipartisan fashion, we will address those needs.”Johnson accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) of being “slow to respond”. He said: “They did not do the job that we all expect and hope that they will do, and there’s going to be a lot of assessment about that as well in the days ahead.”But with Harris’s support appearing to slip in recent weeks, including after a series of TV appearances, there are reports of growing tensions between her campaign and Biden’s White House. The president cancelled a trip to Germany to concentrate on the hurricane response. But he is now reported to have rescheduled the trip for Friday.According to Axios, Biden aides remain wounded by the president being pushed out of his re-election bid amid questions about his age. He is 81 – only three years older than Trump.Harris’s team believed Biden upstaged her by holding an impromptu press briefing while she held a rally in Michigan.Biden on Sunday was expected to meet with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, with whom Harris was feuding earlier in the week. An aide to Harris, 59, told the outlet that the president’s team are “too much in their feelings”. More

Donald Trump’s supporters do not pitch up at his rallies expecting to hear policy speeches or even the truth. Mostly they go for the comfort of distractions from hard realities and the allure of false promises to revive the past.But some of the loudest cheers at Trump’s recent rally in Saginaw, Michigan, came in response to a claim the former US president’s supporters could believe, when he said election polls were swinging his way in the battleground state and that Kamala Harris’s “honeymoon period” was over.“We’re up in all of the polls. We’re up in every swing state. They had a honeymoon period,” he said before he was drowned out by the cheering crowd.With just three weeks left until the election, Democrats fear that Trump is right. Some complain that Harris has squandered an initial burst of enthusiasm after Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, which sparked a surge in fundraising and volunteering for her campaign.View image in fullscreenMichigan is one of the handful of key swing states that will decide the result of this most momentous of elections. While Harris has a slight lead in national polls, she is struggling in Michigan, a state she must win or face a more challenging path through the US’s electoral college to take the White House. Trump won the state by just 10,704 in 2016 and lost it by a narrow margin to Biden four years later.The stakes are enormous. Trump has campaigned in 2024 on an ever more extreme platform, threatening mass deportations of immigrants and promising to seek revenge on his political enemies if he returns to the White House. Last week, Trump even demanded one of America’s big television networks lose its licence because he sees its political coverage as unfair to him. In a country that prides itself on free speech, freedom of the press could ail quickly under a second Trump term. For many, US democracy itself feels on the line.The Harris campaign has long considered its easiest path to victory is by winning the Rust belt battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If the vice-president were to lose in Michigan, she would almost certainly need to win one of the other closely contested states of Georgia, Arizona or North Carolina.A Quinnipiac University poll released last Wednesday put the vice-president three points behind Trump in Michigan, while poll trackers offer a mixed picture.For those desperate to know which way Michigan might go, it is Saginaw that is the bellwether county of the state. Barack Obama won it twice before Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the county by a little more than 1,000 votes, just over 1% of the ballot, in 2016. Four years later, Biden took Saginaw county from Trump by an even narrower margin of just 303 votes.Both campaigns are piling resources into Michigan including a deluge of frantic television advertising, and a merry-go-round of candidates and prominent supporters wheeling through the state.Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, was in Detroit on Friday looking to win over blue-collar union voters. The vice-president is expected in Detroit on Tuesday in a bid to turn out Black voters who are key to a Democratic victory in Michigan.The Harris campaign has wheeled out Barack Obama in recent days and sent Bernie Sanders, the darling of the left of the Democratic party, to rally student support in Saginaw a week ago.Meanwhile Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, traversed Michigan promising to bring back the old and attacking the new. Vance joked to an audience in Detroit on Tuesday about the importance of the state: “I’m going to be in Michigan like 30 times” before the election.The pair have repeatedly pledged to make the American car industry great again, after so many jobs were lost to globalisation and automation, while attacking its future by scorning electric vehicles. Trump’s rally in Saginaw leaned heavily on promises to bring back the dozen or so auto factories in the county that have closed in recent years.Alongside the fantasy promises is a darker campaign aimed at those who do not fit the view of what many Trump supporters think an American should look like. Some of it is dressed up as opposition to illegal immigration but groups supporting Trump are running television ads with sinister overtones in Michigan, including one paid for by Duty to America that shows a series of photographs of white people who are said to have been “left behind”.“Even if we do everything right, Harris and the Democrats find new ways to make us pay. For what? No matter what we do, Democrats are against us. So this November, we’re against them,” it said.Across the key Rust belt states, Trump has a clear lead on two of the most important issues for many voters, the economy and immigration. He is even ahead by one point on which candidate would better preserve democracy, despite his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to the Quinnipiac poll.Behind the scenes, Democratic strategists are increasingly alarmed by the numbers. The party’s US Senate candidate in Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, warned last month that Harris was not polling as well as expected.View image in fullscreen“I’m not feeling my best right now about where we are on Kamala Harris in a place like Michigan,” she told a fundraiser. “We have her underwater in our polling.”Some Democratic campaigners blame the campaign.Carly Hammond is an organiser for the US’s largest trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO, for the Saginaw region who is running for city council while also canvassing for Harris.“This is the most expensive election in American politics so far. There’s more money around, more ads, more signs, the volunteers are there. I really haven’t seen anything like this in terms of the mobilisation efforts,” she said.“What is missing is Harris’s policies. People ask: ‘What is she going to do?’ I’ve heard about 200 Harris ads in the past few weeks just because they’re inescapable. But I couldn’t tell you what her concrete plan is to tackle anything.”Some of the Democratic messaging in Michigan plays to Trump’s agenda, with repeated promises to “secure the border” even though Saginaw is 1,500 miles from the Mexican frontier and undocumented immigrants make up only about 1% of the state’s population. But it does not appear to be doing Harris much good while alienating some Democrats.Hammond said she feared that Harris had retreated into defensive messaging and a reliance on scaring voters over Trump’s ties to Project 2025, the authoritarian plan to impose rightwing control across the entire US government, that is costing her momentum.“When it switched over from Biden to Harris, there was an expectation that Harris would put out her own aggressive policy proposals and that hasn’t happened. There’s been a kind of walking back. Harris’s campaign said she’s going to take on the billionaires and corporate interest rates. A lot of that language fell off and now it’s just kind of ‘Project 2025, it really sucks’,” she said.Trump, on the other hand, has been hitting the state with hard promises even if they’re unlikely to be fulfilled. He told his audience in Saginaw he would make Michigan the “car capital of the world again” after General Motors closed a dozen factories in the county and moved some production to Mexico.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Under my plan American workers will no longer be worried about losing their jobs to foreign nations. Instead, foreign nations will be worried about losing their jobs to America. We’re bringing them all back,” he said.View image in fullscreenLarge numbers of Trump voters don’t believe it will happen, not least because he made the same promise in 2016 and the factories didn’t return. But they apparently don’t care.Gary Ell, chair of Saginaw’s Republican party and a fervent Trump backer, said his supporters take the promise alone as evidence that the former president cares about them while the Democrats care about other people.“They don’t look at him as being a politician. They still look at him as being an experienced former president who still stands on the same policies that he stood for before with the exception that the economy has gotten so much worse and the migration of mass illegal aliens has gotten so much worse. Those are two things that he had in check when he was president before,” he said.Biden boasts of a booming economy, including record job growth, but statistics mean little to large numbers of Americans who feel much worse off after years of surging inflation. Saginaw’s largest food bank has just received a $1m grant to expand because so many families are buckling under high grocery prices.Still, the Harris campaign has been encouraged by data showing the vice-president gaining ground with white voters without college degrees in Michigan, a key part of Trump’s base.In a move to shore that up, Democratic heavyweights from out of state, including the former US senator from Indiana Joe Donnelly, descended on Saginaw last Wednesday to tell trade union members that Biden had been good for blue collar workers and Harris would be too.The area’s member of Congress, Dan Kildee, warned the workers that Trump’s false promises could cost them their jobs.“This is a union hall where everybody’s working because the Biden-Harris administration has invested in American manufacturing. When Donald Trump was president, we were losing these jobs. Sixty per cent of these people were unemployed. Under Biden-Harris, they’re back to work. So, the question is, are we going to continue on this path or are we going to go back to those days?” he said.The Harris camp also brought Sanders to Saginaw to get out the student vote with a rally at the local university. He said that Trump’s denial of the climate crisis threatened the future of the planet and warned that another Trump presidency could be a decisive blow to a democracy already undermined by a growing oligarchy.View image in fullscreenSanders also mocked Trump for losing the support of his own vice-president, Mike Pence.“Mike Pence is a very conservative guy. His views are nothing like mine. I disagree with him on every issue. But he worked with Trump every single day and he said Trump is not fit to be president of the United States,” Sanders told a standing-room-only crowd.Some Michigan Republicans are pushing a similar message. A former member of Congress from Detroit, Dave Trott, and other anti-Trump conservatives launched Michigan Republicans for Harris-Walz earlier this month, aimed at the more than 350,000 Republicans in Michigan who voted against the former president in their party’s primary in February. Trott accused Trump of “gutting Michigan’s economy” and called him “more dangerous than ever”.It’s not clear if any of this is changing anyone’s vote. Both camps are focused on turnout, knowing that it is likely to decide the election. Trump’s support in Michigan went up in 2020 but he was beaten because many of those Democrats who stayed home when Clinton was the candidate four years earlier came out to remove him from the White House.Trump has been restating his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen in urging supporters to vote in order to make the election “too big to rig”. Harris is counting on the enthusiasm initially generated by her campaign, particularly among young female voters.Ultimately, the election in Michigan may be decided by events half a world away.More than 100,000 people voted uncommitted in the state’s Democratic primaries in February in a protest against Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, as the Palestinian civilian death toll climbed into the tens of thousands. But the Uncommitted movement is now alarmed at the prospect of those supporters boycotting Harris if it delivers Michigan to Trump.On Tuesday, the group’s co-founder Lexi Zeidan pleaded in a video on social media to not let that happen.“As a Palestinian American, the current administration’s handling of this genocide has been beyond enraging and demoralising, but the reality is that it can get worse. Nobody wants a Trump presidency more than [the Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu because that is his ticket to wiping Palestine off the map,” she said.Zeidan’s warning fell well short of an endorsement of Harris but across Michigan, the vice-president’s campaign is counting on fear of Trump as much as enthusiasm for the vice-president to get her over the line. More