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      Fraud, lawsuits, chaos: how Trump is preparing to contest the 2024 election

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      Donald Trump has left little doubt that he will contest the results of the 2024 election if he loses.Election lawyers and voting rights experts are bracing for an aggressive effort by the former president in the days after the election to challenge the results while votes are still being counted. But unlike 2020, when Trump’s effort after the election seemed a bit haphazard, experts say they’re seeing a much more organized effort that stretches from the courts to local groups organizing election deniers to work the polls.Here are a few key ways Trump is preparing to contest the 2024 vote:Seeding doubt about fraudFor months, Trump and allies have been spreading the false idea that there is fraud impacting the election.On the campaign trail, Trump has seized on a report that officials in Lancaster county are investigating a batch of 2,500 voter registration applications for possible fraud. The district attorney has said that investigators have discovered some fraudulent applications, but has not said how many or the nature of the fraud. Trump has distorted that limited information to claim that there are fraudulent votes. “They‘ve already started cheating, 2,600 votes, he said. Every vote was written by the same person. It must be a coincidence,” he said at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, last Tuesday.Nationally, a key pillar of Republicans’ claims has been the falsehood that non-citizens are voting and could sway the election. Elon Musk, the billionaire who is a key Trump ally in the campaign, has played a significant role in amplifying this claim. Several studies have shown that non-citizen voting is extremely rare.“If the fraud theme of 2020 was: ‘Covid is allowing ineligible people to vote or ballots to be manipulated,’ the 2024 theme seems to be ‘illegals are voting,’ and that fits in very much with the kind of nativist anti-immigrant language coming from the top of the Republican ticket,” Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an interview in October.Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuitsOver the last few months, the Republican National Committee and other GOP-aligned groups have filed a number of lawsuits in swing states claiming that states are not properly monitoring their rolls for ineligible voters. They have made eye-popping claims, including that states have more registered voters than eligible citizens and that non-citizens are on the rolls.Many of these suits have already been dismissed. But even though Republicans are losing the cases, voting rights experts see an ulterior motive in filing them.“The underlying claims in the suits are based on totally unreliable data, shoddy methodology, and basically the claims are garbage,” Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the watchdog group Protect Democracy. “They are also, in this case, brought by election deniers, in an attempt to spread a false narrative to mislead the public and undermine confidence in elections.”

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      Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that he sees the lawsuits as an effort to give an imprimatur of legal authority to false claims.“I do think you’re going to see after the election if people are upset about the outcome, pointing to: ‘We’ve been saying for the last eight months that they had bloated rolls and dead people on the rolls, non-citizens on the rolls, and the courts didn’t do anything about it,’” he said.Berwick and his colleagues have referred to the cases as “zombie lawsuits” that Trump and allies could try and point to again after the election. While experts are confident this won’t succeed because the claims will still be false, it could continue to seed doubt and provide a pretext for local officials to try and refuse to certify the vote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSowing chaos during a long vote countJust like in 2020, it is unlikely that the US will know the winner of the election on election night. State laws in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two swing states, still prohibit election officials from counting mail-in votes until election day, and election officials are already setting expectations that counting could last long past Tuesday.Trump plans to declare that the vote against him is rigged and point to the slow vote count as evidence, Rolling Stone magazine reported in October.Pressure on local election officials not to certify the voteIf Trump loses the election, there will likely be enormous pressure put on local election officials not to certify the results of the election.Long overlooked, certification is the bureaucratic process of making official the vote tallies at the local and state level. Those charged with certifying the vote are typically boards composed of elected or appointed officials. If a candidate wants to challenge the election results, states allow them to do so in separate legal processes outside of certification.Certification has long been considered a mandatory, non-discretionary responsibility. But in 2020, the Trump campaign and allies targeted Republicans at the local and state level and pressured them not to certify the results. None of those efforts worked in 2020, but Republicans have spent the last four years targeting positions that hold power over certification. At least 35 officials who have refused to certify elections since 2020 will have a role over certifying the vote this fall, according to a report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog group.Voting litigators are preparing to go to court to force local officials to certify, and they say that the law is unequivocally on their side. More

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      in US Politics

      US election 2024 live: Harris and Trump converge on rust belt as final day of campaigning begins

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      Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the 2024 US presidential election.Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will begin a blitz of rallies and media appearances across the vital battleground states in the rust belt, as the final day of campaigning gets under way.Harris is set to appear in the Pennsylvania cities of Allentown, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, in a sign of how crucial the state will be to securing victory. Trump will start his day in North Carolina before making appearances in Pennsylvania and Michigan.Opinion polls show the pair locked in a tight race. More than 78m Americans have already voted, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, approaching half the total 160 million votes cast in 2020, in which US voter turnout was the highest in more than a century.Here are some of the latest developments:

      Kamala Harris pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population two days out from the election. Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Joe Biden in 2020, helping him to a narrow victory over Donald Trump. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the vice-president’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza.

      Harris was making her fourth stop of the day in Michigan, having earlier spoken at a church in Detroit and stopped by a barber shop in Pontiac. Trump is holding his final rally of the campaign in Michigan on Monday night.

      Donald Trump said he should never have left the White House after his defeat in 2020 and joked darkly he would be fine with reporters getting shot. “We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said at a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” he said before abruptly cutting himself off. In other comments, as he denigrated the media, he said: “To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through fake news, and I don’t mind that much, because, I don’t mind. I don’t mind.”

      Donald Trump again suggested he would give a role on health policy to Robert F Kennedy Jr at a rally in Macon, Georgia. “I told a great guy, RFK Jr., Bobby — I said, ‘Bobby, you work on women’s health, you work on health, you work on what we eat. You work on pesticides. You work on everything,” he said. Kennedy, a well known vaccine sceptic, on Saturday said that the former president would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected.

      Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for California’s Proposition 36, which would make it easier for prosecutors to send repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot. The measure would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanors.

      The Trump campaign claimed that recent polling by the New York Times and the Des Moines Register is designed to suppress Trump voter turnout by presenting a bleak picture of his re-election prospects. The memo claims that the Times’s polls have biased samples and overrepresent Democratic voters compared with actual voter registration and turnout trends.

      Trump also 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 the 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”.
      In the 60th US presidential election, 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.Republicans hold a majority in the House, while Democrats control the Senate, both by narrow margins. But the polls – if to be believed – suggest Democrats could win back the House and Republicans retake the Senate.The Republican House majority leader, Steve Scalise, has told Axios that multiple GOP members have been “angling” for senior posts in a potential administration led by Donald Trump.Scalise, a hardline conservative representing Louisiana, told the outlet:
      I’ve heard from a number of members that have been having conversations whether they’re on a short list or a long-short list.
      And we saw it in 2017 where a number of House colleagues got pulled into Cabinet secretary positions and other positions, and so I wouldn’t expect anything different this time.
      Hopefully we have a large enough majority where that option is available to them, but that’s going to be up to President Trump.
      Scalise said he is “very confident” House Republicans will hold or grow their majority, adding that a margin of 8-12 seats would be a good one for the party (Democrats need to flip only four seats to win back a House majority this year).“You know, with the way redistricting is, these aren’t the days we can get a 30-seat majority anymore. So whatever majority we have is going to be slim,” Scalise told Axios.Donald Trump said with two days until the presidential election that he should never have left the White House after his defeat in 2020 and joked darkly he would be fine with reporters getting shot, dredging up grievances that overshadowed his attack lines against Kamala Harris.The closing themes of the former president’s campaign at a rally in Lititz in the battleground state of Pennsylvania brought him full circle with his 2016 campaign that went after the news media and his 2020 campaign that was defined by his attempts to overturn the result.Trump stayed on message for the first part of his remarks but could not resist reverting to resentments he has held on to for years, describing Democrats as demonic and lamenting the 2020 election – an issue that polls badly and his aides privately said they thought he had been convinced to drop.“We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” he said before abruptly cutting himself off.The remark reflected what Trump told aides and allies in the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, a loss he has never conceded, and how he sat in at least one meeting at the end of his first term where he mused about refusing to leave the White House, a person familiar with the matter said.You can read the full story by my colleague, Hugo Lowell, here:As we mentioned in the opening summary, the US vice president and Democratic presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris, pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday.Many Democratic voters, including Michigan’s large Arab American and Muslim American population, have expressed anger at the Biden administration over its support for Israel’s war on Gaza (and now Lebanon).The US continues to be the biggest arms supplier to Israel and is its most powerful diplomatic ally. Harris has not signalled a significant shift from Biden’s policy. Both have condemned the high civilian death toll (according to Gaza’s health ministry over 43,000 Palestinian people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes since last October) but continue to insist on Israel’s right “to defend itself”.Harris said at the Michigan rally:
      We are joined today by leaders of the Arab American community, which has deep and proud roots here in Michigan, and I want to say this year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon.
      It is devastating, and as president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.
      Election Day in the US is now often considered election week as each state follows its own rules and practices for counting ballots that can delay the results. There is also the possibility of legal challenges to counts that could cause delays.In 2020, The Associated Press declared Joe Biden the winner on Saturday afternoon — four days after polls closed. But even then, The AP called North Carolina for Donald Trump 10 days after Election Day and Georgia for Biden 16 days later after hand recounts.Four years earlier, the 2016 election was decided just hours after most polls closed. The Associated Press declared Trump the winner on election night at 2:29 a.m.The tightness of the race this year makes it hard to predict when a winner could be declared – but North Carolina and Georgia could give an early indication as results in these swing states come in relatively quickly.The Associated Press has pinpointed areas in swing states that could give us a clue on how the race will unfold:
      In North Carolina, Harris’ margins in Wake and Mecklenburg counties, home to the state capital of Raleigh and the state’s largest city, Charlotte, respectively, will reveal how much Trump will need to squeeze out of the less-populated rural areas he has dominated.
      In Pennsylvania, Harris needs heavy turnout in deep blue Philadelphia, but she’s also looking to boost the Democrats’ advantage in the arc of suburban counties to the north and west of the city.
      She has campaigned aggressively in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, where Biden improved on Clinton’s 2016 winning margins. The Philadelphia metro area, including the four collar counties, accounts for 43 percent of Pennsylvania’s vote.
      Elsewhere in the Blue Wall, Trump needs to blunt Democratic growth in Michigan’s key suburban counties outside of Detroit, especially Oakland County. He faces the same challenge in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County outside of Milwaukee.
      The Guardian US has been averaging national and state polls to see how the two candidates are faring. Nationally, Kamala Harris has a one-point advantage, 48% to 47%, over Donald Trump, virtually identical to last week.The election will be decided in the seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In these states, the polls are too close to call.Harris has an 8% lead among those who have already voted, while Trump is ahead among those who say they are very likely to vote but have not yet done so. The poll, from the New York Times and Siena College, also found Harris was slightly ahead in Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin, with Trump up in Arizona and the other three too close to call.Many Democrats are worried Trump is setting the stage for a series of legal challenges to poll results, in a sign the former president thinks Harris may win on election day tomorrow.Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the 2024 US presidential election.Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will begin a blitz of rallies and media appearances across the vital battleground states in the rust belt, as the final day of campaigning gets under way.Harris is set to appear in the Pennsylvania cities of Allentown, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, in a sign of how crucial the state will be to securing victory. Trump will start his day in North Carolina before making appearances in Pennsylvania and Michigan.Opinion polls show the pair locked in a tight race. More than 78m Americans have already voted, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, approaching half the total 160 million votes cast in 2020, in which US voter turnout was the highest in more than a century.Here are some of the latest developments:

      Kamala Harris pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population two days out from the election. Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Joe Biden in 2020, helping him to a narrow victory over Donald Trump. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the vice-president’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza.

      Harris was making her fourth stop of the day in Michigan, having earlier spoken at a church in Detroit and stopped by a barber shop in Pontiac. Trump is holding his final rally of the campaign in Michigan on Monday night.

      Donald Trump said he should never have left the White House after his defeat in 2020 and joked darkly he would be fine with reporters getting shot. “We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said at a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania. “I shouldn’t have left, I mean honestly, we did so well, we had such a great – ” he said before abruptly cutting himself off. In other comments, as he denigrated the media, he said: “To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through fake news, and I don’t mind that much, because, I don’t mind. I don’t mind.”

      Donald Trump again suggested he would give a role on health policy to Robert F Kennedy Jr at a rally in Macon, Georgia. “I told a great guy, RFK Jr., Bobby — I said, ‘Bobby, you work on women’s health, you work on health, you work on what we eat. You work on pesticides. You work on everything,” he said. Kennedy, a well known vaccine sceptic, on Saturday said that the former president would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected.

      Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for California’s Proposition 36, which would make it easier for prosecutors to send repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot. The measure would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanors.

      The Trump campaign claimed that recent polling by the New York Times and the Des Moines Register is designed to suppress Trump voter turnout by presenting a bleak picture of his re-election prospects. The memo claims that the Times’s polls have biased samples and overrepresent Democratic voters compared with actual voter registration and turnout trends.

      Trump also 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 the 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”. More

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      in US Politics

      If the US is heading for a soft landing, why do people feel so hard up?

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      The last few months have been filled with great news, according to US economists. Inflation is a hair’s breadth from pre-pandemic levels, unemployment is close to a 50-year low. The stock market keeps hitting record highs. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates last month, the first time since 2020. Some economists have gone so far as to say that the economy we’re living in is one of the best seen in decades.And yet, as the US heads to the polls, many Americans believe the economy stinks. It’s a disconnect that could ultimately decide who takes the White House.Paul Spehar, 62, a maintenance technician based in Daytona Beach, Florida, has seen reports that the economy is doing well but has only seen his savings chip away. His car insurance tripled over the last three years, and he had to take on $2,000 in debt to pay for the copay of a recent surgery. When Spehar retires, he will have to rely solely on Social Security.“The system doesn’t work for people like me,” Spehar said.It’s a common sentiment. In a Harris Poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian in September, nearly 50% of Americans believed that the country is experiencing a recession. Over 60% believed that inflation is increasing, and 50% believed that unemployment is increasing too. Even those who may know what the economists are saying don’t feel great: 73% said it’s hard to feel good about any positive economic news when they feel financially squeezed each month.As election day draws closer, and voters consistently say that the economy is their number one issue, the stakes of understanding why voters feel so blue has never been higher. So why do economists and everyday Americans seem to live in two different realities? The answer may come down to how they view inflation.For economists, inflation is a “nominal thing”, said Stefanie Stantcheva, an economist at Harvard. In other words, for economists, inflation is a measure – an important measure, especially for the Federal Reserve, which is tasked with adjusting monetary to control inflation. But for everyday Americans, inflation is a lived experience.“[Lived experiences] teach us a lot, and they show us that people are suffering a lot from inflation, perhaps more than the baseline numbers say,” Stantcheva said. “I think it’s very important to not just look at that number and say ‘Oh, but this is what CPI [the consumer price index, a broad measure of inflation] says.’… People have a different experience from that, and those experiences should be taken seriously.”That “nominal” number elicits feelings of anger, fear, anxiety and stress – along with a sense of inequality and injustice, when people are asked open-ended questions about how inflation makes them feel, said Stantcheva.People “think that wages are not keeping pace with prices at all, and so their standards of living are eroding,” Stantcheva said. “Inflation affects us as consumers, as workers, as asset holders, and also emotionally. And we see that lots of people, especially lower-income ones.”Inflation peaked in the summer of 2022 at 9.1% – the highest it had been since the early ’80s. It would take over two years for inflation to get back to levels under 3%. The Federal Reserve started ratcheting up interest rates, making the cost of borrowing money more expensive, to tackle rising prices. It has worked, but for many, the economic data and the reality of lived experiences have diverged.For economists, it seems likely that the Federal Reserve pulled off what they call a “soft-landing” – a rare feat where inflation goes down, but the unemployment rate remains relatively low. The opposite, a “hard-landing” – which many economists had forecast – would have meant that unemployment would go up as inflation goes down, triggering a recession.But for many Americans, this is anything but a soft-landing.Inflation coming down doesn’t mean prices have come down, which would be deflation, something economic theory says would actually be a bad sign for the economy. So prices have and will remain elevated. Food prices, for example, went up 25% between 2019 and 2023, according to the US Department of Agriculture.The impact of higher interest rates has also taken time to ripple through the economy, so in addition to inflation, Americans are also still getting hit with high interest rates. As prices increased, so did the cost of buying a home, getting a loan for a car and the rates on credit card bills.What economists call a soft-landing “is diametrically opposed to ordinary Americans, who see themselves in the middle of turbulence”, said John Gerzema, CEO of Harris Poll.While economists – and the Biden administration – celebrate low unemployment, it’s harder for everyday Americans to appreciate the good news even if they still have their jobs.“Unemployment is highly personal when it happens to you,” Gerzema said. But for most people, unemployment is not a big factor in their lives. “But inflation is personal and persistent. Every week it’s changing your benchmark.”MaryKate, 25, who requested she be identified by only her first name for fear of professional repercussions, said that she is still living at home with her parents because rent has been too expensive. When she graduated from college in 2021, it took her a year to find a full-time job with benefits, and saving up to move out has been hard. She recently got financing for a new car, which she uses to commute to work.“I didn’t intend to be at home for this long,” MaryKate said. “It’s hindering my personal growth.”MaryKate said she thinks about how her parents were able to move up from the lower middle-class to a middle-class during their life, and doesn’t feel like the mobility they experienced is possible for her.“At least in my family, that was kind of always the thought, that the next generation does better than the previous one,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to be the case for me.”It’s a sentiment that many Americans share. In the September Harris/Guardian poll, 42% of Americans said they are not financially better off today than their parents were at their age.The one thing that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris seem to agree on is that inflation has hurt Americans, and they are acting accordingly. It’s why Trump proposed ending taxes on tips at a rally in Las Vegas and Harris has shifted her emphasis away from Bidenomics – investing in infrastructure, boosting the US chip industry – to putting housing costs and crackdowns on price gouging at the center of her economic proposals.Gerzema says these kinds of policies are “personally relevant appeals” that focus on the granular “pixels” of the economy, not the overall picture. Purchasing power, personal sentiment on job security, student loans, the price of gas – are all pixels that make up the picture of a person’s individual economy.“I think the pixels just become so incredibly important because when you look at those, you really start to understand a different picture,” Gerzema said.Both presidential candidates seem to understand that much of the election hinges on these emotions. This week, voters will choose who they think has understood them best. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘No social life, no plans, no savings’: Americans aren’t reaping benefits of booming US economy

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      Experts seem to agree the US economy has been on the upswing in 2024. A wave of new jobs, robust consumer spending, lower interest rates, falling inflation, impressive levels of business investment and record Wall Street highs has made the US economy “the envy of the world”.But many Americans appear to feel very little of that.Jim White, 62, an aquaculture specialist from North Carolina, said he has “given up [on] going out”.“I’ll never own a home. A new car is unthinkable,” he said. “The economy is slowly making the rich richer. Everyone else is sinking.”White is among dozens of people from all over the US who shared with the Guardian how they feel about the economy.While some expressed general optimism about stabilizing levels of inflation and reported doing well economically, scores said inflation continued to be financially crippling, with their incomes not even remotely keeping up with soaring costs for housing, food, childcare, insurance, healthcare, fuel, subscriptions and entertainment.Few seemed impressed by months of positive headlines about slowing inflation: “It’s not as if prices have come down, they’ve just stopped rising as obscenely as before,” as one woman in her 70s from Arizona, who still works part-time, put it. “Am I supposed to be happy about that?”“It’s more manageable, but prices are still too high for our wages compared to pre-pandemic,” said a 36-year-old woman from Salt Lake City who works as a research associate.Even those who felt the economy was doing very well complained of the exorbitantly high cost of living.The economy, 40-year-old Roxanne Oesch from Missouri said, felt “remarkably strong”.“Good jobs are available, interest rates are down and will come down further, and inflation has flattened out. It seems like there is a lot of good news.”But simultaneously, she added, “most people still cannot enjoy the same level of financial security they had pre-pandemic”.Alongside various young people who expressed dismay about their economic outlook were dozens of pensioners and people surviving on social security, for whom the new lower interest rates are bad news. “Interest on savings is dropping, [which is] challenging for retirees on fixed incomes,” said retired 71-year-old Paul Ames from Bellport, New York.“The US is doing a lot better than other developed economies. Gas is still way cheaper than Europe,” said Toni, a retired woman from North Florida, who was among various respondents who felt very positive about the economy because they held stock market investments that had been making healthy gains in recent months.“Things are good. The stock market has done well this year. Inflation isn’t having much impact.”“It’s great,” said 69-year-old Timothy Crowley, from Honolulu. “Investment income rising. This is the best economy on earth.”Respondents from places including New York City, Miami and Milwaukee pointed to rising levels of homelessness in their communities and felt that the US economic trickle-down model was broken.Views on who was responsible for America’s economic shortcomings were split: while some blamed the Biden administration for triggering soaring levels of inflation and rising asset prices through unprecedented interventions to keep the economy afloat during the pandemic, others blamed the previous Trump administration and the larger structural economic system propped up by Wall Street and the Republicans.Alex, a married father of two in his mid-30s from rural North Carolina, said he retrained as a welder during the pandemic, thanks to financial government assistance, but he quickly felt exploited in his new line of work.“I welded in two factories, each making millions in profits every year, and never made it off of government assistance, including food stamps and Medicaid. I’m back in school now and succumbing to the student loan vampires, to try and make it work,” he said.Alex said he has turned his back on Republicans, partly because of his economic concerns.Recent eye-wateringly high levels of inflation “were 25-percent caused by circa 15 years of quantitative easing, and 75-percent [caused] by corporate greed. I have completely abandoned the Republican party because they just refuse to rein in these economic monsters”.White, the aquaculture specialist from North Carolina, also said that he became a swing voter because of the economy.He will “vote a straight blue ticket until they turn their backs on Trump and the religious authoritarians”, White said. “I’m retiring this year and believe Trump’s tax breaks for the rich have already endangered my social security. He’s also a threat to my healthcare.”Among the respondents who expressed high levels of hopelessness were various college-educated people with established professional careers, such as architects, lawyers, engineers and medics, who said they were worried about financial insecurity, had recently been priced out of their longstanding communities or had been unable to save for retirement.“It’s horrific,” said 34-year-old Julia, a marketing professional from Washington. “It shouldn’t cost this much for basic necessities. I can’t do anything but work and go to the gym now,” she said, a remark that was echoed by many. “No social life, no plans, no savings.”“‘The US economy’ is not a meaningful or useful concept for most Americans,” said Karena Youtz, 54, a bookkeeper from Idaho. “Inflation is horrible. Around 40% of people in Idaho were fully employed and still unable to afford the cost of living here in 2019. I have no idea what that figure is now, but it’s probably much higher.”Melissa, retired, from northern California, who is disabled, reported struggling to get by on her social security payments.“Everything is too expensive, my rent keeps rising faster than my social security benefits and food prices are too high. Medical services in my rural area are far too few and far too substandard,” Melissa said.“The economy is doing fine and dandy. It’s the citizens of this country that are suffering.” More

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      in US Politics

      US presidential election updates: Poll shows Harris ahead in early voting as Trump jokes about reporters being shot

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      With less than 48 hours to go in the US election and more than 77.6m votes already cast, new polling shows Kamala Harris leading among early voters in the country’s battleground states.The Democratic candidate has an 8% lead among those who have already voted, while her opponent, Donald Trump, is ahead among those who say they are very likely to vote but have not yet done so. The poll, from the New York Times and Siena College, also found Harris was slightly ahead in three swing states, with Trump up in one and the other three too close to call.With only hours of campaigning left, Harris was speaking in Michigan, while her Republican opponent used a rally in Pennsylvania to complain about gaps in the bulletproof shields surrounding him and suggested he would have no concerns about reporters being shot at if there were another assassination attempt against him.“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news and I don’t mind that so much,” he said, adding the press were “seriously corrupt people”. Trump’s communications director claimed in a statement the comments were supposedly an effort to look out for the welfare of the news media.Here’s what else happened on Sunday:Donald Trump election news and updates

      The Trump campaign claimed the NYT polling and Saturday’s Selzer poll of Iowa for the Des Moines Register were designed to suppress Trump voter turnout by presenting a biased, bleak picture of Trump’s re-election prospects. “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.

      In Pennsylvania, Trump told supporters that he should have stayed in the White House, despite his losing the 2020 election. “We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said.

      At a rally in Macon, Georgia, Trump kept up anti-migrant rhetoric and again suggested he would give a role on health policy to Robert F Kennedy Jr. Trump said he told Kennedy: “You work on women’s health, you work on health, you work on what we eat. You work on pesticides. You work on everything.”

      After RFK Jr proposed removing fluoride from drinking water on the first day of a new Trump administration, the former president appeared to approve the idea. “Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump told NBC News. “You know, it’s possible.”

      Trump also spoke in Kinston, North Carolina, where he criticised Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader. “Hopefully we get rid of Mitch McConnell pretty soon,” Trump said. Republican voters in Kinston told the Guardian they are ready to fight a “stolen election”.
      Kamala Harris election news and updates

      In her final rally in Michigan, Harris pledged to do everything in her power to “end the war in Gaza”, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population. Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Biden in 2020. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the administrations stance on Israel’s war on Gaza.

      Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for a controversial tough-on-crime measure that would make it easier for prosecutors to imprison repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot in California. Proposition 36 would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanours.

      At Michigan’s Greater Emmanuel Institutional church of God in Christ in Detroit, Harris told the congregation that God’s plan was to “heal us and bring us together as nation” but that they “must act” to realise that plan.
      Elsewhere on the campaign trail

      A US government communications regulator has claimed that Harris’s appearance on Saturday Night Live violates “equal time” rules that govern political programming. Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the federal communications commission (FCC), said “the purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election.”

      Iowa can continue challenging the validity of hundreds of ballots from potential noncitizens, a federal judge has ruled. The state has targeted illegal voting but critics said the effort threatened the voting rights of people who have only recently become US citizens.
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      Harris vows at Michigan rally to ‘do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza’

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      Kamala Harris pledged to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza” in her final rally in Michigan on Sunday, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population two days out from the election.Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Biden in 2020, helping him to a narrow victory over Donald Trump. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the vice-president’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza, and polling suggests that these voters are gravitating towards Jill Stein, the Green party candidate.With Harris and the former president essentially tied in Michigan, a drop in voting numbers for either could be critical, and Harris made a clear appeal at the beginning of her speech.“We are joined today by leaders of the Arab American community, which has deep and proud roots here in Michigan, and I want to say this year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon,” Harris said.“It is devastating, and as president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.”Speaking at the Michigan State University campus, Harris repeated her campaign promise to “turn the page on a decade of politics driven by fear and division”. Harris did not mention Trump by name in East Lansing, as she gave an address that struck a hopeful tone for the future.“America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow American not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” she said.“We are ready for a president who knows that the true measure of a leader is not based on who you beat down, it is based on who you lift up.”

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      Harris was making her fourth stop of the day in Michigan, having earlier spoken at a church in Detroit and stopped by a barber shop in Pontiac. The state is key to her chances of success, but the result is likely to be close. Trump won Michigan by about 10,000 votes in 2016 as he demolished Democrats’ “blue wall”, and Biden also carried the state by a narrow margin in 2020. Trump is holding his final rally of the campaign in Michigan on Monday night, but Harris was defiant.“We need to finish strong. So for the next two days we still have a lot of work to do but here’s the thing: we like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful work,” she said.“And make no mistake, we will win.”It was a raucous atmosphere at the rally, Harris’s final stop in Michigan before Tuesday’s vote. She repeatedly had to pause for loud chants of “Kamala, Kamala” from a diverse crowd who seemed enthusiastic about voting for her“I feel more energized and more excited in this election than I have in a while,” said Latonya Demps, 40, a small business owner and a Michigan State alumna.“I’m very excited to vote for Harris. As a woman she speaks for my rights and the rights of women that we have fought for for a very, very long time: the right to choose, the right to have equity and access, also freedom for all of us in terms of climate change, in terms of our economy, the type of neighbors we want to have, the families that we want to raise, I think she represents the values that are really important to me.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis week Democrats have fought to counter the gains made by Stein among Arab American and Muslim American voters in Michigan, with the Democratic National Committee launching a series of ads on Instagram and YouTube aiming to discourage people from voting for Stein and Cornel West, who is running as an independent and is also a critic of Israel.The ads highlight recent comments by Trump that he likes Stein “very much”, because: “She takes 100% from [Democrats].” The pro-Democrat organization MoveOn has also been running a “seven-figure” ad campaign this week, which it said was designed to appeal to people who are yet to decide on a candidate and “third-party curious voters”.Polling on the issue has yielded inconsistent results. Last week a national survey of Arab Americans, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit, found 43% supporting Trump compared with 41% for Harris, and 4% backing Stein, while a survey of Muslim Americans, by the Council on American-Islamic Relations of American Muslims, found that 42.3% plan to vote for Stein, 41% for Harris and 9.8% for Trump.Despite that uncertainty, Harris supporters left buoyant on Sunday night.“She’s going to be the first Black woman president that we’ve had. She’s actually going to fight for our rights. She’s fighting for women’s reproductive rights, she’s also fighting for the middle class, for entrepreneurs, and business owners like myself,” said Zay Worthey, 19.Worthey said he was “100%” confident that Harris will win the White House on Tuesday.“Because she has something that Donald Trump doesn’t: community,” Worthey said.“She’s really working and fighting for the people of America, and Donald Trump is just only working for the people of the rich.” More

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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