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Our Deputy Political Editor, Jitendra Joshi, discusses the most pivotal moments from an extraordinary campaign trail.
There’s been assassination attempts, court cases, high-profile blunders, a new Democratic nominee, and plenty of drama.
But, where does this all leave the presidential race now?
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Here’s a fully automated transcript:
From London, I'm Rochelle Travers, and this is The Standard.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, the 5th of November, millions of Americans will decide who they want as their next president, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.
It's been an eventful presidential race, to say the least.
I mean, think about it, less than four months ago, President Joe Biden was still in the race.
There's been assassination attempts, court cases, high-profile blunders, a new Democratic nominee, and plenty of other drama.
Here to take a look back at what's been an extraordinary campaign trail, and share his analysis as to where the race is at currently, is our deputy political editor, Jitendra Joshi.
Jit, what a journey it's been to get to election week.
It's hard to know where to even start, but what do you think was the first huge defining moment from the campaign trail?
It's been eventful to say that is really an understatement.
It's just been epic, hasn't it?
And just to firstly put it into context, we've got used to, ever since 2000 really, we've got used to some fairly momentous elections, but this one really takes the biscuit in terms of just shocks, drama, a narrative changing events.
It's hard to pick any one moment really, given just how extraordinary it's been.
But if we started with anything, we could look at the end of May, when Trump became the first former president and leading candidate for either party to be convicted in a trial.
This was the climax of the case involving the former porn star Stormy Daniels, who Trump paid off just ahead of his victory in 2016 to keep quiet about a one night stand, that had the details that came out of that just really kind of set the tone for what we already knew was going to be a pretty extraordinary few months of campaigning.
Let's look at some of the other pivotal moments from the presidential race in more detail now.
When Biden was still in the running, he made a series of blunders.
How much of an impact did these blunders have on the race?
There was already quite a lot of concern about Joe Biden's mental and physical acuity.
He had been increasingly appearing quite dodgery, forgetful in his public appearances.
And that really was on glaring display at the end of June, when he had his TV debate with Trump.
He was, frankly, all over the place, forgetting what he was saying, sentences trading off, going off into detours, and never quite finishing a point.
And ironically, the sort of thing, actually, we're seeing more and more coming from Trump himself in the closing stretch.
But anyway, going back to that debate, building on the sort of lingering concerns, that really crystallized a sense of panic that was building among Democrats about the way this was going to go.
And look, you know, the poll showed why that panic was evident, because Trump then pulled quite, almost quite decisively ahead in some of the post-debate polling.
And all that said, Biden winning the presidency was the capstone of a very long career, and he wasn't about to let go of it willingly.
And he's sort of brushed it off as a bad night of the races and vowed to carry on.
And so for those few days, Democrats were kind of left wondering, where do we go from here?
As you already know, the assassin's bullet came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life.
Then in July came the first of two shocking assassination attempts on Donald Trump.
Here's a clip of Donald Trump speaking after the attempt.
When I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard on my right ear.
How did this all unfold?
Yeah, so you already have rising democratic concern that Biden is going to lose the selection.
Then you have a shocking moment of drama at an outdoor rally in Pennsylvania, where a 20-year-old guy, Thomas Crooks, somehow managed to evade security on the outer perimeter of the rally site, bombed a roof and opened fire with a rifle.
We all saw the image of what resulted from that, which was Trump sort of glancing one way, and then a bullet nicking his ear, blood streaming down, the Secret Service pouncing on him on stage.
But despite their efforts to hustle him off, he managed to stay upright, fist clenched, shouting, fight, fight, fight, to his supporters and to the world at large.
And it really became a sort of iconic image.
He suffered a flesh wound, but survived.
And at that point, became almost a martyr to the cause, adding to the sort of adulation already that his supporters felt for the Republican.
And at that point, you know, it just felt turns for the election.
It was now Trump's to lose.
And it was just a week later that President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
I revere this office.
I love my country more.
It's been the honor of my life to serve as your president.
How did he come to this decision?
Exactly.
It was just over a week after the shooting in Pennsylvania.
And that itself was a real factor in Biden's very reluctant decision to stand down, I think, because given the jolt of momentum, it had given the Trump on top of the fact that people were already very, very concerned about Biden's state of health.
It became inevitable almost that the Democrats were going to have to face a very difficult choice.
Donors were telling Biden, we're not going to sustain your campaign after this.
And you had very senior Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama working in the shadows saying, you know, we need to change this up, even though it's going to be an extraordinary thing to have.
A sitting president drop out and not seek re-election, that hasn't happened since 1968.
Even as extraordinary as that was, something had to give and Biden very, very reluctantly tweeted, in fact, initially his decision that he would not seek re-election in November and would instead throw his backing behind his vice president, Kamala Harris.
I accept your nomination to be president of the United States of America.
Then Kamala Harris entered the race and was selected as the Democratic nominee.
This seemed to turn the tide for the Democrats in the polls, didn't it?
It did.
You saw a sudden shift in momentum and a sudden shift in narrative, because hitherto it had all been about Biden's past, it Trump's going to coast to victory, the Republicans themselves, Trump himself were getting pretty complacent almost.
Now, all of a sudden, they had to confront a very different reality, which was of a younger and quite history-making candidate, opponent in Harris.
And just the sort of visuals of who she is as a woman, as a person of colour, presented a dramatic turnaround from, frankly, two elderly white men taking lumps out of each other in an increasingly gaffering campaign.
So you saw a shift in the polls.
But it's important to stress also that the polls throughout remain tight.
But these things hinge on momentum and trends.
And before that, it was all going one way towards Trump.
Now, all of a sudden, that slide was arrested and the Democrats felt they were very much back in the game.
And you saw a sudden surge in money and donations and in campaign activity, volunteers massing people who had been sort of holding back a bit, worried about where they were going under Biden.
And suddenly there was this huge surge in momentum and activity in support of Harris.
Let's go to the ads.
Coming up in part two, where things stand now with the race to the White House.
All in all, we're seeing one of, if not the most divisive campaigns of recent political history playing out and the polls have, if anything, tightened.
The Standard podcast will be back in just a moment.
Welcome back.
Still with me is our deputy political editor, Jitendra Joshi.
Jit, usually the TV debates are some of the biggest talking points when it comes to any election, but we've actually only had one TV debate with the two current US presidential nominees, Harris and Trump.
How much do these TV debates matter?
Yeah, so the race initially took a serious turn for the West, for Democrats because of Biden's calamitous performance in that first debate in late June.
All of a sudden now, they were back in contention and Harris really took it to Trump when they held their debate on September the 11th.
Even though we know from talking to people involved in the Trump campaign, they had gone out of their way to prepare him for what was going to come.
What was the obvious line of attack from Harris, which was to try and get under Trump's skin, to prey on his obsessions about foul size and strength and power, and just to belittle him and mock him and ridicule him.
And he just walked into that bear trap.
And even on the strongest points where the Democrats are really vulnerable, especially, say, on immigration, Kamala Harris managed to turn that around and Trump fell into the extraordinary jaw-dropping remark you have heard where he started writing about Haitian immigrants in the hire, eating cats and dogs.
That in itself then threw the focus back on Trump's own state of mind, you know, where is this guy coming from?
You know, and it's given rise ever since to this narrative from Harris that Trump's campaign is about nothing other than his own personal obsessions, his grievances, his hit list of people he wants to go after to settle scores.
In contrast to Harris portraying this certainly revision of saying, look, we're not going to go back to all that.
We need to move on.
We need to focus on things that matter.
Those were just some of the key moments we've discussed there.
And that's without going through the second assassination attempts against Trump, the Republican and Democratic conventions, and the selection of the nominees for vice president, to name just a few.
Plus there's still plenty going on right up until the last moment with this election.
Where are things currently with the presidential race?
In the closing part of the campaign, we've seen all of that toxicity really coming to the fore more than ever.
We're seeing in the final week of campaigning, a real battle going on in the key states that will determine this election.
There are seven states.
Pennsylvania is the biggest prize of all.
And in those states, we're seeing a particular focus on women, on Hispanic voters.
And that battle has been crystallized by some of the remarks that we're seeing, some of the gaffs as well that we're seeing from the two campaigns.
So there was a rally, a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in New York, where you had a comedian come out with some pretty nasty slurs against not just women and Hispanic voters, but Jewish people, black people.
And it was one comment in particular where he called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage that has had Trump on the back foot trying to smooth things over with Hispanic voters ever since.
Then Joe Biden, you know, who we heard earlier, having to drop out of the race, has then reinserted himself by appearing to, on the back of that comedian's skit, then appearing to call Trump supporters themselves garbage.
Harris has then been having to smooth things over and stressed it.
No, no, we're not, we're not sort of dismissing half the country who might support Trump, but there are also particular issues around comments made by Trump towards women, so he's said in the closing stretch of the campaign, I'm going to protect women whether they like it or not.
He's trying to present that as a sort of, no, that's just me showing that I care about the pride of women in lots of communities affected by crime or by illegal immigration, so on.
So the Democrats, for Harris, they're saying, well, here you go again, here you've got a convicted sex offender just sort of telling women what they need in a context of a race that has also really been fought over the abortion rights ever since, a very, very controversial warning by the Supreme Court that they're essentially stripped women of federal protection for abortion.
So all in all, we're seeing one of, if not the most divisive campaigns of recent political history playing out.
And the polls have, if anything, tightened, there's been a bit of an uptick for Trump in some of them towards the end, but everything is very, very tight nationally, and particularly in those seven battleground states, as we head into Tuesday's election.
One way or other, I suspect we might not know a result immediately, and things might well drag on even more divisively if Trump loses, because he's put lots of people in place to test things in every state where it matters.
You can find out the latest on the US election on our website, standard.co.uk.
The Standard podcast will be back tomorrow at 4pm.
