We’re going to end this live coverage now. Thanks for following along. You can find all of the Guardian’s US elections coverage here.
Trump is thanking various supporters.
Here is Vermont senator Bernie Sanders on CNN a short while ago. He spoke about Trump’s actions on and in the lead up to the January 6 storming of the Capitol:
Sen. Bernie Sanders: "There is a reason why his own Vice President Mike Pence, who sat by his side for four years, is not supporting him. Why Dick Cheney, the most maybe conservative vice president in the modern history of this country, is not supporting them.” pic.twitter.com/xdtOrgdFTf
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) October 16, 2024
Updated
Trump has been speaking for 40 minutes.
Trump is now repeating racist and baseless claims about immigrants.
Here is further reading on the impacts of his rhetoric:
And the Guardian view on his attacks:
How China sees its future with the US after the election
Speaking of China, the Guardian’s Amy Hawkins, Helen Davidson and Chi Hui Lin have this report on how China sees its future with the US after the election:
Deciphering the obscure machinations of elite politics is a pursuit that western China-watchers are all too familiar with. But as the US election approaches, it is analysts in China who are struggling to read the tea leaves on what differentiates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump when it comes to their stance on the US’s biggest geopolitical rival.
Commentators are calling it the vibes election. For Beijing, despite the cheers and whoops of Harris’s campaign, her vibes are largely similar to Trump’s.
“Harris will continue Biden’s policies” on China, says Wang Yiwei, a professor of international studies at Renmin University in Beijing. What are Biden’s policies? He is a “Trumpist without the Trump”, says Wang.
Harris has done little to dispel the belief that her stance on China will be largely the same as Biden’s, should she win the election in November. In her headline speech at the Democratic national convention on 22 August, China was mentioned just once: she promised to ensure that “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century”.
Harris has little foreign policy record to be judged on. But in an economic policy speech on 16 August, she emphasised her goal of “building up our middle class”, a vision that Biden has used to justify placing high tariffs on Chinese imports, extending Donald Trump’s trade war.
Beijing fundamentally does not see there being much difference between a Democratic- or Republican-controlled White House. Indeed, hawkishness on China has become one of the few bipartisan issues in US politics.
In a recent piece for Foreign Affairs, leading foreign policy commentators Wang Jisi, Hu Ran and Zhao Jianwei wrote that “Chinese strategists hold few illusions that US policy toward China might change course over the next decade … they assume that whoever is elected in November 2024 will continue to prioritise strategic competition and even containment in Washington’s approach to Beijing.” The authors predicted that although Harris’s policymaking would likely be more “organised and predictable” than Trump’s, both would be “strategically consistent”.
Trump again complains about electric cars that “don’t go very far” and are “made in China”. Then he walks that back to say that electric cars can be good and that Elon Musk makes them.
Trump veers from thoughts on public speaking to say we will “frack, frack, frack and drill, drill, drill”.
He seems to forget where he is, and says, “Don’t forget, Pennsylvania”. He is in Georgia. He was in Pennsylvania yesterday.
Trump is patting himself on the back for not using a teleprompter.
Trump is now griping about the “woke military”. He plays a series of clips that I can’t see – more soon.
Trump is now saying that he is reluctant to talk about Kamala Harris’s record in San Francisco because it could bring down the value of property he owns.
He then plays a series of media clips and clips of Harris about taxes; it includes Harris saying that corporate taxes should be raised.
Trump wants to lower corporate tax rates to 15%, Harris wants to increase them to 28%.
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Trump is speaking to a large audience in Atlanta, and despite the long wait, they are clapping and cheering during the speech, which is littered with false and unsubstantiated claims, especially about immigration.
a look at Trump's crowd tonight pic.twitter.com/lcbBtYTbSx
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 16, 2024
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Trump claims that “starting on day one I will quickly defeat inflation … we will bring down energy costs. Liquid gold”.
Updated
“I got a lot of rich friends. They go here, they go there ,they’re boring as hell,” Trump said.
Then Trump pivots to his misleading claim that Kamala Harris did not pass her bar exam.
From factchecking site Verify This: “Trump’s claims are misleading. Harris failed the bar exam on her first attempt, but passed on her second try.”
Updated
Trump is encouraging people to vote. “We don’t want to take a chance, we can’t lose this country,” he says.
He claims, without evidence, that the American standard of living “is in a freefall” and that “nothing works”.
He says “we’re teetering on the brink of World War Three” and lists other well-worn problems, including his claims that “illegal aliens are pouring into the country.”
But other than that we’re doing well, he says.
He promises that if he wins it will be a “golden time”. He thanks Elon Musk for giving him “the greatest endorsement”. He talks about Space X’s latest rocket test, which he says he watched while on a call with someone “who couldn’t have been that interesting”.
Updated
Trump arrives at Atlanta event 90 minutes late
Trump has finally appeared – 90 minutes late – at his event in Atlanta. We have not yet seen an explanation for why he is so late. He is expected to being speaking shortly, though, given the “musical fest” he chose to hold yesterday after cutting his town hall short, who knows.
Updated
Trump is now running an hour and 20 minutes late for his speech in Atlanta, Georgia.
CNN reports that the number of people who voted early in Georgia today has now risen to 300,000.
The previous record for the number of votes cast on the first day of early voting was 136,000 in 2020.
Update: More than 300,000 people cast their votes today during the first day of early voting in Georgia, per Gabriel Sterling. The number is 123% higher than the previous record for the first day of voting. https://t.co/Ymy33D55xb
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) October 16, 2024
A campaign to restore abortion access in Missouri so far has raised close to $22m, the Associated Press reports, citing finance reports filed on Tuesday.
The campaign reported bringing in more than $14m between July and the end of September.
Missourians for Constitutional Freedom seeks to undo the state’s near-total abortion ban and is one of nine statewide campaigns to enshrine abortion rights into state constitutions.
The campaign had close to $11m in the bank at the beginning of the month to spend on advertising in the final weeks before the election.
Donors to the Missouri campaign include model Karlie Kloss, who gave $50,000, and the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who last month chipped in $1m. Other big funders include Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, Sixteen Thirty Fund and The Fairness Project, among others.
A Missouri political action committee opposing the abortion-rights amendment has raised about $212,000 and had less than $5,000 left at the beginning of October. The political action committee of the powerful anti-abortion group Missouri Right to Life so far has spent at least $637,000 opposing the amendment.
Initiative petition campaigns tend to cost a lot of money in Missouri, and abortion ballot measures in other states have been hugely expensive.
A 2022 fight over protecting abortion rights in Ohio cost a combined $70m, with abortion-rights supporters pitching in nearly $40m and opponents spending more than $30m. The reproductive rights amendment passed with almost 57% of the Ohio vote.
This year, abortion rights groups have out raised opponents by a nearly eight-to-one margin in campaigns for ballot measures across the US.
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CNN has an interesting story on the Harris campaign’s approach to Facebook, where, according to the CNN report, it has spent $11m to promote a page, maintained by the campaign, called The Daily Scroll.
The social media ads, which are adorned with a nondescript logo resembling a pair of checkmarks, have promoted news articles from mainstream outlets including CNN, ABC and NBC, showing easing US inflation, cheaper insulin prices, and the consequences of state abortion bans.
Overall, the Harris campaign has far outspent the Trump campaign on Meta’s platforms, spending nearly $80 million on ads since this summer, compared with about $9.4 million from Trump’s campaign and associated fundraising committees.
Unlike the Harris campaign’s main Facebook and Instagram accounts, the ads run by The Daily Scroll and Headlines 2024 aren’t soliciting donations, and most of them aren’t directing users to the campaign’s website. Instead, the Harris team is using the ads to promote select news stories from major media outlets that reflect well on the Democratic presidential nominee and poorly on Trump.
Updated
Here is more on Biden’s speech.
Biden said Kamala Harris would “cut her own path” once she wins the 2024 election, allowing for more daylight between him and his vice-president as she works to win over skeptical voters three weeks before election day.
“Kamala will take the country in her own direction, and that’s one of the most important differences in this election,” he said. “Kamala’s perspective on our problems will be fresh and new. Donald Trump’s perspective is old and failed and quite frankly, thoroughly totally dishonest.”
AP reports:
Biden’s comments may give Harris more licence to stake out her own political and policy stances in the critical closing phase of the presidential race, and appear to go further to distance the two than Harris has herself. The vice-president’s aides have privately expressed some frustration that the 81-year-old president has been too focused on his own legacy – and not the race to succeed him.
But Harris has of late faced increasing pressure to articulate how she’d govern differently from Biden, a question trickier than it seems on the surface.
While Biden’s favorability ratings remain underwater, some of the biggest pieces of his legislative agenda, from infrastructure to lowering the costs of some prescription drugs, are popular, and signaling any daylight with the president on foreign policy at a time of global crises could be seen as reckless.
Harris herself has been loathe to do anything that could be perceived as disloyal to Biden, who elevated her from a first-term senator to the vice-presidency, and then handed the reins of his political operation over to her, endorsing Harris when he dropped out of the race in July.
Updated
The US Justice Department will send election monitors to an Ohio county where a sheriff was recently accused of intimidating voters in a social media post, federal officials announced Tuesday.
AP reports that the justice department said it will monitor Portage county’s compliance with federal voting rights laws during early voting and on election day. The agency said it regularly sends staff to counties around the US to monitor compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act and other civil rights statutes related to elections and voting.
“Voters in Portage County have raised concerns about intimidation resulting from the surveillance and the collection of personal information regarding voters, as well as threats concerning the electoral process,” the justice department said in a news release.
Updated
Trump is so far running almost 40 minutes late to his rally in Atlanta.
Biden spoke a short while ago on behalf of Harris in Philadelphia.
He said of Trump that he used to hide is racism, but that now it is “out front”.
“He has the same ideas on race as the 1930s. Trump’s ideas on economy are from the ’20s. Trump’s ideas on women are from the ’50s. Folks, this is 2024, we can’t go back.”
Biden: "He has the same ideas on race as the 1930s. Trump's ideas on economy are from the '20s. Trump's ideas on women are from the '50s. Folks, this is 2024 -- we can't go back." pic.twitter.com/DGXpMEJMpM
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 15, 2024
Updated
Donald Trump is expected to hold a rally shortly in Atlanta, Georgia. We will bring you any key developments from that live.
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Harris was asked why people “are acting like this is going to be a free and fair election”, given the events of 6 January 2020 – and those leading up to it – and the conservative-leaning supreme court.
She said: “So it will be a free and fair election if we, the American people, stand up for that.”
Updated
Harris was asked by a caller about Trump saying he would use a law from 1798 to carry out mass deportations.
She responded: “So you’ve hit on a really important point and expressed it, I think so well, which is he is achieving his intended effect to make you scared. He is running full time on a campaign that is about instilling fear, not about optimism, not about the future, but about fear. And so this is yet another example.”
Updated
Charlamagne tha God said to Harris: “I had a politician tell me once that if you’re running for a national election, it’s bad electoral strategy to say you are going to do things for Black people, which is why a lot of politicians don’t speak directly to their plans for Black people.”
Harris responded: “I don’t know that that’s true. I think that what is true is that I am running to be president for everybody, but I’m clear-eyed about the history and the disparities that exist for specific communities, and I’m not going to shy away from that. It doesn’t mean that my policies aren’t going to benefit everybody, because they are –everything I just talked about will benefit everybody.”
Updated
Harris was asked about her stance on reparations, too.
She said, “It has to be studied. There’s no question about that, and I’ve been very clear about that position.”
Harris, in that response on her town hall, also pointed out that Donald Trump is selling bibles for $60 (£46).
“Donald Trump and his followers spend full time trying to suggest that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down, which is absolutely contrary to the church,” she said. “Where our church, and my church, is about saying true leadership, the measure of that is based on who you lift up and right. And then he’s selling $60 bibles or tennis shoes and trying to play people as though that makes him more understanding of the Black community. Come on.”
Updated
In her interview with Charlamagne tha God on Tuesday, Kamala Harris was asked whether she had engaged enough with the Black church.
Harris said that allegations she had not engaged with the Black church “comes from the Trump team … they are trying to disconnect me from the people I have worked with and that I’m from,” she said.
“I grew up in the Black church. I grew up attending 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland, California. That’s church. My pastor is Amos C Brown, of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco, California. I have, throughout my career and as vice-president and recently, been actively engaged in the church and church leaders, not only so we can share in fellowship, but so we can share in what we can do together that is about supporting the community,” she said.
Updated
Here is a bit more on the record early voting numbers in Georgia.
Voters in Georgia turned out in record numbers as the battleground state opened early voting for the 5 November presidential election between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, state officials said on Tuesday.
At least 252,000 voters had cast ballots at early-voting sites as of 4pm ET (8pm GMT), nearly double the 136,000 who participated in the first day of early voting in the 2020 election, said Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s No2 election official. “Spectacular turnout,” he wrote on social media.
Early voting, either in person or by mail, has become increasingly popular with US voters. Nearly one in seven voters cast their ballots ahead of election day in 2020, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. However, many Republicans opposed the dramatic expansion of mail voting that year, saying it was less secure than in-person voting, and Trump cited false claims of mail ballot fraud as he sought unsuccessfully to overturn his defeat byJoe Biden in 2020.
Some Republicans continue to insist that voters should be able to cast their ballots only in person on election day, though party officials are encouraging supporters to vote ahead of time.
Nationwide, 5.5 million Americans have already voted this year, according to Election Lab. By contrast, 27 million people had cast their ballots at this point in the 2020 election as voters sought to avoid crowded polling places during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Like some other states, Georgia has tightened its mail-in voting laws since then, requiring voters who want to cast an absentee ballot to provide proof of identity and limiting the number of places they can deposit their ballots.
Georgia, with 16 electoral college votes, is one of the seven competitive battleground states expected to play a decisive role in deciding the election.
Updated
Harris defends record as a prosecutor as she attempts to shore up support with black voters
Kamala Harris defended her record as a prosecutor and pledged to decriminalize marijuana as president in Detroit on Tuesday, as she aims to shore up support among Black men in an interview with radio host Charlamagne tha God.
Charlamagne, a Black comedian and author who hosts radio program The Breakfast Club, is known for his blunt interviews of celebrities.
Although he is a Harris supporter, he has been critical of her and Joe Biden in the past and called Democrats “cowards” for ineffectively prosecuting a case against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. One of his first questions was asking Harris to address a common rumour – that she disproportionately locked up Black men over her more than a dozen years as San Francisco’s district attorney.
Harris said she was “one of the most progressive prosecutors” on marijuana cases, and would work to decriminalise it, because she knows how that has hurt certain populations, especially Black men.
Updated
Kamala Harris is holding a town hall in Detroit hosted by Charlamagne tha God.
“So can you imagine you go to a city and you say you want the votes of those people and you disparage that city,” Harris is saying now. She is referring to Trump’s comments last week in Detroit.
The former US president and Republican nominee was speaking on Thursday at the Detroit Economic Club in the city, which is the biggest city in Michigan – one of the most crucial swing states in the 2024 US election.
But Trump, whose speeches are frequently rambling and lengthy discourses rather than set piece deliveries, could not stop himself from lambasting the city in which he was speaking by pointing to Detroit’s recent history of economic decline from its heyday as the home of American car production.
As he was speaking about China being a developing nation, Trump said: “Well, we’re a developing nation too, just take a look at Detroit. Detroit’s a developing area more than most places in China.”
He later returned to the theme, warning of an economic disaster if his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, wins in November’s election.
“Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands,” Trump said.
This is Helen Sullivan taking over the Guardian’s live US elections coverage.
Updated
Summary
Early voting has begun in several states including Georgia, where a record number of voters are casting ballots.
Donald Trump spoke at Economic Club of Chicago, where he dodged questions about the peaceful transfer of power, refused to say whether he had spoken with Russia’s Vladimir Putin since the election and promoted his tariff-heavy proposals that economic expects say will do little to address inflation and will likely push prices higher.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris joined a town hall in Detroit hosted by Charlemagne Tha God.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Trump was scheduled to appear on CNBC this week, but backed out unexpectedly. It was the second time the former president canceled an interview recently, after declining to appear on the popular CBS News show 60 Minutes
There are many theories about why presidential polls have moved so little since Harris entered the race in July. In an interview today with CNN, veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz said the atmosphere is beginning to remind him of 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump, despite winning the popular vote.
Tim Walz spent the day in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. Wearing a plaid shirt, Walz spoke at a farm in Volant, Pennsylvania – a small town with a population of just 125 – to tout his campaign’s agenda for rural America.
More than a quarter-million Georgia voters cast ballots by 4pm on the first day of early voting Tuesday.
Lines stretched as much as two hours at some locations in Atlanta at peak times. For context, about 130,000 people cast early ballots in person on the first day of early voting in 2020. So far, about 260,000 Georgians have requested an absentee ballot.
Voters at the Buckhead branch of the Fulton county library said they were concerned about the economy, the tone of the election and attacks on immigrants, but particularly abortion rights.
John Dodson, an orchestra conductor from Atlanta, said he voted for Harris.
“I think she’s enormously capable, and I believe that she understands this moment, that she is the right person to lead us from this moment,” he said. “This moment is unique. We are divided as we have not been since the time just before the civil war. And while I hope it wouldn’t – and don’t think it would – rise to those kinds of outcomes, the foundations of the public are being shaken. Frankly, the way we have seen ourselves is being re-evaluated in ways I could never have imagined. So I think this is a very important moment for us to re-establish norms and return to what made us the ‘shining city on the hill’.”
With regard to the Ronald Reagan quote Dodson referenced, he said Reagan “was quoting someone else, and that is the point. He and I could disagree with a policy, and would have, but that isn’t what we’re discussing. We’re now talking about the functioning of the democracy and whether we simply seize power by hook or crook, or whether we actually allow people a voice in their governance. That’s the real issue underneath this contest.
“I think that election day plus one will be a very difficult day for a lot of people, and election day plus two, and election day plus three, but also Thanksgiving, and also December, at Christmas, or at the New Year’s party or at Hanukkah. I mean, I think that when you really think about it, one half of this country will be very, very unhappy with the results. But the question is, and you spoke about the tenor of this conversation, the conversation has degraded to a point of coarseness, and fear is ruling a huge amount of this discourse. And under fear comes this feeling of being threatened. And when you get threatened, people get angry. And so then, now we’ve filled a country with weapons, and I, too, worry that there are people who really do seem to feel that an outcome that is OK here is a violent outcome, So, this is the point: this is not the great experiment that has been us. And we’ve got to try to find our north star again and return.”
Updated
Harris has spent the town hall addressing very specific policies, focusing on a list of plans to boost the middle class, and help Americans though an affordability crisis.
“I’m going to extend tax deductions to $50,000. Every first-time homeowner, wherever they are, whatever their race, will benefit if they are [a] first-time homebuyer with a $25,000 down-payment assistance. Everyone is going to benefit from my plan to extend the child tax [credit to] $6,000 for the first year of their child’s life,” she said.
In a substantive discussion, Harris also repeatedly emphasized that policies that will benefit Black Americans will help everybody.
Charlemagne: ‘I had a politician tell me once that if you’re running for a national election, it’s bad electoral strategy to say you are going to do things for Black people, which is why a lot of politicians don’t speak directly to their plans for Black people.’
Harris: ‘I don’t know that that’s true. I think that what is true is that I am running to be president for everybody, but I’m clear eyed about the history and the disparities that exist for specific communities.’
Updated
Kamala Harris joins town hall hosted by Charlamagne tha God
The vice-president has joined a town hall in Detroit, hosted by Charlamagne tha God. “This is a margin-of-error race. It’s tight. I’m gonna win. I’m gonna win, but it’s tight,” she told him.
The event is being livestreamed on iHeartRadio. Prior to the town hall, Harris stopped by the Norwest Gallery of Art for a conversation with Black men about entrepreneurship.
Updated
As early voting begins in Georgia, a county judge in the state has ruled that local officials cannot refuse to certify election results.
The ruling from judge Robert McBurney on Monday night rebukes an argument from Donald Trump and his allies that local election officials should have the discretion to deny the certification of election results.
McBurney found that “the superintendent must certify and must do so by a certain time” – with no exemptions. The ruling could help protect the election against rogue officials, encouraged by Republicans who have falsely alleged widespread fraud in elections.
“While the [election official] must investigate concerns about miscounts and must report those concerns to a prosecutor if they persist after she investigates, the existence of those concerns, those doubts, and those worries is not cause to delay or decline certification,” McBurney wrote. “That is simply not an option for this particular ministerial function in the superintendent’s broader portfolio of functions.”
Updated
Tim Walz is spending the day in the key swing state of Pennsylvania.
Wearing a plaid shirt, Walz spoke at a farm in Volant, Pennsylvania – a small town with a population of just 125 – to tout his campaign’s agenda for rural America.
“When people think rural America, farm policy matters,” Walz said. “Crop insurance matters. Trade matters, tariff matters. But you’re bigger than that. Your families, your healthcare matters, your education matters, your roads matter, your retirement matters, all those things matter.”
He also tried to push an optimistic message, saying: “I saw the Wall Street Journal said: ‘Joyfulness isn’t a plan.’ Well, no one said it’s a plan. But it’s a hell of a lot better to be joyful than to be angry and terrible like they’re doing on the other side.”
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Trump cancels CNBC interview – report
Donald Trump was scheduled to appear on CNBC this week, but backed out unexpectedly, CNN reports.
It was the second time the former president had canceled an interview recently, after declining to appear on the popular CBS News show 60 Minutes. He has instead given interviews to rightwing news outlets, and earlier today had a live conversation on economic policy moderated by Bloomberg News.
CNN reports that Trump’s campaign cited a scheduling conflict as the reason he could not appear on CNBC’s Squawk Box show.
“Trump canceled, and he was going to come on,” co-anchor Joe Kernen announced on air earlier today. He added that the network had also asked Kamala Harris to appear but that “she’s not coming on”.
Updated
There are many theories about why presidential polls have moved so little since Kamala Harris entered the race in July.
In an interview today with CNN, veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz says the atmosphere is beginning to remind him of 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, despite winning the popular vote and polls generally showing her with the edge. Here’s what Luntz had to say:
"I began to look at this as quite similar to 2016 when Donald Trump surprised voters and beat Hillary Clinton."@FrankLuntz weighs in on the Trump debate debacle, Harris' narrow lead, the 3 groups to watch for, and why authenticity matters in the #Election2024 pic.twitter.com/dk3i9dorJ9
— Julia Chatterley (@jchatterleyCNN) October 15, 2024
In other swing state news, Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, is suing CNN after the network revealed his history of lewd and offensive remarks on pornography websites, the Associated Press reports:
Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, announced a lawsuit Tuesday against CNN over its recent report alleging he made explicit racial and sexual posts on a pornography website’s message board, calling the reporting reckless and defamatory.
The lawsuit, filed in Wake county superior court, comes less than four weeks after a television report that led many fellow GOP elected officials and candidates, including Donald Trump, to distance themselves from Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign. Robinson announced the lawsuit at a news conference in Raleigh.
CNN “chose to publish despite knowing or recklessly disregarding that Robinson’s data – including his name, date of birth, passwords, and the email address supposedly associated with the NudeAfrica account – were previously compromised by multiple data breaches”, the lawsuit states.
CNN declined to comment, spokesperson Emily Kuhn said in an email.
Polls at the time of the CNN report already showed Josh Stein, Robinson’s Democratic rival and the sitting attorney general, with a lead over Robinson. Early in-person voting begins Thursday statewide, and well over 50,000 completed absentee ballots have been received so far.
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Georgia sees record amount of early voting - report
The day is not over, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia has seen a record amount of early voting on the first day polls have been open:
More than 200,000 voters have cast ballots in Georgia during the first day of in-person early voting according to state elections officials, shattering the state's record. #gapol https://t.co/mrjIq41dx2
— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) October 15, 2024
This is not necessarily indicative of how the swing state, where many polls have shown Donald Trump with a narrow lead, will end up voting in November.
Updated
On the first day of early voting in battleground Georgia, one of the state’s Democratic senators, Raphael Warnock, warned that Donald Trump was a “dangerous” choice for the country.
He urged Black men to consider how Trump would govern, as Harris works to shore up support from this traditionally Democratic-leaning voting bloc.
“I don’t buy this idea that there will be huge swaths of Black men voting for Donald Trump. That’s not going to happen,” said Warnock, a Baptist pastor, who preaches from the same Atlanta pulpit as Martin Luther King. “What I would urge folks to do is to show up, to understand that if you don’t vote, that is a vote – for Donald Trump, that’s the concern.”
Warnock spoke on the call organized by the Harris campaign ahead of Trump’s visit to the state today. Warnock acknowledged the work Democrats still needed to do to mobilize their “broad coalition” ahead of next month’s election, as polls show Harris drawing notably less support among Black men than past Democratic nominees.
“Do you think when the George Floyds and all of those cases emerge again that Donald Trump’s going to do something about it? No, he’s going to do just the opposite,” Warnock said. “An unhinged Donald Trump will give these officers who have behaved with brutality a free pass and immunity, and this could literally mean death in our communities. You need to vote like your life depends on it – it does.”
Updated
Amber Thurman’s mother wants Americans to know that her daughter was not a statistic.
Thurman, a young mother and aspiring nurse, developed sepsis and died after being unable to access legal abortion and routine medical care in Georgia.
“She was loved by a family, a family that would have done anything had we known when I looked at her and reassured her that she was in the best care,” Shanette Williams said on a call organized by Kamala Harris’s campaign. “I had no clue. I had no clue that this could have been prevented, and when I found that out, everything changed.”
With the future of abortion on the line in November, Thurman’s mother has become a reluctant but powerful surrogate for Harris in the battleground state, where abortion is banned after six weeks of pregnancy. Harris has said Donald Trump and Republicans should be held accountable for ushering in the post-Roe bans that ultimately led Thurman to wait.
The campaign call was timed in advance of Trump’s visit to Georgia today for a town hall on “women’s issues” hosted by Fox News.
Williams was with her daughter at the hospital, where she waited for more than 20 hours for a routine medical procedure known as a D&C that removes remaining tissue. She developed sepsis and died in August 2022, leaving behind her young son, now eight.
“Initially, I wasn’t a political person. I’m independent. Because of August the 19th, we’ve been thrown into an arena where we have to do something to honor Amber,” Williams said through tears. “I just need to make sense of it all. My baby is not here, and it’s left us so much pain and trauma.”
Updated
Donald Trump talked more about 6 January 2021, and said that there was a term “peaceful and patriotic” and said “a lot of strange things” happened on that day, mentioning “people being waved into the Capitol” by police.
He said only “a tiny fraction” of people who came to Washington that day went down to the US Capitol after his rally close to the White House and “not one of those people had a gun” and “no one was killed”. He then, as he has done many times before, criticized the shooting by a law enforcement official of rioter Ashli Babbitt as she tried to break into the House chamber as part of the mob that had violently invaded the Capitol.
In fact, the insurrectionists smashed their way into the Capitol against outnumbered police, as they tried to stop the certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the previous November’s election.
At least seven deaths, and perhaps as many as nine deaths, have been linked to the January 6 riots, including suicides among police officers some time after the event.
After fleeing for their lives, the US Congress reconvened in the early hours of 7 January 2021, to certify Biden’s win.
Updated
Trump dodges question about peaceful transfer of power if he loses election
Donald Trump was asked about a peaceful transfer of power after this November’s election. He dodged.
The interviewer on stage at the Economic Club of Chicago, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, said, moments ago: “If you look at the events of January 6, 2021, it showed to many people that America’s democracy was unruly and violent. Only three weeks to go to the election, will you commit now to respecting and encouraging a peaceful transfer of power?”
Instead of answering the question about this election cycle, Trump said that the US had a peaceful transfer of power.
Micklethwait: Will you commit to respecting and encouraging a peaceful transfer of power?
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 15, 2024
Trump: You had a peaceful transfer of power. pic.twitter.com/XCou8CMAEl
There was a smattering of applause in the audience. Micklethwait said: “Come on, President Trump, you had a peaceful transfer of power compared with Venezuela but it was by far the worst transfer of power for a long time,” then added: “Would you respect the decision?”
Trump digresses with some criticism of Micklethwait. Then he comes back to the topic, but again talking about 2021.
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Donald Trump just claimed that, if he became president again, he would have the right to instruct the Federal Reserve about interest rates – while saying he would not actually order the US central bank what to do.
“I think I have the right to say, ‘I think you should go up or down a little bit’. I don’t think I should be allowed to order it, but I think I have the right to put in comments as to whether or not the interest rates should go up or down,” he said at the Chicago Economic Club moments ago.
The president of the US traditionally does not weigh in on interest rates, allowing the Fed to make its own decisions. This doesn’t mean that the bank is not susceptible to political pressure in the wider sense, but the bank expects and is expected to make monetary policy and related decision autonomously.
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Trump refuses to say if he has talked to Russia's Putin since leaving office
Donald Trump has just declined to comment when asked directly in an event he’s appearing at in Chicago if he has had conversations with Russian president Vladimir Putin since he left the White House in 2021 after being voted out of office.
The former president was asked if he had talked to Putin “since you stopped being president”, as has been stated in a book by veteran journalist and author Bob Woodward, reported last week. He asked by Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait moments ago, who is interviewing Trump in an appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago.
“I will not comment,” Trump said.
However, he then hinted maybe he had when he added: “But if I did it’s a smart thing. If I have a good relationship with people, that’s a good thing.”
Woodward said that Trump has held several private calls with Putin since his single-term presidency.
Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait is busy pushing back on Donald Trump’s insistence that imposing what the former president boasts would be “obnoxious” levels of tariffs on imports will have a positive effect on the US economy.
“Critics say tariffs would end up being like a sales tax,” Micklethwait said, saying that it will push up costs for US consumers.
The two men talked over each other a bit, and Trump insisted that high tariffs would force overseas manufacturers to build their products in the US to sell to American consumers.
“The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that company will come into the US and build factories here. You make the tariffs so obnoxious that they come in straight away,” Trump said.
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Trump argues for higher tariffs in Chicago economic speech
Donald Trump just took the stage at the Economic Club in Chicago, where he’s repeating his familiar campaign promise to enact high import tariffs to spur domestic manufacturing.
“We’re going to bring the companies back. We’re going to lower taxes still, further, for companies that are going to make their product in the USA. We’re going to protect those companies with strong tariffs, because I’m a believer in tariffs,” the former president told his interviewer, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.
The ex-president added:
To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favorite word. It needs a public relations firm.
Economists have been skeptical that tariffs would help American manufacturers:
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The day so far
Donald Trump is expected to soon take the stage at the Economic Club of Chicago, where we can expect him to outline his plans to lower prices for US consumers. But the Associated Press reports that his tariff-heavy proposals and ideas for meddling with the Federal Reserve are unlikely to undo the impact of inflation, and may instead push prices higher. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has seized on his strange behavior at a campaign event yesterday, where Trump spent more than a half-hour swaying to the music onstage. The former president said this morning that he was reacting to a pair of medical emergencies that occurred in the audience, but the Harris campaign has implied it is a sign that he is not as healthy as he appears.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
The Harris campaign rejected an allegation of plagiarism brought against the vice-president by a conservative activist, CNN reports.
Early voting begins today in Georgia, and long lines of voters were spotted in at least one Atlanta-area county. Trump encouraged his supporters to vote by whatever method they chose.
Nathan Wade, a former prosecutor in Trump’s election meddling case in Georgia, is testifying behind closed doors to a Republican-led House committee.
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Donald Trump blamed absentee ballots (among other things, real and imagined) for his 2020 election loss.
But on the day early voting begins in Georgia in this year’s election, his campaign is calling on people to get their ballots in using whatever method they choose.
That includes absentee ballots, as the below tweet shows:
🚨 GEORGIA! Early voting has started!
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) October 15, 2024
This is the most important election of our lifetime.
Whether you're voting in person or sending in your absentee ballot, make sure your voice is heard. Let's make it #TooBigToRig!https://t.co/1B6VUcO6YK#EarlyVote #SwampTheVote pic.twitter.com/vOxm75ZZxy
How might swing states like Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina vote on election day, which is three weeks from now?
There’s no way to know for sure, and recent polls have shown Donald Trump and Kamala Harris essentially neck-in-neck across the board. At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, an outfit affiliated with the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics that is one of several well-regarded poll watchers nationwide, they view all seven swing states as toss-ups. But in an analysis released this morning, they offer some thoughts on how the states may end up voting – though do not predict a winner of the presidential race.
Their thoughts on Michigan:
We still think Michigan is likeliest to be Harris’s best state out of this group, as it was for Biden in 2020, and it generally has been the most Democratic of these seven states over the past couple of decades.
And North Carolina:
Meanwhile, North Carolina is the one state among the seven that Biden did not carry in 2020, and we remain somewhat skeptical of Harris’s ability to actually win it.
One thing that is preventing us from being confident enough to move it to Leans Republican is the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, which could have impacts on turnout in what is on balance a Republican-leaning area. In 2020, the 25 counties that FEMA currently considers to be the disaster zone favored Trump by 25 percentage points while Biden carried the rest of the state by 3.5 points. The state has taken efforts to keep early voting on track in western North Carolina; giving voters additional opportunity to make their voices heard in the midst of an unforeseen disaster is probably the best argument there is for offering robust absentee and early voting options.
And finally Georgia and Arizona, two states that generally vote Republican, but which Trump lost four years ago:
Trump has generally, although not always, led polling in Arizona and Georgia, the two typically Republican-leaning states that fell out of his grasp in 2020. Forced to choose, one might also be inclined to tilt those states to Trump. It seems possible that a critical mass of “softer” Republican voters in those states who dislike Trump personally are expressing some buyer’s remorse after they took a chance on Biden in 2020. It wouldn’t take all that many of them to flip Arizona and Georgia back to Republicans after Biden won each by less than half a percentage point.
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Speaking of Georgia, an attempt by a Republican voting official to get out of certifying election results was rejected by a court, the Guardian’s George Chidi reports:
Election certification is a mandatory duty, not discretionary, for county election officials in Georgia, a judge ruled on Tuesday, rejecting assertions made by a Republican elections official that elections board members could refuse to certify an election based on their suspicions of fraud or error.
Julie Adams, a Republican member of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, brought the suit earlier this year after abstaining from a vote to certify the May primary election. The America First Policy Institute, a legal thinktank that was formed by former Donald Trump advisers in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss to help lay legal groundwork for his potential return to office, joined the suit.
Adams refused certification after claiming she had been denied access to a long list of elections documents. But Robert McBurney, Fulton county superior court judge, ruled that Adams was entitled to review documents quickly, but failing to provide those documents was not grounds for denying the certification of an election.
“If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so – because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud – refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” wrote McBurney in his ruling. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.”
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It’s the first day of early voting in Georgia, one of the swing states expected to decide the election, and NBC News reports a long line of people are waiting to cast ballots in DeKalb county, outside of Atlanta:
Voter enthusiasm appears high on day one of early voting here in battleground Georgia.
— Nnamdi (@NnamEgwuon) October 15, 2024
Take a look at the *very long* line outside of a polling precinct in DeKalb County. pic.twitter.com/R7xzpycVLT
Joe Biden won Georgia four years ago, and Donald Trump carried it in 2016. This year, our poll tracker shows it leaning towards Trump, but only narrowly. We’ll know the answer for sure in three weeks:
Trump to speak at Economic Club of Chicago
Donald Trump will speak at the Economic Club of Chicago at noon, where you can expect to hear him argue that his policies will tame inflation.
Prices rose at levels not seen in four decades under Joe Biden, and though the rate of increase has declined in recent months, polls have shown inflation remains one of the issues voters are most concerned about.
But the Associated Press reports that, based on what Trump has proposed, it’s unlikely he would be able to unilaterally bring prices down. In fact, he might make them go up:
Last month, the Peterson Institute for International Economics predicted that Trump’s policies – the deportations, import taxes and efforts to erode the Fed’s independence – would drive consumer prices sharply higher two years into his second term. Peterson’s analysis concluded that inflation, which would otherwise register 1.9% in 2026, would instead jump to between 6% and 9.3% if Trump’s economic proposals were adopted.
Many economists aren’t thrilled with Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic agenda, either. They dismiss, for example, her proposal to combat price gouging as an ineffective tool against high grocery prices. But they don’t regard her policies as particularly inflationary.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, and two colleagues have estimated that Harris’ policies would leave the inflation outlook virtually unchanged, even if she enjoyed a Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress. An unfettered Trump, by contrast, would leave prices higher by 1.1 percentage points in 2025 and 0.8 percentage points in 2026, they concluded.
Taxes on imports – tariffs – are Trump’s go-to economic policy. He argues that tariffs protect American factory jobs from foreign competition and deliver a host of other benefits.
While in office, Trump started a trade war with China, imposing high tariffs on most Chinese goods. He also raised import taxes on foreign steel and aluminum, washing machines and solar panels. He has still grander plans for a second term: Trump wants to impose a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods and a “universal’’ tariff of 10% or 20% on everything else that enters the United States.
Trump insists that the cost of taxing imported goods is absorbed by the foreign countries that produce those goods. The truth, though, is that U.S. importers pay the tariff – and then typically pass along that cost to consumers in the form of higher prices, which is how Americans themselves end up bearing the cost of tariffs.
What’s more, as tariffs raise the cost of imports, the weakened competition from foreign products makes it easier for U.S. producers to raise their own prices.
Updated
Donald Trump has been prolific on Truth Social, the social network he owns and uses most frequently.
He made several late-night posts this morning and yesterday, insisting he is healthy enough to serve as president for another four-year term. But Trump has not released his medical records, something Kamala Harris’s campaign has seized on:
TRUMP at 1am: ranting on Truth Social about how sane he is.
— Sarafina Chitika (@SarafinaChitika) October 15, 2024
Just today, he "swayed" and appeared lost in a "bizarre" town hall and said the election is in January (it's not).
Over 230 doctors called on him to release his medical records.
What is @realDonaldTrump hiding? pic.twitter.com/XGhWBjtBGk
Over the weekend, the vice-president released her own medical report, which says she is in “excellent health”:
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Trump offers explanation for lengthy dance interlude at Pennsylvania event
Donald Trump raised a lot of eyebrows last night, including Kamala Harris’s, after he spent a significant part of his town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, swaying to music on stage.
On Truth Social, the former president has offered an explanation for the campaign event that could, charitably, be described as unorthodox. Here’s what he said:
I had a Town Hall in Pennsylvania last night. It was amazing! The Q and A was almost finished when people began fainting from the excitement and heat. We started playing music while we waited, and just kept it going. So different, but it ended up being a GREAT EVENING!
For more updates on the US election, tune in to the Guardian’s Today in Focus US Election Extra podcast. Join Lucy Hough, breaking down every essential development in the presidential race every weekday.
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After launching her presidential campaign in July, Kamala Harris waited weeks before having a proper sit-down interview with a news outlet.
But she has stepped up the tempo of her media appearances lately, and will tomorrow appear on Fox News, the top conservative network in the country. As you can see below, her campaign is trying to turn the tables on Donald Trump, accusing him of avoiding interviews, including with “60 Minutes”, the popular CBS Sunday evening news program:
NEW >> VP Harris will do an interview with Fox News on Wednesday
— Ian Sams (@IanSams) October 14, 2024
As of today, it has been **one month** since Trump’s been interviewed by a mainstream media outlet, as he has backed out of 60 Minutes and refuses to debate again
Meanwhile Harris is willing to even go on Fox pic.twitter.com/A9VvW0MoeX
Nathan Wade, a former prosecutor in Donald Trump’s election meddling case in Georgia who is a key figure in the legal wrangling that has prevented it from moving forward, will testify in private to a House of Representatives panel today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
The case against Trump and several other defendants brought by Atlanta-area district attorney Fani Willis was upended after it was revealed that she had a romantic relationship with Wade, who has since resigned from the prosecution team. Nonetheless, arguments over his role and whether it created a conflict of interest has prevented the case from moving forward, while the House GOP has launched its own investigation of Willis.
The Journal-Constitution reports that Wade will answer questions about the case behind closed doors. Here’s more:
Wade’s attorney Andrew Evans said Tuesday that his client will sit for questions in a closed-door session before the House Judiciary Committee on Oct. 15. It comes after weeks of back-and-forth over whether he’d comply with the panel’s subpoena.
Wade is expected to field queries related to Willis’ office’s use of grant funding as well as their meetings with the White House and the panel that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 pro-Donald Trump mob that ransacked the U.S. Capitol, Evans said.
The Judiciary Committee’s investigators had not been able to find Wade for several days in September before succeeding in serving him a summons that required him to appear in Washington.
Even so, Wade’s legal counsel bristled at the demands by Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan’s committee. Former Gov. Roy Barnes, one of Willis’ attorneys, fired off a Sept. 30 letter that objected to the “vitriol and anger” directed at his client.
“When you have calmed down and attended the anger management class,” wrote Barnes, “I will be glad to discuss this matter with you in a logical, dispassionate manner.”
At Jordan’s direction, the panel has been investigating Willis for more than a year over her handling of the prosecution of Trump and his allies. The Ohio Republican is a Trump loyalist.
Updated
In an interview with conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt earlier today, Fox News anchor Bret Baier said his interview with Kamala Harris will have no commerical breaks.
“For everybody who’s been asking, it is as live. In other words, we roll the tape, but it’s running just as … we do it. So, from beginning to end, you’ll see every second and it will be unedited, and we will run it without commercial straight through the first half hour of my show,” Baier said.
Joe Biden is in his home town of Wilmington, Delaware, this morning, but will in the evening head to nearby Philadelphia for an unspecified political event.
The White House has not yet made public any details of that event, scheduled for 6.45pm, but the president has frequently traveled to Philadelphia during his presidency. It’s an especially good investment of his time right now – Pennsylvania is one of the swing states expected to decide the election, and Democratic turnout in Philadelphia and its suburbs is expected to be crucial to determining if Kamala Harris can win.
After that event wraps up, the president will return to the White House.
Updated
Harris campaign denies plagiarism allegations from conservative activist – report
Kamala Harris’s campaign has rejected allegations made by conservative activist Christopher Rufo that she plagiarized parts of a book she co-authored shortly before being elected California’s attorney general, CNN reports.
Citing the work of Stefan Weber, an Austrian “plagiarism hunter”, Rufo wrote that Harris’s 2009 book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer co-authored with Joan O’C Hamilton contains sections that were plagiarized.
CNN took a closer look at the claim, and this is what they found:
Rufo, in his post, refers to six specific paragraphs from Harris’ roughly 200-page book.
CNN reviewed several of the passages highlighted by Rufo and found that Harris and O’C. Hamilton failed to properly attribute language to sources.
Plagiarized works include using someone else’s work without giving them proper and appropriate credit for their ideas and words. Even if the source of the information is cited, it is still considered plagiarism if the ideas are not paraphrased or quoted in the correct place, experts told CNN late last year.
In one instance, Harris and O’C. Hamilton appear to have lifted some language from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release without proper attribution. The book copies exact language and sections of the press release but fails to use quotation marks in several sentences, according to an analysis of the book and the press release.
The authors do, however, cite the press release as a source in a footnote next to the text.
They also properly attribute other quotes from parts of the press release.
In response to Rufo’s allegations, Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer told CNN:
Rightwing operatives are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election, as Trump retreats to a conservative echo chamber refusing to face questions about his lies. This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the Vice President clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout.
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He might be “DJ Trump” to his campaign, but Kamala Harris is taking the former president’s lengthy musical interlude as a sign that he might not be well.
Reacting to a clip of his rally yesterday in Oaks, Pennsylvania, during which Trump spent a considerable amount of time onstage swaying and rocking to the music, the vice-president said:
Hope he's okay. https://t.co/WGhGteFpjm
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 15, 2024
US anti-missile system begins arriving in Israel, says Pentagon
The Pentagon said components for an advanced anti-missile system began arriving in Israel yesterday and that it would be fully operational in the near future, according to a statement this morning. About 100 troops will accompany the system.
“Over the coming days, additional US military personnel and THAAD battery components will continue to arrive in Israel,” Pentagon spokesperson Major General Pat Ryder said. “The battery will be fully operational capable in the near future, but for operations security reasons we will not discuss timelines.”
THAAD is designed to defend against ballistic missiles, and will line up alongside Israel’s Arrow 2 and 3 and David’s Sling long- and medium-range defence systems.
Here’s what our defence editor, Dan Sabbagh, had to say about the THAAD deployment when it was announced:
Bringing THAAD to bear suggests the US believes that whatever Israel is planning to do will invite a fresh response from Iran, and that it could test existing air defences seriously.
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California and Nevada voters will decide in November whether to ban forced prison labor by removing language from their state constitutions rooted in the legacy of chattel slavery.
The measures aim to protect incarcerated people from being forced to work under the threat of punishment in the states, writes Associated Press. It is not uncommon for prisoners to be paid less than $1 an hour to fight fires, clean prison cells, make license plates or do yard work at cemeteries.
Nevada incarcerates about 10,000 people. All prisoners in the state are required to work or be in vocational training for 40 hours each week, unless they have a medical exemption. Some of them make as little as 35 cents hourly.
Voters will weigh the proposals during one of the most historic elections in modern history, said Jamilia Land, an advocate with the Abolish Slavery National Network who has spent years trying to get the California measure passed.
“California, as well as Nevada, has an opportunity to end legalized, constitutional slavery within our states, in its entirety, while at the same time we have the first Black woman running for president,” she said of Kamala Harris’s historic bid.
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Men injured in Trump shooting accuse Secret Service of negligence
Two men who were shot during the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump this summer say the US Secret Service was “negligent” in protecting the former president and other bystanders at the campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
David Dutch, 57, an ex-marine, and James Copenhaver, 74, a retired liquor store manager, told NBC News in an exclusive interview yesterday they were excited to be sitting in the bleachers behind the Republican nominee at the fairgrounds in Butler on 13 July when gunshots rang out and they were hit.
Another man, Corey Comperatore, 50, was killed in the shooting while shielding his family. Trump was wounded in the ear.
The interview was the two men’s first public statements since 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, opened fire in July from an unsecured rooftop nearby before he was fatally shot by sharpshooters.
“It was like getting hit with a sledgehammer right in the chest,” said Dutch. He said he could see chunks of the bleacher and metal “flying all around” until the shooting stopped.
He said he was still “angry that the whole situation even happened. It should have never happened.” NBC News reported the two men’s attorneys said they were looking into possible litigation over what they view as negligence by the Secret Service.
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Walz says Trump and Vance 'don't think like us' in pitch for rural votes
Tim Walz will unveil the Democrats’ plans to improve the lives of rural voters later today while he stars in a new radio ad attacking his Republican rivals.
Associated Press reports it will include a focus on improving rural healthcare with plans to recruit 10,000 new healthcare professionals in rural and tribal areas through scholarships, loan forgiveness and new grant programs, as well as economic and agricultural policy priorities.
It marks a concerted effort by the Democratic campaign to win over rural votes. Donald Trump carried rural voters by a nearly two-to-one margin in 2020, according to AP VoteCast.
The vice-presidential nominee is set to announce the plan during a stop in rural Lawrence County in western Pennsylvania, one of the marquee battlegrounds of the 2024 contest. Walz is also starring in a new radio ad for the campaign highlighting his roots in a small town of 400 people and his time coaching football, while attacking Trump and his running mate, JD Vance.
“In a small town, you don’t focus on the politics, you focus on taking care of your neighbors and minding your own damn business,” Walz says in the ad. “Now Donald Trump and JD Vance, they don’t think like us. They’re in it for themselves.”
The plan calls on Congress to permanently extend telemedicine coverage under Medicare, a pandemic-era benefit that helped millions access care that is set to expire at the end of 2024. They are also calling for grants to support volunteer EMS programs to halve the number of Americans living more than 25 minutes from an ambulance.
It also urges Congress to restore the Affordable Connectivity Program, a scheme launched by Joe Biden that expired in June that provided up to $30 off home internet bills, and for lawmakers to require equipment manufacturers to grant farmers the right to repair their products.
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Press secretary hails 'DJ Trump' after 40 minutes of music at town hall event
Donald Trump’s town hall in the Philadelphia suburbs turned into an impromptu concert last night after the former president was twice interrupted by medical emergencies in the room.
As Associated Press reports, the Republican presidential nominee paused during a question-and-answer session as a doctor attended to the first person to have a medical issue. After a second emergency halted the discussion moderated by South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, Trump stopped taking questions. He and Noem mentioned it was hot in the venue, and Trump asked about air conditioning.
“They probably can’t afford it, sir, in this economy,” Noem quipped.
Once Noem announced the second person was up and moving, Trump spoke for a few more minutes before suggesting the audience could enjoy some music rather than hearing him answer more questions.
He called for the Village People’s “YMCA” and it blasted through the loudspeakers, the usual signal that Trump is done speaking and is ready to leave. But he remained onstage. “Nobody’s leaving,” Trump said. “What’s going on?”
More music played — and for roughly 40 minutes, it didn’t stop.
Trump bopped and shimmied onstage to an eclectic playlist of songs that included Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Rufus Wainwright’s cover of “Hallelujah” and Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain.”
Finally, Trump left the stage as “Memory” from the musical “Cats” played.
Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s national press secretary, published on the social media site X a photo of Trump from the side of the stage. “DJ TRUMP!” she wrote.
DJ TRUMP! 🎶🎶🎶 pic.twitter.com/DvvSS1b9s1
— Karoline Leavitt (@kleavittnh) October 15, 2024
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote on X that “something very special is happening in Pennsylvania” as the scene unfolded, adding Trump “is unlike any politician in history, and it’s great.”
Trump 'out for unchecked power,' says Harris
Vice president Kamala Harris has hit out at Donald Trump ‘s comments suggesting the US military could be used to deal with “the enemy from within” as the two presidential nominees took the fight for battleground Pennsylvania to opposite ends of the state last night.
Harris, at her rally in northwestern Pennsylvania, called Trump a serious threat to American democracy who is “out for unchecked power”.
“He considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country,” Harris said after playing a clip of the comment on the jumbo screen at her rally at an Erie arena.
Harris argued that Trump’s comments in a Fox News “Sunday Morning Futures” interview are the latest example of threatening rhetoric from the former president that should concern Americans about what a potential second Trump term could look like.
Trump made the comment in response to a question about “outside agitators” potentially disrupting Election Day.
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump said. He added: “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
Trump held his own town hall event last night in suburban Philadelphia.
Opening summary
Good morning and welcome to what is likely to be another turbulent day in the run-up to the US election amid anger over Donald Trump’s comments suggesting the military could be used to deal with “the enemy from within”.
Both candidates were in Pennsylvania last night and while the Democratic hopeful, Kamala Harris, used her event in Erie to call Trump a serious threat to American democracy who is “out for unchecked power”, her Republican rival treated the crowds in Oaks to an impromptu playlist as he bopped and shimmied onstage to an eclectic playlist of songs that included Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Rufus Wainwright’s cover of “Hallelujah” and Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain”.
More on last night’s events shortly. In other developments:
Nancy Pelosi has admitted she still has not spoken to Joe Biden since her crucial intervention in July led to his decision to drop out of the presidential race. In a Guardian podcast with columnist Jonathan Freedland she also addressed how she feels about Donald Trump. “I hardly ever say his name,” she said of the former Republican president and the GOP’s current nominee, instead describing him as “what’s-his-name”. You can read our story here.
Kamala Harris could sit down for an interview with popular podcaster Joe Rogan, whose audience leans heavily towards young men, as she works to shore up support with male voters, sources said on Monday. Reuters reports that Harris campaign officials met Rogan’s team this week but an appearance has not been confirmed yet, said two of the sources, who have knowledge of the matter.
The White House said on Monday that the US has been closely tracking Iranian threats against Trump for years and it warned of “severe consequences” if Tehran was to attack any of its citizens. “We consider this a national and homeland security matter of the highest priority, and we strongly condemn Iran for these brazen threats. Should Iran attack any of our citizens, including those who continue to serve the United States or those who formerly served, Iran will face severe consequences,” said White House National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett.
Trump will be interviewed by Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago at an event on today from 11am – 12pm CDT. Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait will interview Trump in downtown Chicago. It will be carried live on Bloomberg News platforms and the Economic Club of Chicago’s YouTube channel. This evening he will be speaking at an event in Atlanta.
Meanwhile Harris will be in Detroit later for a live conversation with radio host and comedian Charlamagne tha God, which will air on iHeartRadio at 5pm EDT.
