Harris and Trump begin blitz of rallies across battleground states on election day eve
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:
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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 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.
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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. Trump is holding his final rally of the campaign in Michigan on Monday night.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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”.
Key events
The presidential election is being held tomorrow, but it may take days to count the ballots necessary to determine the winner, and the story may not end there. Evidence is mounting that Donald Trump and his allies are planning to once again cast doubt on the result, should he lose. The Guardian’s Sam Levine explains how:
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:
We can also expect some final polls of the presidential race to be released today, though what has come out doesn’t show much.
The Hill and Emerson College surveyed all seven swing states and found, as many, many other polls before it have shown, that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are in an effective tie:
FINAL SWING STATE POLLS with @thehill
2024 Presidential Election
AZ: Trump 50%, Harris 48%
GA: Trump 50%, Harris 49%
MI: Harris 50%, Trump 48%
NC: Trump 49%, Harris 48%
NV: Harris 48%, Trump 48%
PA: Trump 49%, Harris 48%
WI: Trump 49%, Harris 49%https://t.co/axSc58DgwM— Emerson College Polling (@EmersonPolling) November 4, 2024
We will soon hear from Donald Trump, when he holds his first campaign event of the day in Raleigh, North Carolina at 10am.
And we may also see some of his supporters turn up wearing trash bags, as they have started doing recently:
If you missed this latest bizarre turn in the presidential campaign – which could have real impacts on the allegiances of a key voters group – the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe explains what it is and why it matters in the below piece:
Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz also has a busy day of campaigning ahead of him.
He starts in St Paul, Minnesota, capital of the state he governs, where he and his wife Gwen Walz will greet their neighbors, before heading to Wisconsin for rallies in La Crosse, Stevens Point and Milwaukee. At that last rally, they’ll have Eric Benét as their musical guest, the campaign says.
They finish the day with a rally in Detroit where they will have even more musical guests, specifically the Detroit Youth Choir, Jon Bon Jovi, and The War and Treaty.
Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance will campaign in four different swing states today.
Specifically Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania. His press secretary just posted a video of him dressed all casual and he and his wife set out for the day:
Kamala Harris is spending all day campaigning in Pennsylvania, which is seen as potentially the most important state to win this election.
Her first stop is in Scranton, Joe Biden’s childhood hometown, where she’ll participate in a kickoff for canvassers, he campaign said. After that, she heads to Allentown, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia before finally returning to Washington DC.
Biden is not scheduled to join her in Scranton. He’s spent the weekend at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and is heading to the White House this morning, where he will have a private call with military members involved in fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
US election offices increase security measures amid ongoing threats
Elections offices in the US have hardened their security measures this year, anticipating potential violence based on experience since 2020 and during an ongoing rise in threats and harassment focused on election workers.
Many offices have now trained their workers on de-escalation tactics. They’ve run drills for active shooters or other disturbances. They have a process for flagging the threats that could be criminal and seeking law enforcement help when needed.
Hundreds of election offices have been reinforced with bulletproof glass and steel doors. Some have increased their security details or locked down their social media in case people come looking into their lives. And new laws and added enforcement of prohibitions on such harassment have added to the response to the increased hostility.
Authorities are concerned about the rise of the right-wing election denial movement, which originated in 2020 following Trump’s rejection of his defeat to Joe Biden. Trump’s propagation of unfounded theories regarding the election mobilized large crowds to participate in “Stop the Steal” protests, which reached a climax on January 6, 2021, when supporters stormed the US Capitol in a bid to impede Congress’s confirmation of the election outcomes.
Trump has not committed to accepting the outcome, claiming without evidence that Democrats will cheat to install his opponent, Kamala Harris.
Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said her concern for her personal safety increased after Elon Musk, the owner of X, attacked her online. Before she responded to his claims about Michigan voting and her office, she called her security team to “make sure my family was safe,” she said on NBC.
You can read the full story by my colleague, Rachel Leingang, here:
What would a Trump victory mean for the UK-US ‘special relationship’?
Eleni Courea
Eleni Courea is a political correspondent for the Guardian:
A Trump victory would be awkward for the Labour party, which has close links with the Democrats and has seen droves of members voluntarily head to the US in recent months to campaign for Kamala Harris.
Last month, Trump’s campaign filed a formal complaint accusing Labour of foreign interference in the US election after a social media post by the party’s head of operations Sofia Patel said nearly 100 current and former staffers were travelling over to support Harris and offered to help them with accommodation.
The row was deeply frustrating for Keir Starmer, who has sought to build a good working relationship with Trump since becoming prime minister in July and was one of a few world leaders to speak directly to the former president after he suffered an assassination attempt in mid-July. The pair met in person in September for a two-hour dinner while Starmer was in New York for the UN General Assembly.
David Lammy, the UK’s foreign secretary, was present at the dinner in New York and has actively been developing links with Republican politicians. But there are questions over whether Lammy can remain in his role if Trump wins, given his strident criticism of the former president in past years — he has branded him a “neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath,” a “dangerous clown” and “a racist KKK and Nazi sympathizer”.
If Trump is elected, Starmer would need to try and convince him of the importance of supporting Ukraine in its defence against the Russian invasion. Trump has censured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not making concessions to Russia and has made clear he wants to see a quick end to the war.
Secretaries of state ask social media companies for moderation plans on election day
Rachel Leingang
Rachel Leingang is a democracy reporter focused on misinformation for Guardian US
A group of Democratic secretaries of state are calling on social media companies to detail their plans to moderate inflammatory content and artificial intelligence on their platforms during and after election day.
Seven secretaries of state – representing Maine, Rhode Island, Illinois, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and New Mexico – sent the letters to Google, X and Meta on Friday. Secretaries of state typically play some role in overseeing elections in their states.
The officials note that violent threats against election officials and disinformation about elections are already spreading online, saying they are “deeply concerned about the failure of major social media companies to clearly lay out their plans to moderate inflammatory claims and AI-generated election-related content ahead of, during and following election day”.
Throughout the 2024 election, false and misleading claims about elections have spread widely, playing on frequent myths like that noncitizens are voting en masse or that tabulation machines aren’t secure. Donald Trump often elevates these claims, as does X owner Elon Musk, as part of an ongoing narrative that Democrats can only win the election if they cheat.
Republicans in Congress and in the courts continue to go after attempts to flag misinformation during previous elections and call it censorship. In response, many platforms have taken a less active approach to moderating or removing content, and some have far fewer staff dedicated to trust and safety than they did in previous years.
Some of those signed on to the letters have been targets of threats and harassment personally for doing their jobs.
You can read the full story here:
The Reuters news agency has pulled together a list of people Donald Trump has suggested he would investigate or prosecute if he is reelected for a second presidential term (having lost a reelection bid in 2020 against Joe Biden – a result he still falsely claims was rigged against him):
The ‘enemy from within’
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Asked on Fox News last month whether he expected chaos on Election Day, Trump responded that the bigger problem was “the enemy from within”. “We have some sick people, radical left lunatics … and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
Political adversaries
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Trump has called for investigations into Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama and Liz Cheney, a former Republican congressman and vocal Trump opponent. Trump has shared posts on his Truth Social media platform calling for military tribunals to try Cheney and Obama.
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At a September rally in Pennsylvania, Trump said Harris, the US vice president, was responsible for the “biggest crime story of our time,” referring to illegal border crossings. “She should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions,” Trump said.
Election workers
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Trump and his allies have been laying the groundwork to contest a potential loss in November by stoking doubts about the election’s legitimacy. Trump has portrayed Democrats as cheaters, called mail-in ballots corrupt and urged supporters to vote in such large numbers to render the election “too big to rig”.
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“Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials,” Trump posted on Truth Social last month. “Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our country,” he added.
Protestors
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Following pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses across the USs this year, Trump told Fox News in July that anyone who desecrates the American flag should get a one-year jail sentence. “Now, people will say: ‘Oh it’s unconstitutional.’ Those are stupid people who say that,” Trump said, adding that he wants to work with Congress to allow the jail sentences. Trump has said he would arrest “pro-Hamas thugs” who engage in vandalism, an apparent reference to the college student protesters.
Tech sector
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Trump has also warned Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google over what he claims is potential election interference on their tech platforms. Trump has accused Meta of suppressing content that would have hurt Joe Biden in the 2020 election, and has also criticised Zuckerberg’s donations to bolster election infrastructure. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison,” Trump wrote his recently published Save America coffee table book, according to media reviews of the book.
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Trump has also threatened to instruct the Department of Justice to criminally investigate Google for “only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump,” according to a Truth Social post last month. “I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election,” Trump wrote, without providing evidence for his assertion about Google.
Prosecutors
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Trump said earlier this month that if elected he would fire Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor leading the criminal probes into his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat and alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office. That follows an April 2023 speech by Trump – after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg convinced a New York grand jury to bring the first criminal charges ever against a former US president, in which he said Bragg was “the criminal”. “He should be prosecuted or at a minimum he should resign,” Trump said.
