Opening summary
Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest from the campaign trail, with polling day now just two weeks away.
We start with the news that Donald Trump has urged Christian voters on Monday to participate in the 2024 election, claiming that a Kamala Harris administration would restrict religious freedoms and casting himself as a protector of Christians.
During an event in North Carolina billed as an “11th-Hour Faith Leaders Meeting”, a series of conservative pastors warmed up for Trump, including Guillermo Maldonado, an “apostle” and longtime Trump ally who cast the election in perilous terms.
“You know, we’re now in spiritual warfare,” said Maldonado, alluding to the idea that Christians are at war on the supernatural plane against dark forces that affect the real world. “It’s beyond warfare between the left and the right. It’s between good and evil. There’s a big fight right now that is affecting our country and we need to take back our country.”
Introducing Trump, Ben Carson, the campaign’s National Faith Chairman for the 2024 election, openly rejected the idea of secular society.
“This election is about whether we are a secular nation or one nation under God,” said Carson, echoing the aims of Christian nationalists who view the US as a Christian nation that must return to God.
In other news:
-
Liz Cheney, former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, condemned Republican bans on the procedure and urged conservatives on Monday to support Kamala Harris.
-
Jill Biden acknowledged on Monday that her husband made “the right call” by stepping down from his run for re-election.
-
Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, said Elon Musk’s plan to give away $1m a day in support of Donald Trump is a reflection of a ticket with “no plan”.
-
The Central Park Five sued Trump for defamation after he falsely said during the presidential debate that they had pleaded guilty to a brutal rape 35 years ago, despite the fact that they had their convictions overturned.
-
A Republican county supervisor in Arizona who refused to certify the 2022 midterm election has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.
-
The politics writer Olivia Nuzzi and New York magazine have parted ways after she was placed on leave following the disclosure that she had engaged in a “personal” relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr.
-
Key rightwing legal groups tied to Trump and his allies have banked millions of dollars from conservative foundations and filed multiple lawsuits challenging voting rules in swing states.
-
Trump doubled down on false claims about the federal government’s hurricane recovery efforts and promoted baseless conspiracy theories about immigration.
Key events
The Harris campaign just announced that the vice-president will campaign in Philadelphia on Sunday.
The announcement was light on details, but needless to say it’s difficult for Harris to win the White House without carrying Pennsylvania, and many Democratic voters live in and around Philadelphia.
Harris to campaign in Texas with eye towards pulling off Senate surprise
Lauren Gambino
Kamala Harris will return to Texas in the final days of the presidential campaign for an event that will highlight the stories of women harmed by the state’s strict abortion ban.
In Houston on Friday, she will appear alongside the Democratic nominee for Senate, Colin Allred, who is locked in an unexpectedly tight race with the Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz.
Democrats have turned their attention to the Texas Senate race, despite a long history of falling short in the Republican-dominated state. With Democrats poised to lose a seat in West Virginia and Montana appearing to slip away, their best opportunity to keep control of the Senate may run through the Lone Star state.
According to a senior campaign official, Harris will travel to Texas from Georgia, two states with the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. The Democrat has repeatedly assailed Donald Trump for appointing the three supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe v Wade and paved the way for a wave of new restrictions and near-total bans in Republican-led states.
Harris has made abortion rights the centerpiece of her short campaign for the White House. At campaign stops, and the party’s convention, she has shared the stories of women and families affected by abortion bans, among them Texas resident Amanda Zurawski, who nearly died after being denied an abortion under the state’s law.
Zurawski, along with the family of Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman who died after her medical care was delayed under the state’s abortion law, have become powerful surrogates for Harris’s campaign.
Abortion has been a central issue in the Texas Senate race. Allred has made Cruz’s staunch anti-abortion views a central plank of his campaign. Polls show Cruz with a steady lead, though the race has appeared to tighten in recent weeks.
While in Houston, Harris will also sit for an interview with academic turned Ted talks host and popular podcaster Brené Brown.
Despite campaign rhetoric, IMF projections show US economy better than most
On the campaign trail, you’ll hear Donald Trump assail the state of the economy and say Kamala Harris is to blame. And you’ll hear Harris vow to lower prices for everything from housing to healthcare.
There is no doubt that Americans have suffered from the wave of inflation that racked the country over the past three years, but has recently subsided. What’s less discussed is that the US economy is, in fact, far healthier than many others.
Just-released forecasts from the IMF, the Washington-based crisis lender whose economic data is closely watched from Wall Street to the White House, shows that the US economy is poised for some of the strongest growth among wealthy nations in the years to come, beating out the United Kingdom, Japan and many European nations:
IMF Growth Forecast: 2024
🇺🇸US: 2.8%
🇩🇪Germany: 0.0%
🇫🇷France: 1.1%
🇮🇹Italy: 0.7%
🇪🇸Spain: 2.9%
🇬🇧UK: 1.1%
🇯🇵Japan: 0.3%
🇨🇦Canada: 1.3%
🇨🇳China: 4.8%
🇮🇳India: 7.0%
🇷🇺Russia: 3.6%
🇧🇷Brazil: 3.0%
🇲🇽 Mexico: 1.5%
🇸🇦KSA: 1.5%
🇳🇬Nigeria: 2.9%
🇿🇦RSA: 1.1%https://t.co/sDv9tK6YQb pic.twitter.com/epCi3VT13o— IMF (@IMFNews) October 22, 2024
These are, of course, just projections, and as the Guardian’s Larry Elliott reports, various things could undercut them – including some of the policies Trump is campaigning on:
The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino earlier this month took the political pulse of young voters nationwide, particularly when it came to the question of which presidential candidate to support. Here’s what she found:
It was the height of “brat summer”. Kamala Harris was a “femininomenon”, electrifying a high-stakes presidential race that many of the country’s youngest voters had been dreading: a rematch between the two oldest candidates in American history.
Chartreuse-blocked memes and coconut emojis filled social media feeds. The tidal wave of young “Kamalove” sparked a rush of small-dollar donations and volunteer sign-ups for her days-old campaign. For an extremely online generation of young Democrats, the vibes were so good.
On the ground in St Louis, a cadre of young progressives were gathering for an entirely different election – one with virtually no bearing on the balance of power in Washington, but one they believed mattered deeply. There in Missouri’s first congressional district, representative Cori Bush was fighting for her political survival.
Many of the twentysomethings had traveled from out of state, sacrificing summer jobs and sleeping on yoga mats to campaign for Bush in the sticky August heat. “We just stopped our lives and went to St Louis,” said John Paul Mejia, a 22-year-old student and climate activist.
Mejia was there as part of Protect Our Power (Pop), a youth coalition that came together earlier this year for what he described as a “David-and-Goliath” mission to defend leftwing members of Congress against a well-funded effort to unseat them.
To them, Bush, the nurse turned racial justice activist, was one of the few elected leaders who shared their sense of urgency about everything from the country’s affordability crisis to safeguarding abortion access.
As a newly elected member of Congress, Bush had slept on the steps of the US Capitol to protest against the expiration of a federal eviction moratorium. The action paid off: the Biden administration extended the pause. In warning about the threat to reproductive rights, Bush testified before a House panel that she had had an abortion at 18 after becoming pregnant by rape. In 2023, she emerged as one of the strongest critics of Israel’s war in Gaza, a stance that reflected a groundswell of youth dissent but ultimately imperiled her congressional career.
“There’s pretty much nobody else, even members of Congress who are closer to our age, in some instances, who actually represent what our generation cares about,” Vincent Vertuccio, a 21-year-old college student and an activist with Pop, said of the progressive Squad members. “If we lose these people, even one or two, it’s a direct diminishment of our power.”
Harris matching Biden’s 2020 margin with young voters as support grows – poll
Kamala Harris has a significant advantage over Donald Trump among young voters, matching the lead Joe Biden ended up taking in the 2020 election, a new poll finds.
The survey from CNBC Generation Lab shows Harris up 20 percentage points with voters aged 18 to 34, with 60% support compared with Trump’s 40%. That’s about the same margin by which Biden won the group four years ago.
It’s also an improvement from July, when the vice-president was at 46%, Trump at 34% and independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr picking up 21%. Kennedy has since dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump.
We’ll see Donald Trump around 11am, when he holds a round table with Latino leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida.
Then he’ll head to battleground state of North Carolina for a rally in Greensboro at 7pm, making his second visit to the state in as many days.
His running mate, JD Vance, will be in Arizona, campaigning in Peoria, outside Phoenix, at 4pm, then again in Tucson at 7.30pm.
Obama, Walz to stump for Harris in swing states
Democrats are deploying one of their best-known figures as they seek an edge against Donald Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, with Barack Obama holding two events today in swing states Kamala Harris’s campaign covets most.
The former president will at 2.30pm appear in Madison, Wisconsin, alongside Tim Walz, then hold a solo event in Detroit at 7.45pm. Walz will stay in Wisconsin, where he has an event in Racine at 7.30pm.
The pair’s visit to Wisconsin is to mark the start of early voting in the state, one of three in the Democrats’ “blue wall” along the Great Lakes that are crucial to Harris’s White House hopes.
Expect to see a lot more of both Barack and Michelle Obama before this election is through:
After a busy day of campaigning with Liz Cheney on Monday, Kamala Harris is having a comparably quiet one today.
She has no public campaign events scheduled, but will sit for two interviews. The first is with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson and will air at 6.30pm ET, and the second with Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro, which will be broadcast at 7pm.
The vice-president has been doing a lot more interviews and media appearances lately as the election enters the home stretch. Here’s more on that:
Jason Wilson
Thomas Klingenstein, chairperson of the rightwing Claremont Institute, has cemented his place in the pantheon of Republican megadonors with a more than $10m spending spree so far in the 2024 election cycle, according to campaign contributions recorded by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Klingenstein has been one of Claremont’s largest donors for decades. As the institute has made its hard-right, pro-Trump drift in recent years, Klingenstein has continued to publicly describe US politics with extremist rhetoric, calling it a “cold civil war”, and has encouraged rightwingers to join the fight to defeat what he calls “the woke regime”.
His spending puts him at the forefront of a class of donors who are explicitly supporting more extreme and polarizing politics in Trump’s Republican party.
The largesse has already dwarfed his contributions in previous election seasons. The money has gone exclusively to Republicans, and has included seven-figure donations to at least four pro-Trump Pacs in recent months.
The Guardian emailed Klingenstein for comment on this reporting but received no reply.
Melissa Segura
In the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency, a young lawyer with crisply shorn blond hair approached the podium at a gathering for Texas members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that wields immense power in the US judicial system. As vice-president of the group’s Fort Worth chapter, Matthew Kacsmaryk had the honor of presenting the first speaker.
“We are blessed to have Judge Edith Jones,” Kacsmaryk announced. Jones, a longtime judge on the US fifth circuit court of appeals, stepped on stage to introduce the evening’s guest, her friend, the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. In her introduction, Jones also hailed the four new conservative judges Trump had appointed to join her on the appeals court.
“They’ve raised the bar for the fifth circuit since I got on,” she said. “And that’s thanks to the Federalist Society, to Leonard.”
Leonard Leo needed no last name in his introduction to this crowd as he took his seat in a black leather chair across from Thomas. The justice was the featured speaker but Leo may have been the most important person in the American legal system in that room – a conservative activist who had built the Federalist Society into a political powerhouse and helped Trump create the supreme court majority that, in 2022, erased federal protections for abortion.
His influence continues to be on display now in one of the most consequential cases moving through the American legal system – one that seeks to strike another blow to abortion rights and could possibly bankrupt Planned Parenthood, one of the nation’s leading providers of healthcare for women. It’s a lawsuit that has been filed by an anti-abortion activist tied to Leo and heard by judges – from the lower courts to the fifth circuit appeals court – who are also linked to Leo.
Dustin Guastella, research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623, writes:
The 2024 campaign has entered the final stretch and, as polls tighten, it seems Kamala Harris plans to lean into attacking Donald Trump as a threat to democracy.
Over the past week the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times and even the conservative National Review have all reported or commented on the messaging pivot. In a newly unveiled official campaign ad, a disembodied voice warns gravely that a second Trump term “would be worse. There would be no one to stop his worst instincts. No guard rails.”
At a recent rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris reminded her supporters of Project 2025, the “detailed and dangerous plan” that she believes an “increasingly unstable and unhinged” Trump will follow to cement “unchecked power”. She sounded the alarm about the dire threat Trump poses to “your fundamental freedoms” and how in his second term he would be “essentially immune” from oversight.
This is hair-raising stuff. And the campaign thinks that menacing warnings like these will motivate some urgency to march to the polls for Harris. The only problem is that voters, especially working-class voters, seem uniquely uninspired by the appeal.
Democratic US vice-president Kamala Harris held a marginal 46% to 43% lead over Republican former president Donald Trump, with a glum electorate saying the country is on the wrong track, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Harris’ lead in the six-day poll, which closed on Monday, differed little from her 45% to 42% advantage over Trump in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted a week earlier, reinforcing the view that the contest is extraordinarily tight with just two weeks left before the 5 November election.
Reuters reported:
Both polls showed Harris with a lead within the margin of error, with the latest poll showing her ahead just 2 percentage points when using unrounded figures.
The new poll showed that voters have a dim view of the state of the economy and immigration – and they generally favour Trump’s approach on these issues.
Some 70% of registered voters in the poll said their cost of living was on the wrong track, while 60% said the economy was heading in the wrong direction and 65% said the same of immigration policy.
Voters also said the economy and immigration, together with threats to democracy, were the country’s most important problems. Asked which candidate had the better approach on the issues, Trump led on the economy – 46% to 38% – and on immigration by 48% to 35%.
Immigration also ranked as the number one issue when respondents were asked what the next president should focus on most in their first 100 days in office. Some 35% picked immigration, with 11% citing income inequality and equal 10% shares citing healthcare and taxes.
But Trump fared poorly on the question of which candidate was better to address political extremism and threats to democracy, with Harris leading 42% to 35%. She also led on abortion policy and on healthcare policy.
David Smith
Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, on Monday condemned Republican-imposed bans on the procedure and urged conservatives to support Democrat Kamala Harris for US president.
Cheney was speaking during three joint events with the vice-president in three swing states aimed at prising suburban Republican voters away from party nominee Donald Trump. She has become the Democrat’s most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumoured to be in contention for a seat in a potential Harris cabinet.
At the final event in Waukesha, Wisconsin, against a blue backdrop patterned with the words “country over party”, Cheney, 58, suggested that Republican-led states have overreached in restricting abortion since the supreme court’s 2022 Dobbs decision ended it as a constitutional right.
“I’m pro-life and I have been very troubled, deeply troubled by what I have watched happen in so many states since Dobbs,” said the former Wyoming congresswoman and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney. “I have been troubled by the extent to which you have women who – as the vice-president said, in some cases have died – who can’t get medical treatment that they need because providers are worried about criminal liability.”
Opening summary
Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest from the campaign trail, with polling day now just two weeks away.
We start with the news that Donald Trump has urged Christian voters on Monday to participate in the 2024 election, claiming that a Kamala Harris administration would restrict religious freedoms and casting himself as a protector of Christians.
During an event in North Carolina billed as an “11th-Hour Faith Leaders Meeting”, a series of conservative pastors warmed up for Trump, including Guillermo Maldonado, an “apostle” and longtime Trump ally who cast the election in perilous terms.
“You know, we’re now in spiritual warfare,” said Maldonado, alluding to the idea that Christians are at war on the supernatural plane against dark forces that affect the real world. “It’s beyond warfare between the left and the right. It’s between good and evil. There’s a big fight right now that is affecting our country and we need to take back our country.”
Introducing Trump, Ben Carson, the campaign’s National Faith Chairman for the 2024 election, openly rejected the idea of secular society.
“This election is about whether we are a secular nation or one nation under God,” said Carson, echoing the aims of Christian nationalists who view the US as a Christian nation that must return to God.
In other news:
-
Liz Cheney, former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, condemned Republican bans on the procedure and urged conservatives on Monday to support Kamala Harris.
-
Jill Biden acknowledged on Monday that her husband made “the right call” by stepping down from his run for re-election.
-
Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, said Elon Musk’s plan to give away $1m a day in support of Donald Trump is a reflection of a ticket with “no plan”.
-
The Central Park Five sued Trump for defamation after he falsely said during the presidential debate that they had pleaded guilty to a brutal rape 35 years ago, despite the fact that they had their convictions overturned.
-
A Republican county supervisor in Arizona who refused to certify the 2022 midterm election has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.
-
The politics writer Olivia Nuzzi and New York magazine have parted ways after she was placed on leave following the disclosure that she had engaged in a “personal” relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr.
-
Key rightwing legal groups tied to Trump and his allies have banked millions of dollars from conservative foundations and filed multiple lawsuits challenging voting rules in swing states.
-
Trump doubled down on false claims about the federal government’s hurricane recovery efforts and promoted baseless conspiracy theories about immigration.
