Harris hails Republican endorsements as campaign condemns Trump’s threat to fire Jack Smith – US elections live | US elections 2024

Key events

Joe Biden will travel to Arizona today and is expected to formally apologize tomorrow for the US government’s role in forcing thousands of Native American children to attend Indian boarding schools – a policy which has been widely recognized as an element of genocide. The news comes as Kamala Harris is trailing in the polls in Arizona, a state that Biden famously won in 2020, largely due to the support of Native American voters.

“I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, told the Associated Press. “It’s a big deal to me. I’m sure it will be a big deal to all of Indian Country.”

As the first Native American to lead the Department of the Interior, Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system, which found that at least 18,000 children were removed from their parents and forced to attend the schools, which sought to assimilate them into white American culture. The investigation documented about 1,000 deaths of children that occured at the boarding schools.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the Democratic National Committee announced that it had launched a “six-figure ad campaign” aimed at turning out Native American voters in Arizona, North Carolina, Montana and Alaska. It is the party’s third Native-focused campaign this year, and “the most the DNC has ever spent on a campaign targeting Native voters.”

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Updated at 16.19 EDT

Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego has announced the arrest of a suspect involved in setting a fire at a USPS mailbox that damaged a small number of mail-in ballots:

Phoenix is the largest city in swing state Arizona, and many residents are returning ballots by mail. Here’s more of what we know about the incident:

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Things aren’t looking terrible everywhere for Democrats.

The party grew nervous earlier this year in Maryland when Republican former governor Larry Hogan jumped into the race for the open Senate seat in what is typically a Democratic bastion. Maryland voters had twice elected Hogan to the governor’s mansion, and he is viewed as perhaps the only Republican in the state with a shot at winning the Senate seat.

But a poll from the Washington Post and the University of Maryland released today shows the Democratic nominee, Prince George’s county executive Angela Alsobrooks, with a commanding lead of 52% among likely voters, and Hogan at a mere 40%. That’s sure to quell some jitters in the party, though winning the seat, which is currently occupied by Democrat Ben Cardin, is not enough to get the party the majority in the chamber.

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Democratic senator Jon Tester’s bid for re-election in Montana is a mirror of the party’s wider struggles to maintain the support of voters in rural areas across the country, which have grown increasingly Republican in recent years, threatening the party’s ability to win races up and down the ballot. The Guardian’s David Smith traveled to Big Sky Country to see if Tester’s circumstances are as dire as they appear from afar:

He was a young and little-known underdog. So Max Baucus, candidate for Congress, decided to trek 630 miles across Montana and listen to people talk about their problems. “As luck would have it, on the first day, I walked into a blizzard,” he recalls, pointing to a photo of his young self caked in snow. “It was cold! But the blizzard didn’t last that long.”

Baucus shed 12lb during that two-and-a-half month journey in 1974. He also made friends. The Democrat defeated a Republican incumbent and would soon go on to serve as a Montana senator for 36 years. He never lost an election but saw his beloved home state undergo many changes. Among them is the prospect that Democrats like him are now facing political extinction.

Jon Tester, a moderate Democrat who is one of Montana’s current senators, is fighting for his political life in the 5 November election. Opinion polls suggest that he is trailing his Republican rival, Tim Sheehy. Control of the closely divided Senate, and the ability to enable or stymie the ambitions of a President Kamala Harris or President Donald Trump, could hinge on the outcome.

The Senate race in Montana is widely seen as a litmus test of whether Democrats can still win in largely rural states that have embraced Trump’s Republican party. It is also a study in whether the type of hyperlocal campaigning that Baucus practised half a century ago can outpace shifts in demographics, media and spending that have rendered all politics national.

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Democrats are fighting to keep their majority in the Senate, and evidence continues to mount that Jon Tester, the Montana senator whose re-election is viewed as essential to doing that, is struggling.

The party has already conceded a seat in deep-red West Virginia, but is hoping Kamala Harris’s victory combined with those of Tester and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, along with several other incumbents, will renew its majority.

Polls have lately shown Tester trailing his Republican opponent, and the political advertising trackers at Medium Buying report a Republican group has cancelled television ads in Montana – a sign the party views the seat as theirs for the taking:

FLASH: R group American Crossroads is canceling TV ad schedules it had booked in Montana markets for 10/29-11/4 flight#MTSen

— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) October 24, 2024

Here’s more on the calculations behind the quest for control of Congress’s upper chamber:

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Harris then took a few questions from the press, but didn’t make news.

Asked for more details of the Philadelphia concert scheduled for Monday where Bruce Springsteen will perform and Barack Obama will speak in support of her candidacy, Harris demurred.

“I have nothing to report at this moment. Stay tuned,” the vice-president said, after noting that Springsteen was “an American icon”.

She dodged a question about whether she would allow construction of a wall on the border with Mexico, and how she would vote on a California ballot proposition to heighten penalties for shoplifters and drug dealers.

Harris did share some thoughts on the gender divide pollsters say they are observing ahead of the election, with women breaking for Democrats and men for Republicans by increasingly wide margins:

It’s not what I see, in terms of my rallies, in terms of interactions I’m having with people in communities and on the ground. What I’m seeing is, in equal measure, men and women talking about their concerns about the future of our democracy, talking about the fact that they want a president who leads with optimism and takes on the challenges that we face, whether it be grocery prices or investing in small businesses or home ownership.

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Harris calls Republican endorsements a sign that leaders ‘understand what’s at stake’

In brief remarks to the press in Philadelphia before departing for a campaign event in Georgia, Kamala Harris thanked the two Republican politicians who announced they would be voting for her.

Former congressman Fred Upton of Michigan and Waukesha, Wisconsin mayor Shawn Reilly both cited their concerns with Donald Trump in announcing their endorsement of Harris.

“This continues to be, I think, evidence of the fact that people who have been leaders in our country, regardless of their political party, understand what’s at stake. And they are weighing in courageously, in many cases, in support of what we need to have, which is a president of the United States who understands the obligation to uphold the constitution of the United States and our democracy,” Harris said.

She also hit out at Donald Trump, who declined to participate in a second debate with Harris hosted by CNN that would have happened last night. Instead, the vice-president to appeared solo at a town hall the network organized with undecided voters in Philadelphia.

Here’s what Harris said:

As for last night, yet again, Trump not showing up, refused to be a part of a CNN debate, and clearly his staff has been saying he’s exhausted. And the sad part about that is, he’s trying to be president of the United States, probably the toughest job in the world, and he’s exhausted.

I said last night what I mean, which is the American people are being presented with a very serious decision, and it includes what we must understand will happen starting on January 20, in this choice. Either you have the choice of a Donald Trump will sit in the Oval Office stewing, plotting revenge, retribution, writing out his enemies list, or what I will be doing, which is responding to folks like the folks last night with a to-do list, understanding the need to work on lifting up the American people, whether it be through the issue of grocery prices and bringing them down, or investing in our economy, investing in our small businesses, investing in our families.

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Updated at 14.27 EDT

Voto Latino, a top civic engagement non-profit aimed at empowering Latino voters, has launched a new campaign to raise awareness about what Project 2025 means for Latinos.

The organization identified parts of Project 2025 that would have the most negative effect on the Latino community, and translated these portions into Spanish. Voto Latino is launching paid ads in Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan to publicize this initiative, in a $3.5m campaign.

Remember: Trump has tried to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation-backed initiative to overhaul the US government, which includes plans to outlaw abortion and fire civil servants en masse, as polling indicated it was a political liability for him. The Vera Institute for Justice said that provisions relating to immigration were “designed to initiate mass deportations.”

“As much as former President Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025, we will not be fooled: We know that he will implement this extremist agenda if he wins. It is clear that Project 2025 will set us back by dismantling the fabric of our country through extreme conservative efforts to impose a regressive vision for our nation,” Maria Teresa Kumar, Voto Latino President and Co-Founder, said in a press release announcing the campaign.

“The threats posed to our community by Project 2025 are clear and present. Latino voters and other voters of color will be affected the most by Project 2025.”

“We have the power to ensure that an extremist agenda does not go into place by making our voices heard at the ballot box in November,” Kumar also said. “In this election, over 36 million Latinos are eligible to vote. We have a responsibility to inform one another of the potential dangers related to Trump’s agenda as seen in Project 2025, and the impact that it will have on ourselves, our communities, and our families.”

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Donald Trump has been working tirelessly to win over male voters and by some measures, his efforts appear effective.

Trump is besting Kamala Harris among men 53 to 37 percent, according to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll, while the vice president is winning women 53 percent to his 36 percent.

Trump’s far-right politics seem especially appealing to white male voters, and there have been various explanations for this trend. Some have opined that it’s sheer sexism; others believe that it’s due to a purported male loneliness epidemic and uncertainty about their role in American society.

The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone spoke with residents of Middletown, Ohio–GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s hometown– in an effort to learn why gender is a watershed issue in this election.

Here is their eye-opening report.

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With less than two weeks to go before election day, data indicates that early voting has hit massive numbers in several key swing states.

Some 25 million Americans have already cast their ballots. At least part of this surge was prompted by Republicans deciding to vote early due to Donald Trump’s direction.

In the battleground state of Georgia, which Trump lost by just 11,779 votes in 2020, more than 1.9 million Americans have either cast their votes via mail-in ballots or in person. North Carolina saw 1.7 million voting early in spite of the disastrous Hurricane Helene in September.

While Trump has emphatically urged his supporters to hit the polls, saying at a Georgia rally “just vote – whichever way you want to do it,” Democrats and progressives are also encouraging early voting. Senate Democrats on Tuesday released a report urging Americans to vote as early as possible, and to answer questions about why the results might not be known on election night.

On college campuses, advocates are working to increase early voting access for students. At the University of Minnesota on Tuesday, for example, the undergraduate student government organized a one-day pop-up polling site.

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The day so far

Donald Trump made clear that he would end the effort to hold him legally accountable for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election and hide classified documents, saying in an interview that he would fire special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds”, if elected. The comment drew an uproar from Kamala Harris’s campaign, which is seeking to convince voters that Trump would govern as a dictator in a second term. Meanwhile, the vice-president is gearing up for her rally in Houston tomorrow, where she will reportedly be joined by Beyoncé. We will see her later today in Georgia at a campaign event scheduled for 7pm, while Trump holds a rally in Arizona at 4pm.

Here’s what else has been going on today:

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Later on in Donald Trump’s interview with conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt, the former president attacked special counsel Jack Smith as “a scoundrel”, and says he does not think he would be impeached for firing him.

“Now, they will impeach you again on day one if you fire Jack Smith or you pardon yourself. Are you prepared to be impeached again and again and again if they have the House, because they just will?” Hewitt asked, referring to the Democrats who could recapture that majority in Congress’s lower chamber in the upcoming election.

Trump responded:

No, I don’t think they will impeach me if I fire Jack Smith. Jack Smith is a scoundrel, he’s a very dishonest man in my opinion, very dishonest man, and he’s a mean man, a mean man, but his problem is he’s so mean that he always goes too far, like the raid of Mar-a-Lago.

The latter part is a reference to the second case Smith brought against Trump, for allegedly hiding classified materials at his properties, including Mar-a-Lago in south Florida. Over the summer, Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed federal judge who was assigned to the case, threw out Smith’s indictment, which the special counsel is appealing.

In his interview with Hewitt, Trump said, “We had a brave, brilliant judge in Florida”, apparently a reference to Cannon. ABC News reports that his feelings go deeper than that: Cannon’s name is on a list of potential attorney general candidates for his second administration, and was added after she dismissed the classified documents indictment.

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Special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump for allegedly conspiring to overturn the 2020 election was delayed for months as the supreme court dealt with the former president’s claim of immunity, and is only now getting back on track. As the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported earlier this month, Smith’s team appears to want to center its case on how Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence handled the then-president’s effort to keep Joe Biden out of the White House. Here’s more:

Special counsel prosecutors intend to make Donald Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence and efforts to recruit fake Trump electors the centerpiece of the criminal prosecution against the former president, according to a sprawling legal brief that was partly unsealed on Wednesday.

The redacted brief, made public by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, shows prosecutors are relying extensively on Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to support the charge that Trump conspired to obstruct the January 6 certification of the election results.

And prosecutors used an equally voluminous portion of the 165-page brief to express their intent to use evidence of Trump trying to get officials in seven key swing states to reverse his defeat to support the charges that he conspired to disenfranchise American voters.

The brief’s principal mission was to convince Chutkan to allow the allegations and evidence buttressing the superseding indictment against Trump to proceed to trial, arguing that it complied with the US supreme court’s recent ruling that gave former presidents immunity for official acts.

As part of the ruling, the court ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could proceed to trial.

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Democrats have been loudly condemning Donald Trump for rhetoric they call dictatorial, as well as steering voters’ attention to his former White House chief of staff John Kelly’s comment that he meets the definition of a fascist.

In an interview with the New Republic, Ben Wikler, who as chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party is hoping to deliver the electoral votes of one of the swingiest swing states to Kamala Harris, explains why he believes such allegations may tip the scales in the vice-president’s favor:

This is critical because this is the genuine article that stakes in this election. Now we’ve got Mark Milley, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Kelly, former President Trump’s chief of staff, who was a four-star general—and Harris amplifying it—making clear that the nation’s cameras are pointed directly at this reality. For the voters that are on the fence, who often feel deeply conflicted in the final weeks of this election, people who maybe have voted Republican in the past, but are not quite sure if they can vote for Trump again, this gives them a very clear reason to break against Trump. And that could be the entire ball game.

Wisconsin is a jump ball right now. There’s a poll today that finds 2 percent of Wisconsin, or 4 percent of Wisconsin voters, undecided, and 48-48 for Harris and for Trump. That means that the decisions made by those last 4 percent could tip the entire election here and probably, frankly, in all the other battleground states. There’s seven states that are jump balls in the final stretch. And what we know—I know this from directly knocking on doors and talking to voters; we know this from polls; we know this from models; we know this from focus groups; we know from every method of research that we have—is that there’s a share of the undecided electorate who have been traditionally Republican, who can’t stand the idea of Trump and are trying to decide for themselves whether they can overcome their aversion to Trump and still vote for him, or whether that is just so unacceptable that even if they disagree with Kamala Harris about a bunch of stuff, they’re going to vote for her in the final stretch. That is probably the election-defining question.

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Harris campaign says latest Trump comments proof of his plans for dictatorship

A spokesman for Kamala Harris’s campaign said Donald Trump’s comment about firing Jack Smith and his brags about the supreme court giving presidents immunity is proof he would govern as a dictator.

“Donald Trump thinks he’s above the law, and these latest comments are right in line with the warnings made by Trump’s former Chief of Staff that he wants to rule as a dictator with unchecked power,” said Ammar Moussa, the campaign’s director of rapid response.

“A second Trump term, where a more unstable and unhinged Trump has essentially no guardrails and is surrounded by loyalists who will enable his worst instincts, is guaranteed to be more dangerous. America can’t risk a second Trump term.”

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If elected, Trump says he will fire Jack Smith ‘within two seconds’

Donald Trump has vowed that if he returns to the White House, he will swiftly fire Jack Smith, the justice department special counsel who is prosecuting him for allegedly plotting to overturn the 2020 election and hide classified documents.

In an interview today, conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt asked Trump if he would pardon himself or fire Smith. Trump meandered in his reply, before saying:

It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds.

Trump also noted that “we got immunity at the Supreme Court,” a reference to the ruling by the court’s conservative majority this summer finding that presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts. That complicated Smith’s election meddling case against the former president, and played a part in it not going to trial prior to the 5 November election.

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Perhaps more interesting is this survey that the Guardian’s Robert Tait wrote up yesterday showing that Arab Americans are now narrowly leaning towards Donald Trump, after strongly backing Joe Biden in 2020. That shift is likely a consequence of Biden’s support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza following the 7 October attack, and could imperil Kamala Harris’s chances of winning the White House. Here’s more:

Arab Americans are slightly more likely to vote for Donald Trump than Kamala Harris, according to a new poll, in a worrying sign for the Democratic nominee’s chances of carrying the battleground state of Michigan, which is home to a large Arab American population.

The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows 43% supporting Trump compared with 41% for Harris, and 4% backing the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

The figures are broadly in line with a previous poll carried out this month by the Arab American Institute. Together they suggest that Harris’s support in the community has been undermined by the Biden administration’s backing for Israel’s year-long war against Hamas in Gaza.

The latest poll also shows Trump leading Harris by 39% to 33% on the question of which candidate would be most likely resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the candidates were tied at 38% apiece on who would be “better for the Middle East in general”.

Support for Trump is particularly striking given that the same poll shows twice as many respondents – 46% to 23% – think anti-Arab racism and hate crimes are likely to increase under a Trump presidency compared with under Harris.

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Yesterday, Bloomberg News and Morning Consult released polling that found, like so many before it have, an essentially tied race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

The survey heard from voters in all seven swing states, and found Trump leading by 1.5 percentage points in Georgia, 1.2 percentage points in North Carolina and 0.3 percentage points in Wisconsin.

Harris was up by 0.4 percentage points in Arizona, 3.1 percentage points in Michigan, 0.5 percentage points in Nevada and 1.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania.

Many of these findings are within the poll’s one percentage point margin of error.

Should the swing states end up voting the way they are leaning in this poll – and there’s no telling that they will – Harris would win.

For more of what polls are telling us, or not telling us, check out our tracker:

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NBC News has a little more detail on Beyoncé’s event with Kamala Harris in Houston tomorrow, specifically that she will be performing:

.@NBCNews confirms: Beyoncé is expected to appear with Vice President Harris in Houston Friday evening, three sources familiar with the planning tell @KellyO, @Yamiche & myself. One of the people said Beyoncé plans to PERFORM as well. @tylerpager scooped the 🐝 news first.

— Monica Alba (@albamonica) October 24, 2024

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