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Key events
Kamala Harris has taken the stage in Phoenix, telling supporters: “We have five days leftin one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime.”
She emphasized the threats a Trump administration would pose to reproductive rights. “Did everyone hear what he just said yesterday, that he will do what he wants, whether the women like it or not?” she said, referencing his appearance in Wisconsin, when he declared he would protect them “whether the women like it or not”.
“There’s a saying that you gotta listen to people when they tell you who they are,” she said. “He does not believe women should have the agency and authority to make decisions about their own bodies.”
Oliver Milman
Donald Trump has baselessly claimed that Democrats are acting like the “gestapo” in forcing people to adopt electric vehicles, during a rally in New Mexico today.
In his latest broadside against electric cars, the former president said that trucks made 50 years ago are better than electric versions today but that people are being forced to switch by a Joe Biden administration that is using tactics he likened to Nazi Germany.
“So, I said, did you explain that to the authorities as they burst into your office to demand that you go all electric?,” Trump said, in reference to a conversation he’d had with someone. “He said, I explained it. What did they say? We don’t give a damn. We want you to go all electric.
“This is what we’re dealing with. It’s like gestapo stuff, OK? They use that term. It’s like gestapo stuff. What they’re doing to our country is unbelievable.”
Trump’s accusation is based on a falsehood – there is no obligation to switch to electric cars nor any ban on gasoline or diesel cars. Despite this, Trump’s campaign has repeatedly claimed otherwise, assailing Kamala Harris in TV adverts for adopting an “EV mandate.”
Electric cars have long stirred antipathy in Trump, who has said incentives to buy them are “lunacy” and that their supporters should “rot in hell” even as Elon Musk, the billionaire chief of electric car giant Tesla, has become one of Trump’s most prominent backers.
The president acknowledged this incongruity in August when he said “I’m for electric cars, I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”
The ceasefire against electric vehicles now appears to be over, however. Should he win next week’s election, Trump is expected to roll back vehicle pollution standards that nudge people to buy electric alternatives, as well as repeal tax rebates for people to buy electric models.
Gasoline cars, trucks and other forms of transport are the largest sectoral contributor of planet-heating gases in the US, as well as a major source of the air pollution that routinely causes tens of thousands of respiratory and cardiovascular health problems, and deaths, among Americans each year.
Sam Levine
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is quite present at this Quakertown voting location where there’s a long line of people waiting to vote.
They have a table set up with coffee and donuts and volunteers are going up and down the line giving voters the forms they need to fill out to request their mail-in ballot on demand.
I chatted with Betsy Cross, a Trump campaign volunteer from New Jersey who was handing out forms to people in line to request their mail-in ballot on demand. She had been there since 2:30 and estimated people were waiting two hours to vote. Was she surprised that so many people were there? “No,” she said. “People want to bank their vote for president Trump.”
Sam Levine
I just stopped by a voting location in Bucks county, a Pennsylvania battleground where a local judge extended the deadline for voters to cast a ballot for two days after a Trump campaign lawsuit.
Voters here can request and return an absentee ballot on the spot – Pennsylvania’s clunky version of early in person voting – until Friday. The deadline for the rest of the state was Tuesday, but the Trump campaign successfully sued the county to get voting extended until Friday. The county had been wrongly preventing people from voting if they were in line by 5pm.
I arrived a little after 3pm at the government offices in Quakertown and saw that there was a pretty long line stretching around the corner. Just before he went into vote, a man at the front of the line told me he had been waiting about an hour.
One of the people in the back of the line was Phil Haegele, a 47-year old plumber who was celebrating his sixth wedding anniversary. He’s supporting Donald Trump and said that he heard about voting being extended on the radio yesterday and got “probably 50 text messages” encouraging him and his wife to come vote.
Haegele usually votes on election day but said that he decided to come out and cast his ballot early.
“We had saw that on a lot of the news agencies that we follow, they were saying that they were trying to get as many Trump supporters to vote early to try and ward off as much fraud as they could,” he said.
He predicted that the election would be a “blowout,” even though the polls show an extremely tight race in Pennsylvania and across the country.
“If they call the election on election day, it’s gonna be a blowout,” he said. “If they need to take a week to print more ballots then yes it’s gonna be tough.”
Trump voters unmoved by controversy over protecting women remarks
David Smith
Supporters of Donald Trump in Henderson, near Las Vegas in Nevada, are giving short shrift to a controversy over his remark on Wednesday that he would protect women “whether the women like it or not”.
Awaiting a Trump campaign rally, Patty Periva, 74, a retired education worker, said: “I don’t care. The Democrats do not protect women. They allow abortions. How many of those abortions are women? They’re killing women and they don’t protect women. It’s a lie.”
Lisa Consigilo, 60, a retired personal trainer, added: “My family’s from New York. Some things he says people take literally but I know how he speaks: it’s how my dad spoke. You don’t need to take stuff so literally.
“All their campaign is running on lies. He’s not going to ban abortion across the country. You can’t: it’s impossible. He’s not for that. Everything that they’re running on is not true about Project 2025. He’s a dad, he’s a grandfather, it wasn’t literal like: ‘I’m going to protect women.’”
Opinion polls suggest a historic gender gap in the presidential election, with women supporting Kamala Harris by a wide margin. But Kathy Holesapple, 56, an entrepreneur, pilot and aircraft mechanic, said: “They’ve weaponised the women against this party but the truth is that they’ve also held down the women in this nation by calling us Karens.
“We’re not allowed to stand up and speak for our beliefs. They call us a Karen every time we speak up. So the American woman needs to stand up – and they will – and they’re going to realise that Trump is for American women. He’s for women all over the world.”
The Stakes: mass deportations
Lauren Gambino
Raids and mass deportations lie at the heart of the former president’s second-term vision – a web of policies so vast that critics say their collective implementation would challenge the very ideal of the United States as a nation of immigrants.
Should he win in November, the Republican nominee has vowed not only to restore many of his most controversial immigration policies, but to go even further. While a number of his first-term plans were stymied by the courts and Congress, immigration rights leaders believe a second Trump administration would likely be more sophisticated and strategic.
“It is different this time. There’s a plan. There is a sense of urgency that they’ve created around this issue,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice. “And they know how to use the levers of government in a way they didn’t in 2016.”
Donald Trump would also be operating in a changed political landscape. Since leaving office, the political center of gravity has shifted rightward, amid a post-pandemic rise in global migration that saw a record number of people arriving at the southern border and claiming asylum. Americans have become less tolerant of illegal immigration while a growing minority is increasingly concerned about its impact on the country’s economy and national identity.
Though border crossings have plummeted this year following the president’s asylum clampdown, a sense of disorder persists. Voters continue to broadly disapprove of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the situation. Trump and his team are confident immigration remains a potent political issue for voters – and one that he has long played to his advantage.
When Trump first descended a golden escalator in 2015, he pledged to construct a “great wall” along the south-west border with Mexico to keep out immigrants he disparaged as “rapists” and drug dealers. Now, in the final weeks of his third presidential race, Trump has again escalated his threats against immigrants, but this time he is turning his vitriol inward toward those already here.
“The United States is now an occupied country,” Trump claimed recently at a rally in Atlanta. “But on November 5, 2024, that will be liberation day in America.”
Harris to rally voters in Phoenix and Las Vegas
The vice-president will be appearing in Phoenix alongside the musical group Los Tigres del Norte.
Then, she’ll be heading to Las Vegas, where she will be campaigning alongside Jennifer Lopez and Maná.
In both cities, Harris will seek to energize Latino voters, who could help decide the outcome of the race in the key swing states of Arizona and Nevada.
Summary of the day so far
Happy Halloween! There are barely five days left in the 2024 US presidential election and polls show the candidates – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – remain neck and neck in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina. More than 60 million Americans have cast ballots so far.
Harris and Trump are traveling across the western half of the country in states like New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona in the final days of their campaigns.
Here’s a summary of the day so far:
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Tim Keller, the mayor of Albuquerque, where Trump is holding a rally, said last Friday that the Republican presidential candidate owes the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills from his last visit. The Trump campaign owed the city $200,000 for when he hosted his last rally at its convention center in 2019, which has climbed to almost $445,000 with interest. The costs covered police coverage, barricades and other expenses. Trump is banned from rallying in the city over the unpaid bill – his event is being held instead at a private hangar owned by CSI Aviation near the Albuquerque international sunport.
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Billionaires have flushed the election with cash – roughly $1.9b to be exact, largely to the benefit of republican candidates like Trump. “Billionaire campaign spending on this scale drowns out the voices and concerns of ordinary Americans. It is one of the most obvious and disturbing consequences of the growth of billionaire fortunes, as well as being a prime indicator that the system regulating campaign finance has collapsed,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director.
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Voter enthusiasm is at a historical high for a presidential election, a Gallup poll found. Similar to November 2020, 70% of registered voters nationwide said that they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting now compared to March, when only 56% expressed enthusiasm.
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Trump’s former attorney Kenneth Chesebro has been suspended from practicing law in New York. Chesboro was indicted on state racketeering and conspiracy charges over efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election in Georgia.
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Harris has received more endorsements today. Former New York mayor and 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg and the Economist have publicly expressed their support.
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Harris said on Thursday that Trump’s comment that he would protect women “whether the women like it or not” showed that the Republican presidential nominee does not understand women’s “agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies”. “I think it’s offensive to everybody, by the way,” Harris said before she set out to spend the day campaigning in the western swing states of Arizona and Nevada.
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Harris will be joined by Jennifer Lopez for her rally in Las Vegas, Nevada – a critical swing state.
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Ex-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson will interview Trump in Arizona before the former president heads to his own rally in Nevada.
Of the more than 60 million Americans who have gone to the polls early – some 32 million and counting did so in person. Here are some of the best pictures of early voting from the newswires:
Albuquerque mayor says Trump owes town where he is holding rally nearly $500,000
Tim Keller, the mayor of Albuquerque, where Trump is holding a rally, said last Friday that the Republican presidential candidate owes the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills from his last visit.
“Trump now owes almost a half a million dollars to the city of Albuquerque … We’ve had collection agencies calling and so forth for about two years now,” Keller said.
The Trump campaign owed the city $200,000 for when he hosted his last rally at its convention center in 2019, which has climbed to almost $445,000 with interest. The costs covered police coverage, barricades and other expenses. Since the Trump campaign still allegedly hasn’t paid its bills, he was banned from rallying there. Instead, the rally is being held at a private hangar owned by CSI Aviation near the Albuquerque international sunport.
The general manager for the Albuquerque convention center, Ray Roa, confirmed to the Albuquerque Journal on Monday that members of the Trump campaign contacted them to try to rent the convention center but were denied.
Trump called his supporters smarter than “crooked Joe’s or lyin’ Kamala’s” and denounced Joe Biden over his “garbage” remark.
Trump took several digs at his opponent, telling his crowd that Harris “doesn’t have the stamina, the intellect or that special quality” that certain leaders have.