US politics live: ‘improbably tight’ polls questioned by experts as Trump reportedly grows anxious in final days of race

George Chidi

A rally for Kamala Harris is filling Atlanta Civic Center on Saturday, “three days before we remind the world that the south has something to say”, said US representative Nikema Williams, quoting the iconic Atlanta hip-hop group OutKast.

“This election is too important to sit out,” she said. “This is battleground Georgia.”

Just over 4 million Georgia voters have already cast a ballot, about 80% of the 2020 figure and 55.3% of registered voters in the state, according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office. Fulton and DeKalb counties, the two counties with the largest number of Democratic voters in Georgia, are slightly ahead of state averages for early turnout, but the election remains too close to call judging by early voting turnout. Errors in polling models are likely to be larger than the ultimate margin.

Harris is expected to appear at 1pm. Donald Trump today announced a rally in Macon for Sunday.

Morehouse College graduate Spike Lee and recording artist Pastor Troy opened the rally, with Troy performing Vice Versa.

Sam Levine

President Biden is set to land in Scranton, the city where he was born, for a visit shortly and I spotted this truck parked on Biden street downtown.

Scranton is a key piece in Democratic hopes to win Pennsylvania, a key battleground state this election. Hillary Clinton lost tremendous ground here in 2016 when she lost the state, but Joe Biden improved on that in 2020. Democrats are hoping to build even further on those gain this year, or at least not lose ground.

In the final days before the 2024 election, Donald Trump is growing increasingly anxious, Axios reports. Although the former president’s campaign is projecting confidence, a campaign official close to Trump tells Axios that the ex-president is asking more questions about polling and demanding more work from his aides in late-night and early morning calls.

• Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump head to North Carolina on Saturday to try to clinch support in the south-eastern battleground state just three days before Tuesday’s US presidential election. It will be the fourth day in a row that vice-president Harris and former president Trump visit the same state on the same day, underlining the critical importance of the seven states likely to decide the race, which opinion polls show to be on a knife’s edge, Reuters reported.

• Trump and Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch. Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin. At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.

• At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.

• Top Republicans have called on the White House to produce all documents and internal communications regarding president Joe Biden’s statement earlier this week in which he appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump. White House press officials altered the official transcript of Biden’s statement, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.

• The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight. “The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”

• Officials in the US battleground state of Michigan said they worry that the Democratic-leaning city of Warren could lag behind the rest of the state in reporting the results of Tuesday’s presidential election, raising early doubts about the state’s vote count. Warren, unlike Detroit and most other cities in Michigan, opted not to take advantage of changes enacted in a 2022 state law allowing for up to eight days of pre-processing of absentee ballots, Reuters reported. Instead, the city of 135,000 people will wait until election day to verify and tabulate more than 20,000 mail-in ballots.

• Elon Musk’s troubled canvassing operation on behalf of Donald Trump and the Republican party is now facing a lawsuit in southern California filed by two women who say they were cheated out of wages and expenses as they knocked on doors for an embattled Republican congresswoman. The suit accuses Musk’s America PAC, which has poured more than $100m into this year’s election campaign, of “willful violations of the California labor code” by paying the plaintiffs less than it promised and refusing to make up the difference.

• The US presidential election campaign enters its final weekend with polls showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in seemingly permanent deadlock and few clues as to which of them will prevail on Tuesday. At the end of another unruly week that began with Trump’s racially charged rally in New York’s Madison Square Guardian and was punctuated by celebrity endorsements, misogynistic comments and insults about “garbage” being levelled left and right, the Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker showed little change from seven days earlier, with voter loyalty to their chosen candidate appearing relatively impervious to campaign events, however seismic.

That’s all from me, Tom Ambrose, for today. My colleague Cecilia Nowell will be along shortly to continue bringing you all the latest from the US election.

Lauren Gambino

On the second to last Sunday in July, Kamala Harris had just finished making pancakes and bacon for her grandnieces at the vice-president’s residence in Washington, and was sitting down with them to work on a jigsaw puzzle when Joe Biden called.

“I got up to take the call, and then life changed,” Harris recounted later. Biden, isolating with Covid at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and facing calls from all corners of his party to step aside, had reached the history-altering decision to end his bid for re-election.

“Are you sure?” Harris said she asked the US president. “Because what a big decision.”

With Biden’s endorsement, Harris, still wearing her workout clothes and hooded sweatshirt from her alma mater, Howard University, leapt into action. Time was of the essence. Over the next 10 hours, with pizza boxes littered around her, she placed 100 calls to Democrats whose support she would need to secure the nomination.

Rachel Leingang

A year punctuated by two assassination attempts, high levels of threats and harassment, and a number of troubling, violent incidents in the lead-up to election day will culminate on Tuesday with an election deemed existential by all sides.

It’s the first presidential election since the January 6 insurrection, a reminder of the ways political violence can manifest that leaves Americans with a fear that such an attack could happen again. Those who study the attack and its participants say they aren’t convinced criminal convictions against them will fully deter those involved on January 6 from future political violence, but that the biggest threat is a lone actor, not a large, coordinated event.

In the last few weeks, a man in Arizona was allegedly stockpiling weapons and plotting a “mass casualty” event, according to police who arrested him for shooting at Democratic party offices. The person behind explosive devices that burned hundreds of ballots in two drop boxes in Oregon and Washington is suspected to be a metalworker who could be planning more attacks. Arguments at polling places over political paraphernalia, banned at the polls in some places, have become physical. A young man waved a machete at a polling place in Florida.

The risk of political violence only increases after election day, experts say, once races are called. Certain places could become targets of people or groups upset about results or who claim fraud.

Rachel Leingang

In the last week, the US saw numerous attacks on the voting process and threats of violence, and extremism experts are bracing for what comes after voting has ended.

The goal of people committing these acts is often to create fear and distrust around voting or to sabotage the functioning of democracy. Still, election officials stress that voting is safe, and voters should not be deterred from voting because of any threats to the process, which are rare.

Here is a timeline of the political violence seen so far during the voting period in the US.

Musk’s canvassing operation sued in California for alleged labor law violations

Andrew Gumbel

Elon Musk’s troubled canvassing operation on behalf of Donald Trump and the Republican party is now facing a lawsuit in southern California filed by two women who say they were cheated out of wages and expenses as they knocked on doors for an embattled Republican congresswoman.

The suit accuses Musk’s America PAC, which has poured more than $100m into this year’s election campaign, of “willful violations of the California labor code” by paying the plaintiffs less than it promised and refusing to make up the difference.

The women, Tamiko Anderson and Patricia Kelly, say they were hired last month and promised an hourly wage – about $25, according to their lead lawyer – to help turn out votes for Michelle Steel, who represents a closely contested swing district in Orange county, south of Los Angeles.

It was only once the women started working, the suit alleges, that they found out they were being paid instead by the number of houses they visited. The suit further alleges that they were not reimbursed for work-related expenses, including the use of personal cellphones to track their movements along their designated routes.

Musk’s ground-game operation has come under repeated scrutiny in recent days following a report in the Guardian that canvassers may have skipped as many as a quarter of the houses they claimed to have visited in Arizona and Nevada, and a second report in Wired that revealed hired canvassers in Michigan were not told which campaign they were working for until they had already signed on.

Ed Pilkington

If Donald Trump re-enters the White House on 20 January he will do so emboldened by a power that no previous incoming president has ever enjoyed: immunity from criminal prosecution for any act carried out in his official capacity.

The protection, awarded in a July ruling from the far-right supermajority of the US supreme court, changes fundamentally the dynamics of the Oval Office.

“The justices wrote a how-to guide for a president who wants to break the law,” said Michael Waldman, president of the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice. “In practical terms, if you are a president who wants to break the law, make sure your co-conspirators are also government employees – then you’re off the hook.”

The immunity ruling, in Trump v United States, is the clearest example yet of the judicial feedback loop that the former president established during his 2017 to 2021 presidency. With the active support of Republicans in the US Senate, then President Trump appointed three new hard-right justices to the country’s top court, creating a 6-3 conservative-to-liberal supermajority.

Jonathan Freedland

Is it any surprise that “photo op” is a phrase imported into British English from the United States? Of course it came from there, the land where the visual image sits right at the centre of the culture, with politics no exception.

It was the Nixon White House that came up with it, specifically a press aide by the name of Bruce Whelihan. According to Washington legend, whenever the president was meeting a visiting dignitary, Richard Nixon’s hardball press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would turn to his underling with an order to summon the snappers. “Get ’em in for a picture,” Ziegler would say.

Too polite to put it that way himself, Whelilan would clear his throat and announce to the ladies and gentlemen of the Washington press corps, “There will be a photo opportunity in the Oval Office.”) The photo op was born.

Joe Biden promised a “recovery for everybody” as he prepared to take over an economy ravaged by the pandemic four years ago. Few predicted what would follow.

One of two candidates – Kamala Harris, his vice-president, and Donald Trump, his predecessor – will succeed Biden in January. As millions prepare to elect the next US president, here is how the world’s largest economy fared under Biden.

The shock waves unleashed by Covid-19 were still rippling across the world when Biden took office in January 2021. In the US, and many other economies, they set the stage for an extraordinary rise in inflation.

For months, the White House and Federal Reserve insisted the factors driving this surging price growth were “transitory”. By the time the consumer price index peaked, reaching its highest level in a generation in June 2022, officials had changed their minds.

The Fed embarked upon an aggressive campaign to tackle inflation in March 2022. Interest rates – cut to close to zero at the outset of the pandemic – were increased at 11 meetings, to a two-decade high.

Suddenly the central fear looming over the US economy was not runaway inflation, but the specter of recession. As the Fed scrambled to cool activity in an attempt to tackle prices, warnings of a prolonged downturn cast a shadow.

Moira Donegan

There’s one story of the 2024 presidential contest that says that this election is all about men, and their anger.

Men, in this account, have gotten a raw deal: the decline of the industrial economy in the years since the postwar boom means that many of the jobs that gave dignity, structure, and steady paychecks to their fathers are now gone, and some men, especially those without college degrees, have fallen into a cycle of desperation and despair, unable to make the kind of living for which they could respect themselves.

This economic argument about men is usually followed by a cultural one: that women aren’t as nice to men as they should be, or maybe not as nice to men as they used to be. On one end of this conversation, there are paeans to male loneliness and discussions of the male suicide rate, quasi-poetic odes to their depths of despair and acute feeling: women just don’t understand what it’s like to be sad the way that men are sad.

On the other end, writers and commentators point to more recent cultural trends that they say have alienated men, making them feel attacked or unnecessary. They point, apparently seriously, to the fact that some young feminists online have used the term “toxic masculinity,” which they say makes men feel bad, bad enough that their feelings are an emergency for the nation. They point to those t-shirts that were popular in 2017 that said, “The Future Is Female.” This, too, is reflective of a great social pathology, a sign that we as a nation have failed men and boys. Why, they plead, can’t the future be male?