US election 2024 live: Harris and Trump converge on rust belt as final day of campaigning begins

Here are some of the stances former Republican president Donald Trump has on key election issues. You can read more in this explainer by my colleague Lauren Gambino.

Economy

• Much of Trump’s inflation-reduction plan hinges on his vow to slash energy costs by expanding oil and gas drilling and deregulation. He has also been highly critical of high interest rates, the Federal Reserve’s main inflation-fighting tool.

• Trump said recently that he thinks the president should have a say in decisions made by the Fed, which traditionally operates independently from politics.

• Trump has vowed to extend and expand a suite of tax cuts he signed into law in 2017, while pledging to cut the corporate tax rate to 15% from 21% for companies that make their products in the US. He has also said he would exempt Social Security benefits and overtime pay, in addition to tips, from income taxes.

• He has suggested an across-the-board levy of perhaps 10% and up to 20% on virtually all foreign-made goods, as well as slapping tariffs of 60% – or more – on goods from China.

Abortion

• Trump has said abortion access should be left to the states, and has vowed that as president he would not sign a national abortion ban (weeks before making that pledge, he refused to say whether he would veto such a ban).

• Trump has said that if he wins he would make IVF free for women, though has provided few specifics and Republicans in Congress have repeatedly blocked legislation that would protect the treatment.

Immigration and ‘border security’

• Trump has promised to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in US history, a policy that would face many logistical, legal and financial hurdles.

• Trump has said he would reinstate several controversial policies from his first term, including the Remain in Mexico program, Title 42 and a travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority nations.

• He has vowed to rescind programs that shield undocumented immigrants from deportation, including children, while revoking the legal status of potentially hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the US under the federal temporary protected status program.

• Trump has also suggested he would end birthright citizenship for the US-born children of undocumented immigrant.

Climate and energy policies

• Trump has questioned established climate science, previously dismissing the climate crisis as “mythical” and an “expensive hoax”.

• As president, Trump claims he will prioritize clean air and water for Americans. Yet he has also promised to continue to roll back environmental regulations, including all of the ones put in place by the Biden administration.

• In a May meeting with oil bosses, he reportedly offered to dismantle Biden’s environmental rules and requested $1bn in contributions to his presidential campaign. He is especially opposed to wind power – falsely claiming wind turbines kill birds and cause cancer.

Lauren Gambino, a political correspondent for Guardian US, has done this useful explainer about where the two presidential candidates stand on key issues. Here are some extracts from the piece:

Kamala Harris

Economy

• Harris says she wants to build up the “opportunity economy,”, focused on the middle class, with plans to combat price gouging, boost housing development, aid first-time homebuyers, expand tax credits for parents and expand Medicare to cover in-home senior care.

• Harris has pledged to cut taxes for tens of millions of middle- and low-income families, while saying she supports tax breaks for entrepreneurs and small business owners. She also backs a proposal championed by Trump to eliminate taxes on tips. Harris has called for the corporate tax rate to be raised to 28%, up from 21%.

• Harris is expected to maintain the Biden administration’s approach, relying on tariffs and export controls to boost domestic competitiveness with China.

Abortion

• Harris has called on Congress to pass legislation to restore the protections of Roe v Wade, which the supreme court overturned in 2022. Doing so would reinstate the Roe-era status quo, in effect blocking states from banning abortion before fetal viability, or about 24 weeks of pregnancy.

• As president, Harris has vowed she would veto any nationwide abortion ban, Harris has pledged to protect the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare, including access to contraception and other fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Immigration and ‘border security’

• During a visit to the border in September, Harris laid out a plan to enact stricter penalties for people who attempt to claim asylum between lawful ports of entry.

• Harris has long championed comprehensive immigration reform, including pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, especially those who were brought to the US as children.

Climate and energy policies

• Harris has walked back her support for the progressive Green New Deal proposal and a fracking ban. She is a proponent of electric vehicles – though does not support a mandate – and backs clean-energy tax credits.

Election Day in the US is now often considered election week as each state follows its own rules and practices for counting ballots that can delay the results. There is also the possibility of legal challenges to counts that could cause delays.

In 2020, The Associated Press declared Joe Biden the winner on Saturday afternoon — four days after polls closed. But even then, The AP called North Carolina for Donald Trump 10 days after Election Day and Georgia for Biden 16 days later after hand recounts.

Four years earlier, the 2016 election was decided just hours after most polls closed. The Associated Press declared Trump the winner on election night at 2:29 a.m.

The tightness of the race this year makes it hard to predict when a winner could be declared – but North Carolina and Georgia could give an early indication as results in these swing states come in relatively quickly.

The Associated Press has pinpointed areas in swing states that could give us a clue on how the race will unfold:

In North Carolina, Harris’ margins in Wake and Mecklenburg counties, home to the state capital of Raleigh and the state’s largest city, Charlotte, respectively, will reveal how much Trump will need to squeeze out of the less-populated rural areas he has dominated.

In Pennsylvania, Harris needs heavy turnout in deep blue Philadelphia, but she’s also looking to boost the Democrats’ advantage in the arc of suburban counties to the north and west of the city.

She has campaigned aggressively in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, where Biden improved on Clinton’s 2016 winning margins. The Philadelphia metro area, including the four collar counties, accounts for 43 percent of Pennsylvania’s vote.

Elsewhere in the Blue Wall, Trump needs to blunt Democratic growth in Michigan’s key suburban counties outside of Detroit, especially Oakland County. He faces the same challenge in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County outside of Milwaukee.

The Guardian US has been averaging national and state polls to see how the two candidates are faring. Nationally, Kamala Harris has a one-point advantage, 48% to 47%, over Donald Trump, virtually identical to last week.

The election will be decided in the seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In these states, the polls are too close to call.

Harris has an 8% lead among those who have already voted, while Trump is ahead among those who say they are very likely to vote but have not yet done so. The poll, from the New York Times and Siena College, also found Harris was slightly ahead in Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin, with Trump up in Arizona and the other three too close to call.

Many Democrats are worried Trump is setting the stage for a series of legal challenges to poll results, in a sign the former president thinks Harris may win on election day tomorrow.

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.”

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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”.